So he told a female hotel employee about the problem, they spent about fifteen minutes talking it over, then she got on the phone and a male employee came down and spent fifteen minutes talking to Máximo. Then Máximo went over to the big fat woman covered in gold, and spent fifteen minutes telling her about it, then she got on the phone and spent half an hour talking to someone in the upper levels of the Ministry of Tourism about this big issue – and then finally she hung up and called Máximo over and told him to give me my six dollars back. Strangely, in all that time, nobody thought to have a look at the computer.
So from then on whenever Máximo saw me coming, he’d come out from behind the bar and turn the computer off. As if to say, “This computer is off limits to you, chum.”
—
One of those rare beings, a desperate, homeless down-and-out Cuban, a white man about thirty-five with stinking clothes and badly in need of fumigation, a bath, a barbershop, a massage, a month at Varadero Beach, and maybe a well-paid job in the government, has shown up at the corner of Agramonte and Neptuno, by Parque Centro, and is impatiently pawing through a pair of overloaded industrial-size garbage bins, looking for something of value, and tossing everything else out on the street, causing passersby to look at him with disgust. Oh, he’s an ugly fellow for sure, with a deadly disposition and a vicious look on his face. I’m watching from a distance and can’t hear what is being said, but I have the odd feeling that this wretch might be a non-Cuban, some tough case who came down on a sex holiday a few years ago, lost his wallet, decided to stay, but then everything started to go wrong and now look at him, a perfect example of premature psychopathological paranoid dementia with possible homicidal tendencies and serious dandruff.
Meanwhile, a black police officer, tall and skinny as a rake as they all seem to be, wanders serenely by and of course does a hilarious double-take and orders this wretch to stop making such a mess. So the messy wretch gets angry and takes a pretty vicious swing at the cop, who neatly ducks the punch. The grungy guy turns and goes back to his task of going through the garbage and tossing it on the street, though a fraction more carefully than before. The cop was armed with a gun and a billy club, but he just shrugged it off and let him be, continued watching him, but without getting angry, exercising perfect restraint – a refreshing change from police procedures in most other big cities of the world, where in a case like that there’d be instantly mindless retaliation of some sort or another.
—
So here I am walking along Calle Obispo, it’s getting late already, and I’m being accosted by bright and beautiful young women offering the world for a few dollars, and handsome dark young men in flashy tropical shirts wanting me to come in and drink with them. I’m looking for that fetid pizza restaurant Mimi and I were in last night but I can’t find it, it seems to have disappeared.
Then at midnight, under a dim lamppost at the dark southwest corner of Plaza de Armas, a handsome little white fellow about forty was standing there strumming on his guitar. His name was Rolf and he just got back from a couple of years in California. He didn’t like the politics there. He was bummed out, homesick, and depressed. Now he’s back where he belongs and feels on top of the world. He sang and played “Hotel California” all the way through, just for me. He said he meets a lot of Canadians in Havana, and they almost always turn out to be from the United States. He tells them don’t be ashamed, nobody blamed the ordinary Germans for Hitler. Just then a lone male tourist came by wearing an Oberlin College (U.S.A.) sweatshirt and a Sioux Lookout (Canada) baseball cap, obviously hedging his bets. He gave us a quick glance and kept going.
My guitarist friend was getting ready to join other musicians at a late-night bar around the corner. But he didn’t seem in a rush, so I asked if he knew “Dos Gardenias.” He sang it brilliantly, with great tenderness and passion, all four verses, with some really good guitar work, on a dark empty street to an audience of one. He didn’t even mind me taping him. When he finished he smiled, accepted my modest tip, and rushed off.
Thanks, Rolf – forty years old, happy guy, handsome, a gentleman of sensible height (about five-foot-seven), a great singer. He seemed very connected between himself and his country, especially after having been away, and he seemed pleased with the world around him, as if it might have taken a long stay in California to make him see clearly how much more interesting Cuba and the Cubans really is and are. In fact, when we first started talking he began telling me the history and date of construction of all the ancient buildings that surrounded us. He didn’t learn any English in California, but being there must have tempered his Spanish, because I seemed to understand every word he said, as if in a dream, as long as I didn’t concentrate too hard.
He got me thinking there must be a lot more Cubans in the United States who are terribly homesick, but don’t want to admit they made a mistake in leaving. They had jumped from the barbecue into the furnace, or whatever the old saying is.
—
Calle Obispo seems like a very long street at first, but the more often you walk it the shorter it becomes. Eventually it will disappear. A little mariachi band turned up in the park, and I sat to drink in the sounds. There were four young black women sitting together on a bench opposite, and one of them looked right at me, stuck her tongue out and wiggled it. So I returned the favour, stuck my tongue out and wiggled it back at her. She shook her head frowningly, said no no no, shook her finger at me, and said not you, him – then pointed at some guy standing behind me. He was a Finnish tourist with a video camera, and he was shooting everything that moved, including the girl with the tantalizing tongue. So I shrugged my shoulders, and she laughed.
DAY TWENTY-EIGHT
ANOTHER DREAM FOR CUBA
Friday, March 12, 2004. At the Museo de la Ciudad I’d gazed at an old painting showing a grand stretch of Havana, from an elevated viewpoint out in the Straits of Florida, and with British warships sailing past El Morro and into the bay. The ships are in the foreground, and the entire city is spread out behind them. Strangely, the painter seems to have exaggerated the hills to the south of Havana, unless the last 150 years of hurricanes have ground them down considerably.
The dream from which I awoke at 7:17 this morning placed me in that ancient Havana, not much larger than today’s Havana Vieja, and with little donkey paths leading up the high grassy hills as depicted in the painting. I feel compelled to describe the dream, as I have described others, and as I would describe anything that caught my interest on this trip.
Somewhere in Havana I met two people, a man and a woman. The woman was Isabella the Corsican (from Day Twenty-five), and the man was Fraser Hughes, an old Scottish friend of my youth. Fraser is now a professional music critic, and Isabella a professional cinéaste (as well as amateur art critic). How odd to see them paired up in a dream! But these were two people with a strong critical intelligence. The strong critical intelligence I should be applying to Cuba? Maybe.
The two of them persuaded me to travel to a certain place way up in the hills above Havana. They refused to tell me why at this point, but they insisted so strongly I couldn’t say no. There was no traffic, few buildings, just a few huts and narrow pathways leading up to the high ground. Yet I found a bicycle, anachronistically, and rode effortlessly along the paths up into the hills, then knocked on the door of a big old southern Ontario-style brick farmhouse. The door opened. I was ushered in and presented to none other than Fraser and Isabella, who had somehow got there before me.
They asked if I would be interested in the task of building some earthworks, a stone wall and a flower garden around the house. I was given all the basic information on what was required and was told to do whatever I wanted within that framework. They wanted me to start work immediately. I believed them when they said there would be great benefits if I performed this job properly, but I’m not sure what the benefits were, or who would be benefited. Yet I was certain I wanted to do it. I didn’t even think of saying no.
So
I was working alone on the wall, and the earthworks, and the planting of flowers – all at the same time. But gradually I became confused, and couldn’t remember what I was supposed to be doing. I doubted! Suddenly there was an earthquake: the earth opened up and swallowed all my work, my tools, my materials, my plans. But there was no other damage. The house had not been damaged.
Fraser and Isabella came rushing out, and they were very upset. They thought it was somehow my fault, and they decided it wouldn’t be a good idea to continue on, because obviously the gods had turned against this project. But maybe if I were to leave my bicycle here and roller-skate back down to Old Havana, then I could skate back up the next day, and it would be okay to try to start over again and see what happens. Such a strong show of dedication to sacred rituals would somehow placate the gods, and finally the same allimportant benefits would accrue, plus bonuses.
The dog from the house in the hills was running right along with me as I skated back down to the city. The dog’s friendliness was a sign that I would successfully return and give the earthworks project another shot. But it was not to be: after a while I became tired and had to stop at the side of the road. It was easy to climb the hill but getting down is hard work. The dog jumped into my arms and started licking my face – then, with no warning, it bit me on the finger so hard that blood spurted out in a long powerful arc. The dog started licking the blood as it fell in puddles on the ground. I put my head down and fell asleep.
I don’t know what it all means, but there’s nothing in it that sounded like an urgent warning about anything. So I’ll just give this dream back to Cuba, with good wishes, for Cuba gave it to me in the first place.
—
Today when I went up to the rooftop for breakfast, after having missed yesterday, the staff remembered my donation toward a new coffee maker. They repaid me with the largest breakfast imaginable – with big thick slices of fresh tomato and raw onion, and three of their delicious dry rolls, and though I usually get two small eggs today they presented me with three extra-large ones perfectly cooked. And plenty of coffee. I’d finish one cup and another would be placed on my table. Even the kitchen staff was coming out and blowing kisses. This is absolutely nuts. Somehow they managed to get their coffee maker replaced, but surely it took more than my one-dollar contribution. And the serious young waiter, new on the job, who has been slow to learn the basics of tending table, actually relaxed a bit and allowed himself a smile.
But this young fellow, the little guy with the stern but handsome face and the stiff-legged manner of walking, still almost always takes the plate to the wrong table, and he’s been here for a week already. The would-be diner will say that’s not what I ordered. Then the young fellow will look very perplexed, as if he had been certain this sort of thing would never happen again. The diner will then say but I will take it anyway. Then the waiter will look even more baffled, not understanding why the diner would take it if it wasn’t what he’d ordered. Then the maitre d’ comes running over and says no, don’t take it, it belongs to the lady at table 8.
—
On my way out, I passed four attractive youngish women sitting at a table. One of the women was a dark-haired beauty with braces on her teeth, though she was at least thirty. As the others chatted she was flipping through a mint copy of Christopher P. Baker’s book, same as mine. So I introduced myself and politely asked if she were enjoying it. Her name was Montse. She said yes, it’s heavy to tote around but it is filled with almost too much detail. She said the four of them were from Spain, but they were working as schoolteachers in San Antonio, Texas. I looked surprised, and they laughed. I expressed my sympathies for the horrible explosion on the Madrid commuter train yesterday. Montse looked very sad and said, Oh yes, we weren’t there of course, but we’ve been watching it on TV, and monitoring it very closely. And then for some foolish reason I started to cry. Tears popped out and ran down my cheeks. I couldn’t have been more embarrassed if my pants had fallen down. It was like a pair of little volcanoes erupting, with no warning. So I said adios and scurried away.
—
It was a day off for Mimi so we went for our petite promenade du jour. She walked closely in step with me, so I had to put my arm around her. It was very pleasant. It’s odd that she has been trying so hard for years to learn English, and it has always been a struggle for her. But when she began studying French she found it equally hard but she was more motivated, because it appealed to her somehow, French was in some way more suited to her personality, and she found herself thinking about it all the time even when she wasn’t studying it, so it was as if she was learning it with little effort. She didn’t have that experience with English.
If only her lengthy, fast-paced narratives in three languages were easier to understand. I would have a certain understanding of something she said – for instance, that her father had fought at the Bay of Pigs, sinking ships and blasting fighter planes out of the sky. But then it turned out she hadn’t said that at all. With her rapidly switching from English to Spanish to French, one minute I was certain she was telling me that her father had been a close personal friend of Fidel, and that Che taught her to play chess, and the next minute she would deny having said that.
What was it like when the Russians suddenly left Cuba? She said she was unhappy, she knew something terrible had happened, and she couldn’t understand why it had to be. It was very difficult for her, and sometimes when she was studying she would just start crying. “I had a lot of Russian friends, boys and girls, since high school, we all lived together in my building,” she said. Her three closest Russian girlfriends were Navia, Nastia, and Skip. “They were very good girls.” And overnight they were gone.
Fidel was quoted a while back by the recently deceased Arthur Miller as telling him that the Russians left because Fidel wanted them to help him in liberating various other Latin American countries from the yoke of U.S. domination. The Russians weren’t all that keen on this idea, because they feared a nuclear war would break out. Clever Russians. But Mimi said that couldn’t have been the reason, because if it had been someone would have told her.
She agreed that Havana is a warm, sexy vibrant city full of music now, but during the Special Period she and everyone she knew were in deep depression, there were no smiles. People were walking around like zombies. Was that a difficult time for her personally? She said it was terrible, and she was desperate and uncomfortable. She felt as though she were walking in quicksand. She said there is a law against selling a child’s virginity now, but things were so desperate during that terrible period, such things were done. In fact a friend of hers sold her daughter’s virginity for US$150 to a rich man from another country. He didn’t take her back to his country, but he slept with her that night, and enjoyed taking her virginity. The girl is now married and has children of her own.
Mimi is, of course, like any Cuban, worried about another U.S. invasion. For what it was worth I told her that I thought there was no reason to be afraid. She was dubious, she wanted to know why. I told her it was because the whole world loves Cuba, and is concerned about its welfare. Cuba is the most famous country in the world, everybody in the world admires Fidel and everybody loves Cuba, except for the people in the U.S. government. And if the United States were to attack Cuba, they would be branded as war criminals, they would be universally despised and disgraced. Everybody loves Fidel except for George Bush and his friends. I thought it was important to deliver that message for some reason, so I stopped every few words to make sure she was getting it.
Nevertheless, I told her I thought I had seen some people building a bomb shelter. Could that be right? “Yes,” she said, “it would be that. I know this has been going on, because the new U.S. government is so thirsty for blood.”
When she began to realize that I had such positive feelings about Cuba she was surprised. She wasn’t used to that sort of talk from tourists. She always sensed that the tourists she met in her work were always very negative about her
home and native land. She became very excited and said, “I love you, if you love Cuba, I love you.” I told her I was not talking this way so the Cubans will love me, but because I believe it. I told her that I always admired Fidel, even when others didn’t, and lately my admiration has been growing to the point where I now think of Fidel as a great genius. He will soon be dead, but I am sure the Revolution will continue on without him. I have more appreciation for Fidel today than ever before. And when people speak badly about him, they sometimes, to my ear, seem to be twisting the truth, putting an ugly spin on beautiful things, or to be repeating the lies of others as if true. The people who admire Fidel, for instance, will always be prepared to offer sources for their factual information.
She thought that when sympathetic foreigners come to Cuba they think of the country as something strange, something rare, because not always can they understand how the Cubans were able to withstand the blockade and the imperialistic arrogance, the slander and hatred, and continue on being happy, industrious human beings.
I said that if the human race is evolving, and a new breed of men and women is appearing anywhere in the world, that place would have to be Cuba. And if you asked that question pretty well anybody would say the same thing, especially if they had visited Cuba.
—
I wanted to give Mimi a gift. I didn’t have anything to compare with the beautiful Aztec goddess. The best possible thing I could think of was money. But Cubans are often difficult to give money to. Would she accept it? I counted out a modest 150 pesos – to her it would be half a month’s salary, to me it’s a pizza. She refused to take it. I explained why I was giving it to her. She wouldn’t take it. So I began to think I should not press it any further, because it was offending her Revolutionary principles, or maybe just her human principles, and it was as if I was being stubborn and overbearing by continuing to insist that she take it. In fact, I asked her if this was offending her Revolutionary principles and she laughed hysterically. So I think I had her there, it was true, and she was laughing because she knew that was true, that I had guessed correctly, though she hated to hear me use such a phrase so stale and pompous. I could have accidentally on purpose left the money behind, but that would have been giving her a problem of my own.
An Innocent in Cuba Page 36