Cuba Diaries

by Isadora Tattlin

  Danila, the upstairs maid, in her mid-thirties, is the simplest of the lot. She seems scared and doesn’t speak much above a mumble—scared, maybe, that she will lose her job to Muna, but we would never do that. Danila doesn’t have much to do, though, and she knows it. Muna won’t have much to do, either, during the day, when the children are in school. We have told Muna that her job in Cuba will be more mental than physical. It is her judgment we will be paying for, her consistency with the children. Danila is leche con un poquito de café (milk with a little bit of coffee)—a little bit black, with green eyes and a shapely figure.

  Lorena, the cook, is jet-black, with a lively personality.

  I don’t know much yet about the black/white thing in this country. So far it doesn’t seem to be a thing: you see black people and white people and brown people hanging out together in much more fluid ways than in the States—playing dominoes at card tables on the sidewalk, waiting at bus stops, holding hands, riding four on a motorcycle, each one of the four a different shade. There is no black neighborhood, no white neighborhood, and I find myself with a new feeling: it is the feeling of being relaxed.

  TE SERÉ SIEMPRE FIDEL (I will always be faithful to you). Fiel means faithful, but they have inserted a d.

  I. 8

  “We don’t have to wear uniforms?” Thea asks as I lay a T-shirt, shorts, and sandals out for her on the first day at the International School of Havana. Thea and Jimmie wore gray uniforms at the British-run school that they were in last.

  “No.” I have somehow forgotten to tell her and Jimmie this.

  “Wow!” Thea runs into Jimmie’s room. “No uniforms! No uniforms! No uniforms!”

  “IT WAS LIKE BEING at a party, but with new kids!” Thea says, jumping into the car after her first day at the International School of Havana.

  “Yeah!” Jimmie says.

  Thea’s second-grade teacher and Jimmie’s kindergarten teacher wave at me from behind the chain-link gate. “It went very well!” they call to me in English.

  “Did you put something in their juice?” I ask the teachers.

  They laugh. “They are happy children!”

  I drive home with Thea and Jimmie, bouncing on the backseat.

  “So how did it go?”

  “We sang, Mommy! We danced! I am going to be in a play!” Thea says.

  “I made puzzles with my teacher!” Jimmie says. “And there was a big pig in one puzzle! Ha! Ha! Ha!”

  Nick and I have heard about how hard it is on the children, changing schools and friends.

  We are home. Thea and Jimmie leap from the car. They dump their lunch boxes on the hall bench, take off their shirts, and run upstairs with their shirts streaming behind them like flags. “We’re in Kew-baaaaaaaa, we’re in Kew-baaaaaaaaaa and we don’t have to wear any uni-for-or-or-orms!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!”

  I. 9

  Miguel takes me to an agropecuario, or fruit, vegetable, lamb, and pork market. The pesos-only agropecuario is a middle way between the entirely state-run dollars-only Diplomercado, with its five-dollar-a-pound tomatoes, and the state-run pesos-only bodegas, where only Cubans can go, with ration books, to buy staples (when available) at subsidized prices. Less and less, though, is available in the bodegas, so Cubans are obliged to shop at agros and at the Diplo (if they have dollars) more and more.

  Agropecuarios, where farmers are allowed to sell on the open market a percentage of what they produce, have been operating—this time around—only about a year. Agros were first opened in the eighties and were very successful, but they were shut down after only a few months. Then, when the periodo especial began, and people, especially children, started showing signs of vitamin deficiencies, Raúl Castro declared that people’s not having enough to eat was a matter of national security, and the agros were allowed to open again.

  A farmer can raise pigs and lambs and sell their meat at the agro, but only the state can sell beef. Who can sell chickens seems to be undefined. Miguel says they are seen at the agro once every few months. Watermelons I see, and garlic and squash. Onions, limes, and white, red, and black beans. A pyramid of cabbages. Yuccas, malangas, and sweet potatoes. Cucumbers, and tomatoes at ten pesos (twenty-fifty cents) a pound instead of five dollars. Ten pesos is 5 to 10 percent of a Cuban’s monthly salary, but still, I feel relieved. Parsley, spinach, and leeks. Pork, lamb, and sausages in one section. People yelling, “Buy my stuff! It’s the best!” just like in any market in the world.

  Miguel says it’s a good time of year now for fruits and vegetables.

  “But who would ever buy fruits and vegetables at the Diplomercado?” I ask Miguel.

  “Turistas,” he says, who don’t know any better, businessmen . . .

  “They have to really, really not know any better . . .”

  Miguel says it’s amazing how many visitors or recent arrivals in Cuba really, really do not know any better. “They get off the plane and . . .” Miguel makes like a blind man, groping for his way.

  I. 10

  “Why are there always so many women standing by the side of the road, Mommy?” Thea and Jimmie ask me on the way home from school.

  We see them on Quinta Avenida, which is the main artery of Miramar, a former upper-class neighborhood, and on the Malecón, which is a boulevard running along the sea, flanked by wide sidewalks and, on one side, a low seawall. We see them lingering on the curbs in latex spandex hot pants, halter tops, bike shorts, tube dresses, and sometimes décolleté, full-length evening dresses, the jineteras. Jinete means “jockey” in Spanish. Jinetera is a word invented in Cuba to mean “female jockey” because she rides the tourists.

  It is said that they are not out-and-out prostitutes because they do not talk about price right away and say no if they do not like the man’s face; if police stop, they tell them they are hitchhiking, for Cuban women tend to dress revealingly anyway and hitchhiking has become a common means of transportation since the beginning of the periodo especial, when bus service was drastically curtailed.

  A jinetera will start out as a date, for the most part, going to a bar, to a nightclub, or to a paladar with the sexual tourist who has picked her up. Usually she will stay with the same sexual tourist for the entire length of his stay. She will take the sexual tourist home to meet her family. The sexual tourist will give the family presents.

  “They are hitchhiking,” I tell the children.

  THE BODY OF A DEAD dog has been lying fifteen feet from the entrance to our house for two days. Its body is swollen now and stiff. I keep thinking it is going to be picked up any minute. The guard, who has a walkie-talkie, paces by it. I distract the children when we drive past it on our way to and from school, singing, telling them to count the number of white cars on the other side of the street.

  I ask Manuel if there isn’t some kind of service in Havana to call to pick it up. I say I can’t believe that the bodies of dead animals would be left to rot by the side of a major street . . .

  Manuel laughs politely and says that he will put gasoline on it and burn it.

  I. 11

  It’s early Beverly Hills, our house: that’s it. The body of the dead dog kept me for a while from seeing it as I walked around the garden, looking up at the house, trying to remember where I had seen its style before. The Beverly Hills of Gloria Swanson, Theda Bara, Mary Pickford, and Harold Lloyd. It is the period and style, too, of the house my parents lived in before they were divorced, which my father continued to live in after the divorce, in lonely splendor; it was demolished after his death to make room for luxury tract houses. Spanish style, it was called, which I always assumed was a made-up California thing. I’ve never seen any houses in Spain that looked like it, but here they are in Cuba, built by practically Spanish people.

  I go through the house now with the rush of recognition and a racing feeling not just up my arms but all over. I am home. Home with the cascading bougainvillea, thick walls, terra-cotta tile roofs, cooing of mourning doves, and tsk, tsk of sprinklers in the m
orning. Home with the hugely comfortable closets, mirror-lined dressing rooms, and Spanish-speaking help. Home with the hospital-green aerodynamic pantry with the matching Waring blender. Home with the roaring laundry room, the close-smelling back stairs, the attic I so much wanted to be an attic, with baby buggies and dress molds in it, which was instead just a ventilation space I couldn’t stand up in. (Those real attics, I surmised, the ones in book illustrations, were East Coast attics.) Home with the abandoned staff rooms and bathrooms with emerald green water in their toilets, unflushed for years, and the utility room in the garage with its petrified rags and machine parts stamped ELMIRA, N.Y., or ST. LOUIS, MO., 1937. Home with the brick-solid door handles and hinges, the surprised-eyed firm-gripping electrical outlets, the light switches composed of two bobbing Bakelite buttons, the beaten-iron ceiling lamps and sconces of a Hispanicized Arts and Crafts movement. Home with the ’57, ’58, and ’59 Fords, Lincolns, Cadillacs, and Buicks passing majestically on the street outside.

  I had gotten used to the idea that I couldn’t go home again. Now I know that what the overly zealous fairy godmother (for lack of knowing what else to call her) really meant was that I couldn’t go home again in California.

  SEÑORES IMPERIALISTAS, reads a billboard facing the U.S. Interests Section, showing a muscle-bound, lantern-jawed Cuban soldier facing a cowering Uncle Sam, NO LES TENEMOS ABSOLUTAMENTE NINGUN MIEDO! (Mr. Imperialists: we are absolutely unafraid of you!).

  I. 12

  I have one set of keys to the despensa; the other set is held by Miguel, the gardener, during the day, and Manuel, the butler, from 4 P.M. on. I never remember to bring the chain of keys I have with me down the mile-long winding staircase, so that every time I want to check the food supply during the day, I have to ask Concha, the downstairs maid, who goes to look for Miguel in the garden. Sometimes the process takes more than ten minutes, but it is too hot to climb the stairs, and I can’t send someone to go look for the keys where I have hidden them, because they are supposed to be in a secret place. It’s a pain to all of us, embarrassing to me and (I think) insulting to the help, but here people take a lot. Lorena, the cook, doesn’t even have a key, and I would like to give her one, but I don’t dare, fearing it would upset some delicate chain of command that has been handed down from generation to generation. I try not to think of the advice from the wife of Nick’s predecessor: “Lorena’s the head spy, and everyone else in the house is afraid of her. She lies and she steals, too, as blacks always do.”

  People from X—— (a monocultural, xenophobic little country, where women in loden coats visibly shiver when they see an African) make those kinds of take-your-breath-away remarks all the time.

  Lorena keeps a small supply of oil, rice, pasta, potatoes, herbs, and spices in a smaller unlocked closet for immediate access. It’s some Latin American thing, I think hopefully, this keeping the despensa locked. Something about my aunt, who lived for many years in Honduras, is rumbling around in my mind and then surfaces: my aunt had a despensa that she wanted to keep unlocked. Twenty-four cooks she fired (she said) until she found one who could manage not to steal from it, and that cook she had for twelve years.

  Our closet of cleaning supplies is locked with a key, too.

  I. 13

  No toilet paper in the Diplomercado. There is therefore no Kleenex, no paper napkins, no paper towels, and the stand selling the Cuban newspapers Granma and Juventud Rebelde is doing a brisk business. There are also no telephone directories and haven’t been any for years.

  I feel vindicated.

  I. 14

  All this trying to get settled has meant that we haven’t gotten out to see anything except the Diplomercado, the agropecuario, the school, Nick’s office, and the neighborhood around our house.

  Tonight, though, we go with a documentary filmmaker to see a play put on in a metalworker’s factory. We drive on unlit roads for nearly an hour, looking for the place, diving into potholes and swerving around bicyclists and crowds waiting silently at what used to be bus stops for passing farm or construction vehicles—requisitioned for the transport of people—to pack them in. Heads turn in unison to watch the Toyota Land Cruiser pass.

  Nick and I think it’s going to be something experimental, a performance staged in the factory, like a show that was done years ago in the rail yards outside Paris, but instead we are led into a small auditorium within the factory complex. Then I remember: this is the workers’ paradise, factories are supposed to take care of workers’ cultural needs, and instead of chic or hip-looking Cubans drawn to an alternative experience, the audience is made up of factory workers, short, white mostly, Spanish-looking, as if out of some Spanish travel brochure, as if they could be on some cute street, the men in berets, but they are wearing clothes that don’t fit—really don’t fit—and they are sweating a lot, as if they still aren’t used to the humidity, even after two or more generations.

  The documentary filmmaker explains that the show is a revival of a kind of entertainment that developed in Cuban music halls in the last century and lasted until el triunfo de la revolución (the triumph of the revolution). Originally, only men were allowed to attend music halls, because the shows in them were considered too obscene for women. The shows always involved three characters, El Gallego (the Galician, or Spaniard—all Spaniards are called gallegos because so many did come from Galicia), El Negro, and La Mulata (the Mulatta). The shows were closed following el triunfo de la revolución because they were considered racist. They are now again being permitted to be performed (but in out-of-the-way places) because there’s a current argument circulating that it’s racist not to show historical or popular racism, that representing historical or popular racism in art is criticism of it: there’s that argument, and there’s also the government’s penchant for picking some cultural area in which it can safely show how liberal it’s being, and at the moment, it’s this cultural area.

  It seems that Cubans—it doesn’t matter who they are—never say the word revolución without putting the words el triunfo de la before it, and hearing nonofficial or unorthodox Cubans say it is like the way it was for us seeing the first slogan on our way from the airport: we think, for a second, that they are kidding, but it’s always only for a second.

  We know they aren’t kidding, but whenever Nick or I hear el triunfo de la or see a slogan, something still catches in our chests, and there’s a glow, like a flash from a cherry bomb, which is just as quickly over. It’s getting to be less, though, the catch and flash, all the time.

  The show is called El Encuentro de Dos Mundos (The Meeting of Two Worlds) and it’s about Columbus’s discovery of America, though the Indians this time are contemporary Cubans (represented by La Mulata), and Columbus (El Gallego) is a European sexual tourist, who lures La Mulata with bullion and jewels, causing her to forsake her family and her ideals. We can’t understand all the words, but La Mulata wears a grass skirt and a bone in her hair and jumps up, spread-eagled, on El Gallego’s crotch repeatedly. The audience doubles over, screaming with laughter. El Negro is a white man in blackface who plays various roles, one of them that of a priest, who at one point shifts from a Catholic blessing to the trance dancing of a babalao (a Santeria priest, Santeria being a blending of West African religions, imported to Cuba by slaves, and Catholicism) whirling, muttering, and shaking. Once again the crowd goes wild.

  Afterward, we meet the star and author of the show, Ye Ye Perez. He hands us his card. “Ye Ye Perez, El Negro Vernáculo,” it reads. He is a professional blackface actor, and he is trying to revive this music-hall tradition, he explains.

  CUBA IS DEFINITELY DIFFERENT racial territory from the United States. There is racism, but it is less institutionalized, more in-your-face. A white or a black man will call a black man standing nearby “a cute little nigger,” and the black man won’t seem offended, and then the white or the black will put his arm around the black man he has just called negrito and they will both beam at me, as close and seemingly well ad
justed as two peas in a pod. Black men and white men sigh, “Ay, mi negra . . . ” when a good-looking black woman or mulata passes them on the street. A white or a black will try to get the attention of an unfamiliar black person across the street by shouting, “Oye, negrito!” and the black won’t seem to mind. Unknown Asians are called chino or chinito by blacks, whites, and other Asians. Blacks call, “Oye, blanco,” to unknown whites, but they do not say “blanco” or “blanquito” as often as blacks or whites say “negro” or “negrito.” When someone is really blond, he or she will be called negrito or negrita, as a sign of affection, just as when a woman is beautiful she is called fea (ugly). Reference to skin color is made by touching two fingers to the forearm. “She’s a nice girl,” a white person will say, and the other white person will reply, “pero . . .” (“but . . .”) and touch his forearm. White people and black people both touch two fingers to the forearm as a way of referring to skin color, but only whites will follow it with a “pero. . ..” There are no exclusively black or exclusively white neighborhoods, though when it comes to Miramar, Siboney, or Cubanacán, the formerly upper-class and upper-middle-class neighborhoods, there are mostly whites living in them, and when it comes to Old Havana, there are mostly blacks or mulatos living there, but whites live there, too. There are no waves of black crime, no black anger, no white vigilantism, no hate crimes. Still, when a crime is committed, the policeman, no matter what color he is, will say, “Fue un negro, no?” (“It was a black, wasn’t it?”).