Cuba Diaries

by Isadora Tattlin

“I know many people on vacation don’t care how much the people who are serving them are paid, but when I hear someone at a hotel where I am staying, or at a restaurant where I am eating, is making two hundred pesos a month, it cuts my appetite. I can’t enjoy myself.”

  “But in your country, you have to pay for your education, your hospitals, your housing—”

  “But there is free education in X——, and medical care. There is free education and medical care in Italy, France, Sweden, Holland, and many other European countries.”

  “There is?”

  WE BEGIN LISTENING TO the speech in the bar of the hotel, move into the hotel director’s suite, have another drink, listen to the speech on and off for an hour, drive back to Havana, turn on the television: Fidel is still speaking. I put Thea (who has been waiting up for us) to bed. We floss. I undo my face, pour water, put on hand lotion. Fidel is still speaking. At one o’clock we turn off the television, sleep, wake up at two-fifteen, say to each other, “Let’s see if he’s still speaking.” We turn on the TV and there he still is.

  IV. 46

  We are invited by Eusebio Leal to the dedication of a park to the memory of Diana, Princess of Wales.

  I thought, at first, when I read the word Diana in the invitation that they were speaking of a statue of Diana the huntress, rescued from some ruin and now used to adorn a park. But no, they mean the princess.

  There is near universal shock on the faces of Cuban friends when I tell them what we are invited to. “Now they are truly mad,” they say.

  Nick can’t go.

  The monument to Diana is a ten-foot, entirely phallic column with, to the side of it and much smaller, a vaginal sun.

  A Latin American journalist whispers breathily in my ear that the column must be the monument to Dodi Fayed.

  A Cuban writer favored by the government comes up to me. The writer says it is good the pope is coming because it validates the Cuban process.

  What process, I want to ask him, but don’t.

  He moves to the next group of foreigners.

  IV. 47

  Nick and an American journalist, Herb, who both speak Spanish a thousand times better than I, agree that Fidel’s speech the other night on TV was brilliant. The speech, they agree, was Fidel’s way of controlling the disgruntled nomenklatura; it was Fidel’s way of showing that he was in control of the pope’s visit, that it was he, Fidel, who was asking everyone to go to the Plaza de la Revolución, so that it would not appear that anyone’s going to the Plaza de la Revolución was an independent act or an expression of anything other than support for the revolution.

  I look at Nick. I didn’t realize that Nick had actually listened to the speech, listened enough between the driving and the flossing and the dozing to be able to put it all together, but he had, and I realize, for the millionth time, how much more serious, thorough, and attentive Nick is than I am.

  ON THE PATRIA O MUERTE sign next to the airport, they have taken down O MUERTE and left just PATRIA.

  There is no slogan on the PabExpo traffic circle billboard, only the words THE CUBAN PEOPLE WELCOME HIS HOLINESS JOHN PAUL II.

  AT LAST FIDEL SEEMS younger than someone.

  The pope’s speech is slurred. Fidel looks at him with surprise and concern. One wonders if the pope’s dentures are slipping, or if he has had a stroke right there on the plane, and if this trip is some kind of abuse of the elderly, imposed by the pope on himself. His chin is on his chest, his hands and head are trembling, and his entire torso stays permanently bent over to one side. He manages to stay standing up, though, and when he says, with his trembling voice rising, that he hopes the world can open up to Cuba and that Cuba, “with all its magnificent potential,” can open up to the world, his frailty is transformed into a giant, gleaming bulldozer pushing vanity off a high cliff into crashing violet waves.

  THE POPE’S FIRST MASS, in Santa Clara. We watch it on TV. His theme is the family. I call the help to come in and listen to it with me. When the pope speaks about separation of families, Concha starts crying and runs out of the room.

  ROBERTO STANDS IN THE doorway looking crestfallen. Mark comes up behind him. “We have to go back to Washington,” Mark says. “Clinton’s been banging one of the White House interns and it’s all over the news. Brokaw is leaving; Rather is leaving. I want to stay here, this is much, much more important, but we have to go.”

  Mark was supposed to stay for six whole days, but now he will be leaving after three. That means $60 less for Roberto (or more, if you figure in the proportional tip that it is Mark’s style to give) and $150 less for Roberto’s aunt on his father’s side, in whose house they are staying. Two hundred ten dollars is more than any Cuban makes in a year.

  I want Roberto and his family to make money. I want everyone in our house to make money. I want all the jineteras except the underage ones to make money. I want all the paladar owners and the black-market cigar, lobster, fish, flour, sugar, potato, and cheese vendors to make money. I want all the people who work in the agropecuario to make money. I want all the artists to make money. I want all the people who rent rooms and houses to make money. I want all the people who rent out or show pirated videotapes to make money. I want the antique dealers to make money, as well as all the people who sell something precious out of their homes just every once in a while. I want the independent taxi drivers to make money. I want all the rent-a-clowns, magicians, and puppeteers for children’s parties to make money, and the piñata makers and the independent tire repairmen. I want the man who powers his glass engraver by pedaling his bike and carves your name on your windshield—so that the windshield cannot be stolen right off the car—to make a lot of money. I want all the manicurists at their card tables on the street and the people who restitch tennis shoes and refill lighters with insecticide to make money. I want all the handmade greeting-card and party-favor people to make money. I want Alfonse the innovative vegetable farmer to make money. I want all the freelance masseurs and all the freelance Spanish, English, French, Italian, German, Russian, Portuguese, piano, swimming, dance, karate, tae kwon do, and yoga teachers to make money. I want the people who sell souvenirs in the Plaza de la Catedral and on the weekends in the parking lot on the Malecón to make money. I want the booksellers to make money, and the people redoing the houses of all the people who have made money to make money.

  Every cuenta propista in Cuba will be making less money now because of Monica Lewinsky.

  MASS IN SANTIAGO. The archbishop of Santiago speaks. He speaks of false messiahs and of those who confuse patriotismo with partido (the party).

  PARTY AT THE HOUSE of the principal officer of the U.S. Interests Section, Mike Kozak, and his wife, Eileen, for the media. Five hundred people are expected, but many fewer show up. There are cardinals, also, and congressmen.

  Most of the people we talk to acknowledge that the embargo suits Fidel to a T.

  MASS IN HAVANA, at the Plaza de la Revolución.

  Red Cross trucks are scattered throughout the square, and people in bibs with red crosses on them. A group tries to unfold a banner that reads DOWN WITH THE CASTRO BROTHERS! and are carried off, very quickly, by people in Red Cross bibs, to Red Cross trucks.

  Three groups in the crowd appear to be organized. They pack themselves in tightly to keep the Red Cross people from getting at them. “Libertad,” they chant, all of them, in low voices, no voice louder than another, so that individuals cannot be picked out. They know that the Red Cross people know that arresting a group of them would cause the news cameras, which are now pointed at the dais on which the pope stands, to be pointed at the protesters.

  One friend has bruises on his arms from being packed in so tightly.

  IV. 48

  Juana and I are alone in her family’s Lada. Juana says she and Hernando have had problems and that he has moved out and is living with his mother.

  I tell Juana I am so sorry.

  Juana starts to cry.

  I say to Juana that she is
a treasure and if he doesn’t realize that, that’s his problem.

  Juana continues to cry.

  I ask her if it is the first time he has moved out.

  Juana says there was another time, four years ago, but then he came back.

  I ask her if it is definitive.

  “For me it isn’t.”

  Hernando is an engineer. Working as a baby-sitter, Juana makes nearly eighteen times what he makes.

  I say that the economic situation here must put a lot of stress on couples.

  Juana says that all her female friends, attractive, competent women, are all divorced.

  I say that I read in an article that in Russia, women were generally doing much better than men. Men felt sorry for themselves. They fell apart. Women, on the other hand, were like ducks. They kept floating.

  “Courage,” I say to Juana through the open window after I get out of the car, and “He should realize what he has,” which sounds lame as soon as I say it—like the verbal equivalent of using a twig to keep back a landslide, a landslide of broken families tumbling down whole mountain ranges.

  IV. 49

  The intercom rings.

  “Roberto to see you.”

  “Tell him to come to the upstairs hall.”

  It’s becoming a daily event, Roberto coming to see me to get cash—cash for Jimmie’s computer lessons, cash for a computer part (I don’t ask where he’s getting it), cash for the purchase of a computer printer (I don’t ask where he’s getting it), cash for “caviar” to upgrade the computer (once again, I don’t ask), cash to reserve a rental car for an arriving friend of a friend, cash for touring friends, and sometimes friends of friends, around when they run out of cash in Cuba, who then reimburse my account in the States.

  Apart from the journalist friends of friends, who came for the pope’s visit, there have been fewer visitors this year. As the year goes on, it is becoming obvious that most friends, and friends of friends, who were curious enough to come to Cuba have already come, said, Oh, it’s like that, and have not felt the need to come back again. I had the feeling, in September, that it would get to be this way. The visitors are now truly fewer and farther between.

  Roberto has just returned from taking Jonathan, the last of the journalists, to the airport. Roberto tells me that Mark, who left first, asked Jonathan to give Roberto’s aunt some extra money, for the trouble she took in making her house nice for all of them. Jonathan unfortunately ran out of cash and asked Roberto to ask me to give some extra cash to his aunt—$150 extra.

  I go to my secret drawer, pull out $150, and give it to Roberto. Roberto thanks me and skips down the back stairs.

  I can understand Jonathan not being able to telephone me from anywhere, but I can’t understand Jonathan not even writing me a note about it on his way to the airport.

  IV. 50

  Nick and I slip into the swimming pool.

  Nick tells me his replacement has been named. He’s a nice guy, Nick says. We will be leaving in July.

  It comes all of a sudden like that, as usual—the news. This time it comes even more quietly than usual, as we are slipping into the swimming pool on a weekday afternoon.

  “Look at the orchids,” Nick says.

  They are blooming now—purple ones and white ones, hung up on little boards on palm trees along the fence.

  We walk back to our bedroom, wet feet tracking on the marble floors. We walk through the high-ceilinged downstairs rooms, through which the breezes are constantly blowing, for the doors are never shut and there are no glass windows, only eight-foot-high louvered panels, which bathe the rooms in cool half-light.

  It’s not our house, we know, but a ghost house.

  We will have to go live in a house with glass windows now, which shut.

  It’s a center, a mandala, a stone in a pond, our house, with ripples spreading from it, describing memories: fish on a reef, our Elegguá, sopa de platano, stories every day. Beautiful stories, ugly stories, happy stories, sad stories, hopeful stories, hopeless stories—stories more than I can count, happening every day.

  I cannot leave these stories here.

  IV. 51

  Concha cries; Lorena slaps the cutting board with the flat side of a cleaver.

  “You get used to someone, you know their habits, and then they go,” Concha says, wiping a tear from the corner of her eye.

  I put my arms around them. “It’s not our decision, you know . . .”

  “Y mis niños . . .” (“And my children . . .”), Lorena says. A tear streaks down her negra azul face, causing me to cry now, too.

  “I am from La Yuma,” I say. “I’m just over there.”

  The help, each one of them so distinct now, also in the ripples of the pond.

  I think of them the way Cubans call one another, their physical attributes their handles, signifying affection: La Negra, La Mulata, El Chino, Los Narrow Faces, La Plucked Eyebrows, El Nose Hairs.

  IV. 52

  We cannot take Embargo and Bloqueo back with us to X——, I tell the children. It would not be fair to them. We will be living in an apartment. They would not be able to go outside. There would be no nice Cuban smells for them, nor lizards to catch. The people who will be living in this house after us say they will be happy to take the cats. They also told me they are happy I am going ahead with the surgeries the cats are going to have.

  Jimmie and Thea look at me with tears pooling on their lower eyelids.

  IV. 53

  Friendly Gringo Delivery Service arrives, bringing mail and articles about the visit of the pope, including an edition of the New Yorker dedicated entirely to Cuba. It’s a thin magazine, though, and the articles just brush the surface. Maybe that’s the way it always is when you live in a place that people write about.

  The most detailed article is on architecture. Paul Goldberger calls Eusebio Leal’s restoration of Old Havana “Old Havanaland” and calls Eusebio Leal a “very efficient capitalist.” Goldberger actually got himself and a photographer inside the Faxas house—the green-roofed one just before the tunnel under the Almendares River—“through the roof of which,” Goldberger writes, “you can drop breadboxes.” It is the one we pass at night in torrential rains, see rain pouring through the breadbox-sized holes in the roof, and see, inexplicably and eerily, electric lights on in what looks like the dining room, on the floor below. It is the house the fierce old lady lives in whom no one can meet and who will never move out or sell. It is the house the interior of which everyone tries to imagine.

  The photos show the interior of the Faxas house as we imagined it: grandiose, warped, and surreal to the point of wooziness.

  NATALIA BOLIVAR’S FAVORITE CAT has disappeared. She searches the neighborhood, she goes door-to-door, she goes to her local CDR. Finally it is discovered: some neighbors ate her cat.

  Natalia goes to the apartment of the cat eaters. The wife opens the door. Natalia spits in her face. “May your husband die in the same way my cat died!”

  FIDEL TALKS FROM nine-thirty until well past midnight, sitting at a table with two journalists who never speak. One of the journalists is paralyzed from the waist down.

  THE VETERINARY SURGEON calls me. “There was only one ovary when we went in and it was infected. The doctor who operated on her the first time removed only one.”

  “But they weren’t supposed to remove any ovaries, just the womb . . .”

  “Well, they removed one ovary while they were at it. It was a good thing we operated and found the infection.”

  Miguel brings Embargo home with antibiotics for her infection. We put her in the guest room, where Bloqueo is already confined, recovering from his castration. We have tied up the curtains, put a rubber sheet on the bed, and put down a pan filled with sand, which we collect every week from a spot in front of the former (i.e., before the triunfo) Havana Yacht Club.

  THE HUSBAND OF THE couple who ate Natalia Bolivar’s cat has a heart attack and is rushed to the hospital.

  The
wife goes to Natalia, crying. “You must remove the curse you put on my husband! I beg you! For the love of God!”

  Natalia remains firm. “I will not remove the curse.”

  TWO AMERICAN WOMEN traveling through Cuba come to see us. One is photographing architecture. She was told that in order to see Eusebio Leal she had to make an appointment a month in advance, so she gave up. She met him by chance, though, as she was walking around Old Havana with a Cuban architect. The Cuban architect introduced her to Eusebio Leal, and Eusebio Leal, for some reason, evidently mistook her for some kind of big shot, because he took time with her.

  He talked mostly about his clothes. “I’m a simple man!” he said. “My mother still washes my clothes! Look at these old clothes!” He pulled on the front of his guayabera. “I wear them because I go every day to the work sites!”

  Leal seems more bothered, we agree, by the “efficient capitalist” part of Goldberger’s article than by the “Havanaland” part.

  IV. 54

  We visit Papelería Cubana. It is a paper mill on the Almendares River, not far from Centro Habana. It has been in continuous operation since 1837.

  We meet the vice-director, a stocky blue-eyed blanco who has spent many years in the Soviet Union. We sit around a conference table made of pale wood-patterned Formica curling at the edges underneath an intermittent fluorescent light.

  The director explains that other, more modern factories built in the interior of the country are now standing idle. They used too much electricity and required too many spare parts. Papelería Cubana uses American machines from 1914 and makes the simplest kinds of gray and brown paper—the thick gray paper for making cartons used to package prepared food in the agropecuarios, the thinner brown paper used for wrapping surgical instruments after they have been sterilized, and toilet paper.