Cuba Diaries

by Isadora Tattlin

  The subject of the tunnels comes up. Are they to protect against Yankee aggression? I ask. Our Cuban guide confirms that they are. After a little while it comes up that I am norteamericana. It slips in very gently, though, and, as happens more often than not, causes not a ripple.

  Felix, our Danish guide, whispers to me as we are walking—a little bit ahead of the Cubans—that he found no anti-norteamericano feeling in his work in Pinar del Río. He tells me that a local official told him that 40 percent of the population of Pinar del Río are anexionistas.

  “Anexionistas?” I have never heard this term.

  “In favor of annexation with the United States.”

  I tell him I find that hard to believe, but he repeats to me that this is what a local official told him.

  We visit a home of the Loynaz family, which is now a museum. Dulce María Loynaz is considered Cuba’s greatest living lyric poet. She is in her late nineties and lives in Havana.

  We visit a tobacco farm. It’s the farmer’s own family farm, from before el triunfo. He has been allowed to keep it. Tobacco farming requires great skill and care, so most tobacco farmers were able, following the nationalizations, to stay on their own farms. The farmer shows us the fields. He shows how they pick the leaves from the bottom first. He shows us the barns with the wrapping leaves. They are the most valuable. He stretches one over his hand. You can see his knuckles through it. It is like kid leather. He tells us that there is about $4 million worth of tobacco in the barn we are standing in, but he has to sell it for what the state tells him to sell it for. We go into his house to drink a coffee. It is a better guajiro house than most; the pine studs and boards of the six-foot partitions, which serve as walls, are new. His son is there, but he is a doctor and has no interest in keeping the farm.

  We go to a paladar—the only one in Pinar del Río. The most important artist in Pinar del Río, Oliva, meets us there. He has a jutting jaw and a Mexican face. He shows us the art nouveau building he has been given by the government to have a gallery in, of pinareño artists. It will have an apartment for him, too, with his studio in back. He is optimistic; the cement on the walls of his new gallery space is smooth and new. He takes us to the studio where he has been working while the art nouveau building is being renovated. We see a painting he is working on, which is his response to Guernica: it is called El Gran Apagón (The Big Blackout).

  We go to see other artists, then to the home of a man who I think is an artist, too, but when it comes to group movements and everyone is speaking X——ian, I am the last to know. The man is in his fifties, very blanco, with a refined, aquiline face; large, liquid eyes; long eyelashes; and abundant, slicked-down hair, like an actor of the 1930s. He is dressed entirely in white. Framed photos of him, in various lights and at various ages, dot a bureau and other surfaces.

  The man asks us where we would like to be, in the living room or in the bedroom. I think he is going to show us some paintings, but then someone says, “Let’s go into the bedroom.”

  In the bedroom is a small, low table with some statues and candles on it. He stands in front of the table, lights a cigar, takes a few puffs, puts it on the edge of the table, takes a swig from a bottle of rum, spits it in a corner. He kneels down and starts talking into the ground, lightning fast, unintelligible. He asks me if I would like to know anything.

  “Anything what?” I ask.

  “About the future, of course!” Felix, Nick, and our Cuban guide say exasperatedly, in unison.

  Later, on the street, I tell the others that I needed to be prepared, that they were all talking before we got there, in X——ian, in Cuban, and I didn’t know what was going on. I didn’t know we were going to see a babalao. The guy starts babbling. Everybody’s standing around me. I can’t ask a question with everybody standing around me. If I’d known, I would have prepared myself. I would have made a list of questions. I would have made everybody except Nick leave the room.

  We end our tour at the home of our Cuban guide. Our guide lives with a female relative who is a dwarf. Our guide says that he has taken us to see many artists, but that he is an artist, too. He shows us his work—compositions of sand in fanlike grid patterns, like spiderwebs, which have been glued onto Masonite panels measuring about nine inches by eleven inches. The gluey smell and the designs are slightly sickening, like Spider-Man comics leafed through in unaired boys’ rooms.

  He wraps some panels in copies of Juventud Rebelde for us to take home. He puts the panels into my hands, presses my hands around them.

  II. 63

  There is a surprise tribute to Natalia Bolivar in Coyula Park, on the occasion of the launching of one of her new books on Santeria.

  More police than people are here when we arrive. Loudspeakers are blaring disco at 10 A.M. The weather is already steamy, but trees have not put out their leaves yet, so there is little shade. We are greeted by a kind-faced female friend of Natalia’s who seems to be the mistress of ceremonies. We are seated in velvet chairs along with a handful of old bohemians/revolutionaries—people in their sixties and seventies who became disillusioned years ago but have not gone to Miami and have become involved in fields that have nothing to do with politics, such as anthropology, botany, and music.

  In front of us is a shelter of poured cement with trees and grass sprouting from its roof, the top layer peeling up from the bottom, like the sole of an old shoe. A distinguished-looking, well-dressed woman in her sixties arrives. “Naty,” someone calls her. It is Naty Revuelta, ex-lover of Fidel and mother of his only daughter, Alina, who left for the United States and was joined later by her own teenage daughter, Naty’s granddaughter. Naty and her then husband sheltered Fidel in their home in the early days of the revolution. I try not to stare, I am dying to tell Nick who she is, but I would have to raise my voice too much to be heard over the blaring disco music and she is too close to us. Her well-dressedness is a feast for the eyes in a sea of spandex, broken tennis shoes, cutoff plaid polyester dress pants, gauze-thin T-shirts, no bras, too tight guayaberas, and cowboy shirts with hairy tummies sticking through.

  Naty looks angry. She approaches one of the officials of the Playa district, which is sponsoring the event: “It’s ten o’clock in the morning! We are old people here! This is not Cuban music—this could be anything! We can’t converse . . .”

  It’s the first time I’ve heard a Cuban complain about the music—loud, blaring music in public places, designed to drive away anyone over twenty-five, except for besotted sexual tourists with their jineteras.

  “But who loves this music?” I ask the official, emboldened.

  “I certainly don’t,” Naty says, “and I’m going.” And off she goes, Indian dress swinging, stupendous tanned legs striding in bone-colored pumps.

  Natalia Bolivar arrives and is greeted with flowers. She thought she was just going to give a talk on her new book today. She didn’t know anything about the tribute.

  The testimonials begin. The woman who first greeted us speaks into the microphone. She looks down at the ground as she speaks, moving a chair out of the way, and we wonder at first if she is testing the mike, then realize that she is in the process of making a speech and introducing the various speakers.

  The microphone is then handed to a man in his sixties wearing a tight cowboy shirt. He speaks about Natalia’s vida clandestina as a teenage revolutionary, when she wielded a machine gun and was tortured by Batista’s police. He speaks about her contribution to the revolution and about her subsequent contributions to the anthropology of Cuba. The ambassador of Nigeria is here, his mouth framed with tribal scars.

  The man speaks for a very long time. Natalia leans against a tree, looking at the ground. When she shifts, the mass of necklaces on her chest shift with her. I recognize the colors of Ochún, the orisha of femininity and of rivers. Natalia, who, though no longer young, is still very beautiful, has been married many times. She is not married now and lives in an apartment in Vedado—some say with eight cats, others s
ay with twelve, and still others, twenty, as well as many dogs and a majá (a small boa constrictor native to Cuba) who disappears for months into the walls of her apartment and then, just as unceremoniously, reappears.

  The man is still talking. Adolescent girls in biking shorts, popping gum, skate down the center aisle and up onto the platform, oblivious. Wizened elderly people shuffle by on the periphery. Four small mulato boys with shaved heads, one with black sores and lumps on his head, in cutoff pants with broken flies held up with string, take four chairs in front, swinging their legs.

  Ex-revolutionaries tend to tiptoe among the young so that they won’t be asked questions like, “Hadn’t you ever read Animal Farm?” This morning, though, they are not tiptoeing. They are telling us that they were involved, and I realize, as I watch them and listen to them, that it is as hard to understand the fervor of another time as it is to understand Swahili in one day.

  A little boy burps. The man keeps talking. The hideous poured-cement structure, which he is wisely standing not under but rather in front of, in spite of the heat, looks like it is going to collapse at any minute. The sun is full on us now. Members of the audience pick their chairs up and move back, looking for new shade.

  A NEWSCASTER DESCRIBES THE massing of U.S. troops in Florida as a menacing act.

  We sit up in our chairs, then remember: it’s the shifting of the U.S. Southern Command to Florida.

  II. 64

  May Day. A quarter of a million people parade. Nick and I watch it on TV.

  The head of the student union speaks, and our Cuban baby-sitter, a recent university graduate filling in for Muna, who has gone on a visit to Bangladesh, says, “Qué horror,” and runs from the room. Pedro Ross, the president of the Central de Trabajadores, or Cuban Workers’ Union, speaks. The camera catches Fidel making a widemouthed yawn as Pedro Ross speaks.

  A diplomat who was at the parade tells us it was impressive, how they mobilized marchers through their jobs: if you didn’t go, you risked losing your job or being demoted. He says the placards were evenly distributed, a picture of a national hero every hundred people or so, an anti–Helms-Burton slogan every two hundred. They also put the army in it, in plainclothes.

  II. 65

  A man outside the agro asks Miguel if we would like to buy some eggs. He says they are $3.00 for a carton of thirty. In the Diplomercado, a carton of twelve costs $6.90. The man then indicates to Miguel the alley where we should meet him with the car.

  We drive to the alley; Miguel gets out, walks to a high fence, stands on tiptoe, and whistles. The man with whom Miguel spoke and a woman emerge, carrying bags. We say we will buy four cartons. They ask if they can sit in the back of our car. Miguel starts the motor. “We have to go somewhere else, because here . . . ,” Miguel says.

  They open their bags and start removing eggs as we drive. They have pieces of egg cartons; we have a hatchback. Miguel says they can set them up on the shelf in the back of the hatchback. It is in full view of the window, but Miguel says it is no problem. We park on a shady side street. “We’ve come all the way from Artemisa,” the woman says, pulling eggs out of their bag. Artemisa is seventy-five miles away. “It was really difficult with all these eggs, riding in the back of a truck, trying to keep people from crushing them. The truck was stopped, but the police didn’t look in our bags, gracias a Dios.”

  Miguel keeps his eye on the rearview mirror. “We have to keep moving,” he says.

  They can see things that I can’t, and yet they keep setting eggs—120 of them—up on the shelf in back, right in plain view.

  We pick up Miguel’s wife from the asthma clinic on the way home. She walks on crutches because the bone, since she broke it, is not growing back, possibly because of a vitamin deficiency, Miguel says. His wife had to go to a clinic today because her asthma was so bad, and she needs to be picked up by us because there are no buses.

  A CUBAN WHO COMES for lunch says that the general belief among physicians is that the true problem lies with Fidel’s hypothalamus—hence the torrents of words, the illogical behavior.

  II. 66

  “If I see pole beans on my plate again, I’ll scream,” I say.

  “Ay señora, disculpe” (“Excuse me”), Lorena says, “but we have no other vegetables in the despensa.”

  Pole beans, carrots, cucumbers, and Swiss chard are the only vegetables you can count on in Cuba in the hot, tomatoless months, and it’s living in Cuba that makes you realize how you really need more than four kinds of vegetables, day in, day out, to put some brightness in your day.

  Tomatoes grow only six months of the year. You see them dwindling and becoming mottled and sickly from the middle of April until May, when they have disappeared from the agro entirely. By October I find myself dreaming of them. “But they manage to grow tomatoes in India all year long,” I find myself saying baselessly, but only to myself or to Nick or to some receptive foreigner, for speaking of tomatolessness or other vegetablelessness to a Cuban doesn’t help them any, and even to foreigners I can talk about it for only so long without being branded a weirdo or a bore. Back come the tomatoes in October, puny at first, then increasingly large and full, and the price comes down until, by December, you are dragging home ten pounds of tomatoes at a time from the agro and making soups and sauces and fresh tomato juice. Fat the world becomes again, moist, and I think about the whole winter ahead of us with onions in it, lettuce, cabbages, eggplants, beets, and leeks.

  II. 67

  A Cuban writer favored by the government comes with his secretary for dinner.

  Bleh! and other sounds equivalent to “Yuck!” our Cuban artist-and-writer-friends-not-favored-by-the-government said when we told them who was coming for dinner. One wiped his fingers, as if he were trying to remove some viscous substance from them. Our friends said the writer and his secretary would level a wearying litany, especially at me. That is what they are told to do when they go to a foreigner’s house.

  In the garden after dinner, the secretary tells me about how things were before the revolution. “No black girls were allowed in our school, but there was one, almost white, adopted by a white lady. She went to the hairdresser regularly, so they were able to keep her hair under control. Since she was a very religious girl, our Catholic club in school voted for her to play the Virgin Mary in our Christmas pageant, but the Spanish priest we had vetoed it. ‘The Virgin was a white girl,’ he told us, and he put in the role of the Virgin a silly girl who wasn’t religious at all, just because she had long blond hair.”

  Racism, our friends said they would talk about, as if in 1959 this was news.

  She goes on: “Ninety percent of the population was analphabetic, and I don’t mean to offend, but you can’t imagine how terrible the Americans were here, walking around like they owned the place.”

  “I am sure they were terrible,” I say.

  She smiles sheepishly. “I am sorry to be saying this, because you are an American.”

  Analphabetism, our friends said they would talk about, and they would say it was 90 percent, when the real figure was 30 percent. Everyone knows pre-triunfo analphabetism was 30 percent, our friends said, but still they say 90, as if no one knows anything.

  I shrug. “When you travel as much as I have, you get used to hearing how terrible Americans were, or are.”

  She is silent. I wait for her to start reciting pre- versus post-triunfo infant mortality statistics, which is the other subject our friends said they would bring up, but she seems blocked. I know I should try to get her on some other subject—cooking, grandchildren, giant pandas—but instead I repeat, “I am sure they were terrible. And seeing the problems that are here now and what people put up with—it makes someone like me understand how bad things must have been under Batista . . .”

  She sits up, recharged. “That’s not why we put up with the situation we have now. We put up with it because what alternative do we have? To become like Puerto Rico? To let the Miami exiles come back? Have you seen w
hat Miami is like? They are all mafiosos there.”

  They would refer to the Miami exiles as mafiosos. They can’t leave a party, our friends said, without calling them that.

  “But isn’t there an alternative?” I ask. “Does it have to be only a choice between the way it is now and a mafioso-run state?”

  She is silent and shifts in her seat.

  “Can’t you imagine something different?”

  She mumbles something, shifts in her seat.

  “What would you like to see here?”

  “People being able to determine their own future. People being able to preserve their identity. To be able to live with dignity.”

  LORENA ASKS ME TO translate from English the instructions on the back of a box of hair straightener. I haltingly translate the big letters at the top of the instructions: This product contains strong chemicals, which, if used improperly, can cause burns, eye damage, ear damage, and other injuries. Please read the instructions carefully. If product should come in contact with eyes, wash eyes immediately under running water for no less than five minutes. If product should enter ears, flush with water repeatedly, using bulbed syringe or washed turkey baster . . .

  “This is a violence you are doing to yourself, Lorena.”

  “It’s a strong product.”

  I am silent for a minute, then say, “There is an expression in English in the United States: ‘Black is beautiful.’”

  “I have heard this expression!” Lorena says. Lorena speaks a little English, and her pronunciation is good.

  “You don’t have to do this, you know, because you are beautiful.”

  “Thank you,” Lorena says.