We were never intimate friends, but we had spent a very wild and boozy late adolescence together, as part of a gang of five or six other fellows, all a bit older than I was. The jazz age had hit southern Ontario, and we were always rushing off to nearby Toronto or Buffalo to hear our favourite bands live and in person.
So it was all so very exciting to meet an old friend you haven’t seen in all those long, strange bittersweet years, and it was more of a shock to me than to him because he had never heard any news of my death, and I had thought of him often over the years, and always felt sad that such a fine person died so young and undergoing such slow torture to the end. And here he was suddenly resurrected in the paradise of Havana, among the Cubans, and their flowers, and their music, and their joy.
We talked about the others, what they’re doing now. He knew that Ron was living in small-town California with his high-school sweetheart with whom he has spent all these years together, and had taken an early retirement, reading and rereading the classics of world literature. I was pretty sure that John was still teaching in the music department at McMaster University, and that Brian was in Victoria and took an early retirement as a high-school music teacher.
Roger was pleased that I remembered certain events that he had, and in almost exactly the same little details. I remembered the time he and Ron had driven to New York, and they had been involved in an accident on the New York State Thruway, on the way home. All the details, as reported to me, had stuck in my mind all these years, and Roger confirmed them: Roger was driving and the force of the crash caused Ron to fly through the front window headfirst. But he was scarcely injured at all because he had been sleeping, with his brown suede jacket over his head.
Roger was always a more serious thinker than the rest of us. His mind always seemed to be working out problems we had no access to. He’s even more like that now, I’d guess. He’s calm and quiet, and he wasn’t getting excited about all this, but he did express a bit of amazement that I even remembered that Ron’s jacket was brown and suede. We performed several confirmation checks on our ancient memories and pronounced them dead-on for the most part. I remembered so much, and he confirmed everything.
We spent the rest of the evening reminiscing and philosophizing. We went to various pubs, the final one being the posh hotel he was staying at, the Hotel Parque Central, newly built but employing many Cuban design traditions. We talked at the bar till two in the morning and solemnly promised we’d never get out of contact again.
This meeting was a double miracle for me, because I couldn’t stop thinking about how it wouldn’t have happened if so many links in the chain hadn’t been forged at exactly the same time and place and in exactly the same manner, if the same little mistakes hadn’t been made, and it made everything feel haunted, and strange. Also the fact that I had long thought that Roger had passed away at an early age. In my overworked imagination, fired up by the atmospherics of the Cuban night, I had just witnessed a resurrection from the dead.
Roger was pleased, but it wasn’t as much a resurrection for him. For one thing, he’s never been that shockable, and he hadn’t heard any reports of my death, of course, nor of his own. And I was the younger fellow in that circle. I was only nine months younger, but that’s a lot when you’re eighteen. Mel, Ron, John, Brian, Al were all older, more mature and sophisticated, and I was eager to learn from them. So they would naturally make a bigger impression on me than I on them, and I had stronger memories of them than they had of me.
Roger had only been in Cuba for a week, he’d always wanted to visit Havana and had been looking for the right time. He finally said to hell with it, he wasn’t going to wait till he had the time to do it, he was just going to do it right now, take the time off and go. So he came down for one week. And was flying back tomorrow morning.
If that man hadn’t lost his temper and stormed out of the restaurant, I’d have finished my meal and left the place without having said a word to Roger, walking right past his table, and maybe continuing to believe for the rest of my life that he had died in his thirties. Further, I had sat in three different spots. I was so slow getting served at first. Dr. Spengler hadn’t been where I thought he would be. El Gallo didn’t serve beer. I was very tired but something told me to get up and go somewhere. And on and on. All these little fateful events seemed to have an intelligence of their own, and were somehow intent on engineering this meeting between us. Fate was sly and secretive, but it had its compassionate side as well, at times, and it whispers in our ear without us knowing it, as in the foregoing dream, and it had conspired, in a moment of generosity, to cause two old friends to become reacquainted.
And it would appear that when you think some old friend is dead, he or she is not really dead, they’re just in Havana, Cuba, waiting for you to show up.
—
Roger had seemed pleased that I had such vivid memories of so long ago, but to his credit he was more interested in talking about the quantum ideas he was involved in, also about Cuba and how it related to these ideas. At one point I went to the bar, and when I returned he said, “Yeah, I can see you’re David McFadden from the way you walk. We don’t really change that much, do we?”
I said, “No, and I can see your face as it was then and as it is now, in a sort of double vision, and I can see exactly where you have changed and where you haven’t.” I also told him he expressed himself in ways I remember, and he was always, in our group, the quietest one, the one who would be most likely to switch the conversation back to ideas, the life of the mind. I told him that he was the least mundane of the group. “We were more frivolous than you, goofier. You were more reserved. You were the intellectual, the philosopher. And you still are.”
He said, “Yes, we don’t change very much from our childhood to old age, and life is pretty much what we dream it to be.”
One other odd thing: our friendship had flourished during the time of the Cuban Revolution. When Fidel and Che were heading toward Havana, we cool cats were excitedly making plans to go to see Count Basie at Kleinhans Music Hall, Miles Davis at the Town Casino, Cannonball Adderley at The House of Hambourg. And it turns out that we were both touring the Museo de la Revoluçion on the same afternoon, and if we had been more observant, and the place hadn’t been so crowded, we might have bumped into each other then. Out of all the people I could have accidentally met here, it couldn’t have been anyone any better. It was as if the fates were really trying to get us to meet.
DAY THIRTY-ONE
THE DEATH OF HEMINGWAY
Monday, March 15, 2004. When Amund from Oslo landed at José Martí Airport Thursday night he was the only passenger to be detained. He was held for an hour, and every piece of his luggage was open, unfolded, shaken, and sniffed. They even unzipped his diary and skimmed through the pages. They were polite, but he figured it was because of his hippie hair that they wasted all that time in a futile search for drugs. And as soon as he got into town he was offered marijuana and cocaine, again because of his hair no doubt, but he is neither a toker nor a snorter, so both the good guys and the bad guys were wasting their time on him. He was living proof you can’t tell a book from its cover, front or back. Some ancient Roman probably wrote a play about a fellow like Amund. The strangest thing is that he has never yet been offered a chica in Cuba. I tell him all they ever offer me is chicas. What gives? Shrewd of the Cubans to have figured out that the younger guys desire drugs and the older guys desire sex. But guys like Amund and me, we don’t fit the mould, for we desire nothing.
Amund’s first day in Jamaica, however, a fellow on the street offered him drugs. “And I declined.” Did he want a woman? “No thank you.” To be ready for next time, he came up with a “white lie, that’s not entirely untrue, that I have this girl at home in Norway, and that I’d rather not be unfaithful to her. And they accepted that, surprisingly.” He said he knew that one is supposed to leave his home at home when one visits Jamaica. Only then can one get accustomed to the Jamaican way.
>
He got in trouble in Kingston when he took a picture of the entrance to Nelson Mandela Park, where two police officers were standing. They were upset because so many of them get killed in the line of duty each year. They seemed to think that he might show the photos to some gangster who would then shoot them. “They were speaking to me politely, but I felt a bit intimidated.” It was scary waiting for the cops to be convinced he was just an innocent tourist. They told him don’t ever take a photo of a police officer again. If you want to take a picture of a park, address the officer and ask him if he will mind moving out of the way for a minute, and they will.
“But I was a bit shaky after that. They could easily have jailed me, confiscated my camera, my film, fined me, given me a lot of trouble.” The strange thing about it was that he had been with two Jamaicans, a man and a woman, who were showing him the sights of Kingston, and who had suggested he take the photo. They didn’t say anything about asking the police to move. And when the police were grilling him, his guides did nothing to intervene. “I still haven’t figured out why they told me that.” I couldn’t figure it out either. Maybe they were just being prudent, not wanting to make things worse for Amund.
“Proud people, proud of their island the way it is,” he said when I asked for his basic impression of Jamaica. He thought there was a noticeable level of bitterness directed toward the white tourists, though. He’d accidentally heard some comments about the colour of his skin. He thought it was because of past injustices perpetrated by the white race on the poor Jamaicans over four hundred years of slavery, brutal colonization, repression, then having to fight their way back to independence.
At first he had to learn how to say no gracefully to their kind offers of women and drugs and various other things they wanted to sell him. Once he learned, things got easier. As a person from a country that is about 98 per cent white, he admitted to finding Jamaicans a bit frightening. “They sort of keep their image, they look scary, but once you speak to them, they lighten up, and actually they’re quite friendly and warm.” He divided the people he met into those who were “genuinely warm people,” and people who were “quite bitter, and not that friendly toward tourists.” He felt there was considerable envy if not resentment of the wealth of the tourists. “Once they realized they weren’t going to get my money they were warm and friendly, and lots of jokes and smiling. And if you greeted a Jamaican his face would break up in a smile.”
In Cuba, however, he felt that his greetings were not being responded to. “When I say buenos dias, buenos tardes, buenos noches to the Cubans I see no smile, I only see a hard face. I don’t know what it is. The first time I saw genuine happiness was in Havana Vieja yesterday when I was listening to Cuban music in the park. They were dancing and cheering and making fun. If it wasn’t for the earth their smile would go all the way around.”
I thought it might have something to do with the spring break, for when there are too many tourists it gets tiring. I’d noticed the change this week. There was much more friendliness before the spring break. It seemed odd to think that the Cubans should break into happy smiles just because of being greeted by a tourist. Especially in tourist season.
Amund wasn’t convinced. Maybe he was “greeting” the Cubans in a way that seemed condescending and frivolous. Monsieur Hulot was one to go around offering unsolicited greetings to the natives in the south of France, but nobody ever greeted him back. Amund said he felt his greetings were simply a polite way of expressing his pleasure about being a guest in their country. How odd that I was seeing Cuba as a joyful country, while he so far sees it as hostile. Also that the chicas leave him alone but are always after me.
“That’s what makes travel tales so interesting,” he said. “The strange subjectivity that comes from trying to interpret one giant ink blot.”
We were still sitting in the open-air rooftop restaurant, quietly observing the amusing behaviour of the previously noted little male waiter. He was being particularly interesting today. With a tray full of hot breakfasts in one hand, he would stop, take a note out of his pocket, read it, put it back in his pocket, then take it out, and read it again. We looked the other way and pretended to be sharing a laugh at something down in the street.
—
Amund said that in Oaxaca, he found that people wanted to greet him, but they expected him to make the first move. “When I’d greet them there’d be a big smile on their face. And it was like – well, they were just smiling. And that makes me feel so good, because to me it’s all about happiness, and I’m looking for signs, even though I know the answer, that happiness is not necessarily what we have in the western world. Happiness goes far beyond that. And there is that kind of happiness, that’s my impression, in both Mexico and Guatemala, I also think in Jamaica, but I’m not so sure about Cuba. So having been here for only three-four days now, I hope they are, but I haven’t seen as many smiles as I’ve seen in both Guatemala and Mexico, and Jamaica too.”
I suggested that might be a sign of a superior educational system. The Cubans carry too much of the burden of history, the men and women of Cuba know too much, they have long memories, they definitely do not carry the burden of a national inferiority complex, and it amazes me that they are so friendly considering everything. Their spontaneous friendliness and lack of obvious resentment is amazing. They may simply grunt when you greet them in passing, but if you have something real to say to them they’ve got all the time in the world for you.
I don’t know if I’d worn him out or won him over, but he said, “That’s right, that’s right. But I’m happy about being here, because this is one of the experiences I really wanted to have. One of the things I was most looking forward to, was to come here to Cuba and see how things are. I’m fascinated by how the system works, though I don’t know how it works here.” I told him my impression is that nobody does, not even Fidel.
He said he’d spent several hours yesterday in the Museo de la Revoluçion and followed the history from the first Spaniards coming to Cuba all the way up to the 1960s. “And then I was full, I couldn’t take any more in. There’s a lot going on here for sure.”
Which of the four countries would he be most likely to return to? “That’s interesting. Even though I was shocked, and intimidated, and uncomfortable with the situation in Jamaica the first four days, I would say it’s the country I’m most likely to return to.” He thought that was because he was so pleased and proud to have made the transition from being extremely awkward and fearful in Kingston, to learning how to cope, to finding the Jamaican way, so to speak. He was thrilled to end up being able to relax totally with the Jamaicans. I suspect, however, that soon he will be able to relax that way, and more so, with the Cubans. Let’s hope it happens before he leaves Cuba in three weeks, with a week in Havana, then two weeks visiting Pinar del Río, Viñales, Cienfuegos, and Trinidad.
Amund went with a fellow named Lammy to see Bob Marley’s tomb, and up there in the mountains the people were friendlier and less aggressive. “They were poor, but there were no signs of deprivation. A lot of Rastafarians were smoking their joints all the time. I couldn’t really tell whether they were happy or what it was, but they certainly seemed satisfied in some way. Everything is mellow, everything is chilled out. Nobody’s stressed in Jamaica. It’s soon come, soon come, that may be ten minutes, that may be an hour. And that’s a thing you have to get used to in Jamaica. It’s not like that in Norway. In Jamaica it’s all about knowing that you are the tourist, you don’t set the agenda. If you try, you’re arrogant. I think that’s where many tourists fail, in their attitude toward the locals, they think they are the superior ones, they have no humility. They think of themselves as coming from some western civilized prosperous country and then everybody should jump when they holler.”
When he was boarding a plane in Cozumel he heard a woman say, “ ‘Oh my gawd, you know where I can buy a can of Coke for regular money?’ And she held up two dollars. And it’s like I was just about to te
ll her, man you’re in Mexico, the regular money is pesos. But it was like, okay, I shouldn’t say that. But it was such an arrogant and ignorant comment. But they’re not all like that. I met quite a few backpackers in Mexico and they were reflective, intellectual, pissed off with the system. I asked if they had been harassed on their travels because of being from the United States, and they said yes. And that is so sad, that should not be, that makes me more ignorant and arrogant than they are for harassing them.” He was surprised when I told him that sort of thing definitely does not exist in Cuba. Everybody says the same thing, it’s not the U.S. tourists they dislike, it’s their government.
—
In his travels so far he had met no tourists from the southern states, only from the states that border with Canada. Why would that be? I suggested maybe because Cuba makes it convenient for them because of daily flights from Vancouver, Montreal, and Toronto. Also the northern part of the United States is more liberal because of proximity to Canada. They read our papers, watch our TV, listen to the CBC, and they hear different viewpoints and fresh attitudes, and they become more liberal, and more likely to think for themselves and to harbour strong desires to go to forbidden places. I always think of Canada as the conscience of the United States.
“Just as Norway is the conscience of Europe!” Amund said he’d been to Canada just the once. During his time at college in North Dakota (the conscience of South Dakota?), in 1994, during the spring break, he and some fellow students drove up to Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. “We drank beer for three days and chilled out. That was that. But on this trip so far, I’ve met so many Canadians, and they seem so friendly and open, and just comfortable to be around. I have the idea that the western part of Canada is beautiful, everybody tells me British Columbia is so fertile, so green, so mountainous, so close to the Pacific. But I also met quite a few Ontarians who said the Ontario area is beautiful as well. So I guess there are a lot of things to see in Canada too. But travelling the way I’m travelling now, you suddenly realize oh there’s so many things to see, oh, so many.”
An Innocent in Cuba Page 39