One nice thing about my casa in Holguín – it has an actual reading lamp. The lamp sits on an elaborate cabinet formation constructed to fit snugly around the head of the bed, and there is a matching chest of drawers with a large mirror. Everything is coordinated in pale cream and brown, or, in ice-cream terms, vanilla and chocolate, or, in arts-and-crafts terms, like the carved whales Enmo and I were admiring yesterday. The reading lamp is an old Tiffany, and if you give it the slightest little touch it comes on, if you touch it again it becomes brighter, and it keeps on getting brighter as you touch it and then it goes out. The only problem – it sometimes goes on all by itself in the middle of the night, as if a moth might have landed on it. Also, on the average of three times out of ten, it will give you an electrical shock when you touch it. A big-enough buzz to kill a bug and startle a human.
Yoelkís and her husband have two sons. One is an engineer who develops air-conditioning systems, and the other is a professor of engineering at the local university in Holguín. They each earn about $20 a month.
On the front door, as you’re about to knock, there’s a picture of a family walking down the street, mama, papa, and two little kids, and standing between mommy and daddy is Jesus. You can see right through him but he’s there. And then on their dining-room wall, over the dinner table, is a large reproduction of the Last Supper. Below that is a small framed reproduction of the same painting, as if they couldn’t bear to get rid of the small one when they came into possession of the large one. Also there’s a ceramic piece about fourteen inches high, which depicts a drunken black man all dressed in a black tuxedo with bow tie askew, and a bottle in his hand, and leaning against a lamppost. And many plastic flowers, such as a splendid bouquet of orange roses with little artificial drops of dew, unnaturally tiny, on each and every petal.
—
Not to be forgotten is that last night at the parque: with the great Máximo Calixto looking down at them with no amusement on his face at all, there were three men sitting together on a bench, talking, laughing. Suddenly one man got up and he started to strut like a stripper on stage, then he pulled a black brassiere out of his pocket and put it on over his shirt, while his friends got up and started laughing helplessly. He stuffed some rags into the brassiere to make it look as if he had big fat breasts. So the other men started to molest him, shaping the breasts until they became smaller and firmer, and then caressed them till they came to a point. All this time the cross-dresser squealed happily. They were having a wonderful time.
In the sky, the moon and all the stars were speeding way beyond the speed limit. Oh oh, it’s the end of the world, Velikovsky was right, the earth is spinning out of control. But no, it was an optical illusion caused by the fact that the clouds were moving so fast. It was very still down here, but up there the wind could have knocked a U2 out of the sky the way it was blowing.
—
This morning I settled up with my hosts and called Enmo to tell her to meet me at Parque Calixto. Then I paid up the ten dollars for two breakfasts (I thought it was included), plus two dollars for the use of the garage (they didn’t tell me there’d be a charge for that), their unfriendly manner leading me to wonder if I might have inadvertently said or done something to annoy them.
I picked up Enmo and off we went on our great adventure. I told her she could be the navigator and I’d take her wherever she wanted to go. She wanted to go to Puerta Padre, where she was born and grew up. It was very tiny, and several miles northwest of Holguín. But first she wanted to go to two beach areas for foreigners several miles northeast of Holguín. On the way there she cautiously asked me if I had given her phone number to anyone. I said no, of course not, it was in my notebook and I hadn’t mentioned her or her number to a single solitary soul. She said about two minutes – no more – after I called her this morning from my casa, someone phoned her place. Her mother picked up the phone, and a voice she didn’t recognize asked if she ran a casa particulare. Mirian said no and the woman politely said thank you and hung up. It seemed peculiar, particularly coming so soon after my call. They’d never had such a call before, ever.
I remembered that two minutes after I called her I was out in the garage putting my bags in the car. Yoelkís had seemed annoyed that I was leaving, even though I hadn’t knowingly said anything about staying a third night. So it was almost certainly Yoelkís who had called just to find out if the call I had made two minutes earlier was to another casa particulare. I had asked permission to make the call and assured her it was a local number. So even hard-core Christians can be a tad paranoid, it seems, and she had wanted to know if I was booking another casa in another part of town, but feared to ask me. It gave me the creeps.
Enmo wanted to know how Yoelkís got the number. I said she probably had a redial button on her telephone. Also, if it turned out that it was another casa I had called, perhaps she would have wanted to ask me if perhaps there was something wrong with her service, and she could do some quality control. Or maybe she could offer me a lower rate for the third night. But then again she could have asked me if there was something wrong anyway, or if the service was up to snuff, it wouldn’t have hurt. And of course the service was fine, except for the unexpected cost add-ons, though that didn’t bother me really. I was disappointed, but I didn’t resent their enterprise, and it didn’t bother me that they got a few more dollars out of me.
So it would have been after she had made the call, presumably, that she came out to the garage and hit me up for twelve more dollars. That, she said, was for the people at the Hotel Turquino, which had been all booked up, and who had referred me to her place.
—
Enmo and I stopped at a roadside stand and bought one pineapple, four oranges, and eleven bananas. Now we are at Playa Pesquero on the Bahía de Naranjo, where there are some beautiful people walking back and forth along the beach. The sea is deep dark blue, blue as the finely layered feathers on a peacock’s neck. But when the waves bump into the reef, which is about two hundred yards offshore, that slows them down, and they become turquoise, then green, then almost a pale yellow until the final waves break onto the white granulated sand, so refined and so sugary you almost wish to try it in your coffee.
I have no bathing suit, nor does Enmo, but she says it’s just enough to be at the beach because it’s so healthy, it’s just enough to be sitting on the beach, watching the antics of the people who do have bathing suits, and let the sea breezes intoxicate us. She said the winds coming in off the sea are very good for the nasal membranes, the lungs, and the immune system in general. Some Italian tourists are playing bocce on the beach with silver balls, under some shady trees, and now and then they have to take out a tape measure to see which ball is closer to the main ball.
The hotels around here maybe aren’t quite as posh as the Varadero ones, but they are painted in bright colours, with some of them just a massive splash of brilliant primary colours. Such hotels would seem out of place on the shore of Lough Gur in Ireland, Loch Ness in Scotland, or Conception Bay in Newfoundland, but they look great here. The water is still too cold for swimming, it seems, and there are more tourists riding horses than bobbing in the waves.
The Occidental Grand Playa Turquesa is the hotel where Enmo wished to come to see her colleague Neil, to remind him that she needs some work from the agency. Neil wasn’t there, which caused some disappointment, but they will tell him tomorrow when he comes in that Enmo was here, hoping that she has not been forgotten. He will be pleasantly surprised, no doubt. And she’ll get a call from the agency and be working very soon, I predict. She insisted I come in with her, and so I did, but maybe I should have said no, because being seen with a foreigner could under certain circumstances hurt someone’s chances for advancement. And who knows, maybe she does not get hired full-time because they know about her sister in Florida collecting money for the churches, and thereby financing the anti-abortionists who will stage local protests from time to time in which they can be heard chanting counte
r-revolutionary slogans such as, “Down with the Castro-Communist dictatorship.” Which would be at odds with Fidel’s oft-expressed opinion that everybody in Cuba is a dictator, and he is their slave.
—
At a little seaside restaurant at Playa Guardalavaca, we each had a bowl of fresh seafood soup with tomato broth, rice, a bottle of agua minerale con gas each, and helado with raisins for dessert. The bill came to $10.10. And both of us were very full.
But, at the other table, just for the sake of contrast, were four couples from Sudbury, Ontario, who had just arrived yesterday, and you should have seen the food they wolfed down. It was awesome. And they were so fat and so short, Enmo whisperingly pointed out, that you could hardly tell the women from the men. Also they looked so tired and irritable after twenty-four hours in Cuba, which might have been inspiring them to keep shovelling the food in, hoping it will correct their bad moods. They each had the $20 blue sea special, which came to $160, plus they each drank two or three colas in the course of the meal. And each had an ice cream. They gobbled up all that food with amazing speed. Then one of the ladies went to the bathroom and was dismayed to find there was no toilet paper. She was rolling her eyes as if to say how stupid can these Cubans be! Oh my! What to do! No toilet paper! Why did we come to such a place? They complained to the waiter.
The waiter brought out a roll of toilet paper on a silver platter for the lady at the same time as one of her friends, back at the table, pitched a little package of tissue at her. She looked confused and didn’t know which to use, the tissue or the toilet paper, so she took both back into the washroom. “Nice catch!” someone said, and we all smiled, even the restaurant staff. And when she came out, because she was wearing shorts, you could see an angry red toilet seat ring around her thighs. Then each of the other seven blubber addicts had to go through the same routine.
The men went out for a smoke and decided they wanted to stay outside, because it was very warm indoors. It was a small but sparkling new cakebox of a restaurant at the top of the beach – floor-to-ceiling glass windows and doors all around on three sides, and all the windows and doors hermetically sealed. It was big enough for about six or seven tables for four. They couldn’t open the windows and have the breezes come through, because if they did there would soon be deposits of fine sand in the diners’ food, and maybe even little insects.
When the Canadians were leaving, I asked one of them if Paul Martin was still prime minister. She said, “Yes, as of yesterday, when we left. We just arrived last night, and he was still hanging in there.” Enmo said she thought they were profoundly unhappy people in spite of their huge wads of cash and credit cards, and they had spent on this meal at least one month’s salary for a whole team of dedicated Cuban teachers or doctors.
Enmo is quiet today. She is enjoying the trip, but she is not as talkative as yesterday. Perhaps she is bothered by something that happened at the hotel, some subtextual matter I missed. Or maybe she had an argument with Mirian this morning. Our chit-chat is only on the simplest level. She said last night she would be honoured to be part of my book, but now that we’re committed to a day together she’s not so sure. She’s very happy, her eyes are shining, but she’s become shy and perhaps afraid of saying something she could later be criticized for. Also her English skills seem to have petered out overnight, while my Spanish skills have not improved. She insists I speak in English, but she’s not tuning into it very well.
Enmo thought I should have a sombrero to protect my face from turning any pinker than it already is. To the Cubans, a pink face looks as if it has been singed with a blowtorch, and they tend to cringe with sympathetic pain. So we went to a little crafts fair near the parking lot. The straw hats looked a bit stodgy, as if specially fashioned for the tourists, and not the sloppy but authentic ones the campesinos wear as they walk along the side of the highway carrying their machetes or come galloping by on their steeds. I was attracted to a hat that was in the shape of Fidel’s famous one (similar to Charles de Gaulle’s), except that it was straw, woven very expertly. But they were all too stiff, and even though they might be the right size for one’s head, they still didn’t fit right. The vendor grabbed one hat off my head and started pulling it vigorously to loosen up the fibres and make it fit properly, but much to his disappointment it fit a bit better but still didn’t have that “right” feel.
—
We’re driving along a badly potholed seaside road, and every now and then excited little children will come running from their little houses and wave their little arms like little windmills. Everywhere chickens are pecking away at the ground. We drove along the Atlantic shore for miles and miles, trying to get to Enmo’s birthplace, so she could talk to all her old friends, if any are still around.
We managed to get to Gibara (est. pop. 27,600) along a very bad road, with Enmo stopping and asking directions of the locals, who came running when they saw her flashing eyes and pretty face. One fellow was carrying a dead dog by the tail out to the goat pasture presumably to bury it, although he had no shovel. When Enmo went yoohoo, he tossed the dog as far as he could and came running back to the road. Gibara was beautiful, a smaller version of Baracoa, and the beautiful Bahía de Gibara was filled with boats anchored and bobbing in the waves, putting to rest my theory about the lack of boats. There were more boats here than I’d seen in my entire tour so far.
But the road kept getting rockier and narrower and we soon found ourselves driving by a desolate row of derelict houses along the sea. It was as if some kind of relocation program was going on, perhaps to create more international fun zones for foreigners. But some people were holding out, living in much desolation. Maybe these were towns abandoned by people who had given up on Cuba and sailed to Florida. Enmo wasn’t saying anything. She seemed to be more in the dark than I was. Or maybe she was just pretending to be.
Finally the road got so bad, and the sun was setting, so we turned around and headed back the way we came without having visited Enmo’s hometown. The road is very well marked in thick red on the map, but if we had looked more closely we’d have seen that at Playa las Bocas the road abruptly ended at a river with no bridge.
Then Enmo shyly broke the news that she had an appointment for next Tuesday with the head of the hiring agency for all the hotels in the area. She thinks he may have a job for her. And if he does she will be paid somewhere between four and five hundred pesos a month, depending on how well the hotel is doing, but she will also get tips, and that is where the real money is. On a busy day she could earn the equivalent of her monthly salary in tips, which always come in U.S. dollars these days; although according to Granma, Cuba is thinking of changing to euros at the end of the year.
Soon night had fallen and Enmo effortlessly navigated me back to her home in Holguín. I promised to call her tomorrow. I said I’d book into the posh Hotel Pernik, but they were fully booked, and I somehow ended up heading south, as I suspected I would, to the intriguing small city of Bayamo, and booked into the beautiful Hotel Royalton on the main square. The night clerk, the same handsome young fellow I chatted with when I was last here inquiring about a room, works a twenty-four-hour shift followed by twenty-four hours off, which is the norm for hotel workers in Cuba. But he was finding things difficult. He only made 188 pesos a month, less than half what the hotel workers on the beaches made, if he and Enmo are to be believed. He seemed healthy and bright, but his economic future was on life support. He had a brother in Florida and another in Toronto, but they seemed to have forgotten the family back home. He also stated that he knew for sure he could increase his salary tremendously by getting a job as a police officer with the Ministry of the Interior. They make eight hundred pesos a month, as much as a university professor. But the nature of the work wasn’t to his liking.
DAY NINETEEN
IT’S PALMA DAY IN BAYAMO LIBRE!
Wednesday, March 3, 2004. Last night I confided to the desk clerk that I’d be willing to give some needy soul two dollars t
o wash my car. Oh, if only I’d forked over the two bucks right then and there! At 5:30 this morning, like a few mornings ago at the convent at El Cobre, there was a tremendous pounding on my door. This time the sweetest, shyest young man was standing there. He very politely asked for his money for washing the car. I felt very small when I punched the wall and heard myself saying, “Couldn’t you wait till I woke up?” How petty of me! He was probably more tired than I was and wanted to take some money home to his family in their tiny crowded apartment somewhere. I gave him the two dollars in anger and slammed the door in his face. Now I feel wretched. Now I definitely feel part of the problem. I hate myself!
But misunderstandings abound; in fact they outnumber understandings, whether one travels the world or never strays from home. Maybe Yoelkís really thought I had said I’d be staying three days instead of two. Maybe…oh why go on? You have to add the sour with the sweet when you write a travel book, or it will lack flavour. People do make mistakes, and people do go through periods of self-hatred when they contemplate the general inadequacy of their minds.
—
But there’s a big celebration in Bayamo this morning. And I’m glad I had my car washed because it’s sitting there gleaming, right at the front entrance of the hotel, right next to the speaker’s platform, where everyone can see it. All the schools are out, all the banks, stores, and businesses are closed, and Parque Céspedes is thronged with students, teachers, and swarms of ordinary citizens. There are bands and speakers. Is it the anniversary of a famous battle? No, it’s a great celebration commemorating the 128th anniversary of the wonderful day when Tomás Estrada Palma, a native son of Bayamo, became president of Cuba at the age of forty-four. Like Fidel, he was a lawyer, and was also a general in the vicious Ten Years War. He was a great hero. And he spent a lot of time in prison, both in Cuba and in Spain.
An Innocent in Cuba Page 23