An Innocent in Cuba

by David McFadden

  Then a security guard came by and insisted I come down. Later I would wonder why I was so stubborn, but at the time it made perfect sense to refuse. He insisted he would call the police if I didn’t go with the flow and get down right away. I told him I would make a compromise. I would stand up rather than sit on the wall with legs dangling.

  So I went over to the west side of the grand marble base of this statue and stood there, figuring Mimi would see me even better that way and maybe the security guard would leave me in peace. But then he returned with a fiercer look on his face and ordered me out of the park. I told him he was the worst excuse for a Cuban I’d seen in weeks. He abruptly turned and walked away.

  So then I got thinking, Maybe I’m being culturally insensitive. Maybe this is a sacred shrine and I’m desecrating it, like the Satanic Verses, and maybe there will be a fatwa put on my head. So I reluctantly got down to the ground level, and just stood there, on the west side of the base of the statue. I didn’t want to go sit on the benches because they were in the shadows and Mimi might have had a problem finding me.

  And then I was suddenly confronted by a large Afro-Cuban cop, who, with a deep voice and anguished face, pleaded with me to come to my senses and be like everybody else, keep a respectful distance from the statue, even if you do not in your heart recognize the genius of José Martí, at least please do not offend others by being so disrespectful. Suddenly I became grown up again, my absurd stubbornness left me, I apologized, shook his hand, looked in his eye, we both smiled, and I walked off just as Mimi was hopping off the camella from the Alliance Française.

  I told her what happened. She said, Are you crazy? You were sitting up there? No wonder they were so upset. You just don’t do that in Cuba.

  A photographer and his assistant were setting up a tripod to take photos of the statue. Maybe they had complained, and that was why I was ordered off. I later found out that a similar event occurred in this exact same spot, on March 11, 1949, and it escalated into an international situation. Some drunken U.S. navy sailors urinated on the base of the statue and one managed to get to the top and sit on José’s head. An infuriated crowd gathered. The sailors were saved by the police in the nick of time. The Cubans were outraged that no charges were laid, and that the sailors were simply escorted back to their ship. Fidel’s great biographer, Tad Szulc, claims this incident gave Cuban anti-Americanism a big boost, and served to show that Fidel was anti-American that far back, ten years before the Revolution. Fidel was one of the leaders of the student protest the next day, but the police riot squads attacked the students with “extraordinary brutality,” in the words of Szulc. Fidel was beaten with truncheons. His men delivered statements to the papers, charging that it was a shame for Cuba to have a police chief who refused to arrest the sailors who were desecrating the monument, and instead attacked the patriotic students who were defending Cuba’s honour.

  DAY THIRTY-TWO

  THE WORLD IS A HANDKERCHIEF

  Tuesday, March 16, 2004. I phoned down to the desk and said when I was out last night somebody came into my room and stole the towels. Oh, that’s normal, said the desk clerk. She would have some towels sent up very soon. And she also said that a “message” had come in from the Spanish ladies. Please read it to me, I said. No, it’s not that kind of message. It’s just that they want to see you. She must have been about to buzz my room when I buzzed her.

  So I came down, and there they were, sitting in the car, parked at the entrance, waiting for me. All four of them got out, with four slams of four doors, and surrounded me on the narrow sidewalk. They’d had a wonderful trip to Pinar del Río. They said it was as they remember rural Spain, in their childhood memories: at every intersection there would be numerous hitchhikers. Montse said, “Every chance we got we’d pick up a hitchhiker and she would sit between us in the back seat. One of them told us she was going to the prison to visit her husband. We said oh my, what did he do? She said he killed a cow. He got six years in jail for killing a cow.”

  Reisa jumped in. “Oh no, he didn’t kill the cow. He witnessed the killing of the cow. He got six years in prison just for witnessing the killing of the cow – and not telling anybody.”

  “Not telling the authorities,” said Montse.

  I knew it was illegal to kill a cow. Or even a chicken. But six years?

  “She told us,” said Montse, “that she heard it was going to be reduced to three years. So she was going to the prison to tell him the good news.”

  Is this what it’s come down to? Does Fidel really want to create a nation of snitches? What will Mimi have to say about this?

  —

  The señoritas wanted to know how my meeting went with Dr. Spengler. I said someone must have had the time mixed up, because he wasn’t there. But it was a good thing, because otherwise I wouldn’t have met an old friend of mine from forty years ago whom I thought was dead. Montse responded with glee and said, “You know, we have a saying in Spanish: The world is a handkerchief. Do you have that in English?” I didn’t think so. “Yes, the world is a handkerchief. You open it up, you never know what you’re going to find. No, that’s just my naughty paraphrase. You open it up and you might find something you lost twenty years ago.”

  So now they were off to Trinidad de Cuba. They were chiding me for worrying so much about them, but you could tell they were pleased. I said I was glad my advice wasn’t necessary.

  Montse: Oh, no! Your advice was helpful.

  Reisa: Because of you we were more careful than we would have been.

  María: And we didn’t trust the maps as much as we would have.

  Montse: And we didn’t drive at night.

  Reisa: And we didn’t take any roads unless we were sure where they were leading to.

  María: And what shape they were in.

  Rosaria: Without your help we might not have returned by now.

  They expressed regret that I was going to be flying out Friday morning because they wouldn’t be getting back till Friday afternoon from Trinidad de Cuba. So I wished them a wonderful time, and kissed the hand of each of them, and kissed them each on the cheek. Montse looked me in the eye and said, “You are a good advertisement for your country. The Canadians are so civilized, such gentlemen.”

  —

  Last night, at the Alliance Française, Mimi had also had a nice compliment. After she had forgiven me for being overly familiar with José Martí, she told me how thrilled she was to be in the company of the French ambassadrice, and she felt as if she was on a higher plane now. Moreover, l’ambassadrice complimented her on her excellent French, isn’t that wonderful? And a French poet gave her a copy of his book. And inscribed it, with warm regards. She showed me the book, a modestly produced edition of a hundred poems, one on each page, and each poem was six short lines long – five lines, then a line space, followed by a final line. The poet seemed to be working on each poem as a jeweller cleans each facet of a diamond, and the poems evoked the landscape, with its burning horizons and ruined castles, its pain, its ugliness, as a symbol of the anguish of being human.

  Mimi looked splendid in her bright red lipstick, with her dark-chocolate face, and her bare arms a lighter softer chocolate, because she tends to keep her arms covered when in the sun, but not so her face. She’s nice to be with and she explains things to me. For instance, she told me I was lucky I hadn’t been thrown in jail over that José Martí kerfuffle.

  Being with Mimi on such a beautiful night in Habana Vieja was a badge of honour for me, because you could tell at a glance she was a highly intelligent woman with a great sense of humour, a pointy nose and receding chin, and when she wore her glasses she looked scholarly, and when she didn’t she looked bright and attractive. For a male gringo to be strutting around with a Cuban woman in his own age bracket is quite rare, apparently, and a bit unsettling, at least in the more touristy parts of town. I had a bite to eat at the Gentiluomo, and Mimi, having pigged out at the reception, had a beer and a few Hollywoods. When
she ran out and I offered her a Popular, she removed the tip. Her voice was raspy, almost as if it would certainly be painful to speak, but she insisted it wasn’t. Sometimes things that sound painful aren’t painful at all.

  —

  Sitting at the bar of the Ambos Mundos, to which we had strolled, was a very large fat tourist about sixty-five, knee to knee with a blond Cuban girl about eighteen, who was gleefully stroking his thighs, and slipping her hands up under his shirt and tickling his ribs and causing him to get red in the face. He whispered things in her ear and she replied, while giggling fiendishly: “Oh! I’d love to do that to you!” There were two empty stools to their right and then there was a lone intellectual Canadian woman wearing horn-rimmed glasses with thick black frames. She was about thirty-five, no lipstick or makeup, round-faced and wearing a grey business suit over a white silk blouse, and with a silver cross around her neck, intently studying her Cuban guidebook. And there were two empty stools to the left, then there was a man wearing a sweat-stained bright red Team Canada baseball cap (looking a lot like the one I lost) and watching the soccer game on television.

  We finished our drinks and strolled down toward the Hotel Isabella. I had often admired a beautiful flowering tree in a little gated park there, and it turned out to be Mimi’s favourite tree of all time. “That’s the flamboyant,” she said. That seemed a perfect name for such a graceful tree, almost throbbing with passion, enthralled with its own beauty, with blossoms halfway between lipstick violet and lipstick red, with delicate leaves that look almost fernlike, and with great green plants ululating at the base of the tree and tickling their way up its trunk. Next to the flamboyant was a gnomelike statue of Sancho Panza and his donkey.

  Being with Mimi made Havana look lovelier because she loves it so much and understands it so well. Sometimes I would point out some exquisite view and she would say, “Oh yes, I loves that too, I see that often.” She wished I’d choose something she hadn’t noticed, for just about everything she pointed out was something I hadn’t noticed. You couldn’t ask for more from the most highly paid guide. We kept looking for special images as if we were cinematographers, blessedly unencumbered by all the equipment that has to accompany the making of a movie. My most companionable companion found many more exquisitely subtle little images than the martyrs of photography would be likely to, and enjoyed them more. All we had to do was wander and watch, with nothing separating the eyeball from its object. We wandered around the winding little streets north of O’Reilly, around the Catedral Colón, and I knew I would later think back on this petite promenade and remember it as one of the most romantic and friendliest strolls since the Second World War, even if we were about to separate, perhaps forever.

  She was going overboard in making it clear she wasn’t interested in my money, and she wasn’t interested in using me as a ticket out of the country. She refused my pesos, and even when I asked her to get us ice cream she brought back just one, for me, and I couldn’t force her to take even one little lick. She also demonstrated her faith in Fidel, and in the principles of the Revolution, by her shivers of pleasure whenever I would say something nice about him.

  Again I asked how her mother could have been so annoyed that Mimi had married a black man – especially when she had married a black man herself. Mimi had a hard time expressing it, but it seemed that her mother considered her very special, and if she met a white man it would give her more of a chance to develop in the world and find the proper place for her own talents instead of being submerged, marginalized, optioned off somehow. So it was a keen disappointment to her mother, especially when the fellow in fact turned out to be a little man who drank a lot.

  That’s what Cuba’s like, I said. The big men stay sober and run the country and the little men drink a lot. She laughed and acknowledged that was probably an accurate description of Cuba. Or of any country.

  There is always sadness. Without sadness, something is not quite right. One must have sadness, as a sign that he or she is making the proper sacrifices one must make in order to honour one’s own existence in the universe. But this is a profoundly sad evening for me. I’m sad that I’m leaving Cuba and Mimi both. With Cuba I’m close to tears four days before I have to leave, while with other countries, it was at the most a tear or two on the final day. What gives? Maybe I’m crying for the Cubans and the spectacular sacrifices they’ve had to make in order to live in a country where everyone gets the basics for a decent life and lives in a fairly steady rate of harmony with just the right amount of irritants to test one’s mettle.

  —

  On Calle O’Reilly, you can stick your head in a window and buy a loose cigar for a dollar, and you’ll see a lot of guys walking along with conga drums, guitars, bongos – if you want to hear music just find a guy with a guitar and follow him.

  There are so many amputados on clogged O’Reilly, with slow-moving cars pushing people onto the narrow sidewalks, they’re in danger of bumping into each other with their wheelchairs.

  And just off Calle O’Reilly, by a little urban renewal area, there’s a large yellow garbage bin, and someone has spent several hours painting on it, very professionally, with blue and red lettering on white, an oft-repeated message from Fidel reminding Cubans that they are engaged in building a new civilization: “Un mondo mejor es posible.” But surely a better world is not possible if it entails having everyone spying on their neighbours and snitching on them. Surely that can’t be true. That’s not what Fidel had in mind. How could this be rationalized?

  When we got back to Mimi’s place, I told her about the cow killing, and about the man who was convicted of the crime of witnessing the slaughter but not reporting it. Six years.

  “Of course,” she said. “Do you understand why? Because we have not a lot of cows.” She said the few they do have are reserved for sick children. And maybe it was a dairy cow, producing free milk for children all over Cuba. But to throw someone in jail for not having blown the whistle on a cow-killer? She said she realizes it sounds like a very strange situation, but the government owns all those animals and only the government can kill them and distribute them in the way they want to. You can have goats all over your front lawn but you can’t kill them, you have to let the government trucks pick them up, freeze them, and distribute them, and you get your goat when it’s time for you to get it. She thought these problems were insoluble in a socialist state just as there are many insoluble problems in a capitalist state. If everyone were allowed to kill a cow any time he wanted, it would result in a very awkward situation, it would open the floodgates for a whole new form of private enterprise and be a terrible threat to the sovereignty of the socialist state. Plus they might run out of cows. So that is why there is no choice but to jail people who don’t report the private slaughter of public livestock.

  She got up and drank copiously from the rain barrel in a corner of her kitchen. Then she said she was hungry. I said I was too. She said I was just like her father, because, as he used to say, if you’re hungry, I’m hungry, if you’re tired I’m tired, if you’re thirsty I’m thirsty. I told her she was cute. She said, What’s cute? Cuba is apparently innocent of that word. I said you can be pretty, but maybe you’re not cute. But if you’re cute, that’s better than being pretty, and you don’t have to be pretty. She said, “Oooh, thank you. If I said something amusing, you might say that was cute?” Yes, I said, and I told her that cute means pretty, but a pretty girl can be stupid while a cute girl is almost always very intelligent. She took that as a compliment right up there with the one from l’ambassadrice française.

  Mimi had been trying to understand how I could be rich in Cuba but poor in Canada. She asked me, “What is the opposite of expensive?” I said cheap. She said, “Yes, Cuba is a cheap country, isn’t it?” I said yes, to get a Cuban cigar for one dollar is something that can only occur in Cuba.

  —

  This afternoon, at the Lido rooftop restaurant, while writing out these events, and more, from last nig
ht, I drank three beers. Then on my way up to my room for a nap I met Amund. He was going to a nightclub nearby that was featuring live music starting soon. It was a nightclub all right, wonderfully spacious, as if it had been converted from a great 1920s cinema palace. We arrived about four-thirty for a five o’clock start. At five-thirty we heard the start had been postponed to six-thirty. It was cold! We wished we’d brought a sweater or two, but we felt close to the moment when the music and the temperature would be red hot. And then at six-thirty the curtain did open, and a wailing wall of Cuban cacophony burst forth. And everyone leapt to their feet whistling and screaming. There were five vocalist/dancers on the front line, and behind them were eight musicians – two trumpets, a tenor saxophone, five percussionists, a stand-up electric bass. And it was pretty well no costumes, all street clothes, no emcee, no conductor, no announcer – just a solid monolithic wall of music.