Cuba Diaries

by Isadora Tattlin

Roberto scoots to the edge of the chair and volunteers that for him a whole day means twenty-four hours. He speaks before the words are completely out of my mouth, struggling to keep his tone even. I say that some months he may make a good amount of money, but other months he may make nothing.

  He says, jumping in again, that his health is more important than anything. His job as a night manager is ruining his health. He needs sleep. And besides, the Caribe is going to close—he is sure of it. Foreigners who check in without looking at the rooms usually check out within minutes, or the next day. It’s going to be closed, taken over by a foreign chain, and redone, he is sure of it.

  He will drive me and two American señoras to Cienfuegos next week. He will call in sick to the Caribe. Then after Christmas he will quit his job and start working for me.

  I say I feel worried that he will be leaving something secure.

  “Señora, it’s ten dollars a month . . .”

  III. 20

  There’s a fifty-person line snaking down some side steps at the agro in Vedado.

  I ask Miguel to find out what it is they are lining up for.

  Miguel comes back to me. “It’s for turkeys,” Miguel says.

  “Qué raro,” I say. I have never heard of turkeys at the agro before.

  “Years ago, before el triunfo,” Miguel tells me, “people used to eat turkeys at this time of the year.”

  Today is November 22.

  III. 21

  Opening of the eighteenth annual New Latin American Film Festival at the Karl Marx Theater.

  More lights have burned out in the theater since last year’s film festival, shiny black patches on the carpet and plush seats have expanded and in many places worn through, and the same smell is still there. I can define the smell now: it’s the between-the-toes smell of adolescents, five hundred of them in a closed room.

  There are interviews with the French director of Indochine, with some Brazilian guy, and with the Nicaraguan star of a Scottish movie as we wait two hours for the surprise film of the evening to be shown. The interviews are interspersed with advertisements shown on a small screen. It is the first time the festival has had sponsors.

  The audience makes sounds that range from aghast to pleased as the advertisements are shown. One is a spot for Popular cigarettes. “Soy cubana, soy Popular,” says a lady with a chignon in a long, white off-the-shoulder dress, her neck full of jewelry. Popular in Spanish means “known, famous,” but also “traditional, folk, of the people.” Many people in the audience sit on the edge of their seats, as people here seem to do when confronted by an image of anyone or anything bourgeois. At the end of the interviews and advertisements is a cascade of all the names of all the joint-venture companies who are sponsoring the event, all of them with amalgamated, dissonant names like Etecsa and Suchel.

  Alfredo Guevara’s speech this year praises socialism and extols Fidel as the seeker of justice for mankind. Alfredo’s voice is shrill and tremulous. Delicate hands grip the paper. There was no mention of socialism, nor of Him, in the speech he gave last year. Alfredo has high blood pressure.

  People look sideways at one another. Legs move, kicking ankles.

  “Cuba is the leader of the world in social justice,” Alfredo reads.

  III. 22

  No fish for many weeks. Some kind of crackdown. Just as I am getting ready to go to the one place that sells fish (frozen only) to Cubans, in La Lisa, fish comes—red snapper and crab claws stuffed in the hollowed-out seat of our favorite fish vendor’s motorbike. We buy the ten pounds of snapper and crab that he has managed to stuff into the seat. He returns half an hour later with another twelve pounds stuffed into his seat.

  III. 23

  We go to the opening of the fifth annual Italian Film Festival, which is held in conjunction with the New Latin American Film Festival. The director Vivarelli is there. He looks older than he probably is, with a large potbelly, and chain-smokes. He is the only foreign member of the Cuban Communist Party.

  Vivarelli warns the audience that the film we are about to see is a hard film but, mercifully, a short film.

  Practically the first shot is a close-up of a woman’s unshaved armpit. It fills the screen. The audience guffaws.

  What’s admirable, bordering on the miraculous, is that no matter how much Cubans don’t have soap or hot water, no matter how much they don’t have even running water, no matter how hard it is to find even a dull, shaggy razor blade, Cubans still manage to be clean, and Cuban women always have shaved armpits.

  The film is one close-up after another of women’s armpits after that. When it’s not showing armpits, it’s showing good-looking, sullen young Europeans flopping around in Comme des Garçons gray and midnight blue outfits in an impersonal, devolved, squalid, back-to-the-future–type basement, or groping one another in Armani and Calvin Klein underwear.

  The audience laughs and hoots all through the film. Many leave.

  III. 24

  Alfredo Guevara is placed next to me at a dinner. I tell him the person on the other side of me is from La Yuma, from New York.

  “I was in New York once,” he says, chuckling. “I was in prison on Ellis Island before my expulsion.”

  “But it closed as an immigration center in nineteen twenty-four. . .” For some reason I know this.

  “They still kept a prison there, for those trying to enter the United States illegally. It was in nineteen forty-nine. I was a student activist.”

  “Have you never been able to visit New York itself?”

  “I went again once, with the U.N. They said I could visit New York, but I had to stay with Cuban diplomats. I didn’t want to go around New York with Cuban diplomats. I wanted to see the Village. I went to visit a journalist, and from there I managed to get out on my own, and so finally I saw the Village.”

  “I’m glad. I was having an image of you sneaking out the window of the Cuban mission, like Audrey Hepburn in Roman Holiday.”

  He smiles at this, then leans back in his chair. “Cuba is a lot like North America, don’t you think?”

  “Yes,” I say immediately, surprising myself. “I know some Mediterranean countries, and I would say it’s closer to North America than it is to a Mediterranean country. There is no siesta here. That is very North American, to work all day long, eat just a sandwich, and leave work at five o’clock.”

  It’s a chance: he’s supposed to be one of the least duro (hard-line) of all the nomenklatura, and he is wanting to show me and my yumese friend that he’s not like the recent duro speech he made (which he was obliged to give, Nick and I have speculated, because the speech he made the year before was so un-duro, and because of the advertisements and the cascade of jointventure company names shown at the festival this year), but instead all I say is, “In North America, one of the worst things you can do is park your car on a sidewalk, or park facing the wrong way on a one-way street, or cut in front of someone else in a line. To do any of those things would be unthinkable. In Mediterranean countries, it’s regarded as normal (even necessary) behavior. In North America, though, a crazy person can buy a gun and kill lots of people. In the Mediterranean, what’s most important is life inside the home. In North America, because of the tremendous amount of social mobility, there hasn’t been much of a chance to develop home life and its refinements.”

  Alfredo Guevara smiles with recognition. “I’m trying to give my son a sense of home life.”

  “You have a son?” I repeat, trying not to sound too surprised. He is so very gay.

  “I have a son who has a wife and a child, and they all live with me. But my son is always on the street. ‘Why don’t you stay at home?’ I say. ‘Eat with us, at least.’ But no. He comes in, has a little snack, goes out again. There’s no regularity to his life.”

  What chance, I am now thinking. Chance for what? Chance to say to Alfredo, who looks dispirited enough as it is, “It’s like North America on the outside, but it’s like Spain a gazillion years ago on the inside.
It’s like an Arab country, even, the way people relate to power”?

  “I had to fight so much against my parents,” Alfredo Guevara says after a pause.

  Alfredo Guevara was a leader of the student movement against Batista at the University of Havana. Like Fidel, Che Guevara, and most of the original revolutionaries, he was the child of conservative, middle-class parents who supported the status quo.

  Well, you won, didn’t you? I want to say, but instead all I say is “Hmmm . . .”

  III. 25

  Alfonse says he showed the zucchini to an old man who remembered seeing them before el triunfo de la revolución. He told Alfonse they called them calabazin.

  Alfonse gives me five four-inch-long zucchini to take home. He says he has to save the other six he has been able to grow for other customers. He doesn’t know how much more the plant will be able to produce. Already the farthest tendrils are drying up and the leaves, which never grew larger than a hand, are curling. It must be the quality of the soil, Alfonse says.

  I lay them on the kitchen table.

  “Mira eso,” Lorena says, putting her face close to them and inspecting them from all sides.

  The help file past the prone zucchini, stroking their stiff fur.

  They are like cucumbers, Miguel declares, but they are also like squash, only with thinner skin.

  Manuel, who is nearly sixty, says they may have been in Cuba before el triunfo, but he never saw them.

  Deliverymen and repairmen put on their glasses, bend over them, prod them. “Qué curioso,” they say to Lorena. One then takes off his glasses. “Qué grande es el mundo, verdad? (“How large the world is, isn’t that true?”).

  III. 26

  There are no direct flights from Miami to Havana since the Hermanos al Rescate were shot down last year. Instead of flying directly, charter planes are now touching down in Nassau, resting on the runway, then taking off again after about forty-five minutes. This seems to satisfy whoever it is who needs to be satisfied.

  As we are sitting on the runway in Nassau, a representative of the charter company announces that we will not be able to proceed to Havana in this plane. We will have to deplane. An airplane belonging to Cubana de Aviación is flying to Nassau to take us the rest of the way.

  There is a scream on the plane, and agitated mumbling. People take charter planes to avoid Cubana de Aviación. It will be a Tupolev, we know, which is the same kind of airplane that crashed in Russia a week before. The passengers have already been broken by five hours of waiting in Miami, though, and Christmas is in two days. I am sweating. I am thinking of going back to Miami and trying to get to Cuba through Cancún. I am thinking of doing this, but I have five suitcases full of presents. I am thinking of suing the charter company for misrepresenting its service.

  In the Tupolev steam rises as usual from beneath the seats and fills the cabin with drifting clouds. One habit of travelers to Cuba, apart from having on average one hundred pounds of overweight luggage, is to wear four or five hats stacked on their heads. This is the easiest way to make sure that they won’t get crushed. Between the hats and the carry-ons, there is not an inch of extra space on board. The stewardess begins her pre-takeoff announcements. I am in the second row of seats. A twenty-year-old girl ahead of me suddenly reaches around and inserts a half-eaten hot dog, with mustard on it, in the net bag on the back of the seat, facing me.

  “But what are you doing?” I say to her.

  “The stewardess said to get rid of the trash, and here in the front seat there is no place.”

  “But you don’t—” I start, but there are so many miles to go with the girl I just take my last piece of Kleenex, wrap the still-warm hot dog in the Kleenex, and give it to the stewardess, wiping mustard from my hands onto my pants.

  The Tupolev rumbles tentatively down the runway. The steam increases. Passengers cross themselves. Compartments containing oxygen bags flip open over the bumps, spilling oxygen bags and tubes. Passengers lean forward, pumping. Panels, armrests, hats, and carry-on bags shake loose, fall in the aisle, and are retrieved by darting stewardesses. Bottles roll. I am thinking of the five pieces of luggage for every passenger, the Christmas average, in the belly of the plane. We strain into the air. It’s an hour and a half more to Havana, an hour and a half of shrieks and groans and cries of, “Coño!” (“Cunt!”) and “Dios mío!” (“My God!”) with every shake and strange noise of the plane.

  “Cuba! I see Cuba!” a passenger near me shouts.

  “Thank God,” his companion says. “Now at least we won’t die in the sea.”

  III. 27

  We’ve had houseguests solid for the past three weeks. I would like to use Roberto for every waking moment, even to have mojitos with the guests on the veranda. It’s not that I don’t like them, but my life is slipping by. The scary part is that sometimes I find myself beyond anxiety and in some kind of state of dumb happiness, which comes from having a swimming pool and from the deterioration of brain cells—several thousand of them controlling anxiety, located at the center of the brain, deteriorate when you are in your forties—and I find myself feeling like it doesn’t matter whether I write or not.

  Houseguests on my back, houseguests in my pockets and cuffs, so that I cannot crawl to the word processor. Then, in my mind, I play the alternate scenario, of never having met Nick and therefore having married or had kids or lived in strange places, the alternate scenario a linear progression from the moment of my big revelation (obvious for some, but for me a big revelation) that it was better to be alone than to be with the wrong man: the scenario of me alone in a prewar doorman building in Greenwich Village, leading an ordered, quiet life with good cheeses and plenty of time to write. Plenty of time to write and remember all my nieces’ and nephews’ birthdays. Plenty of time to write, but making myself do it for three hours every morning, followed by twenty-five laps at the New York Health and Racquet Club.

  There is a ghost me that steps out of me and leads that life in snippets.

  III. 28

  Nick and I visit the westernmost part of Cuba. It is the first time we have been on a trip by ourselves, without the children, since Muna left more than a year ago. We spend the first night at Los Jazmines, a hotel built in a traditional style in the first few years following el triunfo. It is the first time Nick and I have been alone together in a hotel in Cuba. We enter the room, put down our bags, and open the French doors leading onto the balcony.

  The setting of Los Jazmines is breathtaking, overlooking the mogotes of the Viñales Valley—massive, verdant rock formations, caused by erosion, that rise out of valley floors, like those in Chinese landscape paintings, and exist only in China, Cuba, and a few other places in the world. In the valley grow corn, tobacco, yucca, lettuce, cucumbers, beans, horses, cows, sheep, pigs. The sun is setting, turning everything bluish green. We will return with the children, we say; we will ask about horseback riding.

  In the dining room, a trio is playing “The Pennsylvania Polka” very loudly to a group of elderly French tourists. They move on to “Never on Sunday,” “La Cucaracha,” and “Guantanamera.” We ask the waitress if she can ask the trio to make the music a little softer. Our dinner is a shriveled quarter of a chicken, some dry rice and beans, some greasy and very tired sliced potatoes, then potatoes again in the form of canned cubed potatoes with canned carrots, and peas. The meal costs nine dollars per person.

  Anita, who introduces herself as the head of public relations for the hotel, stops by our table. Anita is about twenty-five years old and very pretty. “The waitress tells me that you don’t like the music.”

  “It’s fine,” we say.

  “No, really, she said you didn’t like it.”

  “It’s fine . . . just a little loud.”

  “I think it’s about time we stopped the music.”

  She signals to the musicians, who pick up their instruments and leave.

  “And how is the food?”

  “Do you really want to know?�
��

  “May I sit down? I do really want to know.”

  “Why, when we are in such a rich agricultural area, do you serve tired canned vegetables from Europe?”

  She nods knowingly. “This is something everyone complains about . . .”

  “If everyone complains, why do you keep on serving them?”

  “Because we are only allowed to buy vegetables from the entity that sells food to tourist establishments, and this is what has been available recently.”

  “And why do you care what we think?”

  “I just do. Maybe it’s because I am young and have just started this job.”

  III. 29

  We drive the Cordillera de Guaniguanico the next day. It is not just Viñales that is full of mogotes; it is the entire cordillera (mountain chain), which runs eighty kilometers from Minas de Matahambre to Guanes. Minas de Matahambre (Hungerkiller Mines) is a tropical Wild West. We drive up and down hills topped by rusting nineteenth-century mining machinery. From then on, it’s a high plain, wending its way between mogotes, full of caves and rivers that snake in and out of the caves and porous bases of the mogotes. Some of the caves are nearly hidden by thick vines. On the plain, tobacco, beans, rice, zebu cattle, guajiro houses with palm-thatched roofs, and corroding bridges. In eighty kilometers on this main road, we see neither bodega nor store, nor state-run restaurant, nor paladar, nor filling station, nor any sign of commercial life. The only signs of modern life are corroding steel bridges with wooden boards laid across them that shift precariously as we cross. It could be a dream of a place for kayaking, hiking, horseback riding, for sleeping in simple bungalow-style hotels with wide verandas, no electricity, and mosquito nets.

  The mogotes end at Guane. From Guane to Mantua are pine-forested hills. Some of the pines are hung with resin-collecting cans.