The Best American Travel Writing 2014

by Paul Theroux

  But one key fact still sets Cuba apart today: there aren’t many pimps or third-party intermediaries in the sex trade. A police state with tightly restricted access to weapons and severe penalties for drugs creates an underworld more seamy than overtly violent. And few romantic liaisons between locals and foreigners are deemed prostitution; rather, most fall under the banner of relationships with amigos. Any non-Cuban is eligible, and what locals want from amigos, foreigners like me, is neither finite nor clear, a mix of money, attention, and the possibility linked to anyone with a non-Cuban passport.

  In the way that the language of a city fills in the blanks of what its people want to name, sometime between the early 1990s and today the word jinetero/a became the catchall to describe Cuba’s hookers and hustlers, or any person who seeks foreign currency or CUC, the valuable tourist cash, rather than the pesos in which government salaries are paid, via foreigners. The word’s provenance isn’t clear. Jinete in Spanish is a horse jockey; whether this means that women hold the reins of the “horses” is unclear. Today, the masculine jinetero refers insultingly to a man who caters to tourists in any questionably legal, hustlerlike capacity. Jinetera means “a Cuban woman who trades sex for money.” I’d avoided them whenever I’d visited Havana, until I met Sandra that night with a mutual acquaintance on the malecón.

  The European and American media erupted into a mild frenzy in the weeks after Mariela Castro’s remarks, given that the principles of prostitution in Cuba aren’t at all like those in Amsterdam. But her comments pointed toward something that was still unsaid, something essential about the country that was both hers and Sandra’s: jineteras are indicative of contemporary Havana’s frustrations, opportunities, dreams, history, and ennui. Remittances and tourism are Cuba’s top two sources of income, and the inevitable process of aging has shoved the country, with less fanfare than anticipated, into a post-Fidel era. The inheritance of the Castro revolution is hinted at every day in how Cuba interacts with an ever-encroaching world. Sandra, a small symbolic representative of communism’s struggle for relevance, is both admired and reviled within her society.

  Then again, that might be too much weight to put on her; she’s also just a girl surviving Havana, using what’s put in front of her to get by.

  Sometimes it’s hard to discern who’s selling sex and who’s just trying to wear as little fabric as possible in Havana’s oppressive heat. The mainstays of jinetera fashion—miniskirts, transparent fabrics, cleavage- and shoulder-baring tops—appear on most women, including foreigners, who feel freer to be sexy in permissive Cuba than at home. At clubs, I saw foreign women with bikini-strap marks sunburned around their necks look left, right, then pull their necklines down before dancing with slim Cuban men in tight jeans and big silver belt buckles. These women lapped up the sensual aura, as if just breathing would send tiny cells of sexy through their bodies, the infusion pushing and pulling hips back and forth, transforming walks into sashays, planting dry one-liners in mouths.

  Sandra had long since mastered these feminine tricks. Everything about her physical appearance was calibrated to entice: the tops that looked almost about to slip off, the hair that twisted around her neck, her long, soft, red nails. I had just five years on Sandra, but I felt large, clumsy, and dusty around her in my flats and loose dresses. I was a tattered stuffed animal next to her as we sat, the second time we met, in the back seat of a cab that took us from the malecón out to her house.

  She’d met me downtown because she said I wouldn’t find her place on my own. Sandra had recently moved from La Corea, one of Havana’s few slumlike outlying neighborhoods, into a closer but smaller dwelling in San Miguel del Padrón. Her home was in a cluster of blocks between a fetid stream and the main road that linked downtown Havana with outer boroughs like San Francisco de Paula, where Ernest Hemingway lived. San Miguel was a place of contrasts: a street began with a few freshly painted houses near the road to San Francisco and faded into cinderblock shacks with stretched-out oil barrels for fences closer to the stream. Egg cartons, plastic bags, the rusted skeletons of metal chairs, and fruit rinds bobbed in the water.

  The shiny taxi slowed as we pulled onto her street, dodging potholes. A couple on the corner stared at us, and Sandra waved. A few feet away, an old man in overalls, a burlap sack of oranges slung over his right shoulder, stood to attention and saluted. Sandra dissolved into giggles, slapping the vinyl seat. “What a loco, loco loquito,” she gasped. “Viste?” She jumped out as soon as we pulled up to her building and leaned against the car’s trunk, picking at her nails as I paid the fare.

  Years ago, Sandra’s mother had kicked her out of the house. She now lived with her grandmother, Aboo, and her half-brother, Gallego, in a two-room apartment in what had once been a yard at the center of a block, down an alley and behind a single-story home with neoclassical columns and a street-side patio. Aboo didn’t approve of Sandra staying out for days on end, but Sandra’s father was in Florida and her mother had a new husband, a nice house in suburban La Lisa, and a set of twin toddlers. And the money Sandra brought home supported the household.

  For every woman supported by foreign men, I’d heard it estimated that three more Cuban citizens got by on the money, whether directly or not. Sandra, Aboo, and Gallego, at least. The government didn’t do much beyond tossing a too-blatant hooker into Villa Delicia, the nickname for the women’s jail. Sandra had spent four days there when she was 19 and had eaten so little she’d come out “like this,” she told me, holding up her pinkie. If men stopped coming to the island, tempted no longer by images of scantily clad mulattas on white-sand beaches and bodies pressed together in crowded bars, hotel rooms would languish unvisited, taxis would have fewer fares, and restaurants more empty tables. So policemen, Sandra said, were eminently bribable, for the right price.

  Just inside Sandra’s door, a small table and two matching chairs were piled high with folded clothes. The room also held a wooden armoire, a stereo, and a refrigerator near a small kitchenette. Sandra poked around for a box of photos. When she found it, we returned to the central patio, where we sat under the laundry lines that the three families who lived in the middle of the block used on alternating days. Sandra set the box on the ground and sorted through pictures. I pulled out a pack of cheap, unfiltered Criollo cigarettes, which I favored for their clean tobacco and sweet aftertaste. Sandra wrinkled her nose but took one anyway, and used it to point out the Spanish guy who’d asked her to marry him two years ago. He’d walked in on her a few weeks later with someone else. She still had the ring.

  Sandra was 11 when she had sex for the first time (the average in Cuba is around 13), with a man whose name she’d tattooed across the small of her back, MUMÚA, above an image of two doves entwined with scrolls. He was 32 then, and even now he was “crazy for me,” she said, waving her cigarette, though he was in jail for selling stolen motorcycle parts. What had begun as nights out slid quickly into prostitution; government salaries paled next to the $50 she could make on a night with a man, nearly always foreign, nearly always Spanish, Cuban American, or Italian. So she quit, never finished her certificate course.

  The gate at the street end of the alley jingled as Gallego walked in. After introductions, I picked up my bag to leave. Sandra asked me where I was going. “To meet some friends downtown,” I said. There weren’t many decent restaurants in Havana then, and I had no kitchen in my rented room, so a generous cast of friends, Cubans and expats, regularly invited me around to eat during my three-week reporting trips. Sandra gave me a once-over and pushed me toward the floor-length mirror in her living room. If I’d just do my hair like this, she told me as she reached into my curls and flipped them into a messy, voluminous updo, I’d look way sexier. A red wash to make the dull brown more interesting would do me good. And my shorts could be shorter, too. I should also line my lips—you know, show off contours, make them inviting. I handed her bobby pins for my hair but liked my shorts the way they were, midthigh. She looked skeptical, th
e pins between her lips as she styled and then hands on her hips once she’d finished. It did look better.

  I saw Sandra one last time on that trip to Cuba, a quick visit on the malecón again. She’d come up with a plan: when I went back to Mexico, I should get my company to write her a carta de invitación, an invitation letter that she’d use to get an exit visa. “You work at a newspaper or something, right?” she asked. “They wouldn’t have to offer me a real job, just do the carta oficial. I can take care of myself once I get there.”

  I explained that I didn’t really work for anyone, at least not like that, and some of the magazines I wrote for were actually based in Europe. She looked at me coyly. “Whatever,” she said. “Wherever.” I paused, uncomfortable, and then smiled a little and said that I could hardly get them to do favors for me, much less for an amiga in Cuba. Sandra shrugged. She began to gossip about a neighbor of hers who’d come over the day I’d visited her house. There was no change in her demeanor, as if the desire to go to Mexico or anywhere else had dissipated as soon as her shoulders had moved.

  The big turquoise Habana Riviera hotel was originally commissioned by Meyer Lansky’s men to be his mob’s Havana gambling hub, an extravagant high-rise with sophistication unrivaled in the Caribbean—Manhattan on the Florida Strait. Architect Philip Johnson did initial designs until he realized he’d be working for the Mafia and passed the job along. The building opened in December 1957 with Ginger Rogers and her musical revue in the hotel’s Copa Cabaret. In the end, Lansky’s henchmen and Hollywood hangers-on enjoyed only three years of ocean views before Castro nationalized the hotel and casino in 1960.

  Today, the wallpaper in many of the Riviera’s rooms buckles from the humidity. Only half of them have seen renovations after 50 years of use; most floors are partly habitable and some are closed altogether. Viewed from the huge saltwater pool below, to which $10 buys anyone a day pass, the broken curtain rods dangling diagonally across the windows give the hotel the look of a cross-eyed old man. What beds there are have been made up with linens in sizes that don’t fit the mattresses, and cockroaches skitter around the hallways or lie belly-up in corners. But in the lobby, the imagination sketches outlines of the three-piece suits and stiff silk skirts of the past, ghostlike, conjured by the decor. Low-slung, coral velvet couches and surfboard-shaped coffee tables with opalescent mosaic and gold inlay, all well preserved, invite time-travel fantasies.

  Lobbies were where one could forget the hotels and houses that were crumbling for lack of maintenance, ignore the damp bubbles at the corners of walls. Lobbies were also where hotel security could most easily identify the women in spandex and pleather halter tops. The Riviera was Sandra’s beat. Some nights she’d stay out on the malecón and other nights she’d slip one of the hotel workers 5 or 10 CUC to stay from around nine at night until she found a client. The $50 she charged gave her a good profit margin. She’d order a TuKola at the bar and proposition any man whose eyes lingered on her. At the club, now called the Copa Room, she’d shimmy up against a man and make him feel like he was the best dancer in the room. She complained later about how embarrassingly badly they danced, and sometimes even demonstrated for me in the middle of empty streets, but someone usually took her up to his room or whisked her off in a taxi to another hotel.

  A tenuous confidence built between Sandra and me. That winter, we sat on her patio and watched the Brazilian telenovela on her neighbor’s TV, which he dragged outside each night. He was supposed to be leaving for Panama soon, where he’d work as a physical therapist, always any day now. I watched Sandra untangle her 10-year-old neighbor’s jump rope and tally scores from the lotería, the numbers racket that all of San Miguel played, on scraps of paper. Other days, we drank cheap coffees or beers in the cafés in San Miguel and ate the Toblerones I bought at Mexican airports and talked about not much and then hitchhiked downtown together. I got out of cars near my room in Centro Habana, and she continued on to the Riviera. I wore Birkenstocks to Sandra’s heels and demurred when she asked me to buy her a cell phone or told me how great her half-brother was in bed. I rarely took cabs anymore.

  One afternoon, we went for pizza at one of Habana Vieja’s tourist-trap restaurants. Oil-stained white tablecloths hung limply atop red ones and pink-faced men sat with young women at the other two occupied tables. While I went to the bathroom, she flagged down the waiter and ordered a plate of olives.

  “Ay, Julia,” she sighed when I returned, stretching out the round vowels of my name in her hoarse voice, “estoy en estado.” She shoveled the canned olives into her mouth, filling her cheeks. She’d been eating like a horse, she said, peeing four times an hour, had what looked like a spare tire though she could rarely buy the food she craved—she thought it was Mumúa’s baby. He’d gotten out of jail recently and was the only man she didn’t use a condom with. If she had any more abortions, she might not be able to have kids in the future, so she’d have a baby in seven months.

  Mumúa wanted to make a family of them, but Sandra had a plan, she said as she dipped French fries in the olive brine. She’d tell Bong, the Italian who visited Havana every four months with a millionaire invalid boss, that he was the father. As Sandra told it, theirs was a torrid, Jane Austen–in–the–tropics tale, the hunt for an advantageous match. Bong, who had a wife and kid back in Italy, wanted to move to Cuba to be with her, but his boss, who had promised to leave his fortune to Bong, wouldn’t hear of it, so they snuck around. Since he was crazy about Sandra, and he looked something like Mumúa, she’d tell him the baby was his. Then he’d support her until the old man died and Bong could divorce the wife, marry Sandra, and take her and “their” baby away from Cuba, or at least to a better house on the island. “If he asks for a genetic test, I’ll just say no,” she summed up, bobbing her head between bites of food.

  She had never actually seen the invalid boss, though. One day Bong hailed from a town in Italy where everyone looked like they were Asian—Sandra wasn’t sure which town, didn’t care—and another day he was actually Filipino Italian. When I asked what she’d do for money if she did leave, how she’d pay rent or buy medicine, she was dismissive: “Aiouuuuuulia, I’ll do anything, anything,” she said with a wave of her hand.

  Sandra’s plans for the future were like clouds she thought she’d walk into; they’d envelop her and then everything would be different. She’d find a boyfriend who’d marry her and get her the hell out of Cuba, where the life she’d lived for 21 years bored her: the same ration food, the same lack of privacy, the same eternal wait for buses to get downtown, the gloom that rolled in when her days were occupied by sleeping and boredom. The languid sense of time—which I soaked up in Havana—suffocated Sandra. Foreigners opened up wormholes of opportunity: Sandra could have money, sleep in hotels, buy $1 H. Upmann cigarettes, eat her favorite dessert, Jell-O, every day. The dreams Sandra imagined were the size of all the rooms she’d ever been in.

  A few weeks after we’d had dinner, Sandra stopped talking to Mumúa. She’d seen him zipping toward home on his motorcycle with a pretty little thing clinging to his back. He’d also slapped her once or twice, she told me flippantly. I was relieved that Mumúa was out of Sandra’s life and hoped it stayed that way.

  So she’d listed Gallego as the baby’s father on her carnet de embarazada, the ID card with which a pregnant woman can claim state benefits. With her carnet, she was entitled to medical care throughout her pregnancy, including house calls if she couldn’t make it to the clinic and enough sonogram pictures to show off to neighbors, plus, she said: “a cradle that never shows up, a roll of gauze to use as diapers, little bottles of perfume and cream, two baby outfits, and four cloth diapers.” She had already bought an extra roll of gauze off a woman who would use disposables. In stores, disposables retailed for around $12 for a pack of 20, or, on the black market, $14 for 40. Sandra hoped that if Bong pulled through and decided to support “his” child, she’d use disposables once the baby came. It wasn’t an exit visa, but it w
as progress.

  I moved to Havana at the end of summer 2009, just a few months after I’d met Sandra. The more time I spent there, the more I understood that, in direct contradiction to the grand and lofty ideas that dominated the city’s public discourse, the very small details of life were all that mattered in Havana. Since no one had any say in what happened anywhere else, or in the government, or in any larger way, the individual dramas of what one saw, heard, did, felt, or needed held weight. I would never understand how these details stitched together if I left after three or four weeks. And there was something of relief in the surrender that the country forced on its visitors: You couldn’t eat what you wanted to eat, porque no hay, or visit a neighborhood with new buildings, because it didn’t exist. Every car, townhouse, staircase, and avenue kept the patina of a city that had given itself to the passage of time and to which you were of no consequence.

  By then, and since she was visibly pregnant that summer, Sandra had moved on to her second moneymaking plan. She and her neighbor Yessica had bought 200 cups of yogurt of the sort that retailed in the CUC supermarkets for 75 cents each. They paid a middleman 15 cents per cup and then walked the neighborhood to sell the yogurts at three for a dollar. I found them one afternoon near the main avenue, struggling to free a yogurt-filled stroller from one of the potholes that winked across the asphalt. Yessica and I took the stroller, while Sandra waddled along the sidewalk, whispering to people who sat on chairs outside their homes and sticking her head into open doorways and windows to advertise product. Someone emerged from every few doors, handed over cash, lifted the lacy blanket that covered the carriage, and pawed through its contents for the desired flavors.