Cuba Diaries

by Isadora Tattlin

  “You are aware that all books have to be checked by the biblioteca?” Nestor asks, walking right up to and removing a sixty-year-old book from the shelf that was somehow not taken to the biblioteca. Nestor slips it into a box of books that are being packed. The box is sealed. Nestor stamps it, winking at me.

  Nestor moves to a table on which I have put small objects to be packed. There are many seashells, some of which are from Cuba, but most of which we have collected from other places in the world. “Do you know that it is illegal to remove seashells from the country?” Nestor says.

  “But they are ours!” I say, truly surprised. I catch myself: “I mean, they are shells Nick found in Africa.”

  Ours. It is all ours. Still, Nick and I have taken to saying, “This is ours,” about what we brought with us into the country, and “This is from Cuba,” not “This is ours,” about the things we bought or found here, even to each other.

  “Listen,” he says, “my compañero downstairs is from another division. Pack the seashells first.” Nestor motions to the packers to start packing the seashells now.

  The compañero comes upstairs before the shells are completely packed. He gives the shells a desultory look and goes back to reading the weekly magazine supplement to El País.

  SATURDAY. THE PACKERS load the final container this morning. It is also the day of Jimmie’s birthday party.

  I pleaded with Jimmie to have the party on Sunday (“It will be calm then—Mommy won’t be so tired”), but Jimmie said kids never had birthday parties on Sunday it was his last birthday party ever in Cuba in his life and he should have it when he wanted to have it why did we have to leave he was mad about leaving it was nice in Cuba you got to wear shorts all the time it wasn’t fair he had to go to a scary big school now con pale, pale, mean blancos and there were no mangoes and no swimming pools and no tarantulas in the grass and no tostones.

  It is also the day Thea wakes with a temperature of 104 degrees. She is not able to hold anything down. I call the pediatrician at 7:30 A.M. I rummage through the remains of the medicine cabinet for fever-lowering suppositories. All we have are expired suppositories from when the children weighed less. Dr. Silvia is brought to the house by Miguel. Thea is put in a tub and sprayed with cold water—this as I am running out of the bathroom every few minutes to watch the loading of the container.

  Dr. Silvia comes back in the afternoon in the middle of Jimmie’s party. Thea’s temperature is down, but Dr. Silvia thinks Thea should go to the hospital for tests. I am trying to keep kids from running around the pool and say I think she should be tested, too, but I ask Dr. Silvia why we can’t go to Cira Garcia (the foreigner’s hospital) for once. I don’t mind paying thirty-five dollars, I really don’t, and I can’t spare the people right now to drive a sample here, take her there, but Dr. Silvia, looking hurt, says she just can’t do it, have me pay all that money when they, the doctors, get nothing. Dr. Silvia puts her hand on my arm and says she knows I am stressed and she will take Thea with her, she will pretend Thea is her niece. She is a doctor; she will get good service.

  Dr. Silvia props Thea up. “Tea, no dices una palabra, claro?” (“Thea, don’t say a word [i.e., let people hear your accent], OK?”).

  IV. 75

  A week after Jimmie’s birthday party. It is very hot and all the children’s friends are otherwise engaged. Most toys were sent away in the container or given away. We have held on to one TV, but as happens every year, we have forgotten to pay the television satellite subscription—the satellite people in Cuba whom foreigners use (Cubans are not allowed to have satellite TV, or even extra-tall antennae) never send a bill—so there is no Nickelodeon. The children spend most of the day watching bits of stations until they are cut off. Out of desperation, I persuade Nick to go with the children in the late afternoon to see the film Fanny and Alexander. I remember its being about children.

  We convince the Cine Chaplin to let the children in. In movie houses in Havana, no children under the age of sixteen are allowed in, regardless of the content of the movie. We guess it’s because movies are so cheap and there is air-conditioning, so that parents, if they could, would park their kids at movies as a form of baby-sitting.

  It’s about kids, the movie, but it’s also about child abuse, incest, et cetera, et cetera. People in the audience look at us. About fifteen minutes into the movie, Thea starts moaning. “My stomach hurts,” she says. I think she’s faking it because she has been fine all week. She just doesn’t want to be at a movie in Swedish with Spanish subtitles. The hospital found nothing wrong with her when she went with Dr. Silvia last Saturday, her fever subsided, and by Sunday afternoon she was fine.

  Half an hour goes by. More moaning. “My stomach really hurts.”

  I tell Nick we have to go. It’s the ham sandwich she ate for lunch, which no one else wanted to eat, conseguidoed not from our regular source. We go up the aisle and into the lobby. Thea starts to vomit on the floor, just inside the glass door leading to the street. I take a sweatshirt I have brought along for the air-conditioning and hold it under her, thinking she will just vomit a little bit into it and I will be able to get her outside to the curb, where it won’t splash so much. She ate very little except for the ham sandwich. Instead it’s breakfast, too, she can’t move, and Nick is yelling at me, “Why are you trying to preserve it?” I bundle up the first sweatshirt, take out another, and Nick starts yelling at me that I am suffocating her. Finally we get her to the car and I ask Nick if we can give the lobby person some money to clean up the floor because I feel bad—first we persuaded them to let us in, and now one of the children has vomited on the lobby floor—but Nick gets even madder at me and gives me five dollars to give to them, which is way too much, but he doesn’t have anything smaller.

  We get home and I take her upstairs and clean off her face. Nick comes in and tells me he thinks she should drink some chamomile tea. Thea tells me she doesn’t feel like drinking anything. “She says she doesn’t feel like drinking anything,” I say to Nick over my shoulder. Nick repeats what he said about the chamomile tea, louder. “Fine,” I say.

  IV. 76

  Lorena calls to say she’ll be late for work because her son had a problem in jail. When she appears, she explains that another prisoner attacked her son with a knife and cut off three of his fingers.

  She says she is sorry to be telling me this.

  I ask her why she is sorry.

  “Because it is unpleasant for a señora to hear about a boy who did some wrong things in his life getting his fingers cut off. The blood . . . ,” Lorena says, not finishing, not looking at me but into the unlocked closet where we keep small amounts of basic foods, one hand trailing over a shelf.

  “But he’s your son.”

  Lorena hugs me, crying. I steer her to the table on the kitchen veranda. She sits down. I sit next to her, holding her hand and crying, too.

  WE SIT WITH Arquitecto Vasquez in his former gallery, which has been turned back into his living room. The tables in the small paladar area in back have been tilted on their sides and are pushed against the wall.

  “It was a neighbor on my own floor,” he says. “I tried to be so nice to him, too. We had some openings, but in general my visitors were discreet. It wasn’t really the people coming and going and the sounds, though. It was the fact that I did it and that it was a little successful. You’d be surprised how many people don’t like that.”

  EMBARGO IS FOUND DEAD under the car in the morning by José. The night before, José says he had seen her fighting with Bloqueo and had seen her take refuge under the car. José found her in the same position in the morning.

  Now the help tell me they noticed that her belly had been swollen for a few days. They thought she was pregnant. I want to yell at them, How can anyone be pregnant who had her uterus and one ovary cut out in one operation and her remaining ovary cut out in another operation?

  We bury Embargo in the garden, between a lime tree and a palm. The children gather f
lowers. We scatter them on top of her grave. Manuel and Lorena come. The children and I sing Episcopalian hymns. I deliver a homily in English: “ . . . like Evita, like Marilyn, cut down in her prime . . .” Manuel and Lorena catch the names Evita and Marilyn and bow their heads respectfully.

  I tell the children Bloqueo will need a lot of comfort now. Bloqueo lies under the kitchen table eating fish skin, unconcerned.

  WE CANNOT TAKE Bloqueo to X—— even though he is by himself now, I tell the children. It is bad enough for a cat not to be able to go outside; it is worse for a cat to have to stay inside all the time and be alone.

  “But we can get an X——ian cat to keep him company and teach him how to be happy indoors,” Thea says.

  This is an idea and a good one. But I tell them Bloqueo is just too used to Cuba now. It would be cruel. We will find pets in X——.

  “But we love Bloqueo.”

  FRITZ READS ON THE Internet that Fidel, now in Switzerland for a meeting, is seeing a heart specialist.

  ROBERTO ASKS IF WE have heard of any job for him. His voice is strained. He bites the side of his thumb.

  We tell him we have asked everyone we know. We have made follow-up calls, too. We tell him we’ll keep trying.

  WE CALL ON THE Carrera sisters to tell them we will be leaving soon. The tiny mulata is struggling with the front door. “You have to lift it up on your side!” she calls to Nick. Nick puts his fingers under some trim on the lower half of the door and eases the door over the jamb.

  Saida pulls us gently to her and kisses us on both cheeks. Nick turns to shut the door. “You can leave the door open because I am expecting some people for bridge. Reny is already here. I think you know him already—isn’t that so? Reny, where are you?”

  Reny comes up shyly behind Saida. He kisses me on both cheeks and shakes Nick’s hand. Reny is wearing chinos and a plaid shirt rolled up over his elbows. He looks relaxed—much more relaxed than at a party.

  “Saida is a shark, an absolute shark at bridge,” Reny says.

  Saida pushes on Reny’s arm playfully. “Que te vayas, hombre!” (“Get out of here, man!”), she says, laughing.

  A table on the veranda off the dining room is set with teacups and small plates. Lilian, Saida tells us, is not so well today. She is asleep upstairs. On the table there is a stack of sandwiches and a bowl of mariquitas (green bananas fried like potato chips).

  Saida tells us to stay. She says that she and Reny and the others who will be coming have played together for so long that they can have conversations with others while they are playing, but we tell her we will be going. We will return another day.

  “Wait a minute,” Saida says.

  There is another small piece of furniture left over from before el triunfo—a semicircular Louis XVI legless console, which is mounted on the wall. She pulls open its only drawer and takes out a blown-glass bird—it is the size of a sparrow, light pink in color, with a blue beak. She puts it in my hands. I start to protest, but she folds my hands around it.

  I TRIED TO KEEP stuff in reserve for the last few weeks that we are here, but some of it is already gone. No more kids’ toothpaste, no more vitamins, no more face cream for me, the kids’ shoes are falling apart, Thea’s and my bathing suits are stretched out and billowing in the pool, Thea is bursting out of her shorts. No more electric toothbrush refills. No peanut butter. No kids’ books: that’s the worst. Thea goes through a book a day. I tell Thea to check more books out of the school library, but she forgets. Socks a mess. Beach towels that we will be leaving here, to be cut up for rags. One tape player that eats tapes. No television in our room to floss by, just the small one downstairs.

  I should be grateful: I have time. Time to write letters. Time to read a thick book. I read The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love.

  I’m sick of Cuba, but what do I read? A book about Cuba.

  IV. 77

  We drive to Guanabacoa to see Nick’s friend Aurora. Aurora sells books in the parking lot on the Malecón and told us when she last saw us that she knew of some Chinese furniture—precioso—some manteles (tablecloths), and a nice, old-fashioned wooden maniquí (dress mold) near her in Guanabacoa.

  I don’t know why Nick thinks we need a dress mold; he just says we do.

  Thanks to a thriving book business, Aurora has permutaed her old apartment for a grand, ground-floor railroad-type flat built in the middle of the nineteenth century, and in the three years that we have known her, she has been conseguiring lumber, cement, tiles, and kitchen and bathroom fixtures and renovating as her finances will allow.

  Aurora’s flat is a flat without corridors, one room opening onto another in a line all the way back to the kitchen through swinging doors made of carved wood and etched colored glass, like saloon doors, cut off to let the breezes blow. Most of the etched glass in the doors is still intact, Aurora has pointed out to us on other visits, as are the spring mechanisms of their hinges, so the doors still swing.

  We have seen Aurora’s house in many stages. We have seen it with no bathroom and the ceiling falling down. She and her daughter and her marinovio were already living in it then. It has been a struggle, the renovation—a fight, a sufferance, a maneuver, a manipulation, a feint, full of minitriumphs, defeats, and close calls, which she revels in sharing with visitors. She makes faces, she reenacts, she takes sides, doing both parts. She grabs your arm, throws her head back, and laughs in thorough appreciation of your comments.

  We enter the first room, the old parlor, which is still a construction site. A pile of sand is in a corner of the room, with fresh dog turds in it. She’s not got just the Doberman now, she explains; she also has a cocker spaniel puppy. We go through swinging doors to the next room (the old dining room), where Aurora’s six-year-old niece sits on the floor, fitting doll clothes into a miniature closet. “I’m making everything neat,” she says. Beside her, a lit candle flickers in front of a small Santeria altar. We enter the first bedroom. Aurora’s marinovio is asleep in his undershirt on a chenille bedspread, one arm over his eyes, ripe beads of sweat sitting undisturbed on top of his leche con una gota de café armpit hairs. We hesitate for a moment, but Aurora says, “Adelante! No se preoccupen” (“Come ahead. Don’t worry about it”).

  My thoughts turn back to the turds on the sand in the parlor. Maybe it’s the heat or the chaclera I had in a paladar the night before (ordered because I didn’t know the word: fatty ham, it turned out to be, fried with potatoes and onions), but I am feeling as though it would take very little more to make me vomit. I am feeling as though it would take very little to make me vomit a lot these days. I feel dust and (I am certain of it) powdered turds accumulating on my skin (which starts to sweat the minute I leave our house) like crumbs on a breaded cutlet.

  In the next bedroom, Aurora’s sister lies on a bed, wrapped in another chenille bedspread, attended by Aurora’s mother and four other relatives, who sit watching an American Western on videotape. She has just had an operation this morning on her feminine parts, Aurora explains, and is here to recuperate.

  Maybe it’s the lack of ventilation (there are cutoff swinging doors in each room leading to a skinny, open-air courtyard, but it is filled with rubble), but even though Nick and I and the kids have already left Cuba more than a dozen times, sometimes even for long weekends, still I have been worrying, more and more these days, that getting on a plane and getting the hell out of Cuba for good somehow won’t really happen. I worry that we will lose our passports, forget X——ian, forget English even, and some all-powerful, hairy being will declare us Cuban and unable to leave.

  Aurora gets in the car and directs Nick, who is driving, to the house of Usnavy (a Cuban first name, invented at the time of the Spanish-American War, from U.S. Navy), her friend who can guide us to her friend who has the Chinese furniture—“precioso”—and to another friend who can take us to the manteles and the maniquí.

  We drive past a building with a guard holding a machine gun in front of it.

&nb
sp; “What’s in there?”

  “Blumes” (“Underpants”).

  “Cómo?!”

  “It’s an underpants factory. They’ve had a lot of problems with people breaking in and stealing underpants.”

  We are silent for a moment. “Not having underpants can really put you in a bad mood,” I say.

  “Muy mal humor,” Aurora agrees. Then to Nick, “You see how your señora is? She understands us.”

  We drive along a ridge under ancient ficus trees to a “suburb” of Guanabacoa: low, flat-roofed houses with carports, looking like Miami. At the door is a living, mulata version of the late, great actor Divine, in curlers, pancake makeup, and etched eyebrows. She greets Aurora triumphantly. “I did it!” Usnavy yells.

  Aurora yells, hugs her.

  Usnavy has managed to get a certificado médico so that she can retire a year earlier. “Fueron los nervios” (“It was my nerves”). In teaching, women can retire at fifty, and men at fifty-five. She has been teaching for thirty-seven years, she says. She was fed up.

  I don’t know if I am understanding everything correctly, but I don’t dare ask if it means that, if Usnavy is forty-nine, she has been teaching since she was twelve.

  Usnavy says it hasn’t been possible to abduct the maniquí from the factory where it has been sitting unused for years, because King Kong was in Guanabacoa today, inspecting state enterprises.

  Lazo, aka King Kong, is the Communist Party head in Santiago. He is one of the few negros of any shade in the Communist Party leadership. He is very big, very black, with a low forehead, so everyone—black, white, mulato, Communist, non-Communist—calls him King Kong.

  We enter Usnavy’s living room. Danish modern furniture covered in new-looking spring green Naugahyde. We drink more cafecitos and chat with Usnavy about her retirement. Usnavy gets up to guide us to her friend with the Chinese furniture.