Cuba Diaries

by Isadora Tattlin

  I ask if the toilet paper is gray with speckles in it and if it is sold now at the Diplomercado. He says that it is.

  This is an unexpected boon, for every time I am in that part of my sizable bathroom I find myself trying to imagine the factory that produced such toilet paper. It’s because of the speckles, each one a different consistency (some are stiff, like wood chips, some flexible, some crinkly), composing endless constellations for my contemplation: giraffes, cars, a school desk, Independence Hall in Philadelphia, Munch’s The Scream.

  Nick says the word stimulus.

  “My major concern,” the director says, “is making sure that the workers and their families have enough to eat.”

  I look at him. The director of Papelería Cubana is the first official person in any kind of managerial position whom I have met in Cuba (though Nick says he has met some) who has not, upon hearing the words motivation or stimulus, first lectured me about how in Cuba there is free education, health care, practically free housing, and so on, as if this were news.

  The director describes the different ways he has devised to provide the workers with a supplement to their salaries of two hundred pesos per month (a little less than ten dollars). He describes how the workers profit from increased production.

  We visit the factory. The paper-pressing machine, made of cast iron by the Beloit Iron Works of Beloit, Wisconsin, is a single machine, twenty-five-feet high by seventy-five-feet long. It’s a cross between a pasta roller and a locomotive, and it is studded with Modern Timesian cogwheels, valves, gauges, and hissing pistons.

  We start with the finished product, dry paper on rolls, and move backward. The machine, though colossal, is still dwarfed by the room in which it sits. Other machines, we are told, making other kinds of paper, were dismantled years ago and moved out. We end at the beginning: at the depository of used paper, and the vats in which the used paper is mashed and stirred with water and chemicals to make pulp. The factory uses only used paper. We see bales of Mexican telephone books. The director points to another bale, which he says is from Cuba. Nick pulls a crumpled volume out of it. It is a Marxism-Leninism textbook.

  The director walks with us to our car. He studied in the Soviet Union, he says. He really believed in what he was studying.

  Nick thanks him for the interesting tour.

  It pains him, he says, to see waste . . .

  Nick tells him he’s doing a wonderful job with the situation he’s got.

  “But there’s got to be something about socialism worth preserving . . .”

  José stands with the car door open. Nick turns to the director and says that will become apparent with time.

  IV. 55

  Effusive fax from Mark. He asks for my account number so that he can reimburse me in the United States. He is reimbursing me for the deposit I paid on the car rental, plus the $100 extra he and Ted wanted to give to Roberto’s aunt for all her trouble. He hoped I got the message about that.

  Roberto asked for $150 to give to his aunt.

  IV. 56

  Juana comes to the house shaking. We go into the children’s bathroom and lock the door.

  “My mother has been denied an exit permit to go to Spain to visit my brother, Frederico, and her mother—my grandmother—who is in her nineties. They denied her because Frederico stayed in Spain and because he is a doctor. They get really furious when doctors leave. They denied her just to punish the family. They denied it out of meanness. My grandmother is going to die, and my mother is never going to be able to see her again.” Juana starts to cry.

  We can hear the children calling us from the other side of the bathroom door. Juana takes some toilet paper and wipes her eyes.

  “My mother was very cool about it,” she says, her voice still shaking. “But I started to cry. The woman behind the counter, she was embarrassed, can you believe it? She had some genuine emotion, seeing us. I don’t know how she can still have some genuine emotion, being in her job. ‘What can I do?’ the woman said. ‘These are my instructions.’”

  Jimmie is kicking the bathroom door now. “Juuuuuaaaannnaaaaaa!”

  “Mira eso. No puedes darme un momento de paz!” (“Look at that. You can’t give me a moment’s peace!”), she says, opening the door, picking Jimmie up and whirling him around the room in a looping waltz.

  IV. 57

  One of the women photographers who has gone off on a tour with Roberto receives a fax on my fax machine from a travel agent in New York, detailing how she can have a new airline ticket issued, to replace the one that was stolen.

  I wonder if she wants me to know that she has been robbed. She has not called us; there is only this fax. Sometimes, visitors try to keep us from knowing that they have been robbed, especially if they’ve done something we have warned them not to do, like stray too far from Roberto.

  Friends of friends don’t like it much at first, my siccing Roberto on them. They say they can drive around Cuba by themselves, but after a day or two of potholes, roadblocks, scanty road signs, menacing, importuning, or begging people as they park, and smashed car windows and missing radios after they park, they say, “OK, we need a driver, but we don’t need a baby-sitter.” It takes another day or two of being harassed, propositioned, wheedled, ripped off, and robbed, and (worse) of eating in state restaurants because they don’t know how to find a paladar, to admit to us they need a baby-sitter—that is, if it’s not already time to take the plane home.

  I wonder how far the American ladies strayed from Roberto. True, Roberto has seen a lot of movies, and plays his role a little too much to the hilt—insisting on walking right next to his charges, blond ducktail raised, eyes darting, torso puffed like Johnny Bravo’s, arm out from his side as if over an imaginary shoulder holster. Friends of friends don’t like being seen with someone like that. Friends, though, are amused by it. It’s amazing how different friends can be from friends of friends.

  We warn the friends and the friends of friends into getting Roberto. Then, once they get Roberto, we warn them that Roberto’s favorite singer is Barry Manilow and they should not put themselves entirely in his hands, otherwise they will end up at a salsa concert on the rooftop of the Habana Libre with pensioners from Winnipeg and Aachen.

  I wonder how many salsa bands the American women heard before they decided to break out on their own.

  IV. 58

  Danila, whose learning-disabled son is in the army, says that the army doesn’t give soldiers long pants anymore. They wear shorts to save on fabric. She hopes the army will realize soon that it is more trouble having her son in the army than not.

  THERE’S A RUMOR that the U.S. Interests Section will be able to hold a small ceremony in Colón Cemetery commemorating the one hundredth anniversary of the sinking of the Maine. They will not be allowed to display the flag, though.

  IV. 59

  The American woman photographer whose pocket was picked in Santiago says she is annoyed the travel agency sent the fax to my fax number, because she didn’t want me to know. She was ashamed after our warnings. She felt stupid. All she did was spend one day in Santiago by herself, while her friend went off with Roberto to Baracoa. A little kid bumped into her. It was just a little kid. He didn’t take her money, though—her major money—or her passport. They were in an inside pocket. He did take a little money, though, some immediate money that was in her pocket along with the ticket.

  The American women then tell me that they think Roberto is a little funny about money. They paid him for his expenses, but there were twenty dollars in the end that he couldn’t account for. He gave them some explanation, but . . . Maybe it was just their Spanish, but they thought I should know about it.

  WE GO TO THE one hundredth anniversary commemoration of the sinking of the Maine in Colón Cemetery.

  We meet at the chapel. The staff of the U.S. Interests Section and their families are there, along with the marines, us, and the two American women photographers, whom Mike Kozak says we can include, as long as
they don’t take any photographs.

  It is the second time we have been asked anywhere (the first was during the pope’s visit—to the party given at the Kozaks for the U.S. media), not because of Nick and his job, but because I am an American.

  The marines are not wearing uniforms; they have only green tennis shirts on, with “U.S. Marines” embroidered on them, in very small letters, over their hearts.

  We walk to the place where the three hundred men who died were temporarily buried before their bodies were taken to the United States. Mike and his staff found the site of the plot in the densely crowded cemetery after researching old records. We walk to the middle of where the plot was. It is an empty spot, not much wider than a single coffin, filled with rubble and with a rusted fence on one side of it.

  A fan of gladiolus and roses sits on the ground in front of the empty spot. The marine gunnery sergeant holds the flag. It is a tinier, darker flag than the others, but Mike Kozak is pleased that they have been allowed to display the flag at all, for initially they were told that they couldn’t.

  Mike Kozak gives a speech. “Diplomacy with Cuba has always been complicated. It was complicated one hundred years ago, and it is complicated now” is the only reference he makes to the relationship between the two countries. A Cuban priest, sent by the archdiocese, reads a prayer.

  IV. 60

  The director of an American center for the study of international policy calls me. He wants to come over to hear our opinions with an American group he is leading.

  I tell him that Nick, who is much more knowledgeable than I am, is in X——, but they can come if they want to hear the opinions of a not very well informed X——ian American housewife.

  I say the embargo suits the Bearded One very well. They nod in agreement.

  They always nod in agreement—every single American who comes to Cuba—when you say that the embargo suits the Bearded One very well. Sometimes it’s after an hour of being in Cuba and sometimes it’s after five hours, but it’s always on the first day.

  A SECTION OF THE abandoned old people’s home in Miramar that Nick and I visited has collapsed, killing three people. The people who were killed were on the ground floor removing bricks.

  ROBERTO ASKS IF WE can keep a lookout for a job for him, for after we go.

  IV. 61

  The Centro del Nuevo Cine Latinoamericano was established in the outer reaches of Siboney, on a lush former estate of the Loynaz family. The centro is one of our favorite places in Havana. There are offices, a bookstore, a bar with a large patio, and a movie theater, all unobtrusively set in dense greenery. It opens to the public at 2:30 P.M. every day.

  We approach the box office, past a stand of bamboo. There is a Cantin-flas festival currently showing a Cantinflas film every day at 3:00 P.M. Nick and I buy tickets and enter the movie theater.

  The movie theater is one of the nicest we have ever been in, anywhere. It is well air-conditioned and has comfortable seats. Glass sidewalls in the movie theater allow us to take our seats in natural light and gaze at well-tended greenery until the film begins. It is 2:55 and we are the only people in the audience. At 2:57, a Mexican diplomat comes in, nods at us, and takes a seat. At 2:59, the red velvet curtains are closed over the glass walls on either side of the movie theater. The film begins. One ticket costs two pesos (about ten cents); still, very few people in Havana have cars to get here, and buses to this sparsely populated section of Havana are few and far between. It’s also 3:00 in the afternoon on a weekday. Nick can be here because he is the boss and can take off when he wants to; I can be here because we have Juana. Still, the centro does not change the schedule of its showings. A ticket seller waits in the ticket booth. Two bartenders stand in the bar. A bookseller stands in the bookstore. Gardeners rake and clip. The air-conditioning hums, cooling thousands of cubic feet of empty space around us and the Mexican diplomat.

  We will miss the centro very much.

  There is a film for children every Saturday morning at 10:00 A.M. Practically no one comes to the Saturday morning films, either, we are told, except the few mothers and children who live in scattered houses nearby and can get there that early.

  IV. 62

  We visit Cuba’s greatest living lyric poet, Dulce María Loynaz, in her house in Vedado. It is an airless mansion of beige stone. Vedado is like the Garden District in New Orleans, but Dulce María Loynaz’s house is more like a pared-down version of the Frick Collection in New York than like anything you would find in Louisiana.

  Dulce María Loynaz is in her late nineties. She has not had to sell her things, like the Carrera sisters have, nor does she cover them with plastic, like Bibi Sebaya. She has let them age in glass display cases: opera glasses, plume pens, souvenir ceramic thimbles, signed matchbooks, kid gloves, ivory cigarette holders, photographs of her being given things by bald men wearing sashes and by little girls with big bows in their hair. Though widely acclaimed in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s, she has written little and made few public statements since el triunfo de la revolución.

  Dulce María Loynaz sits in a smock of lilac-colored raw silk with a bow at her throat. On her feet are lilac-and-white-striped raw silk pumps. They are about size 4½, width AAAA. They are the kind of shoes you see in display cases of women’s costumes, not of the nineteenth century, but of the eighteenth century, when women’s shoes looked more like slightly opened pea pods. We are served tea in hand-painted cups, through which the afternoon sunlight shines.

  Dulce María Loynaz quotes The Song of Hiawatha for us in English.

  IV. 63

  Back from an early spring trip to Europe for our last push before returning to X——.

  I wonder if I am going to have a heart attack. I get pains in my chest when I think about all I have to do now. I try to think about one thing at a time but can’t get the one thing to stay in my mind, just by itself: other things start coming in, crowding the original thing. After a while the things I have to do start buzzing and moving in beelike patterns of their own. That’s when the pains start.

  This is the time, always, when our acquisitions haunt us. The trick is going to be to get everything out—not only the stuff we bought in Cuba, but also the stuff we came with. We have already been told by every foreigner who has ever left Cuba about how people in uniforms go all over your house, how they watch all the boxes being packed, and how you have to prove to them that everything you are taking with you is either something you brought to Cuba with you or has an export license.

  I HAVE BROUGHT BACK photos of the school Jimmie and Thea will be attending in X——. I have also brought back photos of some of the children who will be in Jimmie’s and Thea’s classes.

  “Qué pálidos son. Están enfermos?” (“How pale they are. Are they sick?”), Jimmie and Thea ask.

  FIDEL MADE A seven-hour speech in our absence, criticizing the Cuban Film Institute and the film Guantanamera.

  Guantanamera has already been out for more than a year, but Fidel hadn’t seen it until Raúl saw it, when he was in Rome, and told his brother Fidel to see it.

  Alfredo Guevara resigned in protest after the speech but resumed his post after a few days.

  THE BILLBOARD ON THE PabExpo circle now reads YOUNG PEOPLE OF CUBA: WORTHY OF THEIR PARENTS.

  IV. 64

  I take four foreign women who are new to Cuba to meet Alfonse, the vegetable gardener. I am trying to drum up some business for him, especially now that we are going.

  We go slowly through the garden. I tell them how Alfonse started with a rubble-strewn empty lot. Alfonse points proudly to the raised beds he and his helpers have built, and to the site he has prepared for the well driller.

  One woman says under her breath, “But it’s such a wreck!” and later, “I’m scared.”

  I am hoping it’s because she is new, but at the end of the visit, with a bag full of vegetables, she mutters, “I hope I don’t get sick.”

  I don’t know why I bother with some people.

&nb
sp; IV. 65

  The thighs of a female member of the nomenklatura are as wide as two midsize Canon photocopiers, and her rather short skirt is tight, so that a large, empty triangle is formed, up which a member of a European undersecretary’s delegation and I, who are sitting across from her, can see all the way to her crotch. She is wearing electric-blue nylon pantalets trimmed with black lace.

  IV. 66

  Piñeiro has died. He confused the brake with the accelerator, had a car wreck that didn’t injure him very badly, was taken to the hospital, told the doctors he was fine, went home, and died.

  We go to a viewing of the body at a funeraria on Calzada, right in back of the U.S. Interests Section, just a few blocks from the Malecón. Lots of people are milling outside. We are led to the fourth floor. We step into a large, low-ceilinged film noir set, dense with cigarette smoke, dimly and nervously lit by feeble fluorescents, packed with thin old men in imitation leather jackets. Some look shocked; others look furtive; and still others, guilty, as if they are worried that what they learned in Catholic school may have some basis in truth and that there may really be a final judgment coming for them, too. Some sit on grimy red Naugahyde banquettes placed at intervals around the room. Some of the old men are so thin that they look like cartoon characters after they have been steamrollered, then peeled off the pavement. Piñeiro, I realize, with his in-shape pectorals, cinnamon-colored chest hair, and willingness to talk to foreigners and to drink large quantities of wine, whiskey, mojitos, and cognac, was a giant among them.