Cuba Diaries

by Isadora Tattlin

  “But really, not that many people ask me for things,” I say to Nick later at the dinner table.

  “That’s because they don’t know you well enough yet.”

  III. 11

  Ivan, the one Cuban at the firm I can relate to besides our Elegguá (who is not really Cuban) has just been fired for stealing firm property—Ivan, who said nothing was more important than a child, and whose son, Eduardo, a cheerful seven-year-old, came here sometimes to play.

  Nick says that it began because Bernard, Nick’s second assistant, saw Ivan loading plumbing pipes belonging to the firm into his car. The number two assistant asked him who had authorized him to take the pipes. Ivan named Fritz, the number one assistant, who was on vacation. Bernard told Ivan to put the pipes back and wait for the return of Fritz. When Fritz returned, he said that he had never authorized Ivan to take any pipes. Quietly, Bernard started to make other investigations and discovered missing plumbing fixtures, too, and a bathroom mirror.

  “Ivan must be doing over the bathroom at his family’s house,” I say to Nick, serving myself a few more tostones.

  Nick looks at me darkly.

  “I mean, here we always thought he was a spy, and it turns out he was just a thief.”

  I add that it’s a pity Eduardo won’t be able to play with Thea and Jimmie anymore. Eduardo was the only Cuban child they played with, apart from Yolanda at school.

  III. 12

  We go to see an artist, Saidel Brito, at the Instituto Superior del Arte. Saidel Brito is the same artist who, at a show in the spring, presented a painting of the underside of a horse, four times larger than life, suspended from the ceiling, its testicles coming at you like two bombs. Underneath it, hung waist-high, was a burlap sling full of actual horseshit.

  El Caballo, Fidel is called, but you can still paint a horse.

  This time Saidel Brito has made a painted terra-cotta statue of a goat lying on his back on a lawn chair. Caribbean Man, Saidel calls it. The goat is wearing sunglasses and an undershirt, one leg is crossed over the other, its balls lolling formlessly on the chaise.

  III. 13

  Juana is the Rolls-Royce of nannies, as far as we can make out. She has gotten the children to speak Spanish. “Cómo? No quieres hablar español conMIGO?” (“What? You don’t want to speak Spanish with ME?”), Juana says, rolling her eyes and tickling them until they speak Spanish without realizing that they are speaking Spanish. She is tireless. She plays Ping-Pong, hide-and-seek, capture the flag, handball, badminton without a net, checkers, cards, Spanish word games. She settles down with them on big pillows and reads with them or to them. She builds forts with them out of pillows, tables, and chairs and sits with them with a flashlight under blankets, telling them stories. She teaches them chess, how to read palms, and Cuban children’s songs.

  I get Juana’s personal story in snatches, for we are not together much. She comes to the house for a few hours in the afternoon after the children are home from school, then stays on if we have to go out in the evening. If we come home very late, she calls her husband, Hernando, to come and get her in their car. Otherwise she walks home.

  Juana’s grandfather on her mother’s side came to Cuba as a fifteen-year-old immigrant from Spain in the early twentieth century. He started sweeping out stores, and eventually owned a chain of stores in Cuba. He married a Cuban woman. They had several children. He sent all his children to study in the United States.

  Juana’s father worked for an American oil company but then became a revolutionary. Juana’s parents already had three children at the time of the revolution, Juana being the youngest of the three. Juana’s grandparents moved to Spain when the stores were appropriated. Juana’s mother left her husband and Cuba and went to Spain, too, taking the three children with her. Juana’s father persuaded Che Guevara himself to let him travel to Spain to try to persuade Juana’s mother to return. Juana’s mother returned to Cuba out of love for Juana’s father and had three more children.

  The family’s house was appropriated while Juana’s mother was in Spain. They had to move into a smaller house next door to it and look every day at the big house they used to live in. It was cramped with six children in the little house, but they built two new rooms on the terrace. They would go to Santa María del Mar for weekends, the two parents and six children, Juana tells me, all crammed into one Lada car. One child would be in front, on Juana’s mother’s lap, and the other five would be in the backseat. Juana tells me her father used to say he wished he had a mechanical hand mounted on the back of the driver’s seat that would move on a kind of track, slapping Juana and her brothers and sister as they squirmed on the backseat, the hand going back and forth unceasingly. Juana’s grandfather died, but Juana’s grandmother, who is in her nineties, still lives in Spain. Juana’s father died in 1985. Juana’s sister now lives in Chile, and one of her brothers lives in Texas. Three other brothers live in Cuba.

  Juana drives Jimmie and Thea to the Copacabana and teaches them how to snorkel in the hotel’s saltwater pool. She takes them to the beach. She takes them with her own family to the beach and introduces them to her nieces and nephews.

  Though she has tried everything, even going to a babalao and having half a pumpkin rubbed on her stomach, Juana is not able to have children.

  A FIST-SIZED OBJECT falls into the pool, not far from Nick, while we are swimming with the children. At first I think it is a large seedpod from a tree (it is windy), but then Nick says, “It’s a stone.”

  Nick picks it up off the bottom of the pool. It’s a piece of cement block. I look up at the edge of the roof above us, but all I see are red tiles and white stucco. Quietly it dawns on me that it is a stone that someone has thrown.

  “It was some kid,” I say.

  Nick says he saw it coming out of the corner of his eye. It came from the side street. Our house is on a corner. Nick says the thrower had to have been back from the fence a considerable distance—in the middle of the street, or better yet, in the bushes in the empty lot across the street, out of sight of the guard (who is supposed to cover both streets but is often dozing)—and had to have thrown hard. He must have been an adult or a big boy.

  There’s a bus stop at the side of the house where the rock came from. Six-foot-tall metal sheets line the chain-link fence around our house to keep people from looking in, but between the fence and the low cement wall it is set in, there is a four-inch gap, and the low wall provides a nice toehold, so one can either stoop and look through the gap under the fence, or step on the cement wall and look over it to see us having a nice swim. We often see the ocher color of high school uniforms through the gap, and sometimes lips on raw teenage faces yelling, “Puta!” (“Whore!”) and “Maricón!” (“Faggot!”).

  III. 14

  Fidel, appearing on television, says Hurricane Lili, which is supposed to hit Havana tonight, will be the greatest challenge to the Cuban people since the beginning of the periodo especial.

  Fidel’s stomach is sucked in, and he looks clear-eyed and energized as he explains in detail, with the aid of maps and charts, the emergency evacuation plans.

  In the part of the house where we all sleep, there is a way of closing three doors between ourselves and the outside, at least on the side nearest the sea. The children get in our bed. The wind mounts. Fight-or-flight hormones keep me awake all night, but Nick and the children are soon snoring. The wind wails in the palm trees as if toward some crescendo. The crescendo never comes, and at seven, I go bleary-eyed to the TV room. A guy with a pointer, a Magic Marker, and a big piece of paper on an easel is explaining that the eye passed near Matanzas.

  First we hear thirty-six buildings were destroyed, then two thousand, then six thousand. No one in Cuba was killed, however, while in Puerto Rico three hundred people died. The absence of fatalities, it is explained on television, is due to the constant review and perfection of Cuba’s emergency evacuation procedures.

  III. 15

  Dr. Yamila Lawton is thr
illed with the cassette player I bring her from Orlando. She makes a halfhearted attempt to offer to repay me, but I tell her not to think of it. She opens her pocketbook, closes it, opens it, and cries.

  NEW STEEL PANELS ARE welded in place over the gap at the bottom of the fence and at the top of the fence, next to the barbed wire.

  II. 16

  Nick and other executives and diplomats get back from a two-day bus trip to tour the destruction left by Hurricane Lili. The Foreign Ministry tried to persuade countries and companies to give special aid by showing them a videotape of the destruction, but the executives and diplomats said they had to see the real thing.

  In two days, they saw a flooded orange grove, two banana plantations with wind damage, and a refugee shelter. On the way, they saw many small guajiro houses with roofs blown off and mattresses outside drying in the sun. Nick talked to one woman whose income was 79 pesos a month (about $3.50).

  Nick says the hurricane’s happening to them was like stealing ten cents from someone who has twenty-five, and it looked like all they needed to restore their miserable lives to the miserable lives they had before was nails. Nick says, laughing, that in the refugee shelter were spanking-clean mattresses that hadn’t been slept in. There were no sheets, no bundles, no clothes lying around—just a handful of women and children who definitely looked as if they had been planted there. Nick says the scene at the refugee shelter was so fake that the diplomats and executives—who had been on the bus for two days—didn’t know whether to laugh, be angry, or feel pity.

  III. 17

  Cocktail party. Reny is there, aka the White Rabbit. He is called that because he has a white goatee and, like the White Rabbit in Alice in Wonderland, is a running theme. Reny is about sixty, and one of his assignments (one doesn’t know if it is from the Foreign Ministry, the Ministry of Culture, or the Ministry of the Interior) is to look after foreign wives.

  Reny, who is the height of the average foreigner’s wife and understands that I am still learning Spanish, speaks Spanish slowly and distinctly to me, pausing between one word and the next, inches from my face. He speaks about the next opera, the next ballet of Alicia Alonso. It is not unpleasant (Reny uses a good-quality mouthwash), and if you can withstand his first few efforts to get you to go to operas and ballets you are not interested in, he doesn’t insist.

  Another of Reny’s assignments is to look after Mme. Voisin. Mme. Voisin is the widow of a leading French expert on grazing grasses who wrote extensively on the subject in the 1950s. Fidel avidly read the works of M.Voisin in the first few years following the triunfo. Fidel invited M. and Mme.Voisin to Cuba, met them at the airport, and escorted them personally to model farms, to dairies, and to schools. M. Voisin died a few days after his arrival in Cuba, of a heart attack. Mme. Voisin was given a standing invitation to visit Cuba anytime she wanted and has done so every winter since his death. Reny is allowed to visit her in Paris every spring.

  Yet another of Reny’s assignments is to dabble in antiques. Reny has dabbled on behalf of the Carrera sisters, and he continues to dabble in antiques on behalf of other elderly women who have opted to stay on. He lowers his voice when he talks about antiques, pretends that he is acting on his own, but seems to stay on good terms with the Carreras and other elderly women, even with the ones who have children who live abroad and return regularly to Cuba to check on them, so perhaps the government’s cut is not all that onerous.

  Reny sports a different look at every party. Tonight he’s wearing a green silk Russian peasant blouse, buttoned on the side, and a silver peace medallion. His pants are tucked into knee-high boots.

  “Make love, not war, Reny!” I call to him, flashing the peace sign.

  Reny takes my hand and kisses it, beaming with satisfaction.

  III. 18

  I am taken to meet Alfonse, aka El Ingles (the Englishman) because his father was an East Indian from Jamaica. Alfonse is a handsome negro de pelo who has been allowed to cultivate a rubble-strewn empty lot on the outskirts of Siboney. He started with two helpers and three hoes and has been clearing the land by hand, removing the rubble and extracting from the soil shards of dientes de perro (literally, dog’s teeth—sharp volcanic rock), which he is using to make raised beds.

  Alfonse is also, through some new law or loophole, allowed to sell what he produces to members of his “club.” For five dollars each time you attend the “club” you receive a jaba full of vegetables.

  Pole beans I see, carrots, cucumbers, and Swiss chard, but foreigners also bring Alfonse seed packets of plants he has only heard of and seen only in pictures on the backs of the packets. The foreigners translate the instructions on the backs of the seed packets for him.

  “Mira, señora,” Alfonse says. He leads us to a raised bed in a corner of the garden. He pulls an empty seed packet off a stack. “Do you know this vegetable?”

  I tell Alfonse zucchini are very well known in the United States and in Europe.

  Alfonse kneels, brushes other leaves aside, and shows me a mound out of which zucchini tendrils and leaves are beginning to unfold.

  Memories of the taste and smell of zucchini come flooding back, even though I was in a country in which zucchini were readily available just a few weeks before. Memories of the tastes and smells of other vegetables you can’t get fresh in Cuba come flooding back, too—of broccoli and asparagus and fat celery.

  III. 19

  It is Saturday morning. The children sit in the despacho in the morning, watching cartoons. I am in the kitchen, peering into the refrigerator, trying to figure out what to tell Lorena to fix for lunch for the help and for us.

  Concha comes into the kitchen. “Señora, me da pena (it pains me), but I have to tell you that someone has been urinating in the wastebasket in the despacho (den), and I’m worried about it because it’s near the electrical cords.”

  “What?” I think it’s my Spanish.

  She repeats slowly. “The wastebasket in the despacho. Urine in it. Electrical cords.”

  “How many times has this happened?”

  “Four times.”

  “Four times!” It’s Jimmie, of course, not wanting to miss a cartoon, or being afraid of going into the dark powder room, but at the moment, I’m trying to deal with an even greater strangeness: “Why didn’t you tell me about it before?”

  “Because me da pena, I didn’t want to get little Jimmie in trouble . . .”

  “Concha,” I say, nearly dumbstruck, but knowing I have to go on, “we adults have to be united in what we expect from the children.”

  Danila stands beside her, nodding with recognition.

  “You must not accept from the children behavior that you would not accept in your own house! It’s not fair to them!”

  “But señora, Jimmie, he has such a carácter, I didn’t want you to get mad at him.”

  “But Concha, por favor, we can’t let the children think they can behave one way in front of one adult and another way in front of another adult. It will only confuse them. They will start to play on this.”

  Danila keeps nodding. She looks relieved. Concha’s face turns pink.

  “The children live in a big house with a lot of people to help them, but they are children just the same.” On I go, trying to make sensible points, Danila nodding, Concha flushing. I am feeling shaken by how little I can trust them to do the sensible thing, and by how Concha was able to go on for so long, dealing with shit’s near equivalent, and not make a peep.

  I follow Concha into the despacho. She holds up the square wooden waste-basket with the urine sloshing inside it. It sits behind an armchair with a high back, against the wall. I didn’t know six-year-olds could be so sly.

  “Gross!” Thea says.

  “Did you know about this?” I ask Thea.

  “Gross! No!”

  Jimmie holds a blanket up to his face and cries. I turn off the TV. He turns out of my arms, runs upstairs, and shuts himself in the bathroom.

  “Jimmie, it’s no
t terrible, what you did,” I say at the door.

  From the bathroom, a furious squeal.

  THERE IS A CRITICAL mass you reach in terms of numbers of help in the non–First World countries where you can have them. Four in help is fine, but with more than four, in most cases, confusion mounts geometrically: the number of help you have becomes inversely proportional to the actual amount of “help” you receive. This I say to Nick at night when he is back from work and can concentrate, but we agree that we can’t, we absolutely can’t, deprive Danila, Concha, or anyone who is used to getting eighty-five dollars a month from those eighty-five dollars.

  I TELL JUANA ABOUT Jimmie and the wastebasket, Danila, and Concha, and I tell her how we need her very badly.

  WE HIRE MORE HELP. After two years of showing visitors the Plaza de la Catedral, Plaza de Armas, Palacio de los Capitanes Generales, churches of San Francisco and La Merced, Plaza Vieja, Museo de la Revolución, Granma, and Castillos del Morro y La Cabaña and finishing with a drink at El Floridita, I decide that I just can’t take it anymore. I need a chauffeur for visitors. I go to Lola. She recommends her nephew, Roberto, who is working as a night manager at the Hotel Caribe and making ten dollars a month.

  Roberto is a twenty-eight-year-old blanco with dark circles under his blue eyes. I tell Roberto it will be very irregular work, chauffeuring only when I have visitors, and I don’t know how many visitors we will have. I tell him we may have many visitors in a row, then none for who knows how long. I go away in the summer, and then there will be no visitors. I tell him I will pay him ten dollars for a half day and twenty dollars for a whole day’s work.