An Innocent in Cuba

by David McFadden

  So I’m still stuck with these pesos. I do hand them out to people who are obviously destitute but aren’t so obviously pestering me for a handout. I’m still hoping some miraculous idea will pop into my mind, satisfying my desire to give Mimi something she would value as much as I valued her goddess, and her goodness.

  And when Mimi told me that she loved me it was a Revolutionary thing to say, because she didn’t love me because she wanted anything from me, or because she wanted to romance me. Rather she loved me for no other reason than that I loved Cuba, because she was moved by what I said about Cuba, and because I somehow made her feel better, prouder, about being a Cuban. And when I told her about the Cuban craze going on right now in Japan, so I’ve heard, in terms of music, culture, history, and so on, she hadn’t heard of that, and that too made her feel proud of her poor country. It also reminded her that when she was a child she wanted to live in a Japanese house.

  But most of all she loved me simply because I told her that Cuba is the most famous country in the world, everybody loves Cuba and wants it to prosper, and Fidel is everybody’s favourite world leader.

  —

  Earlier today I stopped to chat with a fellow who was sitting in the open door of a house on Calle Tejadillo hawking bananas. It wasn’t his house, it was a friend’s house. He lived out in the large suburban community of Regla. He wanted to visit his friend, so he brought as many bananas as he could handle and was now offering them for sale.

  His name was Yasser Aly. He reminded me of Jannier very much in his outgoing personality and enthusiastic manner of speaking – also in his sense of useful private enterprise. Both were young men with a lot of integrity. Neither was at all bitter about anything as far as I could see, but Yasser Aly did find it odd that he was unable to get a job, and was also unable to get a satisfactory explanation for being continually told no dice. Same situation as Enmo. He wanted to be a marine engineer, but when he applied at the school they kept turning him down without explanation.

  He said, “I used to chase tourists for money. You know: Amigo! Where you from? Are you staying in a casa or a hotel?” But as he grew older he grew tired of it. Maybe that sort of background got in the way of him getting into the marine engineering course.

  He had also sometimes worked at escorting groups of foreigners on tours of the city, pointing out all the sights. He did that every day for a whole season. He made twenty dollars a day, but the police caught him, and he was forced to quit. He said it wasn’t that he didn’t have a licence, for such a thing is usually overlooked. It was because he was doing it too much on his own, in some kind of unauthorized manner he didn’t understand, rather than through the channels, and with all the requisite paperwork. We’re into a murky area of Cuban politics for sure. They seemed to be accusing him of taking shortcuts because he didn’t have the patience to read the fine print or to figure out all that detail. And so he was forced to quit. In Canada someone in a situation like that would just phone a lawyer.

  So now he’s been desperately trying to get a job with his excellent English but with no luck. He thinks he has a mark against his name for being more interested in enriching himself than enriching the state. It’s hard to defend yourself against a rap like that. Just a little private enterprise can do you in, though many are able to leap the barriers.

  I told him about my experiences with the “milk for my baby” routine, and he said it was a complete and utter scam, and that’s all there was to it. This was the first he had heard of this scam, but he had no doubt it was a scam. Every baby in Cuba gets a litre of milk a day, free, he said, until the age of four at least. I asked him if he thought that the fellow would have split the five dollars with the woman who ran the store, and that the milk would go right back into the cooler. He was affirmative on both counts. I felt like phoning Fidel and telling him about it and giving him the name of the store. Yasser Aly did have some admiration for the nature of the scam, playing as it did so cleverly on the average tourist’s desire to help the poor people of Cuba, and their natural suspicion that perhaps the right-wing line on Cuba may be right, and that Fidel may be deliberately bleeding the soul out of the Cuban people for his own personal enrichment. They will go home and tell their friends, “I actually met a very nice man who was desperate to get some milk for his baby. So I marched him right to the store and bought him a three-quart plastic bag full. He was so grateful! You should have seen him run home with that bag.”

  Yasser Aly was the only one who could answer my silly question about how Cuba got its name. He said when the Spanish first arrived, the natives were talking about “kooba,” “koova,” or “koowa” all the time, because that was the name of a certain fruit they were very fond of, and that the Spanish were fond of too. He couldn’t remember what we call it today. Maybe it was pineapple. That’s my choice. Or maybe coconut. As soon as he told me that, I remembered I had read it somewhere a long time ago. So it must be true. The Spanish would say to the natives, “What is your name for this place?” The natives would think they were saying, “What is your name for this fruit?” So they would hand the Spanish more fruit and say “kooba, koova, koowa.”

  DAY TWENTY-NINE

  MY LEFT EARLOBE

  Saturday, March 13, 2004. A falling leaf can hit you and cause damage. Not as much damage as the brick that hit that fellow in Sancti Spíritus maybe – but one leaf from a laurel tree on the Prado, with unerring accuracy, whacked me on the left earlobe very hard late last night, and drew blood. Glad I was watching my step instead of stargazing or I might have lost an eye. I actually noticed the leaf pass my eyes before scoring a bull’s eye on my earlobe, and it stung like a bee. I had to show my left ear to Barbaríta this morning because she wanted to know where the blood on my pillow was coming from.

  When my friend A. was here ten years ago, she visited the seventeenth-century San Felipe Neri church and convent, at Aguiar and Obrapia Streets in Havana Vieja. She took some mysterious and moody photographs of the interior of the church, with people kneeling at the altar, and the beautiful interior courtyard, with people sitting on benches and drinking in the silence. She met a man who had just been appointed head of a restoration project, with headquarters at the church. He had a team of three students who were halfway through restoring some old silver candlesticks. She asked if I’d pop in to see how the restoration was coming along. I can report it’s coming along brilliantly, but it’s no longer a church, it’s a secular concert hall. He must have known that’s what they were planning to do when he had his interview with A., but he didn’t have the heart to tell her because she likes churches.

  This may be distressing to Catholics, but more people are attending the concerts than ever attended mass. In fact, most of the concerts are of religious music, and the concert hall has an ecclesiastical feel to it. By some miracle of the arts of restoration and renovation, the hall retains an eighteenth-century atmosphere; the old religious paintings have been saved, and restored, and are placed lovingly on the fresh new walls. The orchestra plays where the altar was, there is no sign of an altar now, and the chorus sings on the balcony behind and above the audience.

  I’m being given a tour by Marita, a charming woman of thirty-three, happy to be able to practise her English on me. We have the usual small talk – but I am getting better at it, and enjoying it more. She is happy to describe the transformation from church to concert hall – in English, and insisting that I correct the slightest error. We were on the second floor and she said, “Come, I have my affairs on the first floor.” I didn’t know whether to correct her on that one or not, so I just laughed.

  Her “affairs” turned out to be a table loaded down with compact discs and books for sale. The books are by the official historian of Havana, Dr. Eusebio Leal Spengler, author of an excellent guide to Havana Vieja, which A. bought when she was here, and which she solemnly presented to me when I left on this trip. The maps are particularly beautiful. So I was thrilled to see that Dr. Spengler as he is known, is s
till at it, and has more recently written many other books about Havana, highly detailed histories of certain distinguished buildings and neighbourhoods.

  Marita said Dr. Spengler spends most of his time wandering around Havana Vieja and he pops into the concert hall at least twice a week. I should keep my eye open for him, she said. He’s a great guy to talk to. He’s my age, my height, and it’s amazing how much alike we look.

  So I decided to go looking for a guy that looked like me, and when I found him I would say, “Dr. Spengler, I presume.” But it wasn’t to be. I asked around, met many people who told me pretty well what Marita had told me, but I couldn’t find him. I think he was told someone was looking for him and he went into hiding. Maybe he’d spoken to a tourist once before and never again.

  Marita did say if I didn’t find him, I should come to the concert hall tomorrow at 7 or 8 p.m., he’d be here for sure. Her face just lit up with pleasure. She seemed to relish seeing the two of us together, and she thought it was important that we meet. In fact she gave me a throwaway map of Havana Vieja, and marked where his office was, at the corner of Mercaderes and Empedrado, just off the Plaza de la Catedral.

  —

  I was making my way slowly, serenely, in the general direction of Dr. Spengler’s office, when I ran into the four friendly Spanish ladies from Texas. They were sitting in a row on the long east bench of the beautiful Plaza de Armas. We all exchanged names this time. Montse, Rosaria, María, and Reisa teach Spanish to Hispanic children. Sounds crazy, but the Hispanic population in Texas is growing more quickly than the number of Spanish teachers, so they are importing teachers from other countries. Each of them teaches at a different school.

  We sat in the park and talked. They are going to rent a car and go down to Pinar del Río. I warned them about the dangers of driving and that the roads are much worse than advertised. But that didn’t bother them.

  Montse said she was interested in exploring the Santería religion, but the others weren’t interested and I didn’t want to tell her that I wasn’t interested either, but I think she could tell. There was a band in the park, a large Sentería musical group. Several women dressed all in white (and some not) had begun to dance wildly, with swirling skirts. The highly percussive music was beyond critique. I couldn’t resist jumping to my feet, transformed into a madman as if by a little Sentería miracle, and one of the dancers, not one of the ones in white, beckoned me enticingly. Who says tough guys don’t dance? I caught the rhythm, or it caught me, and these old bones were whirling and twirling like mad. I could hear kids screaming: Look at that gringo go! My partner, black as shoe polish but shining with pleasure, gave me a big kiss on both cheeks, and then an even bigger one on both lips. She had blue-and-green stripes of paint on her cheekbones, and she was wearing a swirling red-and-green ankle-length dress. Whew! That was one big fat steaming wet kiss, but when she did that I was so shocked, from head to toe, that I lost the beat and had to retire. It was like a knockout blow. She took the juice out of me, dear reader. One kiss did it! And when I turned around everyone in the park, including Montse and her friends, were laughing and applauding. I’m usually a bad dancer, but felt I’d done a good job for an older gentleman, perhaps under the spell of some Senterían goddess named Euterpe.

  —

  The shoe store was very well stocked, but it was also very busy. My size and preferred style was forthcoming, but the shoe pinched. It seems that each size came in just one width. Without checking they said they didn’t have anything wider. They were so busy they didn’t have the time to waste on someone who was hard to please. They were practically throwing shoes at people, and if the shoe didn’t fit, don’t wear it.

  But a lot of money was changing hands and that’s the main thing. People need money, so that nobody will step on their toes, and people need shoes for the same reason.

  —

  When I catch up with Mimi she looks at me with alarm and says, Why is your face all red? She must have remembered it as white from two days ago. I said it’s called sunburn, everybody gets it but only fair-skinned turnips like me turn red. She looked closely to make sure I wasn’t fooling her, then said, “Oh!”

  She also mused, meaningfully and pointedly, about how it often happens that writers come here and go around telling everybody how much they love Cuba and then go home and write horrible stuff about the country. I didn’t ask for any examples of who that would be, but surely she wasn’t suggesting anything. I’ve definitely heard those complaints before, particularly in Ireland. And I might even have been accused, by the people who live in the area written about, of that kind of duplicity, because we all tend to hate any travel book written about our hometown, or the place where we have chosen to live. We hate the writer for noticing stuff we’ve never noticed, and we hate him for writing about stuff that we would have preferred he hadn’t noticed.

  Mimi told me she has a brother who lives in Florida. I asked her what he does. She said, “He’s a black Mexican, he doesn’t do anything.” She sounded bitter, but I didn’t pursue her on it because I didn’t want either of us to be bitter just then. It would have been too obvious to point out that she herself is a black Mexican, and she does lots. I felt as if I didn’t want to get into all that with her. She earlier had made a statement to the effect that she’s not on very good terms with her mother because she won’t forgive Mimi for having married a black man. And at that time I did say the obvious, that Mimi’s mother married a black man, and it was a good marriage, and he was a good man. But she didn’t reply, and it would be best not to pry. Given the language difficulties, it’s not easy to determine how profoundly we might have been misinterpreting and misunderstanding each other.

  A group of about 150 people were trying to get exit permits, at the foot of the Prado the other day. They were dressed in their best business suits, carried little suitcases, and looked very grim. They were milling around, not meeting anyone’s eyes. They looked uniformly grey, but that may have been the shadows from a large grey building or two nearby. There was a sign on a high wooden fence saying EMIGRAÇION. Maybe some of them were the very people who used to criticize other Cubans for wanting out. Now they wanted out. It’s no longer considered proper to call those who wish to leave gusanos (worms), as they were back in the days shortly after the Revolution when bloody machete battles were breaking out between the people who wanted to leave and the ones who wanted to stay. Now the very people who used to call others gusanos are applying for exit visas. If that’s true, no wonder they look a bit grey. We all make mistakes. Life’s a gamble. They were reading notices on the wall, waiting for their name to come up, so they could get their visa to wherever it is they so desperately want to get to. Everyone was dead solemn. Nobody was smiling. Nobody was talking.

  DAY THIRTY

  A GHOST IN THE AIR

  Sunday, March 14, 2004. There was no way of getting out of a very claustrophobic situation in my dream. Many Cubans undoubtedly have that dream. They manage to live with it, but in this dream I was unable to. Some of the things were obvious. There was an older woman I was working for. She was issuing me instructions on the telephone, but I couldn’t understand anything she had said even though she was speaking perfect English. It was a cellphone, and I didn’t know how to hang up, so I put it in the glove compartment. Why couldn’t I understand someone speaking my own language? Why couldn’t I use a simple cellphone? There seemed to be a ghost in the air.

  Everything being hopeless, I decided to commit suicide. I watched from a distance, as one is said to do at the moment of death, as I galloped by on a black horse and into a black tunnel. I somehow timed the pace of the horse so that with each gallop I’d bounce up in the air and hit my head on one of the wooden crossbeams positioned at regular intervals along the stone ceiling. I had become my own guardian angel and was trying to destroy myself, from a distance.

  —

  At breakfast this morning, the four Spanish señoritas were there. We sat at the same table, we all
talked at once, and there was picture taking and the exchanging of addresses. Amund Schliemann, from Oslo, was there, at the next table, and he courteously offered to take our pictures. Montse told me not to be concerned about their driving, they’d be fine on their trip to Pinar del Río. After all, they were used to Spanish roads. They had listened wide-eyed to all the pitfalls I’d experienced, and they were certain they were ready for anything.

  There is María, who smokes a lot, and Reisa – “like Gorbachev’s wife” – the serious dancer with a lean and long muscular body, and there is Rosaria, who is a bit older, from Morocco originally, with red hair and a Norwegian look about her. Montse Quibus is the one I first spoke with, and she has been the friendliest of the four. María is the cynical one, the independent thinker; she seems to be saying, Oh how did we get mixed up with this guy, but then she got chatting along with the rest of us, it just took her a bit longer. Rosaria is shy, a keen listener, friendly but with not much to say, maybe because she’s a year or two older, and is the mother of the group in a way. She seems to be a special friend of Reisa.

  When the women left, I stayed on and talked to Amund for a while. Amund is an engineer in Oslo, and a native of that city, but he got his engineering degree at South Dakota State University. He’s thirty-five and is on a little tour that he thinks will change his life. He’s been to Jamaica, Guatemala, Mexico, has two weeks in Cuba, then back to Oslo. He sees big changes happening in the world, and wants to make a change himself. He says that “capitalism is putting on an increasingly ugly face,” or “capitalism used to look like Santa Claus but now it looks like Satan’s Claws.” He also says there’s no reason why the socialist countries like Cuba, Vietnam, China, and so on can’t get along with all the other countries of the world. Really, there’s not all that much difference. It’s not exactly apples and oranges, it’s more like Macs and Spies. And it’s nonsense that they should be in such aggressive competition. He was a very kind, well-spoken gentleman, a very attractive fellow, with fluffy blond sideburns and a long braid, blond and beaded.