
By Chris Bruton
Copyright ©2025
I was sitting in the Parque Martí one night, taking in the moribund scene—the floodlit red and black 26 de Julio banner draped over the provincial government building, the house band playing “Chan Chan” to a smattering of tourists at the Teatro Terry, a bored waitress checking her cell phone outside the vacant state-run restaurant—when a gaunt old guy approached me. You want a chica? he asked. He pointed across the plaza to where a couple of young women stood in the shadows under a tree. I’ve got two over there, he said. Nice girls, they won’t give you any trouble. Why don’t you come and talk to them?
I followed him to the women. The guy had a few words with them and left. I sat on one side of a bench, the women on the other. Neither spoke. The one sitting closest to me was probably in her late twenties, thin and a bit rundown. She would glance at me, smile, then quickly look away again. The other was younger. A mulata, her crinkly hair pulled up in a bun. I asked them their names, where they lived. After a few minutes the younger one stood and I got a good look at her. She was tall and wore a Micky Mouse shirt stretched tight over a prominent bust, a red leather jacket and short skirt. When I invited them for a drink both said they were hungry. We walked to a paladar around the corner and I had a couple caipirinhas while they ate. They took me for an Italian or Canadian and seemed surprised I was American. Otherwise there was little conversation. I would turn from one to the other and once the younger one said, How he looks at me! Her name was Leidy. After they finished eating I asked if she wanted to go with me. She said okay.
We rode a bicitaxi to my casa. Leidy surrendered her carné to the owner and we went to my room. I got a beer out of the fridge and offered her one. She wanted a refresco. I took off my shirt and after a few minutes she stood and began to undress. I watched her. Long of limb, skin deep dark brown like well-oiled leather. Her face broad, squarish, with a small flat nose and those almond-shaped eyes Cubans call china.
“How old are you?”
“Twenty-two.”
“Got any kids?”
“Sí. Tengo dos.”
She lay on the bed in her bra and panties. I kissed her. The bra was a heavy-duty affair and I had trouble releasing the hooks. She had to do it and her freed breasts were bell-shaped, firm, the nipples nearly black. I took them in my hands, fondled and sucked them. She had a bit of stubble on her armpits. When I asked about her period, Todavía, she said, then went in the bathroom and had a quick shower.
Back in bed she wanted to know how much I would give her. Fifty, I said. Amor, give me eighty, she pleaded. For my children. I let that slide and put a pillow under her. There was still a bit of odor but that is part of the deal. Her juices began to flow, like sweet water gushing from a spring. She had a fabulous pussy, as opulently proportioned as the rest of her. While fucking she revealed an odd quirk. She kept her face covered with her shirt. It was like making it with a mummy. I gave her the fifty, we exchanged numbers on Whatsapp and I told her I would be in touch.
I had arranged to go hiking the following day in the Escambray with Felix, a singer I’d met on one of my visits to Cienfuegos years ago. We had shared a lot of good times together and come to be pals but like all things Cuban the relationship was complicated by money. Felix helped me in countless ways, like finding gas when the stations ran out and running interference with aggressive jineteros, and while I never explicitly paid him for his services he ate and drank well with me and I would always throw him my spare cash when I left town. He had a daughter and only worked whenever he landed a singing gig, which seemed seldom.
We rode a rented scooter to the mountains, taking lodging in a near-deserted complex of holiday cottages administered by the state. The trails were a little lame, none over five kilometers. Daytrippers from Trinidad would arrive in the morning and clear out by dark. At night a cold mist settled over the depopulated cabañas and we, like moths to the light, would venture out to the resort’s reception area to drink draft beer and shoot the shit with the locals.
I was listening to the gay waiter lament the romantic challenges of living in the mountains when I got a text. Que haces? It was Leidy, the chica. I had pretty much decided not to see her again. She was way too passive for my taste. But now I started remembering her eyes, her cunt. I realized I had fallen under her spell. A sudden access of desire swept over me as I typed out, Missing you.
I contacted her as soon as I got back to Cienfuegos. Picked her up on the scooter, had a bite to eat in town, then straight to the casa and fucked. She just as aloof as before. No cariño, not a smile, hardly a word of conversation. Was she disgusted with me? Was it my age? This went on for days. Each time I was forking over cash, never as much as the first time, but an ayuda. One night after we arrived at the casa she stayed in the foyer, texting. I waited for her fifteen, twenty minutes in the room. Finally I marched out to see what she was doing.
“Espérate,” she said, tapping on her phone.
“What do you mean, wait? Do you think this is what I pay you for?”
She stared at the screen for a moment. “You don’t own me. Not you, not anyone.”
“Okay, but right now I own your time.”
“I want to go home.”
“Then go.”
I saw her out the door. Ten minutes later she called to ask me for cab fare.
“Good news,” Felix told me over billiards the next day. “You’re better off without that jeba. It’s certain she has a boyfriend, probably her chulo. That’s why she’s always on the phone.
Don’t worry, you’ll get another.”
Felix had little tolerance for chicas, jineteras. Not so much from a moral standpoint as the fact that they made good money spreading their legs, while he had to sing his lungs out at weddings and quinceañeras for a pittance. And then he must have calculated, at least unconsciously, that the more I spent on pussy the less there would be to gift him. But Felix accepted this proclivity in me, even if he didn’t approve; it was something that tourists did, like visiting the Granma or the monument to Che. We played until three when Felix had to meet his partner, a schoolteacher. They lived out in the sticks and each day had to line up on the highway and beg a ride home. I would have lent him the scooter but I was thinking Leidy might repent and want to see me.
Back at the casa the owner and his wife offered me a coffee. They had a son in Miami and the sala was filled with glitter-frame photographs of the fellow through the years. He had petitioned for them over a year ago. “No es fácil,” the wife told me, the multi-purpose phrase of resignation, hopelessness and complaint. That evening I walked up the Prado and had dinner at a rooftop paladar. Looking out over the boulevard, I noticed a guy rooting around in a trash bin a block from the posh Hotel La Unión. He was about my age, maybe younger. Clean-shaven and neatly dressed, he went about his task with solemn dignity, from time to time depositing a can or other bit of rubbish in a bag he held to the side. Watching him, I reflected on the randomness of fate, how the simple accident of one’s place of birth could determine whether you lived comfortably or had to pick through garbage. Then the waiter brought my lobster, and I ordered another mojito.
After dinner I strolled down to the parque. I didn’t want another chica but it was too early to go back to my room and stare at the four walls. The plaza was dead except for some dog walkers and the usual gaggle of adolescents goosing and shoving one other. The boys still juvenile but the girls well-developed. I wondered if they were already fucking.
On my way to the muelle a group of three young women approached me.
“Hola,” one of them said as she passed.
“Hola.”
I stopped to buy a cone of popcorn from a vendor nearby and the women gathered around me. Don’t you want a chica? one asked. I declined but offered to buy them a drink.
We occupied one of the picnic tables at the wharfside bar. I ordered beers. They told me they were sisters, which seemed unlikely since they didn’t look alike or have the same skin tone. They were not very attractive but full of high spirits, and after the Sphinx-like Leidy I enjoyed watching them tease and diss one another. They asked if they could get food, ordered hamburgers and wolfed them down. I wondered if it was a thing, scoring a meal off the gringo when sex-for-hire wasn’t in the cards. We had another round and one of the women, a chubby trigueña, asked me if I liked to dance. She said there was a dance club on the Prado called Infinity. I invited her there, paid the tab and we parted company from the “sisters.”
In the club she danced dirty with me, bending over and grinding her big ass against my dick. I felt a bit self-conscious of these attentions, as we were the only ones dancing, but the few other patrons didn’t raise a brow. The thought of sleeping with her didn’t excite me but began to take on a certain inevitability. Between dances she wormed out of me that I’d been seeing Leidy and offered love advice. She was impartial, suggesting I give the muchacha another chance.
Back at the casa she got naked without fanfare. Her breasts were enormous, balloon-like. She sucked ferociously and then wanted to get on top but it had been years since that had worked for me. I fucked her missionary, dispassionately, like a commuter boarding the six o’clock train. She offered to suck me again but I told her it was okay and paid her off.
The next day Leidy texted me. How are you? Why haven’t you been writing to me? She said she wanted to talk, “face to face.” I picked her up that night and drove to the little park beside the muelle. She sat a little apart from me, wearing the same short skirt and red leather jacket from when we first met.
“Go ahead. You told me you wanted to talk.”
“I don’t know what to say.”
“It was your idea!”
“I’m sorry I spent so much time on my phone. It won’t happen again.”
“Is that too much to ask?”
“No.”
I leaned towards her and brushed back her stiff hair. “You know I’m crazy about you. Do you like me at all?”
“I like you.”
“Then why don’t you show it?”
“I will. Only don’t talk so loud, somebody might hear you.”
We rode to a nearby paladar. Leidy wouldn’t eat and only requested a cola. I asked her why.
“I’ve got an empacho,” she said, pointing between her breasts.
“Like indigestion? We’ll buy some medicine.”
“No, it’s worse than that. I need to do a cure.”
“What kind of cure?”
“They pass a towel over you, it takes the empacho away. There’s a man who lives near me that can do it.”
“You’ll need money, I guess.”
“Sí.”
I gave her a couple thousand pesos in the morning. When I asked Felix about the empacho business he was unusually circumspect; he would only say that a lot of people put stock in such cures, but he himself had never tried it. He insisted there was nothing wrong with Leidy, though.
“She’s just playing you. Avoiding you while still getting paid.”
“Well, I fucked her anyway.”
“Menos mal.”
The next night Leidy didn’t show. I had told her I was picking her up and texted her upon arrival, but she never responded. She lived several kilometers from the main town, in a complex of spare tenement blocks besieged by rank weeds, piles of trash and building debris. In most countries it would have been considered a slum but in Cuba the term lacked context. Waiting in the darkness down the block from her edificio, random men and youths walking by, I got spooked. After fifteen minutes I cranked up the scooter and drove away.
In the morning, without addressing her absence, Leidy messaged me that the empacho had worsened overnight. She had gone to bed early and only now managed to see the curandero. She attached a video demonstrating the treatment. A pair of hands beckoning over a prone torso. A towel hovering over a woman’s breastbone.
What time, she asked, are you going to pick me up?
About Chris Bruton:
Chris is a writer and Spanish translator living in-mostly-San Antonio. He is in the final stages of finishing a novel entitled Like Barabbas.
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