—
It’s a chartered tour, all arranged in Munich. The Germans flew to Holguín, and by contrast with the Cubans they are graceless. I suppose I am too, but I don’t feel that way, and I’ve had some time to get acclimatized. Every German muscle seems to be stressed. Their anxious eyes are constantly shifting, as if on guard for sneak attacks. You can tell they’re not Cubans. Their heads don’t seem connected to their bodies. If they’re having any fun there’s no indication of it. If they’re enjoying themselves you would never know it from their faces, or the way they whisper to each other with their hands covering their mouths like baseball players. They’re so nervous they’re causing me to be nervous about not being nervous enough. They’re paying a lot of money for something they don’t appear to be enjoying but they’re going to remember it as long as memory lasts. And they’re going to remember it fondly even though they know they didn’t enjoy it at the time. We can all relate to that. Only one of them is a woman, very attractive despite her extreme nervousness, a lovely women with an unpleasant look on her face, and iron selfcontrol in every step she takes. These aren’t Teutonic stereotypes, these are human observations uncontaminated by preconceptions. She came out of the hotel and started to walk toward the square, looked as if she was going to examine the statues, but then changed her mind and came back, possibly because she felt self-conscious about the bench-sitters. These Germans seem to adhere to the don’t-make-eye-contact-with-the-natives school of bourgeois travel. Can that be fun?
—
There again is the sweet octogenarian who approached the two guys reading the Rebelde in the parque earlier. He is elegantly dressed for Bayamo, he looks as if he might be visiting from Miami Beach in his lightweight pale blue suit. He is eighty-five if he’s a day, he has a fine white moustache carefully trimmed, and he’s wearing a ball cap that says, No. 1 Grampa, which reminds me we’re back in Granma Province.
This is the same group of Germans who were sitting in soft black leather sofas and armchairs in the lobby last night, seven men and a woman, and they each had a mimeographed history of Bayamo in their hands, in English. The Cuban tour guide, also in English, was sitting on a hardback chair and reading the history aloud for them and fielding questions. They are all youngish, forty maximum, and fit of course, but they seem so old and grey. They don’t seem to notice that they’re not standing or sitting comfortably and that they are not watching where they’re going.
—
In the Casa de la Cultura, on the east side of Parque Céspedes, I’m looking at a display of paintings by young painters and listening to a well-amplified tape of mournful Cuban songs from la belle époque. One artist has done a whole series of intricate collages, but then he’s covered them with double-gauge crinkly plastic so you can’t really see them. It’s frustrating and annoying. He seems to be saying, My mind is mine alone and I have no desire to share it with you. Maybe this is a silent protest about some aspect of Fidelismo. Another collagist is more comfortable with depicting a normal-sized, rosycheeked Yankee businesswoman about to dig into a hamburger the size of a horse. And there’s a picture of a guy with no face, but he’s holding up a fork with something hanging from it, and sure enough it’s his face. The most disturbing collage shows a girl who looks as if she is very happily jumping on a trampoline, but owing to cut and paste there is no trampoline under her, and she is suspended several storeys in the air, as if she is falling to her death from a high building, but with a perfectly joyous look on her face.
I hope the Germans don’t come in here, because there’s a ghastly painting of a large passenger ship in flames and going down at sea, with people screaming and leaping for their lives, and in the foreground is a German U-Boat with a number 31 on the side and a Nazi captain chuckling with malevolent glee. His men fire at the people as they beg to be rescued from the sea. And here’s one by a fellow named Frank, showing Earth surrounded by numerous planets and moons and galaxies, and right in the centre of Earth is a Cuba taking up almost the entire half of the world, with just a little room for each of the other continents, and it has a giant royal palm three thousand miles high and firmly rooted in Cuba.
A young fellow named Arnel Mohaina has done an excellent painting of the old Bayamo church and he’s captured something seemingly so obvious and yet I’d looked and hadn’t noticed it. The bell tower looks like a scary human face, a face that seems to be looking out over Bayamo and reacting in horror to what it sees around it. The nose is the clock, there are bell openings in perfect position for the eyes and the mouth, and the tower itself gives the proper proportion to increase the scariness. The artist didn’t have to exaggerate. It was all right there for him. But another painter has drawn the same church from the same angle, with very fine pen and ink, and the bell tower is there in the same proportion, but it doesn’t look like a face. It’s as if this other artist no more noticed the face than I did.
What gets me about these paintings is that they are so ambitious and yet rendered with such confidence. This is a splendid tribute to an educational system for all, in which artistic ventures are not only encouraged, but somehow are made to seem supremely important, not trivialized out of fear as they always seem to have been where I come from, and more so now than ever. These artists have no problem understanding the vital importance of art, a concept Canadian painters seem to be losing, through attrition, and lack of appreciation. There is also in this gallery a sense of the enormous voraciousness of art. You can throw anything into its craw – ideas, things, events, whatever – and solid gold comes out.
But my favourite painting is by Fidel Castro Naranjo, twelve years old. Watch for him, folks, he’s going to be a great painter some day. It’s a painting of a large factory, a warehouse, some workers’ apartment buildings, and a river with an island in it, and there are a few trees and a few garbage receptacles on the island, plus a walkway all the way around, and a boat tied up. Sounds dull, but his style has transformed it because it is so free and effortless, and full of colour, and the whole composition is quite stunning. He has all the right instincts. The factory and warehouse have yellow walls and red roofs, blue smoke is coming out of the smokestacks, one apartment building is pink and one is green, and green mountains loom in the distance.
The friendly fellow who seems to be the curator of the exhibition is sitting there, and he has been listening to the music and carefully watching my reactions as I sail past the paintings. He disagrees entirely with my taste, for he puritanically prefers the darker work, the more laboured pieces. He won’t budge an inch from his position, as he takes me around and shows me the poorly conceived paintings he most admires. I forgot to ask him if he was one of the painters. Egad, what if that wretched painting he liked so much was one of his? But both of us were very courteous in our differing opinions. I kept telling him I could see his point. Which was true.
There is also an exhibit of professional painters, but not much to report. The work is a little too clever, imitative, derivative, a basic fundamental absence of joy and freedom, and overly grand in scope – as if I were to shelve these modest little travel books and decide to write the next War and Peace. It’s not easy to be a painter or a poet in Cuba, especially with Fidel constantly egging artists on to pay allegiance to the Revolution first, their own vision second, and knowing that if you are judged overly counter-revolutionary you might as well pack it in. But as long as El Comandante is such a great admirer of the works of his pint-sized buddy Gabriel García Márquez, things can’t be all that bad.
—
I had an ice-cream cone for breakfast! The only way I could avoid the crowds was to be there when the Tropicrema opened at nine o’clock. My verdict? I’d prefer not to say. I’ve been spoiled rotten at the Coppelia. Back at the hotel, when the cyclists mount their bikes, they accidentally hit the back wheel with their leg, and they lack poise in the saddle. Their faces are slathered with sunblock. One cyclist, about twenty-five, is constantly wringing his hands. He’s been up for a
couple of hours, and even last night he was wringing his hands, in the most obsequious manner, and when he walks he leans strangely to the left. Maybe he’s “left” behind a whole lot of troubles at the office, and at home. Maybe in capitalist countries he leans to the right.
These people are fanatic cyclists. They are very well organized, and maybe the fun for them is in the organization of the trip, and the danger of having to lose face if something that you were responsible for goes wrong. There’s a Cuban motorcyclist who will be leading the eight cyclists, and her boyfriend will be sitting behind her and holding a spare bicycle wheel in his hand. A Cuban male bus driver will be following behind, but I can’t tell you why they don’t stow the spare bicycle wheel in the bus. I spoke with one of the cyclists. He was very nervous and could hardly speak, no matter how much I encouraged him. He showed me the map and I told him it looked like a great trip, and they’d be soaking up a lot of Cuban atmosphere and history. He nodded enthusiastically.
It turns out they have made arrangements with the Cuban Cycling Association, and now seven or eight Cubans have shown up with their bicycles. The Cubans are much more youthful, if no younger, and it’s amazing how much more elegant and graceful they are getting on and off their bicycles, etc. The Germans seem grotesque by comparison, inwardly twisted out of shape, and they stand there staring off into space with ugly looks on their handsome faces. But the Cubans are like flowers, delicate and graceful, like creatures from paradise.
The tallest fellow in the German group is about six-feet-four, and he seems to be more connected to what he’s doing than the others. He’s actually looking around, checking out the city a bit, not so afraid of eye contact and maybe even chatting and joking with the Cubans. But he’s the only one, and I get the feeling he might be a Turkish German, he does not have the typically pink and blond German colouring. Sounds as if I’m doing a bit of racial profiling, but I’m quite carefully just writing down what I see.
Everybody grimaces for a last-minute group photo. And there they go! They’re off! With no fanfare, no bugle blasts, no horn honking, no cheers – they just head off in complete silence on the long lonely road to Manzanillo. Honest, there should have been a little band.
—
Just as I was saying bye-bye to Bayamo, a rich brassy Las Vegas–type tourist showed up and started shouting at a little old man trying to sell him a cone of peanuts: “No, no, get away. Don’t want it, don’t need it!” It was obvious he didn’t realize what this fellow was offering, beautifully wrapped cones full of red unsalted Spanish peanuts, small, fresh, and delicious. So I told him, and suggested he give the guy a peso and try one. So then he started shouting at me, “I don’t have a peso, I don’t have any pesos!” But I could see that something I’d said had registered, and when I drove away and looked through the rear-view mirror he had given the vendor a dollar bill and had received a whole armful of cones of peanuts in return.
—
I called Enmo last night and she said, “We were thinking maybe you forgot to call me.” She went on and on about what a wonderful time she had. She was so happy I couldn’t resist asking if she wanted to do another day trip. We’re only eighty miles apart. She’s a good guide and interpreter. She helps me to understand what is going on. She is very shy of giving opinions, but she’s good with background information if she’s certain of her ground.
DAY TWENTY-ONE
ALL DAVIDS ARE BROTHERS
Friday, March 5, 2004. On the approach to Holguín, the road becomes an excellent four-lane highway divided by a boulevard planted with flowering shrubs seemingly chosen for their durability under adverse conditions. As I was admiring these tough shrubs, the heavy traffic approaching the big city suddenly came to a halt and stayed halted – both ways. It was a police roadblock. Three police officers quietly standing there was all it took to stop four lanes of traffic for two hours. They weren’t searching the cars. It was all very benign. The motorists around me didn’t know what was going on and didn’t care. I casually informed the guy next to me in a beautiful old white Mercedes-Benz 350 that his left rear tire was three-quarters flat and you should have seen the speed with which he got out his spare and changed the wheel. His trunk was well organized, and his tools nicely arranged. He had all the proper tools – not the toy tools that come with a rental car.
I wandered ahead to ask the cops what was going on. They weren’t too sure, they were just following orders and didn’t ask questions. But since we were in the vicinity of the Frank País International Airport, they thought it may have something to do with a visitante importante. Surely we weren’t sitting here frying in the fiery sun because García Márquez was flying in to have a game of dominoes with Fidel? They really weren’t sure. But all the time we sat there, not one plane was seen to land or take off. The peace and quiet was awesome on a jampacked autopista. Nobody was wringing their hands or pacing up and down. A harmonious serenity was in the air. Hummingbirds were flicking among the shrubs. People seemed almost happy to have a break in the driving, a pause to reassess whether they really wanted to go where they were trying to get. After an hour of this silence, the guy in the Mercedes-Benz, who was in the slow lane, got me to back up a bit and the guy in front of me to move forward a bit – then he drove in between us, mounted the high curb of the median, got stuck, gunned the engine, squealed the tires, then drove over three flowering bushes, came down on the other side, and took off.
Soon other cars were doing the same. They had decided they didn’t really need to go where they were going after all, and being forcibly immobilized without even given the courtesy of an explanation violated their socialist instincts.
And wow! Are they going to do it? Yes they are! A bus jammed with at least a hundred schoolkids, like too many monkeys in too small a cage, performed the same trick, up and over, with the kids squealing away as if this was a carnival ride. And soon everybody was either climbing the median or contemplating doing so. It was amazing how resilient those flowering shrubs were. The vehicle would pass over them, and they’d spring back up without even a sepal or a petal out of place. Some smart committee had selected the hardiest shrubs for this median. This sort of situation had been foreseen.
Enmo was expecting me, but I was running late and would soon be running much later. Holguín in my absence has not become an easier city to navigate. I knew exactly how to get to the main plaza. From there I knew exactly how to get to Enmo’s place. I could have parked the car and got there on foot easily. Or better still I could have parked it in some hotel lot on the highway and taken a taxi to her place. But for some inexplicable reason I was determined to get there by car or not at all. It seemed important to figure out why everyone, not just me, was having such a problem. And so I drove around and around the city for a couple of hours. I’d spiral in very close to my destination and then inexplicably I’d be spiralled far away out into the barrios or even out into the lonesome hills overlooking the city without knowing how to get back. Every few blocks I’d stop for directions. In fact everybody was stopping for directions. Even the bicycle taxis were most times completely lost but trying to pretend they weren’t.
By the time I got to Enmo’s, I’d overextended myself. She greeted me at the gate, introduced me to her dogs, then reintroduced me to her mother. Her white-haired grandmother was also there and proudly told me she was “eighty-one-and-a-half-going-on-eighty-two and my husband died ten years ago.” Was she considering remarrying at all? She gave me a big toothless smile. “Mi no loco!” But then I collapsed in my armchair. I couldn’t take the chit-chat. Are you all right? said Enmo. I seemed to be in a previously unknown state of collapse, like a four-minute miler staggering and collapsing at the finish line. Do you want coffee? I thought about it. No, the coffee would make me feel worse. A big glass of red wine would have been perfect, but this was a teetotalling house. So I asked for the coffee.
I could barely speak and my thoughts were stalled like the traffic at the airport. The girls insisted on w
hipping up a meal for me. I staggered out to the car and brought in a fresh whole pineapple bought at some roadside en route. Mirian got out her pineapple slicer and we all dug in. Then she presented me with a plate full of cerdo frijo, sliced tomatoes, and cabbage salad.
Gradually my senses returned to their nest, accompanied by a great fatigue. I was dozing off in my chair while reading the big family Bible. Psalm 23 is excellent in Spanish, and it suited the moment perfectly. The Bible with its very fine onion-skin paper was on a little table of its own between two windows with the shutters almost always open. The pages would flutter in the breeze so at any given moment you would have a seemingly random page selected for your reading pleasure and inspiration.
Finally I felt as if I’d been enough trouble. I could drive to the Hotel Pernik but no farther. Mirian and Enmo insisted on accompanying me to prevent a recurrence of my inability to get anywhere in this town, so to speak. They directed me almost flawlessly, and they navigated me through a part of town I hadn’t even noticed during my earlier lost wanderings. They were nice about it, but they refused to believe that Holguín was a difficult city to navigate.
When we got to the hotel they refused my offer of cab fare home. They wouldn’t hear of it. Strange how in Cuba I’m besieged by the extremes of being unable to pay for kind services pleasantly rendered, and having to dish out cold cash for services neither required nor requested.
—
After a gin and tonic at the Hotel Pernik Cyber Café, my energy returns. My brother Jack has sent me an e-mail informing me of the deaths of two great Canadian painters, Tony Onley in a plane crash and Guido Molinari of lung cancer. But there were no vacancies at the Hotel Pernik, so I slithered down the road to the Villa El Bosque. Eduardo, who doubled as bellboy and front-desk clerk, soon was eagerly trying out his English on me. His vocabulary was impressive, but his grammar and pronunciation needed a lot of work.
An Innocent in Cuba Page 26