Cuba Diaries

by Isadora Tattlin

  There is a buffet of rice casserole colored bright green with food dye and pasta salad heavy on the mayo. The host says he hasn’t been back to Europe in a long time. Nick whispers in my ear that this is obvious. The host, squeezing the waist of his slouching girlfriend, says he doesn’t know why anyone would want to go. The host wears a white linen suit over a black T-shirt. He is in the import-export business. Medicines, he says.

  Nick says he has to get his secretary to explain better to him, when an invitation comes, who exactly is inviting us.

  LOLA TAKES US TO a pleasant modern house in Miramar, where we are greeted by a couple and led into an air-conditioned bedroom. The shutters are closed. The man carries a zippered case. He takes out a piece of green felt and lays it on the bed. He then takes out one piece of jewelry after another. He takes out necklaces, bracelets, earrings, and rings. Some have diamonds in them, some, sapphires, some, rubies, and some, emeralds. They are pieces from the end of the nineteenth century. He takes out a necklace with matching earrings and a massive, diamond-encrusted cross. He takes out a diamond necklace. “They are from my family,” he says. “We have to sell them because we want to renovate our house so we can rent it full-time.” It’s getting trickier all the time to rent out houses, but people still do it. A miniature poodle tries to make love to my foot and has to be pried off. The diamond necklace is worth twenty thousand dollars. We select two smaller bracelets, art deco style with diamonds and sapphires. They are wrapped in smoothed-out pieces of Kleenex, which we are assured are clean, and put in the bottom of my purse.

  I SEND A MESSAGE to the Cuban American through a friend of a friend who is traveling to the United States, detailing what Lola can do for her. The Cuban American gets back to me through the friend of a friend, saying she and her family have changed their minds about traveling to Cuba.

  IV. 6

  I ask Concha how her children, both of whom live in the United States now, are doing. She says they are doing very well. Daniel, who left first, has a job managing a tobacco warehouse in Tampa. “The Americans in Tampa, they don’t like Cubans, but for Daniel the owner makes an exception. Daniel says to me, ‘It’s not like in Cuba, Mommy: here you have to work.’ He has bought a small yate (yacht), which he is fixing up.”

  I ask Concha if there are a lot of Cubans in Tampa.

  “Very few,” she says, “but the ones who are there are Communists.”

  “Communists?”

  “They get there, then complain that they have to work.”

  IV. 7

  The El Salvadoran bomber who placed the bombs at the hotels and at the Bodeguita del Medio appears on television. There is a lot of hype about his television appearance beforehand. Officials move through a cocktail party we attend, telling all foreigners to watch the news at 8:30.

  The bomber is a very young, very Native American–looking guy. He says he exploded all the bombs, including ones earlier at the Capri and the Nacional. He says his s’s precisely, the way Mexicans do. He demonstrates how he brought the explosives in, in the back of a television. He unscrews the back of a television and points out the hiding places inside it. The bomber also says to the journalist that he was part of a group of terrorist narcotraficantes financed by the Miami-based Cuban-American National Foundation, but neither he nor the Ministry of the Interior spokesman give other supporting details.

  “GIVE US THE SUPPORTING details and we’ll go after them,” Mike Kozak, the new chief officer at the U.S. Interests Section, says he says to them, but they won’t do it. Mike says they believe that the U.S. government already knows everything there is to know about the CANF and its activities.

  IV. 8

  Roberto is tan to the point of looking weather-beaten and very thin after the summer, like a man dragging himself out of the desert. He has had no income for the three months that we have been away. I told him when he started that he had to be prepared for that, and I’m trying not to feel responsible, but still he is twenty-nine and has a degree in computer science. Roberto’s blue eyes look even bluer and his hair is bleached almost white from the sun. When I remark on how tan he is, he says he is tan because he got divorced, moved back into his family’s house, and spent the summer working on his parents’ patio and garden because there was nothing else to do.

  I say I am sorry about the divorce, and he shrugs and says, “Eso no es nada. “

  We have no visitors, so I give Roberto our iron to fix. In addition to knowing computers inside and out, Roberto can also fix appliances. The iron is a Black & Decker that I brought to Cuba only six months ago from the United States. Roberto takes the iron apart and says the resistencia is broken. He says he will take it to a friend who he thinks will have some resistencias.

  IV. 9

  Roberto’s friend has no resistencias. I tell Roberto to take the car and look for an iron so that our firm can apply for permission to buy an iron and then we can send someone from the firm to buy it, a process that can sometimes take weeks. Cubans are not allowed to buy high-energy-consuming appliances, such as irons, air conditioners, and microwave ovens, and non-Cubans can buy them only with permission and only from special stores. Estrella has very kindly loaned us her iron (acquired when Cubans were still able to buy irons), but we can’t keep it forever.

  ROBERTO SPENDS THE WHOLE day driving around Havana, checking in every store where there might be an iron. Nada.

  I call the secretary in Nick’s firm who is in charge of material things since Ivan has gone. I don’t like to deal with her because she is so deer-in-the-headlights about stuff. After a painful question-and-answer session, I finally get it out of her that the Korean firm GoldStar, the most recent company to supply irons to Cuba, used to sell directly to firms and embassies but now sells to Cubalse, who are in turn supposed to sell them to firms and embassies, but the irons disappear from the Cubalse warehouses before they are able to sell them, the result being that there are no irons to be found anywhere in Havana. She says I will have to ask someone in Mexico or Panama to conseguir one and ship it to us.

  THERE MAY NOT BE visitors for quite a while, I tell Roberto, but I tell him I will pay him ten dollars per week to give computer lessons to Jimmie. Forty dollars per month, plus the twenty he has just made driving around Havana looking for an iron, should help to tide him over until visitors arrive.

  IV. 10

  A diplomat tells us that Piñeiro told him at a small lunch that the bombings were arranged by a secret military cell within the Cuban-American National Foundation and that the U.S. government knows about it and supports it. He says it is impossible to have enough security at Cuban airports and that the bombings will probably happen again.

  We ask the diplomat if Piñeiro was less cootlike when you got him alone, the way people said he was, and the diplomat (who, though not a native English speaker, possesses an extensive English vocabulary) says without skipping a beat that during the lunch Piñeiro was, on a scale of cootlikeness, about a four, but he’s seen him as high as nine and as low as two. It has to do with whether reformistas or duros are in ascendancy, the diplomat says, and how much Piñeiro has had to drink. Piñeiro even expressed the view that it is Fidel himself, who has the charisma, who must initiate change—now—to prevent a total collapse of society following his death.

  Coot is a word I’ve dusted off recently. I have looked it up in the dictionary to be sure of all its meanings: “coot (koot)n 1. a kind of waterbird, especially one with a horny white plate on its forehead. 2. (informal) a stubborn or foolish man: an old coot.” I have taught it to Nick. I have also taught Nick the words geezer and codger and have discussed with him how they differ from one another and from coot.

  There are geezers and coots in both Havana and Miami, we agree, but codgers, who are fatter, are only in Miami.

  This is a cootocracy, I say to Nick: bearded, fragile, isolated, in ill-fitting clothes, unchallenged, long fingernailed, muttering to itself, obsessing about the reality of forty years ago, because in the end, n
ot enough human beings feel strongly enough on the planet.

  Nick gets up from the table and turns off all the electric lights, and I realize that I am being a bore again, the way I am getting to be more and more these days.

  The generator hums. There is an apagón in the neighborhood, making the circle of candlelight at the garden table where we eat our dinner even more of a cocoon, or like an illustration from some old-fashioned storybook, our little circle bathed in rings of yellow watercolor. A night-blooming jasmine is in flower nearby, its perfume wafting over us. Elephant’s ears nodding next to the table deflect a drip from the air conditioner above us in a way that seems to agree with them, for they have grown huge since we planted them, and the ferns we planted underneath the elephant’s ears seem to like the drip as well, for they are furry with health. A double hibiscus, whose blooms are in the process of closing for the night, arches over Nick’s head.

  We eat grilled shrimps with lime juice and garlic; rice and white beans cooked with garlic, onion, ham, and minced sweet pepper; avocado salad; and homemade bread. Insects sing. A green lizard on the wall, our nightly companion, distends a bloodred bladder under his chin. Dogs bark in the distance and our talk fades, as it often does now in the evenings, into how we won’t miss the Cuban day after we are gone, but the Cuban night we will miss for the rest of our lives.

  IV. 11

  Still no flour at the Diplo, and our reserves are nearly finished. Everyone talks big, they can get us flour, but in the end not even Lorena can get us flour.

  I HAVE A SMALL HEADACHE. Nick says I should go swimming at the Comodoro with him. He says it will make my head feel better.

  The Comodoro has been improved. Algae has been scraped off the seawall, so you can walk on it now without slipping and you can climb down a ladder to the sea. The mast on the seawall sports new flags, fluttering in the breeze.

  “Oh my God, Piñeiro in a bathing suit.”

  Piñeiro sees us and bounces up from the lounge chair he has been lying on between two good-looking forty-year-old women.

  Piñeiro’s body is trim, relatively young looking, with a not unusual amount of cinnamon-colored chest hair. He is not that old, we realize: it is only the beard that makes him look like an aging werewolf.

  “This looks like Cape Cod, don’t you think?” he says to me gaily in English, gesturing to the flags, his beard coming at me at the same time. I brace myself: he kisses me on both cheeks. He has always shaken my hand before. The beard is surprisingly not bristly. He introduces us to the women in the lounge chairs.

  “I was thinking more of Caribe,” I say. I have been kissed by a murderer, I think, though it doesn’t come naturally, thinking that. I have to kind of make myself think it, just as I have had to make myself think it the times I have been kissed by other people in Havana who, if they haven’t killed people themselves, have certainly arranged for their deaths.

  COCKTAILS AT THE KOZAKS’. Naty Revuelta is there. We start chatting. I know that her daughter, Alina, has just published a book, Rebel Daughter of the Revolution, but I don’t dare ask her about it. The Portuguese ambassador comes up to Naty. He tells Naty in a loud voice that he has just read an interview with her daughter in a French newspaper. Her daughter was very critical of Fidel.

  “You don’t say,” Naty says.

  She and the Portuguese laugh. She and the Portuguese ambassador talk about Alina’s emotional development. Naty doesn’t know the Portuguese ambassador any better than she knows me, but there they are, talking about very intimate things, very openly. I realize that I’ve been here three years and still don’t quite know when not to mention something and when to jump right in. Naty asks me if I have read the book. I lie and say I have. The Portuguese ambassador says, “It seems that Alina is more developed emotionally now.” Naty says that Alina was a girl who was very developed intellectually but was not developed emotionally at all. The gap was . . . Naty makes a wide gesture with her hands.

  Naty tells us that Alina is in Los Angeles now, promoting her book, but it is not known if it will be translated into English. Without prompting, Naty then goes from talking about Alina to talking about her relationship with Fidel. She and Fidel had, she says, “una amistad amorosa” (“an amorous friendship”). It is a practiced phrase, and I realize I am finally realizing something everyone else in Havana already knows: that Naty is used to talking about her relationship with Fidel at cocktail parties.

  A VISITING CUBAN AMERICAN says to us that the driving force here and in Miami, too, is hurt feelings. More than people being killed even, what operates is hurt feelings.

  DINNER PARTY. I AM placed next to a young member of the Foreign Relations Committee of the National Assembly. He is an associate of the man who told me, soon after my arrival, that 40 percent of Americans have sex with animals.

  This man goes the other way and tells me that the big difference between Cuba and the United States is that the first settlers in the United States were people seeking religious freedom, whereas the first settlers in Cuba were criminals.

  “What?” I tell him I knew that about Australia, but Cuba?

  “It’s true,” he says. Some of Cuba’s first settlers were given the choice between prison in Spain and exile in Cuba.

  I say criminals ended up in the United States as well. I quote Thomas Wolfe’s line about the Georgia slattern. Then follows a little competition between us: My country was settled by more dubious types. No, mine. No, mine . . .

  IV. 12

  This is the first time I’ve been able to write in a week.

  Felt bad the night after the dinner. It’s October, diarrhea time, but better me than the children. Showered in the morning and managed to make it through my time for reading to the third grade at the school. Came home, collapsed on the bed. Switched from Kaopectate to Binaldan. Managed to get through a cocktail party. Got home, put on my nightgown, and was in bed by 8:30.

  Diarrhea again in the morning, more Binaldan. I dropped the children at a friend’s house, went home, tried to write, but kept being drawn back to bed for little lie-downs. Went back to bed after not eating the boiled chicken and rice Lorena made me for lunch. I was getting a fever. Maybe it was a stomach virus, not bacteria or parasites. Nick came home. José was about to leave for the day. “Stop, José,” I said. I called Dr. Silvia. She was home and could come. José went in his car to pick her up. Managed to capture a muestra in a bottle. There was blood in it. Cramps were coming every few minutes. It was as if someone had shaken four Coca-Colas in my stomach. Dr. Silvia was almost sure it was not a virus. José took her and the sample to the laboratory. Time crept by—one hour, one and a half hours, two hours. Silvia finally called me from her home. I had amoebas, she said, and a high leukocyte count, evidence of infection. I probably had shigella also. She said I should take some medicine she was prescribing against amoebas. As for the shigella, they couldn’t do a coprocultivo over the weekend, but if on Monday I had a fever and the diarrhea was still liquid, I was to collect another muestra so they could do a coprocultivo on that. Also, José’s car had broken down. It broke down ten blocks from her house. She walked home. José was with his car, she said. A heavy rainstorm was going on outside. I asked Dr. Silvia if she could get some medicine. She said she could. I asked Dr. Silvia if she could get some medicine and walk back to José, and then José could take a taxi back to the house with the medicine. I lay back, listened to the soda fountain in my stomach, and waited. Nick was getting excited. He said I should go to the Institute for Tropical Diseases. He said amoebas could enter the liver. Two more hours passed with me in the bathroom the whole time. José showed up with medicine and oral rehydration salts. I scarfed the medicine, and after about a half an hour there was a definite quieting of the rumbling. Ate some breakfast in the morning, lying back after bites. Cramps and bathroom trips then subsided, until by midmorning I had almost none. It was miracle medicine. Dr. Silvia was a genius. I was exhausted.

  Felt almost normal in my stomach th
e next day but had a migraine headache. Lay in the dark until the sparkle vision was over. Nick called, said he had made an appointment for me at the Institute for Tropical Diseases. I said I felt silly going since I felt so much better. Nick then had a strained sound in his voice, so I said I would go, but I wanted him to go with me so that he could hear with his own ears what they said to me and ask the doctors questions right then, so that he wouldn’t say later, when he heard their diagnosis from me, that it was wrong and the doctors didn’t know what they were talking about: it was one of our cultural differences.

  LIKE MANY INSTITUTES in Cuba, the Pedro Kouri Institute for Tropical Diseases was nearly deserted, and the remaining staff wasn’t even faking that they had anything to do. Desks visible through open doors had nothing on them; eyes in hallways fixed on us with total interest for the entire duration of our passage through them.

  The Pedro Kouri Institute was established in the 1930s and enlarged in the 1970s for the wars of liberation in Angola and in other parts of Africa.

  We sat down with the director and with another doctor. We were offered coffee. Nick was offered cigars. I described my symptoms to the director and the other doctor. I showed them the pills I was taking. We then went with the other doctor to an examining room, our steps echoing in the empty hall. The other doctor asked me how many pills I took before starting to feel better. I said two. He said it was impossible that I could feel so much better after just two pills. He said maybe I didn’t have amoebas. He said he wanted to make two coprocultivos and led us down another empty hallway to the recepción de muestras, where a dozing attendant gave us two sterile plastic jars with labels. We were taken back to the director to thank him and say good-bye, then taken on a meandering walk through another empty corridor, the doctor opening the door of one empty office after another, mumbling something that sounded like an apology; we wondered if it meant we were supposed to pay.