Luz: book i: comings and goings (Troubled Times 1) by Luis Gonzalez

this outsourcing would create local jobs, that could hardly be the case at the moment. Not with every worker in sight running around with an efficiency and intensity he had never witnessed in his life. The everyday Cuban did not work like this; clearly these were all foreigners. There were definitely some locals there, but only a few. He could tell from their appearance, from their manner of dress and their diction especially. Camagüeyans actually pronounced their words rather than ate them. Rigo recognized a few cattle hands from the co-op, some of the vegetarians, and approached them on their break.
    “What’s going on here?” he asked. “What is all this?”
    “The new Varadero,” they proudly informed him. “Cuba’s new international hotspot.”
    “Was it hard getting hired?” Rigo asked. “Are they paying you well?”
    “Well, we’re not exactly hired,” the cattle hand explained. “And we’re not actually getting paid.”
    “I don’t understand,” Rigo said.
    “Well, technically we can’t get hired because that would be accepting foreign currency, and the state won’t allow it. But we can put in hours of unpaid volunteer labor.”
    “And you don’t mind?” Rigo asked. “You wouldn’t rather be earning something?”
    “Well, of course! But as long as we have to put in volunteer hours anyway, it might as well be for something exciting. Besides, sometimes we get tips on the side—but you didn’t hear that. Hey, aren’t you that new architect in town? That visitor everybody’s talking about?”
    Rigo felt so disgusted by all he had heard, he couldn’t think straight. These were the local jobs created by outsourcing? Measly menial labor with no monetary compensation? How would he ever get his school built? How, when all the able-bodied townspeople preferred building hotels for free just to be part of the experience? How, when all the locals preferred the paltry handouts of foreigners to the stoicism of self-dignity? Even here, all the way in Camagüey, the residents preferred to lend themselves to visitors of foreign lands than give of themselves to their own posterity. On the ride back from Santa Lucía to Rio Piedras, Rigo did some long, hard thinking and decided that the moment he arrived at the cattle co-op, he would resign immediately and head back to Havana. My husband had had it with all the deception and chicanery and no longer wanted any part of it. But when Rigo made his announcement to local leaders, they wouldn’t hear of it.
    After only one week with their new visitor, everybodyfrom Rio Piedras had grown quite fond of Rigo and did not want to see him go. People from the countryside understood disappointment better than anyone else in Cuba and told him to forget about the schoolhouse along the rolling plains. It turned out that, while he had been visiting his non-existent aunts over the weekend, a strange cable came in from Havana about a new project slated to take precedence over all else and for which ministry officials were seeking an appropriate candidate. Local leaders from Rio Piedras hoped Rigo might be suited for the position even though it didn’t seem related to architecture in the least.
    “Do you know what calculus is?” they asked him. “Have you ever heard of the word
calculus
?”
    “Yes,” he said. “Of course I have.”
    “What is it?” they asked.
    “Well, it’s higher math,” he explained. “It’s one of the branches of mathematics that focuses on limits, functions, derivatives, integrals, and infinite series; in short, it’s the study of change. That’s all calculus is—change.”
    They all looked at Rigo with vacant expressions on their faces, as if he had just uttered a foreign language to them.
    “Never mind,” he said. “Why do you ask?”
    “Well, are you any good at it?” they persisted.
    “I’m excellent at it,” Rigo replied. “As architecture students we not only study theory and design, but engineering, physics, drafting,