by A. C. Fuller
The only pocket of calm and quiet was in the rear of the plane, where a church group of bright-eyed teenagers and a couple chaperones wore matching t-shirts that read "St. Olaf's Teen Trip: 2017." They took up the last four rows and, through conversation with a chaperone while waiting for the bathroom, I learned that they'd flown from Minneapolis to JFK earlier in the day, and were traveling to Cuba for the same reason Greta and I ostensibly were. To tour old missionary sites.
While thumbing through the guide book, Greta and I learned that drinks would be about one-tenth the price the moment we landed in Havana, but I wasn't about to go seat to seat to tell people to save their money. In fact, the boisterous chaos of the plane made me feel a bit safer. Ever since I'd seen the redheaded flight attendant, I'd been a bit on edge, but looking down on boorish jerks was emotionally familiar enough to be comforting. Clearly I wasn't in danger if I had enough presence of mind to think that the sloppy drunk in 17C was going to lose his toupee if he didn't slow down, right? As people tend to do in dangerous and unfamiliar situations, I was taking refuge in rational logic, and it actually helped a lot.
Of course, Greta could sense it. "You know why I decided to come with you?" she asked when we were about an hour out of Havana.
"I have some theories, but I'm not sure."
"What are your theories?"
"You liked James, and my first guess was that you wanted to see the people who killed him held to account."
"I did like him, but that's not why. C'mon, Alex. You know I don't really think in terms of vengeance."
"No one thinks in terms of vengeance. But most people want it, if they're being honest with themselves."
Greta punched me on the shoulder gently and smiled. "You're saying I'm lying to myself."
"Not lying so much as… deceiving. I bet there's some part of you that wants to strap the bastards who killed James to an electric chair and flip the switch yourself. Keep in mind, they also killed five other innocent people. Plus, they shot up a newspaper office, which is far less horrible than the mass murder, but I really don't like the symbolism. Seriously though, who knows what else they've done?"
"Okay, maybe I wouldn't mind seeing Amand and his crew get justice," Greta said. "But you're changing the subject. Guess again. Why did I come?"
I hadn't said so, but I'd been stunned when she'd decided to come with me. Since the moment she'd announced it, I'd been trying to figure out why. But I hadn't wanted to bring it up in case talking about it made her change her mind. "Something about me?"
"Getting warmer," she said, putting her hand on my knee and sliding it up my thigh.
I looked around the cabin awkwardly. "Not for—"
"Well, maybe," Greta said, "but that wasn't the reason."
"Then I got nothing."
"Because I love you," she said. "I knew you needed to go. I knew you needed help. You've said yourself that the panic attacks are easier when I'm around. You need my help and I want to support you. Simple as that."
When she said it, it struck me as obvious. It was the kind of thing couples do for each other.
But not long ago I'd been living in an apartment by myself as Greta planned our divorce and dated other guys. We'd been reconciling, but it wasn't as though we'd fallen back into each other's arms and suddenly everything had become perfect. We still had tense moments, moments when I wasn't sure our relationship would survive.
Maybe they were aftershocks from the earthquake of our separation, but it hadn't fully sunk in that she'd go out of her way to support me. At least not this far out of her way. She'd been hurt by years of inattention, by years of my taking the relationship for granted.
She scooched down in the seat and rested her head on my shoulder. I closed my eyes and breathed the stale air of the cabin, listening to a raucous group of tourists talk about the cigars they were going to buy.
Then, for a moment, everything but the warmth of Greta's cheek on my shoulder faded, and I realized that, until that moment, I'd had no idea how much she loved me.
10
The Havana airport is one story, so there was no heat-controlled jetway from the airplane to the airport. After a long wait, the grounds crew rolled a rusty staircase up to the plane and we waited in the aisle as half-drunk tourists fumbled with their luggage, the humid outside air slowly seeping in.
The guide book had said it would be hot—low to mid eighties were the averages for October. In our rush to pack and leave, we hadn't actually checked the weather, but five minutes into the deplaning process, I knew it was going to be much hotter than the guidebook had warned.
With the cabin door opened the hot air was rapidly filling the cabin, winning a fight with the cool air we'd been enjoying for the last three hours. Simply standing in the aisle and reaching for my carry-on was enough to get the sweat beading up over my eyes.
But it wasn't until Greta and I made it to the front of the plane that we understood the extent to which we'd underestimated the heat. It hit me like a blast furnace as I rounded the corner from the aisle and looked down the stairs.
"Oh my God," I heard Greta say as I descended.
"I know. This is brutal."
When we reached the bottom of the stairs, she surveyed the airport. "At least the sun is already down."
Greta is half German and half Japanese, with creamy light skin that she says doesn't tan. Because of that, she tries to avoid the sun. Luckily, it had set recently, so sunscreen was one thing we didn't have to worry about until tomorrow.
"I guess," I said. "But if it's this hot without the sun…"
"Yeah, tomorrow may kill us."
We made our way into the airport, which had an odd feel, like we were entering a different world. A past world. But at least it was air conditioned.
There were dozens of customs officers checking visas and passports, mostly female. Emphatically and loudly female, at that. They all wore tight khaki miniskirts with fishnet stockings and high heels, kind of like the female officers on the original Star Trek. As I looked closer, I noticed that not all of them had stockings, and they all seemed to be wearing slightly different styles.
The male customs agents were in khaki pants and short-sleeved uniform shirts; some of them were leading small, floppy-eared dogs that I assumed were supposed to be sniffing everyone's luggage for drugs. The dogs weren't very convincing, though. Most just tried to nap in the heat before the customs agents led them away.
As we waited to have our passports inspected, I took Greta's hand. "Does this place have a weird vibe? I mean, I can't quite place it but—"
"It's the lack of signs," Greta said, gesturing around the large open space. "Advertising. There isn't any."
"Oh, right. That's it."
The walls were blank except for a smattering of Communist propaganda posters and an old-fashioned metal sign welcoming us to Cuba, but there were no advertisements anywhere.
No brightly-colored sign reminding me to stop in at the McDonald's at the end of the terminal. No flashing digital billboard advertising ice cold, refreshing Pepsi. No cash-green billboards reminding me to invest for my retirement with Fidelity Mutual. No pictures of juicy steaks enticing us to visit Ruth's Chris Steak House while we were in Havana.
Just drab colors, mostly blank walls, and beautiful women who looked like they belonged on the starship Enterprise.
After checking in, we headed over to the cash exchange to trade in our British pounds for Cuban currency. We knew that none of our U.S. credit cards would work in Cuba, and we'd taken Innerva's advice to heart. I'd taken $2,000 in cash out of my account, and Greta had managed to withdraw 3,000 British pounds from her account, equal to about $4,000. We hoped it would be more than we needed, but the truth was that we had no idea since we didn't know what we were there to do, or how long it would take.
In Cuba, there are two currencies, one for the locals and one for tourists. The locals use Moneda Nacional, but the tourists use CUCs, convertible pesos worth roughly one dollar per peso
.
I stuffed a couple hundred CUCs in my pocket and we stashed the rest of our massive stack of bills in Greta's carry-on, then headed out into the heat, where we navigated a long taxi line made up of all sorts of old, unmarked cars, and finally hopped into a 1960s Volvo that looked a few decades behind on maintenance. But it ran well.
We took the freeway north, past a sports stadium and a bunch of propaganda billboards, until we saw the water. "It's hard to believe that Key West is only a hundred miles away," I said.
"No way. It's gotta be further than that," Greta said, skeptically.
"Seriously. Hundred miles." I pulled my cell phone out of my bag to show her on a map.
Greta chuckled as I tapped at the map app. "Planning to tweet this?" she asked. "Or maybe play some Candy Crush?"
"I was gonna...oh damn."
One of the things I'd learned while researching Cuba was that our cell phones wouldn't work. At least not to make phone calls or access Wi-Fi. But the habit of looking things up would be tough to break. There were Internet cafes, but not many. Hell, I even had four bars of signal, with the name "Cubacel" hovering in the corner of the screen, letting me know that a network existed, but that I wasn't allowed to access it.
I put the phone in my bag and smiled at Greta. "No biggie," I lied. "Anyway, it's a hundred miles. Two hundred or so to Miami."
"Yeah," she said. "Now I remember hearing that."
As we entered Havana, I stared out the window at a small row of fruit carts being operated by a group of men and women chatting merrily. I was trying to distract myself by taking in the scene when Greta touched my leg. "You'll make it through this," she said.
I guess she could tell that I was upset at being cut off from the world in a way I hadn't been since the pre-iPhone days. But I tried to play it cool. "I…what do you mean?"
"Without your phone."
I was going to protest, to argue that I was actually excited about the connectivity break, but there was no point. "You know me too well," I said, taking her hand.
And she did. I've never been a drug addict or alcoholic. I don't have a gambling problem or a sex addiction. But little by little I'd become reliant on my phone, on the fact of connectivity, to get me through the days, and sometimes even to get me through the minutes that made up the days.
Not being able to check the sports scores, which I don't especially care about but check anyway, wasn't going to be easy. Not knowing what was happening at The Barker was going to be even harder. And not being able to keep tabs on any stories about Innerva and the ransomware attack was going to eat away at me every second until we figured out what was going on.
I put on my infomercial voice and smiled at Greta, "Welcome to Cuba, where people from all over the world come to get over their technology addictions."
Greta laughed and squeezed my hand with affection. "It's outpatient Betty Ford treatment for phone abuse."
11
Half an hour after exchanging our money, we stepped out of the antique Volvo in the touristy section of Old Havana.
The oppressive heat had faded slightly during the ride, and was diminished further by the spray rising over a seawall called the Malecón. The big cruise lines had docked a couple vast, floating skyscrapers at the end of the street, and it was impossible not to see them as visitors from a different world.
Tourists bustled down the dock, and cab drivers hailed them and offered them rides, tours, views of the city, and hotel recommendations. The cab stand was over a block long, and resembled nothing so much as a classic car show.
Beautiful 1950s sedans, a few classic VW Beetles, even a lovingly restored 1956 Corvette gleamed in the sunlight, each with a neat little TAXI sign on it. The cars were nicer than the ones at the airport, and it made me think that someone must be making a great effort to beautify the area where the cruise ships dock.
"It's like they say," Greta said, "this place is a time capsule. It hit the fifties and froze."
"Most visitors to Havana come by cruise ship and don't make it more than a mile from the dock. The further we get from the water, the more decrepit things will look. See?" I pointed to a pair of old buildings off the main street.
One of them was half painted, the other had scaffolding going about a third of the way up one side, but there was a large hole covered with a tarp about ten feet above the scaffolding.
"You're right," Greta said. "It's like they ran out of money halfway through the repairs."
"They probably didn't have enough scaffolding to get up high enough to finish. I'm guessing it'll get worse the further we get into the city."
"They did get hit by a hurricane recently."
I knew that Cuba often had shortages of building materials, but hurricane Irma had ravaged parts of Cuba not long ago, so it made sense that they were even more strapped than usual. "Good point," I said, crossing the street. "But one of those buildings is a bar."
"Shots?"
It wasn't like Greta to suggest drinks other than tea, and I glanced at her skeptically.
"We're in Cuba," she explained, "and even though we don't know exactly why, we may as well enjoy ourselves."
The guide book was right about the drinks. The building with the unfinished scaffolding had a sign advertising two shots of rum for a peso. And it wasn't just any rum. Standing at an old wooden bar that needed repairs thirty years ago and now needed a complete teardown, Greta and I each downed a shot of smooth, dark rum that burned and somehow cooled us off at the same time. Or, maybe it was that after shooting the rum, the heat stopped bothering us.
We continued walking away from the water, away from the cruise ships, and toward a more run-down part of town. Within a block of leaving the Malecón, we found ourselves in a different Havana entirely.
Narrow sidewalks barely a foot wide, old men sitting on stoops smoking hand-rolled cigarettes, a pervasive urine smell that either came from inadequate sanitation or the various street dogs that wandered about sniffing everything in sight.
At the next corner, a couple small doorways advertised themselves as shops, their prices no longer in tourist CUCs but in moneda nacional. One place smelled like food and offered pan con lechon and pan con perro, which I hoped meant "bread with hot dogs" and not "bread with dogs," which Greta offered up as the literal translation.
The other had stacks and stacks of bootleg DVDs, with a sign Greta told me read "All shows, all seasons, all movies." A two-pack of both Atlantis movies hung on the door next to a sleeve containing a dozen Chow Yun-Fat titles, films he'd done in China and the U.S. all jumbled together. A bored-looking Cuban teenager sat behind a counter just inside the door, playing with his iPhone, flanked by every season of Game of Thrones and every season of Santa Barbara.
"I was totally wrong," Greta said. "This isn't a time capsule at all. The last sixty years happened here, but not the same last sixty years the rest of us got."
As Innerva had instructed us, we were looking for a casa particular, a small boarding house we could rent by the night for cash. Each one was marked with a small sign with an eye-shaped symbol, and we rejected a few based on nothing more than our gut reactions to the condition of the building.
About ten blocks from the waterfront, Greta stopped. "How about this one?"
It was a narrow, three-story building shaped like the old brownstones I used to walk past in New York. Small windows with pale yellow curtains faced out into the street and, tacked onto the facade, a neat wooden sign with the eye-symbol and the words:
Casa de Remedios. 20 CUC Per Night.
Like the bar we'd been in earlier, Casa de Remedios was in need of repair, but unlike that bar, the repairs appeared to be underway. The bottom two floors had been recently plastered in bright white, and a pallet of tiles sat in the yard, covered in plastic.
I'd read that the law allowing Cubans to rent out space in their homes was relatively new, and had become a literal cottage industry. Apparently, twenty tourist-dollars a night adds up to a lot of plaster a
nd tile.
We made our way up partially-replaced steps and knocked on the door. Everything was quiet except for a couple scooters passing on the road. The house was still.
After knocking again and waiting, we were about to move on when we heard steps on a wooden floor. "Hola." A woman's voice came through the door as it opened.
"Queremos una habitación," Greta said. The woman wore light blue jeans, a floral shirt and a white headscarf. She was in her sixties and worn-looking, but had warm, friendly eyes that put me at ease.
She burst into a huge smile at Greta's Spanish. "Veinte CUC por noche. Desayuno incluido."
Greta thought for a moment and turned to me. "I think she said that breakfast is included."
"As long as they have coffee," I said, pulling out a wad of pesos. "Do we pay now?"
"¿Cuándo pagamos?" Greta asked.
The woman eyed me, then Greta. "¿Por cuánto tiempo se hospeda?"
"Cinco dias," Greta said, and I knew what that meant. Even though our tickets had been one-way, and we had no idea how long we'd stay, Greta and I had decided to say we'd be there for five days if anyone asked.
The woman nodded, pondered for a moment, then said, "Usted y su esposo pueden pagar al final," and led us into the house.
Greta gestured for me to put the money away, and I stuffed it back in my pocket.
After filling out a simple check-in form, we followed the woman, whose name Greta had learned was Maria, to the third floor. The room was small but cozy, with low, cracked ceilings and a small gold cross on the wall near the bathroom.
When Maria left us, Greta sprawled out on the bed, which creaked and wobbled.
I put our bags in the closet, did a quick check around the room, then leaned on the tiny desk by the window. "Now what?" I asked.
"What do you mean?"
"It's almost ten," I said. "We have no way to connect to the Internet, no way to find out anything that—"