The appropriate office was finally found; in it were a woman and an ornate, open, empty safe with “National Cash Register Company” written along the top of it in flowing golden script. The woman smiled and wrote some numbers down on a pad marked “Cubanacán,” the state tourism company. We were then led down another corridor to a place marked CAJA (Cashier). A nurse was called to pull a metal cash box out from the drawer of an empty desk. They were beginning their new operation, the doctor explained, as a place of tourismo de salud, where people could come and cure their tropical diseases in a relaxed atmosphere, with experienced doctors who had been in Angola. Some patients had already come, and they were hoping for more.
On the way out, we were led past a series of bulletin boards detailing the history of the institute. On the one marked 1930 there were the words “Cornell University.” I wanted to look more, but Nick said we had to go. On the board marked HOY (Today) there was a picture of a turista de salud lying on a gurney, swathed in white cloth with his head raised, smiling, with a circle of doctors and nurses around him.
Cramps returned in the late afternoon, until by bedtime, I could not sleep. Wondered if it was the second generation of amoebas hatching, and found myself routing for Dr. Silvia. Spent the night waiting until 5:30 A.M., when I could collect a muestra that would still be fresh by 8:00 A.M., when José showed up and could drive it to the institute. Spent the night dreading not the collecting of the muestra so much as the having to leave the air-conditioned bedroom and walk down the fluorescent-lit sweltering back stairs, wearing my disgusting bathrobe over my disgusting nightgown, sweat rolling underneath it, saying to Manuel, who would be there kneading bread, “Manuel, it’s only me,” and putting an envelope the whole world knew the contents of in the refrigerator door next to the capers.
IV. 13
It’s been a week now. I still have cramps and can run to the bathroom four or five times in an hour and then be fine for twelve. Blastocytes, the institute says I have, not amoebas, but the medicine Dr. Silvia gave me works for them, too, and so I have just kept on taking it.
I will be leaving for New York tomorrow. I was planning to stop in New York on the way back to Cuba after a trip to X—— Nick and I will be making at the end of the month, but Nick now says that because of my illness, I should go to New York first and see a specialist there. I tell Nick I think it’s overreacting, to change plans, leave the children so soon after the beginning of the school year when I felt so much better, but Nick, lying next to me, drawing an imaginary doodle on my stomach with his finger, says he wants to be sure I am well, and besides, he has been talking to Fidel’s secretary and the only time Fidel can come for dinner is right after our trip to X——, so there is no time for me to go to New York after X——.
“Fidel is coming for dinner? Coming to this house?”
“Yep.”
“Caramba.”
I TRY SURRENDERING MYSELF to New York anticipation (a prickling in the palms of my hands, as if from the points of tiny Chrysler Buildings) but I cannot let myself go. A trip to New York already, and for six whole days. My rule has been that I have to be in Cuba a lot longer to earn a trip to New York—not that there is a rule, really (I have Juana), but the last time I came back, Jimmie said, “I cried in computer class because I missed you, Mommy.” According to my rule, I have to be in Cuba for at least three months before I can go to New York and enjoy myself at all.
IT’S NOT BLASTOCYTES OR amoebas at all that I had, the New York specialist tells me after several kinds of examinations. He does not see the traces amoebas or blastocytes make. Moreover, the medicine they gave me is not the medicine that is given for blastocytes or for amoebas in the first place. I tell him the medicine worked for me. He says he cannot tell me what I had, only that it wasn’t blastocytes or amoebas and that whatever it was has gone away.
IV. 14
There’s a new class in business travel: funky first. That’s the unofficial name of the class I am in, on the Cubana de Aviación flight, paid for by Nick’s firm, from Europe to Havana, with a stopover in Santiago de Cuba. The only other travelers in funky first are two Cuban bureaucrats in polyester business suits and basket-weave loafers and one non-Cuban woman. The non-Cuban woman is the only other woman on the flight besides myself and the stewardesses. All the other first-class seats are empty, and all the other passengers, in class tropical and economy, are male.
The men, about eighty of them, are between the ages of twenty and fifty-five, not ugly, and you wonder what it means, that they have to go so far. The men appear to be utterly undisturbed at seeing almost no women on the flight; some men, in fact, look so serene that you feel as if their wives, mothers, or girlfriends ironed their clothes, then dressed them, packed their suitcases, and sent them off with kisses, saying, “Now run along and play, dears!” and then sat themselves down, with sighs of relief, to glorious, solitary cups of coffee and cigarettes at their kitchen tables, their feet up.
No champagne, no tablecloths. Silverware in plastic bags. I try to prop my legs up with two triangular bolsters put together, but they keep sliding. None of this would be so bad if the ticket, one-way, did not cost sixteen hundred dollars. Chipped paint everywhere. The grime is so built-up in corners that you would need a trowel, then a wire brush with Ajax, to dig it out. The aisle carpet, where not worn through, sports shiny black stains. The seat bottoms of two seats in funky first are completely gone, and many of the armrests show only metal supports. I try to go to the one bathroom in first class, but the handle has fallen off the door.
“There’s no handle on the bathroom door,” I say to the stewardess.
“Ven pa’ca,” she says in Cuban (meaning “Go over there”), jerking her head to the back of the plane, where ten men are waiting in line in front of the only bathroom that seems to be working.
“There’s a line back there. Can’t you fix the door handle?”
“No.” The expression on her face is one of absolute contempt.
Later I see the crew putting the door handle on the door and using it to open the door every time they need to go, then taking it away again when they finish.
We view a newsreel of Fidel reaccepting the presidency of the country, the leadership of the armed forces, the chairmanship of the Communist Party, and Raúl reaccepting the vice presidency. This is followed by an announcement of the name of the film we will be viewing during our flight. The film is Absolute Power, starring Clint Eastwood.
We deplane for refueling in Santiago. It is one o’clock in the morning, European time; six o’clock in the evening, Cuban time. A salsa band blares in the single waiting room. I look around the edge of the room for deep angles or halls to wait in, but there is no escape. “Do we have to listen to this music?” I ask a guard.
“Ven pa’ca,” he says, indicating a gift shop with the doors wide open.
I pay fifty cents to an attendant sitting at a table outside the bathroom for four squares of toilet paper, which she keeps in a stack in front of her. I roll them into balls, stuff them in my ears, and wait, as far away from the salsa band as I can, for the plane to reload.
IV. 15
I promised the children before I left that when I got back we would go, the three of us with a friend of theirs, Megan, to Varadero. Nick will be returning from X—— in three days, and Fidel’s office called while we were away and said Fidel will not be coming for dinner for another ten days, so there’s time.
We have not been back to Varadero since the time soon after our arrival in Cuba three years ago. After we had admired the color of the sand (white) and the water (turquoise) and swum in the sea, Varadero got pretty boring. No shops to speak of. No restaurants that weren’t empty (of food) or grim or dirty, except in tourist hotels blaring salsa. Jineteras galore. No shade. Nick had said he never wanted to go back. Even the children had said they were bored.
Varadero, though, has taken on an allure for the children since their friends have reported going there many times. We ha
ve also heard that it is less squalid. The police rounded up seven thousand jineteras in Varadero several months ago and put a barrier across the road, and visitors are now charged two dollars to get onto the peninsula and two dollars to get off. Tourism dropped 30 percent after the jinetera roundup. Paladares were also banned and there was a clampdown on people renting out rooms. Friends said there are still a few jineteras, though, but very discreet, just enough to make it not a total cemetery, and people still rent out rooms, but they have to be very careful. I will do anything twice.
Megan’s mother calls just before we leave. Megan has a sore throat and a temperature. We set off on a grimmer trip.
We enter Varadero. Jimmie says he is hungry. We pass a corner open-air restaurant that looks like a regular restaurant: people are sitting at tables, there is a freshly painted sign at the entrance, there are freshly thatched palm-leaf umbrellas, and the chairs look new. There is a menu on a sandwich board. They have plates of food for one dollar—meat or fish, rice and beans, french fries. And sandwiches. There are about twenty-five items on the list. We have not been in a state-run restaurant since the trip we took to Trinidad soon after arriving in Cuba. Maybe they have improved.
The restaurant looked cool from the outside, with its palm-leaf umbrellas, but when we sit down we realize the palm-leaf umbrellas trap heat blasting from the kitchen. There is music playing, too, which I didn’t hear at first. It is Barry Manilow. A gift shop tucked in one corner sells T-shirts with cartoon characters on them, the bottoms of the T-shirts shredded to look like fringe. Geezers and chicas for customers, I now make out, and jet-lagged, stalwart, but slightly angry mittel-European retirees. A sullen mulata shuffles to our table, the light changes, and swaths of grease and flies are visible on every table.
They have no pork. They have no chicken. The fish is two fish fillets stuffed with ham and cheese and fried.
“What do you have, then?”
“Ham-and-cheese sandwiches. French fries.”
We order those.
We see a sign across from the hotel: MONTE A CABALLO (Horseback riding). I speak with a man named Bigote (Mustache). He says he can take all of us on a ride that will last two hours. We will ride for a little while along the highway, then cut through to a place where there is white virgin sand. His voice lilts over the “white virgin sand” part and his hand flutters like a hula girl’s, but I still trust him. We arrange to ride tomorrow.
I take the children to a Chinese restaurant in the hotel for dinner. Even Chinese paladares in Cuba are terrible, but I’m still in the where-do-I-think-I-am mode.
The food is terrible, but there is beer, fried noodles out of a bag, soy sauce, and little bowls to pour the soy sauce in, and the children have fun dipping noodles in the soy sauce. I keep hoping “less squalid” means “better,” even though I know that’s not what our friends meant.
Four young men sit down next to us. They hear us talking and ask me if I am Canadian or from the States. I say I am from the States. They say they are, too. They say I am the first person from the States they have seen on their trip. Two have dark eyes and dark hair, and two are blond. The two dark-haired boys, who are brothers, have Cuban parents who left in ’61. They are visiting Cuba for the first time. Their parents have never been back.
They ask me where they can get a good meal. I tell them about paladares. They were only in Havana for one day, then headed out. They are on their way back to Havana now. They write the names of paladares I recommend on napkins. The Cuban Americans say Spanish words with strong American accents.
“We have no relatives left in Cuba,” one of the Cuban American brothers says to me. “But we came with a list of friends of my parents from the old days and distant relatives. We drove up to this one place. The guy was up on his roof, nailing something. ‘Do you remember Davide, the hermanito (little brother) of Omero?’ ‘Si.’ ‘We are his sons.’ The guy almost fell off the roof. We stayed with the guy and his family. The family really put themselves out for us. They gave up their beds for us. We didn’t want them to do that, but they insisted. They cooked pork. As we were leaving, we didn’t want to exactly pay the people for the rooms, we thought they would be insulted, but we thought we should make a contribution. We gave them a hundred dollars. Only when we opened our suitcases at the next place did we discover they had taken our shoes, some shirts, some shaving stuff . . .”
“But maybe the stuff was taken by someone else between the time you left and the time you got to the next place,” I say. “Maybe someone got into your car.”
“No way that could have happened. There was someone with the car the whole time. We know not to leave the car alone. After we packed, the bags were sitting in our rooms for like about an hour. That’s when they took our stuff. They were nice to us, and then they took our stuff. I’m telling you”—he points at his chest and leans forward—“it makes me ashamed to be Cuban!”
The other brother nods. “Me, too.”
I feel a flash of uptightness and see in my mind’s eye the wide stripes of the red, white, and blue Cuban flag: Cubans and foreigners who live in Cuba can say things like that, but not people who are just visiting, even if they are Cuban Americans. I find myself making up more rules: People who have left Cuba can say things like that, too, but they have to have left in the past five years, they have to have stood in line for hours on end, they have to have conseguired and resolvered until they were ready to drop, they have to have experienced new shoes only in the imagination. Then they could say things like that, if they still felt they had to.
I tell the brothers they just had bad luck. Then I tell the brothers that it was a lot better that the people they stayed with were nice to them, then took their stuff, than it would have been if the people they stayed with were mean to them, then took their stuff.
HORSEBACK RIDING WITH BIGOTE. The children are gung ho before we actually get there, but after Jimmie is put on his horse, he starts to cry. “It’s so high up!” he says. Bigote says this is no problem: he will ride with him. Thea looks like she is about to ask for company, too, but I cut her off, for I can barely stay on a horse myself.
Most of the trip turns out to be on the road. Massive hotels in various stages of completion on the beach side of the road, cement-block sheds with images of Che and revolutionary slogans on the other side of the road, tour buses blowing soot in our faces. We pass a Club Méditerranée that has just opened. We turn in to a construction site and make our way to the beach. An official-looking car passes us. Bigote dismounts, has a conversation with the man inside the car. I am sure we are going to be turned away; it is evident that no one has paid Bigote to ride this far in a long time, but Bigote remounts and we go on. We come to a gate. There is a padlock on it. “They didn’t tell me . . . ,” he says. We ride along a wall to where there is a gap. A pile of sand is filling the gap. We dismount; Bigote leads the horses over the pile of sand one by one.
We remount, duck under some branches, and step onto the beach. For a moment in our sight, if we don’t move our heads or use peripheral vision, it is paradise, magazine-type paradise: the sea is clear, then turquoise, then violet. The sand is just short of blinding white. Turn our heads a little to one side or the other, though, and there is one construction site after another.
Varadero is a series of beaches separated by small bluffs. On one bluff is a former vacation home of the du Ponts. There used to be no hotels or houses beyond it. It is now a restaurant, and on the beach beyond it is the Meliá Varadero. On the beach beyond the Meliá is the Club Méditerranée. We are on the beach beyond that, which is the last beach to be developed. Beyond it are rocks, trees, and mangroves. It is a zona militar. There is a small cayo (island) in the distance. It, also, is a zona militar.
“Ojalá (God willing), they will be able to save some of the natural parts,” I say to Bigote.
“Ojalá, they will,” agrees Bigote.
It is like riding stuffed animals across a bag of sugar, riding on sand, and f
or us it is yet another original sensual experience, taking its place alongside “orange grove in full bloom” and “evening breeze on upper arms.” These are the last few weeks people like us will be able to experience it here, this unintended nice thing, the last few weeks kids and horses will be able to ride through gaps in walls and find no one on the beach on the other side.
I GO WITH THE children to check out the new shopping mall in Varadero with the game center Megan’s mother told us about.
The windows are clean. There’s a small dollars-only food store and a small dollars-only department store. We are the only ones in the department store. There are the fringed T-shirts and wooden items with images of Che burned into them for tourists; bike shorts, bras, cheap shoes, and stonewashed jeans for Cubans; and one sixty-dollar toilet seat displayed on a kind of plate holder for visitors to buy for a Cuban, for a visiting Cuban American to buy for his or her relative, or for a tourist to buy for his or her Cuban marinovia (-o) or jinetera (-o).
There is a room with electronic games in it; another room contains a bar and a six-lane bowling alley; an air-hockey table sits on the patio outside; and on a back lot are bumper cars.
Hotel workers’ pay at Varadero is 230 pesos a month—about $10.00. On top of that, every month they receive a jaba—a plastic bag containing soap, shampoo, and toothpaste. They also receive a percentage of the service charge, which amounts to about $35.00, making their total monthly pay about $45.00 plus the jaba.
Cuba Diaries Page 27