by Lia Matera
Havana Twist
A Willa Jansson Mystery
Lia Matera
1
I often hear people complain about their mothers. But I’d celebrate if all my mother did was skewer me with advice and bore me with anecdotes. I think anyone who hasn’t had to bail her mother out of jail cells full of demonstrators is lucky. Anyone who can guiltlessly utter a cynicism or consort with an occasional Republican is lucky. My mother once organized a petition drive to oust the man of my dreams from office. (Needless to say, that cooled the romance.) And she’d objected to every job I’d held since graduating from law school—except the ones that didn’t pay enough to live on. Even now that I’m a sole practitioner there’s no convincing her I’m not “holding up the capitalist structure.” But the capper, as far as I’m concerned, was last year, when my mother flew to Cuba with a bevy of gray-haired brigadistas, then failed to return with them.
When fourteen sweet and unpretentious women dedicated to not hugging their children with nuclear arms filed off the plane, I could tell by their faces that something was wrong. Global Exchange and the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom had, by natural selection, assembled an ecstatic group prepared to bliss out on revolution. The women should have been flushed with the rapture of connection, they should have had that noble Dances with Revolutionaries look. Instead, they looked worried and confused. And members of WILPF rarely look confused. They are the Jewish mothers of politics, ready to chicken-soup the whole third world. So I knew something had gone wrong. But, foolishly, I thought maybe they’d been disillusioned. I thought maybe something had cracked their rose-colored lenses.
I should have known better. I’d accompanied Mother to an itinerary meeting filled with women who couldn’t stop exclaiming about Cuba’s excellent schools and health care, the warmth of its people, and the fact that no racial inequality existed there. My mild question about political prisoners provoked a temper tantrum about our CIA-backed press and the hypocrisy of blockading Cuba while maintaining relations with governments of torturers. I followed up—at considerable risk to my mother’s reputation—with some particulars about a recently jailed poet. Until her sudden fall from favor, she’d been relentlessly trotted forth as an epitome of the Cuban spirit. Could a repressive regime produce a world-class poet? Castro argued.
“A perfect example of distortion by a biased press,” one of the Fidelistas sniffed. “When we asked our Cuban hosts about that, they explained that since the U.S. is waging war on Cuba, certain things the poet did were tantamount to treason.”
I let the war on Cuba slide. “What things?”
“Well, she was talking to foreign journalists.” The woman’s voice was hushed with disapproval. “She was leafleting.”
Leafleting. Any woman in the room would run into a burning house to save her stash of WILPF pamphlets. Most would sacrifice family photos before they’d let their leaflets burn.
My mother poked me in the ribs. “You have to understand their context, Baby—their whole economy is being ruined by our government! They have a right to try and stop that.”
Leaflets were powerful weapons, all right: look how WILPF’s tracts had brought the Republicans to their knees.
Since that evening, I’d been inundated with alternative-press articles on Cuba. Mother’s friends couldn’t bear to have me think bad thoughts about the place. The regular press, on the other hand, was gleefully monitoring the collapse of the Cuban economy. See, it said, socialism doesn’t work. Never mind that Castro’s “final hour” had dragged on for decades.
Anyway, the WILPF women did not look righteous as they deplaned—not a good sign. They huddled together, stopping short when they saw me. Also not a good sign.
“We had to leave,” one of them blurted. “Because of visas and other commitments and things. I’m so sorry.”
My first thought was they were apologizing for not having defected. “Of course,” I murmured. “Where’s my mother?”
“We wanted to wait for her, we really did.”
By now they stood close enough for me to smell their cheek powder.
“She’s still there? Why? What’s she doing?”
I was suddenly flanked, motherly hands on my back.
“We don’t know. Last night she went off on her own and didn’t come back to the hotel. We looked everywhere we could think of this morning.”
Sarah Swann, the alpha granny, added, “Our Cuban hosts were so upset. They’ve made finding her their top priority.”
I’ll bet. My mother was not a cannon you’d want loose in a controlled society.
“I know you have some funny views about Cuba from the Western media,” Sarah continued, “but, honestly, it’s such an open society. The one thing you can count on is that there’s no monkey business from the government. It’s not like other countries—ones our government supports—where people get disappeared.”
I sat on a hard plastic airport lounge chair. I was quickly going numb. My mother had “disappeared” from my life many times, getting arrested for pouring blood on draft files, attacking missile nose cones, blocking access to nuclear power plants, and, more recently, driving chainsaw-demolishing spikes into old-growth redwoods. My government was committed to arresting her, usually at her insistence. I didn’t see why a foreign government should be more charitable.
I looked up at the concerned faces of women who resembled my mother: spry seniors with uncolored hair and intelligent eyes. I took comfort. Like them, my mother believed in the Cuban revolution. She’d see their militarism—anything they did, including jailing of dissidents and polluting of their coastline—as a pitiable result of U.S. policies. She would save her civil disobedience for her return to this country.
“No,” I said finally. “I can’t think of any reason for the Cuban government to bother her.”
“Oh no! They’re wonderful there, you can’t imagine.”
Unless you’re a homosexual. Unless you leaflet.
But Mother would have agreed with these women. She would—for once!—have made no ideological waves. So where was she?
“The crime rate is very, very low there,” Sarah consoled me. “If you’re thinking she might have been … attacked.”
The thought had certainly crossed my mind.
On the other hand, I could imagine Mother meandering off with newfound friends and missing her plane. In which case, maybe she’d already turned up.
At worst, how difficult would it be to find a pale-skinned blond American in Cuba?
Famous last words.
2
All the airplane needed was a few chickens and goats—God knew it smelled just like a rural Mexican bus. It had less leg room, though; when I squirmed, the woman in front of me cried out. Or maybe she’d noticed the flickering light fixtures dangling from wires, the doorless overhead shelves unburdened with oxygen masks, the cardboard showing through thin seat fabric. Looking out the window at the plane’s chipped paint and loosely connected wings, I considered getting up and walking off. I’d been considering it for three sweltering hours punctuated by the squeal of an engine that failed to engage.
Now and then, a man with a wrench wandered down the aisle. In the distance, to one side of the runway, another Cubana de Aviación plane lay strewn in fire-blackened bits. That fact that it had been left there troubled me. I was flying out of Mexico City; were crashes so frequent here that no one bothered clearing them away? Was it Cuba’s way of needling soft capitalists? If so, it was working.
Getting to Cuba (assuming the plane made it) was complicated enough, thanks to the U.S. State Department. Only those going for “research” purposes coul
d fly from Miami could withstand Castro’s mesmerization. And they had to be lengthily screened and vetted. Though a number of tours handled this aspect of the paperwork, none happened to be departing soon. I heard about a group leaving from Mexico City and hastily made arrangements to go with them. This had involved frantic Federal Expressing and faxing, and a horrifyingly expensive no-advance-notice flight that almost didn’t get me to Mexico City in time to board (and then spend three hours in) this Cubana sweatbox. So I’d already done as much flying as I could stand.
Plus, my sojourn in the airport reminded me my Spanish ranged from rusty to embarrassing. I was born in Mexico because Mother had wanted me to be bilingual. And sometimes I was. But I hadn’t been back here since college. Today, I’d been snickered at without being fluent enough to know why. Feeling inadequate rarely improves my mood.
Add to this the frustration of not having reached my father. With my mother away, he’d decided to sneak off to the San Juan Islands in Washington state. He and a flotilla of nerdy acolytes were working on a computer project with a physicist guru of whom my mother disapproved. Unfortunately “Brother Mike”—gurus, like rock stars, apparently can’t use normal names—lived on an island so remote its phone lines were currently, and frequently, down. An answering service on the main island literally had to ferry messages there in the interim. I hated to break the news in a terse note, but I’d tried without success to access voice mail and e-mail, so I’d had no choice but to explain the situation to an astonished-sounding operator. I would try to get through to my father from Cuba—I prayed with good news—before he panicked.
But as the Cubana engine engaged on perhaps the twentieth try, I wondered if I’d even survive the flight. I looked around, gauging whether other fliers prepared to run screaming off the plane. In the seats beside me, a tall couple ignored each other as they scribbled in notebooks. They seemed to be about my age— mid-thirties—she with short brown hair anchored behind her ears, he with longer graying hair similarly anchored. They looked rumpled but sophisticated in khaki and cotton, and they weren’t bolting. They weren’t scanning the plane to see if any parts were about to fall off.
My other fellow travelers (so to speak) looked equally unconcerned. They were without exception too old to be cane cutters or graduate students. Some were Mexican, others might have been American or Canadian or European, somewhat tan but not primped. They didn’t look especially earnest, nor did they have the traveling-to-Graceland look of young socialists.
I just hoped I hadn’t hooked up with the Hemlock Society, looking to Cubana to save them some trouble.
When we finally landed, I nearly burst into tears, I was so relieved.
The Havana airport was a low-ceilinged building in the architectural style of campground bathrooms. While we waited in the customs line, the notebook-toting couple chatted to me about the trip. A small film festival had drawn the group here. They looked forward to seeing new films from a dozen Latin American countries.
So when the customs officer said to me, in English, “Films?” I nodded vaguely. He stamped a piece of paper and handed it to me—no mark in my passport to get me sidelined by U.S. customs. They were clearly used to Americans trooping through, embargo or not.
Luckily, the group’s chartered bus was going to a popular hotel, the same one Mother’s WILPF brigade had used. I saw no taxis outside and was grateful to hitch a ride.
As the grimy old bus rattled over potholed roads, I could make out palm trees and low buildings that had seen better days. We passed billboards with smiling faces touting Full Equality and Social Security and Power to the People. Writing on building walls— far too even and artistic to be real graffiti—brightly advocated Socialism or Death. Occasionally, I saw the outlines of light paint over what must have been real, if cryptic, graffiti; 8A, it read.
By the time we reached Havana, I was sweltering in the sticky night heat. But it seemed appropriate to the scenery. The buildings were porticoed and hung with flowering vines, a vision of colonial splendor … except for a total lack of fresh paint. Even at night, huge pocks, blisters, and gashes of bare stucco were visible beneath old layers of faded colors.
And though there were no cars on the road, parking spaces around hotels were showcases of perfectly maintained American cars from the forties and fifties. I expected to find the Godfather sitting poolside with Meyer Lansky.
Others on the bus seemed used to the sights. They chattered in Spanish about hoping to find enough hot water this time.
The hotel, despite the busload of folks with reservations, had room for me. It asked to be paid in dollars, but the U.S. Treasury Department considered spending dollars in Cuba “trading with the enemy.” That could get me arrested (ten years maximum sentence), fined $100,000, and disbarred, so I persuaded them to take Mexican pesos instead.
I asked the desk clerk, a young black woman in a cheap polyester uniform, if she’d seen the person I was here to meet. I showed her a picture of my mother, squinting crankily into the sun, her flyaway hair blown in wisps across her face by the ubiquitous San Francisco wind, her stretched-out sweater billowing.
The clerk flashed me a big smile. She leaned close to me. “She tries to give us soap! From her room, you see, extra soaps she has saved. We cannot accept.” She glanced over to see a stern-faced older clerk watching her. “We have everything we need. She was not right. But nice, a nice lady.”
Trust my mother to be offensively obvious in her attempts at equitable redistribution of toiletries.
Refusing a bellhop’s offer of help (since I couldn’t tip in dollars), I hauled my bag upstairs. My room was small, it stank of mold, and the furniture was decrepit. The sink was stained and the water was tepid. My mother had probably gone into socialist ecstasy, assuming the lack of luxury proved goods were fairly apportioned here. Myself, I’d have preferred a scalding shower and cheerier surroundings. But then, I always did disgrace her with my bourgeois longings.
There was no phone in the room, so I went back down to the lobby to call my father. I was told that the international phone lines were not currently available. Yes, there were pay phones nearby, but outside the hotel an international call often took eight or ten hours of constant redialing. I tried to look on the bright side—perhaps Mother had been trying to call home.
Feeling jittery and frustrated, with nothing useful to do at this time of night, I decided to take a stroll. I didn’t make it out of the lobby before a man in a light blue shirt and dark pants stepped in front of me. He wore a badge that translated to “Tourism Police.”
He flashed me a big, toothy smile. “If you should wish directions or suggestions at any time, or if—we hope not!—you are bothered in some way by anybody, you have only to find someone wearing this.” He fingered his badge.
I supposed most tourists would appreciate this level of service. Trust an old hippie like me to get nervous at the sight of a uniform.
“We are here especially to help you, Señorita.” Behind him, potted palms cast shadows on oiled wood walls, giving the impression of an old movie set, Our Hippie in Havana.
I mumbled my thanks, then bolted. I walked a few palm-lined blocks to sea, passing other colonial-style hotels. I could smell the ocean—not the bracing air of the Pacific coast, but an almost fetid smell, the perfume of slime on rocks, of salt spray on unwashed streets, of fish in humid air.
A winding street was bordered by a thick, waist-high wall. Young Cubans, their clothes old and ill-fitting, sat or leaned there, talking, embracing, giggling. Groups of boys from early to late teens watched the street. A few were turned the other way, fishing.
I looked over the sea wall at the ocean, lapping against rocks ten or fifteen feet below. A voice beside me startled me.
“You are American!”
I hesitated. Unlike the desk clerk and tourist police, this young man was speaking Spanish, a very rapid Spanish with most of the
Ns and Ms mumbled and the Ss dropped. I tried to shift to the little-used portion of my brain that stored the language.
The boy moved farther from me. “They will pick me up if they see me talking to you. Do not look at me, look ahead.”
“Who will pick you up?”
“Tourist police. They will not let us talk to Americans—very strict. They do not want us bothering Americans. Do you have any dollars? For my family? I will exchange pesos for dollars.”
“I only have pesos.”
He snorted. “Pesos are worthless. Cuban pesos? How did you get Cuban pesos? They do not let Americans have Cuban pesos. They have special tourist money for Americans. Is that what you have? Tourist pesos?”
“Mexican pesos.”
“Too bad. Only dollars can buy you anything here now. Everything we have is in the tourist stores, and those will take only dollars. We Cubans can buy nothing with pesos. Dollar apartheid.” He stepped a little farther away when headlights lit the street. “Only the police drive cars. No gas. All reserved for foreigners to rent cars and go to Varadero Beach to spend dollars.”
I was surprised he’d launch straight into a lament. He had no idea who I was, after all.
“Tell me about America,” he continued. “From this spot, it is only a hundred and forty-eight kilometers to Florida. If I would launch a raft, I would reach America in only days.”
It sounded like a surer bet than Cubana airlines.
“I have a cousin in Miami,” he continued. “If I could go to him! But the water is like prison bars. All of us at the Malecon”—he swept his arm to indicate the young people lingering along the sea wall—”we would be gone in a moment! What is there to do here? We are educated, yes, but there is nothing to do with it. We cut cane to pay back the state for our college, and then? Myself I am a most excellent guitar player, but you cannot play in a rock and roll band unless you have a license, and only salsa bands can get a license—the old men hate us roqueros.”