Cuba Diaries

by Isadora Tattlin

  I am closer to Nelson Figueroa’s level, and I can tell from his pleased expression when he opens his mouth at the mention of the Benetton magazine that he is about to say that it is a good thing, the magazine, that it has really put Baracoa on the map, and so on, but before he is able to say anything, Nick says the magazine is depressing and disgusting, and so Nelson Figueroa says, “Yes, it is disgusting.”

  In chorus, Nick and I say that it’s encouraging the dregs of Europe and every other place to come here. It will also cause the spread of AIDS.

  Nelson Figueroa, looking more stricken, nods vigorously. “Exactamente,” he says, pointing into the air in front of us for emphasis.

  Nelson Figueroa mentions a Dutch woman who is living in his house. We ask what she is doing in Baracoa. Nelson says she is doing research. We ask Nelson what she is doing research on. Nelson says he doesn’t know. We ask Nelson if she is his girlfriend. Nelson makes a face and says she is not.

  WE ITCH IN THE night and find raised welts all over our bodies in the morning from agua mala, which we must have gotten the day before, when we lolled for three hours in the water.

  Roberto goes to pick up Nelson Figueroa. Roberto finds him passed out in bed, having completely forgotten that we were supposed to meet. He arrives extremely hungover, his hair wet.

  Nick wants to visit a chocolate factory. We have heard there is one in Baracoa. We pull up to it unannounced. An American family we know visited the factory a few years ago. They drove right up and went in with their four children. It is Saturday. Nick explains to a guard stepping out of a guard box that he is a director of Energy Consulting International (he gives the guard his card) and he was wondering if we could visit the chocolate factory. Nelson hangs back, after having said several times on the way to the factory that it would probably be impossible to visit it.

  The guard calls a higher-up. The guard tells us that the higher-up says it is impossible to visit the factory without the permission of the director, who has to get it from the Committee of the 26th of July, who has to get it from the party.

  Nelson Figueroa leads us to a fake farm geared to group tourism. Bohíos (thatched guajiro huts) with shined, intact cement floors. A mulata in rumbera costume smoking a cigar. Neat signs in front of plants: CACAO, PINEAPPLE, MANGO, GUAVA.

  Nick keeps wandering off, leaving Nelson in midsentence.

  “We want to go to a river,” I tell Nelson Figueroa. Last time I came here with Sam and Marianne, we heard about the rivers, but it was raining and chilly. Nelson Figueroa takes us to another fake primitive group-tourism establishment to look for a boat to take us up the Toa River. “It’s just for a minute, ” he explains quickly.

  A man is roasting a whole pig under a tent for a group of Swedish tourists who will be arriving. The boat is not there. Nelson stands there.

  “I am from America, too,” I finally say.

  “Go farther, go farther,” Nick says to Roberto, as we drive on a rough road up a bank of the Toa River, every time it looks like Roberto is about to stop. “Go farther,” Nelson, who has finally understood, says, too.

  We put on our bathing suits, take off our shoes, and climb down an embankment into the Toa River. There is a small rapids. Nick gets in, feet first, hands behind his head, then Nelson Figueroa, then me. We float, letting the current take us.

  Sometimes the river is deep and slow, sometimes shallow and rushing, but never rushing enough to cause us the slightest bruise or bang. The water is crystal clear. High above us on either side rise the riverbanks, covered in dense jungle. There are in the river no alligators, no snakes, and not one aggressive reptile, insect, or mammal. There are not many people, either, only an occasional hut with a woman outside it, washing clothes. The women smile at us and wave. Every hundred yards or so, there is a rock or a rise on which we can rest, feel the water rushing around us, soothing our agua mala welts, and contemplate Nelson Figueroa’s hairy elfin body. The Toa is one of four rivers in Baracoa, the others being Doaba, the Miel, and the Yumurí. These rivers have never been exploited and cut through forests that have remained as they were when Columbus arrived here; it was on approaching a beach near Baracoa that Columbus said, “Never have human eyes beheld anything so beautiful.” There is no boat in the river and no one else in the river floating as we are. We float without sandals, without keys, without keep-dry bags, like otters, always to another bend in the river, to see what is beyond, and it is such a nice clear run that we float down it, too. After two and a half hours, we know we must be tired, though we do not feel tired. We stop not because we want to but because Nick and I are middle-aged and it’s weird not to feel tired after floating for so long. We figure it’s something the river has done to us, this not feeling tired, and that maybe it does this, make you feel not tired, until you drop like a stone.

  We have forgotten a towel and share our supplies of canned tuna, crackers, olives, nuts, and raisins with Nelson, standing on the sand. Nelson looks a little more relaxed now, but still stricken.

  At the end of lunch we give Nelson an extra can of tuna from our picnic basket to take home, as well as a can of olives and a can of something we took out of the minibar of the hotel, thinking it was a beer, which turned out to be a nonalcoholic malt drink. When we have nothing else, we give money, but usually we give things. We think it is less embarrassing that way, when the recipient is a professional, but Nelson’s fraught silence as we root in the picnic basket—a silence we understand only seconds after we have given him the tuna, the olives, and the malt drink—communicates telepathically: It doesn’t matter if I am an architect. Give me money. Still we hold our ground—I don’t know why.

  ROBERTO FINDS A MUCH better and cheaper paladar for us than the one we were in the night before with Nelson. I take Nick afterward to the bar of the Hotel La Rusa. La Rusa is for dollars now. Cubans no longer go there. Three lone tourists sit on the back veranda, staring out to sea.

  On the way back to the hotel, Roberto begins a long, flowery speech about how much he respects us. We are, he says, like, like . . . we are younger, of course, than his parents are, and he hopes we don’t mind him saying, but we are like parents to him. Yes, like parents. His hand sweeps down in front of the steering wheel with a flourish on the word parents. He cares about us. He really does. If we were other people, he wouldn’t feel the need to say anything . . .

  We tell him that it is very nice of him to say this, but what is he trying to say? Roberto says he knows that we have advantages, privileges, but that we try to do what we can to help people. We help people, and we try to see only what is good in people. That is why it pains him when some Cubans try to exploit the situation . . .

  We ask him if he is trying to say something about Nelson Figueroa.

  Roberto says Nelson Figueroa is very talked-about in the town as a big drunk. He has the habit of taking his clothes off in public and getting up on tables when he is drunk. Roberto says Nelson said to him the night before, when Roberto was driving him home, that they should use our car to cruise bars and pick up women.

  “But where are the bars that you can cruise to? People don’t even have boniatos (sweet potatoes) here; where are they going to get beers?”

  “Señora, he wanted to use your car . . .” Roberto says Nelson asked him if he thought we would give him some money for going around with us. And the Dutch woman? Roberto says Nelson told him she is some old woman in her fifties who is in Baracoa, hanging out, and Nelson is sleeping with her in exchange for being maintained. Roberto says Nelson told him, “Me cuesta mucho trabajo” (“It’s really a lot of work”).

  I HAVE TOLD NICK to steel himself, but the Gran Hotel Camagüey, we discover, is now managed by a Spanish chain. The bronze girl still holds her globe lamp at the bottom of the stairs, but the rooms on floors that are open to guests now have hot and cold running water.

  Nick and I lie in twin beds while I tell him about how Marianne and I lay there, waiting for running water, our armpits smoking.

&
nbsp; The top-floor breakfast room, lifted directly from a William Holden movie, has not changed, however, and it still takes more than an hour to get fried eggs.

  IV. 73

  The bank and Bienes Culturales come today. The bank is represented by the same two men who came and listed all the jewelry and silver we brought with us when we moved in. They come with the list they made that day. They also bring with them a man from Customs, who introduces himself as Nestor. Nestor is a smiling blanquito with curly black hair and large dark eyes. They sit at the dining room table, checking the list of silver and jewelry we brought into the country against the silver and jewelry we are bringing out, and adding the new pieces of silver we have bought here, which we have already gotten stickers for, after paying 10 percent of their declared value, from the government export-licensing entity in the state antique store in the Hotel Kohly.

  All antiques, silver, and jewelry, no matter where you buy them (and strangely, they don’t seem to be much concerned about where you buy something), must be taken to the Kohly for export licenses. All paintings must be taken to the export office of Bienes Culturales for export licenses, and all books more than fifty years old must be taken to the Biblioteca Nacional. With the export licenses come little stickers, which are placed on each item. The silver items and jewelry are checked again, before the movers come, by representatives of the bank and one Customs representative, the other items are checked by Bienes Culturales, and then everything is checked again by Customs when the movers are actually in the house and the packing is going on.

  We can’t find a piece of silver that we brought into the country and is on the bank’s list. We think it must still be in the attic. Miguel, Danila, and I climb to the attic and kick papers and shift mattresses and rip open boxes. Miguel and Danila keep looking, and I start back downstairs. I meet the two bank people and Nestor coming up the stairs as I go down. I have not told them they could come upstairs; they are just heading on up. Standing in front of them on the stairs, I tell them that the piece of silver we are looking for will be down shortly, ask them what they would like to drink, and escort them back down the stairs to the dining room.

  To gain time as Concha is serving drinks, I ask her if she is sure she has brought out of the pantry all the silver belonging to us that we will be taking out of the country. I go back into the pantry with her and rattle trays. I pull out some ladles and a soup tureen and take them into the dining room. “We forgot these!” I say, sounding alarmed.

  “It’s silver plate. It doesn’t count,” the older bank person says. Just then Miguel and Danila come into the dining room carrying the lost silver piece.

  Bienes Culturales, which comes an hour and a half after the arrival of the bank, is Maida, a modified boarding-school-housemother type in a plaid polyester skirt with a frayed hem. With her is Betina, the bouncy woman who was present three years earlier as our things were being unpacked—on the lookout for Cuban national treasures coming from Southeast Asia—and had handed us her card. Recognizing the name Maida and noticing the whiff of gentility about her, I ask Maida if she knows Nicoletta.

  “We were at the conservatory together,” Maida says.

  Maida is one of the childhood friends of Nicoletta’s who stayed on, whom Nicoletta looked up when she came back to Cuba. They hadn’t seen each other for forty years.

  “She has a pitiful job,” Nicoletta said, describing Maida to me, “going into foreigners’ houses, checking what they are taking out of the country. ‘But how can you do that,’ I said to her, ‘checking the things that Cubans are forced to sell in order to survive. Going into foreigners’ houses, checking every little thing, saying yes, no, yes, no. A Chartrand (nineteenth-century Cuban landscape painter) or a Pelaez (twentieth-century Cuban painter) painting, I can understand, but every little thing. You were such a talented girl at the conservatory. You can’t possibly believe in what you are doing, now that you have seen how it has turned out . . .’”

  I take Maida and Betina to the section of the upstairs hall where I have put the clocks, vases, ashtrays, door knockers, paintings, daguerreotype, furniture, china, opera glasses, mantilla combs, fans, glassware, pharmaceutical jars, and books more than fifty years old bought in Cuba that we are taking out of the country—the valuable objects with their stickers from the Hotel Kohly, the books with stickers from the Biblioteca Nacional.

  Maida tells me we have to have export licenses for the ashtrays and less-valuable items as well. The less-valuable items are grouped in lots of five, on which we must pay an export tax of ten dollars per lot. Maida measures and describes every one of our forty biomorphic Murano ashtrays, measuring the distances between swoop points or bulges, and calling the measurements to Betina, who writes them down.

  I point out the piano in the playroom.

  “Problema,” Maida says about the piano.

  It is one-thirty. Concha comes upstairs. “The bank people are still downstairs,” she whispers.

  “But I thought they finished . . .”

  “I thought so, too. But they are just hanging around in the dining room.”

  I seat the bank people, Nestor, and the Bienes Culturales women on the porch and give them empanada de atun (tuna cooked with peppers and onions in a piecrust), beer, salad, and ice cream; the table is set with doilies and cloth napkins. Concha waits on them, looking peeved.

  Nestor shakes my hand, grinning, as he leaves. “Be sure to ask for Nestor when you move.”

  Maida says we can export everything except the piano, the pharmaceutical jars, the daguerreotype, and two door knockers in the form of ladies’ hands.

  I knew the piano and the pharmaceutical jars would be a problem and I suspected the daguerreotype would be, but I had no idea about the door knockers. Still, I act surprised about everything. “A Chartrand or a Pelaez painting, I can understand . . .”

  Maida looks at me, startled. Then slowly, with her eyes half shut, she explains in a quiet voice that it is forbidden to export pianos or anything that reflects cubanidad.

  “Cubanidad?”

  “Anything that is symbolic of Cuban history.”

  Maida says she will ask her superior.

  Nick says he will write to Bienes Culturales.

  I get a chorus of reproofs afterward from Lorena, Concha, Manuel, Miguel, Estrella, and Danila that I should have served them in the kitchen, with paper napkins.

  IV. 74

  Smiling Nestor comes the day the actual packing begins with another Customs guy, an unsmiling six-foot-eight-inch negro azul y trompudo whose muscles strain the seams of his uniform and whose pants stop a good eight inches above his ankles. We didn’t know Nestor would be coming with someone else. I explain to them and the packers that they can do downstairs first, then move upstairs.

  I am not so worried about the two painted fifties side tables we have downstairs that we forgot to get an export license for as I am about another small table I forgot. It is caoba—Cuban mahogany. Some say they don’t let you take out caoba furniture at all, but others say that if the piece is minor enough, you can take it out. Still, every piece of caoba furniture has to be considered by Bienes Culturales, and I am afraid that if we ask about it at this late date, they will just say no and we will have no time to appeal. I detach the tabletop from the base to make the top look like a tray and the base like nothing and put the screw in my pocket. I put them and the painted tables in the “stuff we’ve always had” section.

  Nestor stamps every juncture of strapping tape with a small stamp from Customs as the boxes are finished. Nestor is very talkative and asks questions about words and expressions in English and X——ian as he stamps. The negro azul y trompudo watches in stooped silence. I wonder if it is a good cop/bad cop routine or if Nestor’s joviality is meant to give me a false sense of ease, and the seriousness of the negro azul y trompudo is meant to give me I don’t know what. My heart races and there is a sweaty feeling in my palms as the packers move closer to the caoba table. There are lulls be
tween stamping sessions, though, and after a while Nestor’s attention and the attention of the negro azul y trompudo fall on the old copies of El Nuevo Herald (the Spanish-language version of the Miami Herald), Herald-Tribune, the Economist, Hola (a Spanish gossip magazine), and other magazines and newspapers that are being used for packing. Nestor and the negro azul y trompudo sit on the floor, carefully smoothing rumpled newspapers and magazines, so absorbed in their reading that the packers, when they finish a parcel, have to yell, “Stamp!”

  They seem casual, but the caoba table, when they get to it, will trip an alarm that will cause them to go scuttering through the house, picking up on details that we didn’t think were criminal, but turn out to be criminal.

  THE NEGRO AZUL Y TROMPUDO is replaced today by a slender young blanquito, who is also silent and spends most of his time reading Hola and drinking Tropicolas.

  ON THE THIRD DAY, the small table and base are packed in a box with such insouciance that I slip the fat screw I have been holding in my pocket since the first day into the box right in front of everybody.

  Nestor has yet another partner today, who like the others is silent and spends most of his time smoothing out crumpled magazines and newspapers and reading them while sitting cross-legged on the floor.

  Nestor and the packers move upstairs. His partner lingers downstairs. All of the books we owned before coming to Cuba, as well as those we bought in Cuba that are less than fifty years old, are still on their shelves in the upstairs hall.