The majority of our boat people, however, originated from the United States. Every day more would arrive, by large ship or private craft, even on homemade rafts that brought an ironic smile to our faces. So many of them, a total of five million, equal to almost half of our indigenous population, and along with all the other nationalities, they were placed under the jurisdiction of the government’s “Quarantine Resettlement Program.”

I would not go so far as to call the Resettlement Centers prison camps. They could not compare to the lives suffered by our political dissidents; the writers and teachers…I had a “friend” who was accused of being a homosexual. His stories from prison cannot compare to even the harshest Resettlement Center.

It was not easy living, however. These people, no matter what their prewar occupation or status, were initially put to work as field hands, twelve to fourteen hours a day, growing vegetables in what had once been our state-run sugar plantations. At least the climate was on their side. The temperature was dropping, the skies were darkening. Mother Nature was kind to them. The guards, however, were not. “Be glad you’re alive,” they’d shout after each slap or kick. “Keep complaining and we’ll throw you to the zombies!”

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 specialized 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. 1 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 not surprised that Fidel knew the tides 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 cannon fodder in hours; for us, it might take years. This tends to make us more pragmatic than our compatriots in green. We tend to look at a situation with a bit more…I don’t want to say caution, but perhaps more strategic conservatism. Withdraw, consolidate, husband your resources. That was the same philosophy as the Redeker Plan, but of course, the army wouldn’t listen.

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 of 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?

That was what pushed Captain Chen over the edge. He knew what would happen if the war continued along its course, and what our chances for survival would be. If he thought that there was any hope, he would have grabbed a rifle and hurled himself at the living dead. He was convinced that soon there would be no more Chinese people, and perhaps, eventually, no more people anywhere. That was why he made his intentions known to his senior officers, declaring that we might be the only chance of preserving something of our civilization.

Did you agree with his proposal?

I didn’t even believe it at first. Escape in our boat, our nuclear submarine? This wasn’t just desertion, slinking out in the middle of a war to save our own pathetic skins. This was stealing one of the motherland’s most valuable national assets. The Admiral Zheng He was only one of three ballistic missiles subs and the newest of what the West referred to as the Type 94. She was the child of four parents: Russian assistance, black-market technology, the fruits of anti-American espionage, and, let us not forget, the culmination of nearly five thousand years of continuous Chinese history. She was the most expensive, the most advanced, the most powerful machine our nation had ever constructed. To simply steal her, like a lifeboat from the sinking ship of China, was inconceivable. It was only Captain Chen’s force of personality, his deep, fanatical patriotism that convinced me of our only alternative.

How long did it take to prepare?

Three months. It was hell. Qingdao, our home port, was in a constant state of siege. More and more army units were called in to maintain order, and each was just a little less trained, a little less equipped, a little younger, or older, than the one that came before it. Some of the surface ship captains had to donate “expendable” crew to shore up base defenses. Our perimeter was under attack almost every day. And through all of this we had to prepare and provision the boat for sea. It was supposed to be a routinely scheduled patrol; we had to smuggle on board both emergency supplies and family members.

Family members?

Oh yes, that was the cornerstone of the plan. Captain Chen knew the crew wouldn’t leave port unless their families could come with them.

How was that possible?

To find them or to smuggle them aboard?

Both.

Finding them was difficult. Most of us had family scattered throughout the country. We did our best to communicate with them, get a phone line working or send word with an army unit headed in that direction. The message was always the same: we’d be heading back out on patrol soon and their presence was required at the ceremony. Sometimes we’d try to make it more urgent, as if someone was dying and needed to see them. That was the best we could do. No one was allowed to go out and physically get them: too risky. We didn’t have multiple crews like you do on your missile boats. Every rating would be missed at sea. I pitied my shipmates, the agony of their waiting. I was lucky that my wife and children…

Children? I thought…

That we were only allowed one child? That law was modified years before the war, a practical solution to the problem of an imbalanced nation of only-child sons. I had twin daughters. I was lucky. My wife and children were already on base when the trouble started.

What about the captain? Did he have family?

His wife had left him in the early eighties. It was a devastating scandal, especially in those days. It still astounds me how he managed to both salvage his career and raise his son.

He had a son? Did he come with you?

[Xu evades the question.]

The worst part for many others was the waiting, knowing that even if they managed to make it to Qingdao, there was a very good chance that we might have already sailed. Imagine the guilt. You ask your family to come to you, perhaps leave the relative safety of their preexisting hideout, and arrive only to be abandoned at the dock.

Did many of them show up?

More than one would have guessed. We smuggled them aboard at night, wearing uniforms. Some—children and the elderly—were carried in supply crates.

Did the families know what was happening? What you were intending to do?

I don’t believe so. Every member of our crew had strict orders to keep silent. Had the MSS even had a whiff of what we were up to, the living dead would have been the least of our fears. Our secrecy also forced us to depart according to our routine patrol schedule. Captain Chen wanted so badly to wait for stragglers, family members who might be perhaps only a few days, a few hours, away! He knew it might have jeopardized everything, however, and reluctantly gave the order to cast off. He tried to hide his feelings and I think, in front of most, he might have gotten away with it. I could see it in his eyes though, reflecting the receding fires of Qingdao.