An Innocent in Cuba

by David McFadden

  This representation of him is said to be faithful in every way, and the sculptor, José Villa, has a reputation for lifelike accuracy in his more-famous representations of such subjects as Ernest Hemingway and John Lennon, in Havana, and a statue of the great Mexican comedian Germán Valdés (Tin Tan), in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico.

  As I was admiring the statue a tiny old lady, who might have been quite the cutie in the Caballero’s day, asked for some money. I gave her all the coins in my pocket and she seemed very thrilled. When you do something like that in Cuba, people notice. They will embrace you, or look at you solemnly as if you may be an angel in disguise.

  —

  Back at the ferry terminal, nobody has a clue where Manolo is, but it was nice and cool in there, and the silence was also pleasant.

  “Soy contenido,” I said to Eloy.

  “Bueno,” he replied.

  We both looked at the safe at the same time to make sure Manolo’s stuff was still there.

  “He won’t be going home without that,” said Eloy.

  He wanted me to take the car over to Vedado where I could settle up with Nelson at the twenty-four-hour Panautos. I told him I couldn’t do that because the car was not a pleasure to drive, the shocks did not work, nor did the radio. And I would hate to be in an accident now after all that careful driving I’ve been doing. I’d had a couple of drinks by then anyway. I had received the car from Manolo, and I wanted to deliver it back into his hands.

  And just when I thought he was never going to show up, and just as Eloy was saying for the third time, he has to show up, he hasn’t closed up his strongbox yet, then all of a sudden Manolo showed up. No apologies were needed or given. He simply threw his arms around me, with an ear-to-ear smile, and said, “Mí amigo! Mí papa! Mí daddi!” Then he went out to check the car, making sure there was no more damage than I had signed for two weeks ago. Sure enough, there’s a tiny piece of metal off the hood ornament. The car had been full of dings when we checked it out before, we couldn’t possibly have listed all the scratches and dents, and now he’s busy charging me for the ones that we didn’t record because he insists they must be new dents and scratches.

  Then he noticed that the car aerial had been snapped off. Of course! And it must have happened about the time I was at Varadero Beach, because up to that point I was getting excellent reception from Florida. And then I couldn’t get anything after that until last night upon returning to Havana, when all of a sudden the radio came on with no warning in the middle of Rod Stewart, a great fave of mine, singing “Have I Told You Lately,” followed by Betty Carter singing an almost-out-of-control “East of the Sun,” then Shirley Bassey’s fabulous version of “This Masquerade,” and a strange song I’d never heard before called “I Learned to Do the Boogie-Woogie When I Was Only a Child,” sung by a girl who sounded as if she was about twelve. Sorry, I missed her name.

  Also I missed out on a ton of Jamaican and Haitian music because some slimy malcontent mindlessly snapped my aerial. But why hadn’t I been clever enough to buy a radio somewhere, or rig up some kind of metal attachment to the stub of the aerial? Perhaps subconsciously I didn’t want a radio to complicate things and get in the way of the job at hand. Odd that Manolo charged me more to replace the aerial than I would have had to pay to buy a whole new radio.

  Manolo found some other previously unchecked and unreported scratches and gouges and charged me for them even though I know I didn’t cause them. I didn’t hit anything and I wasn’t hit by anything, not even a flying stone. A driver knows these things, especially such a slow and cautious driver as I have been on this trip. And why would they have given me a car so obviously unsuited for the sort of expedition I was undertaking, especially since I described to them in full what I would be doing and where I was going?

  Poor Manolo didn’t know what to say. He was a bit upset about the sharpness of my complaints. He had done his best and wanted to remain on good terms. He wanted to be my friend. He wanted me to call him first thing on my next visit to Cuba.

  So finally Eloy, who had been eavesdropping while doing some paperwork at the Cubacar desk, said something that shut me up, because I knew the truth of what he said: “We Cubans, we have a lot of problems, but we never play tricks.”

  I suddenly felt perfectly okay about paying the amount Manolo said I owed. Better the poor Cubans nickel and dime the rich Canadians than the other way around. I told Eloy he should remember that line, the one about the tricks, that is, because it was very effective. He said he had always found it effective in the past.

  I’ve already mentioned this place was an old stone ferry terminal with ancient cannons and cannonballs here and there. On the way out, as I passed directly in front of the muzzle of one cannon, I yelled out “BANG!,” clutched my heart, and fell to the floor. Just for a second everybody thought I was dead. Now there’d be hell to pay. The last thing they were expecting was an old cannon to go off. And the second last, some foreigner pretending the cannon had gone off. But then everybody started laughing, and I jumped to my feet and bowed graciously. What a guy. Shameless. A stranger to embarrassment.

  But I was feeling on top of the world because car-free equals carefree, a secret I’ve known for twenty years, but keep forgetting. I hopped into a cab to the Hotel Lido, where I had myself a delicious two-hour late-afternoon nap.

  —

  In the evening a bunch of students from Holy Cross University in Massachusetts appeared at the bar of the Hotel Ambos Mundos. One handsome young fellow told me they were all President Bush supporters, and were full of confidence that the ongoing U.S. invasion of Iraq would make the world a safer place. They were on a study tour of Havana and they had a special permit from their professor, which enabled them to travel freely in Cuba without earning the wrath of the U.S. State Department.

  We chatted amiably as we wandered around the lobby and stopped to gaze at the framed photos of Hemingway and Fidel. The Holy Cross student vaguely knew of Hemingway from T-shirt images, but had read absolutely nothing of his. He listened carefully and seemed impressed when I briefly described the story of The Old Man and the Sea. But alas! he seemed to drift away when he found out it was mandatory reading for all Cuban schoolkids.

  —

  At La Floridita I ordered a gin and tonic with no ice, and José Villa’s new bronze statue of Hemingway wouldn’t take its eyes off me till I drained the glass. Hemingway looks arrogant and supercilious in the statue, but his eyes are gazing at everybody in the entire bar, and all at the same time. Everybody says the same tired old thing: his eyes follow me around the room. But it’s true! I’m having a déjà vu over something I’ve never seen before! But it’s as if this statue is filling the exact spot Hemingway left when he died, which is José Villa’s sculptural intent in all his work, although as far as is known John Lennon never visited Havana.

  La Cuna del Daiquiri/The Cradle of the Daiquiri, boasts the bilingual sign, in the form of a line of tin letters screwed into the wooden base of the large cabinet behind the bar, and then painted over a plum colour. But the “f” in “of” was missing, and it was missing ten years ago, recalls A., who seems to be whispering in my ear. And just then it occurs to me that given the look on the face of Hemingway’s statue, he could be looking up and down the bar saying to himself, “Look at these ignorant bastards, not one of them has noticed that missing ‘f.’ ”

  And I’m saying right back to him, “Yes, but I bet you, oh great genius, didn’t notice the interesting coincidence that the only letter missing just happens to be the first letter in the name of this famous bar.” I think Hemingway appreciated people who stood up to his insults, and he was basically insulting people all the time because he wanted to see if they had what it took to stand up to him, and if you did stand up to him you would be friends for life, and if you didn’t stand up to him he would write about you in such a way you would want to shoot yourself when you read it.

  With his right elbow on the bar, and his left hand on h
is hip with his elbow sticking out behind him, and looking at his fellow drinkers with friendly contempt, Hemingway had a way of looking nastier when he was smiling than when he was frowning, and the sculptor brings it all back perfectly. Everybody’s saying to himself, “That’s exactly the way he was,” as if they’d been on the scene here in Havana in 1955.

  And you look around and see numerous people having serious boozy conversations, and most of them are neither looking at the statue nor thinking about Hemingway, but the statue of Hemingway is looking at them, smirking at them, and you can’t help thinking that he might be thinking bad thoughts about them too, in order perhaps to make himself feel better. For when you feel as lousy as Hemingway did in the last decade of your life, booze is definitely not enough.

  So I brazenly walked up to this bronze statue of the guy I’ve been reading and thinking about constantly since latching on to For Whom the Bell Tolls at age eleven.

  I looked him right in the eye. It was just like talking to Hemingway. He even had a sort of spiritual glow around him as if alive. This is the way people speak of Che Guevara in the hours immediately following his death. While, oddly enough, Che’s statue in Santa Clara, as well as all graven images of him around Cuba, seem limp and lifeless. José Villa needs to do one, perhaps in front of the Hotel Havana Libre where Che used to play chess. Maybe a statue of him sitting at a table playing chess. And maybe another one standing on ground level, in the park in Santa Clara, with his rifle in his hand, calling on his men to fire on the hotel.

  Papa H.’s head was as big as mine, and I have a pretty big head. And his body was much bigger. I looked him right in the face, nose to nose, and I said, “Why did you have to go and kill yourself?” It was just like being in his presence. I’ll always feel as if I’ve met Hemingway now after having seen that statue.

  Unfortunately he had no answer for the only question I wanted to ask him.

  So I ordered another gin and tonic and, in honour of Hemingway, mixed in a couple of shakes of Angostura bitters, which was how he liked his gin and tonics before he discovered (or invented, if you wish) the daiquiri.

  —

  The bar was filling up, with an alarming percentage of male drinkers. The guy on the stool to my right introduced himself as a “bartender from Bratislava.” And then on his right all the way down the bar were six or seven other guys. He pointed at them and said, “These guys are too, we’re all bartenders from Bratislava.” They had been selected to take part in a competition for the world’s greatest bartender, in the utterly fabulous Hotel Naçional. They’re only here for a week, but they were so happy to be here, and they all spoke seven or eight languages ranging from Slovakian, Russian, Czech, and English (all excellent) all the way down to Spanish (not so good), and they’ve all read Hemingway, in various translations, whatever is handy. In fact they knew a lot about Hemingway and had studied him at school. I didn’t ask if it was at bartender’s school, but that would be very fitting.

  What did they think of the bartenders at La Floridita? They said they were in awe. In fact, they were here to watch them in action because of their terrific reputation. “These daiquiris are beyond perfection,” they said. “These guys really know what they’re doing.”

  —

  The bartenders at La Floridita, unlike the Bratislava boys, were all close to retirement age, but you wouldn’t dare ask if they remembered Hemingway. When I first asked for a gin and tonic they seemed a bit startled. It threw them. They hadn’t been asked for a gin and tonic since the Triumph of the Revolution. So one of them, in complete silence and with great dignity, dusts off a bottle from the back of the shelf and pours me a half-inch in a martini glass. I tasted it. It was gin. He smiled and showed me the bottle. It said on it ginebra – another word for my Spanish vocabulary (but every time I learn a new one I forget an old one). It means gin, but it also means bedlam or confusion, strangely enough, and it is a girl’s name as well, the equivalent of Guinevere. I told him it was excellent gin. He was pleased and poured me a long one. They seldom get asked for gin here, obviously. It was great with a dozen drops of Angostura.

  A band came in – a singer, who also had little castanets she bashed together rhythmically, and a female conga drummer, and a white guy on guitar, and a really good black violinist who played Latino torch songs with enormous brio. Frankly, the violinist was much more interesting than the singer, who seemed to be having a bad night and, I later heard, was on the verge of changing careers.

  An earlier band comprised a flute player who also sang, a percussionist who also sang, a pianist, and a string bass player. A lot of the Cuban bands have string bass players, which are certainly classier and more sonorous than bass guitars. People who couldn’t get in because the place was full were putting their arms through the wrought-iron windows and clapping at the end of each song.

  A tourist yelled out a stereotypically tourist request, “La Rumba,” and the musicians rolled their eyes and played something else. The next break, some smartass (not me, honest) held out a dollar and with a grand flourish tossed it into the guitar case, looked the leader in the eye, and said, “La Rumba.” That time they played “La Rumba,” but not with much spirit.

  I kept checking out a married couple, only about thirty-five but already packing on the pounds, and they were sitting solemnly at a table, drinking mojitos, and passing a cigar back and forth. He would take a puff, then she would take a puff. The interesting part about it was that everybody, and I mean everybody, was interested in everybody. Everybody was checking everybody else out. You don’t have that in a lot of places in the world, and it’s even not that common in Cuba. I think it was the Hemingway spirit, and the fact that Hemingway’s statue was there, and in the statue he had assumed a pose and a look that indicated that was exactly what he was doing. He was checking everybody out, which is what he would have been doing anyway, if he had been alive, and not too drunk. And it was as if he was alive, to be truthful, and just slightly tipsy. So if a person of Papa H.’s authority can do it, that sort of gives a carta blanca to everybody else.

  Can you believe it? The woman who waited on me next door at Il Gentiluomo where I dined a few hours earlier was now busy sweeping the floor in La Floridita. Apparently there is a passageway between the two restaurants. And it would appear they use the same kitchen, except that they tend to have different menus, and very much different prices, and you know which one will be the most expensive.

  —

  On the way home I got caught short passing by the Club des Arabes on the Prado and asked if I could pop in for a minute. “Four dollars,” they said. But I just have to have a pee. “Five dollars.”

  Then I became surrounded by all these ladies of the night, who were pointing at me and saying grab him, don’t let him get away, and making all kinds of merry suggestions about various things we could do if I had the dough, and they knew damn well I did. I was just wearing an old pair of jeans and T-shirt, and my shoes were falling off my feet, but they instinctively knew, perhaps because of my pink face, that I had a credit card and lots of U.S. cash.

  Without paying much attention to them I was thinking that they seem to be into the joy of the thing, unlike the poor sex trade workers in Toronto who sometimes seem not even to know how to spell fun, never mind joy. In a weird sort of way, it seems that Cuban hookers are better off than their Canadian counterparts. For one thing they can pop in and out of the neighbourhood polyclinico as often as they want for friendly, lecture-free checkups. For another thing, Havana is happy and Toronto is triste.

  And just then the tortured sad-eyed face of a woman about sixteen going on sixty drifted out of the shadows like a ghost, and she accosted me by standing in my way, without actually touching me. We both stopped and looked full into each other’s eyes, and in a perfectly haunting iambic pentameter line (a metrical form we often instinctively adopt in moments of intense passion or utter desperation), and in a raspy voice, with a look of acute anguish on her face, she said, “S**ky f
**ky all night, twenty dollars.” I turned away and she disappeared into the darkness.

  DAY TWENTY-FOUR

  SAD-EYED SEÑORITAS OF EL MORRO

  Monday, March 8, 2004. Maybe those young fellows in handcuffs being lead to prison last week had been accused of “ambiguity” or “anti-historical attitudes,” as was the recently deceased poet Heberto Padilla in the late 1960s. Or maybe they were accused of “disseminating an imperialist-type reality,” as was playwright Antón Arrufat in the same period. They couldn’t have been accused of homosexuality, because that particular view of reality hasn’t been a crime since 1988. I’m sure also that those silly-sounding crimes from the 1960s are no longer in effect, except in the minds of those who had to do the time for them.

  But as of August 2003, poet and independent journalist Raúl Rivero Castañeda, pushing sixty, had lost close to sixty pounds while serving the first few months of a twenty-year sentence in the Canaleta prison in Ciego de Ávila for the seemingly ridiculous crimes of “undermining the independence and unity of the state,” “collaborating with the United States,” and “spreading anti-socialist sentiment” – plus one charge of treason. Rivero was arrested in March of 2002 and was accused of writing “biased” articles in the foreign press, meeting with U.S. diplomats, and working with Reporters Without Borders, which was described on a Revolutionary Cuban Web site as a “French terrorist organization used by the U.S. government.”

  Rivero has an oddly sarcastic, bitter, humourless but hot-blooded writing style. Many of his essays, in which he portrays Cubans as living in the midst of a propaganda machine, are available on the Internet (as is his poetry). He published a piece in the Argentinian newspaper La Naçion, in 2001, denying that he was in the pay of U.S. interests (though many of his anti-Fidel articles have appeared in major U.S. papers), and stating that the only crime he is guilty of is “writing without being dictated to.” He is also supportive of the U.S. trade embargo, at least to the degree that he maintains it’s Fidel rather than the embargo that is the main problem affecting Cuba.