?Have you pulled any great pranks?

These come to mind:

Joaquín Castro was married to my Tía Lucía Porto and was terrified of frogs. One evening many of my family were sitting in the ample front porch of the house in Pinar del Río where my father was born, where Tía María as matron used to sit at the right side in a rocking chair (as looking out from the front door), others sat on more rocking chairs, the rest of us on "taburetes" (rigid hard-wood straight chairs with unpadded heavy letter seats and backs). In front of country estates in Cuba there usually were two parallel rows of palm trees leading to or from the house, called "guardarraya" through which most people approached or left.

Legend had it that through the guardarraya in front of that house sometimes a beheaded woman approached, at least that was one of the many scary legends that Negro Felipe related to entertain us while we were sitting in the porch at night.

One such evening, while listening to scary stories from Felipe, I quietly dropped a piece of cold paper that I had kept refrigerated on Joaquín, who thinking it was a frog, jumped up a foot in the air and almost fainted.

Tía Lucía, who was of very strong character, gave me a good reprimand, telling me that Joaquín had hard trouble, which I doubted, but never did it again.

The second thing that comes to mind is one day, when I was 10 or 12, that I had gone to "La Casa de los Trucos" or House of Tricks, where they sold all kinds of pranks, and had bought a smoke bomb which two wires that you could attach to the ignition of a car and when you tried to start the car, emitted copious amounts of very black smoke.

One day, as it was his custom, my father went home for lunch and while he ate and conversed, I attached the device to his car, then remained innocently sitting on the porch.

He went to the car with a cigar in his mouth, inserted the key, turned it and the smoke bomb did its job, tremendous amounts of black smoke began coming from under the hood. It was all for naught, he did not even get upset or open the hood. He simply got out, locked the car and began walking to the corner to turn and walk a block to catch a bus. I had to stope him, tell him what I had done, remove it, and he left in his car, smoking his cigar.

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