Cuba Diaries

by Isadora Tattlin

  We are driven for miles outside of Matanzas to a 1940s country house, now some kind of official guest house.

  The dining room is very clean and the help are cheerful and willing to serve. We are served fruit first, which is typical of Cuban meals, but a Frenchman, recently arrived in Cuba, makes a face at me over the fruit when no one is looking.

  I go into the bathroom. It is a spacious bathroom in a building all by itself. It may have been part of a pool house, for there are rusted supports for benches and partitions still in the walls and on the way to the bathroom I passed a pool-sized depression in the earth, filled with gravel and weeds.

  Most of the tiles in the bathroom are missing. There is no toilet paper, no seat, one dripping cold-water faucet, and to one side of the toilet is a gaping hole the diameter of a soccer ball, edged with a white crust.

  A fat fly bites deeply into my ankle; I smash it with my hand. Grateful for the small trickle of water, I rinse fly cadaver out of the contours of my wedding ring, wipe my hands on my dress, and retake my place at the VIP table.

  IV. 35

  Lunch with an acquaintance from X——. He speaks about his meeting with a Cuban vice-minister. He speaks about how agitated the vice-minister became when he brought up the question of human rights and religious freedom. “And I suppose you’re also going to ask me whether there is going to be Christmas this year or not?” the acquaintance says she said to him. “Why is everyone always asking me whether there is going to be Christmas?”

  IV. 36

  This is the third Thanksgiving we have celebrated here. I am unable to find a turkey in the agropecuario this year as I did last year, though. I find one at the Diplomercado for twice the agro price.

  Corn kernels cannot be eaten straight here—corn grows tough in the tropics, and the fresh kernels have to be ground into maíz molido in order to be eaten. I try making a chowder out of it to serve as a first course, with onion, crab meat, and sherry. I think the soup is going to be a failure because it tastes very floury at first, but then it starts to thicken, the fresh crab is added, and it becomes one of the best soups Lorena and I have ever made.

  Lorena has been using dried cranberries in the oatmeal cookies because we have run out of raisins, and I have forgotten to tell her to save some, but there are a few left. We mash them in the blender with one orange, skin and all. The pieces swell in the orange juice and make a convincing sauce. Cuban calabazas make a fine pumpkin pie.

  “The fish-and-corn soup,” I find myself telling our guests, all Cubans and X——ians who have never had Thanksgiving before, “is a reference to the corn Squanto showed the Pilgrims how to grow. He placed a dead fish next to each planted kernel to act as fertilizer in the sandy soil of Cape Cod.”

  I don’t know whether it’s having a third-grader and a fifth-grader at the table with us or being in Cuba that makes me invent this culinary tradition. I don’t know, either, whether it’s having kids and reading the Squanto story over and over again with them while being in a place that’s not the United States at Thanksgiving time—it could be any place—that puts a lump in my throat now when I recount the Squanto story, embarrassing me totally and making me hope people don’t notice.

  I raise my glass of champagne after the pumpkin pie is served. “Imperialismo no, pumpkin pie sí!” I say loudly, the lump in my throat mercifully disappearing. This starts rounds of “Socialismo o muerte!” “Imperialismo o muerte!” “Pumpkin pie o muerte!” “Pumpkin pie y socialismo!” and “Pumpkin pie o socialismo!” delivered around the table with booming voices.

  I am aware of Juana at the end of the table, sitting next to Jimmie, who is trying to keep his eyes open, and of her revolutionary father, who died in the eighties.

  “I hope in the future people will not have to make such terrible choices,” I say.

  “Why is it such a terrible choice?” an X——ian guest says. “I would choose pumpkin pie any day.”

  I am aware, too, of Juana’s grandfather, the self-made man, who emigrated from Spain to Cuba as a young boy and moved back to Spain after his stores were nationalized. I am aware of how he killed himself after he returned to Spain. This is the part of the story I didn’t have until Juana filled it in for me, in a moment when we were alone together, about a week ago.

  IV. 37

  Miguel tells me on the way to the agropecuario that there is going to be a new law that sailors and merchant marines will no longer be able to bring electronic equipment into the country.

  I tell him I already know this.

  He says he has heard of doctors and academics who received grants and are studying abroad who are cutting their stays short so that they can return to Cuba with the VCRs they bought before the end of the month.

  There is silence. Miguel lifts the palm of one hand, as if weighing something. “People get so bored here,” Miguel says, “but at least, until now, they have been able to watch nice movies.”

  IV. 38

  Nick and I explore an abandoned Catholic old people’s home in Miramar. It covers an entire block. The guardian, an elderly blanco who lives with his family in the back of it, shows us around. It was closed two or three years after the triunfo, the guardian explains, when the Spanish monks, nuns, and priests who ran it were expelled. It was built in 1922 but already a section of it is in ruins, with a large hole in its roof and in the floor below, fringed with bent steel rods.

  It’s not the buildings built in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries that are in perilous shape—they are in Habana Vieja and are protected by UNESCO; it’s the buildings built in the nineteenth century and afterward in Centro Habana and beyond that are in perilous shape. Most often they are the big institutional buildings because their sheer size makes them impossible to maintain. They are the most difficult to keep people from pillaging, because such long fences would have to be built. Bathroom and kitchen fixtures were the first to go, the guardian explains, and then copper roof gutters and copper pipes. People dug holes in the plaster to pull out pipes. Doorknobs and window latches were then taken, and then in the seventies people started digging electrical wires out of the walls, for their copper and other metals. Bathroom and floor tiles were pulled off and taken, and roof tiles, too, as neither could be found anyplace in Cuba for a long time. He was hired as guardian and given the apartment in the back in the early eighties, but by that time it was already too late. People take bricks and cinder blocks now. He tries to keep them out—he has a German shepherd, too—but there is no fence, and the walls are full of holes.

  IV. 39

  Opening of the Festival del Nuevo Cine Latinoamericano. Alfredo Guevara’s speech is back on the mild side. Che is mentioned, but the speech is not shrill. It is also brief. I find myself wondering if the black Lacoste-type shirt he wears tucked in and the blazer he wears draped over his shoulders is in emulation of Sartre.

  The floor show this time is a lone musician onstage singing a song, the words of which are, “The problem is not . . . ,” and he sings a list of a lot of problems or reasons for problems. At the end he finally sings, “The problem is love.” The floor show, like the song, is over after a short while.

  The movie, kept secret until now, is announced. It is a joint French-Spanish production, The Cosmonaut’s Wife. It is a situation comedy, stretched out to nearly two hours, with labored humor. The star of it, Victoria Abril, is there. She makes a brief speech before the beginning of the movie. I take a little nap near the end of it.

  IV. 40

  A statement is released by a group of bishops in Rome in which Cuba is described as a “totalitarian state.”

  PIÑEIRO SAYS THE BISHOPS’ statement is no big deal, just some rightist elements sounding off.

  Nick has managed to get Piñeiro to come for lunch by himself.

  Piñeiro has two mojitos before lunch, wine through lunch, and scotch after lunch. We eat garbanzo soup with cumin, grilled snapper, roast potatoes and carrots with rosemary, spinach sautéed with garlic an
d lemon, green salad, and Lorena’s lemon meringue pie. Piñeiro eats hunched over his plate, making low noises of pleasure.

  Piñeiro says something toward the end of the meal about Cuba’s elections being free. I burst out laughing. Nick turns red in the face. “What are you laughing at?” Nick asks me. It is me getting Piñeiro’s tone of voice wrong, but I should know never to laugh when someone like him says something like that. I have had a mojito, too, but just one. It seemed like an ironic tone of voice he used when he spoke about Cuba’s elections being free, as if he were scrunching his body apologetically and putting quotation marks around the word free. I should know by now that when he drinks, he is more duro. I do a save: I say I hope Cuba is preparing itself for when the embargo ends. The embargo’s ending will be the greatest challenge to the revolution, in my opinion. Piñeiro nods. His eyes are heavy-lidded. He makes a contained burp, puffing out his cheeks.

  Piñeiro weaves to his Lada and gets in the driver’s seat. He shuts the door. The Lada clatters into first gear. Manuel opens the gate. Piñeiro hunches over the wheel, the way you have to over a Lada steering wheel when you don’t have a lot of upper-body strength. We wave at him under the blazing three o’clock sun. I feel as if we are releasing a deadly weapon into the traffic. I tell Nick that Piñeiro is going to kill either himself or someone else.

  “Maybe both,” Nick says.

  PRIESTS AT A MASS use the word derechos (rights) for the first time.

  A Spanish priest is expelled from Cuba for what is described in Cuban news media as “counterrevolutionary” activities. It is not explained what the activities were, nor can anyone tell us.

  NICK SAYS HE SAW the pope on television, celebrating mass. He was so weak he could not lift the chalice.

  All reports still say the pope is really coming.

  FIDEL HAS NOT BEEN seen in public for many weeks.

  I ASK NICK HOW often, when people are in a historical moment, do they feel they are in a historical moment.

  Nick says he thinks not very often.

  FIDEL APPEARS IN PUBLIC for the first time in months, accepting his nomination as a representative of Santiago in Cuba’s parliament. The speech lasts three hours. Those who watch it tell us later that Fidel looked blank a few times and that sometimes his mouth moved, but no words came out.

  IV. 41

  All shoes of the Cuban nomenklatura are curious. And Raúl Castro’s shoes, visible below the pant legs of a snug-fitting olive green military uniform at a dinner party we attend, are no exception. They look custom-made. The heels of the shoes are slightly higher than normal men’s heels and there is probably a lift inside them as well. This is to be expected, for Raúl is a good five to eight inches (depending on who is telling you) shorter than his brothers, Fidel and Ramón. It’s the last on the shoes (I think that’s what you call it—the slope of the shoe, from heel to toe) that makes them curious. The lasts of Raúl’s shoes are more swooping than the lasts of modern men’s shoes, even of shoes with lifts. They are more like the shoes of burghers in late Dutch Renaissance paintings, swooping down to square toes, or a more stolid version of the shoes men wore in France during the reign of the Sun King. They are shoes of The Nightwatch or The Anatomy Lesson. They are laced but would take buckles well.

  It is curious how Raúl does look entirely different from his brothers, Ramón and Fidel, who greatly resemble each other. But the rumor that Raúl’s father was the Castro family’s Chinese cook and that he is gay—hence the nickname La China—seems to me a little extreme. Ramón and Fidel are both around six foot one. Raúl’s height, according to different assessments, ranges from five foot five to five foot eight. Raúl’s face is round, flat, and beardless, with slanted eyes and high cheekbones. His fine hair, which is light brown and still has very little gray in it, is straight. His voice is high and nasal.

  Raúl says people say he doesn’t talk as much as his brother Fidel, but that it’s not true: he talks just as much. The guests laugh politely. Then what follows is a play-by-play of the campaign in the Sierra Maestre, without anyone’s asking for it, without any conversational lead-in, lasting throughout the entire dinner. He gestures, he bobs, he smiles, he grimaces, and you can tell from the degree of his absorption that he is not with us in the dining room at all, but back in the Sierra Maestre with his men.

  The high-ranking members of the nomenklatura at the dinner table remain absolutely silent while Raúl talks, even more silent than they are when Fidel holds forth. The expressions on their faces are neither rapt nor adoring nor in love, but this is Raúl, and these are ministers, not vice-ministers nor the dormouselike lower-ranking members of the nomenklatura with whom Fidel prefers to surround himself these days. The ministers drink sip after sip of wine as Raúl talks. Some ministers slide forward on their chairs, their tail-bones giving way until their underarms are nearly level with the table. They play, straight-armed, with the stems of their wineglasses, draw with the tines of their forks on the tablecloth, steal glances around the room.

  Then, just as abruptly as he started, Raúl stops talking. The ministers who have sunk push themselves back up in their chairs. There is a collective inhalation. Raúl rises. Chairs grind back. We move into the living room. People break up into smaller groups. Conversations start. Standing in one group, Raúl says that he hopes that Cuba can normalize relations someday soon with the United States. It is a fact of geography that the United States is Cuba’s closest neighbor, and you can’t go on forever, having difficulties with your closest neighbor.

  IV. 42

  A Cuban tells us Fidel told him he invited the pope knowing that he was an anticommunist. Fidel then said, chuckling, that maybe he—Fidel—was an anticommunist, too.

  IV. 43

  The intercom rings. It is Manuel. “You should come and have a look at Bloqueo. He doesn’t look well.”

  I sigh. Things have just gotten going at my desk.

  Bloqueo’s face is blown up to twice its normal size. One eye is shut and oozing. “He hasn’t been seen for two days, and he just showed up like this. He’s been fighting.”

  There’s a new official veterinary clinic on Quinta. We have heard that, being so new, they haven’t had a chance to go downhill yet. We bundle Bloqueo into the laundry basket, and off we go.

  Claw marks, teeth marks on his face and legs, filled with pus. On one leg the skin has been ripped off, exposing bone. Miguel and I hold Bloqueo down as the doctor drains the wounds and paints then with purple disinfectant. The doctor gives him an injection of antibiotics.

  We make an appointment for castration for Bloqueo and a complete ovariectomy for Embargo.

  IV. 44

  We move to the living room between the main course and dessert to hear the archbishop of Havana, Cardinal Jaime Ortega, speak on television about the visit of the pope. It is the first time since el triunfo that any religious person has been allowed to speak on television in Cuba.

  The cardinal’s speech is well constructed. First he speaks about poverty in the world and the scourge of neoliberalism, and he takes a potshot at abortion; then he gives a brief biography of the pope. He speaks of the pope as a young man, of his struggles against the Nazis, and of his struggles against the domination of his homeland by a large neighboring power, which imposed its system on his country. He concludes by speaking of the need to achieve the widest truth possible.

  I think he has done a good job, but others in the room say he is tense and that he uses too many complicated ideas and words for the average Cuban.

  IV. 45

  I have rented rooms for Mark and other journalists in Cubans’ homes, as they asked me to, but it’s getting more and more illegal all the time to stay in people’s houses, so I faxed them that I reserved rooms for them at the Hotel Lincoln. The Hotel Lincoln looks, from the outside, even more poorly managed than other hotels; the management probably has little idea who is going to be staying there, so (I reason) that if any one of the ministries that intercept my faxes should choose to
check if Mark and his friends—among the three thousand other journalists who are coming to Havana to cover the pope’s visit—are really in it, even it might have a hard time verifying this.

  This morning, a decree goes out that all those renting to foreigners during the pope’s visit will not have to pay taxes on the rooms they rent out, so now I can go ahead and fax, “You’re in a private house,” and give the address and telephone number. We rent a car for them today, too, even though they won’t be coming for another week. There won’t be any cars available by then. It sits waiting in Roberto’s garage, costing one hundred dollars a day.

  Within hours of the decree, the airport arrivals area is jammed with people holding up signs advertising rooms for rent.

  INAUGURAL DINNER AT A newly refurbished tourist hotel, Arenal, in Santa María del Mar starts earlier than scheduled, in order to allow the guests to return home to listen to Fidel’s speech on television about the pope’s upcoming visit.

  I ask the vice-minister of tourism, a brisk, open-seeming thirty-year-old, if his ministry is doing anything to discourage single-male tourism.

  “We are raising prices,” the vice-minister says. “We are developing more cultural activities.”

  “Because the girls, you know, they go to Europe thinking to improve their lives. They are generally disappointed.”

  “You don’t appreciate what you have until you lose it,” the vice-minister says.

  I ask him if hotel workers are given any more stimulus.

  “It depends what you mean by stimulus.”