Back home, Olga noticed that the apartment lights were out. René was late and the film festival would have to wait for another day. Inside, with the lights on, she saw that Dandi, her daughter’s dog, had chewed up a pile of old newspapers, spreading bits of paper all over the place. When she went to the kitchen to get a broom, she heard the neighbor’s voice:

“Look, the lights have come on. She’s back.”

Seconds later there was a knock at the door. Opening it, she came face to face with two solemn-looking men.

“Are you Olga Salanueva, René González’s wife? May we come in?”

Her reaction was immediate: her husband, a pilot and parachute instructor, had had an accident. What else could it be?

The man tried to calm her down:

“We’re from the Ministry of the Interior. Please, sit down, we’ll explain everything.”

“Explain what? My husband! What’s happened to my husband? Is he injured? Is he alive?”

“You knew your husband was going to fly today?”

“Yes, I knew. What happened to him?”

The answer, she would remember later, was like a blow to the head:

“Your husband has defected.”

“René? Unbelievable! René is a veteran of Angola, a Party militant! Where did you get this idea?”

“René stole an airplane from San Nicolás Airport and fled to Miami.”

“I don’t believe it! I don’t believe it! This is an insult!”

Despite her distress, the man went on dryly, unflappable:

“Do you have a radio? If you do, switch on Radio Martí.”

Olga’s tiny, battery-operated radio could tune in on shortwave to Radio Martí, a station created in May 1985 by American President Ronald Reagan to broadcast anti-Castro propaganda to the Cuban public. With her heart racing, Olga heard her husband’s crystal-clear voice spreading through the house in an interview that had been broadcast over and over all afternoon:

“I had to flee. In Cuba there’s a shortage of electricity, a shortage of food, even potatoes and rice are rationed. The fuel for our planes is counted drop by drop.”

Olga’s anguish was understandable. René, thirty-four and six feet tall, lean with a rough face, prominent nose and faint shadows around his bright eyes, was a war hero decorated by the Cuban government. They made a handsome couple. Olga, a few inches shorter and three years younger than her husband, was an attractive woman, with distinctive eyebrows, abundant hair and a determined air. Apart from being workers’ children, they had both been admitted a few months earlier into the Communist Party where they were militants. And they shared a love of children and dogs. The main difference between them was that Olga was a true habanera on both sides, whereas René, an American citizen, had been born in Chicago. His father Cándido, a metal worker and a card-carrying communist, had emigrated to Texas in 1952 in the hope of becoming a professional baseball player. At that time, baseball was the national sport of both Cuba and the United States.

His cherished career as pitcher, however, would never go beyond the odd training session on the fields of the major league teams. Faced with a choice of going back to Cuba, where the repressive dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista (1933–59) awaited him, and trying his hand as a manual laborer, he chose the latter. He moved to Chicago, where he married Irma Sehwerert, the granddaugher of Germans and the daughter of Cuban emigrants, with whom he had two sons—René was born in 1956 and Roberto in 1958. It was while living in Chicago that the family heard the news that Fidel Castro had put an end to the Batista dictatorship. In April 1961, after the attempt by the United States to invade Cuba at the Bay of Pigs, Cándido decided that it was time to return to his native land with his wife and children.

From that day until this, René had never again set foot in the country of his birth. When Olga met him in 1983, he was working as a flight instructor at various flying clubs around the country. Aged only twenty-seven, René was a veteran of the Angolan War—not unusual in Cuba, where more than half a million people, or 5 percent of the adult male population, had taken part in military missions abroad. But René stood out among the roughly 300,000 Cubans who fought on the side of the People’s Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA). The MPLA was backed by the USSR, which opposed the National Front for the Liberation of Angola (FNLA) and the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA). The FNLA was sponsored by the United States, China and Zaire, and UNITA by South Africa. After two years in the jungles of Africa, where he performed fifty-four combat missions driving Soviet tanks armed with 120-millimeter guns, René quit military service, but wore a medal officially designating him as an Internationalist Combatant by the government in Havana.

December 8, 1990, started like any other day. René woke at five and ran eight kilometers through Miramar’s tree-lined avenues. Back home—an apartment so small that the only place to stretch and do some exercises was the tiny space by the side of the couple’s bed—he took a cold shower, woke Olga and together they shared a quick breakfast. They had little time for conversation. At seven sharp, René had to catch the bus that took him and the other workers fifty kilometers to the San Nicolás de Bari civil airport, where he had been working for two years as an instructor. As they said goodbye Olga reminded him of their evening engagement:

“Don’t be late, because we are going to the cinema at eight.”

“I’ll be back at six, don’t worry.”

Still tormented by what she had heard on the radio, Olga didn’t notice the men leaving. It didn’t sound like a fake recording, nor did it seem that René had been forced to speak such nonsense. She switched off the radio and called her brother-in-law Roberto, a lawyer who had also done his stint in Angola. Lacking the courage to give the news over the phone, she said only that something had happened with her husband and asked him to come over right away. Roberto was not alarmed. He knew his brother was an expert pilot, and that the planes at San Nicolás were regularly overhauled—sometimes by René himself. The flying club’s planes were so safe that if he wanted or needed to, the pilot could even cut off the engine in mid-flight, glide and then land safely somewhere. At worst, he would have been forced to make an emergency landing. There was no need to worry. The calmness lasted only until he opened the door and found Olga, eyes swollen from crying. She hugged her brother-in-law:

“René has defected, fled to Miami.”

He opened his eyes wide:

“You’re crazy, who told you that?”

“Listen to Radio Martí.”

She switched on the radio and the air was filled with the sound of the interview, repeated for the umpteenth time. In his unmistakable voice, René was denouncing the problems that had turned him into what is considered in Cuba a traitor to the Revolution: food was short, money to buy food was short, transport lacking, shortage of this, shortage of that. Roberto shouted:

“Turn off that radio! I don’t want to hear this guy talking shit! That bozo is not my brother!”

“That’s not the René I married either; he’s not the father of my daughter. Roberto, this must be some set-up by the gringos!”

It wasn’t. At noon, after launching Michel Marín, the last parachute student of the morning, René saw that the little airport was half empty. He took advantage of the two control tower employees’ lunch hour to cut the cables of the radio communicator with pliers, and stuffed the microphone into the pocket of his overalls. He went bounding down the stairs and got into the cabin of the only plane parked outside the hangars. It was a yellow, double-winged, Antonov An-2, made in the Soviet Union forty years earlier, and used in Cuba as a crop duster and for towing gliders. When the ground crew realized that something strange was going on, the plane was already in the air.

René knew that although the tower had no communications, it was a matter of moments before the Cuban radars would be warned of the escape. He also knew that as soon as his plane was detected, Soviet-made MiG fighters would take off from the military base at San Antonio de los Baños, minutes away from Havana, and force him to return. To outwit the control he flew almost hugging the ground, below the reach of the radar network. And, contrary to what any pilot headed for Florida would do, he did not take off in a straight line for Key West, a route that would take only forty minutes. He crossed over Cuba, and when he reached the sea, he made a turn to the northeast, pointing the plane in the direction of the Bahamas. Only when he was sure he was beyond the twelve miles of Cuban airspace did he swerve the plane round to the west, making a perfect zigzag through the air. The maneuver worked, but it almost cost the pilot’s life: when René sighted the first islets of Florida, an hour and a half had passed since he had taken off from Cuba. There was only enough fuel for another ten minutes of flying. His hands sweating, he tuned his radio to the control tower of the naval air station at Boca Chica, thirty kilometers north of Key West, announced that he was a Cuban defector and that his airplane was running out of fuel. He received authorization from the US Navy to land on one of the military base’s three runways and when the Antonov’s heavy wheels touched down on American soil, its fuel tank was practically empty. “Bold Defection” and “Dramatic Return” were the headlines the next day, celebrating the feat. “After starring in a story of heroism, valor and compassion,” said the Miami Herald, “the bold René González” would have no problems being accepted by the Cuban community in Miami.

The new hero of the north shore of the Florida Straits, the stretch of sea between Cuba and Miami, René had left a trail of desolation among family and friends on the south side of Havana. Olga and Roberto’s first painful duty was to break the news to both of their parents. It was especially tough telling the truth to Olga’s laborer father Esmerejildo, and Roberto’s mother, Irma, both old communist militants, Party members since before the triumph of the Revolution. From the anguished look on the faces of her son and daughter-in-law, Irma knew something bad had happened. Olga looked terrible and it was obvious she had been crying. They had barely walked in when Roberto punched the wall:

“René betrayed us, Mother. He’s betrayed us!”

The old lady was incredulous:

“It’s not possible! I can’t get my head round that. It’s not possible!”

Unsure what to do, Roberto took her to the back of the house and told her in no uncertain terms:

“Mother, he has betrayed us and there’s nothing we can do but accept it. In time we’ll get used to it.”

With tears in her eyes, the white-haired Irma refused to believe what she had heard. She couldn’t understand how a person like her son, so immune to consumerist temptations, could do such a thing. Deep down, not even Roberto was able to decipher his brother’s gesture. It might be understandable had there been political differences, but to see someone with his ideological background defect “because of food” was, as Cubans say, like pouring vinegar on the wound. Although they were both American citizens, neither René nor Roberto had ever considered going to live in the United States. Unlike many people who dreamed of emigrating, the brothers had stayed in Cuba because they wanted to, as a matter of personal choice. Both had gone to Angola as volunteers. “We weren’t brought up to bother about material goods,” Roberto would often say. “Potatoes and beans were never the center of our lives.”

In spite of the widespread incredulity, the reality was that René had stolen a plane and gone into exile in Miami—full stop. This was the hard reality his family would have to live with. Roberto encountered an extreme variety of reactions. People who had known his brother seemed genuinely surprised, unable to understand what had driven him to leave. Others reacted as if it were the most natural thing in the world. “Don’t give yourself a hard time over this,” he heard several times, “because René was just one more. It’s over, forget it.” Some didn’t hide their admiration. “Good for him. What’s a competent pilot going to do here if there isn’t even fuel to fly with?” said others. “This place is a piece of shit, he did the right thing leaving.”

Only 160 kilometers from Havana, the deserter was being feted by the Cuban community in Florida. Upon landing, all he had to do was present his birth certificate, proving his American citizenship, for the military authorities in Boca Chica to release him. Once in Miami, he spoke to waiting journalists—among whom was the Radio Martí reporter, whose retransmission hours later would put Olga and Roberto’s doubts to rest in Havana. Showing no sign of regret, he seemed sure of what he had done. He said he had felt like “a true Christopher Columbus” when he spotted the first cayos, the string of islets of southern Florida, and revealed that it was a long-hatched plan: “Planning the escape took three months, but I had already said goodbye to Cuba many years ago.”

As time went by, Roberto’s “we’ll get used to it” took on a prophetic note. Deep down, however, Roberto, Olga and Irma continued to find it difficult to understand. And it was many months before René sent news. The sparse, scattered information that reached Olga about her husband’s doings came over the waves of what Cubans call radio bemba—the grapevine of whispers and rumors. Some said he was working as a laborer, while others swore he was an employee at Miami Airport. But all of them agreed on one point: René had gotten mixed up with organizations of the extreme right in Florida.

The radio bemba was spot on. In the first year he worked as a flight instructor at the airport in Opa-Locka, a township close to Miami, and as a roofer, among other odd jobs. In addition, he had become involved with armed anti-Castroist organizations throughout southern Florida. The Cuban diaspora was intensely excited about the self-dissolution of the Soviet Union. The foreseeable damage that the disappearance of the communist power would cause to the structures of the Cuban Revolution rekindled the hope of accomplishing a thirty-year-old dream, even among the most conformist: overthrowing Fidel Castro, reinstating capitalism on the Island and recovering the assets confiscated by the Revolution. Faced with such a promising outlook, the former owners of banks, factories and sugar refineries—many of whom had had their businesses expropriated in the early 1960s, only to rebuild their fortunes in exile—opened their coffers to the many factions and tendencies within their community. More precisely, the United States was home to forty-one anti-Castroist groups, led for the most part by Bay of Pigs veterans who were openly in favor of armed confrontation with Cuba.

In early 1992, after a year of roaming from place to place, René joined one such organization, the recently-founded Hermanos al Rescate, or Brothers to the Rescue, led by an old acquaintance from Cuba: José Basulto. He wasn’t just another defector, like René, but a sworn enemy of the Cuban Revolution. When ...