Cuba Diaries

by Isadora Tattlin

  I do not want to watch them work. I am afraid they will have heart attacks in the heat.

  MUNA TELLS ME THAT Manuel has told her that one of the diggers—the shorter one—is seventy-two.

  I am appalled: grandfathers jackhammering all day long under the sun in our backyard! I start planning the speech I will make to the contractor when he shows up. The estimated two weeks to finish digging is of course a complete lie.

  I spy on them from my lookout post on the second floor as they work. They are very efficient. The hole now big enough for both of them to stand in, the taller one jackhammers a chunk of rock off like a piece of Parmesan cheese, and the shorter one shovels it out. A sewer line, a water line, and an electrical cable have been revealed. Rougher young men would have broken them.

  The diggers sit in the shade, smoking cigars. The word edad (age) is mentioned—I don’t know by whom. The shorter digger squints up at me in my lookout post. “How old do you think I am?” he asks.

  “Um . . . fifty-five?”

  “Gracias,” he says, “I was born in 1921.”

  The taller one says, “And I was born in 1928.”

  “Felicidades,” I say.

  “Gracias,” they say.

  Suddenly everything seems OK to me, I don’t know why.

  II. 27

  There are two basic kinds of Negroes in Cuba, Lety tells me in a combination of English and Spanish: negros de pasas (Negroes with raisins) and negros de pelo (Negroes with hair). Negros de pasas are black people or brown people with kinky hair. Negros de pelo are black people or brown people with straight or wavy hair. To be un negro de pelo in Cuba is to get the best of both worlds. “Ay, qué hermosa (o hermoso) es esta negra (o negro) de pelo” (“Oh, how beautiful is this negress [or negro] with hair”), people say, sighing. Foreigners, too, love negras de pelo. “Italian and German men are locos for negras y mulatas de pelo. They are locos for them una barbaridad (a barbarity, meaning very much).” Lety says, shaking the fingers of one hand. “They see them and they want to marry them and take them out of Cuba right away! They are fascinated by them. They look good in their apartments, in, yo no sé (I don’t know) . . . Frankfurt. Los norteños (men of the North), they can’t get a tan, but they want to look at a tan. It’s like having sunshine in their houses. Ay, being una negra de pelo in Cuba is as good as having a visa to Canada or western Europe, guaranteed. And being una negra with blue eyes”—Lety shakes her fingers again, like they have been scalded—“when the girl turns fourteen, people say, ‘El norteño is coming, chica, pack your bags!’”

  Then in addition to the negros de pelo and negros de pasas categories, Lety says, there are skin-color gradations: Leche con una gota de café, leche con café, café con leche, café con una gota de leche, negro, muy negro, negro azul, negro trompudo, negro azul y trompudo (milk with a drop of coffee, milk with coffee, coffee with milk, coffee with a drop of milk, black, very black, blue black, thick-lipped black, blue thick-lipped black), so that a medium-brown black person with kinky hair, for example, would be un café con leche y pasas.

  There are two basic kinds of blancos, Lety says. Un blanco is a blond- or light-brown-haired person with blue or green or gray eyes. “Pero if a blanco has dark hair, or has dark eyes,” Lety says, grimacing slightly, bobbing her head, and holding one hand out in front of her, which she tilts one way, then the other, “eso no es un blanco. Es un blanquito.”

  NICK COMES HOME with the news that a new person has been placed in charge of the council of plastic arts, a woman named Ruiz, who has issued a statement declaring that artists can no longer paint nudes, Fidel, or symbols of national sovereignty.

  II. 28

  Coming back from the agro on this November Sunday in our car, Manuel, who usually never says anything to me about his personal life, tells me that he and his mujer (woman or wife) have been living nearby, in the home of an elderly doctor, for more than fifteen years. Last year, the doctor died. The doctor, who had no family, left the house to them, but Manuel says that he is worried because the house is in a good neighborhood, and houses in good neighborhoods are often taken over by the government for the nomenklatura. Manuel says that when that happens, he will go to the United States.

  Manuel is fifty-five.

  I ask Manuel if he has any family in the United States. He says he doesn’t.

  I tell Manuel that life can be very difficult in the United States. It’s hard to get a job, and there’s no guaranteed universal health care, as there is in Cuba.

  “But in the United States, there is liberty,” Manuel says.

  Nick has told me to always be careful.

  “There is liberty,” I say, “but you could end up on the street, in the worst of cases.”

  We arrive home. Manuel gets out of the car to open the gate.

  II. 29

  I park my car in Habana Vieja. I make sure to have only one dollar in my purse, as I am alone. A young man starts to follow me.

  “Do you want to buy some cigars?”

  “No, thank you.”

  “Can I wash your car?”

  “No.”

  “Would you like to buy a T-shirt with Che on it?”

  “No.”

  “Can I have una fula (a dollar)?”

  “No.”

  “Do you want a boyfriend? Just for tonight, though . . .”

  “I do not want a boyfriend!” I yell, standing on the curb. People at a nearby café turn and look at me. The young man scuttles away.

  II. 30

  Lety says that realmente (really), for average Cubans, things were not so bad in the seventies and eighties. “There was a lack of freedom, true, people couldn’t travel, and there was Cuba’s involvement in the internationalist campaigns, which no one understood. Still, on three hundred pesos a month, people could buy what they needed, they could go out a couple of times a week, they could take taxis. Each profession had its círculo, or club, with a tennis court, a swimming pool, a little bar. It was a limited life, but people were happy. There were not that many things available to buy, and there was no variety and not very good quality, but still, no fue tan malo (it wasn’t so bad).”

  WE GO TO ALEXIS’S exhibition at Vasquez’s gallery-cum-paladar. The gallery has just been filmed by CNN for a special on Cuban paladares. The paintings we saw in Alexis’s studio are now on the walls. We ask Vasquez if anything happened. In a quiet voice he tells us that someone from the Ministry of Culture appeared and “invited” him to remove the paintings from the walls, but here they are, still on the walls. He says it was very good that CNN had been in the gallery a few days before.

  TWO X——IAN COMMUNISTS come for dinner. They say they are shocked—shocked—by the condition of Havana, by the low level of intellect of many of the officials they have met, by their lack of information, by the outright senility of some of the older officials. They say that a dissident they met—a Communist who called for reform in the party—had his telephone disconnected immediately after their visit and was called in by the political police. They ask us what these people think they are trying to do.

  We have watched Fidel earlier in the evening on CNN, wearing a dark blue, double-breasted business suit, having cocktails in New York with U.S. businessmen and journalists.

  We tell the X——ians we don’t know what these people are trying to do.

  WE HEAR THAT VASQUEZ’S gallery-cum-paladar has just been closed by the police.

  II. 31

  Moles are appearing on Thea’s back and neck, and some of them growing quite large. There is one on the edge of her hand, too, which is very black.

  Dr. Silvia says she can take us to the greatest skin doctor in Cuba, Dr. Millares Cao. Dr. Millares Cao is world renowned for treating for vitiligo and psoriasis. People come from all over the world to the clinic he runs. There are days for foreigners, who have to pay, and there are days for Cubans. We will go on one of the days for Cubans, of course: Dr. Silvia will use her pull. I tell Dr. Silvia we really don’t mi
nd paying, but she says there is absolutely no point in paying. We’ll have to spend a little more time in the waiting room, that’s all.

  WE SPEND TWO AND a half hours in the waiting room, Thea, Dr. Silvia, and I, with Thea missing school and Silvia apologizing. We play hangman, “I spy,” and twenty questions, and toss coins. We are finally ushered into the inner sanctum. Dr. Silvia moves ahead of us, talking about her pull and our pull.

  Gnawed, stained, beige-gray wall-to-wall carpeting. Functioning air-conditioning. No natural light whatsoever, and lamps that are so dim that it takes us a while to make out the doctor, far off in a recess of the room, behind a big desk. A couple of people in white coats, flanking him. Some drooping rubber plants.

  We approach the big desk. Dr. Millares Cao is scowling. Dr. Silvia called me after she called Dr. Millares Cao last night, and said that everything would be fine. Dr. Silvia is still talking, a barrage of words, about how important we all are. I feel like I am with my mother and I am twelve. At best, it’s the people flanking him who are making Dr. Millares Cao scowl: Dr. Millares Cao has to look annoyed to be seeing foreigners on a Cuban day, in case one of the people in white coats should talk.

  In my halting Spanish, I tell the doctor about the moles of Thea’s that worry me.

  Still seated behind his desk, he asks me to take off Thea’s shirt.

  I look for an examining table; I wait for a light to go on. No light goes on. The doctor stays seated behind his desk, about eight feet away from Thea, still in semidarkness.

  I turn her back toward him, show him the constellation of moles there.

  “Normal,” he says.

  I turn her to face him, show him the moles on either side of her neck, just under her jaw.

  “Normal.” He doesn’t even lean forward in his seat.

  I show him the fleshy part of her hand, where a mole, very black, is growing out of unpigmented skin. I say that I heard it was the kind to watch.

  “Normal.”

  We slink out of the office. Dr. Silvia is sheepish.

  I tell Dr. Silvia that the next time we see a specialist, we have to try to do it in another way.

  Dr. Silvia nods.

  WE HAVE AN EXCELLENT dinner at Vasquez’s gallery-cum-paladar. It’s not closed at all. That was just a rumor, Vasquez explains.

  II. 32

  Miguel calls me on the intercom, asks to see me in the upstairs hall.

  His wife has fallen down and broken her leg. Broken her leg in the place where the cyst was removed. His mother stands behind him, biting her lips. He must take his wife to the hospital.

  I tell them they can both go home immediately.

  II. 33

  Embargo, who is female, and Bloqueo (Blockade), who is male, are now preadolescent. They are loping and rangy. I fear incest because of the babies they might produce, but most of all I fear them escaping to jinetear (cruise like a jinetera) on our avenida and getting run over by trucks.

  Bloqueo is what the U.S. embargo is sometimes called on billboard-sized slogans: NO AL BLOQUEO ESTADOUNIDENSE (No to the United States blockade), though a blockade is really when ships from one country surround another country and prevent all goods from getting into or out of that country. There was a U.S. blockade of Cuba, but it ended in 1962. Now there is just an embargo. Whatever it’s called, we have named one cat Embargo and the other cat Bloqueo so we can say “No!” to either one of them when they scratch on the furniture.

  I don’t know how it happened, but I have gotten to be in my mid-forties without ever having been involved in the neutering of any animal.

  Once again, the Cubans we talk to, even though it’s only about cats, are adamant about our never going to a actual clinic. We are supposed to go to a veterinarian who works in a clinic but then works after-hours in his home: these veterinarians are the ones who have access to medicines. The out-of-it, newly arrived foreigners who go to clinics, the Cubans we talk to say, are the same ones who buy five-dollar-a-pound tomatoes at the Diplo. I think of making the point that foreigners are more likely to walk off planes and buy tomatoes than they are to neuter cats, but I don’t have the energy.

  I make the rounds of veterinarians to find the most plausible one. One veterinarian lives in an apartment building on Calle 13 in Miramar in a three-room apartment he shares with his wife, daughter, and grandmother. He is taking a nap when we come in and wraps a chenille bedspread around himself for the interview. He shows us the room where he operates—the steel table is fairly clean looking, but there are bloodstains on the walls and on books in bookshelves lining other walls, which are festooned with cobwebs.

  Another veterinarian lives in a spacious house in Lawton. He is a professor of veterinary medicine. He shows me the place where he will operate. It is in his living room, on a carved mahogany coffee table, next to a Louis XVI–style display case with porcelain lords and ladies in it. When I act surprised, he says he will cover the coffee table with a towel.

  Another veterinarian works in a house not far from ours, with a front veranda that serves as a waiting room. There are other families waiting on the veranda, with pets. The veterinarian, it is explained to us, used to work in a state clinic but now works full-time on her own.

  One patient after another is called. There is a consulting room and an operating room at the back of the house. The veterinarian greets us. She is a woman in her sixties, with tightly curled steel gray hair and glasses, wearing a white coat over a checked shirtwaist dress and light blue plastic clip-on earrings. She takes us into the operating room. The operating table is stainless steel and the room is clean. There are bottles of what look like disinfectant or medicine on the shelves. Syringes are sterilizing in a stainless-steel pan.

  The door opens. In walks another woman in her sixties, with tightly curled steel gray hair, glasses of the same style, a white coat over a shirtwaist dress in the same checked pattern, and light blue plastic clip-on earrings.

  “You are twins,” I say.

  They nod together, smiling.

  “And you’re both veterinarians.”

  “Claro,” they say in unison.

  I tell them that I am new to neutering, but I have the notion that I don’t want a lot of surgical violence being done on our cats.

  They tell me—in unison—that the simplest thing would be to remove the womb of Embargo but leave her ovaries intact. That way she would still have her sexual desire . . .

  I jump in without waiting for them to finish. “And we should leave the . . .”—I search for the polite word—“testiculos of Bloqueo, and that way they can have sex together and won’t need to go out on the street.”

  They nod, smiling. “Eso es.”

  We take Embargo and Bloqueo out of the laundry basket we have brought them in. The veterinarians say Embargo is too young yet and that I should wait to have her ovaries removed until after her first heat.

  “How will I know when Embargo goes into heat?”

  “You will know.”

  II. 34

  Ivan is the other Cuban I can relate to at the firm, besides our Elegguá. Ivan is in his early thirties, with a small red goatee and a receding hairline. He’s called Ivan because he was born at a time when Russia was really popular. He lives with his parents and a son Jimmie’s age, whom Jimmie and Thea play with sometimes. I don’t know what happened to the son’s mother. Ivan had the opportunity to go on his own to Miami, he said, but he couldn’t leave his son. “There is nothing more important to me than my child,” he said simply, which of course hooked me right away. I don’t know why only he had the opportunity to go to Miami, and not his son.

  Ivan speaks Spanish, X——ian, colloquial American, French, German, and Russian. In addition to being the conseguidor of material things, Ivan is also the firm’s technical resolvedor—of computers, telephones, and appliances. In a country of no yellow pages (nor of any telephone books whatsoever), this means that he knows who to call to fix what and, more important, that he knows when to cajole Cubal
se repairmen, when to threaten them, when to show up at their places demanding service, and when to dangle the possibilities of cash rewards, rum, or food in front of them, or in front of their bosses, in order to get them to show up, and when to not struggle and just hire independent cuentapropista repairmen. Keeping after Cubalse repairmen is an art, but still it seems beneath Ivan’s capabilities. It is assumed, therefore, that Ivan is an informer.

  Ivan and I spend a lot of time in cars, going to see repairmen and appliance dealers.

  “Did you see that jine?”

  “My God . . .”

  “And no support garments.”

  “No support garments whatsoever.”

  “How do they keep them up?” I know, but I want to hear him explain it.

  “It’s latex spandex. It squeezes them so tight they have no place to go.”

  “If they went around like that in X——ia, or even in the United States . . .”

  “Oh, señora, you don’t know the half of it . . .”

  “It’s sad,” I say after a while.

  “Cuba is very sad . . .”

  Ivan studied computers in East Germany, but that’s the only foreign place he says he’s ever been. He has lots of foreign friends, though, he says. That’s how he is able to speak so many languages and see Cuba with more . . .

  “Detachment?” I ask, completing Ivan’s sentence.

  “Eso es. Detachment.”

  I want to believe, but I know it’s impossible, that Ivan learned so many languages and his detachment simply from talking to foreign friends.

  II. 35

  We are invited to the opening of the terminal for the first cruise ship to enter Havana harbor in thirty-eight years. The ship, of the Italian cruise-ship line Costa, is due tomorrow.

  We drive to one of three terminals at which ferries from Miami and Key West used to dock. All three terminals were completely dilapidated. Costa restored the terminal to which its cruise ship will arrive tomorrow in only six months; the other two are still dilapidated. It has been renamed the Sierra Maestra, after the mountains from which Fidel began the revolution. On the outside, the terminal is a faithful restoration of early-twentieth-century Spanish-style industrial architecture. The inside of the terminal, however, has been made serviceable with aluminum-slat ceilings, rolled-on imitation parquet flooring, and cast-iron columns sheathed in ready-made aluminum tubes. Looking at the inside, it is easy to see how the restoration was accomplished in six months.