Cuba Diaries

by Isadora Tattlin

  I. 15

  We finally get a chance to walk around Habana Vieja. We have been through it a couple of times in the car, but this time we are able to get out and walk, and not just in the Cathedral Square.

  “Pretty run down,” “It’s in bad shape:” You hear that a lot, but no one prepares you for Berlin, 1945. Berlin, 1945, but routine, with tourists walking through it, taking photographs of the baroque and neoclassical and art nouveau and art deco remains, and people trying to sell you cigars, and kids and mothers and grandmothers living in the ruins, acting like it’s a perfectly normal day, descending the stairs with water buckets to fill from tank trucks in the street because while there may be bathrooms in their apartments, there’s no running water, and there hasn’t been any for years. Sometimes a street is blocked off because a building has collapsed, its insides reduced to rubble by a fire brigade and shoveled into a big mound on the street to await pickup, which often, because of gas shortages, does not come for several days. The rubble heap attracts other garbage: corncobs, carrot tops, blood-soaked rags, uncrumpling issues of Granma that have been used as toilet paper.

  Putti, caryatids, Corinthian columns, sphinxes, fasciae, garlands, meanders, centurions, blare past elegance. Sidewalk mosaics announce the stores that were: JOYERÍA (Jewelry Store), PELETERÍA (Shoe Store), WESTINGHOUSE Y HOTPOINT. Wooden braces hold some facades in place. Yagruma trees grow out of second-story balconies—not out of pots, but out of the balconies themselves—their roots finding enough nutrients in the interstices between blocks to grow several stories, sometimes higher than the roofs.

  It is hard to believe that thirty-odd years of mere neglect could destroy so much. It looks more like an assault or, if not an assault, as if someone really hated the place, hated it in spite of its beauty, or because of it, as if being beautiful were a taunt. Touring Habana Vieja is like stepping into a feud you don’t know all the details of and being stunned at the strength of the hatred, at the force of the negative energy, and at the monumentality of the ego, or egos, behind the feud.

  We walk under a series of porticoes. More mosaics set into terrazzo pavement: PIELES (Furs—we suppose for Cuban ladies who traveled to New York or Europe), AGENCIA DE VIAJES (Travel Agency), HERMANOS —— SASTRES (—— Brothers Tailors; the name is blotted out by a blob of cement). People have set up card tables and stools along the street side of the porticoes. Women sit behind some, doing manicures. One man repairs eyeglasses, others refill Bic lighters from spray cans of insecticide. Another man restitches tennis shoes. Another with tarot cards, incense, and Santeria images speaks earnestly to a client.

  One of the few active establishments along the store side of the portico is in a niche between two empty stores. People line up at the niche for tiny vanilla ice cream cones, one small scoop of vanilla per cone. Each customer walks away with two cones. Nick finds out that the ice cream vendor is a state establishment and that only one size ice cream cone can be offered. It costs one peso (five cents). The ice cream seller is not allowed to sell two scoops on a cone. Each customer is, however, allowed to buy two ice cream cones. Each customer walks away licking one cone, then the other, in rapid succession, before they melt in the heat.

  We enter a department store called Fin de Siglo (End of the Century). At first we’re not sure it’s open because it is so dark inside and the display windows have nothing in them but dust, curled poster board, and sun-bleached crepe paper flowers. But we see people coming and going through smudged swinging glass doors, so we go in, too.

  Eyes adjusting to the dim light, I feel the fifties washing over me again. I’m with my mother this time. She has on a crisp white hat about half as big as a regular hat, curved to her head like a piece of seashell and held in place by two tortoiseshell combs. I am holding her hand, and we are cruising through aisles lined with polished wood biomorphic-form display counters.

  Fluorescent lights flicker on the first floor, salesgirls are there, a wooden escalator is running to the second floor, but only a quarter of the counters have anything in them. The counters that have anything in them contain only items that can be produced in Cuba: aluminum kitchen utensils, papier-mâché puppets, baby shoes, sport shirts, buttons laid out individually like jewels. There is a lot of space around each button, and I find myself, as I look at the buttons and at the space around each one of them, thinking about how my mother is dead and I am not going to see her anymore: my mother died in the middle of our packing for Cuba, and I have been so busy until this moment that I have not thought about how I am really and truly not going to see her anymore.

  Raised, carpeted platforms with plaster neoclassical columns and mannequin body parts on them. Some wide, absolutely empty spaces. A store directory announces the departments: children’s clothes, home furnishings, men’s shoes. Scratchy salsa from a cassette player. Salesgirls sit, legs wide apart, on sagging vinyl armchairs in what was once the shoe trying-on area. No one is shopping: the people going in and out of the store, we realize, are just using it as a way to cut a corner and stay for a moment in the shade, for the store has another entrance on a cross street.

  I get a Nick-and-I-are-in-a-film feeling—a surrealistic French or Spanish film or an Eastern European film from the seventies—and we talk in low voices about how we can’t understand why filmmakers are not using this place right now to make all kinds of films, and when Cuban officials refuse to let them because they would be showing an unflattering side of Cuba, why those same filmmakers are not shooting from their pockets, from holes in their lapels, any way they can.

  Nick and I are in one of the weirdest places on earth, weird not so much because it is stuck in the fifties and is empty, but because it is open, staffed, and routine. It is one of the weirdest places on earth, but it is at the same time familiar, as if a nuclear missile really did hit Saint Stephen’s School and forty-year-olds now climb out from under their desks, blinking at what’s left. It will become routine, too, I know, in time, not having a mother.

  A sign at the bottom of the escalator reads MORE UPSTAIRS.

  I. 16

  The International School of Havana, which serves the English-speaking foreign community, is an adequate school academically, and Thea and Jimmie definitely enjoy it, but Nick and I start to look around for other activities for the children to do after school. The Community Center of Siboney offers dance classes to children in the afternoons, Nick discovers. Thea will be able to keep up the ballet she started in the previous country and meet Cuban children at the same time. We can’t have the children living in Cuba and never spending time with Cuban children.

  There is only one Cuban child in the school, Yolanda. Cuban children are not normally allowed. Yolanda is there because her father, a Cuban actor working in Mexico, is a gusañero, a new category of expatriate Cuban, the term being a combination of gusano (worm, a term for all Cubans who have left Cuba) and compañero (comrade), meaning a Cuban who makes foreign currency and returns a portion of it to the Cuban government in exchange for being able to keep his Cuban citizenship and travel freely to and from Cuba. Yolanda is in the school because her father can pay for it and because the Cuban government either hasn’t yet developed a policy about children with a gusañero parent or simply hasn’t noticed Yolanda is there.

  José drives down a pitted driveway and around a circle and stops in front of a midsize mansion, its garden a jungle with rusting appliance and machine parts poking through the foliage. As usual, we’re not sure we’re at the right place. Few buildings in Havana are used for what they were originally intended, and even fewer have signs in front of them. José goes in ahead of us and comes out with his thumb up.

  An upright Remington typewriter and a battered, unplugged mimeograph machine sit on a desk behind a particleboard partition in the marble-floored foyer. The directora, a cheerful mulata, kisses both of us and Thea on both cheeks. We thank the directora for making it possible for Thea to take classes. She says it’s odd, but few foreign families have ever expres
sed an interest in their children’s taking dance classes at the centro.

  We are shown into the dressing room. Thea has asked Nick and me to stay with her the whole time. We are led through a pantry to what must have been a state-of-the-art kitchen in 1959. There is space in the French provincial wooden cabinets for a wall oven, another space for a stove top once set into a yellow Formica countertop now gouged with cigarette burns, the remains of a garbage-disposal unit, and a space for a built-in refrigerator. Vents near the ceiling show that there must have been central air-conditioning. A coffin-style freezer remains, its lid ripped off, brownish liquid at the bottom. Only a few linoleum tiles are still in place, so the floor is for the most part crumbling cement. The directora tells us to leave Thea’s clothes heaped on a counter. We do not have to worry about the clothes, for she . . . she points at her eye. “Entienden?” (“Do you understand?”).

  “I feel weird,” Thea says to us.

  Other girls arrive soon, lithe-limbed, giggling, with tulle bows in their hair. They change out of their clothes and into leotards, helped by earnest mothers, most of them a good fifteen years younger than I am. Most of the leotards have been mended more than once, the straps taken up or extended, and the legs rehemmed.

  We move into the dance studio, in what must have been the library. Scalloped borders of oak paneling outline alcoves where the bookshelves must have been. A cast-iron chandelier, festooned with cobwebs, is the room’s remaining ornament.

  “It’s like a witch’s house, Mommy.”

  What parquet is left has buckled, but most of it has been removed and replaced with shellacked plywood. It is April, eighty-five degrees, and humid.

  The teacher, an El Greco–faced blond, kisses us on both cheeks. One window is open; the other window is shut. “I try never to use the word heat,” she murmurs to us in French. She climbs onto a chair and opens the other window. “There!” she says, smiling, to her students as she steps off the chair. It does not cool off at all.

  Nick and I sit in the garden at the back of the house, dangling our feet in an empty swimming pool, getting up every five minutes to stand on a tree stump and look in through a window at Thea. Parents are not allowed to stay in the room, but we have assured Thea that we will look in on her every ten minutes. “Every five minutes,” Thea said.

  “How much longer?” Thea mouths to us through a forest of lithe, nut-brown, arching limbs every time we look in on her.

  AFTER WE GET HOME, Muna motions to me to follow her into an empty hallway. She tells me Manuel was in jail for nine years. A political prisoner. He keeps his conviction in the despensa.

  “In the despensa?”

  “He says it’s safe there.”

  I. 17

  Nick and I go downtown every chance we can get, to complete our tour. We go to a cuentapropista (people allowed to do business for themselves) complex in a large store on Avenida Galliano. People rent counters in the store and sell either what they have made or what they are allowed to sell. Aisles of glassed-in counters hold handmade party decorations, aluminum utensils, used record albums, bottles and packages of mysterious liquids and dried leaves, some bicycle parts, used baby clothes, plaster Santeria images, rolled beeswax candles, hair ornaments, goldfish swimming in little glass bowls.

  A lunch counter with built-in stools wraps around three sides of the store. Some of the stool seats are missing; only the bases are left. A repeating frieze of menu runs along the top of all three sides of the food area: PERROS CALIENTES (hot dogs), 5 centavos, PANATELA DE BOSTON CREMA (Boston cream pie), 20 ¢, ENSALADA DE ESPAN (spam salad), 15 ¢, PANQUÉ, 5 ¢ CADA UNO (pancakes, 5 centavos each), HAMBURGUESA (hamburger) 20 ¢. It is the menu and the prices of 1961.

  Only one side of the lunch counters is occupied. The other two sides are empty and dark. Stool seats have been taken from the empty sides to keep the stools along the lighted counter intact.

  The waitresses do not take orders, nor do customers give them. One waitress stands at blackened pots on an unplugged griddle filling plates with rice, beans, squash, and pinkish meat and handing them to another waitress, who hands them silently to customers. During lulls, the second waitress pours tiny glasses of Tropicola. Dirty plates are removed, and more blackened pots are brought through a swinging door as the pots on the unplugged griddle empty.

  In the pavement at each of the store’s two entrances, mosaic in flowing script spells out WOOLWORTH.

  I. 18

  Word has gotten out that a couple of people in the government think that Nick is a good guy, and word has gotten to Nick that he should invite them for dinner.

  We have to serve twice as much food when Cubans come over, Lorena says, because they eat a lot.

  “Yes?”

  “Oh yes. No tienen control” (“They have no control”).

  Thin, pale white men in 65 percent polyester guayaberas, Chinese nylon socks with lines of arrows or Ping-Pong paddles running up the ankles, and gunmetal, powder blue, or pale yellow basket-weave loafers. Placid, heavy first wives, for the most part, with feet stuffed into pointed patent leather shoes with poofs of flesh out the top. There are, however, some younger trophy wives as well. I didn’t think there would be trophy wives in Cuba. One sports a dé-colletage held up by Chanel-bag–like chains suspended from a band around the throat. This looks somehow more socialist. I don’t know why.

  Concha shows the seating plan at the entrance to the dining room. The first woman into the dining room, wife of the guest of honor, tries to take the seating plan from her, thinking it’s some kind of party favor, but Concha holds on. “Oh,” the woman says. Concha smiles slightly, arching one eyebrow.

  The first course is served, and each person served digs right in without waiting for anyone else. I don’t know whether to hold my ground or not, but eventually I do, waiting for Nick. Some don’t put their napkins in their laps. One stands up and reaches across the table to grab the salt. Others spear the pâté on their plates with knives and carry it directly to their mouths. Still others wave their knives around as they talk. One woman, clacking loudly, with her face very near her plate, sucks pâté from her side teeth, clearing the rest with the nail of her pinky.

  “Qué rico!” (“How rich!” i.e., sumptuous) several of them say, complimenting me on the food.

  “Sí, sí, muy sabroso” (“Yes, yes, very delicious”), one of the men who has just been waving his knife around says to me, in a honeyed basso profondo. “Señora, felicidades . . .” (“Congratulations . . .”). He makes a flourish with his knifeless hand, as though he were doffing a hat.

  “You’re from the United States?” the high official to my right says. He is very thin, with bad posture and a few strands of hair combed over his baldness. His voice is thin, too, plaintive.

  “Have you ever been there?”

  “Never,” he says. “They won’t let me . . .”

  “Maybe you will get there some day . . .”

  “But the United States, it has this policy, this embargo, it won’t let Communist ministers like me in. Only to the UN . . .”

  “That’s really too bad,” I say, “because Cuba is a beautiful country, and the United States is a beautiful country, and I think they would enjoy each other so much.”

  He sighs. “I just don’t know why they don’t like us . . .”

  “The United States is a very large country, a very vast and complicated country, and there are some people in the United States who are for the embargo, but there are also a lot of people who are against the embargo . . .”

  The man to my left is saying something across the table about North Americans.

  “The señora is North American!” the man to my right, leaning forward, calls to the man to my left.

  “The señora is North American!” the man to my left repeats. He looks at me. “You can help us! You know Sullivan’s wife—you can talk to her!”

  Sullivan is the chief officer of the U.S. Interests Section of the Swiss Embassy, the de facto U.S
. ambassador.

  “But Sullivan doesn’t have a wife. He is divorced . . .”

  “He has a wife! You should talk to her!”

  MIGUEL APPROACHES ME in the garden after breakfast. “Mira, señora . . .” I follow him to where the hose we use for watering the lawn and vegetable garden is lying on the ground. He picks up the end of the hose. It is completely bare. “One of the chauffeurs last night, they stole the attachment for connecting the hose to the sprinkler. It will take much more time to water the garden now.”

  “One of the chauffeurs from last night? One of the chauffeurs of the officials?”

  “Señora, when Cubans come, you have to hide things.”

  “But people from the government?”

  Miguel looks at the ground, shaking his head.

  “Can you find attachments in Cuba?”

  “No.”

  “That’s why they stole it, then.”

  Miguel considers this. He sticks out his lower lip, nodding. “That’s why, of course . . .”

  I. 19

  Lorena’s son is in prison. He was sentenced to ten years in prison when he was eighteen years old. He has already been in prison for three years. Muna hasn’t found out yet what he is in for. Lorena goes once a month to visit him.

  After Lorena has gone home for the evening, we ask Manuel what Lorena’s son did. Manuel shrugs, saying he thought it was just an ordinary crime.

  After a minute or two, Manuel returns. He clears his throat. We know what’s coming. Manuel has the habit of shuffling his feet and moving one hand, then the other, beyond his ample paunch as he talks, in a kind of sedate cross-country skiing action. “With your permission, there is something I have been meaning to talk to you about . . .”