An Innocent in Cuba

by David McFadden

  This hotel has a pleasant tropical border blur when it comes to the categories of indoors and outdoors. There’s an outdoor karaoke bar with a very good singer whose breasts, like a pair of white cockatoos, were teetering on the verge of flying from the half-open cage of her very low-cut dress. Nobody could take their eyes off her for a second, since a wardrobe malfunction seemed imminent. Then out came two male comedians, whose fast-paced repartee, with wigs and dresses, and sudden gender reversals, required no translation. One of the guys was big and fat and the other short and skinny, but together they were 100 per cent obscene. The crowd was full of families with kids, and nobody was rushing to put their hands over the kids’ ears. In fact, the kids were getting the jokes before the parents were.

  On the way back to my room to catch up on my note-taking and sleep I ran into a little mariachi band looking very down in the dumps. The karaoke speakers were blasting out canned Cuban music, and these guys, who were hidden in a corner of a porch outside the main dining room and with no audience whatsoever, were very quietly playing along with the karaoke music, and they looked so depressed I sensed a great injustice was being perpetrated that bodes poorly for the future of Cuban music. These musicians were being locked out in favour of canned and pirated recorded music both domestic and from other countries. When they saw me go by, then do a double-take, then stop with a look of astonishment on my face, they leapt to their feet and began to serenade me with mucho gusto. It was wonderful. There was David (with Indian features) on Cuban guitar. When he asked my name his jaw dropped. He gave me a hug and said, “All Davids are brothers!” He said he had two little boys at home, and they both have their own pint-sized Cuban guitars. To me, anything acoustic, with six strings, particularly in three pairs, is a Cuban guitar.

  We all started dancing gaily and effortlessly, even some of the restaurant staff gathering around to applaud and laugh. But, strangely, the tourists in the restaurant and the Cubans at the karaoke bar preferred to ignore the live music. We were having too much fun for their taste. There seemed to be a few metaphorically still-lively women in their thirties or forties who were with old men who wanted nothing better than to drag them back to their room, though I sensed the women would have preferred to be free to stick around, have fun with us, and let the old guys get back to their room all on their own.

  As for the band, they liked it when I declared it highly unfair that they should be relegated to a lonely corner, while the karaoke operator was making a good dollar for his “work.” Well, he had to lug around the speakers and adjust the controls now and then, or pretend to. These were three of the thousands of brilliant musicians in Cuba and elsewhere who will live and die without ever seeing a hint of a recording contract, or very seldom even get a paying gig. And the hotel owners would rather pay a karaoke dealer to play recorded music than to actually hire live musicians. It’s not only unfair, it’s short-sighted, and it’s counter-productive, and it may even be counter-revolutionary. But we are living through a period where there is a very pronounced fin de siècle attitude about everything. Worse than fin de siècle, more like a fin du monde mindset – not just culturally but in every way. Take the money and run.

  As for the “important visitor” at the airport, nobody can tell me what that was all about. Not even Eduardo. Not even David. Not even the two gay comedians. And not even the floozy with the two cockatoos. Will we ever find out? Stay tuned.

  —

  After sitting up in bed and jotting down some notes for an hour or two in my room, the power went off, so my power went off too and I fell asleep, but when the power jolted back on, I was suddenly wide awake and resumed taking notes. This happened several times. Just as I began to feel sleepy again, at dawn, workmen showed up under my window and started hammering. So I checked out, got in the car, and the battery had died overnight. Managed to get the car started with the help of a little push from a competitor in the car-rental racket who kept saying he should not be doing this because he was from a different company. Then out on the road once again to Camagüey, where there was a Panautos agency, and where I would be able to get a battery replacement. But first, as soon as I got onto the autopista, I pulled the car over for a moment to check the map or something, and as an act of unconscious self-sabotage I turned off the key. With a dollar bill I managed to flag down a man and woman on a scooter: they gave me a push, enough to start rolling down the hill backwards, jammed it into gear, and the car started. But they wouldn’t take my dollar bill. I had to beg them. I said, “Please?” and put on my little Lolita look, tenderly slipping the dollar into the fellow’s breast pocket. He smiled sweetly, and accepted it.

  After getting the second push I picked up a hitchhiker who had cleverly positioned himself at a level crossing that caused traffic to slow to a crawl. He ran alongside me with his head in my open window, and with such a funny look on his face I had to stop for him. He turned out to be a pretty good young fellow, about twenty-six, and he helped to keep me awake, and he helped me with the car as well. He was asking me so many questions about my life in Canada I didn’t have a chance to ask him anything about his life in Cuba.

  He said his father is an engineer, high up in the Ministry of Industry, who gets to approve and review projects, assign staff, have long lunches, etc. He’s highly respected because he does good work. He even gets sent abroad now and then, most recently to Mexico for a conference on Latin American development. Mexico is the only country he mentioned, but that’s something.

  Jannier lives with his mother and his sister, somewhere in this general area. But he’s not often home. He’s got a nice personality, he’s naturally likable, outgoing, smart, but he never stops talking. If you’re a little tired, as I was at the time, you sort of wish he’d shut up for a while. But maybe he knew I’d doze off and crash the car if he shut up. Therefore he went on and on about how it’s generally understood in Cuba, and he agrees, as does his father, that every marriage should split up after fifteen years. By that time a man has his friends and the woman has her friends, so they don’t really need to be under the same roof, or even to be in touch with each other constantly.

  He claims to know every town in every province of Cuba, and when I asked if he knows all eleven million Cubans as well he said that in the remoter parts of the island province of Juventad there were still a few he hasn’t met yet. He says he supports his mother and his sister by travelling from one end of Cuba to the other, making friends, buying things cheap, and selling them dear, mostly portable things of great value such as rare parts for old cars or motorcycles. He goes to one province where there’s a surplus of squiggle-jiggles, and he buys a box full, and then he goes to a province where there’s a shortage of squiggle-jiggles and he makes a killing. It’s not the sort of thing Fidel might approve of, and Che would be disappointed that this far into the Revolution people still have to operate that way to make things work, especially when they have to hitchhike everywhere they go, and stay over at an uncle’s place. But it’s not the sort of thing my friend would be thrown in jail for, except maybe for the occasional short stretch.

  He mostly deals in car parts, bicycle parts, motorcycle parts, and he likes to pick up unusual things that nobody would think they need until they see it and then can’t live without it, like toilet seats maybe. He talks to people and finds out what they need, what they’re short of, or he helps them figure out what little part they need to get their motorcycle on the road again, and he remembers all these talks. Then he might return in a week or two with the very thing they’ve been wanting, and everybody’s overjoyed. Not only do they pay him, they invite him to dinner and a sleepover.

  I asked him where his bag was and he said he was just going into Camagüey to make a delivery and he’d stay over at his uncle’s place. He pulled a shiny chrome gadget out of his pocket. It seemed to be the sort of thing that would be easy to rig up at a machine shop. But he insisted it was extremely rare, it broke easily, and there was a certain kind of motorcycle that cou
ldn’t run without it.

  It was a strange conversation because he wanted to listen to stories about Canada, but I was too tired to tell him any more, and he picked up the slack by telling me about his life. He was excited about what he was doing, but you could tell he didn’t want to be doing it when he was thirty. He was ready to make a significant shift when the time came. But he had no sense of what it would be.

  —

  I told him about the flat battery, the slow leak in the tire, the malfunctioning jack. Forgot to mention the broken radio and the bad shocks. Jannier didn’t think it was the battery that was flat, there was something wrong with the ignition switch – and he knew where he could get a new one for me easily, and he’d even help me install it. Look, I said, the clock and all the digital displays are screwed up, that’s not caused by an ignition switch, it’s caused by a flat battery. So then he reached over and peeped the horn.

  “Yes, but the horn is working,” he said.

  “Maybe a horn doesn’t require as much power,” I said.

  “But a horn,” he said, “must certainly draw more power than these tiny lights.”

  I said, “You are most certainly right, but these lights are still on. If they were a horn they’d be honking, but it is just that they can no longer register the correct numbers.”

  He tried the horn again for a bit longer and it faded out. “You too are most certainly right,” he said. “The horn in fact does not sound the way a healthy horn should sound.”

  —

  We pulled into a tourist restaurant up from the road on the side of a hill so we could get the car started easily. But he showed me how well he knew Cuba by taking me on a climb above and behind the proud tourist diner to a humble peso restaurant. It’s not unheard of in Cuba for two restaurants – one high-priced, one low-priced – to share the same kitchen. It’s the sort of two-price system one might expect to see in semi-touristy parts of any poor country, or even the poorer provinces of a rich country. Cubans in the back, tourists in front. It is a bit offensive from a human point of view, although if you make the stretch it’s certainly defensible from an economic point of view.

  Cocaine has its appeal to many, but for a quick pick-me-up there’s nothing like icy-cold agua mineral con gas, the more you can get down the better. What a lifesaver on a hot day. Jannier had a pork sandwich, but sparkling spring water was all I needed.

  —

  The wonderful thing was that when we pulled into the Cuba Taxi garage in Camagüey, they confirmed that yes indeed they were part of the same company that owned my car, Panautos, and they would be glad to exchange a better battery for my battered battery. Jannier is truly a famous and well-loved guy, everybody at Cuba Taxi knew him and welcomed us with open arms. There was a woman with flashing dark eyes who, though with happy smiles, seemed a bit out of place in a greasy garage, with seven or eight guys. I pictured her as giving tango lessons on weekends. We were all standing in a semicircle, watching as the designated workman pulled out my battery and replaced it with the one he had just removed from another car. Several of us had clipboards, and there were even notes being jotted down. And, in one of those imperishable Cuban moments, when I flicked on the ignition and the car roared to life, everybody jumped for joy and threw their arms around each other. No kidding! The tango queen naturally wanted to throw her arms around the gringo or, even better, Jannier, but she was prevented from doing so by the piggish embraces of her boring old Cuba Taxi colleagues. When we calmed down, I shook hands with every single one of them and thanked them profusely.

  Jannier mentioned there was a baseball game in Sancti Spíritus tonight, with Havana. He said if I felt up to it he’d love to come along and I wouldn’t even have to drive him back. I wanted to go, but I just felt it would be foolish because although I didn’t feel sleepy just now, I could be overcome with sleep at any moment.

  He was a sort of medieval character, a travelling tinker – but much better educated and much healthier. More of him to come.

  —

  Camagüey is not the city I remember from two weeks ago. I had a hard time finding the park where I met the two Canadians, and when I did it seemed much smaller, and the surrounding buildings more imposing. Things kept going wrong. I began to think I shouldn’t stay the night. Also it seemed impossible to find a patch of shade at this time of day. It was very hot. I developed a severe burn on my left arm – the same arm I’d had out as I drove all day because of the flat battery and having to keep the air conditioning off.

  A young mosca who was very persistent and obnoxious, but always just interesting enough to make me resist telling him to buzz off, started chasing me on his bicycle, frantically offering his various services. Like many overly energetic persons he didn’t know what he was doing. For instance, I just wanted a hotel, but he insisted on taking me to all these casa particulares. Unfortunately for him, they were all booked up with Cubans on longer stays. They wanted to take me, a guy with U.S. dollars, but it wouldn’t be right to kick out a Cuban with pesos to make way for a Canadian with dollars, now would it? So my friend kept taking me to all the wrong places. He yelled at them and told them they were crazy for not throwing out a poor Cuban to make way for a rich Canadian. And I soon had no idea how to get back to where my car was parked.

  —

  But I finally got back on the road, having failed to find a place to stay in Camagüey. And now I’m sitting in that same crummy hotel in Ciego de Ávila. Maybe I came back here because I was too tired to look for another place, or maybe I needed more punishment. The night clerk was begging me not to eat in the hotel restaurant. He didn’t have to convince me, it wasn’t very good before, and I wasn’t going to try that again.

  But I did pop into the restaurant for a moment and there was Gina. She looked at me and remembered me instantly. She approached me ever so slowly, didn’t want to be too fast, she was such a fascinating mixture of womanly grace and girlish awkwardness, and she silently presented her cheek for a nice little kiss. When I gave her one she presented her other cheek for another nice little kiss, and when she switched cheeks she accidentally brushed my cold lips with her hot ones.

  But the fellow insisting the food here is no good was perfectly right. There was a lot of steam rising from a lot of vats, but the grub reminded me of the descriptions of what Che and his men had to eat in the final days in Bolivia.

  Maybe it was a scam, and to be sure he’d get a kickback from the paladares, he wasn’t telling me the food here was bad out of the kindness of his heart, but he was in his own way doing the right thing. He was the whistleblower. Pretending the restaurant was good was not helping the Cuban tourist industry. The more people he tells not to eat here, the sooner the hotel people will realize improvements have to be made.

  I walked through the restaurant to a bar at the back, a U-shaped bar with about twelve stools. The bar was a bit too large for the room it was in, and it was also exceedingly darksome even for a dark bar. It was definitely a bar in the Cuban-only style, but the bartender wasn’t about to accept pesos for my Cuba Libre. Not only was he too smart for that, he spoke excellent English. He had real Coca-Cola, at a premium, so it was no wonder he didn’t want to mess with pesos, as if Coke was somehow better than the local cola manufacturers, or in some magical way worthier of being purchased, as if Valium were better than diazepam.

  Not only was this place poorly lit, but the walls, the ceiling, and the bar were all painted black. So I snapped open the can, which was unusually cold, so cold the Coke wouldn’t pour. It was frozen solid. It’d been sitting in the freezer for eons waiting for a tourist and was perfectly preserved. I tried to eject some Coke like a ketchup bottle, but it didn’t work; so when I gave it a squeeze it splattered all over the counter. At first the bartender had a look on his face that said when you have liquid gold don’t spill a drop. But he brought his rag over and asked if I wanted ice with my drink. Haw haw!

  At first I was the only one there, but then a black man and his wife
came in and ordered Coke. They were smarter than me. When they noticed it was super cold and wouldn’t pour they calmly let it sit and thaw out – no problemo. Then three other black people came in, but they didn’t want anything just yet.

  The bartender looked like a movie star of the 1930s, with pure white skin, black curly hair, red lips, and he wanted to know what part of Canada I was from. He said he had a daughter up in Canada, and I wondered if it was a romance between a Canadian tourist and him or was it something more serious. So to spare him embarrassment I simply asked if he was troubled by that at all, and he said no he was perfectly happy. Now I wish I’d asked for details.

  —

  Meanwhile, back in the lobby, the small but very comfortable leather sofas that the staff sleep on at night were just now completely occupied by very respectable family-oriented Cubans. They had no luggage, they weren’t staying at the hotel, they were just sitting there stiffly in the soft chairs, in complete silence, surreptitiously eyeballing the tourists, picturing themselves in a tourist’s shoes, and wondering if they would be acting the same way if they had seemingly unlimited sources of U.S. funds. It was pure entertainment and an exercise for the imagination. Mostly the same people as when I was here before. It was a nice place to sit on a hot night. There are doormen diligently refusing entry to other Cubans, but that was probably because they knew they wanted to sit on the leather chairs and they were all occupied. Try again tomorrow. Come early if you want to stay late.

  But this time there were some crazy screamers upstairs. Beautiful women were running through the halls in their underwear and scaring each other by screaming fearsome pussycat meows and tiger growls at the top of their lungs, pretending they had escaped from the zoo, and they were having fun leaping out and pouncing on each other in the dark corridors. And there was a rather oafish thickheaded person behind the front desk. He hadn’t been here on my previous visit, for I would have remembered him for sure, with the odd grunting sounds he persisted in making, whether talking to me or his colleagues. He insisted on carrying my bag upstairs. I didn’t want him to. He kept insisting. We had a tug of war. He won. The cat people had taken possession of the elevator, so he snorted and panted all the way up the stairs. He waited at the door with his hand out. I reluctantly pulled out some money and he pointed at it and said, “Dollar! Dollar!” Earlier he had shouted, “Passport! Passport! Passport!” in my good ear three times before I had finished reaching in my pocket and getting the passport out of my wallet. I managed to shove it under his nose before he could yell “Passport” a fourth time.