Cuba Diaries

by Isadora Tattlin

  “That’s because it’s not real coral and real silver.”

  “Too expensive,” we say, and start to leave the shop.

  The boy with the badge catches up to us on the threshold of the shop. “Do not believe my colleague,” he says. He doesn’t care whether anyone in the shop hears him. “The crosses they sell in the shop are the same as the crosses they sell outside.”

  We look back into the shop. The salesgirls are nodding in agreement at what the young man is saying. Even the salesgirl who helped us is nodding.

  “Why such a difference, and why are you giving us the information?” the executive asks.

  “This is a state shop. The state wants to make money. It doesn’t care how it makes money. We are paid in pesos, and it is so little that it doesn’t matter if we sell from the shop or not. It’s the same if we tell you to shop on the outside. Follow me; I’ll take you to someone who sells good crosses.”

  We cross the square with him to another vendor who shows us a cross of the same type, only smaller and with less silver.

  “How much?” we ask his vendor.

  “Thirty dollars,” his vendor says.

  “But it’s much smaller and much more expensive than the first one we saw,” we say to the young man.

  “That’s because it’s better quality.”

  We thank them and start to walk back to the original vendor.

  The young man catches up with us. “My friend can make a discount for you . . .”

  We return to the original vendor and end up buying the cross for eighteen dollars.

  II. 10

  Thea lies facedown on her bed, unable to move.

  “You don’t have to go to dance class anymore if you don’t want to.”

  Thea looks at me in disbelief.

  “You gave it a really good try, though, you really did . . .”

  Thea jumps from the bed. She wraps her arms and legs around me and squeezes me tightly.

  SEAMOS UN HAZ DE GENERACIONES. This one confuses us. It means either “Let us be an ace of generations,” and the Spanish word as (meaning “ace”) is misspelled haz, or “Let us be a bundle of generations.”

  II. 11

  I am becoming more skilled in the arts of conseguir and resolver. Rather than always going through the help, I try to break out on my own.

  Returning from the bakery with Miguel, we see two spearfishermen walking down the street. One has a long fish slung over his back. It’s a serrucho, I think. They make excellent escabeche—the fish is filleted, breaded, fried with onions, then soaked in vinegar under a weight for at least a week, and eaten cold.

  “That’s a serrucho, isn’t it?” I ask Miguel.

  “Yes,” he says.

  “Let’s ask them how much it is.”

  Miguel calls to them from across the street. They approach the car, still dripping.

  “Is that a serrucho?” Miguel asks.

  “It is.”

  “How much do you want for it?”

  “Ten dollars.”

  It’s a good deal. Fish is usually a dollar a pound, and this fish is more than ten pounds.

  I pay them and they flip the fish into the car, onto the naked backseat.

  “THIS IS NO SERRUCHO!” Lorena yells, waving the fish at me, the tail of which has already been cut off by Manuel, fried, and served to the children last night, Lorena’s night off, for their dinner. “This is picua! It can be toxic! You have to throw it away! People have died eating this fish!”

  Concha, Danila, Manuel, and Miguel stand behind her, in a V formation, nodding in confirmation of this fact—Miguel, who helped me buy the fish, and Manuel, who fried it.

  I could have killed my children, but there they are, nodding in a V formation, with only Lorena yelling about it.

  “You’ve got to help me, you know,” I say to all of them. “You have got to tell me when something is wrong.”

  They keep nodding.

  I SPEND A WEEK not sleeping much, playing one disaster-with-the-children scenario after another in my head. They are poisoned. They fall out of palm trees, out of mango trees, out of ceiba trees. They fall headfirst off the jungle gym at school. They are run over. They drown. They are eaten by sharks. They stray from a school group, wander into a military zone, and are shot. They are murdered by evil grown-ups. They are forgotten by Nick and me somewhere (because it slips our minds that we have children), and some other couple (kind, upstanding Cubans) find them so beautiful and intelligent that even though they live in reduced circumstances, they adopt them and give them the little that they have; Thea and Jimmie forget us, English, and X——ian and speak only cubano.

  II. 12

  I have found a gymnastics teacher for the children, Lety. Lety teaches the children two afternoons a week in a gym at the Hotel Tocororo. The Tocororo, we have found, has the least-squalid gym room, where the floor has no splinters in it, and the adjacent pool, where the children go after lessons, is relatively jinetera-and-sexual-tourist free. Lety is a retired professor of biology, but when she was young, before the revolution, she was a champion gymnast and competed in the United States and Puerto Rico. She also traveled often to the United States with her parents, just for the fun of it, because it was so easy to get there and so cheap. A round-trip airplane ticket to Key West cost ten dollars. She drove all the way up the East Coast to New York with her parents, y le encantó de los Luray Caverns of Virginia.

  When the periodo especial started, Lety discovered she was making the equivalent of five dollars a month as a professor of biology, so she retired from the university and now uses her gymnastics experience and knowledge of English to teach gymnastics to foreign children.

  Lety, who is in her early sixties, lives in an apartment in Siboney, not far from our house, and has been bicycling five miles uphill to the Tocororo, I discover after a few lessons, in the heat of midafternoon in order to meet us. I tell her she cannot do this. Nick, who is milling around nearby, cuts into our conversation and says that I can simply pick Lety up with the children on the way to the Tocororo, and I say to Lety, “You see how he has a superior mind?” just to say something. It seems too good to be true, to be able to spend time twice a week with a likable English-speaking sixty-year-old Cuban, who probably isn’t an informer, and in a car no less, where, it is popularly believed, there are no microphones.

  II. 13

  I am seated at a late-fall dinner next to a high-ranking member of the Foreign Relations Committee of Cuba’s National Assembly. He is wearing an orange open-necked shirt and a polyester stretch-knit sports jacket.

  The talk turns to Helms-Burton, the bill proposed in the U.S. Congress that would tighten the embargo against Cuba. He says Helms-Burton is an expression of the extreme right wing of the United States, which includes the Cuban exiles of Miami, of course, and reflects the strategic importance of Florida in presidential elections.

  I tell him you have that on the one hand, and on the other hand you have the apathy of the rest of the American public. Cuba isn’t important to them.

  He says it is amazing how uninformed the American public is and how uneducated norteamericano people are. Where is Cuba, where is Santo Domingo, where is Puerto Rico? you ask them, and they don’t know. They are only interested in what directly concerns them.

  I wait at this point for him to make some qualifying statement about how he is, of course, not talking about me, but he goes on to say it’s tragic how the norteamericano people are becoming more brutelike every day. He shakes his head sadly. He tells me that just the other evening he saw a norteamericano program on television—this was made in norteamerica, by norteamericanos—and it showed a school where they train animals to have sex with humans, and hotels where people go to have sex with animals. He tells me that 40 percent of the norteamericano population have sex with animals. He says it’s pitiful, really . . .

  I make mistakes in Spanish. I speak with a really broad norteamericano accent. I make my rs really hard so that a mortifi
ed flush will come over his face when he realizes it’s a norteamericana he’s saying this to, so that I will then be able to say to him, It’s odd, I am a norteamericana, but since I have been in Cuba, I haven’t found an animal that appeals to me yet. Of course, if a really handsome German shepherd were to come along . . ., making him flush even more, but his expression remains exactly the same. I take away all the accents when I speak, and mix up the genders of nouns even worse than I usually do. Still nothing.

  “You really know the United States well,” I finally say.

  “I’ve never been there,” he says, “but I read a lot.”

  “Where are you from in La Yuma?” someone finally calls cheerily to me from across the living room, where we stand after dinner, drinking coffee.

  I watch him out of the corner of my eye: still nothing.

  LA YUMA, THE UNITED STATES is called, from the 1957 film 3:10 to Yuma, starring Glenn Ford and Van Heflin. It is not a pejorative term, as far as I can make out, just a term: “Voy pa’ la Yuma” (“I am going to the Yuma”).

  II. 14

  “Señora, I have to talk to you about something,” Lorena says, her voice lowered.

  We go into the hallway.

  “I can’t work here anymore.” Her voice is shaking. Tears are starting to stream down her cheeks. “I can’t work with Concha. She is mean to me . . .”

  Concha of the plucked eyebrows and the cigarette-hoarse voice, who bites the side of her thumb and whose two children have left Cuba.

  “Everyone says I am a spy, but I am not a spy . . .”

  “Who says you’re a spy?”

  “Everyone.”

  “Well, no one has said it to me. And besides, even if you were a spy, what difference would it make?”

  “I am not a spy.”

  It’s Muna, I’m sure. I told her what the wife of Nick’s predecessor said, just so that she would watch what she said. I know now that was telling her too much.

  “I know,” I say, “but say if you were a spy . . .”

  “I’m not a spy.”

  “I know you’re not, but just say you were, or . . .Miguel were . . .”

  “Miguel has to make his reports . . .”

  “OK, he’s not a good example.”

  “But he makes his reports . . .”

  “But how is that spying if we know about it?”

  Lorena considers this.

  “Say if . . . Danila were a spy . . . what is there to report about? We are very boring people. We don’t do anything worth talking about. ‘The señora likes loose tea’? ‘Yesterday she complained about the apagón’?”

  Lorena stops crying. I hug her. She is round but very firm. “Don’t sink to Concha’s level,” I say.

  II. 15

  Carlita has to do her servicio social, which all young Cubans must do if they do not do military service. For one year, Carlita will be teaching swimming not at the Escuela de Natación but at a big pool in a park not far from our house. I can take the children to the pool in the park and she can integrate them into her group. Carlita explains to José how to get there, then tells us that we should not go in the Land Cruiser with José but should follow him in the Mitsubishi, which I should drive. José will then drive past the pool and go home, and I will park a little distance from the pool so that my new car will not arouse suspicions. Carlita says I should drive there in the Mitsubishi every time and park a little distance away, just like I did at the Escuela de Natación.

  I tell Carlita that I don’t think it sounds like a very good arrangement, but Carlita says it will be fine.

  II. 16

  Jimmie has a high fever and diarrhea. Diarrhea medicine we brought from the last country works for a few hours; then the diarrhea comes back with a vengeance, liquid, dripping down the backs of his legs and along the floor as he runs, crying, with me after him, to the bathroom.

  Dr. Silvia comes in the afternoon with medicine but says we’ll have to get a muestra (stool sample), take it to the laboratory, and have a coprocultivo done. Dr. Silvia tells us that we must take the sample to the laboratory at a time when a friend of hers is there.

  Nick ends up driving to the laboratory at 6 A.M. with Manuel to guide him, calling up at the windows of the laboratory until a woman with her hair in curlers and face cream on leans out of the window. Nick leaves her with the stool sample and a gift bag of X——ian products, for Dr. Silvia has said her friend won’t take any money. It’s too risky to take money, Dr. Silvia says, and what is there to buy in the stores, anyway?

  IT’S SHIGELLA JIMMIE HAS, which is fatal if left untreated. It’s a bacteria, usually picked up from water. It is curable, though, with the medicines we have brought from our last country. Dr. Silvia says not to worry, though: medicine for shigella can be found in Cuba, too.

  The diarrhea stops, but Jimmie has no appetite and drinks only oral rehydration salts in boiled water for the first two days. He has lost five pounds. On the third day, he eats an egg and rice. On the fourth day, boiled mashed malanga, boiled chicken, three bananas, an egg, some bread, boiled carrots, and a grated apple from Chile—one of four bought especially for him from the Diplo.

  II. 17

  Querido Vecino! (Dear Neighbor!) is from the former Eastern-bloc country of Z——. He lives a few doors away. He is very playful whenever we see him, so we have taken to calling one another Querido Vecino! like they used to in the Soviet Union, complete with an exclamation mark. He has been in Cuba five years. He speaks English, Spanish, and French with an accent like Bela Lugosi’s, as well as German, Z——ian, and Russian. He lives with his wife, his twin sons, three dogs, three cats, three kittens, innumerable birds, and a small alligator, which is kept in the bathtub of the guest bathroom upstairs. He puts a hand on my hipbone whenever we kiss him hello—actually, right above my hipbone—and bears down and squeezes until the curved bone is isolated in his hand, so that I am never sure if it’s a cheap feel or some kind of Georgia O’Keeffe–like veneration of pelvic bones.

  Querido Vecino! and his wife go swimming every afternoon in the saltwater pool at the Hotel Comodoro before the salsa and the sexual tourists heat up and the jineteras come out in force to shake them down. Sometimes we pass them, doing the sidestroke, skirting floating objects. Sometimes we go home with them after swimming to drink mojitos and watch CNN.

  Querido Vecino! collects animals, he says, because he doesn’t have much else to do since the end of the “special relationship” between Cuba and the Eastern bloc. Once, he was obliged to take care of a retired Z——ian cosmonaut who was mugged in Santiago de Cuba, but that’s been about all. Nick says he is just being modest, he knows Querido Vecino! is a very significant triple agent. Querido Vecino! chuckles. Still, Querido Vecino! says, six cats are too many and they would like to give some kittens away.

  We go home with two of Querido Vecinos!’s kittens cupped in our hands, our hair still wet from the Comodoro. One is tiger-striped, and one is black with white patches.

  We walk one block home in the orange dusk, rubber sandals flapping, tiny claws and teeth worrying our fingers, and feel for a few moments as if we are in some kind of ordinary surburbia in some kind of First World place, but then the guard, seeing us coming, flips a switch, and the wrought-iron gates open with a creak worthy of the rue Morgue.

  II. 18

  The first store to be refurbished on Calle San Rafael has been open for a few days. It was a peso store, selling, like all stores before the collapse of the Soviet Union, goods from Communist-bloc countries as well as goods made in Cuba. Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, it limped along for a few years selling (for pesos) goods made in Cuba, its display windows dispiriting, its salesgirls lolling on broken stools. Dollar stores selling quality imported goods to Cubans became possible following the legalization of the dollar in 1993, but it has taken such stores a while to get going. Expensive, isolated household items in tourist stores, such as the Black & Decker sandwich maker we spotted in one store, it is final
ly explained to us, represent a kind of “transitional” period: they are meant to be bought by visiting Miami relatives for Cuban family members, or by sexual tourists for their jineteras. Expensive items such as the sandwich maker can’t be in dollar stores for Cubans yet, it is explained to us, because Cubans can’t afford them, and seeing something so beyond their reach in the newly opened dollar stores (the Cuban friends who are explaining to us speculate) only depresses Cubans. Our Cuban friends remind us that they are talking only about entirely state-run stores. The cuentapropista stores, like the one in the old Woolworth, in which individuals rent spaces and sell what they are allowed to sell, are another category, as are the artisans and old-book vendors on the Malecón and in the Plaza de la Catedral.

  Cubans line up in a short line outside the store on Calle San Rafael and are let in one by one, while small support groups of friends and/or relatives wait outside, biting the corners of their thumbs and craning their necks around the heads of other people looking through the window.

  Nick and I finally find a space to look between support-group members’ shoulders. The store has clean bowfront windows, an aluminum-slat ceiling, and fluorescent lights. The shelves are nearly filled. Gillette shaving cream we see, Johnson’s baby shampoo, Palmolive soap, packs of double-edged razor blades, baby socks, pastel-colored men’s socks, an alarm clock, an extra-long shoehorn, three hairbrushes, boxes of toothpicks, cologne, nail polish, a folding, magnetized backgammon game for traveling, some airmail letter paper, a lone box of Tampax, a lone box of panty liners, some bedside lamps, some stonewashed jeans, some organza baby dresses and guayaberas hung up on a rack at the back of the store, an invalid’s toilet suspended in an aluminum frame. Customers emerge smiling, clutching one or two things in a bag.