Cuba Diaries

by Isadora Tattlin

  The true fascination of Piñeiro, of course, lies in the contemplation of the size and scope of the secrets contained in one unkempt head. He knows how Camilo Cienfuegos died, he knows how on purpose it was that Che was not resupplied in the Bolivian jungle, he knows up to what level Cuba’s leadership was aware of drug trafficking out of Cuba in the eighties. He knows all these things, the foreigner thinks, and here he is, in my living room, enjoying my scotch, sucking my food out of his dentures. It is minuscule, Havana.

  Some foreigners think, Here he is, and try to crack him—through charm, food, and drink—like a safe. He winks, drinks, smokes, guffaws, eats, insinuates, and drops phrases of American slang. They urge him to write his memoirs. He smiles crookedly, squeezes elbows. He is told that he can write his memoirs and put them in a box and seal the box for a hundred years. “You think so?” he asks, cocking his head.

  This is on good nights. Tonight, though, he asks the European ambassador sitting on my left if his country is against the common position recently taken by the European Union regarding investment in Cuba (which ties investment to improvements in human rights and is more in accordance with the position of the United States). The European ambassador states that the position recently taken is a common position. Piñeiro says that he knows that is what they say, but his European country was really against it, right? The European ambassador, his face reddening, repeats that the position the European Union took is a common position. Piñeiro then says that he hopes that the ambassador’s particular European country is not sacrificing its dignity and its sovereignty on the issue. Piñeiro’s voice is raised, and his speech is slurred. Dignidad and soberanía are favorite words in orthodox speeches. The European ambassador looks at Piñeiro incredulously and says that his country remains very independent of the United States in its decision-making process . . .

  A Spanish woman sitting beside Piñeiro bumps him with her shoulder. “Leave it, hombre,” she says to Piñeiro.

  Piñeiro slaps his chest. “We have balls!”

  “Ay, balls again,” the Spanish woman says, sighing. “Don’t be this . . . thing that everyone expects you to be . . . like something out of National Geographic.”

  Piñeiro looks at me, ignoring her. He leans forward. “I have nothing against the American people. It’s the politicians—”

  “But the politicians are elected by the American people!” the Spanish woman says, cupping her hands around her mouth and speaking into his ear.

  “Only thirty percent of the people!” Piñeiro leans back smiling against his seat.

  III. 54

  An empty tanker has sunk—Italian, registered in Panama, with six Cuban crew members lost; another tanker on the way to Cienfuegos has sunk (the word is there was “an explosion on board”); there was a bomb in the nightclub Aché, attached to the Meliá Cohiba Hotel; and a munitions warehouse blew up in Pinar del Río, sending bullets flying.

  The Cuban government has asked the press not to write about the bomb in the Meliá Cohiba Hotel.

  Nobody except the army can have explosives here.

  There is speculation that the United States’ Transition document, which details the role the armed forces could play in Cuba’s transition to democracy, is being considered.

  WE ARE TOLD BY a friend who was there that Eusebio Leal, the city historian and head of the corporation restoring Old Havana, gave a speech in Old Havana in which he declares that there needs to be greater respect in Cuba for human freedoms.

  Some officials, we are told, looked down at their shoes as he spoke. We are also told Leal swept out of the room without shaking anyone’s hand when the speech was over.

  “PE PE HAY, PE PE HAY . . .” (“PPG,” an anti-impotence drug, pronounced pe pe hay). Young men and boys follow us and others in their forties and older in the Plaza de la Catedral muttering the name of the drug, trying to sell it to us.

  “No, gracias,” Nick says sunnily.

  “Pe Pe Hay, Pe Pe Hay . . .” They will not stop.

  I turn to the two following us. I put my hands on my hips. “Mi marido no necesita PPG!” (“My husband does not need PPG!”).

  “Señora, felicidades! Estamos tan contentos para ustedes!” (“Congratulations! We are so happy for you both!”).

  A SWEEP OF JINETERAS before the May Day parade: The agents go in plain cars, with license plates that say TUR for turista. They pretend they are customers, then take the girls to waiting buses.

  THE BIGGEST MAY DAY parade ever.

  Jineteras are back on the street hours after it’s over. I don’t know how it is possible with the sweep that happened just days before. When they are picked up, jineteras are usually trucked into fields to harvest sweet potatoes and other tubers and stay out of circulation for weeks. These must be other jineteras, waiting in the wings.

  Also hours after the parade, while we are stopped at a streetlight, a man shoves his arm into the car. “Give me money! Give me money!” he screams.

  III. 55

  Mrs. Fleites—the Bette Midler look-alike at the school, whose parents “went to Brooklyn because of Batista and returned to Cuba because of Castro”—and her husband catch up to me on the street, just outside of the school. She says she has a favor to ask of me.

  Mrs. Fleites says she wants to travel to the United States this summer, but she needs an invitation from a U.S. citizen. There is a person she knows, a U.S. citizen, who is going to go with her tomorrow to the Consultoria Juridica (the place that certifies invitations to travel abroad), but the person may not be able to make it. She is wondering if, in case the person doesn’t show up, I would be able to go with her to draw up an invitation letter. The place is just down the street from the school. It is just a formality.

  I look from Mrs. Fleites to her husband. They are both nearly hopping, from one leg to another.

  MRS. FLEITES CATCHES UP to me outside the school. She says the person she thought was going to go with her to the Consultoria Juridica is going to be able to make it after all. I will not have to go with her.

  I am relieved.

  III. 56

  Juana tells me how her brother Ernesto, who now lives in Texas, got out of Cuba and into the United States.

  Ernesto was determined to get to the United States in style: he didn’t want to get in a balsa or be a wetback. Ernesto is an engineer. He has blond hair and blue eyes. Ernesto was often sent by the Cuban government to Mexico. Ernesto contacted some relatives in Texas. The relatives studied the situation in some border towns. They found a town—Juana doesn’t remember the name of it—where U.S. college students go over the border into Mexico for the weekend, to drink and visit prostitutes. The relatives drove over the border in their car on a Sunday afternoon. They took with them some yanqui clothes: chino pants, a Lacoste shirt, Nike sneakers. They met Ernesto. Ernesto dressed in the yanqui clothes. He sat in the backseat of their car, between some relatives. The only American word Ernesto knew was yup. They went back over the border on Sunday night, when all the college students were returning from their weekend. There were so many people going back to the United States that the border guards couldn’t check every car; they only checked the cars with Mexican plates or the cars with people in them who looked like Mexicans.

  A guard shined a light in the backseat. “You all Americans here?”

  “Yup,” Ernesto said, and in they went.

  “This is racism in action,” I say to Juana.

  III. 57

  Nick and I go to a performance of Tania Bruguera, plus a show of the works of fifteen other artists at the Faculty of Arts and Letters. It is one of the shows that is not part of, but is taking place around, the Havana Biennial.

  The artists who are in the show lie in a circle on the floor. Tania, dressed vaguely as a sheep, walks on the bodies, planting red flags on them as she walks. At each body, she also binds either their mouths, their eyes, their hands, or their feet with red cloth. She then steps out into the audience, planting red flags and binding mouths
, eyes, hands, and feet.

  Alexis Esquivel has a piece in the show called The Machine for the Fabrication of Tradition. It consists of a row of Plexiglas boxes filled to varying degrees with water. A fighting fish is in each box. Above each box, a tube leading from a suspended intravenous bag drips water. Soon the fullest box will overflow, carrying a fighting fish with it into the adjacent box, to fight with the other fighting fish until death.

  In a room marked LADIES ROOM there is a small bronze statue of a guajiro astride a giant penis—his own, but three times the size of his body. The foreskin is pulled back, and out of the head of the penis sprout the antennae of a snail. Testicles trail out the back. It is a plan for a monumental sculpture to be mounted at the entrance to the art school. There is a blown-up photograph of the sculpture, glued onto a photo of the entrance to the art school, so that you can see how it will look.

  III. 58

  Dinner at a European banker’s house. An American diplomat is there. This is convenient because we want to hear the other side behind the headlines in today’s issue of Granma: U.S. CONDUCTS BIOLOGICAL WARFARE AGAINST CUBA. An article states that a parasite is attacking the potato crop in Matanzas just where an American crop duster had crossed the island several months ago, emitting a cloud of black smoke.

  The diplomat says the crop duster was on its way to Colombia. A Cuban airliner was getting too close, so it let out some smoke. The diplomat says he remembers Carlos Lage (a vice-president) complaining to him about the parasite a few months ago. The diplomat says the funny thing is that when the crop duster incident occurred, they gave the Cubans the explanation about the airliner getting too close and the Cubans seemed to be happy with that. Now they send a letter to the United Nations and to all its members, without even bringing it up with the United States first. It’s probably because they have had a very bad potato harvest and need to come up with some reason. No news lately about the sugar harvest, so it must be pretty bad, too.

  III. 59

  News of the United States’ biological aggression against Cuba has disappeared utterly from the news.

  NICK DECLARES AT DINNER that Cuba combines the souplesse of Africa with the surrealism of Spain.

  A LOW-RANKING U.S. diplomat speculates that the reason for the appearance and rapid disappearance of the U.S. biological aggression story is that the Cubans are continuing to expand their chemical and biological weapons program, in spite of their having signed a treaty, and if the United States ever calls them on it, they want to be able to point to U.S. biological aggression against potatoes in Matanzas. Making a story appear and disappear is a kind of putting-it-in-the-file, he says, for future use.

  ARTICLES APPEAR IN THE Miami Herald stating that Cuba may be developing anthrax, and that Cuba has the capability of wiping out three million people in southern Florida before being itself wiped out.

  It is true that a few weeks ago Fidel gave a speech about Cuba’s being a “poisoned lamb in the mouth of the beast” in the event of U.S. aggression.

  NICK ASKS A DOCTOR who is visiting us how long it usually takes before Parkinson’s begins to affect thought processes.

  TOMATOES ARE ENDING now at the agropecuario, not to reappear until October.

  WE REVISIT LA CABAÑA, the higher of the two Spanish forts overlooking Havana harbor, where most of the exhibitions of the biennial are taking place. Installations in one sixteenth-century barracks room after another. The theme is memory, and since most of the artists are from Latin America, most of the installations are about violence. Lázaro Saavedra, a Cuban artist, has a piece near the end of the show, in front of the paredón, or wall where enemies of the revolution were shot. The wall is in a grassy, elevated square, reached by a ramp. A flame tree is in flower in one corner. Havana harbor is visible through a crack in the ramparts on one side. A cement wall was built in front of the sixteenth-century wall when the number of executions started accelerating, so as not to further damage the ancient wall. The new wall was made more porous than the fort wall to absorb ricochets. We can see the deep gouges the bullets made, in three lines—head, chest, legs. Nick wonders why they would shoot legs.

  In front of the wall, Saavedra has put tombstones, thin slabs embedded in piles of stones. There are about thirty of them. Many of them have fallen over, and whether they were installed already fallen over, or fell over later, or were put in sloppily so that they would fall over, one by one, eventually, we don’t know. We walk on a stone walkway to the wall, turn left, and enter a long, narrow, airless, vaulted room. On the way, we pass the title of the installation: Buried by Forgetting. There are more tombstones in the room. At the end of the room, painted on its wall, are three figures, mostly human but with some elements of birds in them (their mouths are more like beaks), hurtling headfirst from the sky and spewing stones from their open mouths—actual stones are glued onto the wall below them, leading to a pile of stones heaped on the floor, out of which human legs and arms protrude. The bird-humans are machine guns of vituperation. It is hard to stay in the room. It is hard to breathe in it. Turning to leave, we see a cross, placed over the entrance to the room. The cross is placed so that you see it only as you are leaving.

  III. 60

  Fidel gives a speech in which he declares that internal immigration from eastern provinces is a threat to national sovereignty. It is a threat to national sovereignty because it has led to a rise in deliquency in the capital, and a rise in delinquency can lead to instability, instability in which CIA infiltrators can do their work.

  III. 61

  The right-wing Spanish newspaper ABC writes that three hundred thousand orientales have been deported back to Oriente province or trucked to cane fields to cut sugarcane.

  Three hundred thousand is nearly one-sixth of the population of Havana.

  When, where, I ask Lety on the way to the Tocororo, were the orientales rounded up, where were the trucks and buses, driving them off? I ask her if it happened in the middle of the night.

  Without answering my question, Lety launches into how orientales are the most proud, the most machista of macho Cubans: “‘No one is more beautiful, no one more intelligent than I,’ that sort of thing.” Lety preens in the car seat. “Their expectations are too high. It’s the problem of tu lo sabes (you know who). Es puro orientale . . . Y también es delincuente!” (“He’s a pure Oriental . . . And he is a delinquent, too!”), Lety yells, laughing at her own joke.

  “But how were they deported?”

  “Yo no sé” (I don’t know).

  LETY CAN NO LONGER rent out a house her parents left her, which she has been renting to foreigners. There are too many laws and taxes now. She says she knew it was too good to last.

  III. 62

  The Palestinian ambassador is annoyed. He says a letter has just been sent to all embassies, stating that ambassadors will no longer be allowed to use the protocol lounge at the airport. The Palestinian ambassador says this is because some diplomats were using it for smuggling items out in their hand luggage.

  “What sorts of things were they smuggling?” Nick asks.

  “Artwork, antiques, black-market cigars . . .”

  “No.”

  “Yes.”

  The ambassador says diplomats are being blamed for a general problem. Now ambassadors will have to use the VIP lounge and be there with businessmen and their jineteras.

  “I beg your pardon?” Nick says.

  “Ay, disculpe,” the ambassador says, patting Nick’s arm.

  III. 63

  Crowds of people on a street corner in Habana Vieja. Half a building has collapsed. It is the half with the stairwell in it. Men, women, and children stand in every window of the remaining half of the five-story building. Firemen have pulled an extension ladder out of a truck. They are working the levers, trying to get it to stay up.

  “Don’t move!” one fireman shouts to the people in the windows. “Don’t make any movements, or the rest of the building will fall, too!”

  III. 64


  Pretty heated discussion at the parents’ meeting at school. The school is a sweet school, but it is not challenging, especially for children whose parents are native English speakers. Two educators have come from Virginia to counsel the teachers, and the meeting is ostensibly for the parents to meet them. There was not going to be any talk of accreditation at the meeting, but the parents raise the topic. They want the school to be up to some kind of standard, somewhere. A representative of the business community says the businesspeople are especially concerned. The businesspeople are concerned because if they cannot find successors—if successors are discouraged from coming because the school is not good enough—it means that they, the present businesspeople, will be stuck in Cuba forever!

  One Norwegian father says that he doesn’t understand why they don’t just plunk the kids down and give them standardized exams from time to time so that everyone knows where their kids stand.

  One educator says it isn’t accreditation and standardized tests that are going to get them into MIT . . .

  The businesspeople and some diplomats don’t let her finish. There is a loud grumbling. “We need exams, we need accreditation, we need standards!” an Indian father says, slapping his hand with a rolled-up magazine on each word.

  I put my pearls in my pocket and walk down Quinta after the school meeting to a dinner party we have been invited to, where Nick will meet me. Young Cuban men start muttering things and blowing kisses at me from a bench on the median strip. True, it is dusk, I’m not fat, and they can’t make out much about me, but when you get to be forty-five and are beginning to look like a turtle, you wish you felt safe enough to be able to turn and ask them, Are you doing this because you think I am attractive, because you think I am ugly and need the attention, or just because . . . ? Just so you’d know where you, or at least they, stand. It, too, is an accreditation process.