An Innocent in Cuba
Page 43
Or all these wonderful buildings I’ve never seen before, on strange old streets I still haven’t walked along, so many parks I haven’t sat in, and my airport taxi passes an old building, now used as a polyclinico, and renamed Edificio Nguyen Van Troi, in honour of the great Vietnamese hero who was killed in 1964.
How stupid, counterproductive, and foolishly expensive it was of me to have rented a car on this trip. I thought it would give me more freedom and more time for fruitful contemplation, but it just made me feel more isolated. Also I should have gone to more baseball games; a game in Havana would have been nice. It even pangs me I didn’t go to the peanut factory, or the cigar factory, or to the Occidental Provinces.
My irritability might be a portion of a larger irritability that is mysteriously affecting a lot of people on this particular day. For instance, a girl who is hitchhiking hops out of one car at a stoplight. She has a fed-up, intolerant look on her face. She immediately hops into another car.
Even my driver seems to be suffering. If the driver ahead of him takes one split second too long before taking off when the light turns green, my guy will clench the steering wheel so hard his knuckles will turn white, and he’ll be on the verge of slamming his fist down hard on the horn.
I didn’t spend enough time on the Malecón or even in Havana Vieja. I should have taken Mimi to the Coppelia for ice cream instead of to the zoo. She loves the sun, and she has no tolerance for my attachment to the shade. But she seems to be getting too much of the sun, for she’s darker than she should be, and she has a kind of discolouration on the back of her neck that looks as if it could develop into the cancer her mother had. Not that I’m a dermatologist. Also I shouldn’t have tried to change her mind about the degree of racism in Cuba. She refused the notion that things had improved in the past ten years, because there was never any racism in Cuba in her entire lifetime, as far as she could see. But on occasion she will say something that indicates a contrary opinion also lurks in a corner of her large mind. Barbaríta saw me going and looked sufficiently sad for me to remember to give her a tip. She said, “One dollar, you go, that is all?” I reminded her I’d given her a dollar every day. You’d think we were married with kids. She stopped pouting and gave me a smile.
People on bicycles nonchalantly ride the wrong way in the fast lane of the expressway while eating a sandwich. Thick black clouds of diesel exhaust everywhere. But the “milk for my baby” mystery has been resolved, at least to my satisfaction.
—
In the departure lounge of José Martí Airport, every non-perishable item offered for sale has CUBA stamped on it, and every garbage bin has LUCKY STRIKE stamped on it. And there are flags hanging from the ceiling from every country in the world – again, except the United States. And there’s a whole bank of clocks showing the time in different cities, but no clocks show the times in U.S. cities.
I felt sad about leaving, then I felt irritated, now I don’t feel anything. But I laugh when I hear a mother telling her twelve-year-old boy, “It’s okay to call a smart person an idiot, but it’s not nice to call an idiot an idiot.”
Lucky I have a window seat, so I can hide my hot, silent, nonsobbing tears as the plane lifts off. Up at the Finca Vigía, in its days of glory, Marlene Dietrich, Ava Gardner, Spencer Tracy, Gary Cooper, and Errol Flynn frolicked in that large grey pool with the Busby Berkeley steps. All those people are gone, so why can’t I be gone? I have to learn to accept my fate like a man, I can’t become a Cuban.
I’m looking down at what I’m being wrenched away from, and it is hurting my heart and causing me to mourn how incomplete my visit somehow seems to have been, although the very nature of my modus operandi practically guarantees sudden departures and elliptical behaviour, just as it feeds on surprising bolts from the blue, and the odd tricks one’s spirit guide will play if one pays close enough attention to things of that nature. It’s also sad that I couldn’t stop thinking of my book, not for a minute. Torturing myself about it too.
And there was the sadness for not having visited Cienfuegos, for not having spent more time in Santiago, Bayamo, or for not having visited the English school in Baracoa, and for not having explored Havana more thoroughly. Sadness at not having headed up to the extreme north coast, the Romany Archipelago that Hemingway writes so well about. Innumerable sadnesses hung from the roof of my mind like bats from a cave.
I thought thirty-three days would be enough. Maybe for the book, but not for the author.
SUGGESTED READING
Anderson, Jon Lee. Che Guevara: A Revolutionary Life. New York: Grove Press, 1997.
Arenas, Reinaldo. Before Night Falls. Toronto: Viking-Penguin Books Canada, 1993.
Cabrera Alvarez, Guillermo. ed. Memories of Che. Secaucus, N.J.: L. Stuart, 1987.
Cardenal, Ernesto. In Cuba. New York: New Directions, 1974.
Castro, Fidel. Che: A Memoir. Sydney: Ocean Books, 1994.
———. History Will Absolve Me. Secaucus, N.J.: L. Stuart, 1984.
Carpentier, Alejo. The Chase. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux; Collins, 1989.
———. Concierto Barroco. Tulsa, Okla.: Council Oak Books, 1988.
Cirules, Enrique. Ernest Hemingway in the Romano Archipelago. Havana: Editiones Unión, 1999.
Didion, Joan. Miami. Toronto: Lester & Orpen Dennys, 1987.
Fernández, Alina. Castro’s Daughter. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998.
Galeano, Eduardo. Upside Down: A Primer for the Looking-Glass World. New York: Picador, 2001.
Gébler, Carlo. Driving Through Cuba. London: Hamish Hamilton, 1988.
Greene, Graham. Our Man in Havana. London: Heinemann, 1958.
Guevara, Che. Bolivian Diary. London: Pimlico, 2000.
———. Motorcycle Diaries. Mississauga, Ont.: Penguin, 1996.
Hébert, Jacques, and Pierre Elliott Trudeau. Two Innocents in Red China. Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1968.
Hemingway, Ernest. Islands in the Stream. New York: Scribner’s, 1970.
Hijuelos, Oscar. The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1989.
Hinckle, Warren, and William Turner. Deadly Secrets. New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 1992.
Michener, James. Six Days in Havana. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1989.
Saldana, Roldofo. Fertile Ground: Che Guevara & Bolivia. College Park, Ga.: Pathfinder, 2001.
Smith, Wayne S. The Closest of Enemies: A Personal and Diplomatic Account of U.S.-Cuban Relations since 1957. New York: W.W. Norton, 1987.
Sullivan, Rosemary. Cuba: Grace Under Pressure. Toronto: McArthur & Company, 2003.
Szulc, Tad. Fidel: A Critical Portrait. New York: Morrow, 1986.
Taibo II, Paco Ignacio. Guevara, Also Known as Che. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997.