Almost Dead Havana El Comandante woke up with a start, his legs tangled in the top sheet. Damn these catnaps. Nothing was worse for courting ghosts. He’d had another dream about that hunger striker, Orlando Martínez, his head cowled in a yellow hood. With his bulging eyes and bony hands, that hijo de puta kept calling to him from the grave, twisting and hissing like a snake about to strike. Behind him stood a mob of Damas de Blanco, wailing like a Greek chorus. Insomnia was preferable to this torment. His sleeping pills only perpetuated the nightmares. The long-dead Che had been popping up, foulmouthed and threatening to expose him. Other adversaries lined up to take their potshots: school yard bullies from Colegio Dolores, peasants he’d executed in the Sierra Maestra, a tremulous semicircle of forsaken lovers that included Adelina Ponti, with her face of pure sorrow. In one dream Adelina stepped off a cliff into air saturated with a piano sonata, the pleats of her pink dress flaring like a sea anemone.
