Cuba Diaries

by Isadora Tattlin

  I look at the crowd and try not to think about how, at this moment, all it would take would be for the U.S. Marines to pull up to the funeraria with amphibious landing vehicles. They could get practically all of them with one sweep. The marines would broadcast on television and on the radio in Miami and on loudspeakers blaring over Little Havana that they were coming. But the time the marines would announce would be an hour and a half before the time the boats would actually come, giving plainclothes marines waiting on the docks time to disarm the aging Cuban Americans who came to the docks carrying clubs, knives, guns, and bombs to meet the boats. The plainclothes marines, masquerading as unarmed “monitors,” would wait until the dock was full and the false time they had announced for the arrival of the boats had come and gone. Then, on a signal, a roadblock would go up behind the aging Cuban American warriors, and they would be told to surrender their arms. Those who resisted would be overpowered. The marines would then transfer all nomenklatura members and Cuban American warriors to a high-security retirement home with a hospice, an infirmary, three hundred domino tables, and a cinema with nightly showings of Glenn Ford, Cantinflas, Rita Montaner, María Felix, and Kim Novak movies, and all the marines and all the people under fifty-five, from both sides of the Straits of Florida, would walk away from the retirement home brushing their hands, a job well done.

  I know it does absolutely no one any good to think like this, but I’ve been here three years.

  “I’M GOING TO miss him,” Mike Kozak says about Piñeiro, shaking his head sadly.

  IV. 67

  Nick and I go to the Jardin Botanico (Botanical Garden) in the afternoon. It’s what I would do if I had to live here—be a botanist, even though I have no inclination. It’s what I would do if I had no choice but to stay. We see salami trees from Africa, their seeds in pods truly as big as salamis. We see a palm tree, its bark covered in long black spikes like a porcupine’s, and another tree, the seeds of which are as big as zucchinis and swell and burst and rain down furry pelts like hamster skins. We see trees bursting with fuchsia-colored blossoms and dark brown blossoms, other seedpods round and yellow like lemons but with flip tops.

  IV. 68

  I have started asking Reny about his past when I see him at cocktail parties. He is not used to people asking him about his past—where he studied, what he did during the revolution, if he ever visited the United States before el triunfo, how many members of his family went to the United States or to any other country, if he still communicates with any of them—and watching him be evasive and weird. It’s not fair, for the man can’t escape, but he’s at the party and so am I.

  IV. 69

  Embargo and Bloqueo are losing their fur in patches. The veterinarian scrapes the skin and looks at it under a microscope. They have mites.

  Danila’s father-in-law’s present mujer, who is a nurse, is enlisted to come every morning to give Embargo and Bloqueo courses of subcutaneous injections that make their blood toxic to the mites. The cats are kept trapped in the bathroom every morning until Danila’s father-in-law’s present mujer arrives. They are held on the kitchen table as they bat their tails and moan.

  IV. 70

  The packing representative of Cubalse comes this morning to see what size container everything can go in.

  MY PERCEPTION OF TIME contracts and expands unreliably. Sometimes I feel like a runner, crouched down, waiting for the starting gun. Other times I feel like Butterfly McQueen, sashaying her way past the picket fence as the Yankees close in on Atlanta. Everyone has been telling me how awful it is when the people in uniforms go all over the house and you have to justify to them every single thing you are taking out of Cuba.

  I feel that I should be doing something to get ready for the people in uniform besides throwing things away and giving things away, but I don’t know what it is.

  THE DIPLO IS BRUTAL these days. Long lines at the diplomatic checkouts spill over into the regular checkout lines, where we stand. Cases of cooking oil and Cristal beer stacked on hand trucks appear in the cramped aisles of the Diplo. They are piled, minutes later, into Vietnamese, North Korean, and African diplomats’ shopping carts, which then block the lines at the checkout.

  One Vietnamese diplomat has a blackboard hung outside her house in Miramar, posting what she has available, for 15 percent less than the Diplo price. As a diplomat she gets a 33 percent discount at the Diplo, so she ends up making 18 percent.

  THE MIAMI HERALD HAS come out against the embargo. It also states in an editorial that the lack of direct charter flights, suspended after the Hermanos al Rescate planes were shot down, simply makes the trip to Cuba, now through Nassau and Cancún, a calvary for the passenger and nothing else. It inconveniences thousands for the sake of a few fanatics.

  NICK CALLS FROM the office. Direct humanitarian flights are being resumed to the United States.

  CARLOS VARELA, A CUBAN singer based in Cuba, has just sung in Miami and nobody made a fuss.

  Maybe things are getting back on track.

  IV. 72

  Nick’s replacement is arriving from X—— today, with his wife, to check out the house.

  Nick says the wife is the one who should be scared of me, not me of her. Still I’m scared of middle-aged X——ian ladies, with their serious makeup, streaked blond hair, straight skirts, stockings, and high heels all day long.

  RUN INTO THE U.S. consul at the Diplo. I tell him that we have a Cuban nanny whom we would like to take with us to the United States this summer. I say she will be spending the summer with us in the United States, then going with us to X—— and spending a few weeks with us there to help us get set up there.

  He says the important thing is that she won’t stay in the United States.

  I say she doesn’t have a reason to because she already has another job lined up with another family after she returns from X——. I say that she makes now and will continue to make about fifteen times the average Cuban salary and that she lives in a nice house in Miramar and has a car.

  The consul is a big man with a round, impassive face.

  I say that she has a grandmother living in Spain and a brother who has just emigrated there and that if she were to go anywhere, it would be to Spain.

  The consul says to send in her visa application with a note addressed to him.

  I thank him. I thank him for taking the time to talk to me. I thank him for thinking about her visa application. I tell him that she is a person who will really benefit from traveling. I tell him that she has a superior mind . . .

  “Well, if she has a superior mind, then she will want to stay in the United States. There is nothing for her here.”

  I backtrack quickly and tell him that we have a very open relationship and I have often asked her if she would like to leave Cuba. I say she has told me that she has hope for the future and says that Fidel can’t live forever and that Cuba is one of the most beautiful places on earth, physically.

  “It is that,” he says.

  I ask him how long it will take to get the visa. He says she can get it in one day.

  JUANA AND I GO to the Consultoria Juridico. The Consultoria Juridico is the place where I have to go to have Juana’s letter of invitation composed. Juana cannot even apply for her exit permit until she has a letter of invitation from a resident of the country she is visiting, who promises to act as her sponsor and to pay her medical and travel expenses.

  The Consultoria Juridico is in a mansion in Miramar with chandeliers and clean, well-lit rooms. The whole operation takes just a few minutes. I tell Juana that I expected the Consultoria Juridico to be in some dingy place across town where we would have to line up for hours and sweat, but Juana says it’s in an easy-to-get-to, nice-looking place because foreigners go there; it’s the other offices Juana has to go to that are dingy and across town and make you sweat.

  I pay $140 for a girl at a computer to compose a letter for me on official paper and put a stamp on it. Juana says she is embarrassed that I am payi
ng it, but I tell her that it is normal for me to pay it, for I am inviting her. Juana says it is not normal, it is not normal to have to do this, and I say that it is not normal but it is normal that I pay.

  Now Juana has to apply to the Ministry of Education for a paper confirming that the Ministry of Education has no objection to her leaving. It’s because it educated her, she explains, and they want to make sure she’s not taking her education off to benefit other countries. That process takes about a month and costs $40. If the Ministry of Education has no objection to her leaving, she can then apply for an exit permit, which takes another few weeks and costs another $150. I say I will pay that, too, and Juana, balking at the Mitsubishi door, says I will not. I say it is normal that I pay because she is coming to America to help me, and Juana says, “Por favor, con este normal,” and says that if she doesn’t pay she will feel bad for the rest of her life. I say we will see.

  In the meantime, Juana must get her visas to visit the United States and X——. They will together cost another $30 and will take a few days, but she says she wants to have them in plenty of time.

  Roberto asks if we have heard of any jobs for him yet.

  We tell him we have been asking all the diplomats and businessmen we know. We have asked Nick’s replacement, too. So far we have found nothing.

  IV. 72

  I insist on driving to Santiago and back with Nick, stopping at towns on the way, some of which I have seen but Nick hasn’t, and some of which neither of us has seen. I tell Nick he can’t leave Cuba without having seen Camagüey, Santiago, or Baracoa and that we can’t leave without having seen Remedios, Sancti Spíritus, and Bayamo. We go in the Land Cruiser, with Roberto driving. We take plenty of clean underwear in case we can’t find showers. We take raisins, crackers, nuts, canned tuna, canned beans, and canned fruit and two dozen bottles of water in case we can’t find places to eat.

  The children started moaning, “Do we have to go?” three weeks before the trip. I said yes the first week, wavered the second week, and by the third week said they could stay in Havana with Juana.

  They are ecstatic.

  OUR FIRST STOP IS Remedios, a swept-bare colonial town. It is devoid of cars and even more devoid of stores, of any kind of commerce, than other Cuban towns we have seen. It is more devoid of commerce than Dimas, Baracoa, or Mantua. We park our conspicuous car in front of the church we have read about in our guidebook, but our arrival elicits only mild interest from passersby. No one offers to watch our car, to be our guide, or to sell us una moneda con el Che (a current three-peso coin with an image of Che on it, which in Havana they try to sell you for five dollars). People are the way we have heard they were before the periodo especial—reserved and unmaterialistic.

  We enter the church through a side door and come immediately upon a baroque, three-hundred-year-old gilded wooden altarpiece. It fills the entire back wall of the sanctuary of the otherwise bare church. It is naive, overpowering.

  Nick, who was raised a Catholic but is not devout, kneels on the altar rail and crosses himself.

  Nick asks the priest who has let us in if they will be allowed to have their Good Friday procession this year outside the church. It has been rumored that since Christmas was allowed, they will allow Good Friday processions again outside of churches, for the first time since 1960. Since 1960 they have had to mark the stations of the cross inside the churches.

  The priest says that as usual the Good Friday procession will not be allowed outside the church.

  THE AMERICAN WOMEN photographers who recently traveled around Cuba with Roberto said they managed to sleep in a private house in Remedios, on beds with Cabbage Patch Kids sheets, but Nick prefers a hotel, so we drive fifty more miles to where there is one, in Morón.

  Morón means idiot in Spanish, too. The room is spacious and clean. There is CNN. “I can’t believe it,” Nick says. The bathroom, too, is modern and clean.

  Eating a bland but edible dinner of chicken, rice, and beans in the dining room around nine-thirty, we look out through the windows to see two lone jineteras under a single streetlamp at the entrance to the hotel, one in over-the-knee boots with stacked soles. As we are ending the meal, we see them, with resigned gestures, clomp off in the direction of town. There are only five guests in the hotel.

  We retire to our amazingly comfortable room, which costs thirty-four dollars with breakfast. We go to sleep but are awakened harshly at one in the morning by the noise and thump of a discotheque, which seems to be directly underneath our room. Nick puts on pants and goes downstairs. The night manager follows Nick back to our room, stands in the middle of the room, and says, “It’s true, you can’t sleep with this.” I put on my bathrobe and we are moved as far away from the discotheque as possible, into a cramped, unrenovated room.

  “This is more like it,” Nick says.

  Before we leave in the morning, we are given a basket of fruit, a bottle of wine, a baseball cap, a T-shirt, a pen, a 50 percent discount, and a personal apology from the manager.

  EVEN USING A LOT of pull, our Elegguá hasn’t been able to get reservations for us in Santiago at the Hotel Casa Granda, on the main square, only at the ugly modern hotel outside of town. Nick takes one look at the modern hotel, and we head to the Casa Granda.

  The desk clerk says there are no rooms available. We go outside to Roberto. “No rooms,” we say.

  Roberto goes in. Five minutes later, he comes out. “You can go back in now and take your pick.”

  The same desk clerk greets us. We are shown three rooms—one a suite, one overlooking the square, and one in the back. We choose the one overlooking the square.

  A PLAQUE IS BEING put back under the statue of the soldier with the Grace Kelly profile on top of San Juan Hill. The plaque sits on the ground next to the young people who are doing the restoring, two young women and a young man, who are carefully brushing the spot on the rock where the plaque will go and trying different sizes of screws. TO THE MEN OF THE NEW YORK REGIMENT, the plaque reads. There is another plaque on the ground next to another rock. It reads TO THE MEN OF THE MASSACHUSETTS REGIMENT. We take a photo of them working.

  The young man and one of the young women look annoyed, but the other young women smiles. “It’s for the tourists—they want to know,” she explains.

  “Siboney,” I see on the map. It is on the coast, with a little umbrella symbol next to it, indicating a beach. “Siboney” is the name of one of the most beautiful songs by Ernesto Lecuona, the Cuban composer. It takes us more than an hour to drive there. The drive, over green hills under a rising moon, is beautiful. We pass the hut where Fidel planned the attack on the Moncada barracks.

  When we finally get to the former resort village, there are so many men, women, and children watching our every move that we don’t know whether to place Roberto near the parked car or with our towels on the beach. Finally we decide to leave everything in the car with Roberto, including our sandals and our towels, and walk barefoot over the gravel to the water.

  A man swims after us holding up a coconut for sale.

  WE STOP AT A deserted beach on the way from Santiago to Baracoa, just before Guantánamo. We plan to spend half an hour there but end up spending three hours. It is the kind of beach we have been looking for ever since we came to Cuba. It is utterly deserted and in a glorious setting—this we have found before. But this is the first time we have been on a deserted beach and not had to worry about our stuff. This is because it’s so deserted. It’s deserted because it’s in a desert, a desert microclimate found between Santiago and Guantánamo. People cannot live here, and few have cars or reason enough to come here in the heat. Agave and cactus on steep hills frame small beaches, one after another. All we see in three hours is one spearfisherman.

  THRONGS OF PEOPLE on the street in Guantánamo. We think there is some kind of festival, but there are no banners. Roberto says it’s just people looking for a ride. We look around. There are no cars. A truck passes and slows (it’s the law that a
truck with any kind of space in it has to pick people up), and people throw themselves on it, packing themselves in until they are hanging off the sides.

  EL SOCIALISMO, a sign in Guantánamo reads, ADEMÁS DE SER JUSTICIA, ES EFICIENCIA Y CALIDAD (Socialism, in addition to being justice, is efficiency and quality).

  WE ARE AT THE Spanish fort turned into a hotel in Baracoa, where I stayed with my brother and Marianne. Looking out through the sealed plate glass window, between the curtain and the air conditioner sealed with brown stuff, which has remained (I check it with a fingernail) gooey after two years, Nick says he didn’t think Baracoa would be such a dump.

  I say I never said it wasn’t a dump; I just said it had other things in it besides things that made it a dump.

  I send Roberto to find the architect Nelson Figueroa. He arrives, with a trimmer beard, looking dazed. I ask him if he remembers me from when I was there two years ago, with my brother and Marianne, the Canadian photographer. He says, “Of course . . . ,” but it is obvious that he doesn’t. He looks stricken when I introduce him to Nick. I don’t know whether it is because Nick is so tall (Nick is not really tall, just six foot one, but Nelson Figueroa is four foot ten) or because he is so serious-looking, but Nelson Figueroa is completely different from the way he was before. Then I figure it’s the way he is around any woman with any tall, serious man attached to her.

  Nelson Figueroa takes us on a walking tour of Baracoa. Baracoa is even more depressed than before. One or two buildings in the town seem to be operating as paladares, but to me the people look even more bedraggled than before.

  Nick and I mention a kind of travel magazine that came out a few months ago, published by Benetton. It’s a special issue devoted exclusively to Baracoa, in which Baracoa’s poverty and degradation are presented as colorful tourist attractions to be exploited. There is an article on a coffin maker who makes five dollars a months. It is presented as a good thing, such a salary, as something that keeps him pure and unspoiled. There is an article titled “I Like Sex,” showing the good-looking young men and women of the town. In it, they are quoted as saying that sex is their source of entertainment. Several young men and women are quoted as saying they especially like having sex with foreigners.