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Matanzas cigar factory in a quiet side street near the Orange Bowl. For a long time it had been four, until Pepín died. Now it was only three. Elberto could have come if he had wanted to, Elberto whose cunning hands had made cigars for princes and presidents in Cuba. But Elberto was lazy. He had always been lazy. Cabrón. Now he played dominoes day and night, useless, like an old woman. Elberto liked to tease his friends who still went to work every morning.
    “Fools,” he would cry as he passed the bench where they waited for the bus. “You need not work. Let your Tío Sam pay for your frijoles. You have worked long enough. Don’t you know where they pay Social Security? Come, I will show you.”
    Fools? It was Elberto who was the fool, thought Jesús. One day he would learn how important it was to make cigars at the Matanzas factory. One day he would watch with envy while all of Little Havana crowded around the Matanzas tabaqueros to shake their hands and slap their backs. Then Elberto would see who had been the fool.
    It was Jesús who opened the rickety front door each morning, who made the cafecitos and laid out the savory tobacco leaves to be worked. The leaves came from the Dominican Republic now, and the wrapper from Cameroon, but the tobacco had been grown from seeds smuggled out of Cuba. It was better than ever, better even than the tobacco other Cuban exiles now grew in Honduras and the Canary Islands. Was it as good as Cuban tobacco ? Ni hablar. Of course it was better. Jesús had never met a Communist who could grow tobacco, much less roll a good cigar.
    It was Jesús who fed the chickens in the small plot of green behind the shop and who turned on the radio that was the pallid North American substitute for the lector. Pedro and Raúl teased Jesús that he must do all the housekeeping work because he was the baby of the shop. Jesús knew they expected him to do all the work because he was a natural leader, and he appreciated that. Jesús was seventy-four.
    It was Jesús, too, who emptied the ashtray and dusted and switched on the air-conditioning in the small private office at the rear of the shop. The office was soundproofed, paneled richly in wood. It held a modern desk and a swivel chair and a telephone with many buttons. It looked a century newer than the rest of the shop, and it was the real reason the three old men came each morning to make cigars. The brave man who worked in that office would one day lead them all back to Cuba. And that was a secret that stupid Elberto and his almighty dominoes would never know. Cabrón.
    The old men always listened to the same Cuban exile radio station, and it was the talk shows they liked best. They sat, like a family for dinner, around the scarred tambol, gleaming chavetas cutting and shaping the cigars, the gray heads nodding agreement with each new forecast of disaster for el tirano. Castro. El verdugo. Pig.
    It was the old men’s pride that they understood so much more than the exiles who needed the radio for their news. The man who worked in the back would always know first when there was news. A crop failure. A plane crash. Important sabotage. Defections. He always knew, and he would always tell the tabaqueros who screened for him and protected his lair.
    Never any details, mind you. Details were secret. They could be dangerous. There were many spies in el barrio. A nod. A smile of victory. Thumbs up. A shrug. They were enough; the old men understood. It was a difficult struggle.
    When the man came that morning, he was impassive. It was not hard to explain: The radio spoke of a new Cuban victory in Africa. How that must have hurt. He touched Jesús lightly on the shoulder, took a Churchill from Raúl’s rack and disappeared without a word into the office.…
    He made two phone calls that morning. The first was to an office in a skyscraper overlooking Biscayne Bay.
    “Law office.”
    “Mr. Redbirt, please.” The English was flawless.
    “Who is calling,