As we cross the avenue at Carlos Manuel de Céspedes, I stand in the middle of the crossroads watching the first peek of sunrise beyond the edge of the hill. This is the same road we always take back to the city after Manuel waits for me, sometimes for hours, to emerge from the airport, after the security questioning, after my luggage has been searched, among the swell of Cubans waiting for their loved ones to return from abroad. Manuel doesn’t have any family overseas. His father, who left his mother when he was young, died in Las Vegas, but they had already been estranged for decades. He had a second family, and Manuel doesn’t speak to them, either. He has a cousin in Argentina, but he left years ago and has never been in touch. Manuel’s never even been inside the airport. He only ever goes there, he says, to wait for me.
Manuel and I stand in the middle of the road. Desolate except for the police ushering people through, pointing them to the back roads, Ermita to Ayestaran, in the direction of the plaza.
Despite the commotion, I feel a strange stillness. We can see clear down to the massive memorial to José Martí. I look at Manuel to see if he feels it too.
Since I met him, Manuel had been telling me that his days of driving the Tico were numbered. He and his cousin were in the process of restoring a 1952 Chevrolet so that Manuel could drive it as a shared taxi for locals. His cousin had worked for years on cargo ships to save money to buy the car part by part. The deal would be that Manuel would drive it all week long and pay his cousin a daily fee of thirty CUC for the privilege of operating it. The almendrón was years in the making, and when I returned to Cuba for yet another research trip the following April, Manuel came to meet me at the airport in his new car, which he introduced, with both pride and a tinge of embarrassment, as El Frankenstein.
Its shell was unmistakably Chevy, painted a thick matte black because Manuel said they didn’t yet have enough money to pay for a gloss. Its interior was the original red leather, and the dash had been cobbled together in bits imported from a dealer in California. The engine was from a Kia and it ran surprisingly smoothly. As we drove back to the capital Manuel explained to me that he was doing la ruta now, driving popular commuter paths, picking and dropping off paying customers. He started each day at seven in the morning and didn’t end until around ten at night. It took him about eight hours to simply make enough to pay his cousin his agreed daily operating fee. Everything he made from that point on, usually around ten or fifteen CUC, Manuel got to keep for himself.
“What about the Tico?” I asked.
He told me the car and the girlfriend were gone. I’d met her once or twice. Cassandra was her name. She wasn’t especially friendly, but Manuel spoke so highly of her that I considered her amazing, too. She’d been an economist but left her job at the bank when she figured she could earn the same if not more just driving around people from her neighborhood. But Manuel said lately she hardly left the house. Not to work. Not to see friends. She was in a real depression, which he said happened about twice a year, lasting four or five months each time, that culminated in fits of rage. She’d thrown him out, so he went back to live with his mom. Then she’d begged for him to come back, so he did. Then she’d thrown him out again. Now, Manuel said, he was done.
Over the dozen or so trips I made to Cuba during those years, sometimes he asked me about my life, but always in a careful, discreet way that gave me an out if I didn’t feel like answering. He asked me if I was married and then, why not? He asked me if I had a boyfriend. Sometimes I did and sometimes I didn’t. Manuel planned on never getting married. He’d briefly considered it with his girlfriend, but now he was totally against the idea. But even then, in their best days together, they’d never wanted children.
“I would never bring another life onto this island,” he said. “Me, I didn’t have the choice. But if I had, I would have never asked to be born here. This island is a prison. This life is a purgatory. Every single child born here, especially of the new generations, thinks of nothing but escape.”
Manuel and I find a small clearing in the center of Plaza de la Revolución. He and his mother have told me about all the times it was mandatory to come here to take in one of Fidel’s seemingly endless speeches, standing for hours and hours, in the sun and in the darkness, with his voice booming across the ministry buildings faced with the likenesses of Che Guevara and Camilo Cienfuegos. Manuel’s mother, a devout Catholic, had wanted to come with us. She’s seventy-three but is used to walking all day since she still works as a hairdresser, meeting clients in their homes, from Habana Vieja to Nuevo Vedado to La Lisa, all by foot or maybe with the help of an almendrón. But this morning she was tired, so Manuel left her at home. A good thing, too, he says, because with all the detours they made us take to get here, she would have surely had to give up and go back home.
The sun is up and the sky is a pastel blue, cloud covered but bright. We still have two hours until the Mass is due to begin. We sit on the warm and sticky pavement. The empty spaces in the plaza fill with large groups from Mexico, Venezuela, Panama, and Poland. Some are praying, singing songs; others are just laughing, telling stories or jokes between them. Manuel didn’t want to come today. He hadn’t gone to see Pope John Paul II or Pope Benedict when they each came to town. He thought it was all a big show and hated how each pontiff met privately with Fidel. I’d told him that with the changes announced last December, this visit was something historic. When we met a few years ago, neither of us could have imagined the changes that were on the horizon, Raúl Castro and Barack Obama pledging to begin a new era of relations between Cuba and the United States.
Manuel is skeptical, like so many others. I’ve never tried to convert him with optimism. I’d planned to come to the Mass on my own, since none of my Cuban friends were interested, either, lamenting the traffic and that the plaza itself filled them with dread. But I considered it another page in my research. At the last minute, Manuel said he would come, too.
“I’m warning you,” he said, “I don’t know any of the prayers.”
“That’s okay. A lot of people don’t.”
“I just want to hear what the guy has to say, you know? He seems like a good guy, this pope.”
Manuel’s brother died when he was eleven and Manuel thirteen. In those days, they lived in Alamar. His father, who was a military man, had been given an apartment, what they called a cajón, in a building facing the sea. He took me there to see it once. We parked at the corner, where some guys had tied an angry cock to a low tree. I stepped a bit closer to get a better look and the cock lunged at me, its enormous, sharp talons digging into the dirt.
“You’d better step away,” one of the guys warned me. “It will tear off one of your fingers.”
Manuel took in the narrow road. He used to play here, he said. One day, when Manuel’s brother went out, some older kids dared him to jump onto the back of a moving bus. The boy did as they said, but he got caught on a rail, fell to the street, and got tripped up in the wheels and run over. He died in the children’s hospital. We pass it often when we are driving past Habana Vieja toward Vedado on the Malecón.
“That’s where my brother left us,” Manuel says whenever we pass it.
We’ve been to Cementerio Colón together many times. I like to get lost in its serpentine roads. We’ve seen all the famous graves, spent hours with the hundred-year-old man who guards the statue of Amelia La Milagrosa. We’ve been robbed by security guards there, caught in rainstorms, and left flowers at the grave of a friend’s relative after thieves robbed the tomb for its bones for use in rituals. We both know the cemetery well by now, but it wasn’t until yesterday, when I said, “Manuel, let’s take a ride in the cemetery,” that Manuel took me to a far corner of the property against one of the back walls where the burial plots are more modest and less adorned. He parked the almendrón, pointed to a single flat raised tomb, and said, “That’s my brother. Nothing of him left but bones.”
I spend my days with Manuel. He lends me a cell phone since mine does
n’t work here. He gets me Wi-Fi cards, introduces me to his friends, takes me home to visit with his mother. And he comes with me wherever I want to go, from Matanzas to Varadero, Mariel, or Viñales; he is at my side as we visit Santería altars to meet with babalawos; and he takes me across the bay to Regla to visit the church that overlooks the harbor.
But at the end of the day, when sunset has already folded into the waters of the Straits of Florida off the Malecón, Manuel and I say good-bye and I go out with other friends, mostly non-Cubans who, because of their work or their relationships, live here now. They invite me for drinks at their houses, take me to parties, restaurants, bars filled with foreigners and the moneyed Cuban class with government connections. We go to nightclubs where Cubans wait on line outside and foreigners walk right in. We go to embassy parties, cultural festivals, and private musical performances. I often invite Manuel to come along, but he always declines. He doesn’t like to go out, not even to dance or to see a movie. Instead, he prefers to remain working until his eyelids fall, demanding sleep, and wake up early, before night turns to day, to drive la ruta again.
In the mornings, when Manuel comes for me, I tell him about my nights.
“It’s like when I leave you, you go to another Cuba,” he says. “It’s a place I’ve never seen.”
The past six or seven times I’ve returned to Cuba, I’ve brought Manuel the one thing I know he really wants, what seems to be worth more to him than gold: chocolate. I watched the first time he tasted a Hershey bar. It was so new and special, he looked deeply moved by the experience. I’d brought him a whole selection of supermarket delights. Kit Kats, Snickers, Butterfingers. He shared them with his mother.
“Never in my life have I tasted anything like this,” she said, savoring the last bits of a Milky Way.
I bring them bagfuls every time I go back, and they dig into them with childish delight. I also bring his mother cosmetics, perfume samples, and hand creams. Luxuries, she tells me, she could never find here. For Manuel, I bring books or DVDs. I’ve discovered his favorites are true crime. He loves them and then lends them to friends. He gives me gifts, too. Reggaeton CDs, which he knows I love, or burned DVDs of the latest popular Cuban films. Once his mother tried to give me her best piece of antique bone china, but I insisted it would probably get confiscated at the airport, so she relented. I spend a few hours with her every time I come to Havana. We sit together in the small living room of her apartment in Vedado, where she and Manuel sleep in twin beds on opposite sides of the single small bedroom. A family of cats lives on the tin roof just below their bedroom window. She knows I like cats and lets me sit there to watch them, the mother and father cat fussing over the four tiny kittens, as she tells me stories of her girlhood in the campo, where her father had cattle and you didn’t need government permission to slaughter a cow; before the Revolution and before her husband brought her to Havana. Sometimes Manuel’s mother pulls out old photographs of herself to show me she was once young and beautiful.
“You can’t believe it when you look at what’s become of my face,” she tells me, running her fingers over her cheeks and her lips. “All that beauty turned out to be good for nothing.”
One day, Manuel and I planned to leave early to drive out to Pinar del Río. I bought us some chicken sandwiches from a hotel lobby restaurant to take with us for lunch on the road. We’d made it just beyond the limits of Jaimanitas when the car broke down and Manuel had to pull over to the side of the road. He opened up the hood while I waited, then sent me across the street to a bar to ask for some water to cool the engine down. When the car got moving again we decided to turn back to Havana and stopped near Parque de la Fraternidad to take refuge from a sudden rainstorm. I pulled out the sandwiches and gave one to Manuel. He looked at it curiously and turned it around in his hands. I realized he didn’t know what to do about the tinfoil it had been wrapped in, so I showed him how to peel it back. He stared at it, fascinated. He’d never seen tinfoil before. And he’d never seen the whole wheat bread the sandwich was made with. He ate it slowly, marveling at the taste and texture, then decided to put half away to share with his mother because he was sure she’d never tasted anything like it, either, so different from the bland, stiff white bread they sold in the local bodegas. He wanted to save the foil, too, and asked me for mine when I was done with my sandwich. He flattened and smoothed it out carefully, touching it as if it were silk.
Vans and trucks full of Red Cross medics line the periphery of the plaza, though Manuel says they’re likely not real medics but undercover police keeping tabs on the pope’s audience, ready to subdue any potential protest or dissident activity. I’m skeptical until I approach one of the vans in search of a Band-Aid for a bleeding toe and the medics give me blank stares.
One of them finally says, “We don’t have anything like that here.”
“Do you have any sort of bandages at all?” I ask, showing them my bloody foot.
They shrug. “Maybe if you buy an ice cream down the road, they will give you a napkin and you can use that to clean up the blood.”
“Are you really medics?” I ask.
Again, they shrug. “Why do you ask?”
The pope appears seemingly out of nowhere. Once again atop an open-sided white jeep, he cruises around the edges of the plaza, waving to the audience, picking up and blessing a baby, before heading to the altar at the far end, beyond the ministry buildings. The front rows have seating reserved for the government officials, ambassadors, even members of the FARC delegation, who are in the midst of their Havana peace negotiations. Everyone else, including us, is beyond the barrier, standing or sitting on the pavement, leaning on one another under the hot morning sun.
The Mass begins. Manuel watches intently.
A few years ago, I was walking along the beach near my home in Miami when I felt the tide push something to my feet. I looked down and saw what looked like a strand of wooden beads over my toes. I picked it up and saw that it was a rosary; at its center, on the bead that would have been the first glorious mystery, was a carved wooden heart imprinted with the face of Pope John Paul II. Things wash up all over Florida shores, from wooden planks and plastic bottles to dead bodies and car parts. I have seen bones wash up on the sand. Pieces of clothing. I have seen rafters touch ground on Florida shores and cry out in ecstatic joy, and I have seen others caught by the coast guard before they touched American soil, who were therefore immediately taken into custody and set for deportation. Something told me to hold on to the rosary. I put it in my pocket and took it home.
A year or so later, I made a new friend, a recently arrived Cuban. He spoke no English. He’d arrived to the United States by crossing the Mexico border on foot. He told me about his upbringing as a child of proud Communist parents, a proud young pionero, through the struggles of the Special Period. He told me about his hunger. The things his family had to do for food. His disillusion. And ultimately, his defection.
I showed him the rosary I had found on the beach. He recognized it immediately. “Those were the rosaries they gave out when the pope came to Havana,” he said. His mother had one just like it. “They were thick and rough edged because they were handmade.”
I thought of how the owner of those wooden beads had brought them from Cuba with them, likely by boat, intending to land in Florida. The beads were lost at sea. I wondered about the person who’d had enough faith to carry those beads with them on their journey. I wondered if that person’s life had been lost in the waves, too.
When I found that I would be back in Cuba precisely when the new pope would be visiting, I decided that I would go to the plaza to see him, not just out of my own intellectual curiosity, my writer’s spirit, which propels me to be a witness, but also in remembrance of that person who owned that lost rosary, wherever their life and soul may have left them.
Sometimes I accompany Manuel on la ruta. He likes to start on the base of Avenida 23, near the Malecón, and ride high into the hills, or sometimes we
just take Linea, picking up and dropping off people until we’re nearly in Playa. I sit in the front seat next to Manuel, leaving room for another passenger to my right. In the back, three more passengers are legally permitted, but occasionally Manuel lets a fourth squeeze in, usually a small child. Passengers are mostly silent as they ride. University students sit with their earphones tucked in, the volume loud enough for the rest of us to hear the buzz of their Cubatón music. When it’s time for their stop, a passenger nudges Manuel in the shoulder or simply says, “Chofe, aquí,” and Manuel pulls over. They hand him their coins, usually not more than fifty cents’ worth. Maybe another passenger will climb in at that stop. And the almendrón continues on its way. Up and down the avenues. Picking up and dropping off. The endless ruta.
One day we pick up a trio of young girls dressed provocatively. Two of the girls give instructions to the third on how to behave when they meet their dates at the hotel. Their dates, I am able to gather, are German.
“It doesn’t matter if you can’t understand a word he says,” one girl advises. “Just look at him as if he’s speaking to your soul. They love that.”
We drop them off near Parque Central. I watch as they walk toward the hotel, fat tour buses and hordes of foreigners standing out front.
Cuba on the Verge Page 15