Be generous, says Christopher P. Baker. That’s the best part of Baker’s book, when he’s telling tourists to be generous.
The pure physical grace of the Cubans is more pronounced than anything visible in the numerous scenes of Havana life in the movie Memories of Underdevelopment from forty years ago or I Am Cuba, from the same period. It might have something to do with the neverending chain of poverty, or with the notion that it’s never going to get any better so let’s dance sort of attitude. But maybe it’s simply that this is the unconscious direction the Cubans are moving in: all nations evolve, but each in a different way, and the Cubans are evolving into a people of tremendous physical grace. This might be the birth of the “new man” promised by such local Marxists as Fidel and Che – although Fidel, and Che if he were alive, might not recognize it as such. The Cubans do not have the freedoms that Canadians, for instance, take for granted, or so the story goes. Maybe the lack of certain freedoms gives vent to a sort of gracefulness, a paradoxical freedom from stress, for we in the “developed” countries sometimes feel crushed by all our wonderful freedoms. In fact we are so free that we spend all our spare time worrying what we should do with all this freedom, and we end up doing nothing. When you’re spending night and day wondering if you are exercising your freedoms in the best possible way, your own sense of grace and movement may easily suffer, and many other things as well, such as gusto for life, the ability to think rationally, and so on – only to be replaced with anxiety, guilt, and murderous impulses. It’s a different kind of life here in Cuba, and it would be a mistake to say that the principal problem is lack of freedom.
One very elegant Canadian couple, when I was going up the stairs to the cafeteria, they were moving out, and they had an exquisite double set of fine leather luggage, about twelve pieces in all, six for each of them. The woman had them arranged next to the elevator, the button of which she was leaning into as she not so patiently waited for her husband to get his luggage together and out there next to hers. As I zipped by I said to her, smilingly, “Going somewhere?” and she looked at me, suddenly relaxed, and broke out laughing. “Looks that way,” she said. I was pleased that she laughed because it must be awful being able to afford all that expensive luggage, and whatever is in them, and have to stay in such a cheap hotel. Then I could hear her nosy husband stick his head out and say, “What did he say?” She said, “He was talking to me, dear.”
Barbaríta cleans my room every morning. On my freshly made bed she places a pair of clean towels folded, rolled, and twisted to resemble a pair of swans. She also makes powerful kissing sounds when she sees me, sounds that would seem offensive in Canada but are friendly as a howdy-do in Cuba. She knows that if I’m there when she is, she gets a dollar tip, but if I’ve gone already I always forget to leave a tip. So she’s at my room early. She’s Afro-Cuban, close to forty. She seems to have never suffered, her face is as unlined as a child’s, life for her has been one nice thing after another. Her pale green maid’s uniform is always unbuttoned daringly from neck to deepest cleavage. Yesterday she had a collection of three or four naughty compact discs on her maid’s dolly. She tried to sell me a reggae CD featuring a naked dancing white woman on the cover. She seemed astonished that I didn’t go for it.
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The big restoration projects along the Malecón and throughout Havana Vieja seem to have stalled lately. Right now there are a large number of beautiful old buildings halfway renovated, and in many cases the facades are being salvaged because the rest of the building was too far gone. The facade will be just standing alone, propped up with girders. Occasionally you see some serious work going on, but the work only goes in fits and starts.
It’s very cold in the other Museo de Bellas Artes, the one that houses the international collection rather than the Cuban collection. It’s a ravishingly designed nineteenth-century Renaissance palace, and looming massively through the west windows is the great golden dome of the Capitolio, which is said in Washington to have been a blatant copy of the U.S. Capitol building.
It’s odd to enter a gallery in a tropical country, and immediately start shivering. The first painting doesn’t help: It’s a frigid winter scene in the far north, Niagara Falls, in 1858, with a lighthouse sitting on an ice-covered rock at the far end of the falls. The lighthouse is caked with ice, there are icicles hanging from it like tears from a snowman. There is a wooden walkway along the lip of the Falls leading from the shore to the lighthouse, and the walkway is also of course covered with ice. Hard to imagine anyone walking along that walkway. Also it seems like a stupid place for a lighthouse. There’s something highly suspect about this painting.
Regis-François Gignoux was a Frenchman who wandered through the United States in the nineteenth century and is famous for his paintings of Indians and battle scenes. He apparently did two highly unusual paintings of Niagara Falls in the winter, one I remember being frightened by in childhood, and this one that is new to me, and which is frightening me now. They have to be on the shortest list of his greatest works. But why would he have put that lighthouse there at the brow of the Falls? And who would willingly walk that scary walkway along the edge of the great abyss? I’m sure Gignoux visited Niagara Falls, but this painting, and the other one, were done at his studio in New York, and his aim obviously was to be inspired by his subject rather than faithful to it. He must have had fun fooling people.
Gignoux’s other Niagara Falls painting in winter hangs, with pathetic irony, in the Senate Wing of the U.S. Capitol building, and shows the old Table Rock on the edge of the Falls, two years before it collapsed and broke apart at the foot of the Falls. In this work too he uses odd distortions to increase the dramatic effect.
The Cuban paintings are much warmer and more interesting for the most part. Here’s a view of the Prado, looking north from the roof of this very palace it would seem. It’s dated 1895 – with many more boats out in the sea than there are today. There’s only one steamer, but dozens of sailboats and numerous little dots representing canoes. Another picture, like a Norman Rockwell but not as sentimental, shows a black waiter sitting on the floor with one plate smashed and two intact, and he is glaring up at another young black fellow who is laughing merrily, presumably having just tripped the first guy.
I’m taking more time over this highly detailed and realistic bird’s-eye view of a backyard bullfight gone bad. There have been some problems, people are very excited and leaping from their benches; the picador has been knocked off his horse, and it looks as if he’s been badly gored. Another fellow who has also been gored is lying on the ground dead and covered with blood. The horse is lying on the ground, the bull is trying to trample it to death, and a little boy is trying to get the bull to back off the horse by pulling with all his weight on the bull’s tail. Someone is trying to spear the bull through the neck. Three horses in all are lying on the ground with their intestines spilling out – one is dead, one about to die, and one is just sitting there propped up on his forelegs, wide awake and watching his blood gush out. Whew! All on one medium-size canvas.
There is also a small gallery devoted to paintings of the Virgin Mary baring her breast and squirting milk into St. Fernando’s mouth. This seems to be a distinctive motif among nineteenth-century Latin American painters, and maybe earlier. St. Fernando is climbing Calvary, and he is carrying the cross, the hammer, the ladder, the INRI sign, all the implements of Christ’s crucifixion. But he’s not too busy to take the time to open his mouth to drink from a two-foot arc of milk pouring from Mary’s breast, and splashing off his lower lip! And sitting on Mary’s lap is the infant Jesus, quietly observing the preparations for his own crucifixion to come.
Meanwhile a black gallery guard with no neck and the meanest look on his face apprehended me and insisted I put my camera in my pocket. I tried to tell him it wasn’t a camera, but he wouldn’t listen. So I put my tape recorder in my inside pocket, then continued to record little comments by whipping my jacket open and pressing th
e record button while he watched grouchily from a distance, like an angry bull with red eyes, pawing the floor with his hooves.
Having convinced myself that English is a dying language in Cuba, at least among the white people, I came across several people, employees of the museum, who were spending their abundant downtime frantically studying that greatest of all languages, as most of us like to think of our mother tongue. The first woman, in a gallery on the second floor, was very dark-skinned, but with Spanish features, and her undeniable beauty was marred by a serious skin problem, which I managed to ignore by focusing on her deep dark eyes. She was a warm and pleasant young woman, she had a very sensitive and delicate face, with a flat nose and extremely tiny nostrils, and seemed generally disposed toward brightness and beauty. When I walked into the gallery I thought I heard someone singing, so I looked around, and there she was, sitting on a bench, reading a book giving words and simple phrases in four or five European languages. She was trying to say the words out loud, singing them, but it was a very cheap book, and there was no pronunciation guide, if you can believe it.
She was trying to learn English words without having a clue how to pronounce them. But soon she was pointing to words and phrases, I’d give the proper pronunciation, and she’d repeat it perfectly the first time. She said she has been studying hard because it’s a boring job and she has all this time on her hands. She works five eight-hour shifts a week, often without any people coming through, even at peak tourist times, such as the famous spring break, which was now, and she makes the equivalent of thirteen U.S. dollars a month, same as Mariano. She and her colleagues sit around studying languages all day long.
She hailed from some sad village in Granma Province, and she said it was very difficult to find another job, because all the interesting jobs had been taken already by the time she rolled into the capital. Her eyes flashed when I told her that Cuban people in general don’t seem to have much in the way of options. She laughingly tightened her lips, kissed the tip of her forefinger, and said, “I’m not saying a thing!” I told her it must seem at times like being in a quagmire, but that doesn’t mean you can’t enjoy your life, because it’s still a terrific country. She didn’t say a thing.
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The woman tending the spacious and well-stocked gift shop was similarly bored out of her skull. She was tickled pink to have a visitor. She straightaway asked if I knew anything about Cuban music. I had a feel for it, but I was no expert. So she slipped a CD into the stereo, and played some fairly staid music, nothing that would tempt us to dance. We couldn’t have that, could we? That furious bull downstairs just might decide to charge up the stairs and throw us both out on the street. She asked if there was anything I’d like to hear, they have everything by everybody who’s anybody in all the fourteen provinces.
So I asked for something by the classical guitarist Leo Brouwer. His international reputation had reached my ears, but his music hadn’t and I was curious. So she put on a CD called From Bach to the Beatles, and I listened carefully to several Bach songs and several Beatles songs before saying enough already. She asked if I knew about the Buena Vista Social Club, and she sadly related that some of the members have died, and they’re folding up now. She played a few of her favourite songs, but they didn’t get to me the way I expected. She must have suddenly got an inspiration, because she played some Lecuona piano music, and I loved it immediately. This was Cuban music, even if some of the songs were old Spanish classics, he gave them a strangely Cuban spin. So I bought it – plus, without even sampling it, José María Vitier’s twelve-part mass, Misa Cubana a la Virgen de la Caridad de El Cobre, in honour of my visit to El Cobre.
Maybe it’s not as grand as the Presidential Palace, but the swirling staircases of this building are exquisitely designed to make you forget, in the most pleasant manner, what floor you’re on and what floor you’re trying to get to. Everything is just perfect. I find myself standing or sitting and staring at nothing and everything. There’s a coffee shop adjacent to the gift shop, and it’s large and empty of people. It does have good coffee though, and the fellow behind the bar was making some for me. First customer of the day – except for staff members. As in every city, no matter how crowded and noisy things become you can always find a quiet and uncrowded spot when you need one. He insisted this place is nowhere near the architectural marvel that the Presidential Palace is, but to me the Presidential Palace is much heavier and darker, maybe even clunkier.
Best not to go into this in great detail, but there were several very flirtatious encounters in this building with attractive female guides. In Canada, women no longer flock about me, if they ever did, but here the babes love me like crazy. One was actually holding my hand as the two of us looked at a seventeenth-century Spanish painting by Alexandro DeLoarto. It was called El Manna del Cielo, and showed several people solemnly picking up all these strange little floating white things falling from the sky. We looked at each other and smiled.
And when I tore myself away, she held up her hand to be kissed. Mid-kiss there was a bit of a cough and we both turned and noticed the bull-necked red-eyed security guard from the first floor. He was watching us from behind a marble pillar and had a fiendish look on his face. I had the strongest feeling there would soon be a directive on guides being overly friendly with single male tourists.
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The Palacio de los Capitanes Generales (also known as the Museo de la Ciudad, or the City Museum) is a repository for relics from the Havana of a century ago: fragments of statues and remarkable old crosses from churches that have been turned into banks; cornerstones, dedication stones, marker stones, and dozens of stone lions from long-demolished buildings. There’s a charming series of four marble drinking fountains long ago rescued from a block being torn down, the four chubby little deities with no water gushing from their open mouths.
There are many interesting old pictures and maps of Havana down through the centuries, some nineteenth-century engravings showing rows of splendid buildings hugging the seafront, but no seawall yet, no Malecón. Somehow these relics make Havana seem more real, while not taking anything away from its dream quality. In fact the dream becomes deeper, takes on further dimensions.
There’s an interesting painting showing the death of Gen. Antonio Maceo. The setting is a grassy field with a dense grove of tall palm trees behind it. Maceo looks dead already, his men are holding him up, trying to ease his pain although they know it’s a lost cause, and one sympathetic campesino in the background is holding his gun in his left hand, and has his right hand over his heart, which is exactly where Antonio Maceo took his fatal wound, according to the painting. But real life is not so tidy. After being wounded twenty times in previous battles, the Bronze Titan, as Antonio was called, took two bullets on this day, one in the chin (and out the back of the neck) and the other in the stomach (after passing through the body of General Máximo Gómez’s son Panchito and then through a horse).
As I drank in this painting, a guide approached me and said that Antonio was a handsome, well-groomed, and very small Afro-Cuban, with an excellent moustache and beard, a fastidious dresser, and gentle with people when not on the battlefield. Also at one period when Antonio, after much deliberation, had finally decided to free a female spy his men had captured, he was told that she had already been executed, by his no-nonsense brother José.
Antonio was only fifty-one when he died, and Cubans still regard him as the greatest general of all time. Not only was Maceo an Afro-Cuban, all his men were too, though most of them towered over him in size. My guide also showed me his eyeglasses, and the saddle that he used through all his campaigns, though not always on the same horse.
She also said Antonio, unlike many of the other generals, had refused to make peace with the colonial armies until slavery was abolished. He insisted that only a coward asks for his rights, a real man must take them.
She became warmer and friendlier when she found out I knew a little bit about Cuban history,
and actually remembered having seen the magnificent and imposing statue of Antonio Maceo in Santiago de Cuba. It doesn’t take much for a tourist to impress a Cuban, especially one who although in her forties still looked smashing in a miniskirt and fishnet stockings. She showed me a picture of Manuel de Céspedes, and when I told her (before she told me) that he was from Bayamo and had designed the first Cuban flag, had honoured his country above the life of his son, and had his beautiful house burned down for strategic reasons, she gasped with astonishment. By now she realized I wasn’t on a single-male sex tour, and she became all smiles, and close contact, and even a bit of feline purring. She proceeded to show me all the old satin and velvet flags of all the countries of the Western Hemisphere – with the notable exception of the United States, that flag having been found missing, so she said, after a very heavy tourist day a few years back, and was never recovered. I loved the way she pronounced Bolivia, and made me think how interesting it would be to attend (with her, if possible) a football game between Libya and Boo-Libya. Then she draped the Canadian flag over her shoulder and stroked it so lovingly I knew it was time to say adios.
As I was leaving, a tourist came in the front door with a terribly bored look on her face, stood between the two main columns at the entrance, snapped a picture, yawned, and walked out to rejoin her tour group. When she gets home her picture will show an inner courtyard with a luxuriant garden full of brilliant flowers, tall palm trees, numerous exotic birds all squawking away, forty-four gothic arches arranged on three two-storey walls, and about fifty-two granite columns.
An Innocent in Cuba Page 34