World War Z

Every camp had a rumor about the dreaded “zombie pits,” the hole in which they’d throw the “troublemakers.” The DGI (the General Intelligence Directorate) had even planted prisoners in the general population to spread stories about how they personally witnessed men being lowered, headfirst, into the boiling lake of ghouls. This was all just to keep everyone in line, you see, none of it was actually true… though… there were stories about the “Miami whites.” The majority of American Cubanos were welcomed home with open arms. I myself had several relatives living in Daytona who just barely escaped with their lives. The tears of so many reunions in those early, frantic days could have filled the Caribbean Sea. But that first wave of postrevolution immigrants-the affluent elite who had flourished under the old regime and who spent the rest of their lives trying to topple everything we’d worked so hard to build-as far as those aristos were concerned … I am not saying there is any proof that they were thrown to the ghouls by their fat, reactionary, Bacardi blanka drinking asses… But if they were, they can suck Batista’s balls in hell.

[A thin, satisfied smile crosses his lips.]

Of course, we couldn’t have actually attempted this kind of punishment with your people. Rumors and threats were one thing, but physical action… push a people, any people too far, and you risk the possibility of revolt. Five million Yankees, all rising in open revolution? Unthinkable. It already took too many troops to maintain the camps, and that was the initial success of the Yankee invasion of Cuba.

We simply didn’t have the manpower to guard five million detainees and almost four thousand kilometers of coastline. We couldn’t fight a war on two fronts. And so the decision was made to dissolve the centers and allow 10 percent of the Yankee detainees to work outside the wire on a spe-cialized parole program. These detainees would do the jobs Cubanos no longer wanted-day laborers, dish washers, and street cleaners-and while their wages would be next to nothing, their labor hours would go to a point system that allowed them to buy the freedom of other detainees.

It was an ingenious idea-some Florida Cubano came up with it-and the camps were drained in six months. At first the government tried to keep track of all of them, but that soon proved impossible. Within a year they had almost fully integrated, the “Nortecubanos,” insinuating themselves into every facet of our society.

Officially the camps had been created to contain the spread of “infection,” but that wasn’t the kind spread by the dead.

You couldn’t see this infection at first, not when we were still under siege. It was still behind closed doors, still spoken in whispers. Over the next several years what occurred was not so much a revolution as an evolution, an economic reform here, a legalized, privately owned newspaper there. People began to think more boldly, talk more boldly. Slowly, quietly, the seeds began to take root. I’m sure Fidel would have loved to bring his iron fist crashing down on our fledgling freedoms. Perhaps he might have, if world events had not shifted in our favor. It was when the world governments decided to go on the attack that everything changed forever.

Suddenly we became “the Arsenal of Victory.” We were the breadbasket, the manufacturing center, the training ground, and the springboard. We became the air hub for both North and South America, the great dry dock for ten thousand ships. We had money, lots of it, money that created an overnight middle class, and a thriving, capitalist economy that needed the refined skills and practical experience of the Nortecubanos.

We shared a bond I don’t think can ever be broken. We helped them reclaim their nation, and they helped us reclaim ours. They showed us the meaning of democracy… freedom, not just in vague, abstract terms, but on a very real, individually human level. Freedom isn’t just something you have for the sake of having, you have to want something else first and then want the freedom to fight for it. That was the lesson we learned from the Nortecubanos. They all had such grand dreams, and they’d lay down their lives for the freedom to make those dreams come true. Why else would El Jefe be so damned afraid of them?

I’m nor surprised char Fidel knew the rides of freedom were coming to sweep him out of power. I am surprised at how well he rode the wave.

[He laughs, gesturing to a photo on the wall of an aged Castro speaking in the Parque Central.]

Can you believe the cojones of that son of a bitch, to not only embrace the country’s new democracy, but to actually take credit for it? Genius. To personally preside over the first free elections of Cuba where his last official act was to vote himself out of power. That is why his legacy is a statue and not a bloodstain against a wall. Of course our new Latin superpower is anything but idyllic. We have hundreds of political parties and more special-interest groups than sands on our beaches. We have strikes, we have riots, we have protests, it seems, almost every day. You can see why Che ducked out right after the revolution. It’s a lot easier to blow up trains than to make them run on time. What is it that Mister Churchill used to say? “Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others.” [He laughs.]

Patriot’s Memorial, the Forbidden City, Beijing, China

[I suspect Admiral Xu Zhicai has chosen this particular spot on the off chance that a photographer would be present. Although no one since the war has ever remotely questioned either his or his crew’s patriotism, he is taking no chances for the eyes of “foreign readers.” Initially defensive, he consents to this interview only on the condition that I listen objectively to “his” side of the story, a demand he clings to even after I explain that there is no other.]

[Note: For the sake of clarity, Western naval designations have replaced the authentic Chinese.]

We were not traitors-I say this before I’ll say anything else. We loved our country, we loved our people, and while we may not have loved those who ruled both, we were unwaveringly loyal to our leadership.

We never would have imagined doing what we did had not the situation become so desperate. By the time Captain Chen first voiced his proposal, we were already on the brink. They were in every city, every village. In the nine and a half million square kilometers that made up our country, you couldn’t find one centimeter of peace.

The army, arrogant bastards that they were, kept insisting that they had the problem under control, that every day was the turning point and before the next snow fell upon the earth they would have the entire country pacified. Typical army thinking: overaggressive, overconfident. All you need is a group of men, or women, give them matching clothes, a few hours training, something that passes for a weapon, and you have an army, not the best army, but still an army nonetheless.

That can’t happen with the navy, any navy. Any ship, no matter how crude, requires considerable energy and materials to create. The army can replace its ca

They rejected Redeker?

Without the slightest consideration or internal debate. How could the army ever lose? With their vast stockpiles of conventional armaments, with their “bottomless well” of manpower… “bottomless well,” unforgivable. Do you know why we had such a population explosion during the 1950s? Because Mao believed it was the only way to win a nuclear war. This is truth, not propaganda. It was common knowledge that when the atomic dust eventually settled, only a few thousand American or Soviet survivors would be overwhelmed by tens of millions ot Chinese. Numbers, that was the philosophy of my grandparents’ generation, and it was the strategy the army was quick to adopt once our experienced, professional troops were devoured in the outbreak’s early stages. Those generals, sick, twisted old criminals sitting safely in their bunker and ordering wave after wave of conscripted teenagers into battle. Did they even think that every dead soldier was now a live zombie? Did they ever realize that, instead of drowning them in our bottomless well, we were the ones drowning, choking to death as the most populous nation on Earth found itself, for the first time in history, in danger of becoming fatally outnumbered?