Cuba Diaries

by Isadora Tattlin

  Farther down the street, a long line is forming in front of one of the few peso stores still open. The shelves in the window are bare but for a travel poster of Kraków. The line goes through the empty store to a barely lit counter in the back of the store.

  “What’s going on?” Nick asks one of the people waiting in line.

  “They just got a shipment of talcum powder.”

  II. 19

  Lety says it was so beautiful after the triumph of the revolution. People were so happy. She was in Florida, in a gymnastics competition. “When news came that Batista had fled, all the people who had left Cuba because of Batista were trying to get back. The ferries were full, the airplanes, everyone rushing to get back. Estaban locos.” She laughs. “People were hiring fishing boats, people were hiring anything that floated, just to get back.”

  II. 20

  At a party I chat with Alex, a diplomat who lived in New York in the seventies. He wonders if Fidel loves men more than women. He does hang out more with men than with women: the diplomat wonders if I have noticed that. I say I haven’t noticed because I haven’t seen Fidel yet, only on television and once speeding down Quinta in the back of a black Mercedes. Old hippies and the Fab Four do come to mind when you see him, he says, but also gays in the West Village of Manhattan, circa the late seventies, with the uniform stuff and the boots.

  I cough from some drops of mojito that have gone down the wrong way. “But the untrimmed beard?”

  “That’s meant to put you off the track.”

  II. 21

  There is a school at the end of our block. Every morning you can hear the children reciting Pioneros del comunismo, Seremos como el Che! (Pioneers of communism, We will be like Che!)

  The director of the school and an assistant come to our door this morning. The director tells us they need detergent, rags for cleaning the floor, disinfectant, a broom. There are little children in the school. She and the teachers are afraid for their health. They have had nothing to clean the school with for months.

  Concha says to just give them a little bit because no matter how much you give them, they will always ask for more. I send Concha to the school with some detergent, rags, and disinfectant. Concha says we can’t send them a broom, though, because we only have one and won’t have any if ours breaks.

  The director says she doesn’t know how she can thank us—then asks us if we have any lightbulbs.

  II. 22

  I spy a movement in the jar containing the tarantula.

  I grab the jar and start running down the stairs.

  The children run behind me. “Mommy, why are you running?”

  “Creatures need air to live, they need food and water. The tarantula has lived without air, food, or water for two weeks . . .”

  We nail holes in the lid. We get some grains of hamburger and a cup of water. I throw the grains of hamburger in the jar and sprinkle water over the tarantula, which is moving animatedly now.

  “Eat, Charlotte, eat!” the children and I tell him or her, whom we have decided to name after the spider in Charlotte’s Web.

  We raise the jar to be able to look at Charlotte’s underside. Charlotte is squatting over the hamburger and stuffing hamburger into a masticating orifice with its two front legs.

  “It’s a miracle!” I say to Miguel and Lorena, who are watching us, bemused. “Two weeks without air, food, or water.”

  Miguel and Lorena shrug. “Es una tarantula cubana.”

  II. 23

  Lorena says she has to tell me something. She is telling me because she, José, Concha, Miguel—they are all concerned. She is telling me because she feels like a sister to me. “Yes, like a sister,” she says, patting her chest. “And the children, I feel like I am their aunt. I hope you don’t mind me saying this . . .”

  “On the contrary. I feel very complimented.”

  “Bueno.” Lorena tells me I should not let the children take swimming lessons at the public pool in the park. They do not put enough chemicals in the pool. The children will become sick again. Jimmie has already been sick once—maybe he got it from the pool. There are too many rough children there, too. José has told them how other children jump in the pool, big boys, not looking where they are jumping. She and the others are afraid the children will be injured. Many Cuban mothers do not send their children to that pool anymore, nor to any public pool.

  II. 24

  The children and I go to the countryside with Miguel to get food to feed the swimming-pool construction workers.

  Construction on our swimming pool will start soon. Cubalse, the state conglomerate, that’s supposed to provide all construction materials and do all construction work (supplying workers who are paid the equivalent of two dollars a day) has given an estimate of $40,000 for the construction of a pool. An independent contractor has given an estimate of $11,000. We don’t know how much the independent contractor is paying his workers, but he reduced the price by $1,000 when we told him that we would provide the workers with a good lunch every day.

  We don’t know if it is completely legal to do work with an independent contractor. It seems to be the kind of thing that you are not supposed to ask. We got the name of the contractor through a series of whispered conversations at the school gate and notes written back and forth between me and other families who have installed pools. The contractor talks to me sotto voce even in our own garden. Trucks slide in and out with materials, workers looking both ways past the gate as they move through it. Still, there is always a guard at the gate, provided, as all employees are provided, by a state agency. The help presumably continue to make their reports. Digging is going to involve jack-hammers, which are not exactly discreet.

  Building the pool means fifteen for lunch every day, counting the pool people, our regular help, and now Walter, an upholsterer who has moved in with his sewing machine and has been working in the attic on slipcovers and cushions for one month.

  Miguel says that his neighbor, the plumber, doesn’t have any more pigs. Miguel then tells us that his family has a farm near Matanzas and that we can get what we need for the lunches—pigs, chickens, lambs, turkeys—from them. Later, when the plumber is actually at our house, Manuel calls me aside and says that Miguel has said the plumber didn’t have another pig, when the plumber actually does have a nice, fat pig. Manuel says he doesn’t understand it. Cubans usually help one another . . .

  LOS TIEMPOS DIFÍCILES REVELAN LO MEJOR DE CADA UNO (Difficult times bring out the best in people), reads a sign on the road to Miguel’s family’s farm.

  I laugh. Miguel laughs, too.

  Some have said that if we feed the workers, the work will go faster because they will not have to go out to look for lunch. Others have said that if we feed them, the work will go on longer, and the better the food is, the longer they will stay.

  Nick asks Miguel the day before we are supposed to go if it is legal or illegal to go into the countryside and buy food directly from a family. Miguel says there is no problem. Nick says he wants to be sure that it isn’t a problem with—he doesn’t know who—the People’s Power, the Committee for the Defense of the Revolution, the Martyrs of the Twenty-sixth of July . . .

  “There will be no problem. My cousin’s father-in-law’s brother’s wife’s uncle is a vice-secretary of the Communist Party of the region.”

  It’s been raining since we left Havana. The Toyota Land Cruiser dives into mud holes and out again with a sucking sound. Farmworkers file by under the rain, wearing garbage bags, the corners pointy on their heads.

  We stop the car and remove the jar with Charlotte in it. We walk through a fallow field to a stand of trees and bushes. We open the lid, put the bottle on the ground. Charlotte remains in the bottle. We tilt the jar up. Charlotte slides out onto the dirt. She gazes at a tuft of waving grass and disappears around a large clod. “Good-bye, Charlotte! Have a good life!” Thea and Jimmie and I call after her. We get back in the car.

  From the windows of the Land Cruiser, w
e look into guajiros’ (farmers’) houses—dark rooms with curtains (which serve as doors) blowing into them, babies scrabbling on floors.

  We pass through a provincial town, its elegant square ringed by colonnaded buildings, the stores under the colonnades empty, and at last come to the luxuriant hollow where the ten brothers and sisters of Miguel’s family live, in scattered houses.

  Kisses on both cheeks for the children and me in front of the first house we come to, from a blue-eyed, narrow-faced uncle, his wife, and three blue-eyed, narrow-faced teenage children.

  Turquoise walls and a kitchen counter of powder blue and yellow tiles, a single cold-water tap. A 1950s refrigerator painted turquoise. In the living/dining room, a solid neo-Gothic caoba sideboard, a table with six chairs, and some rocking chairs, and off one bedroom, a bathroom with a real door.

  The toilet has no seat, the lid is off the tank, and inside the tank there is no mechanism left, just a tin can covering a pipe end. Some paper napkins are produced to serve as toilet paper and are placed discreetly beside the toilet by one of Miguel’s cousins before I shut the door. The lower part of the bathroom door has a lacework of holes in it made by termites, so that I can peer through to the bedroom (from which all family members have withdrawn, to give me greater privacy) as I crouch over the seatless bowl.

  My eyes fix on the paper napkins serving as toilet paper perched on the lid of a plastic trash can nearby. They are very good quality paper napkins—two ply, with tiny shells embossed in the corners. Delsey. They are the kind you can’t find in Cuba. They are the kind we brought in our shipment from Southeast Asia.

  I find myself wondering how Miguel, who is loath to drive his 1957 Buick to Guanabacoa (five miles outside of Havana), let alone to Matanzas (seventy-five miles away) or his family, who have no visible means of transportation, were able to get the napkins all the way from the despensa to here.

  In the yard outside the house, pigs, chickens, lambs, ducks, turkeys, a garden of roses and mariposa lilies. Papaya, peanut, yucca, avocado. Our children follow Miguel’s cousins on planks through the mud, play with sticks, chase chicks, and peer through the planks of a nearby shed at a black Canadian sow with twelve piglets at her teats. I sit in a rocker on the veranda, admiring meat on the hoof and claw. Nothing like paying through the nose at the Diplo for a scrawny chicken to make you look at a barnyard and drool.

  It’s too wet to kill a pig, they say. They have to boil water under a big pot outside to scald the pig after it’s been killed, and it’s too wet to build a fire. We agree on a lamb. Their chickens are too small. We will have to ask another uncle or aunt for chickens. Off we go in the Land Cruiser to ask at one house after another of blue-eyed, narrow-faced people, whose ancestors came from Asturias, in northwestern Spain. More houses with wonderful color sense, red coffee beans, sacks of unhusked rice, cherries and corn fermenting to make wine, peanut butter fudge from their own peanuts. The children, tired now, refuse to get out of the car, but the relatives keep pressing peanut butter fudge on us, so I pass the fudge to Thea and Jimmie through the car window. I am embarrassed by the children’s inertia and by the size of the Land Cruiser. “Must consume a lot of gas,” the relatives speculate. One cousin, a doctor, asks me how much a car like that costs. “About twenty thousand dollars,” I lie. Another cousin, a very young engineer who is studying English, asks me if it is true that in the United States, people can do what they want to do.

  “What exactly do you mean?” I ask.

  “Anything. You can do anything. There is freedom . . .”

  Ten pairs of blue eyes are on me.

  “There are not the controls that there are here. But there is not the social safety net that there is here, either. In the United States, you are free to succeed, but you are also free to fail.”

  The engineer considers this. There is an approving murmur around me.

  We branch out in our search for chickens. We even go to a non–family member. “Everyone takes their chickens to Varadero, to the tourist hotels,” it is explained to us. A man in an olive green uniform with red epaulets jumps behind a tree as we pass. I wonder if headlines in tomorrow’s Granma will read EXECUTIVE’S YANKEE WIFE CAUGHT BUYING ILLEGAL CHICKENS. We find an aunt who has another fat lamb. The shuttling around works out perfectly because while we are away from the first uncle, they kill that lamb, and then, as we are returning to him, the aunt kills her lamb. The first uncle serves us lunch—one of the bigger chickens, black beans, rice, avocado, fried bananas. I serve Jimmie chicken. “You mean they had to kill a chicken for our lunch?” Jimmie asks.

  “I think they bought it in the supermarket,” I lie.

  The headless lambs, as big as medium-sized dogs, are placed in black plastic garbage bags and stacked on the floor of the front seat, between Miguel and me. The children are too bored by the rain to be inquisitive. Peanuts, we take also, as well as avocados, limes, and yuccas; Miguel will return in two days for the chickens and a pig, after the weather has gotten better and the pig can be scalded and fat chickens located. The peanuts and other foods are piled on top of the lambs in the front seat because the children have taken over the space in the back, sprawled on cushions, listening to tapes. “It’s a big, big world,” their song goes. They sing along.

  I think of how even though there is lamb in the agropecuario, it is out of the reach of most Cubans, and I wonder if when we serve lamb for the first swimming-pool construction workers’ lunch, it will be the first time some of them will have eaten lamb in years. I don’t know why I am enjoying planning the swimming-pool construction workers’ menu so much. I don’t know why it causes me so much pleasure, imagining the swimming-pool workers’ reactions to the food we will serve them, but it does.

  I think, also, of how much better off Miguel’s family will be with the thirty-five dollars they have been paid for everything so far, and with the money they will be paid for the pig and the chickens, and about how much more prosperous they will probably always be than the guajiros in the houses we passed on the way here, because of connections, planning, coordination, and a solid family network.

  I start to think, also, about the Delsey napkins showing up there beside the toilet, then decide not to think about them anymore.

  II. 25

  Alexis Esquivel lives in a small porticoed house in the Vedado with his marinovia (a Cuban word combining the word for spouse, marido, with novia, the word for fiancée, meaning a live-in girlfriend) María del Carmen, a psychologist, and her daughter, a psychology major at the university. Alexis looks to be in his late twenties. María del Carmen doesn’t look over thirty, but her daughter is twenty-one, so María del Carmen has got to be at least in her late thirties. Alexis is a good-looking, light-skinned black man with dreadlocks, his girlfriend is even lighter, and her daughter, with straight blond hair and blue eyes, could be German. An old lady, entirely Spanish-looking, enters the house. “This is my great-grandmother,” Maria del Carmen’s daughter says. We sit in rocking chairs in a circle under a single fluorescent tube.

  It is a jumble of colors, Cuba at its best, and of ages—copper-colored skin showing not a wrinkle, people having gone through the joy and pain of having children almost without a trace.

  Hanging on the wall is a plaster bas-relief head of Fidel as a red Indian, smoking a cigar. All around the room there are paintings for an upcoming exhibition, Hysteria del Arte, to be shown at Vasquez’s gallery-cum-paladar.

  We wonder if Vasquez will be able to put the paintings up without a problem. There’s the Karl Marx–Groucho Marx painting again, back from the same gallery but returning to it. Another painting is of Marat, murdered this time in a baroque purple bathtub with IN GOD WE TRUST engraved on the side of it. Intravenous tubes come from his fallen arm, held by tiny, frolicking female nudes. Behind him, Robespierre talks on a cellular phone in a business suit, crowned by mystic symbols—the Masonic pyramid with an eye on top of it and the Star of David, among them. Marx hovers near them, in a lotus position.
/>
  Alexis shows us a folder of photos of earlier paintings. One shows Alexis as a newborn baby being looked at by Fidel (once again in Indian headdress), John Wayne, and Brezhnev. Its title is The Adoration of the Magi.

  I ask Alexis, María del Carmen, and her daughter if there is a natural impulse among psychologists in Havana or in Cuba to analyze people in the government.

  Alexis says young people are mainly interested in psychology because they feel crazy themselves these days. They were educated to believe one thing, and now there are many different messages coming at them. María del Carmen’s daughter says that all their psychology texts used to be translations of Russian texts, but now they study the writings of the North American Carl Rogers. There is only one book per class. The whole class shares it.

  II. 26

  Work on the swimming pool begins. The workers set up a board on saw-horses in the garage for a dining table. We serve lamb for the first meal. One worker says he has not eaten lamb since Easter of 1958.

  THE DIGGERS ARRIVE. The hole for the swimming pool will be dug by hand because the gate is too narrow to get heavy equipment through. Heavy equipment would also destroy the lawn.

  The diggers are not how I thought they would be. I have been expecting four or five muscular young men—brown or white, like coiled springs—but instead I see only a pair of slender, elegant, jet-black men. There is something about their skin, too, that is not the way I thought it would be: it has a papery quality, and it sags a bit, under their shoulder blades and from their pectorals. A few sprigs of white hair on their chests, and many white sprigs on their heads. They are old, I realize. About fifty-five. It is strange for the engineer to have sent old guys when there are so many young men needing work.