Cuba Diaries

by Isadora Tattlin

  Mantua, the northwesternmost city in Cuba, is a town of twenty-three thousand people, who live for the most part in small wooden houses with porches. The straight streets have U.S.-style sidewalks of poured cement with lines drawn in them and U.S.-style fire hydrants placed at regular intervals. One area in Mantua looks as if it might have been a business district at one time, but now there is not a café nor a bodega nor an agro to be seen anywhere.

  There is, however, a historical society, which is nearly bare inside. A custodian rises from the seat where she is dozing and kisses us on both cheeks. There is a reproduction of the table at which the victorious mulato Cuban general Antonio Maceo sat when Mantua’s Spanish mayor ceded the town to Maceo’s forces. It’s a reproduction, the custodian explains, because the town was burned twice during the war of independence. There are a few arrowheads, some remnants of cooking pots and stirrups from the colonial period, a photo portrait (taken in 1920) of a lady who danced all night with Maceo in 1896. There is a photo of the high school band, taken in 1940: braided uniforms they had then, plumed hats, and a full complement of shiny musical instruments, including a tuba, and there were majorettes in tasseled white cowboy boots with batons. There are photos of martyrs of the revolution and a photo of the one boy from Mantua who died (of disease) in Angola.

  “But the town was burned after Maceo arrived?” we ask. “Who burned it?”

  “It was burned by the Cubans themselves. The Spanish retook the town after it was ceded to Maceo’s forces and were trying to fortify it. The Cubans burned it so it would not fall into Spanish hands.”

  Maceo died in Mantua later in the same year, in a Spanish ambush.

  A thin blanco in his sixties arrives. He is introduced to us as the city historian. He takes each of our hands in both of his hands and squeezes them. “It is so good to have some visitors,” he says.

  We catch sight of a small boy standing outside in the alley peering through the shutters at us. He slams the shutters shut when he sees us looking at him. “My grandson,” the historian says.

  The historian explains that it is generally believed that the city’s name is the Spanish name for Mantova, a landlocked Italian city, because the duchy of Mantova, in Italy, became a Spanish protectorate in the sixteenth century following the Spanish invasion of northern Italy. A duke of Mantova, Gonzaga, himself of Spanish origin, was chief of Spanish shipbuilding for a time in the sixteenth century. This is the first explanation. After that, there are two slightly diverging explanations, both having to do with a Spanish ship named the Mantua or the Mantova and captained by one Anatolio Fiorenzana. One legend is that the ship, pursued by the English, sought refuge behind coral reefs off what is now Mantua, and its captain and crew decided to stay. The other legend is that the ship was wrecked on the reefs, and those who made it ashore decided to stay. There is no money, though, to look for the remains of the boat or the shipwreck on the coral reefs, and there are no written records. All that is left is oral tradition and the fact that a lot of people in the town have names that sound like Italian names. There is also a copy of the original sixteenth-century shield of the town, which has in it the image of a sinking ship. Finally, there is the Virgin in the church, the Virgen de las Nieves (Virgin of the Snows), which is also the Virgin in the cathedral of Mantova. The Virgin was saved from both fires. No one knows exactly how old she is, only that she is very old.

  There has not been a priest in the church for a long time, the historian says, but more priests are being ordained now in Havana, and they have heard that one will be sent from Havana soon. The house facing the church has the key. We kiss old women rocking on the porch of the house facing the church, who raise their faces to us expectantly, and are handed the key.

  Over the door of the church is the copied shield with the sinking ship on it. Above the altar is the ancient Virgin of the Snows. She has the small mouth and full chin of eighteenth-century-and-earlier beauty. Her robe is white satin, with large rhinestone snowflakes embroidered on it. She holds a white tobacco flower in one hand. The tobacco flower, of carved wood, was added in the last century, the historian explains, when she became, in this tobacco-growing region, the Virgen del Tabaco as well. Her shrine is carved from one piece of wood. She holds a tiny Jesus in her arms. Jesus is the size of a newborn but has the face of a crabby four-year-old.

  At the end of Cuba, the Virgin of the Snows. The expression “when it snows in Cuba” is the Cuban equivalent of “when pigs have wings.” The silence on the street outside, the loneliness, is like that in some wintry place. We sit in the front pew, willing the Virgin’s sweet face to reveal the mystery of her origin and tell us when snow will finally fall.

  III. 30

  The only place to spend the night is in the Laguna Grande Motel, about forty kilometers from Mantua. The one-star motel is a former campismo popular, where workers were sent on vacation. Its small bungalows are made to look like thatched huts. The interior walls of our bungalow are lined with patterned curtains. At first we think it’s because someone has an enthusiasm for sewing, but when we look behind them we realize they are to cover sweat and mildew on the plaster walls. The pillows are thin mats with lumps. Large ants crawl on the floor of the shower.

  I ask the receptionist who shows us to our room if there is hot water. In a toneless voice she says that there is none running from the taps, but if we would like some, it can be heated in the kitchen. I ask in what container, in what receptacle, the hot water could be put, but I’m not using the right word. What I am trying to find out is whether I have to take my body over to the kitchen and wash there, so I ask, “If someone wants to take a shower, how do they do it?” She gets in the shower and, with the same bored expression on her face, takes the telephone-type showerhead off the hook and trains it over her body to illustrate. “I know how to take a shower,” I say. “I just want to know where you put the hot water.” She holds up a plastic bucket with a top. The room costs forty dollars per night.

  We go into the dining room for dinner. There is no other place for seventy-five miles offering food of any kind.

  The tablecloth and the napkin are gray, as if they have been used for dusting. “Can I please have a napkin that is a little cleaner?” I ask. Paper napkins are produced. The waiter appears. “There is no electricity in the kitchen,” he says, “so we can’t cook the food. There will be a delay.”

  “Can we look at the menu?”

  “There will be a delay.”

  “How long?”

  He seems confused.

  “Can we look at the menu so that we can think about what we want to eat while we are waiting?”

  He hesitates.

  “They want to look at the menu,” Roberto barks.

  It is finally produced.

  “I don’t see why they didn’t want to at least bring a menu,” I whisper to Roberto. Usually I don’t say anything, but there are still times here when bad service, delivered so unapologetically, feels like an aggression.

  When we are alone in the car, Roberto criticizes nearly everything, with no prompting from us, heaping the greatest vitriol upon the Bearded One himself, but here in the restaurant, Roberto begins a loud sotto voce speech—like an operatic aside—about how unprepared they are for tourism. It’s for the benefit of the restaurant staff, and for the handful of Cuban “guests”—chain-smoking men in tight polo shirts who sit, also without food, at another table. Roberto speaks about how difficult it is to get soap, about how one state agency will not provide another state agency with the product for making a decent soap, about how difficult it is to get running water and to heat it if there is little gas. Nick and I flatter ourselves that the men in tight polo shirts might be our tails.

  “But before el triunfo de la revolución, there were water heaters,” I say to Roberto. “People had hot water . . .”

  “My family never had hot water.”

  Nick kicks me in the ankle.

  After dinner, Nick vomits into the plastic bucket th
e receptionist told us was meant for hot water. I spray the sides of the bucket with the telephone-type showerhead and dump it into the hibiscus bushes to the side of our bungalow.

  “I don’t see any point in staying here another night,” Nick says, his face gray atop the lumpy gray pillow.

  Staying in less-than-two-star hotels in Cuba during the periodo especial, we realize, means passing below the rock bottom of comfort, to the point where involuntary abuse of guests begins.

  III. 31

  We drive back to Havana the next day, stopping at a beach we have heard about, Playa Las Canas. We drive about fifty kilometers, then drive another eight on a deeply rutted road through a cow pasture dotted with royal palms. We come upon another former campismo popular, only one that is really abandoned this time. It is much more attractive than the Laguna Grande probably ever was. It is made of real palm-thatched huts, about thirty of them, spread out along a bay with not much beach but with a view of islands strung out along its entrance, all of them uninhabited. The huts have cement floors, which have buckled and crumbled. It is puzzling how in Cuba, when they build huts, they never build them on stilts, with wooden floors, as they are built in other tropical countries, but rather pour cement floors right on the ground. The slip of beach goes on for several kilometers in both directions. Cows have eaten the grass behind the beach, so that it is like a lawn, dotted with dried cow patties. Shade trees arch conveniently over this lawn and over the beach as well, so that you can choose whether to picnic on shaded grass or on shaded sand.

  Every place we hear of and then make an effort to see, we have been telling ourselves, is for future reference, for when friends come. We will take time, we have been telling ourselves; we will load the car with stuff; we will have a convoy, even. The future looks dimmer, though, with each unspoiled, unsqualid, jinetera-free place we find, as we contemplate the monumental effort involved in driving many hours and taking everything with us—gasoline, food, tent, grill, and a guard, or two guards, to spell each other—then spending at least two days (otherwise the monumental effort wouldn’t be worth it) and in the end feeling ridiculous, with guards to watch our canned tuna, and lonely (we admit it now), even with friends.

  Deserted places can be mysterious and exhilarating, or they can make you feel lonelier still; in Cuba, deserted places make you feel lonelier still. We have tried to feel exhilarated, coming to a gorgeous, deserted place, and proud of ourselves for having found it. “Think of how so-and-so would love to be here,” we say to each other, but it falls flat.

  A guajiro is living in one of the more substantial huts. He is muscular and weather-beaten, in an army jacket with the sleeves ripped off, no shirt, and army shoes worn to a kind of leather latticework on top. His son is with him. We ask him how long the huts have been abandoned. He says they have been abandoned since last year. We say it looks like they have been abandoned for longer than that, and he says that a few people had been there the summer before, living in the huts that were in better shape. He says he’s only been here two weeks. He asked the local Consejo del Poder Popular (literally, Council of the People’s Power, or local Communist Party council) if he could live here, and they said he could, but he doesn’t know how long he can stand it. Water is a big problem. He’s requested the tank truck three times, and they’ve only come once. He says it’s just his son and himself. He’s been alone, he tells us, with his son since his son was born. The son is about fifteen, willowy, with doe eyes and bad acne. I feel that we are in a Hemingway story. We give them some canned tuna and some chocolate and a bottle of water. We wish them good luck. They wave at us as we drive away. I know I will think about them and about Playa Las Canas long after it becomes a Club Méditerranée.

  We drive to the nearby town of Dimas to see if we can find some food there—a paladar is too much to hope for, but we are hoping for an agropecuario or a stand selling yucas rellenas. We pass a low stucco building with RESTAURANTE written on the side of it with fluorishes. I go in. A woman stands behind an empty display case. She looks at me suspiciously. “Do you have any food?” I ask. “We only sell cigarettes,” she says. We drive to the shore, turn right, drive to the end of the street. “Let’s get out and walk,” Nick says. “But where?” I ask. There is a military post in front of us. In back of us is a dock leading to a building. A cluster of men stand at the entrance to the dock. One of them seems to be a guard.

  “Let’s walk on the dock,” Nick says.

  “They probably won’t let us.”

  Nick approaches the one who seems to be a guard. “Good morning. Can we take a walk on the dock?”

  “Es prohibido.”

  “Ah, prohibido. That is a word I hear very much in Cuba.”

  The guard pushes himself up from the wall he’s been resting on.

  “What country are you from?”

  “It is prohibido to tell you.”

  “What country? Japan?”

  I would like to stop, face him, and ask him if he really thinks we are from Japan or if he is kidding. Sometimes non-Asian people in really, really faraway places (once, in the mountains of Greece) have thought I was Asian because my eyes, though blue, are a little slanty and my hair, though brown, is dead straight. I want to ask him if he thinks people from Japan have blue eyes and brown hair, but Nick yells, “Prohibido!” over his shoulder at him as we move to the car.

  III. 32

  Danila comes into my little room. She asks me if she can leave early. She was robbed the night before. She has to go to the police.

  They took knickknacks from her shelves, she tells me. They unplugged the stereo but they didn’t take it. Danila then says darkly that her husband was in the house drinking with a friend while she was at her mother’s.

  DANILA SAYS THE ROBBERY was worse than she thought: they took her blender and her electric frying pan, too. Her voice is trembling. The police were at her house. They said it is odd that there was no sign of anyone forcing his way in. Her husband was in the house drinking with a friend when the things disappeared, she tells me again.

  III. 33

  Fidel gives a speech on television about the Clinton administration’s recently published Transition to Democracy paper, which is a blueprint for Cuba’s transition to a democratic system following the death or removal from office of the Castro brothers. Fidel calls Clinton an idiot for proposing it. Never in the history of the world, he says, has one country so blatantly meddled in the affairs of another country. He says the United States is the most racist, violent, discriminatory country in the world. “It discriminates against blacks, against women, against Hispanics, against . . .” He looks at the camera, searching. “Children,” he continues triumphantly.

  A South American journalist sitting with us in the despacho bursts out laughing. “He is really having fun,” the journalist says.

  LO NUESTRO ES NUESTRO (What is ours is ours), reads the slogan on the billboard at the PabExpo traffic circle in Cubanacán.

  III. 34

  Tight-fitting knee-high boots along the Malecón after dark now, and in the shadows of the street in back of the Meliá Cohiba Hotel, male jineteros in cutoff hot pants with bare midriffs, emerging from among the dead appliances and potted plants on front patios to flash their wares—hot pants hiked high, seams cutting into balls—in the seconds it takes for our lone headlights to pass. The hair is stringier, the scene harder than it was when we first got here: they are becoming pros.

  We have gone to a play, Te Sigo, Esperando (“I Follow You, Hoping,” which can also mean “I Follow You, Waiting,” for the words for “hoping” and “waiting” are the same in Spanish). It is the first play we have seen about a real situation, not a “symbolic” play set in a vague time that the audience has to read things into and figure out. Here the only thing to figure out is how the play, written by a Cuban living in Cuba, got to be performed in the first place. The play is about families divided by emigration. It is about trying to get by on a minuscule salary and care for an aging par
ent. It is about how Cubans exploit and blackmail one another. It is about anger and boorishness, about broken elevators, about the contortions Cubans have to make to acquire enough food, about the lack even of rags to wipe the floor. The audience roars and claps with recognition at the site of a sopping T-shirt slapped down on the floor to clean it. It is about how a person who plays by the rules gets shafted.

  Toward the end of the play, the protagonist, facing the audience, asks, “And do you think that with so much paternalism and lack of discipline we can really construct socialism?” The audience roars again and stamps, hoots and whistles. We emerge from the play energized and drive home along the Malecón.

  III. 35

  Gonzalo, our swimming teacher, has stopped wearing his diamond ring, though he still wears his gold chain. He has started spending every weekend with his parents, his ex-wife, and their son, Olaznog (which is Gonzalo spelled backward), who all live near Trinidad. He always brings back five pounds of shrimp for us, and we pay him ten dollars. The shrimp is piling up in the freezer. After about the fifth week, I offer weakly that we have a lot of shrimp already, but he looks so crestfallen that I buy another five pounds, then another, until I am giving shrimp away to friends.

  III. 36

  Ana María Guevara, the stepmother of Che Guevara, whom we met last year at the Argentinian ambassador’s, lives in a pleasant house in Miramar. It is nearly bare, with a shiny terrazzo floor and just a few pieces of worn Danish modern furniture. At the back is a room with many windows, which she uses as a studio. The windows look out on a thick grove of banana trees. When I compliment her on the trees, she shrugs and says, “I find tropical a little boring. It’s always the same, but what can I do?”