An Innocent in Cuba

by David McFadden

  So we wandered some more. I told her I’d like to meet her boyfriend, so she said wait here and she disappeared. Ten minutes later and no word from them. So I went back to the bench and sat there in the moonlight for a while. Yes, it’s night already and the moon is shining off the alabaster head of the long-dead Calixto García, who was born in this city in 1840, and died in Washington in 1898, after fighting many battles against Spanish tyranny, arm in arm with José Martí, Antonio Maceo, and Máximo Gómez.

  —

  One fellow kept coming around and wanted a dollar for a mouldy old cigar he’d been carrying in his pocket for a week. Failing that, he could get me a chica or two. It’s so embarrassing. He won’t take no for an answer. He was like the cat who came back, and maybe because of some kind of impairment of the part of the brain that remembers faces, he keeps asking me, as if for the first time, if I want a chica. For instance, the first time he said where you from, I said Canada, and he said, Canadá, mucho bueno. The second and third time it was the same thing. The fourth time he asked where I was from I said Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, and he was rather startled. He looked at my face to see if I was Tibetan or Mongolian or maybe from a distant galaxy. Chica? Mouldy cigar? “Deseo nada,” I told him for the fifth or sixth time, and he would understand, but not for long.

  The seventh and final time he accosted me in a crowd surrounding a peanut vendor, and very quietly offered to get me a chica. So I lost my cool. I screeched angrily, at the top of my lungs, “NO CHICA!” About a hundred people immediately turned to look at him. I didn’t think he’d be capable of embarrassment, but this was his town, and he was extremely embarrassed. He disappeared instantly and I didn’t see him again.

  So, there’s no need to run when you’re being pestered by moscas. If someone is really pestering you persistently, just hold your ground, and whatever it is they’re trying to sell you, just yell out, “NO CHICA!” It’s more effective than fly spray. And remember, Fidel is on your side. He likes to see the tourists happy.

  —

  The tallest building on the main square of Holguín is the public library. It’s a near twin of the Hotel Santa Clara Libre, although it doesn’t have any bullet holes, and it is badly in need of a paint job. But it has those vertical art deco alternating forest-green and sea-green stripes from the pavement to the roof, and it’s a handsome building, though squatter and less tall and slenderly elegant than the hotel. From the front of the library, a large bank of speakers was rolled out into the park and Cuban music filled the plaza, causing everybody to be completely incapable of resisting dancing. Even a certain stodgy old Canadian was tapping his feet a bit. The speakers were set up to fill the square with a grand landscape of music, but a short block or two away and you don’t hear it at all. Ground zero is right in front of the library, and readers will be glad to know that it was not until the library was closed before the volume was cranked up.

  —

  The old San José church from 1820, rebuilt in the 1950s, is located in Plaza San José, a few blocks north of Parque Calixto García. In wandering around the interior, I was suddenly very taken with one station of the cross, where Jesus has stumbled under the weight of his burden, and you can see he’s suffering intensely, all the suffering a solitary human being is capable of suffering. But the artist has somehow managed to make his eyes look radiant, they are on a superior plane entirely, above and beyond all suffering, and there is the most peaceful look on his face, as if he is understanding all, accepting all, forgiving all. It’s a very sturdy grey stone church, with a rather unusual and eye-pleasing exterior, you might call it neo-Romanesque, and it’s odd the way that whatever church one visits somehow tends to become the most beautiful church in the world, at least for the duration.

  Also in the church was a tiny old lady with a terribly worried look on her face, she was doing the stations of the cross and crossing herself and praying desperately at each station. The only other person in here was stretched out on the back pew, and although he wasn’t snoring all that much, he was definitely deeply in dreamland. Outside in the plaza there is a kiosk selling beer, and someone has set up a music system over which Beethoven’s Piano Sonata No. 14 is playing. The speakers weren’t excellent, they didn’t have the clarity of the speakers in the main square, but in these surroundings, somehow, there’s a harmony, and a warmth, and a friendliness, even among the desperate people praying for their children, or the desperate people trying to sell you cigars and chicas, there’s something about the city that melds everyone together, even the tourists. Everybody looks kindly upon each other, and even the police seemed to be charmed by the beautiful music. It was a special version of the Moonlight Sonata with a choir in the background. Sounds as if it would be hokey, but it almost had me in tears as I sat there drinking my icy-cold Cristal. The Beethoven was followed by Rhapsody in Blue, with the same pianist and the same chorus in the background.

  —

  I was chatting with Enmo, a beautiful woman close to thirty, and definitely no chica. She was with her mother, Mirian, a very proud, blond, curly-haired woman who claims to be fifty-two years old, and has a very interesting way of walking, with shoulders pinned back, and swaying side to side, very proud of her sexuality, and nicely pleased with herself. Enmo is much more conservative, and refuses to strut her stuff like her mama does. Enmo says she has an evangelistic sister in Florida who goes around collecting money for the church in Cuba. She hasn’t been back to Cuba in years.

  It all started with this well-dressed guy with extremely angular features and a sharp chin and nose and a brand-new white cotton peaked cap of the sort that Cuban motorists wore in the 1920s. He was an artisan, and had carved two whales out of very fine and smoothly sanded and shellacked wood, in dark brown and pale yellow, and was trying to sell them in the park to tourists for five dollars each. Each whale had a little hole in the bottom, where a dowel was inserted, to form a stand for display purposes. A lot of patient work went into these artifacts, and everybody in the park was admiring them but nobody was buying them.

  Enmo and Mirian spotted me as a tourist and called me over to have a look at these whales. Tourists were in short supply and they were trying to help the guy make a sale. Enmo knew him and said he was an Italian who came to Cuba for a holiday one winter and just never went home. He’s been here for five years now. Funny the way we sheep will sometimes hop the fence and never return to the old meadow, no matter how lushly it may loom in our memory. Nothing bothers him, he seems very happy, he’s not desperate, he’s just one with all the poor people, doing his whales and being apparently unable to sell them, at least in this park and on this day.

  Enmo seemed very impressed with my pathetic Spanish, and positively beamed with pleasure when I said that I admired the whales but had no desire to own one. She told me she works in the tourist resorts on the beaches just north of here, but even though she desperately wants a full-time gig she only gets short terms of two or three weeks, so she spends most of her time near the phone waiting for the “agency” to call. Even though she has the perfect personality and appearance for such a job and her English is good, they haven’t phoned in months.

  Canadian tourists often come home complaining about the lack of news available in Cuba. But Enmo said that besides Granma Cubans get an hour’s worth of world news every night at 8:30 on channel 3, and they know all about the problems in the United States since George W. Bush took power, they know about the 9/11 disaster and the disastrous invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. Many have their own computers, which they share freely with others, and Internet access as well. She told me exactly what she knew and it seemed pretty solid to me. She also told me that the Cubans, when they see the news from Iraq, are very solemn, maybe even bitter, and they know that Cuba could be next. And she confirmed that there are people who are building bomb shelters here and there around the country. People are getting very weary of the cruelty of the blockade, after more than forty years of suffering under it. They do not under
stand why it is they can’t have a slightly alternate system all their own. Oh, it’s just hopeless. But she said every Cuban senses clearly that the United States is capable of doing to Cuba what they’ve done to Iraq. It’s like trying to raise your little family in a little house when next door there is a huge house full of numerous homicidal maniacs who despise them, and all the other little houses on the street as well.

  We talked about Holguín, and the husband and father who hasn’t been heard from in ages. I invited the ladies into the coffee shop. I had a beer and they had canned fruit juice that didn’t look very appetizing. Enmo and I were merrily chatting away, but Mirian was bored, though she’d give us a smile from time to time.

  At the next table there was a young Japanese man, looking very much alone, a sort of awkward solitude you sensed in him. He had a backpack, and was obviously a lonesome traveller, and he had a Cuba guide in Japanese, so I was identifying with him, and hoping that I didn’t look so glum and awkward when I was sitting alone in Cuban cafés. He went up to pay for the cheese sandwich and beer he had. It was a nice cool place to drink beer just off Parque Calixto. I said, “Should we call him over? He looks so lonesome.” Enmo said “Yes, that’s a great idea.” So we called him over. He got telling us that he was an economist with a special interest in Cuba because Cuban music is currently very popular in Japan, and people in Japan are very concerned about Cuba, and so he just wanted to visit Cuba to see what it was like, and he said he was having a fabulous time. As soon as we invited him to sit down, his demeanour changed, and he became happy and cheery. He spoke excellent English but was having terrible problems with Spanish, and maybe that was why he looked so glum. He was so happy to be able to speak English to at least two of us. Enmo had been asking many questions about my writing, she was very inquisitive about my book. So she told the Japanese guy, “David is a famous Canadian writer.” To which I added, “One of many thousands.” And I told him I’m a great fan of Japanese food, fiction, and poetry and had read a great number of famous writers from his country, both past and present, in translation.

  He of course wanted to know which writers. And this has to be the most embarrassing moment of my life. My mind went blank. I couldn’t remember the names of any one of the Japanese writers I’d spent so many delicious hours reading over the years. I could remember reading The Tale of Genji but could remember neither title nor author. I could remember reading numerous books by Kawabata and Mishima down through the years, but I couldn’t remember their names. I couldn’t even remember my love affairs with Basho, Issa, Lady Murasaki, Natsume Soseki (Kokoro), Osamu Dazai (Self Portraits), and Ogai Mori (Vita Sexualis). And I couldn’t remember Masuji Ibuse (Black Rain), Abe Kobo (Woman in the Dunes), Junichiro Tanizaki (Makioka Sisters), and so on, all of whom had altered my life at various stages. I felt as if I was trapped in a whirlpool, my brain refused to yield up a name to save my life. So I just looked helpless and unhappy, which caused him to snort derisively.

  With Enmo and Mirian waiting patiently for me to remember the names of all the Japanese authors I claimed to have read, the Japanese guy became utterly astonished and asked if I was crazy. In fact, he looked right into my sad eyes and said, “Are you crazy?” But Enmo didn’t like that. And so he left.

  Still, I was impressed by his seventeen-hour flight (not including a stopover in Cancun) from Tokyo to a country he wanted to see just because the music of that country was currently hot in Japan. But it would have been more impressive if he’d said he came to Cuba because he himself liked Cuban culture, rather than because it’s the current craze. Sounds like he’s trying to cash in on a trend rather than set a trend or follow his heart. But maybe his job is to chase trends. Maybe he’s a journalist for some financial paper.

  —

  So here I am with my new friend Enmo, who is hanging on my every word, and her mother who is more my age but is not hanging on anything of mine. I couldn’t resist suggesting we do a day trip tomorrow. Enmo went for it immediately. She suggested the three of us go to the place where the donkey drinks the beer. Tourists buy a beer, and the donkey drinks it. When there are a lot of tourists the donkey soon starts staggering, making funny noises, then lies down for a nap. So then they trot out another donkey. I counter-suggested Fidel Castro’s birthplace, which was nearby, but Enmo had already seen that on a school trip. Then she thought she’d like to visit her own birthplace, a certain town where she was born and raised and hasn’t seen in ages.

  So I walked the two of them home. Her mother wasn’t sure if she’d come. She’d sleep on it. Enmo was very sure. It was late, and as we walked through the city square, bereft of children now but with lots of adults enjoying the night air, someone sitting on the bench had a little marker flashlight, and was flicking a little red dot on the ground in front of us as we walked. I pretended I thought it was a firefly and was running around trying to step on it. Just to amuse Enmo and her mom. They seemed amused. In fact I got laughs all around the park doing that. It’s so easy to get a laugh in Cuba.

  —

  I hopped on a bicycle taxi, a relatively lightweight Chinese bicycle with a sidecar. The driver got lost. I had my map of the city, trying to help him find the casa where I was staying, and it was just a few short blocks away, and on the map it looked easy to find. The driver was a bright kid born and raised in Holguín. It was very mysterious. Even Christopher P. Baker talks about this phenomenon, which is unique to Holguín. Just when you think you’re almost there, the place you are looking for has disappeared. We would stop and ask directions, and the people would be sincerely interested in helping us, but the directions didn’t work.

  The bicycle taxi had no lights, not even a rear fender reflector, and the streets of Cuban cities are very dim at night – but for some reason I felt very relaxed, in good hands, completely unconcerned about an accident. A car or bus or truck would barrel by, and neither of us would blink. Something in the Cuban air turns a wimp into a hero. My driver was thirty-three years old, and he had a wife, and a little baby, and he spoke fairly good English, but when I asked him how he had learned English he couldn’t somehow find the words to tell me, just as I couldn’t remember those Japanese authors. I vowed to give him a huge tip if we ever got to our destination, and maybe even if we didn’t. When he was going up a hill, I’d hop off the bike and help push. I gave him little pro-Cuba speeches, told him the whole world is very worried about Cuba, and everybody hopes that the United States is going to back off. He was definitely drinking it all in, and he said that he had lived in Holguín all his life and he didn’t really know “anything about anything outside Holguín.” And I’m sure he knew a lot about Holguín, but not how to get to my casa, which was in Central Holguín, at the corner of Aricoches and Avenida de los Liberadores.

  Maybe Holguín has never been properly mapped. The maps we find in guidebooks and tourist kiosks look perfectly reliable but are copies of some fundamentally sloppy and bogus map drawn up in 1914. Apparently this is the only Cuban city that has this problem.

  At one point while wheeling through these dark deserted streets he took off his hat, handed it to me, and said, “Look, look at what is on this hat.” I looked, and all that was on the hat was the single word SIKKENS. “It’s a very good company,” he said, “and it’s a trademark for your country.” I had no idea what he was talking about, but pretended I did, since he was already working too hard to have to explain any further.

  On a lonely dark side street we encountered a little old guy who was sitting there next to a rickety card table on which he had stacked about fifteen Cuban-style empanadas, which are not that much different from Scottish meat pies, but flatter, and about five inches in diameter. He also had another stack of pies that had been cut in four slices, for people who were only a quarter hungry. It was a very dreamlike scene, hugely cinematic, for it was past midnight, the street was empty, he was in a very poor location for commerce, but he was patiently waiting, like an elderly Lili Marlene, under the dim lamplight, t
o sell his pies while they were still fresh. Why didn’t he set up his table on a busier street? Maybe he was too old to lug his table and pies that far, or maybe he didn’t have a licence and so the police asked him to restrict his business to the barrios.

  So I bought one for my driver, and he gobbled it up lickety-split, then gave me a big smile. To me it was like giving a bale of hay to a hard-working horse, but the old fellow got all emotional, leapt out of his chair, threw his arms around me in the warmest embrace, and said, “You’re a good man!” He wasn’t being ironic at all, he genuinely seemed to consider this the greatest act of generosity since a repentant St. Francis, in a fit of ecstasy, took off his clothes in the Assisi town square and gave them to the poor. In this life we get appreciated for the unlikeliest things, and never for the things we expect to be appreciated for. In 1968, in closing down the last vestiges of private business enterprise in Cuba, Fidel argued that among street vendors and hot-dog sellers, there is a high percentage of people who are planning to leave the country. But thirty-five years later I don’t think this empanada seller is going anywhere.

  The pieman said the casa we were looking for was right there. He pointed across the street and down a bit. And there it was! What a thrill! I bought my driver another pie, paid him handsomely, and we said goodbye.

  It was well after midnight when I tapped on the door. My host didn’t say a word, he just glowered at me as I offered my abject apologies and explanations.

  DAY EIGHTEEN

  AN AFTERNOON AT THE BEACH

  Tuesday, March 2, 2004. No spy would walk around the civic square whispering into his tape recorder. Only a totally innocent person, with nothing to hide, would be that stupid. And no terrorist or drug smuggler would drive the wrong way on a one-way street, then stop to ask a cop for directions to the nearest airport. So what’s to worry about?