An Innocent in Cuba

by David McFadden

  —

  Perhaps this is silly, but I still do not wish to identify the beautiful government building where Mimi and I had a friendly encounter on my third day in Cuba – the building outside of which I waited for her in vain on the evening of my fourth day. But I popped into the same building this afternoon and there she was. Many tourists had come and gone in the past three weeks, but she hadn’t forgotten me. We definitely didn’t shout and embrace, we spoke politely, quietly, and kept our distance. We were happy to see each other again, she slipped me her address and invited me for coffee. We could go for a “petite promenade.” She’d be looking for me at eight o’clock.

  On the way over to Mimi’s place I was walking along a very dark street and all of a sudden my feet wouldn’t move, like a fast freeze in a movie. It was exactly as if somebody had tossed a lariat on the pavement and the moment I stepped inside it he gave it a yank. But it turned out not to be a lariat but a circular strip of soft metal, a band of steel not much bigger than the fan belt of a Humvee, and by the strangest fluke one foot went inside it and then the other did as well, so I had to stop dead or take a serious tumble. This seemed so strange it was like a dreadful omen, and something told me I should turn around and forget all about visiting my friend. But it would have been very ungentlemanly of me to have chickened out now. I’d never forgive myself for my cowardice. Besides, it was perhaps ominous in a good way. After all, it was amazing I didn’t fall to the ground and break my head open.

  She came running down from her second-floor apartment wrapped in a white towel and with her hair all wet. She took me upstairs by the hand and I sat at the kitchen table while she got dressed. She kept apologizing for the mess of the place, but it was a big apartment and I kept seeing it as it might have been thirty years ago, before things started falling apart. She has a nineteen-year-old son who has been drafted into the army for a year or two. I met two of her son’s friends, two guys also nineteen, and they were very sweet, lovely, charming, well-mannered, honest young fellows. Very nice guys. They had just popped in to say hello and see if there’s any news from her son.

  —

  So we went for our petite promenade, but she had a cold coming on, and I was hungry, and she hadn’t eaten, so we had to get to a restaurant fast. We went over to Il Gentiluomo, but there was a private party going on and we couldn’t get in. So we walked a bit down Obispo to another pizza joint. We ordered a pizza and a couple of beers. They took an awful long time to bring the beer, the two bartenders just ignored our order and kept talking. And when the pizza came, it was inedible. It was smothered in what looked like ketchup, and there were little melted globs of cheese here and there floating in the ketchup. It tasted even worse than it sounded, but I couldn’t figure out which tasted worse, the ketchup or the cheese. Mimi, who hadn’t taken a bite yet, said the cheese was actually a concoction of bread and cheese – sort of a cheesy breadball. So I told her I couldn’t eat it, and she refused even a taste. We paid our bill in full – seven dollars – and walked out, with two withering backward glances at the waiter and bartender who were not at all concerned.

  We went over to La Floridita. She refused anything more expensive than the cheese sandwich, the cheapest item on the menu. I had the tuna sandwich. She kept switching from English to Spanish to French around and around in circles, and I got a bit overloaded. I couldn’t concentrate any more, and I know I was missing a lot of interesting stuff.

  But I recovered when we got back to her apartment. We talked for hours. She did tell me her salary was three hundred pesos a month, and out of that comes twenty-seven pesos for lunch each working day, whether she has lunch or not. Although Mariano claimed that he didn’t have to pay any rent, or water, or power, Mimi said she had to pay thirty pesos each month for the rent, two pesos per month for the water, and twenty-two pesos a month for the power. So with the mandatory lunch she has 219 pesos to throw around, which is the equivalent of US$8.11 a month. But she turned to me and said, “I’m not desperate for anything. Life has not smiled on me, but I’m not desperate.”

  She also noted, with no pleasure whatsoever, that when we were in La Floridita, everybody was smiling at me but they were not smiling at her. I said it might be because she was dark-skinned, and there might still be some racial prejudice in Havana. But she denied that strongly, no way could she accept that. She was simply astonished that salespeople and waiters were actually smiling at me. They knew that she was Cuban and I was Canadian and I had the dollars and she had the pesos, and therefore people instinctively bestow their smiles on the person with the greatest amount of ready cash. She hadn’t noticed that before, that her fellow Cubans could be so crass, and it was a little knife twisting in her heart. We tourists are doing a lot to benefit Cuba, we are the biggest cash cow the Cubans have, and maybe the smiles are smiles of gratitude – but why couldn’t she have had a smile bestowed on her now and then?

  So we sat for half an hour in her favourite park, mine also, the Plaza de Armas, with the Hotel Isabella on the east and the Museo Ciudad on the west. What a charming spot, especially with such a warm friendly companion to help me admire and thrill to certain particularly beautiful sightlines, angles, corners, juxtapositions, certain patches of shadow and starlight, or a glance of moonlight penetrating a dark alley, or the little halos of lamplight underfoot along the pavement, and now and then a glimpse of the moonlit alabaster El Cristo high on its promontory on the other side of Havana Bay.

  Now and then we would notice a police officer watching us from a distance, or from behind a bush, as if they were simply curious about someone who seemed to be a tourist hitching up with an older black woman when there are so many young exciting ones around for the taking. I suppose Mimi would seem more like a dark-skinned Indian than an Afro-Cuban, but she told me right off the bat that she thinks of herself as a black woman right down to the inner core of her being. Even though she looked more like a dark Mexican Indian than anything else, she identified totally with her negritude. She showed me pictures of her son, her late father, her brother, and her long-gone husband – all of whom were 100 per cent African in appearance. She may have been more spiritually connected with her paternal negritude than her maternal aztecitude – but she definitely thinks of herself as an Indian as well. She said she hurts very badly when she hears sad stories about life on the Native reserves in Canada.

  And as we walked in the moonlight, she would keep shivering with pleasure as she beheld certain seldom-observed sightlines, or exquisitely odd little nighttime tableaus, and she would stop suddenly and say, “Oh, look at that, isn’t that wonderful,” and so on, as if her lack of opportunity to travel to other countries has turned her into a tourist in her own backyard.

  The sun doesn’t shine on her, but she is a great lover of Havana, and she is not in despair. And when you are a great lover of anything under the sun, it doesn’t matter if the sun shines on you or not. She is a great lover of Havana, and that’s enough for anyone to be in love with.

  I walked her home, she brewed up some coffee, and when I left at 2:30 a.m. she presented me with a gift. She wanted me to have a hand-crafted Aztec goddess about eight inches tall. It’s from the Quetzalcóatl pantheon, a rather stout little Chicomecóatl, a corn goddess of great antiquity, who has gone through many forms. In this form she has a long nose, sad eyes, and a chubby face, so that she actually looks like Mimi. She is standing with great presence, dressed in an elaborate headdress, a splendid robe. She seems very serene and full of understanding of the importance of her role as an archetype for Aztec women down through the centuries. She’s almost geometrically symmetrical, she is a pleasure to look at, and she radiates serenity.

  DAY TWENTY-SEVEN

  TWO ENGLISHMEN IN HAVANA

  Thursday, March 11, 2004. Mimi said she used to be married to a little guy who drank a lot, but she got rid of him. Why? She looked up and said, Because he was a little guy who drank a lot. She said he was even smaller than she was, and she was only about fiv
e-foot-two. She also said her mother had recently had a large skin cancer completely cured by laser surgery. You couldn’t even see where it used to be. Her mother’s original tongue was Náhuatl, the language of the Aztecs, but her Spanish was fluent.

  We found out we were both solitary creatures. She had been worrying about tales she’d been told regarding the alleged tendency of solitude to speed up the aging process. I suggested surely not if you like it. If it’s right for you it would have to slow down the aging process rather than speed it up. If you were a solitary soul and liked it, being with people would be more likely to speed up the aging process. She enthusiastically thanked me for saying that and said she’d never worry about being alone again. She said she was forty-nine, and I said see? You only look about thirty-five. So she didn’t have to worry about her aging process.

  —

  That wretched restaurant last night had me confused this morning. I woke up wondering if they had got mixed up and gave us the peso pizza for tourist dollars. Since I was a Canadian and Mimi a Cuban, obviously I had a taste for peso people and therefore would also have a taste for peso pizza. Would I have been given a different menu, or a different pizza, with special ingredients for the tourists, if I had come in by myself, or with another Canadian? It was hard to say.

  But then, I’d had peso pizza before, at the baseball game at Santa Clara, bought and paid for by Orestes, and it was fine. So I didn’t understand it, and if Mimi had any opinions on the subject she didn’t offer them. But she definitely did not think it was deliberate at all on the part of the restaurant staff. She maintained it had absolutely nothing to do with us. We were not the target. In fact, she grabbed my arm and pointed dramatically to the little apartments above the stores along Calle Obispo, and her voice took on a fiery quality.

  She said, See those windows? The people who work in these restaurants and these stores along this street, they all live in those apartments up there, in very crowded conditions. They don’t have time to be prejudiced in any way. They can’t afford it.

  Earlier that day I’d bought, in a dollar store on the Prado, for forty-one dollars, a cheap digital watch to replace the one I’d lost. It was black and yellow, to match my nylon Hamilton Tiger-Cats jacket. When I showed her the rather gaudy watch, she looked at it in astonishment and said, “You paid forty dollars for that piece of shit?”

  I laughed and said the watch I lost was also a plastic digital watch, I bought it sixteen years ago for forty dollars, and it was very much like this one, and it kept perfect time for sixteen years, and wherever it is now it’s probably still keeping perfect time. So I got my forty dollars’ worth out of that.

  Then she started beating her breast and tearing her hair out. “Oh, I’m so sorry,” she wailed. “How could I have said such a thing?” She was a fiery woman! Such seriousness! I used to think I had the lowest self-esteem rating in the world, but lately I’ve been noticing that almost everybody is in the same boat. Some hide it better than others. It seems I’m naturally drawn to those who don’t hide it well.

  Also I was a bit mad at myself for not having waited until I could ask her if she could get me one cheaper at a peso store.

  —

  Not much happening today, but let me offer two short, sad stories about Englishmen in Havana. The first was in a little coffee shop on the lower west side of the Prado, where I had a pair of delicious hot huevos fritos with Tabasco sauce this morning, owing to waking up too late for the hotel rooftop with the cafetera rota. I always feel better after a couple of eggs in the morning, at least in Cuba. I can’t imagine having cholesterol problems if you eat a pair of these eggs every morning. Cuban eggs seem to be anti-cholesterol, giant delicious cholesterol-fighting pills.

  It must have been obvious I was enjoying my eggs because there was a table of Germans in the corner and one of them called out to the waitress, in English, “I’ll have what he’s having. Eggs? Eggs?” Then in came two very beautiful, tall, graceful Afro-Cuban women, followed by a very tall, skinny, aristocratic Englishman more than three times their age, dressed very tastefully, everything carefully chosen for carefree travel in tropical countries. The women with their café au lait skin sat down and they seemed to have a lot to discuss, and they seemed to be brimming with intelligence and excitement at being together. The taller wore a white turban, a white silk suit, white shoes, and a string of white pearls around her neck. Smashing! This is the outfit favoured by initiates into the mystical core of the Santería belief system. They have to wear white for a full year. Mimi told me last night when we passed several women dressed that way.

  And the other woman was just dressed like an ordinary habanera calle chica, but equally beautiful in her own way.

  The Englishman was of a breed that is almost extinct, having been largely wiped out in two world wars. He still had that “stiff upper lip” mentality. But he lacked the calm, cool, collected patience of the Cubans as we shall soon see. He was one scrappy guy.

  The women were excitedly yacking back and forth in inscrutable Spanish, rolling their eyes, squealing with laughter, drawing pictures in the air with their hands, hugging each other, and generally having a wonderful conversation. But the Englishman was not thrilled about this. He sat down and just glared at them. You could sense his blood pressure rising as he got more and more miffed. Soon he’d blow up like a cafetera rota. And he did. He all of a sudden rudely interrupted them and started talking angrily at them. He was trying to keep his voice down and I didn’t catch what he was saying, and the women hardly paid any attention to him, they just kept talking to each other, which made him even angrier and caused him to explode once again, at a higher level, and he leapt to his feet and started yelling, so that everyone in the place could hear him.

  “You can keep on talking to yourselves if you want,” he screamed, “but you can pay the bill too.” With that he stormed toward the door, but then he inexplicably turned around and walked back to the table. This could be a mistake. Would there be reconciliation or escalation? Neither, he just sat down, they continued talking to each other as if nothing had happened. Still his anachronistic English superiority couldn’t accept not being the centre of attention. You could see him getting angry again, but before he could explode he just got up and walked out.

  When I left, this perfect English aristocrat was standing under the laurel trees on the Prado, where Calle Colón intersects, and staring northward toward the Capitolio. He had the look of a man who knew where he was but didn’t know where the heck he wanted to go. It was as if his day had been spoiled and it was all the fault of those ungrateful bitches. I couldn’t resist saying with a little smile, “Don’t let them get you down.” He looked at me and said, “I’m easy.”

  —

  The second Englishman looked a bit like actor Michael Caine except he was very short, sheepish, and seemed about to burst into tears. He walked into the Hotel Lido as I was standing at the counter annoying the flashy manageress about something. Just as the Englishman came in, a tall and dignified Cuban man in a business suit was leaving the hotel. The Englishman stopped him and said, “I owe you a tremendous apology. I wonder if you could spare me five minutes.” The Cuban fellow said, “No, I can’t” – and he left.

  This was a terrible blow to the Englishman, who had already been whipping himself to death, so I felt sorry for him, and being interested in getting the story, I said, pleasantly, “I can spare you five minutes if you wish.” He looked at me as if he thought that was kind of me, and his lips were moving, and he was trying to say something, but the words just wouldn’t come out somehow. I felt so sorry for him. He was having a terrible attack of culture shock, or so it seemed. His self-esteem had hit rock bottom.

  Then he turned to the iron-fisted manageress, the most obese and impatient Afro-Cuban woman imaginable. She was covered in gold necklaces and rings, and he tried to say something to her, but the words still wouldn’t come out. I never did find out what the story was, dammit. Then an attractive young
German couple went to the front desk and said to the manageress, with shy and nervous smiles on their faces, very slowly, “Sorry, but we accidentally left our key in the room? And we’d like to have a new one? A new key, that is? So we can get back in?” With the glummest look, the manageress handed them another key, and said, “Bring it back – right away! Instantly!” I burst out laughing, which caused the manageress to give me a withering look, but it eased the pain of the German couple. They turned to me and the woman said, “It’s very embarrassing.” I told her not to be. I said, “You wouldn’t be human if you didn’t leave your keys in the room now and then.” They liked that and it made them feel better. “Thank you very much,” they said. When you’re newly married, as they seemed to be, such things can be mortifying, but when you’re newly divorced losing a key is nothing.

  So then I decided to check my mail on the single little computer at the back of the lobby by the bar. The bartender, a nice guy named Máximo, seems to be sleeplessly manning that bar around the clock and with never a day off. It’s not a busy bar, but he never sits down. When there’s nothing going on he stands there watching the overhead TV. I gave him six dollars in advance, and I sat down at the computer, and it was so slow, that I would issue a command, and then wait and wait until it timed out. This happened over and over again, so finally I gave up and asked Máximo for my money back.

  Well! He’d never heard of such a thing. He’d been my friend up to that point, ever since I first checked in. But no more. No matter how I tried to explain to him what that problem was, he obviously thought I was trying to cheat him. I thought he was a mensch, but he thought I was a crook and a liar. He finally offered three dollars back because I’d been on the computer half an hour, but I insisted on the six dollars because I’d wasted that half-hour unsuccessfully trying to get the computer to work.