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horses would not have kept Roberto from the Orange Bowl to cheer the young president who promised to return a bloody battle flag one day in a free Havana. Octavio Nelson had not stayed for the speeches.
    At first Roberto had proclaimed himself a businessman in their adopted land. Now he announced to all who wished to listen and many who didn’t that he was an executive. An executive of what? Will-o-the-wisp International, maybe. But something evidently. Roberto always had “a big deal cooking,” as he liked to tell his brother in his flawless English. Roberto wouldn’t even speak Spanish to his family. It didn’t suit his image.
    Good old Bobby Nelson. Big house on the bay, big boat, graphite tennis rackets, decorator wife, vacation cottage in North Carolina. Thank God he didn’t have any kids; they would have sneaked into the Ivy League on minority programs and claimed to their classmates to have been born on Beacon Hill.
    His brother was a crook. Octavio Nelson knew that. Big crimes, little crimes, any kind of crimes at all that didn’t require dirty hands. Roberto was always on hand with a charming smile, a brisk handshake and empty promises.
    And now he was running dope. Leave it to Roberto, forever at the height of fashion—a dope runner like every two-bit blow-dried dilettante in Miami. Probably even had his-and-hers matching gold spoons.
    How tricky for Roberto to have a cop brother who was always arresting dopers. Tricky but bearable. Octavio would always be a brother first and a cop second. Roberto knew that. He counted on it.
    Octavio Nelson sat for a long time. Around him the business of the police ebbed and flowed. He sensed it, but he didn’t see it, and he didn’t hear it. Should he, this one more time, do his brother’s bidding? If he did, it probably would be abetting a crime. If he didn’t, somebody might get hurt, and it certainly wouldn’t be cagey Roberto.
    Finally, painfully, Nelson picked up the black phone on his desk. He called a friend in the police garage.
    “Tommy, this is Nelson. Could you do me a favor? I need a car towed in tonight—a brown Mercedes on Brickell near the causeway.” He recited the license number. “I’ll take care of the paper work on it tomorrow.”
    “Sure, we’ll get to it; it’s a quiet night.”
    “Thanks. And listen, Tommy, tell the boys to check under the hood before they move it. There might be a bomb.”

Chapter 3
    ONCE, WHEN MEN were young and home was Cuba, the lector sat in a place of honor above the long rows of wooden benches. He did not look at the artisans or they, gracefully building rich men’s toys with flashing fingers, pungent leaf and wicked blade, at him.
    In the mornings the lector exhausted the newspapers. Slowly, clearly, loud enough for the most junior apprentice to hear him, the lector would read all the local newspapers: the news, the editorials, the sports, the comics. In four hours of spoken lullaby each tabaquero would make one hundred cigars.
    The long hot afternoons were a more contemplative time. The lector read novels of history and romance in the afternoons. Another four hours, another one hundred cigars.
    The lectores were gone now, obsolete as lamplighters, vanquished by radio. In Miami today the tabaquero radios play loudly: saucy Latin music, mournful laments for a lost homeland, blatant come-ons to a consumer society. In the afternoons, soap operas.
    The hands that caress the velvet leaf are the same. They are still quick, still supple, as loving as ever. It is the ears of the tabaqueros that are not what they once were. They have survived the lectores, but they will not survive the century. And there are none to follow them, not in Miami. Young Cubans in Miami drive trucks, teach school, run banks, smuggle dope. They do not roll cigars.
    It is the old men who come to work in Miami’s storefront cigar factories, old men steeped in tradition, patience and pride. Three old men came to work most mornings at the