Cuba Diaries

by Isadora Tattlin

  II. 50

  I take a field trip with the children to visit a newspaper.

  All newspapers—Granma, Juventud Rebelde (Rebel Youth), Trabajadores (Workers)—are in one building, behind the Plaza de la Revolución. All newspaper production has been cut back since the beginning of the periodo especial. Granma is still published daily, but it is just a few pages. Trabajadores and Juventud Rebelde are published once a week.

  A newspaperman greets us at the entrance and takes us up unswept stairs to the offices of Juventud Rebelde. We see the newsroom, which consists of fifteen desks with manual typewriters on them. Only three desks have people working at them; the other desks are absolutely bare but for the typewriters, which look about forty years old. Dead malanga plants serve as decoration.

  “Please speak slowly and clearly,” the teacher leading the field trip says to the newspaperman. “The children are very small.”

  We visit the pasteup room, the corrections room, the room where the pasteup is fed into a computer, the telex room. These rooms are smaller and have more activity. One man sits at a desk reading Time magazine, a Spanish-English dictionary beside him. Some of the children start getting restless. We walk upstairs to see where the printing plates are made. The rooms are nearly abandoned. Two fluorescent lights still working out of a line of ten barely illuminate the dark hall. A tall, elderly negro de pasas pulls a large black barrel on a dolly, his face grim. He pauses in midstride to let the children pass. The toes of his shoes have been cut away to give his feet room. He stays frozen in midstride even after the children have passed.

  Nobody else in the hallway seems to notice the catatonia and carry on as if it’s normal to see him frozen like that.

  It’s very active in Cuba, this random time-standing-still, people-being-paralyzed thing. It’s like in fairy tales: some people frozen or turned to stone, others very much alive among the statues.

  I look back: still frozen.

  We enter a cavernous room where the printing and folding presses are, twelve of them lined up in a row. Only one is working. We look inside the machine where pages are being printed and folded. A long conveyor belt carries them out, folded, to the floor above. The printer gives each child a copy. They are pages of an English textbook. The newspaperman explains to us that now that not as many newspapers are being produced, the presses are being used for other jobs.

  We go back down the unswept stairs, under sunlight that filters weakly through unwashed windows, to the main floor, where there is a model of the building we are in, on display in honor of its tenth birthday. The building is modern, just recently built, but without the model and the sign underneath it, it would be impossible to know this.

  I RETURN TO THE house earlier than I said I would, to find Danila, dressed in street clothes, ready to leave for the day. Beside her on the curb is a container of green liquid. She stumbles over the curb when she sees me. Miguel and Concha are near her, watching.

  “Hello, everyone,” I say, then go into the house.

  The container of green liquid doesn’t look like something we have in the despensa, but I am not entirely sure.

  II. 51

  The next day, Danila comes up to me and starts mumbling. “I’m sorry I left early yesterday,” I manage to make out.

  “If you would tell me ahead of time when you have to leave early, then you would never have to apologize,” I say, surprising myself, for I sound as if I am taking the situation coolly in hand, or as if I have spent the last eighteen hours thinking about how Danila left early, when in fact I haven’t been thinking about it at all.

  I don’t work up the nerve to ask her about the green liquid.

  THAT NIGHT, AT A dinner party at which there are no Cubans, someone mentions a Stradivarius for sale.

  “Oh, that old Stradivarius. It’s been around for years,” someone else says.

  II. 52

  NUESTRA FORTALEZA ESTÁ EN LA BASE DE LA SUPERVIVENCIA DE LA PATRIA Y DE LA REVOLUCIÓN SOCIALISTA (Our strength is the basis for the survival of the country and of the socialist revolution), reads the slogan on a billboard placed in front of the parking lot at the Diplomercado. Underneath the words are images of children in military uniforms, lifting Cuban flags. One child holds a sign on which is written ¡VIVA LA REVOLUCIÓN SOCIALISTA!

  The billboard is placed next to two other billboards, one for Adidas and one for Bagley S.A., which is, I believe, a biscuit manufacturer.

  I’m pretty much inured to big slogans by now, but some of them still manage to catch my eye.

  II. 53

  My brother Sam is here. He is six foot one and weighs 220 pounds. His friend Bill, who is six foot four and probably weighs about the same, is here with him. I never take my purse to Old Havana, or if I do, I take it with just a few dollars in it and nothing else, but today I would like to stop on the way home and pay for a painting that I have bought for Nick for $650. I have Sam and Bill with me to protect me, and I know Sam and Bill won’t mind my stopping for a moment on our way home to pick the painting up.

  We make a reservation for lunch at Galería Vasquez. Bill and Sam are impressed, I can tell, by my savoir faire as we enter the foul, dark hallway, the kind of place where you would be sure to be mugged in the States but in Havana never are, and climb up a winding outdoor staircase in a courtyard full of dripping pipes, screaming children, tomato plants in coffee cans with eggshells in them to ward off the evil eye, broken birdcages, bicycle parts, shreds of clothes drying in the wind. Squid guts are splattered over the last flight of stairs.

  Cultivated, gentle Arquitecto Vasquez takes our order for lunch, which we will return for in a few hours. We go down the stairs again and into the Plaza de la Catedral. A gaggle of people trail behind us as we cruise the vendors. They are asking to be our guide, trying to sell us cigars or PPG, an anti-impotence medicine. When they get to be too insistent, I turn to them: “Si, somos extranjeros, pero que culpa tenemos nosotros? Si no pueden dejarnos en paz, voy a llamar a un policia” (“Yes, we are foreigners, but what fault is that of ours? If you can’t leave us in peace, I am going to call the police”). They scatter before I am able to finish. We tour the Plaza de Armas and enter the Palacio de los Capitanes Generales to see the Basura de la Historia, or “dustbin of history”—a room in which busts of past Cuban presidents are scattered at random on the floor. There is also a broken headless eagle from the top of the monument to the USS Maine, and a case of Coca-Cola placed underneath a Spanish colonial armchair as if it were a chamber pot. An ornate ivory telephone on a table by the side of the armchair is mysteriously off the hook. On the wall is a death announcement for Fulgencio Batista.

  We continue to the Plaza Vieja, where the first slave market was, which became, around the turn of the last century, the Jewish wholesale section. So busy was it that an underground parking lot was installed in 1946, creating an ugly cement platform where the square had been. It is now being smashed by the army with pneumatic drills. We gaze at the porticoed colonial buildings (some restored and devoid of Cubans, others with a hundred people living in them, in buildings no bigger than generous three-story town houses) and at the deeply funky Palacio Viena, an art nouveau hotel built in 1912, divided infinitely into teeming living spaces.

  Everywhere on the street, there are poor negros and poor blancos and poor mulatos. (In Cuba, technically everyone is poor, but in Siboney, where we live, people on the whole manage to look and act less poor.)

  We turn on Calle Cuba and start heading for the Church of La Merced. There are fewer people on the street now, and I am no longer walking between Sam and Bill, but to the left of them. “Isn’t it relaxing,” I say to Sam and Bill, “—how you can walk down a street like this and not feel any kind of menace?” Just then I feel a gentle unburdening, and I am thinking about how light I feel, how relaxed, when the next thing I know, I’m looking at a familiar shoulder strap, trailing gaily from the hand of a thin young man who is running past us. I wonder what my shoulder strap is doing, t
railing along in front of us, and then I realize it’s trailing from my purse, which is in the hand of the boy running in front of us, my purse with the $650 inside it and a latch attaching the strap to the purse that you can undo with a flick of the finger. I was insane to take a purse with a strap like that to Habana Vieja.

  I start running. “What the hell?” Sam and Bill say, and they start running, too. I am trying to think of the word for “thief” in Spanish as precious seconds tick by. Finally it comes to me: ladrón. “Ladrón!” I start yelling. “Ladrón!” The thief turns up a deserted street. We follow. An old man lunges at the boy, but the boy easily skirts him. A woman leans out of a coffee shop. “Cógelo!” (“Get him!”) she yells. There’s supposed to be a policeman or an undercover agent on every corner, and they were there near the catedral, but now there is no one. Bill moves ahead of us and is gaining on him. Bill has very long legs, but he’s fifty years old. “Ladrón!” I scream every time I have breath.

  The thief turns another corner. The street is fuller now—children, people lolling in doorways. They will catch him now for sure. He is moving away from Bill. “Ladrón!” There are some able-bodied people, but they do not move from their lolling positions. I am aware of how blanco we are, how touristy in our baggy clothes and enormous, stark white jogging shoes—I was of course aware of it before, but now I really am. Bill and the thief are so far ahead of Sam and me now that we can’t see them anymore. I stop, panting.

  Little children crowd around me. “Were you robbed?”

  Sam returns. Between pants, Bill says that the thief had a friend on a bicycle waiting for him about halfway down the block. The thief jumped on the back of the bicycle, and together they rode off in the direction of the waterfront.

  A little boy guides us to the police station several blocks away. Sam puts his arm around me as we walk. “Poor sweet pea,” he says.

  “Better me than you,” I say.

  Bill tips the boy one dollar. “That’s a lot of money—” I say before I can stop myself.

  We are led upstairs to a room where there are two plainclothesmen sitting at ancient typewriters. I sit down in front of one of the plainclothesmen. “Un momento,” he says. He is working on an earlier report. Sam and Bill sit nearby, in low-slung vinyl-covered chairs with stuffing coming out of them. Sam grins tenderly. “Poor sweet pea,” he says again.

  The plainclothesman introduces himself. His name is Orestes. I tell Orestes what happened.

  “Was it a negrito?” Orestes asks. He himself is a negro de pelo, slightly chinito.

  “He was not very black.”

  “Was he like him?” Typing, he gestures with his head toward a medium-brown man sitting in front of the other desk. The man turns and looks at us indifferently.

  “Like him.”

  “Mulato,” he says while typing.

  Orestes asks me if I can describe the thief. I say I only saw the back of him. Orestes gives me a stack of about seventy-five mug shots to look through—all black or mulato boys between the ages of thirteen and twenty-five, looking like deer caught in headlights. He asks me if I would be able to identify the thief in a lineup. I shake my head no. I translate Bill’s description of the clothes the thief was wearing. Orestes asks me to describe the contents of my purse. I have to tell him that there was $650 in it. There were credit cards in it, too, and a driver’s license and some mementos. Keeping U.S. credit cards, which cannot be used in Cuba, in my purse is further evidence of my staggering lack of judgment.

  “Sweet pea . . .”

  “Hey, it could have been worse . . .” I say breezily, while thinking painfully of the mementos in my wallet, which are now gone, too—blood-type cards for the children made after they were born (the blood that was tested drawn from their tiny heels), the fortune from the first Chinese restaurant I went to with Nick, a two-dollar bill.

  I took a purse with that kind of strap and with $650 in it to Habana Vieja, I realize, because Sam is my big brother.

  Orestes has to type the report twice because he does not have any carbon paper. It takes about an hour.

  When Orestes has finished typing, he tells us he wants to return with us to the scene of the crime. We are led back down the stairs to where there is a dented Lada police car, its trunk held down with twine.

  I ask Orestes if we can take photos of my brother and Bill in front of the police car, then of my brother and me. Orestes says we can, as if to show how relaxed he is. We pose, grinning broadly.

  A tall, pockmarked uniformed policeman pushes himself off a backless kitchen chair, propped against a wall under the shade of a yagruma tree, where he has been dozing. He ambles toward us. He is going to be our driver. We ask this uniformed policeman if we can take a photo of him, too, in front of the police car, but he refuses sternly and sidles away.

  Bill sits in the front seat of the Lada with his knees under his chin. I scoot forward in the middle of the backseat to give Sam and Orestes more room, but still the backseat of the Lada is so small that I am practically in Orestes’ lap. “Can you believe this?” Sam and Bill say to each other for about the twentieth time.

  I tell Orestes the robbery occurred between the Convent of Santa Clara and the Church of La Merced. I had wanted to show Sam and Bill the Church of La Merced’s dim baroque interior. We stop in the middle of the block, get out, and start to walk.

  “Here?”

  “No.”

  “Here?”

  “No.”

  At the intersection, just before the Church of La Merced, I see the street with the long, blank wall running along it. It’s where the thief chose to turn because there were few people on it. Bill, Sam, and I reenact the scene for Orestes. Orestes looks for a doorway where there might have been witnesses. He approaches a take-out paladar. “Oh, it’s you señora,” the vendor says, noticing me behind Orestes. “Yes, I saw it all.” Orestes has made contact. It is a tiny ray of hope. He says to the witness that he will return.

  He offers to drive us anywhere we would like to go. I ask him to take us back near the cathedral so that we can continue our tour of Old Havana.

  I shake Orestes’ hand as we get out of the Lada. I have gone from feeling angry and trying to feel cheerful back to feeling foolish and ashamed. Orestes is a good man: he will help me. I imagine our children’s newborn feet, miniature bendable bananas, in Orestes’ thin hands: Orestes will save the memory of their feet from the bottom of Havana harbor, along with my American Express gold card, which does not work in Cuba anyway.

  “It’s not the money—it’s the cards and papers that are the most important to me,” I say earnestly as I shake hands with Orestes. Orestes nods with what looks like understanding, though we and Orestes and the uniformed policeman all know what Orestes (whose extreme thinness gives him and other Cubans the air of unwitting ascetics) would choose.

  Sam and Bill and I eat an excellent lunch at the gallery-cum -paladar. Sam has to pay, for I have no money.

  We walk to the Prado. Children ask us for money. I tell them my money has all been stolen.

  “Really?” they say. “You don’t have any money? Any money at all?”

  “Mira.” I turn my pockets inside out and spread the lining out for them to see.

  The children crowd around me. The boldest children finger the empty lining, then carry the message to children waiting at the back of the crowd: “It’s true! She has no money!”

  II. 54

  Sam and a Canadian friend of mine, Marianne, and I go to the airport to fly to Santiago. Sam’s friend Bill flew back to the United States yesterday. Our plane to Santiago is delayed three hours. We drive home, have a sandwich, and drive back. The plane is a Russian Tupolev, with wires dangling inside the cabin, seats and armrests missing, and steam emerging from under the seats and fogging the cabin.

  We are met in Santiago by a man who can only communicate with us in grunts and hand signs. We refuse to go anywhere with him, until finally an airport official appears who assures us that
the man is indeed from the travel agency, which was contacted before our arrival. He drives us to a hideous modern hotel on the outskirts of Santiago, but it is too late at night to complain, and anyway, it turns out the driver is also deaf.

  II. 55

  Today’s driver can speak and hear. We tour Santiago. It’s a kind of Jerusalem of the New World, so much started here. It’s also a relay point between two worlds, or three worlds if you count the Arab world, too, Santiago having been founded just a decade after the Arabs left Granada.

  We visit the main square and the house of Governor Velazquez, with its mosharabia—Arab trelliswork in place of windows—and a gold smelter built right into the house. In addition to being much older than Havana, Santiago is also more dramatic and more Caribbean, with its hills turning into mountains, its heat, and its black majority. We see the balcony from which Fidel gave his first major address following the liberation of Santiago.

  We visit the Moncada barracks, which Fidel and his companions assaulted in 1953. The wide bullet holes scarring the face of the building were repaired after the assault. The scars were put back in after the triunfo. We visit San Juan Hill. Its summit is studded with monuments. We read about the charge of San Juan Hill from a 1953 Baedecker I bought in Havana. There are statues of soldiers with mustaches and hats that are pinned up in the front, and plaques in Spanish. There is one statue of a soldier without a mustache, with a hat pinned up on the side instead of the front, whose profile is like Grace Kelly’s. There is no plaque, only four screw holes where a plaque used to be.

  We return to the main square. We sit on the wide front porch of the Hotel Casa Grande, overlooking the square, and drink mojitos. A guard with his arms outstretched keeps dolled-up young Cubans of both sexes off the steps leading from the street to the porch. The young Cubans crane their necks around the guard, marking which foreigner to approach the moment he or she leaves the balcony.