Cuba on the Verge

by Leila Guerriero

  Later we pick up a pair of santeras dressed in white, heads covered, colored beads layered around their necks. They ask Manuel if they can hire him for the hour. He agrees and we take them to the forest in the hills above the Río Almendares and park along a ridge. When the ladies get out of the car, I notice for the first time the canvas sack they’ve brought with them, and when they step in front of the almendrón and make their way down the slope of soil to the river’s edge, the fabric of their bag moves from within. Manuel and I watch from the car as the ladies find a place near the water, pull fruit and a live chicken from their sack, and with a quick, almost invisible movement, leave the animal dead, bleeding from the neck, the blood dripping into a bowl at their feet.

  Sometimes we pick up non-Cubans, usually Europeans who’ve been in Cuba awhile and already know how to navigate the shared cab system. One day we pick up an Italian man. He must be in his midsixties. With him is a Cuban girl who can’t be older than seventeen. In the rearview mirror I see him kiss her neck while she looks bored and stares out the window. An older woman sitting on the man’s other side closes her eyes as if to pray or at least not to be complicit, until we leave the man and the girl on the corner of Neptuno.

  One day Manuel and I drive out to El Rincón to visit the church of San Lázaro. We head down the dusty road past shacks and lonely skinny horses and stacks of beaten sugarcane. Outside the church property, we are surrounded by beggars and vendors of candles and wooden saints. I expect that Manuel will want to wait for me outside, as he usually does, as I go in and look around, lighting a candle or two at one of the altars. But this time Manuel says he will go inside with me. We walk together into the large white church. We part and wander separately from altar to altar, where people have left mounds of flowers for Lázaro of the parable, and at another altar for Our Lady of Charity. I go outside to the fountain of holy water where people missing limbs rub water into their skin and cross themselves with its drops.

  Beside the church is the lazaretto where lepers still live, exiled from society. A few dogs roam the church grounds. A group of caretakers taking their lunch in the shade tell me those dogs were abandoned here and adopted by the church. The small cream-colored one is named Belén, because last Christmas she was found as a puppy abandoned in the crèche, curled asleep beside the baby Jesus. I tell them it’s sweet that they care for the dogs here, but one of the caretakers tells me the dogs are only allowed to roam when supervised. Otherwise they are locked in a garden for their safety.

  “People are capable of terrible things,” one caretaker tells me. “It wasn’t so long ago that many found their only meals in dogs.”

  I have heard this many times before. I have also heard it vehemently denied.

  One day Manuel and I were driving through Buenavista when we saw two men skinning a dead dog hanging from a beam that had been suspended over an alleyway. Manuel stopped the car to ask the men what they were doing.

  “Don’t ask questions you don’t want the answer to,” one man responded.

  The other man laughed. “Want a bite?”

  My favorite part of the church of San Lázaro is the small house that holds the ex-votos, proof of prayers answered offered in gratitude to the saint. Knitted baby booties, photos of families reunited. Olympic trophies, boxing championship medals. I wander among the glass cases holding the prayer memorabilia and see Manuel doing the same, reading the letters written by the faithful in gratitude to San Lázaro for granting their petitions.

  One of the reasons Manuel doesn’t believe in God or the orishas or anything considered divine is because he says he has been so close to it all—he’s sat in countless church services with his mother and gone to plenty of toques de santos with people from his neighborhood—yet he never feels anything.

  “I always stand there waiting for something to happen, waiting to be moved by the music or the prayers or the ceremony, and nothing happens. I don’t feel anything.”

  At the pope’s Mass in the Plaza de la Revolución, we listen to music, the echoes of prayers like a fortress around us; watch the consecration, enveloped by a communion of silence. The pope leaves the crowds with words encouraging peace and courage and freedom. He tells the crowd never to give up hope.

  Once Manuel and I were driving along the Malecón in the direction of Cubanacán, where I was to meet a friend for lunch. Few cars were on the road that morning, but I noticed a pelican walking, dazed and disoriented, across the avenue. Manuel swerved so as not to hit the bird. I turned in my seat to see if the pelican had made it across to the sidewalk. Manuel said pelicans rarely appeared on that stretch of the Malecón. He saw my look of concern. He knew me well by then—how I would save scraps from my lunches to offer stray dogs and how I wouldn’t hesitate to bend over and pet stray cats. As soon as he found a place to turn, he looped back to the same spot on the Malecón in search of the pelican. We found a small white van parked in the same place, its back doors open, and the driver had already scooped up the bird and loaded him in.

  We tried to stop the man. I was so stunned I could barely find the words to explain why the pelican should be free. The man simply looked at me and said the pelican was his now. Manuel tried to reason with him, but the man quickly slammed the doors shut, climbed back in his van, and drove off.

  I thought about the pelican all day. At lunch at my friends’ house, they served juicy chicken breast procured from a government connection, far better than the meatless thighs only occasionally available with the government ration card. I told them about the pelican. They laughed. They didn’t think the man had taken it to eat it.

  “Pelicans give very bad meat,” they said. “Maybe he took it to sell for brujería. Or maybe to sell to a foreigner as a pet.”

  They teased me for caring so much about things that had nothing to do with me.

  “You have to learn to look away,” they said. “One can’t be sentimental in Cuba and survive.”

  We are part of the exodus leaving the plaza that Sunday morning. The roads are still blocked and there is no public transport. We will have to walk just as we came. But my feet are raw with blisters, my hips stiff from hours walking, standing, and sitting on pavement. The sun is high, blazing. The masses disperse and Manuel leads the way, finding a shortcut through parks and uphill across Avenida Salvador Allende until we land on Zapata and I spot an unoccupied cocotaxi and call it over. I ask the driver to take us back to Paseo and he says he will, for seven CUC. I agree and climb into the backseat of his scooter-rickshaw, but Manuel hesitates, arguing that it’s too much for such a short distance. I tell him I will pay for it, and besides, this is the only ride around, and if we don’t take it we will have to walk all the way back, and look at my bloody heels and toes. Manuel gets in reluctantly. He has never been in a cocotaxi, he says. They’re for tourists.

  In a few minutes we arrive on Paseo and again, Manuel tries to get the driver to agree to a more reasonable fare.

  “It’s not right that you’re exploiting people just because they’re tired from having walked miles to see the pope.”

  The driver laughs in his face. “I’ll do what I want.”

  “I drive a taxi myself,” Manuel says. “I know what it costs to drive people. The ride you just gave us shouldn’t cost more than two CUC.”

  “What do you know? What kind of car do you drive?”

  “An almendrón,” Manuel says.

  Again the driver laughs. “You drive a garbage taxi and you’re trying to tell me what I should charge?”

  I see the shame wash over Manuel’s face.

  “Come on,” I say. “Let’s go.”

  I pay the driver, but Manuel still wants him to know he has no conscience. He’s robbing people. “That’s not right,” Manuel says. “You’re a thief.”

  Another cocotaxi pulls up and the two drivers greet each other.

  “What’s going on?” the friend asks our driver.

  “Nothing, asere. This almendrón jockey thinks he knows ev
erything.”

  “Ha,” says the friend. “If you ever see me driving an almendrón, kill me.”

  Manuel and I get on our way. He’s angry like I’ve never seen him. Angrier than when we got robbed by the security guards of Cementerio Colón. Angrier than the day he got bumped from behind by another almendrón and the Chevy was taken out of commission for a month. Angrier than the last time Cassandra kicked him out and made him leave his DVD player behind.

  “We had a beautiful morning,” he says, lighting himself a cigarette, “and that shameless guy has to ruin it. It’s the story of our island. It’s the reason we’ve become just a hole in the ocean.”

  Months later, Havana prepares for a visit from the American president.

  Once again, one can follow the planned motorcade route by the visible restoration of particular corridors. Quinta Avenida all the way to Cubanacán. A friend lives in a small building just off the main avenue and the government has sent workers to repaint and replaster the broken balconies—requests the residents have been making for years, all but ignored until it was determined Obama might glance in that direction when being driven to his quarters at the embassy residence.

  The only differences Manuel has noted since the official changes were announced in December 2014 are that there are now many more Americans visiting the island. So Cuba has changed for them, he says. But for ordinary Cubans, Manuel insists, nothing has changed at all.

  It’s true, now there are Wi-Fi hotspots in public parks and on street corners. I was surprised, one day back home, to receive an e-mail from none other than Manuel, who wrote that he didn’t know anyone else with an e-mail address and that’s why he was writing to me. But that was the first and last e-mail he wrote. Everyone he knows, he says, is easier to reach by phone or by just driving over to their home.

  Now, Cuba prepares for the arrival of Obama. For the first time in all my years visiting, I see the American president’s face silk-screened on T-shirts and the American flag hanging high outside the U.S. embassy.

  Manuel just shakes his head at any mention of it, waving his hand through the air as if swatting a fly.

  “Popes and presidents. They come and they see Cuba, then they leave and they forget us,” he says. “But for us, nothing changes. Here we are. Here we will always be. En la misma Cuba, la misma ruta, la misma lucha de siempre.” The same Cuba, the same ruta, the same struggle as always.

  THE OTHER SHORE

  BY JON LEE ANDERSON

  The primary school my daughters attended in Havana was called the Eliseo Reyes, named after a Cuban guerrilla who died fighting alongside Che Guevara in Bolivia. Over the door of the entrance to the school was a sign that read: “Muerte a los Traidores” (Death to Traitors). Every weekday morning, the children were gathered by their teachers in the school’s front garden, where they uttered the obligatory oath: “Pioneers for Communism, we will be like Che.”

  There was an inescapable paradox in the situation. My daughters Bella and Rosie were not Communists, and moreover, they were half American, thanks to me, but nonetheless I had brought them, their British mother, Erica, and their younger brother, Máximo, to live in Havana so that I could research a biography of Che.

  It was the early nineties, and Cuba was in a state of seemingly inexorable collapse. The Soviet Union had recently disintegrated, and with it had vanished the generous subsidies that had kept Fidel Castro’s Revolution alive for the previous three decades. Fidel had dubbed Cuba’s crisis the Special Period in Time of Peace. It was a time of extraordinary austerity and penury. Accustomed to fairly high levels of material comfort, Cubans were faced with inadequacies of just about everything, from food to medicine. There was insufficient fuel to produce electricity, and so there were rolling blackouts, all over the island, sometimes lasting twelve hours a day or more. Oxen had replaced tractors in the countryside and Chinese bicycles had replaced cars in the cities. Queues for the few city buses lasted for hours. People walked and hitched rides where they could. Many were not eating enough.

  We, on the other hand, were foreigners with hard currency and privileged access to the array of coveted items available in the Soviet-style Diplomercado, a drab shop with a paltry selection of overpriced imported foodstuffs that were, nonetheless, beyond the reach of most Cubans. Next to the Diplomercado was the walled diplomatic compound of the former Soviet Union, with several apartment blocks for the diplomats and their families. At the center of the compound was the embassy itself, a strange windowless edifice that rose some fifteen or so stories before bulging out into a box with wraparound polarized windows. It resembled an air traffic control tower, or a robot with its arms amputated, and was the tallest building in Havana. The Russians themselves were almost invisible; their greatest evident legacy, after all the years as the madre patria of global socialism, was the rusting Ladas and Moskvitches that jerked fitfully along the roads and broke down everywhere, belching black smoke from their exhaust pipes.

  While the majority of Cubans adhered to the expected public displays of stoicism and revolutionary fealty—such as the one that took place every morning in the Eliseo Reyes schoolyard—most of them were simultaneously engaged in a personal quest to secure enough food to feed themselves and their families, even if it meant stealing or hustling. These were mutually exclusive pursuits, for the most part, and posed a dramatic dilemma for people across the island, forcing them to live a schizophrenic existence that became known as el doble cara—literally, two-facedness.

  Having granted us permission to live in Cuba, the relevant government agency tasked with dealing with diplomats and “foreign technicians” allocated us a house to rent in a seaside residential neighborhood of western Havana known as El Náutico. The house was a fifties-built two-story, three-bedroom villa that sat cheek to jowl with several others on a short block that ended at the seaside. The three houses that lay between us and Náutico’s own little corniche along the rocky shoreline were occupied by Cuban families. They were severely dilapidated. Most of our neighbors had originally come from elsewhere in Cuba and had been given their homes by the government after their original owners fled into exile years before, leaving them vacant. But few of them had the means to maintain their homes, which were falling apart. Náutico’s houses were made of cement, and because of their proximity to the sea, el salitre, the salty sea air, had chewed away the façades of some of them right down to their corroding rebar.

  Our assigned home was falling apart, too. It had been left unoccupied for a couple of years since its last occupants—Bulgarians, apparently—had left Cuba when the Cold War ended. Cuba’s government promised to have the house repaired and painted so that we could live there. In the meantime, we lived a couple of miles away in the residential district of Miramar, in a small apartment building overlooking another stretch of the rocky shoreline—the formation known as diente de perro, dog’s tooth—that skirts much of Havana. The strand in front of our apartment was a place of encounter for lovers, who conducted their business on one of the several concrete benches that had been placed there, and the occasional white-garbed Santería initiates, who came at dawn to throw flowers and other offerings into the sea as part of their purification rite.

  The government workers’ brigade that was dispatched to whip our house in Náutico into shape consisted of three elderly men, and they worked very, very, very slowly. One of the reasons for their slowness, I soon learned, was that they were hungry. Each day they traveled to Náutico from their own homes in one of Havana’s far-flung peripheries. Because of the shortage of fuel and the scarcity of passenger buses, this journey, which should have been no more than a thirty-minute run, was taking as much as three hours. Once they got to Náutico, the first thing they did was to go to the local comedor popular, a kind of soup kitchen for state employees, that was supposed to provide them with lunch, to see if it had food for the day. If there was none, they would turn around and return to their homes. This happened around twice a week. And when there was food, it
was very often little more than chícharos—split peas—or sometimes rice and beans, never meat, and it was clearly inadequate.

  Once I discovered the reasons for the lack of progress on our house, I began going to the Diplomercado every weekday morning, buying food, and taking it to the workers before they had given up for the day. I usually brought them pork sandwiches and the canned malt drink that Cubans love—men in particular, because they believe it enhances their sexual energy. The men were grateful and began coming to work more consistently than before. I would often stick around to chat with them. One of them, Mederos, regaled me with tales of his time serving as a soldier in Angola a decade or so earlier. Cuba’s military expedition to Angola was one of its proudest moments, in which Fidel Castro airlifted thousands of Cuban soldiers to assist the embattled Marxist Angolan regime, which had come to power after the end of Portuguese colonial rule, only to come under siege from guerrilla armies that were armed and financed by the American CIA and South Africa’s white apartheid regime. The Cubans had helped the Angolans prevail by winning a crucial battle against the South Africans, weakening the apartheid regime and leading to the negotiations that led to Nelson Mandela’s release from prison and the country’s return to democracy and black-majority rule. Whatever they thought about their own government and some of its errors, most Cubans were rightly proud of the achievements of their adventure in Angola in the name of revolutionary solidarity.

  Mederos was an unswerving Fidelista, and despite the penuries of his own life, he saw everything he did within the context of his revolutionary commitment. His current job—painting the house of a strange Yanqui who was writing about Che, something he had been ordered to do by the Party—was not something he questioned. I admired Mederos for his sense of duty and his ceaseless ordeal traveling to and from my house, and although I knew it was a double-edged sword to provide him and his comrades with their daily food, I enjoyed the rapport we struck up. While many Cubans were wary of outsiders and limited their conversations to brief informational exchanges, Mederos’s patriotic garrulousness was a refreshing source of friendly banter, as well as a window into the world that the Cubans inhabited.