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the television there is only one station, and after the news and sports, after the music videos, there is always the same late-night program: El Caballo expounding on the recent achievements of the regime.
    Walking through the old city, where hookers beckoned from alleyways, Isabel grimaced as we listened to the voice of the leader, and it seemed as if he were speaking from every corner, from every house we passed, and I felt Isabel’s arm tighten around mine, trembling.

Three
    I SABEL never sees her father, Manuel told me after I noticed her at the airport. She does not speak to him. They do not say hello when they are in the same room, but he will not let her go. You know, it is said that he has sixteen sons, but she is the only girl. Except for one boy, they are all bastards, just like our leader is a bastard. Seventeen children, you know.
¡Qué cojones!
Manuel puffed up his chest like a rooster. Our leader, he told me, never sleeps in the same bed two nights in a row.
    He tried to arrange for me to meet with Isabel, “But you know, she is very busy.” Somehow I sensed she did not want to meet me. Or that he did not really want me to meet her. Whatever it was, I knew I probably would not see Isabel again, and it didn’t matter that much to me. I might catch glimpses of her at the airport or in bars, but meeting her, after all, was a digression. An interesting diversion, but not really a part of my reason for being here.
    I went about my business, checking out the snorkeling ona remote strip of beach called Smuggler’s Cove, renowned for its reef. There I tiptoed across oily sand and cast-off debris to swim above undulating beds of sea urchins. The beach bar had been long closed. Smuggler’s Cove would receive a small correction in my update.
    In the city a few days later Manuel accompanied me as I visited the Monuments of the Revolution. He led me slowly past the small, unlit cases of the Museum of the History of the Revolution, which begins its history not with the great liberator of
la isla
, as you might expect, but with the arrival of the first Spanish ship in 1472. They docked for a night and dropped off the first white man to live on
la isla
—Alejandro Martinez, a Spanish sailor, believed to be a Moor. He was missing his right hand and the fingers on his left, his nose, and his ears. The Taino Indians knew a holy man when they saw one and left him alone to forage and live in a cave in the hills.
    For years Martínez lived in seclusion, walking the perimeters of the island, until he determined its shape to be that of a crocodile and named it Caimán, after its shape. When his solitude became too much, Martínez began to greet the ships that stopped to dock there. At first they were afraid of him, but the word soon spread across the high seas that a man known for his seclusion and torment lived on an unnamed island in the turquoise sea. The sailors, too, determined he was a holy man. They brought him gifts of seeds from coffee plants and avocado trees, they brought him kittens and dogs, goats and horses, and Martínez bred these and filled the island—which had once been merely a place of parrots and howler monkeys and snakes—with the domestic animals of his own country.
    When Columbus came, he killed all the Taino Indians,whom he called Carib, after the old Spanish word for cannibal. One Taino woman, it was said, escaped to the cave where Martínez lived and eventually became his wife. Martínez watched this slaughter from his hiding place in the hills, but he could read and he could write and he recorded all that he saw in a book entitled
The Conquest of the Tainos on the Island of the Caimán
. Except for Bernal Díaz del Castillo’s
The Conquest of Mexico
, it is the only definitive portrait that we know of an ancient people and their massacre.
    From the time of Columbus the islands and its sea and the people who came to live there became known as the Caribbean, and for four hundred years the Spanish