Cuba Diaries

by Isadora Tattlin

  We find a paladar. It seems to be the only one in Santiago. Sam drinks too many mojitos and goes back to the hotel after dinner. Marianne and I ask the driver to let us off a few blocks from the Casa de la Trova, or concert space for the promotion of traditional music, in downtown Santiago. We saw Cubans hanging on the bars of the windows of the Casa de la Trova earlier in the evening. They are still hanging on the bars. We slip down the street unnoticed, pay, and enter a brightly lit room. There are few people actually in the audience. The musicians are wearing jeans and straw cowboy hats. They are playing son—traditional country music for three voices with guitar, bass, and drums. It is plaintive, sweet, and charming. Marianne and I would be happy to sit there all night, listening to Eliades Ochoa and his group, but after a few songs, they announce that they will continue playing in an adjacent bar. Most of the audience leaves, but a few people move to the entrance to the bar.

  Two Cuban men in their thirties approach Marianne and me. “Can we go into the bar with you?” they ask.

  We don’t know what to say to them. They do not seem like jineteros, but it has been so relaxing, slipping down the street and having no one attach themselves to us, relaxing being ignored, the way middle-aged women generally are, the world over.

  They follow closely behind us and sit at our table. Finally one of the men says, “We have to sit with you because we have to look like we are your friends. Otherwise, we can’t get into the bar.”

  We look around. It is true: there are no Cubans in the bar, just one or two others, trying to seem like they are with groups of foreigners.

  “Ah, tourist apartheid,” I say.

  “Shhhhhhh!” they say.

  Nick and I have heard of tourist apartheid, but this is the first time one of us has been so thoroughly on tour.

  Marianne and I buy them beers. Before Marianne and I leave, an hour later, one of the men writes a poem for us on the back of the evening’s program.

  THE ROAD TO BARACOA from Santiago is the most dramatic in Cuba, winding through steep mountains and virgin forest. Boys wait at scenic turnouts selling mamey (a fruit the shape and consistency of an avocado but orange-fleshed and sweet), guayaba (guava), and strings of small bananas warm from the sun.

  Telephone reservations were made by Nick’s firm at the hotel where we are supposed to stay; confirming faxes were exhanged; but when we get there, they have never heard of us. Even so, the desk clerk manages to find rooms for us.

  The hotel is in a converted Spanish fort overlooking the town. Its windows are sealed now, and air-conditioning units have been installed, seemingly in the middle of each window.

  Once in our room, I climb on the bed and push back the curtains: a rectangular hole has been cut in the center of the window and an air-conditioning unit set into the hole, then sealed with brown stuff, which (I touch it with my finger) is still gooey.

  BARACOA IS THE NEAREST town to the beach where Columbus landed in 1492, where he said, as his ship approached the shore, “Never have human eyes beheld anything so beautiful.” In the church of Baracoa, there are the remains of what is believed to be the cross planted by Columbus. The oldest house in the New World, the original home of Governor Velazquez, built circa 1510, is here also. Baracoa was not connected by road to the rest of Cuba until 1971. It was reachable only by boat, and it still has the feeling of a place that is alone and floating, an island at the edge of an island. If Cuba were a regular country, Baracoa would have been discovered in the sixties and have become a Kathmandu or a Goa or a Maui or a Cadaqués, and then a Majorca or a Patmos or a Borocay. It has the right elements: the beaches are vast, deserted, and clean; four utterly clear rivers flow for tens of kilometers through virgin-forested ravines to the sea; and the population is innocent but catching on fast. The architecture (apart from one Soviet-style apartment block) is in the requisite range from adorable to impressive—Victorian houses in the “newer” part, with verandas, around miniature squares; squat, massively thick walled churches and other buildings in the colonial part; thatched huts on the outskirts with packed-dirt yards, which are direct imports from Africa; a lower Spanish fort and an upper Spanish fort. All would be real estate opportunities, if Cuba were a regular country. As it stands now, though, Baracoa is one of the poorest towns in Cuba. There is no commercial life, as far as we can make out. Stores are absolutely empty. Gaunt people shuffle down the road and mill in the squares. We have seen papayas and bananas growing on the outskirts of town, but where they are sold is a mystery.

  We are told that a shipment of 150 dresses made in India arrived the other day in a truck that stopped in front of an empty store. The dresses were sold right out of the truck. One dress at a time was simply thrown from the back of the truck to pairs of upraised arms. Money was balled up and thrown back into the truck—$5, or 150 pesos, for each dress. When they ran out of dresses, some women who hadn’t managed to buy dresses got violent. Police were called.

  TOMÁS, A LAWYER WHO lives in Baracoa, is a relative of a friend we have in Havana. He takes us to a community settlement on a beach at the mouth of the Doaba River. One sandy road leads between board huts with thatched roofs. Naked children and a few old people sit on sagging verandas. At the end of the road is the most substantial house. Its veranda does not sag, and the yard and steps and windows are filled with flowering plants in coffee cans and jars. Colorful compositions made of glass and seashells and driftwood, depicting human faces and animals and Santeria gods, dot the house’s weathered clapboards. The house belongs to Gloria and her husband.

  Gloria is a mixture of black, Indian, and Spanish. In Baracoa, because of its isolation, some Indian blood has been able to survive. She is tall and has almond-shaped eyes, an aquiline nose, reddish brown skin, and wavy gray hair pulled back in a bun. Her husband is shorter than she is, wiry, totally gallego, with bright blue eyes. Her house has several rooms. We walk through them, admiring the intense colors of the decor, to her backyard, which faces the sea. We sit on a bench and lean our backs against the boards of the house. A vast, empty beach stretches before us. She serves us homemade wine, made from papaya, coconut, and raw coffee beans. It is very good, not too sweet. She offers us some dulce de coco. We compliment her on the sweet.

  “We have lots to eat,” she and her husband say. They have chickens, geese, and rabbits in cages. Her husband shows us his trap for catching crabs and his net for catching tiny eels in the lagoon at the end of the sandy road. They have a lime tree and coconuts, and they trade eggs, rabbits, crabs, eels, and fish for whatever else they need. Gloria shows us her handiwork. She has taken plastic bags—the mesh kind, for potatoes and onions—and shredded them into long filaments and then crocheted them. She makes scratchy placemats, doilies, handbags, table runners. The colors depend on the color of bag she is able to find—some of her pieces are beige, some yellow, some white, and some blue. We select several items and pay her fifteen dollars. She takes the money, smiling broadly.

  We ask Tomás as we walk back to the car why it is that Gloria seems to be doing so much better than her neighbors.

  “She is more intelligent,” he says simply.

  We go at night with another relative of our Havana friend to a peso bar at the Hotel La Rusa. This relative is an architect, and his name is Nelson Figueroa. Nelson is about four foot ten and has a beard growing to the middle of his chest.

  La Rusa was a Russian émigré who came to Baracoa in the 1920s and opened a hotel. She fled the Russian Revolution but ended up supporting the Cuban Revolution. She had affairs with famous men, including Fidel, even though she was older than he. She died in the 1970s. Portraits of her in 1920s finery adorn the lobby. The bar has a back porch that looks out onto the beach. Nelson is greeted heartily when we step onto the porch. He leaves us and starts making rounds.

  There seems to be no tourist apartheid at La Rusa—the clientele is mainly Cuban, with a few foreigners. Tourists can go where Cubans are, but Cubans can’t go where tourists are—that’s the usual dea
l. Still, even the hardiest tourists (and quite a few Cubans) decide not to go to the peso places because of the dim lighting, grimy tabletops, flies, and inedible food. La Rusa, though, is pleasant and full of animated people who are not on the make. If there is filth, we don’t see it.

  A rock band called El Ruso is playing. The lead singer is one of La Rusa’s great-nephews. He is blond. We sit down where there is a free space. Marianne, Sam, and I start talking to the other people at the table—two brothers in their fifties. One is a heart surgeon who works in Santiago; the other owns a Cuban restaurant in Miami. The restaurant owner has lots of gold chains around his neck and wrist; the doctor is in a threadbare plaid shirt. They are from Baracoa. The restaurant owner tries to get back to Cuba once a year. They offer us beers. Nelson Figueroa takes over the microphone. He sings Cuban rap in a raspy voice. People start yelling, waving beers around. “Arriba Nelson!” No one cares if we are foreigners or not. Cubans come to our table, kiss the doctor and his brother, and kiss us. We dance between the tables with Cubans and with one another. The doctor’s brother calls to Sam, Marianne, and me in English over the music, “This is a nice place, isn’t it?” Nelson climbs up on one of the tables. He is so short that, like a child, he has to climb fully up onto a chair before climbing onto the table. Someone hands him the microphone. He wiggles his hips and sings more rap, screaming to the audience. We have more beers. The doctor’s brother buys two cassettes of El Ruso at the bar and gives them to Marianne and me as presents. We thank him, we tell him he shouldn’t have done that, but he raises his hand. “Baracoa is a beautiful place, isn’t it?” he calls, shouting to us in English over the music. “My God, it is a beautiful place.”

  II. 56

  Our guidebook describes one of the two hotels open to tourists in Camagüey as “a Soviet-built monstrosity” with “the surliest staff in the entire socialist world,” so we opt to stay at the Gran Hotel Camagüey, in the center of town. Our guidebook tells us that the plumbing of the Gran Hotel Camagüey is “problematic,” but a bronze statue of a toga-clad girl holding a lighted globe at the foot of a mahogany staircase in the lobby convinces us that we have come to the right place.

  Our guidebook does not tell us that there is no water in the hotel at all. This we discover only after we have unpacked in our rooms. There was only cold water in Baracoa, and the weather has not been warm, so we have not showered for three days.

  The desk clerk tells us that there is water, but only cold water, and only from 6:30 to 7:30 every morning. Our rooms cost forty dollars a night. The desk clerk has gleaming, waist-length hair. I ask her how she washes her hair.

  “I stand in a basin in the courtyard in back of our house in the middle of the day when it is warmest, and my sister pours buckets of water over my hair. It is water we have saved from when the tank truck comes to our barrio, in a cistern.”

  We eat the only thing available on the menu in the only restaurant open in town, which is the hotel dining room: a quarter chicken with spaghetti on the side. On top of the spaghetti are pickles and a dollop of mayonnaise.

  MARIANNE AND I LIE awake from 5:30 A.M. on, waiting for the water to arrive, our redolent armpits secreted under the covers.

  At 6:30 precisely, it arrives in a rush, roaring out of the sink faucet and showerhead (after turning handles all over the bathroom when we first arrived, we couldn’t tell which way was off anymore), making puddles in the bathroom and in the room, and causing the toilet to flush, ceaselessly, for an hour.

  II. 57

  We watch it on CNN: the aftermath of the shooting down of the two Hermanos al Rescate (Brothers to the Rescue) airplanes. We learn about how the Hermanos, ostensibly looking for rafters, were warned previously by Cuba and by the United States not to penetrate Cuban airspace. They had dropped leaflets on other occasions over the island of Cuba. “No compañeros, hermanos” (“Not comrades, brothers”), one set of leaflets said. We see various American officials on CNN asserting that the Miami-based pilots were in international airspace. We see various Cuban officials on Cuban TV asserting they were in Cuban airspace. We see the face of the informer, Juan Pablo Roque. We learn about his disappearance from Florida and reappearance, hours later, in Cuba. We see the face of his baffled wife in Miami. We see the faces of the four pilots who were shot down. We see the face of the Hermanos leader, José Basulto, who was in another plane nearby and was not shot down.

  We hear the recording. “We got them in the balls!” one of the Cuban pilots shouted after shooting one plane down.

  We see Madeleine Albright at the UN, talking about balls.

  We see Roberto Robaina, the Cuban foreign minister, addressing Madeleine Albright about balls.

  We hear about how the Cuban pilots were going to be decorated in a public ceremony and how the ceremony was canceled.

  AT A DINNER PARTY we are attending (no Cubans present), the talk turns to Cuban officials’ feelings. It is agreed that what is driving Cuban policy in general is the protection of Cuban officials’ feelings. They cannot have their pride offended: that is the most important thing.

  One ambassador says it’s impressive, when you read history, to discover how often it is driven by trivialities.

  II. 58

  It doesn’t seem to be working out so well, the remove-the-womb-but-leave-the-ovaries idea. Embargo goes into heat frequently—it seems about once a month. Bloqueo stands beside her, nuzzling, as if to say, I’d like to help you out, but . . . The twin veterinarians tell me cats learn how to have sex by watching other cats.

  There is a bloodcurdling yowl from under the curving marble stairs of the front hall. I jump up from my position in front of CNN with the only weapon I have in hand, a yellow sweatshirt, which I snap, stamping and cursing, at a black tomcat who is locked in combat with Bloqueo. Virgin Bloqueo, attacked in his own home.

  We conseguir chicken wire and put it under the gate and in all places where there is a gap. Still we see strange cats sashaying tranquilamente on our side of the fence, and Embargo and Bloqueo sashaying tranquilamente on the other side, inches from traffic.

  II. 59

  Raúl Castro speaks for five hours about actions and papers published by certain government-run study centers calling for reform. He calls it a “democratic infection.”

  Ascui, the head of the Center for Studies on the Americas, has a fatal heart attack the day after Raúl’s speech.

  His funeral is seen as the largest protest by Communist intellectuals in years.

  II. 60

  Lola is determined to have us for dinner, so since her kitchen is torn up to make still more improvements, she is going to have us at her daughter’s house. She has prepared the dinner; her daughter is providing the house.

  Lola shows us her torn-up kitchen before we take off for her daughter’s house. Polished green marble countertops, it will have, conseguidoed from a friend of theirs in the marble industry. Hot and cold running water, conseguidoed from a relative who has access to water heaters. Hot and cold running water is harder to find in Cuba than green marble. New terrazzo floor tiles stacked neatly in the yard, conseguidoed from Cubalse. Her husband, an engineer, makes three hundred pesos a month (about thirteen dollars), but she sells her linens and other things, and they have a house in Guanabo that they rent to foreigners.

  We drive to her daughter’s house. It is neo-Gothic, built in the twenties, and pristine. Her husband is an agronomist and makes, Lola tells us, around ten dollars a month. We are led onto a terrace wedged between her house and the neighbor’s. There, in a tiny space between her house, her neighbor’s house, and the piece of her house in back, is a swimming pool. It has been built up instead of excavated, so that you have to climb up a ladder to get to the edge of it. It is made of undulating cement, like a false grotto. A filter hums comfortingly. A shiny Jacuzzi ladder leads into it.

  “Something tells me he’s going to go this year,” Margarita, an antique-dealing partner of Lola’s, whispers to me as Lola and Nick talk. She str
okes her chin.

  “Who?” I say.

  “Him.” She strokes her chin again.

  “But how?”

  “The army is dying of starvation.”

  “Hm . . . ,” I say.

  “How long have you been here?” she asks.

  “We’re into our second year.”

  “How much longer will you be here?”

  “Probably two more years.”

  “I’m sure you will be here for his departure.”

  We eat lobster salad, boneless chicken breasts, and a boneless leg of pork marinated in bitter orange and pan-roasted slowly with malt. French wine is served.

  Margarita’s husband speaks. “A foreign journalist said to me that the problem with Cubans is that they think the world spends all its time thinking about Cuba, but the world really does not think about Cuba very much. We think Cuba is important, but Cuba is not a very important country. Isn’t that so?”

  “Is this cold wave we’re having good for the mango crop?” Nick asks.

  II. 61

  More and more foreign firms are moving into Cuba. They take long leases from the government on mansions on Quinta Avenida and put up signs in front of them. They are buying shares in agricultural properties. Mansions in Cubanacán are being offered for sale, too, to any foreigner willing to put up a few million dollars.

  II. 62

  Our tour of Pinar del Río, the capital of Cuba’s westernmost province, begins near the main hospital. Near the entrance to the hospital, there is a big hole with steam shovels beside it. It is a project of tunnels and underground bunkers for Fidel and his commanders to hide in, in the event of a U.S. invasion. It is said that there are tunnels going all the way from Pinar del Río to Havana, 150 miles away.