3 dozen boxes quart-size Ziploc freezer bags
64 gallons fabric softener
120 rolls paper towels
216 bars bath soap
4 cartons Scotch-Brite sponges
24 rolls wax paper 60 cakes hand soap
1 carton insecticidal spray
25 cans insecticidal powder
6,000 paper napkins
2,000 plastic glasses
3,600 feet plastic wrap
1,000 garbage bags
120 liters pine disinfectant
20 liters oven cleaner
120 liters all-purpose cleaner
36 liters toilet cleaner
6 liters toilet rust remover
12 liters ceramic cleanser
120 scouring pads
36 liters glass cleaner
4 gallons grease cutter
672 rolls of toilet paper
384 Kleenex boxes
6 liters Woolite
360 clothespins
3 dozen boxes sandwich bags
2,400 feet aluminum foil
120 kilos Tide powder detergent
6 gallons shampoo
4 gallons cream rinse
48 boxes Tampax
24 boxes panty liners
24 kilos rice
12 kilos lentils
24 500-gram boxes (each) of spaghetti, linguine, penne, farfalle, and rigatoni
1,200 bottles wine
3 cases each of gin, whiskey, vodka, and vermouth
48 liters olive oil
8 kilos tea
8 kilos canned tuna
12 kilos Kalamata olives
3 kilos capers
2 kilos anchovies
12 dozen boxes assorted cookies
24 liters silver polish
20 liters brass polish
600 meters roast-tying string
1 kilo oregano
½ kilo each of thyme, basil, rosemary, marjoram, allspice, cinnamon, and cloves
6 cans baking powder
6 cans baking soda
240 packets dry yeast
360 candles
60 bobeches (glass collars to catch candle drips)
6 bottles Tylenol
12 tubes toothpaste
12 boxes Alka-Seltzer
6 boxes hemorrhoidal suppositories
2 gallons Mylanta
½ kilo athlete’s foot powder
2 liters calamine lotion
4 bottles Visine
12 boxes Band-Aids
6 dozen Gillette Trac II razor blades
6 bottles children’s chewable vitamins
4 bottles amoxicillin
4 bottles antihistamine
2 tubes Genticol (for yellow eye)
4 bottles children’s Tempra
5 bottles Dimetapp
12 bottles sunblock (SPF 20)
24 cans insect repellent
120 packets water disinfectant
And I am sure I have forgotten many things.
Our forty-foot container is packed by a team of six Indians. The toilet paper is the last to go. The packages are light and flexible and can be packed in anywhere. Four Indians stand and watch as two carry the clear plastic packages out on their backs. The look on their faces is of embarrassment, astonishment, and glee. “Cuba” is the only word I can catch. All six start to laugh, pushing one mover, who, laughing, pushes them back. I look at the leader of their group. “He India vote Communist,” the leader says, putting his arm around the one who was pushed. We all laugh.
I. 4
We stop in Madrid on our way to Cuba to visit a friend of Nick’s who lived in Cuba for four years.
“But what is the basic problem?” we ask Nick’s friend.
“Fidel is an old man who can’t admit that he made a mistake.”
“But surely it can’t be as simple as that.”
“Oh yes it can.”
I. 5
The captain announces that we will soon be beginning our descent. The Spanish executives in the first-class cabin stand, lean, anything to be better able to look out the windows. There is an audible sigh.
Christopher Columbus, on first seeing Cuba, wrote, “Never have human eyes beheld anything so beautiful.”
I have never been to Florida or the Caribbean: I never felt the need to go, but no one ever told me that the sea was violet. Violet, then a greenish violet band, then turquoise, then aquamarine, then clear, utterly clear, to rocks and white sand, then green, green grass dotted with silvery white palm trees, then jungle-covered bluffs and ravines with rivers shining through.
Can this be real? Am I looking at what I am looking at? I have seen photos of the Caribbean in magazines but always thought the colors were enhanced. I feel aesthetic floors, ceilings, and walls being snatched off me like dry mats, leaving me in a giddy new space.
How can anyone have a problem, living here?
Closer, we see houses and roads. We search for cars. There are none; then, closer, we see one, moving patiently. Closer, we see Olympic-sized swimming pools with (now it begins) no water in them, with high platforms for diving boards but no diving boards, just bent, rusted metal supports. We see rusted metal supports for billboards, the billboards having fallen off long ago. Closer still, the real funk begins. Now here we go: rust, lack of paint, mildew, stucco falling off, grass and trees growing out of roof drains, large rusted tanks and rusted, twisted metal structures—supports for more billboards, which have fallen off, too. Closer still, banana trees, papaya trees, mango trees, orange trees, plants with red plumes, orange flowers, yellow hanging bells, purple sprays. Climbing plants that look very much like the plants you see in dentists’ offices, only twenty times as big, climbing up palm trees, dentists’ office plants gone wild, a green blur past the plane now. An Aeroflot fuselage and a basic little airport.
A 1956 two-tone Chevrolet, a hospital-green brush-painted mid-1940s Oldsmobile, a canary yellow 1957 Ford, the year of the first tail fins, and a Studebaker, a Studebaker, with its bullet nose, moving majestically. Nick and I contemplate it as if it were a Titian. And we’ve only been on the road for three minutes. And there’s a gas crisis.
It’s Moscow, but instead of grim-looking white people walking down the road, you have happier-looking white and black and brown people walking down the road, waiting for buses in groups in front of giant slogans painted on walls or plastered on billboards.HASTA LA VICTORIA SIEMPRE (Always toward victory) one slogan reads, and another, VIVA FIDEL Y LA REVOLUCIÓN SOCIALISTA (Long live Fidel and the socialist revolution).
You think, for the first two seconds that you see the slogans, that the people who made the slogans, the people who put the slogans up, and the people standing in front of the slogans are somehow kidding, but then you realize, just as quickly, that they are not kidding.
There are advertising billboards, too, on trusses that are still intact, for Habana Club rum, Pepsodent, and Cubatur, a travel agency. Some thoughts about Pepsodent’s being an American brand, and about there being a U.S. embargo against Cuba, rise desultorily in our conversation, but we are too jet-lagged to speculate seriously.
Seeing advertising billboards among the slogans brings on another private wave of thinking-they-must-be-kidding, but again, the thinking-they-must-be-kidding vanishes in one second more.
It’s China, too, with the bicycles, whole families packed on some. No one is fat, and you are sure of it because they don’t have a lot on in the way of clothes. Shorts, halter tops, tank tops, sneakers—Cuban national dress.
IT’S ENORMOUS, OUR HOUSE. Six help lined up just inside the front door as we arrive: a butler, a gardener, a cook, a downstairs maid, an upstairs maid, and a laundress. That’s not including the chauffeur, who is bringing the bags up behind us, and Muna, our baby-sitter from Bangladesh, who to our intense relief has agreed to come with us. She will be lonely here, we know, and we have told her that, but she loves Thea, who is six, and Jimmie, who is four, and we have thought that it would be better for t
he children if she came along. We have told her that if she can’t stand it, she can leave, and we’ll understand.
I asked Nick several weeks ago if six in help wasn’t a little too much. We weren’t diplomats, and in the last country, we had only three, including Muna, but Nick said his predecessor had six, it was mean to let anybody go, the house was huge, the kitchen was medieval, and we could afford to live a little because the help cost so little, only $150 per month per person. Of the $150 per month per person, $85 would go directly to the employee, and $65 would go to Cubalse, the state-run conglomerate in charge of almost all construction in the country and almost all services, which provides domestic and other help to foreigners and watches over the help it provides. Eighty-five dollars a month was a fortune, Nick explained to me several weeks ago as we were packing, because in Cuba, the average salary was $10 per month.
“Watches over them?”
“Watches over them to make sure they watch over us.”
Muna is paid much more because she travels with us, goes to the States and Europe with us, and her salary is a compromise between what she would make in Europe and what she would make in the States. I have told her that the best thing to do when the other people in the house ask her how much money she is making is to lie and say $300.
We look through the house. The children career, yelling, through the echoing halls, searching for their rooms.
The help come at us, as we are touring, keys in hand. Five years of Spanish in school, but I cannot understand a single word. They open closets, safes, close them, put keys in our hands. They seem to want to get the keys out of their own hands as fast as possible. There is a lot of ceremony around a walkin air-conditioned closet off the kitchen. It is called the despensa and it is closed with a key, too.
We walk onto the veranda. Dwarf palms rustle like sheets in the evening breeze. We sit down in metal rocking chairs. The butler, tray in hand, asks us what we would like to drink. We ask for the most Cuban drink. It is a mojito, made of dark rum, light rum, lime juice, sugar, and crushed mint.
It was very hot when we arrived, but now it is cooler and a soft breeze hits us, though the words soft breeze flop dully as soon as I think them, just as before, on the plane, the word violet didn’t come anywhere near describing a whole new sensual experience. A pleasant panic as I rummage, jet-lagged, for what it’s like: it’s like getting hit by a well-powdered marshmallow.
“I think we’re going to like it here,” one of us—I don’t know which one of us—says.
WE HAVE TWO BATHROOMS off our bedroom. The bathroom we determine will be Nick’s, the His-looking bathroom, is green, purple, and pink. The gardener takes the lid off the toilet and shows us the date, 1928, and the words SANDUSKY, OHIO, stamped on the lid’s underside. “Sandusky, yeah!” I say in English. The gardener smiles. The bathroom we determine will be my bathroom, the Hers-looking bathroom, is pink and green with a pink sunken tub underneath a frosted arched window, against which you can see the shadows of palm trees waving.
The she of the Hers-looking bathroom, who lived here (we have been told) until 1958, was short, we realize, and the he of the His-looking bathroom loved her very much and liked to lie in bed and watch her in the tub, her hair pinned up, high-heeled satin slippers ready at the side. He was an adviser to Batista. “Mr. Castro’s going to kill me,” he is reported to have said. Which is what happened. She went to Miami and died there in 1981. They live in our house now, as ghosts.
The showerhead in his bathroom is a Speakman, crusted with mineral deposits, so that it can’t be adjusted beyond a fat spray. Only boiling-hot water comes out of it—there is no cold—so we shift to her bathroom. A modern European “telephone”-type showerhead has been attached to the pitted art deco faucet, which emits only a very weak spray. Still, it is a bearable temperature, and I hold it for Nick, who then holds it for me, training it on key parts.
I. 6
The Diplomercado is not far from us, in an area of inexplicably empty volcanic plains on the edge of the sea, with only the occasional tourist hotel. I have to go immediately, for there is nothing to eat in the house, absolutely nothing. Our shipment is still two months away. José, the driver, says that he will go with me. He says it will be a little crowded because it is Saturday morning.
There is a wedge of about three hundred people in front of a single swinging glass door. A guard is letting them in one by one. “Follow me,” says José. I get in immediately behind José, and we move, remarkably quickly, along one side of the wedge. “Permiso, permiso,” José says. People move out of our way.
I am embarrassed. I have heard that foreigners are served first, allowed to go places Cubans cannot go. I am wondering if I look so different: I am wearing a T-shirt with sweat patches under the arms and a pair of shorts. I have dark hair. It is José, I guess, who is making me seem foreign, but on the faces I see, there is no annoyance, though I think I hear a sigh or two. José nods to the guard, and in we go.
Once inside, people start running. José makes three quick leaps to the shopping carts, pulls one, and we make for the meats. People are standing four thick at the meat bins, scooping plastic-wrapped packages of frozen and semifrozen chicken and meat out of them—thin blood dripping from the packages—almost as fast as the clerks are throwing the packages in, then inching their way out of line, middle-aged white and brown women, mostly, their faces flushed. There is a little jostling, but there is no pushing or shouting. “Excuse me,” I hear, “please.” It is polite semipanic.
“What do you want?” José asks.
“Ground beef,” I say, “chicken . . .”
José feints, ducks, dodges, passing frozen chickens and packs of ground beef back to me in the one space I have found for the cart as I try not to think of freezer burn.
It is the only place to buy beef in a city of two million people.
The cook has made a list: flour, milk, cream, baking powder, salt, sugar, onions, carrots, potatoes, pasta, rice, beans, vegetable oil, and canned tomatoes, in addition to the meat. It’s a two-person operation, I realize. I stay with the cart while José moves around, gathering the items and returning to the cart.
Squid in ink, I see. Octopus, too. And a twenty-foot section of white asparagus in cans. Rows upon rows of cardoons in glass jars from Italy. Pigs’ feet floating in brine in glass jars with Russian writing on them. Something labeled “Luncheon Meat.” Purple hot dogs from Romania, standing on end in a kind of cookie tin, and layers of pale yellow peas and greenish carrots in gallon jars with no labels whatsoever. There’s a smell of sweat and mold and pickle juice, and the terrazzo floor looks like it hasn’t been mopped in thirty-five years.
There are American products, too, and some of them look the worse for wear—cans of Planters corn chips with the paper coming off the canisters and brown around the edges—but some of them look brand-new. Pepsi. Heinz ketchup. Del Monte canned fruit.
When it comes to what you really need, there’s vegetable oil, I see, but only a single row of bottles on the edge of the shelf, with no other bottles behind them. From a distance and if you squint, it looks like profusion.
José returns. He speaks slowly so that I can understand. There is no flour, he says, no sugar, and no salt. He tells me to leave the cart and follow him. José leads me to a swinging door at the back of the Diplo. He knocks, and a man in a green smock looks out cautiously. José mumbles something to him. The man shakes my hand. Just then, a cart loaded with packs of sugar is being wheeled out. José takes two off the top. The man in the smock disappears into the back of the shop and emerges with five packs of flour. José says maybe he can buy some salt from a friend. There’s no baking powder at all.
A shopping list in Cuba, I realize, is just a wish list. It has little to do with what might actually be there. There is toilet paper, though, lots of it, and I start to feel as if I have gone a little overboard with what I put in the container.
We pass the produce section on the way out. Four tomatoes wr
apped in plastic on a Styrofoam tray for $5.00, three apples for $4.50. I tell José I can understand it, about the apples, but $5.00 for four tomatoes, which surely must grow here? José tells me to buy just enough fruits and vegetables to last for the next day or two, until I can get to the agro.
CREEMOS EN FIDEL Y EN LA REVOLUCIÓN (We believe in Fidel and in the revolution) reads a slogan Nick and I see during a walk we take in the evening.
I. 7
I am beginning to get the names straight after three days. José, about thirty-eight, is medium height, wears too-tight guayaberas (traditional Cuban shirts buttoned down the front, with pockets), and has some hairs growing out of the top of his nose, which he tries to keep after. Manuel is the butler, and though he shares the title of custodio with the gardener, Miguel, Manuel is, by way of age (he’s fifty-five) and experience, the head guy and is perfect for the role. He looks like an Asian version of Robert Mitchum and Cubans call him Chino (Chinese), but he tells me that he has no Chinese blood and his ancestors were all from the Canary Islands. He is quiet, dignified, knows when to advise on the way things are usually done and when not to. He comes every day at four o’clock, as the others are leaving, serves dinner, and sleeps in one of the three maids’ rooms (the other two are used now for storage).
I ask Muna to find out if Manuel has a wife. Muna seems to be getting along with everyone and brings me back small bits of information.
Miguel, the gardener, about thirty-five, is small and slim with a razor-thin face and looks just like his mother, Estrella, the laundress, who has a razor-thin face as well, and bright blue eyes. A telephone and computer technician from Nick’s firm comes to do some work at the house and has a razor-thin face as well. This must be some kind of Cuban face, I think, some Galician or Canary Islands or Asturian face, until they tell me the electrician, Ysidro, is Miguel’s brother, Estrella’s other son. “I like their faces,” Nick says. “So extreme.”
Concha, the downstairs maid, in her mid-fifties, is tense, with eyebrows that have been plucked, then painted back on. She has one son in Tampa and a daughter in Venezuela. She has some pretensions to propriety (an urban background, some education, unlike Estrella and Danila, the upstairs maid, who are both country girls), which can be an asset when you’re having to deal with downstairs (taking phone messages, serving meals) but can lead to lording it over the others.
Cuba Diaries Page 2