A Hustler Close To Me

A Hustler Close To Me / Fernando Damaso
Posted on September 6, 2015

Fernando Damaso, 29 August 2015 — In my distant childhood in the El Moro
neighborhood of Mantilla, currently a part of the Arroyo Naranjo
municipality, I had the good fortune to know and live with a character
that left deep traces on me. Manolo "The Pole," as everyone called him,
was the son of Syrians or Lebanese who had emigrated to Cuba. His real
name, if I remember correctly, was Manuel Sahinz Anhus.

One day he appeared at my house, because of his relationship with
Carmen, the daughter of Sara "The Galician," with whom my mother and I
shared — like a single family — the large house on Rodriguez Street.
Manolo was dark complexioned and over six feet tall. When I met him he
was practicing boxing, participating in Saturday fights in covered
space where a ring was installed, on Route 4, near the Juventud campus,
Professor Nilo's college, where I studied in elementary school. He
almost always won, which earned him some pesos, from the bets.

On formalizing his relationship with Carmen, he decided to look for a
more stable means of making a living, and with some savings bought a
wooden cart with a canvas roof–similar to those of American old west–and
two mules, and started to manufacture soaps of charcoal and mud highly
prized by the Chinese in their car washes and by makers of sweets.

I participated in their manufacture, in my free time, in a workshop
constructed in the backyard patio, and in their sale in Havana's
neighborhoods and districts, as co-pilot of the cart. We packed them in
wooden boxes of 100 cakes for 30 centavos, but we also sold them at retail.

When he married Carmen they went to Pennsylvania on their honeymoon,
where he had family. Soon their first son was born and I was the
godfather, but the boy died of gastroenteritis in a few months.

Hit hard by this misfortune he abandoned the business, more than
anything because of the annoyance of being covered with ashes all the
time, and bought an old green panel Ford, and became a distributor of
bubble gum, the ones that came on a blank post card that when you licked
it with your tongue and exposed it to sun, showed a photo of some
important athlete.

Later he became a cockfighting enthusiast, transforming the abandoned
workshop into an enclosure and dedicating himself to breeding the cocks,
offering fights on the weekends, where juicy bets were placed. Of this
time I remember that he gave me two "retired" cocks.

When Nury appeared, an employee of the Shell refinery, as the boyfriend
of his sister Ramona, he convinced him to sell his job, and with the
money earned, plus a portion provided by him, join him in buying a Dodge
dump truck to transport construction materials on contract. At that time
he had another son, whom they named Manolito, like the deceased son, and
to whom I was also a godfather.

In 1952, a few days after Batista staged his coup d'etat, recommended by
a neighbor who was turned from a taxi driver into a National Police
captain, he started working as a driver for the then Minister of
Education Manuel Fernandaz Concheso and, on the minister's premature
death, for his wife, who replaced him in office.

Then, driving an elegant black Oldsmobile 98 with air conditioning,
January 1, 1959 [the day Castro came to power] took him by surprise.

At that time our two families had already been separated, with him,
Carmen and Manolito living in a wooden bungalow on Managua at El Lucero,
across from the Chic cinema, then known as "the house with the statues"
because of the number of them installed in his garden.

I visited him several times, to see my godson and bring him toys, until
one fine day they disappeared from the place, perhaps abandoning the
country and moving to Pennsylvania.

It could be that the sequence of all this is not exact, but the facts are.

This great hustler was my best friend in those long ago times.

Source: A Hustler Close To Me / Fernando Damaso | Translating Cuba -
http://translatingcuba.com/a-hustler-close-to-me-fernando-damaso/