CUBA
For spring break in 2011 I planned to make my yearly visit to Edmonton with the boys, and in mid-March I called Dad to make arrangements.
“Have you watched the Lakers since the All-Star Game?” he said, after we exchanged greetings.
“Yeah. They’re struggling to win with Kobe Bryant back in the lineup. Shouldn’t happen to such a good team.”
“Well, Kobe doesn’t pass, right? You said it yourself last time.”
“True enough. So are we OK for spring break? I’m hoping to get to your place by midday on Sunday.”
“Well,” he hedged, “your sister’s really busy leading all her choirs, and I’m helping her of course. Your mother gets worried with extra noise and people — and I’ve been seeing a doctor.”
“Why didn’t you tell me sooner? I wish we’d known.” I knew that my mother’s “worry” was my father’s euphemism for her worsening dementia, but it was unusual for Dad to see a doctor, and I was concerned. I sent an email to my sister, who said she really was too busy to handle guests. My mother was much worse too, she said, and Dad was on blood-thinners.
My father’s refusal to plan ahead was nothing new — as a kid I often didn’t know what country we’d be in the next year — but still I was upset that he’d left it so late to cancel our trip. I felt the old anger flare. Here was my father once again affecting all our lives on the spur of the moment: the boys who were looking forward to the visit, Betsy who enjoyed her week away from us, and me, left to figure out how to spend spring break without disappointing everyone.
But as Betsy pointed out, I needed more to connect with my sons than with my father, and she suggested we go to Cuba for spring break. We spent a single frantic night on the Internet looking at all-inclusive vacation prices and customer reviews, and pictures of women with girlish thighs on extremely white beaches. It turned out that my father’s procrastination had paid off in one way: a profusion of great last-minute specials.
Unfortunately, like one of those saboteurs Stalin and his henchmen constantly invented, Peter tended to undercut the state, especially when the state delivered good things. So the day before we left for Cuba Peter had a bad day in school, talking out of turn, wandering around the classroom when he was supposed to sit, shoving a classmate on the stairs. And the day we were to leave, Peter woke up after terrible dreams. He had dreamed that he was in a room in Ukraine with his family. He couldn’t see their bodies, only their heads, and when he reached toward them, to touch them, he realized they were faceless, and then they disappeared completely.
At breakfast Peter wanted to talk about his birth family, not the trip to Cuba, even though his whole body vibrated with trip-related tension. “How come we don’t know anything about my family?” he demanded.
“We do know some things, and we’ve told you everything we know,” I said. “We know the names of your grandparents, and also exactly what village you were born in, and what part of western Ukraine near Poland your family lived in. Keep eating your cereal, Peter. They were likely there for centuries, farming the land when it was owned by Polish nobility.”
“But there are no pictures of my mother or my father.”
“That’s true.”
“If you were my father you could tell me more about my family.” He said this in a neutral tone, with his mouth full of cereal, and I was not offended.
“You’re right. But I’ll tell you something. My family tree on your grandpa’s side, from when they lived in Ukraine, with the names of uncles and aunts and their children, it’s not complete either. My family was poor on both Grandpa and Grandma’s sides and they didn’t keep proper records. And you know what else happened?”
“What?”
“War. When there’s armies and destruction, people have to run away and they often lose important documents, pictures, diaries, all kinds of things that matter to the family.” I told him about how embarrassment over poor spelling had prevented my family members from writing down what happened to the Mierau great-grandparents. I didn’t tell him that maybe they failed to write the truth because it was just so awful.
“Take those vitamins, buddy. You too, Bohdan. We have to finish packing.”
We landed in Camaguey, on Cuba’s north shore, at about midnight, with Peter and Bohdan still wide awake. Walking across the tarmac of the small airport I could feel the tropical humidity envelop my body like a nostalgic wave. I’d told the boys how beautiful the beaches were in Jamaica when I lived there as a boy. They were punch-drunk with exhaustion, clinging to my hands as we got in line for our tourist visas.
An hour later we slouched in the back of a Chinese-made bus driving to our resort. The boys still had not slept, and their eyes rolled around in their heads with every jolt on the narrow, pockmarked road. Someone at the front announced that the air-conditioning couldn’t run or else the driver’s window would fog up. I tried to follow the logic of this but my brain had stopped functioning.
About half an hour from the resort all three of us fell asleep. When the bumps and rolls stopped we woke up grouchy and disoriented. The resort’s lobby had no outer walls and we stood in line in the sea breeze for twenty minutes to check in. The bellman led us through a labyrinth of sidewalks past the pool, the buffet restaurant, various low buildings, until we reached our room. He stood in the doorway after showing me the controls for the air conditioner and I tipped him five Canadian dollars since there had been no chance to get local currency yet.
The room was crowded with the three beds I requested and no chest of drawers was visible. But the air conditioner worked fine. It was past two in the morning and we fell into bed in our underwear without brushing teeth or unpacking.
The morning sun penetrated the room’s curtains and woke us up by seven. I opened the closet and found a pressboard chest of drawers that had been stuffed inside to create floor space for our three beds. The room was clean and bare with high ceilings and tropical light coming in through the French doors.
I got the boys up and we unpacked. Then I called a family meeting even though every fibre of my jangled, sleep-deprived brain wanted to get coffee as absolutely soon as possible.
“We’re going to have breakfast now at the buffet. I need you guys to stay with me. Peter, can you please look at me?” Peter was fidgeting and reaching around me for the TV remote, completely distracted.
“Yes, Dad.”
“You’re still not making eye contact.”
“DAD I’M HUNGRY,” shouted Bohdan.
“OK, let’s go.”
Outside the sky was azure blue and the sun touched your skin like a masseuse. I retraced the bellman’s steps from last night and we found the pool and buffet. The boys ran off to investigate the food and the room. Peter had near-crashes with several guests and I decided to just get my coffee and ignore it.
We regrouped at a table near the lineup for breakfast. Peter loaded up on fruit and bread. Bohdan and I got omelettes with bacon on the side. The breakfast chef wore a white hat and smock, and sported a sly smile. For the next seven days he would be there every morning, remembering that I liked a three-egg omelette with cheese, green peppers, onions, ham.
After breakfast Peter wanted to explore the resort on his own. I relented because it was small and the staff helpful and friendly. Bohdan and I went to the beach where the sand was miraculously white and fine on your feet, the sun hot without blistering, and later that day, the water warm behind a coral reef. Under an umbrella I read a Gary Shteyngart novel on a borrowed Kindle, which I carried everywhere inside a beach towel to keep it dry.
The boys and I rented a pedal boat and Peter refused to let anyone else steer. When I insisted that we all take turns, he jumped off the boat and tried pulling it in the opposite direction. While Peter and I argued, Bohdan got off the boat into the shallow water and played with a starfish an Italian man gave him.
I gave up and left Peter the pedal boat. The boys started fighting as soon as Bohdan tried to board, their yells
echoing down the beach. I put Peter in a time-out since he refused to share. He glared at me murderously.
A spirit of irritation filled me like a bone-weariness and I thought, I am too old for this shit. In a parallel universe I could have been here with a different wife, without kids, without responsibility. But Peter’s beautiful, emphatically determined face was the image of my dilemma: I could not imagine being without him. His stubborn, joyous enthusiasm and dark anger resembled my own. But he was not an extension of my personality or my family history. He bore my name, but he was entirely himself.
Late in the morning all the guests who’d travelled with the same charter company met with a sales rep. She was chatty, round, relaxed, getting along in English, French, and Italian. She told me her grandparents had come to Cuba from Jamaica looking for work in the 1940s. Her grandfather cut sugar cane. I said that I’d lived in Jamaica as a boy and felt tempted to chat a bit more, but after the small talk, she was all business. I bought several excursions: a tour of a crocodile refuge and a violin factory, a snorkelling trip out at the big Atlantic reef, and a tour of historic Camaguey, a UNESCO world heritage site.
After lunch at the buffet we went for a swim in the pool. What most enthralled the boys was the swim-up bar where they could get unlimited soft drinks. It occupied them all afternoon. I sipped watery Cuban beer at the bar and read a novel while Peter and Bohdan experienced several hours of sugar high, running amok around the pool.
The next morning I took a two-mile run while the boys lolled in bed and watched TV. The resort was on a barren service road that connected a gas station, a nightclub, and several other resorts. Mangrove swamp grew on the road’s other side, and the sidewalk past the resort cracked and heaved.
In the parking lot I met Julio, who had a horse and carriage and offered to give me a tour of the nearby village. I promised to come back with my sons later in the morning. I wanted them to see how people lived here, how not everyone goes on a holiday where they get endless beverage refills.
I insisted the boys have a shower, and we started our carriage tour just before noon, wearing hats and greased up with sunscreen. Julio began by taking us outside the “Zona Turistica” to the narrow highway we’d driven from the airport.
Bohdan sat up front with Julio. He fidgeted and removed his hat. Julio turned to me. “Tropicale uh,” and he pointed at the sun.
“You have to wear your hat, Bohdan.” Bohdan replaced his hat but dropped his spending money on the road. Julio stopped the carriage and we scoured the road and the short grass at the edge. No success. Bohdan knew I wouldn’t replace it and he pouted until the horse relieved himself on the road, which distracted him.
In the village we saw a bright yellow apartment block just off the main road. Peter wanted to know why laundry hung from the windows. I explained that they could use the sun to dry their clothes, since it was nearly always warm.
We drove past rows of tiny one-storey houses made of brick with tin roofs. Dogs and cats swarmed the roads and yards.
“Why are the dogs so skinny? Don’t they feed them?”
“People here are poor, Bohdan. The dogs probably just get scraps from the kitchen.”
“When I grow up I’d like to come back and give everyone some money,” said Peter.
“I’ll come back and feed the animals,” said Bohdan.
The next morning after breakfast we went to the crocodile farm. On the bus the tour guide told us that Cuba had two kinds of mangrove, red and green. Oddly the red mangrove clumped on one side of the road, the green on the other, as if making a statement about racial purity. Drinking water had to be piped in from a distance to this swampy area because the local water was too salty.
We passed ranches and the guide pointed out the white, golden-billed egrets in the fields with Cuban cattle. We stopped at a flea market of Chinese-made goods laid out on a town square’s sidewalk. The square was clean but the paint peeled off the buildings in grey flakes. The only new vehicles were Chinese, and all the others looked like a vintage American automobile show.
Our next stop was a violin factory, a one-storey structure like a barn, painted white. It smelled pleasantly of sawdust and sweat. All the workers were male, ranging from boys to old men. The guide said they made violins and guitars out of native wood and Canadian maple when available, only for Cuban schools, not for export, though of course they would sell to the tourists. Bohdan depleted his remaining spending money to buy a toy drum and Peter got a miniature guitar.
The boys were quiet at the crocodile farm. Neither of them touched the baby croc held up for a group of kids, and they both jumped backwards when a giant croc had to be restrained with a pole. As hundreds of crocs competed for food in the red mud, Bohdan said he was scared because “they can bite your hands off.”
A couple of days later we went snorkelling on the outer reef, one of Papa Hemingway’s old haunts. We took a bus to the dock and waited for our yacht. The boat to the reef was crowded with tourists wearing lifejackets. Peter and Bohdan were the only kids and they wanted to sit on the front of the yacht, in the open, and I said no because it was too easy to fall off. But I gave in after ten minutes of pleading, even though it meant we had to walk on a six-inch strip of metal to the front deck, with only a delicate railing to hold.
The wind blew hard and I panicked every time the boys repositioned themselves on the smooth white deck, but they were enraptured with the sensation of the boat bouncing on the waves and the wind whipping salt into our faces.
As we neared the reef an older retired man, a Canadian, said to me that my boys were at a great age, a time when you could really enjoy them. I nodded agreeably and wondered why worry kept interfering with my pleasure in their eagerness and enthusiasm.
The boat stopped and we all put on masks, snorkels, and fins. The water was warm and clear, teeming with fish. The coral looked like a work of art, as if God had worked out fractals on a computer he built with his own gnarled, hairy white hands. I noticed Peter swimming in the opposite direction from everyone else and nudged him back to the group. He nodded so vigorously that his snorkel dipped underwater and he came up spitting water, then he followed me without any drama.
Bohdan had become obsessed with the stray cats that haunted the resort, and one in particular who was starving and pregnant. “Why don’t they fix the cats so they don’t have kittens?” he asked, and I explained they probably didn’t have money for that. We were eating lunch at a grill that made burgers, fries, hot dogs. The starving cat twined through Bohdan’s legs.
“Get her a chicken burger, just the meat,” I said to him. He was back in ten minutes and put the meat on the flagstone floor. I’d never seen a cat eat so quickly and indelicately. Bohdan smiled continuously while the cat bolted down the burger patty. Then Bohdan ran off to the pool, looking for Peter. I followed at a leisurely pace, ready for the courtly politeness of the bartenders.
“I saw a boy playing with one of the cats today,” Bohdan said at dinner that night, “and he wasn’t wearing shoes.”
Peter raised his eyebrows as if about to contradict him.
“You know, when we lived in Jamaica,” I said, “some of the kids went without shoes. Their families were poor, and they only wore shoes on Sunday to church.”
“Doesn’t that hurt your feet?” asked Peter.
“Yes, but you get callouses so you don’t feel it much. Still, I was like you guys. I wished that I could give everyone money so they would have shoes like mine.”
“Were you rich?” asked Bohdan.
“No, not at all. But we had a lot of money compared to the other kids’ families. My sister and I were the only white students out of 500 in the school. Sometimes the kids would pinch our skin to see what it would look like.”
“That’s not nice,” said Bohdan.
“They didn’t mean to hurt us.” I took a drink of thin Cuban beer and a deep breath. “But I was like you guys are in school. I felt very lonely there.”
“But y
ou had your mom and dad,” Bohdan said.
“Yes, I did,” I said, not bothering to point out that he had parents too. It wasn’t the same.
Horses often grazed by the resort’s outer fence and one day I agreed we could go see them for a few minutes, but no petting. Suddenly a large iguana lurched past the fence, stopped short at the sight of us, and waddled toward the shrubbery. Bohdan no longer cared about horses — he sprinted after the iguana and grabbed him by the middle before I could do more than sputter Let go, let go! I was terrified and frozen in place. The iguana was almost the size of Bohdan and had nasty-looking claws on his back feet, which rotated in the air like an upended truck. Bohdan let go and the iguana sprinted away from him on its comically short legs, likely more frightened than Bohdan, who ambled back to us.
That night we made our usual phone call to Betsy. She told us how much she loved us, how much work she’d gotten done, how she’d washed the floors, how Peter should try not to argue with me and his brother, how Bohdan should listen and be polite, and how I shouldn’t stress out too much about Bohdan losing the power supply for his Nintendo DS. I did not tell her that an iguana almost killed Bohdan. We signed off, brushed teeth, and went to bed.
On our last night I told the boys they could spend an hour watching cartoons on TV in our room while I went out. The only cartoons were in Spanish but that didn’t bother them. Peter even claimed to understand bits of the dialogue, which was possible: he’d spent four years in French immersion classrooms.
“Where are you going?” said Bohdan.
“I want to buy cigars for one of my friends.”
Peter shook his head.
“Can’t you die from smoking?” Bohdan asked, a reasonable question. Freud died from smoking twenty cigars a day. Fidel still hung on.
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