The Cuban Affair

by Nelson DeMille

The Green Parrot’s regular clientele are eclectic and eccentric and mostly barefoot. The owner, Pat, is a bit crazy himself, and he tells the tourists that the parachute hanging on the ceiling is weighed down with termite turds.

Key West’s official motto is “One Human Family.” Well, they haven’t met my family. And they haven’t been to Afghanistan to see the rest of the human family. Or, like Jack, to Vietnam. Or if they have, they’re here, like me and Jack, to float in a sea of alcohol-induced amnesia. I’ve been here four years. Five is enough to forget why you came here. After that, you’re not going home.

Being captain of your own fate doesn’t mean you always make good decisions.

Most of the MacCormicks and Bedells are college grads and according to my father the youngsters have all been educated beyond their intelligence.

My financial advisor is Jack Colby, who likes to say, “I spent most of my money on booze and broads and I wasted the rest of it.”

Jack Colby and Webster MacCormick are unknowable to me because their screwed-up heads were screwed up in a screwed-up war that was different from my screwed-up war. Also, I had the impression from both of them that they’d like to go back to that other country. My generation, on the other hand, has no nostalgia for the past, which was screwed up when we arrived. In any case, as my father once said to me in a rare philosophical moment, “Memories about the past are always about the present.”

Revolutions usually replace one group of incompetent autocratic assholes with another, and the real losers are everyone else.

There’s a saying—‘I’d rather regret the things I did than the things I didn’t do.’ ”

Honesty is the best policy, unless you could lie and get away with it.

I’d watched a little CNN, which reminded me of why I don’t watch TV news, then I watched a news cycle on Tele Rebelde, looking for a mention of Pescando Por la Paz, but I didn’t see anything.

I understood the emotional attachment and the sense of loss that Sara Ortega must be feeling, but you really can’t go home again. Unless you’re just there to pick up what you left behind.

We all got a good laugh at that. This was fun. Like making jokes about blood while you’re dining with a vampire.

Well, as they say, you should never travel faster than your guardian angel can fly.

Fate whispered to the warrior, “You cannot withstand the coming storm.” And the warrior whispered back, “I am the storm.”

The military teaches you about the loneliness of command, and the weight of command that sits on your shoulders and is the combined weight of everyone whose lives you are responsible for. It is the worst feeling in the world. But that’s what you signed on for, and no one ever said it was going to be easy.

“I only drink a little, but when I do, I become a different person, and that person drinks a lot.”