The Girl in the Picture

by Denise Chong

  Everywhere Kim turned, what she saw of the Cuban revolution impressed her. Havana and its distant suburbs were well served by public transit that was both cheap and efficient. A wait at a bus stop, where a concrete roof offered protection from sun and rain, was five or, at the most, ten minutes. In Cuba, since everybody worked for the state, there were no unemployed. Everybody had a salary and everybody had the essentials. The homeless and dispossessed, the begging and squalor of Ho Chi Minh City were sights unseen. Every Cuban household had a ration booklet giving equal privileges to buy what they needed at the ration stores, from food to shoes, from toothpaste to a television. Foreigners, including foreign students, shopped in “parallel stores,” paying about three times the price for the same goods sold in the state stores. But foreign students also received a stipend three times that of domestic students.

  Whereas in Vietnam everyone was driven to the black or the open market, and everyone was obsessed with devising legal and illegal ways to buy and sell, cynically flouting the regime’s dictates, Cubans prided themselves on the purity of purpose of Castro’s revolution and held their leader in steadfast awe. So strong was allegiance among youth to Fidelismo that students shunned any foreign student fingered by the rumor mill to be privately trading or dealing.

  In Cuba, teachers and students alike held themselves to the highest standards of conduct. Teachers tolerated neither absenteeism nor lateness. Students were mindful of both their academic and revolutionary performance, seeking to avoid any black mark on their dossiers that could affect their job placements. Kim preferred even the propaganda in Cuba to that in Vietnam. Cuba’s teachings were steeped in centuries of diverse history and rich in intellectual culture. Vietnam’s were strung with slogans about the sacrifices and deaths that had been necessary to achieve the final victory in 1975. Though Maritza got Kim excused from the three weeks of “voluntary” farm labor required each semester—and the weekly student exercise and sports programs—to be bused out of the city was not a sacrifice. Living in tent barracks was uncomfortable and harvesting vegetables was back-breaking, but returning students exalted the good food and the rum and the music of late-night partying.

  As fate would have it, the year that Kim arrived in Cuba—1986—would be the end of what Cubans considered the country’s “golden years.” She came six years too late. In the early 1980s, when Vietnam was crawling back from the brink of economic collapse, the opposite was happening in Cuba. Helped by Castro’s experiment with farmers’ free markets, the Cuban economy turned in year after year of impressively strong growth. However, in 1986, Mikhail Gorbachev’s perestroika and glasnost were forceful winds of change that reversed Lenin’s legacy and sent shudders through the Communist world. Countries dependent on Soviet aid took a new lesson from an old joke—Moscow says “Tighten your belts,” to which the reply is “Send belts”—when the Soviet Union began drastic economic restructuring and political reform that included deep cuts in foreign aid and shipments of subsidized oil. Some eastern European countries and, as well, Vietnam saw the imperative of bringing in their own programs of reform. In December 1986, the Vietnamese Communist Party held a landmark congress that popularized the Vietnamese term doi moi, heralding “renewal.” Hanoi began to free the economy from state control and to eliminate state subsidies. And, in its most dramatic change in Party leadership in the fifty years since its founding, Hanoi retired three men from its politburo, among them eighty-year-old Pham Van Dong (who also retired as prime minister but remained as an adviser to the regime), sending a signal of its intention to rejuvenate the Party from the top down.

  Cuba was the sole holdout against reform. Castro condemned the others, accusing them of engaging in “capitalist backsliding.” In 1987, he announced a Cuban campaign of “Rectification of Errors and Struggles Against Negative Tendencies” beginning with the shutdown of the successful experimental farmers’ markets. Every Cuban would pay a price for Castro’s retrenchment to Communist orthodoxy. The reappearance of lineups at ration stores, which had nearly disappeared in the early 1980s, would mark the start of the economy’s downward skid. In contrast, Vietnam would keep its sights on shifting towards a market economy, which would ultimately restore growth after a decade of decline.

  KIM’S SENSE OF ISOLATION FROM FRIENDS and family eased some seven or eight months after she arrived in Cuba. One of her Spanish teachers arranged for her to move to a residence in Siboney, a stately old home with a large shaded garden, among the many in Havana left vacant by fleeing Americans when Castro took power. The main house accommodated thirty; Kim shared the quiet of the double room in the coach house, which also had its own private bath. Her Cuban roommate was Yamilen Diaz, a girl with cascading red hair, who was in her last year of high school and studying Russian. Her family’s love of Cuba under Castro had nurtured her ambition to study at the most elite of universities in the Communist world, in Moscow.

  From the start, Yamilen took to bringing Kim home on weekends. Her family lived at the opposite end of the city in a working-class neighborhood in east Havana, reached by taking the tunnel under the harbor channel. The Diazes were a close-knit family. Yamilen was the elder of two daughters. Her parents were not much older than Kim’s eldest sister, Loan. The father, Manuel, a mechanic at an oil refinery, and the mother, Nuria, vice-principal of a primary school, made a handsome couple. He was dapper, with his slicked black hair, white socks and polished shoes; she was elegant, made up to perfection, her hair red one day, black with a strand of white at the forehead the next. The family’s home—a modest two-bedroom house that Nuria inherited from her grandparents—gave the Diazes a leg up on the average Cuban household. They could buy what few Cubans could afford, a car. Manuel jury-rigged parts and repaired the engine of a 1957 Ford to working order, applied a coat of paint to the body and sacrificed the pigpen for a carport. His car joined the vintage pre-revolutionary American vehicles that dominated Havana’s roads, outnumbering newer Russian Moskvitch sedans and Ladas.

  The family’s nervousness at the prospect of hosting a foreigner in their home for the first time evaporated upon meeting Kim. The bond was immediate, warm and enduring. Cubans are physically affectionate, and the Diazes found Kim the same. Kim called Nuria and Manuel Mami and Papi, and they regarded her as the spark that reignited their enthusiasm for life. She herself loved to sit in the garden under the mango tree and listen to the chirping of the canaries. Manuel had some two dozen, housed in a cage so large it held smaller cages inside.

  Kim’s only talk of Vietnam was of the ache of distance from her family. “Your family is so far; consider ours as your own,” the Diazes told her. It would be almost a year before Kim received a letter from her family. To Kim’s dismay, her father’s news was stale, the letter written almost a year earlier. She read that her girlfriend, Trieu, had married. She could have had a baby by now, Kim thought, and I wouldn’t know it!

  Shortly thereafter, Kim met a Vietnamese military attaché posted to Havana. She warmed to him, delighted to hear a southern accent. He spoke of his wife and children in Ho Chi Minh City—as an economy measure, families accompanied diplomats on postings only at the level of ambassador—and Kim’s question popped out: “Do you receive letters from your family often?”

  “Oh, a letter from them,” he replied, “can take up to a year to get to me.” Kim understood. The mail of southerners was held to be read by Vietnamese authorities before it was passed on, if at all. Her mail, like her life, was under scrutiny.

  The Diazes understood Kim to be a famous war victim. While they deliberately avoided the subject of the war, they did not ignore her burn wound. They all took turns applying cream to her scarred back and easing the pain with massage. Kim herself had no shyness about handing Manuel the cream and seating herself on his lap. But what Nuria noticed was that Kim regarded her burn scars as a burden of ugliness. She made it her mission to give Kim the self-confidence to see herself not as a burn victim but rather, first and foremost, as a woman like any ot
her.

  In an offhand manner, Nuria began to cajole Kim to join the family on an outing to the beach, the Cubans’ favorite play-ground. Even older women, with ample hips like Nuria’s, wore bikinis. “You must come with us for a swim, or at least a picnic!”

  Few Vietnamese students in Cuba were keen on swimming. They went enthusiastically on the annual two-week campismo organized by the university, but they would opt out of going to the beach by day. They saw the beach as a place to go at night to hunt for crabs.

  Time and again, Kim put Nuria off: “It’s too much sun for my body. I will burn.”

  Coached by Nuria, the family persisted. “Just put suntan cream and a hat on.” Or: “We’ll go at the end of the day, when the sun is less hot.”

  “I can’t go. I don’t know how to swim.” She had other excuses: “I don’t have a bathing suit to protect my burn.” Or: “I have to ask my parents to send me one with long sleeves.”

  Almost a year later, Kim came around. She did not know that the family had deliberately picked the least attractive beach nearest Havana, at Guanabo, for their first outing—a place where old men reel in fish from the surf. Once Kim was in the water, it was hard to get her out, and going to the beach became her favorite day trip. The Diaz women bought her a new bathing suit, a dance leotard in white accented with fuchsia flowers. Kim herself bought a pair of oversized white-framed sunglasses to match.

  Kim’s blossoming confidence in her sexuality was bolstered by another female friendship she forged in Cuba. She met Helen Le, a student a couple of years older than herself, at a social event on Havana’s diplomatic calendar in 1988. The newly posted Vietnamese ambassador, Do Tai, and his wife were hosting a party for one thousand at their home. The new face of the Vietnamese bureaucracy in the era of doi moi, Tai was erudite, educated and only in his forties, still raising a family.

  Helen was a vivacious beauty and a second-year computer-programming student at the University of Havana, and she and Kim hit it off. The two communicated in Spanish; Vietnamese was Helen’s fourth language after Punjabi, Spanish and English. Born in Danang to a Pakistani businessman and a Vietnamese mother, at war’s end she fled with her father and family to Pakistan. When he died, his widow moved to Ho Chi Minh City and took a job there as the cook in the Cuban consular office. Helen ended up in Havana using the connections of a Cuban telecommunications expert. She boarded with the family of a high-ranking Cuban army commander but spent her weekends with her Syrian boyfriend, Mohammed Haitzam. He would come four hours by bus from Santa Clara, where he was studying dental technology, and the two would take a room at the twenty-five-story Habana Libre, formerly a Hilton hotel, built in the 1950s, overlooking the Gulf of Mexico. Mohammed had the foreign currency to pay for it; he was well supported by his father, a wealthy retailer in Damascus.

  Together with Helen and Mohammed, Kim enjoyed two favorite Cuban pastimes. One was going to Coppelia. Castro’s regime had built the ice cream emporium in 1966 on Vedado’s La Rampa, a street formerly of hotels, nightclubs and casinos that had epitomized the Havana of the swinging 1950s, a time of mobsters and high-rollers. To demonstrate Castro’s promise of a better life under socialism, the state heavily subsidized bread and ice cream; in Batista days, only the well-to-do, cosmopolitan families could enjoy either. Set in a park of the same name, Coppelia was shaped like a flying saucer and decorated with oversized ballerina legs dancing on pointe. It served some thirty thousand customers a day and had indoor and outdoor seating for several hundred. The second diversion was going to the cinema. Havana had 170 theaters showing Cuban and international films. Yara Cinema was steps from Coppelia. Both were popular with students looking for an evening’s entertainment. The price of admission to a film and the price of a two-scoop bowl at Coppelia was the same: one peso, a price unchanged at Coppelia since its opening day.

  The greatest influence of these women on Kim’s life was a remaking of her self-image. In Helen, Kim found a model of independent womanhood allied with impulsive flamboyance. In spite of a steady boyfriend, Helen was given to uninhibited declarations about love. As Cubans, the Diaz women came to that naturally. Encouraged by Nuria’s sensitive motherly ways, and admiring the strength of her marriage in a society where divorce and remarriage were common, Kim brought Nuria her timorous questions about love and sex. Nuria and Yamilen tried to impart to Kim the feminine mystique that Cubans call swing. Ultimately, Nuria triumphed. Kim came to use perfume and to curl her hair, often pinning it to one side with an orchid, and she began to brighten her face with rouge, lipstick and eyeliner. She shed an image of herself as weak and ugly, and started to think in terms of strength and beauty. Years ago, in the dark of the noodle shop, Nu had taught the teenage Kim that tragedy had dimmed her prospects for love, if not marriage. Where Nu had seen a normal life for her daughter as something already stolen from her, Nuria showed her that it was still within reach.

  AFTER THE PERIOD OF DOI MOI BEGAN, VIETNAMESE returning from visits home were abuzz about how things were looking up there. People had rice all the time, they were eating meat again, and they could even afford to go to restaurants. The price of the move away from state control was runaway inflation (from 1986, when the program of doi moi began, until 1988, annual inflation was a brutal 700 to 1,000 percent), but where once the old guard in the politburo would have put the brakes on, the new leadership in Hanoi did the opposite and stepped on the accelerator. In measures aimed at increasing production of food, consumer items and goods for export, Hanoi ambitiously moved to further cut state subsidies, allow limited private business, reduce centralized planning and open up the country to foreign investment. Western governments, sensing commercial opportunity, began reappraising their policies towards Vietnam (except the United States, whose embargo remained in place).

  Within the walls of the Vietnamese embassy in Havana, there was wishful talk of wanting to bend the ear of Fidel Castro about the benefits of reform, to laud how Vietnam had turned a rice deficit into an exportable surplus. Outside the embassy, such talk was unthinkable among Cubans. Complaint about Castro or of conditions in Cuba was hushed. What with a policeman on nearly every street corner, one could be arrested as a counterrevolutionary, charged with “lying about the economy.”

  Castro continued to turn the clock back. By 1987, to meet its commitments to the Soviet Union, the Cuban government had to purchase sugar, the “white gold” that had brought unrivaled prosperity to colonial Cuba. Cubans saw the economic deterioration as a call for solidarity; it was not the first time that the Committees for the Defense of the Revolution (the equivalent of the neighborhood “cells” in Vietnam) had called on them to rededicate themselves to the Revolution. First, it had meant enduring lineups. Next, an expanded list of rationed goods; then, poorer-quality goods in the state stores. The first signs of growing paucity at the university residences showed up in the food service. At first, less variety in the menu; then, shrinking portions.

  Yet Kim’s own outlook was more positive than ever. Because of her mid-term start at the language institute, she did not leave there until the end of the following academic year. With new confidence in her language skills, and renewed confidence in her health, Kim decided in the fall of 1988 to take back the dream of a career in medicine. Conceding that she was not up to the demands of a career as a doctor, she enrolled in the faculty of pharmacology, planning on something she thought next best, dispensing medicines to the sick.

  One day, there was an electricity brownout at the residence. Students had to line up with their pails on the ground floor, where an emergency generator pumped water, and carry their filled pails back up the stairs. Without electricity, the elevators weren’t working either. Kim put her back out. Her roommates sent her by ambulance to hospital, then sent word to the student who was head of the Vietnamese contingent.

  Appointed to that position by the embassy, Bui Huy Toan was a third-year student of English and Spanish in the faculty of foreign languages. His reputation for being he
lpful—he was the one who had approached Kim on her very first day in residence to show her the ropes—and his proficiency in Spanish had brought him to the attention of Vietnamese delegations as a good contact in Havana. Often such visitors, more frequent under doi moi, were afraid to leave their hotels for fear of getting lost.

  Toan visited Kim in the hospital. “Next time,” he told her, “wait for me to come back from classes to help you.”

  He was sincere in his concern for her welfare. When Toan heard Kim tell of how her burn wounds regularly brought on headaches and deep pains, he began to come by after classes several times a week to massage her back, which helped prevent their onset. The fourth of six children, Toan had learned responsibility from the age of six upon the death of his mother after complications in childbirth. She had delayed making the trip to a doctor one village over because there’d been no one to mind the younger children, what with her husband working miles away and the older children at school. Her death forced the older siblings to leave school so they could fish in the river to help support the family, leaving young Toan to care for his two younger siblings. He remembered those early years as a time when there was never enough to eat, when the younger ones owned neither pants nor shoes and no other shirts than the ones on their backs.

  Dropping her guardedness about befriending northerners, Kim accepted Toan’s invitations to join him and his friends. They were charmed by her smile, and mesmerized by her southern accent. Toan called her “Mei jin,” as if she were the spice that enlivened the all-male contingent. When residence authorities transferred Kim to the building’s other tower, he asked to follow so that he could be nearer to her should she need help.