Cuba Diaries

by Isadora Tattlin

  I ask Nick later what they were talking about, and he tells me he didn’t understand. He didn’t understand a thing; he just liked them, that’s all.

  II. 2

  I bring architectural magazines from the United States for Davide. We sit on the Danish modern sofas in his living room while he leafs through them eagerly. “Mira eso, qué interesante, gracias,” Davide says. He leafs through page after page, slapping the back of his hand down on images he likes. He pauses on some photographs of a spare clapboard neoclassical American house with a wide veranda painted pale blue and white. “I love this,” he says, holding the image up for me hurriedly. “Look, so plain. You don’t need a lot of . . .” He looks at the magazine. A large American flag is hanging down from one of the beams of the veranda. It’s the Fourth of July edition. He doesn’t finish his sentence and turns the page.

  “I have a paladar for you,” he says conspiratorially. He scribbles the name down on a piece of paper.

  II. 3

  Dance classes have ended at the community center. The community center is closing. The building is going to be made into offices for a foreign company, the directora tells us. There is not going to be a community center anymore in Siboney.

  Thea beams.

  The directora tells us the teacher will be giving classes in her apartment on Primera Avenida. We will have to pay for them, three dollars a time.

  Thea looks at me, stricken.

  I tell her to try them, just try them at the new place, for three times. If she doesn’t like the classes after three times, if she really doesn’t like them, she is not going to have to take dance anymore.

  II. 4

  “I itch, Mommy,” Thea says.

  I take Thea into Nick’s study, shine the desk light on her bare chest. Red blotches cover her chest, back, neck, and stomach. I pull down her pants. They cover her crotch, behind, and upper legs. They are not agua mala, for it is not the season, and besides, the blotches are flat and wide, not raised. “They really bother me,” Thea says, crying.

  I cover Thea in calamine lotion. The outer reaches of a hurricane are passing by outside, and the phone works only intermittently. Not long after our arrival in Cuba, someone had thrust the name of a pediatrician at me. I’m kicking myself now for not having made a courtesy call on the pediatrician the last school year, just to get acquainted. I don’t know why I think this would have made it easier for me to get through to her on the telephone.

  I spend the night with Thea on a towel-covered mattress, reapplying calamine lotion. I finally reach the pediatrician after twelve hours of calling her neighbor on our cellular phone and leaving message after message. José drives to pick her up. Thea stays home from school. The doctor arrives, a tall, thin, smiling woman with black hair. Dr. Silvia.

  THE PEDIATRIC ALLEGRY CENTER is in the Vedado section. It was somebody’s house, reduced now to brown rooms (you can’t make out in the dim light whether they are painted brown or darkened by time) and snaking corridors lit by flickering fluorescent lights.

  We get in a line of about ten seven- and eight-year-old boys and girls and their mothers. Dr. Silvia stands beside us. The center is for Cubans only, Dr. Silvia explains sotto voce to me in broken English so that the others in line can’t understand. There are hospitals for foreigners to go to, but you have to pay, and it’s ridiculous to pay fifty, sixty dollars, she says, for exactly the same service you get here. It’s maybe even better here because the doctor we are going to see, Dr. Yamila Lawton, is the specialist in Cuba for pediatric allergies. She was Dr. Silvia’s professor and she won’t see foreigners in the center, but she is Dr. Silvia’s friend, and Dr. Silvia called her and asked her to see us, just this once. Then afterward, if I want, I can give Dr. Yamila a little present—not money, but a little present. I can send it to her through Dr. Silvia. Food, some clothes maybe. Just a little thing. Foreigners pay in the foreigners’ clinics, but the doctors who work there don’t get any of it; the doctors still get their same three hundred pesos a month (about eleven dollars) no matter where they work. “The rest of the money,” Dr. Silvia says, whispering very close to my ear and making the beard sign, “goes you-know-where.”

  The door opens. “Next,” a nurse calls.

  Dr. Silvia walks in first, talking rapidly in Cuban. Dr. Yamila Lawton, a small woman in her fifties with eyes magnified behind her glasses, sits on a stool in a tiny room with one weak overhead lightbulb. She is flanked by two younger doctors. She tells Thea to take off her clothes. The blotches are subsiding but still visible.

  “Could be strawberries, could be chocolate, shellfish, milk, wheat, egg whites, dogs, grass . . . Try this.” Dr. Yamila Lawton scribbles a prescription on a piece of paper. “If it doesn’t work, come back and see me.”

  “But . . .”

  “Next!”

  II. 5

  The building on Primera Avenida where the dance classes are being held is a stuccoed, poured-cement six-story building built, it looks like, in the late fifties. The ground floor is an open carport and garage. High tides and sea spray have eroded much of the stucco and cement on the first three floors down to the rusted steel underneath. Thea and I look at the elevator and decide to walk to the fifth floor.

  Thea is feeling fine now. The blotches went away in a couple of days, but since they were starting to go away anyway, we don’t know if it had anything to do with the medicine, and she continues to eat everything she ate before.

  The apartment is already crowded with the girls from the community center and their mothers. It is much cooler, though, in the apartment than it was at the community center. Sliding glass doors lead onto a corroding terrace facing the sea. Some picture windows on either side of the sliding doors are broken and boarded up with plywood. “Hurricane Andrew,” one of the mothers explains to me, motioning with her head toward the plywood. The terrazzo floor is smooth and cool, but one class is leaving and another class is arriving, so that between the gesticulating mothers and the many limbs getting into and out of leotards, it is hard to find a place even to stand.

  The teacher greets us, kissing us on both cheeks. She squeezes Thea’s arm. “Try, Thea, try . . . ,” she says.

  The teacher explains that there are so many girls that they will have to take turns exercising. The first group starts. The girls, most of them the same age as Thea, but smaller than she, bend their bodies backward into perfect O’s and do splits with nonchalance.

  The Cuban girls listen to the teacher. They do what she tells them to do; they allow the teacher to bend them, bend them more. They concentrate in a manner far beyond their years, far beyond the concentration of any foreign girl. The mothers sit on the sidelines watching intently, straining their bodies in the directions their daughters bend, traveling with their daughters as they bend, spending a quarter to half of a month’s salary for one lesson and traveling with their daughters, in their dreams, to Mexico City, to Toronto, to Paris, and to beautiful hotel rooms with bellboys bustling into them carrying flowers.

  II. 6

  Manuel gives the children a present after we have been back a few weeks. It is a dead tarantula in a jar. We leave the jar on a table in the upstairs hallway. The children show it off to friends who come home with them after school.

  Nick says it bothers him, having it there in the upstairs hallway, but we don’t move it, and after a few days it becomes part of the decor.

  II. 7

  I am in the parking lot of the Diplo at three o’clock in the afternoon, walking as fast as I can to the car, for it is blazingly hot, when a fiftyish woman in a Lada with a swooping blond bouffant hairdo stops alongside me. She doesn’t even ask me if I speak English; she just launches right in, in perfect and somewhat haughty British English: “Excuse me. I make cakes. Devil’s food. Sponge cakes. Meringue. Birthday cakes, wedding cakes, cakes for other occasions. Look.” She gestures with her hand toward the backseat. There, loose on a plate on the backseat, sliding toward the backrest, a bit of frosting already having
smeared the backrest, is a cake with pink meringue icing on it. The icing, which has been whipped into waves, has a liquid sheen to it, and widening airholes, as if it is about to give way in the heat.

  “Thank you for telling me about this, but we have a cook at home, and I don’t think she’d like it so much, me coming home with other desserts.”

  “I see. Well, ta-ta,” she says. She revs the Lada and streaks ahead to the next foreign woman she sees crossing the parking lot.

  II. 8

  At the recommendation of friends, we call on Saida Carrera, who is ninety-five, and her sister, Lilian, who is ninety-three. Saida and Lilian live in a medium-sized mansion in Vedado, built, we are told, by their father at the turn of the last century. It was their country house then. The neighborhood grew up around it. Some say the neighborhood is called Vedado (Forbidden) because blacks were not allowed to enter it; others say that is not at all why it is called Vedado but don’t come up with another reason for its name. Still others say it is called Vedado because it was forbidden for anyone—black, white, Chinese, or mulato—to be out on the streets in Vedado after dark.

  Vedado is younger as a neighborhood than Centro Habana, but older than Miramar or Siboney or Cubanacán. It is cozier, too, than the newer neighborhoods because the houses are closer together. Greek Revival row houses exist on the humbler streets, sometimes whole blocks of them with perfectly aligned front porches framed by columns, so that you can stand in the middle of one porch and look all the way through successive porches to the cross street at the end. The effect is supremely pleasing. Grander streets sport freestanding small and medium-sized Greek Revival houses, with strips of garden on one side and driveways on the other leading to carriage houses in back. Some have cast-iron balconies. The newer houses, from the 1920s, are Spanish-style or art deco, with larger gardens, and there are a few houses from the fifties. Thick, dark ficus shade the streets. The streets look somnolent, melancholy, and American all at the same time, like some more heartrending version of New Orleans.

  We step back, as we always do when coming to a big or medium-sized house where Cubans live, and double-check the street number to make sure we have the right place. Nick twists a bell placed waist-high on the massive front door.

  Cuban friends have told us that in the first few weeks following el triunfo de la revolución, the first thing to change about Cuban houses was that outdoor furniture and pots were either removed from the front porches as a precaution or stolen. Later the window hardware broke. It was usually just a question of a latch or a spring, which could not be found at any hardware store. Storms came, unlatched windows were blown open and panes were broken. No glass could be found, so the broken pane or panes were boarded over. Still, the windows leaked in driving winds, letting in water, which caused floors to buckle and plaster on ceilings below to stain and crumble. Maids, butlers, cooks, and gardeners quit or were let go. Curtains left on windows mildewed and then rotted away. Paint peeled off window frames, causing them to leak more. Cement porches cracked, and weeds took root in the cracks, causing them to crack more. Cornices chipped, and plaster columns wore through, showing steel reinforcements.

  A wizened four-foot-tall mulata in slippers stands in the gloom. She has been hauling on the door with two hands. Behind her stands a snow-white, very old woman in a crisp, ironed, black-and-white polka-dot dress. She is also wearing pearls, pearl earrings, and black-and-white spectator pumps, several sizes too big, Minnie Mouse–like on tiny feet at the ends of bird legs.

  “Come in! Come in!” she says. Nick grabs hold of the doorknob and hauls up on the door to ease it over a bump in the floor. The doorknob comes off in his hands.

  “That always happens,” she says.

  Nick hands the doorknob to the mulata, who shuffles off with it, calling a man’s name.

  Saida takes Nick’s hand, then mine, in both of hers. “I am so pleased to meet you. I knew your predecessor. He was a darling person.”

  We tour the house. It is nearly bare, except for a Louis XVI–style love seat in the living room, covered in white-on-white jacquard silk in an exuberant late art deco pattern of looping S’s and spirals, and in the dining room, a massive oak table, with a drum-shaped hanging metal lamp, lined in shredded orange silk, over it. Flat shapes cut out of the metal depict running satyrs. In the dining room there are some odd chairs, a caoba (Cuban mahogany) sideboard, and on the walls, some platters depicting scenes of Old Havana that Saida tells us were made in England in the nineteenth century. We admire the platters. Saida says they and the few pieces of furniture she has left are the things she will never part with. Saida’s sister, Lilian, who at ninety-three is two years younger than her sister, dozes in a chair in the dining room. “She is not doing very well today,” Saida says loudly. She has already explained to us that her sister is deaf.

  Nick places a bag of X——ian food products on the dining table—canned mushrooms, pâté, preserved plums, raspberry jam, crackers, some sparkling wine.

  “But this is a marvel!” Saida says, picking up one can and one package after another and holding them close to her eyes. She pulls our faces down to hers and kisses us on both cheeks. She calls the mulata to come and have a look. “We have enough to eat for weeks,” she says. The mulata starts shuttling the cans, jars, boxes, and bottles to the kitchen.

  Saida opens a drawer in the sideboard and removes a wavy piece of paper. “This is the only thing I have left that I am willing to part with!” she says. She puts it in Nick’s hands. It is hard to see, by the strength of the twenty-five-watt bulb in the hanging metal lamp, what it is. Nick carries it to a leaded-glass window that is still intact. It is a study in sepia ink of two fat-thighed babies and an arm.

  “One person who was here told me it might be by one of those holandesas (Dutchmen)!” Saida says loudly, we presume because she’s used to speaking to her deaf sister. “You know, the one who always painted gorditas (fatties) . . .”

  “Reubens?”

  “Eso es,—” Saida says, though it doesn’t look that old.

  Nick and I sit on the love seat in the living room. Saida sits on a wooden box. Nick tries to get Saida to sit on the love seat, but she insists on sitting on the box. The mulata, who we have realized is a maid, shuffles between us, in a brown cardigan with holes in the elbows, serving us coffee and tiny biscuits.

  The front door opens, a teenage girl in cutoff blue jeans greets us brightly and disappears into the back of the house. Saida does not introduce her or explain who she is.

  Saida speaks of the trouble she has had with diplomats. “I sold the wife of the ambassador of Bolivia so many things. A Chinese urn, some Syrian chairs inlaid with mother of pearl. She said she would send me the money. My son said not to trust her, but I did. She never sent the money.” Saida says she is not interested in selling to diplomats anymore. “Many have been lovely, but one or two have been dishonest.” Saida has a son living in Puerto Rico who is seventy years old and comes to visit her regularly. “He has tried to get me to move to Puerto Rico, but what would I do in Puerto Rico?”

  A man walks down the stairs carrying a bicycle. Saida nods to him. “My physician,” Saida says after he is out the door.

  Saida was fifty-three at the time of el triunfo de la revolución. “When we heard that there was a young lawyer in the mountains who was going to change everything, I said, ‘But this is una cosa maravillosa (a marvelous thing).’” Saida clasps her hands together and closes her eyes. “We—and by we, I mean people of my class, but who were for justicia (justice)—sent him money, so much money, for arms, for supplies. It was dangerous to do that. I sold an emerald bracelet. ‘What do I need an emerald bracelet for,’ I said to myself, ‘when my people are starving, are being tortured? . . .’”

  A side door opens. Another man, in his thirties, in running pants and a bare torso, walks through an adjacent room, carrying a bag full of sweet potatoes. “Hola, mi amor” (“Hello, my love”), he calls to Saida. Saida nods but does not
introduce him, either. Saida does not introduce anyone, we guess, because if you were to introduce all the people walking through this door and that door in large or medium-sized, seemingly abandoned Vedado mansions, you would never finish any story.

  II. 9

  We are in the Plaza de la Catedral. Various vendors are selling from their stalls. I am taking an executive from the home office around Old Havana. He wants to buy a black coral cross with a silver Christ figure on it to give as a Christmas present to his wife. The vendor wants twenty dollars. The executive is not sure if the coral and silver are real. We then go into an official shop. We see a similar cross, but with less silver, in a display window.

  “How much?” we ask a boy with a badge on who is working there.

  He says he doesn’t know and goes to get a salesgirl, who opens the display case for us.

  “How much?” we ask.

  “One hundred twenty dollars,” the salesgirl says.

  “But outside it’s twenty dollars.”