Sodium monofluoracetate is infallible. Its chemical formula is CH2F-COON and I’ve read that it takes less than a tenth of a teaspoon to kill a degenerate like Francisco.
But what if the police perform an autopsy? Probably not, though; there aren’t that many doctors left in this country, now that the majority has been contracted out to Venezuela and other places. And those that are left are overwhelmed with work, so they’re more likely to determine it was a sudden cardiac arrest and not waste time and resources on an autopsy.
I’ve read that this poison interrupts the Krebs cycle, that it alters the citric acid in the body. The poison turns into fluorcitrate, creates a citric concentration in the veins and deprives the cells of energy. Cellular death is slow and painful.
The cops aren’t going to waste time over whether some guy like Francisco died from a cardiac arrest or a few drops of sodium monofluoracetate. The cops have highly qualified experts and forensic doctors working with them who can find traces of the poison lingering in the liver, the brain, the kidneys, hair. But what if the morgue technician removed Francisco’s liver and viscera and sold them on the black market as beef liver, beef viscera? Did other families die – children too – poisoned by Compound 1080 residue in meat?
The police officer who asks for my documents, for my passport, has a threatening expression. Behind me, the giant automatic glass door is closing forever.

The glittering lights blind me. It’s been a long time since I’ve seen so much artificial illumination. The airport’s hallways seem so beautiful, even though they have nothing by way of decoration other than their cleanliness and tang. I walk. I go very fast, so that the doors won’t close anew. I run to the escalators, then run again until I reach the counter where there’s a man with a quizzical but apathetic expression.
“Your documents are in order but you cannot be completely admitted to the United States until you prove your soul came with you; your body has arrived but you’ve left your soul in Cuba,” the immigration official at Miami International Airport says coolly. “What are you going to do?”

What am I going to do? What am I going to do? I ask myself over and over as I leave the airport. I’ll start over, that’s what, I’ll transform my hopes into a new soul until I can recover the lost soul that they tell me here I left in Havana and which, in Havana, they say I brought here.
Somebody else can take care of the thief at 503 La Rosa Street.
I could never get my hands on even two drops of sodium monofluoracetate, and I could never actually be motivated to kill another human being. Perhaps they would have never found me out, but I’m glad that crook Francisco lives on and can still hope to change. I will, from here, far from Cuba, try to reconstruct my soul from own sense of hope, which is only possible where there’s light.