by Pico Iyer
“Yeah. But how long is it going to stay like this? Things are getting really bad really fast.”
“Forget it. It’s always been like this: been cockeyed from the beginning. These guys don’t know their asses from their brains. Their big celebration is of this coup attempt where ninety of their hundred and fifty guys got wasted in the street, and everyone knew about the surprise attack in advance, and thirty of them had to go to jail. Why do you think they have these statues of Quixote all over the place?
“It’s like the Keystone Kops meets Yogi Bear, man. You never know what’s going to happen next. You know the night they attacked—twelve men on a boat against the world—they arrived two days late, on the wrong beach, to be met by a welcoming committee who took out seventy of their eighty-two guys? Purgatory Point, the place is called. They’re always talking about how they fought against the odds—but who was it who made the odds so crazy in the first place? These guys were shooting themselves in the foot from the moment they got guns. They were making problems for themselves so big they would have to be heroes just to conquer them. Heroes chasing their own tails. At least I’m chasing someone else’s.”
“But that was their heyday. Fidel giving exclusives to the New York Times. Getting carried by cheering students around the Princeton campus. Handing out checks for three hundred thousand bucks. Appearing on “The Tonight Show” with tears streaming down Jack Paar’s face. Fidel was the American Dream in action, riding into town with a few compañeros and cleaning up the whole place. Rugged individualism with a vengeance.”
“Sure. Only thing that saved their asses was that their enemy was even more screwed up than they are. So Washington mass-produces Fidelistas as fast as Fidel produces good capitalists. It’s great. And”—he swerved around as a couple of señoritas displayed their wares—“capitalism with curves.
“I’ll tell you one thing, Rick: this is the only place in the world where the hookers pay you. I was driving along the sea a couple of weeks ago—in this rental car, which works on them like catnip—and a girl flags me over and gives me two twenty-dollar bills. For shopping, she says. So we go across town to the Hyper-diplostore—over in Miramar—and then go to her ‘aunt’s house’ to recuperate. Cute girl—nice complexion, lots of sparkle. So we do the deed in the house—this empty mansion by the sea—and then I’m on my way again. But later I realize I’ve got two bucks in change we never used. So she ended up paying me two bucks! For humping her! And you wonder why the whole country’s bankrupt.”
I felt happy just listening to him talk: it was like being on solid ground again. The world I knew.
“So how much longer you here, Ricky baby?”
“Leave tomorrow.”
“Okay. See you round somewhere. Long live la lucha!”
I left him to his sport, Miguel cracking his knuckles in a chair nearby.
The last thing I had to do that day was check in on José: self-interest, I guess—I needed a reading from him. On the private side of the Revolution.
When I went into his apartment, the place was transformed. In the front room, where the stereo and books had been, there was an enormous santeria altar, each shelf given over to a different deity, with framed pictures and food at the bottom, and a coconut with a face.
“Let me get a picture of this,” I said.
“No, no,” said José. “You cannot.”
“Why not?”
“For one year after I make saint, I cannot have a photograph. My father tells me—my santeria father: I cannot give food to anyone; I must only wear white; I cannot have a woman.” I looked again at the roses in bottles, and the old pieces of meat, and some handmade swords, and axes all around.
“What’s going on here, José?”
“This is my new religion.” He looked at me with his broad smile. “Many, many people are doing it. For me, is like a bank. If I need something, if I need anything, I can go to a tree—a ceiba tree—and I hit the tree two times, and I can talk to the gods. Like a prayer.”
“Or a telephone?”
“Sure. And if I need something real bad, I can go to my father: I give him some money, and he talks to the gods for me. He can do anything; I introduce you to him later.”
“Fine, but right now, I need you.”
“Sure. What can I get for you? When you need it?”
“Your advice only.”
He looked a little disappointed.
“About Lula. What do you think of her?”
“She’s a pretty girl.”
“I mean, beyond that. What would you think if I married her?”
“Okay. If you want. Give her a ticket out.” I caught the change in his voice, and knew that some kind of wall had come down.
“The thing is, my divorce hasn’t come through yet. To get it through is going to take a lot of paperwork, a lot of time.” I’d put it in terms he’d understand. “A lot of money too. Lawyers, trips to Singapore, payoffs, all that. And I’m not going to go through all that if she turns out to be a washout. Or maybe, in the year it takes to do this, things get even worse, and she can’t wait, and she’s got some other iron in the fire, who can give her a confirmed seat.”
“Maybe. So if you want to move fast, you find a guy to marry her.”
“What do you mean?”
“You find a friend, a foreigner. Soltero, maybe siempre soltero. Give him some money if he wants. Then she marries him, he takes care of the papers, and when she’s out, you go and get her.”
“Sounds crazy. Why make everything so complicated?”
“Is better. Not so difficult. Everyone does it all the time. I have a friend, he can help you.”
“You mean we fix up the marriage here, then she gets a visa, then both of us are safe?”
“Sure. It happens all the time. Is easy, no problem. There is a way of doing these things.”
“In Havana?”
“Sure. But is better outside. In the country.”
“Like Cayo Largo.”
“Right.” He gave me a broad, and approving, smile. “Not so many police there. Very free. Maybe you go there with Lula, and her new husband, and my friend, he can plan everything. Then they come back to Havana, go to the yanquis’ Interests Section, show them the papers, and she is free.”
“As easy as that.”
“Sure. Why not? It is not against the law to make love. Not yet. So I tell my friend tonight?”
“No, wait a little.” I thought about what he said when I got back to the hotel; and again, when I went to say goodbye to her; and then again, on the plane home. After a while, I figured that anything was better than nothing; sitting around would get us about as far as it had got the Revolution. It was the crazy ideas that were usually the best ones. So I got out a postcard of the Cameron Highlands—to remind him of his king and country—and wrote.
Hugo: I’m not much of a correspondent, as you’ve probably noticed, but I’ve got an idea. How about we meet up again—our third reunion—and go for a drive to Santiago. It’s a funky place, and the Carnival there is just incredible: round-the-clock dancing for two straight weeks. Whatever happens, it’ll be crazier than Greece. And I have a surprise for you too, to collect upon arrival. What do you think? Yours, Richard.
Ten days later, I got a reply, in his church-mousy little black-pen scrawl.
Dear Richard,
You can imagine how surprised I was to come upon your letter. Not displeased, though, and I really can’t see any reason to say no. I can easily organize my arrangements with the travel agent, and might even be able to scrounge some reimbursement from the school. A bird’s-eye look at the Revolution, so to speak. With jazz bars in the background.
I do hope that all is going well indeed for you, and that developments—of every kind—are proving fruitful. I imagine that delays in a car can be quite as exciting as those on a plane. With warmest regards, Hugo.
IV
We planned the meeting for just before the Pan Americans: that way I could get
some pictures in my spare time. I knew it was the kind of event I could shoot in my sleep. New stadiums. Fat Fleet Street journalists being bused to distant hotels, where the taps never worked. Razzle-dazzle new billboards and slogans and TV crews, with teenagers outside the arenas begging for bread. Everywhere in the world it was the same: suddenly, everyone is told to stop eating dogs, and to be polite to foreigners, and to refrain from spitting in public, for two weeks. Walls are spruced up, shops repaired, camera angles worked out in advance. Bright colors; Potemkin houses. Even in Beijing, the whole city had been turned into one murmurous haze of hospitality girls, speaking good English in the hotels, filling up your glass every time you took a sip, smiling you in and out of security checks, and every single flight into the city, during the Asian Games, had been met by whole welcoming groups of kindergarten cuties waving fans and singing folk songs. Cuba didn’t have it together for all that, but they’d repainted all the houses along the Malecón, dressed up the city in its tropical best.
I took the Iberia flight over that time, from Madrid, the cabin attendants putting on black gloves before they handed out the copies of Granma, as if they were scared of contamination. When I went to the immigration booth, they waved me over to the Hotel Reservation desk, as usual, where a sweet young thing with dark lashes asked me where I’d like to stay, and when I said, “Victoria,” she said no, and when I said, “Habana Libre,” she said no, and when I said, “Sevilla,” she said no, and then, smiling deliciously, with that look that all the Cubans have—“Sorry, compañero, but we’re all in this together”—she told me that I could stay only in the Colina.
“How about the Colina?” I asked.
“No problem,” she said, laughing again, and pushing the brown curls from her eyes. I hadn’t even formally entered the country, and already I was in some kind of ambiguous exchange.
“Okay, you give me the—”
“I know. I give you the money, you give me the receipt. I give the guy at the desk the receipt. He gives me the key to a room without water. If I want water, I give him more money.…”
“You know our country very well.”
“Not well enough,” I said, and she shot me a glance, and sent me back to the immigration officer, who gave me a conspirator’s smile, and sent me off to the customs official, who checked my case to make sure that everything was contraband, chose not to look at the nine pairs of jeans and six bottles of whiskey, and then all but pushed me into his country, with a friendly “Have a good trip!”
“Catch you later,” I said to the girl before I left.
“I hope you will,” she said. “I have the number of your room.”
I grabbed a public taxi then, told him I’d give him dollars, and we drove toward Havana in the dark, darker than I’d ever seen it, pitch black like Africa or Bali, with just a few sudden faces at the bus stops, and then monuments and convention centers and four-story paintings of Che. The Plaza de la Revolución. The shadows around Lenin Park. The broken, lonely bus stops. A city of dancing ghosts.
In the hotel, the policewomen, brown hair tucked under their blue caps, and mouths unsmiling, worked the lobby in pairs, circling around the girls who were circling around them. Female policemen were not subject to temptation, went the thinking. Here and there, display-case mulattas were arranged on sofas, and boys whose smiling eyes caught anyone’s who looked. The receptionist thumbed wearily through a huge handwritten ledger, hoping not to find my name. The six-seat bar in the lobby was all occupied, all female.
I walked out past Coppelia, past lines outside the restaurants, past bars slammed shut by shortages. Sunny girls and moony couples; a few fat English guys barreling into the Habana Libre with teenagers under their arms. On the wall near the TV station, an ad for a production of the Oresteia, Kabuki style, with chalky phantom faces in black leotards prowling around the stage like spirits.
I crept into a bar, and the smiling guy behind the counter said, “No hay beer. No hay whiskey. No hay nada. Ron solamente, y agua minerale.” Because of the Games, the stores and restaurants were even emptier than usual, he explained: food and drink were reserved for authorities and strangers. Glad to have got anything, I drank warm rum out of a dirty tin cup, next to a few old guys sitting before their empty glasses, staring into space. A girl in a pink dress was stretched out on a booth like a corpse. Two kids were strumming love songs in a corner on a guitar. A friend of theirs with a pixie smile was bouncing up and down on the lap of a Mexican with long dark hair and shades who looked like he was on the way to the slaughter-house. He pawed her fondly, and she threw back her head and laughed.
I bought the guys next to me a round of drinks, and as soon as I did, the two guys from the corner came up and introduced themselves. Ángel and Israel, they said. “Do you like Cuban music?” said Ángel. “Or you like girls? Mulattas, chinas, qué quieres?” I looked around to plan my escape. “Mira,” said the other. “Somos amigos. No tienes miedo. Yo no quiero robarte. Somos amigos, entiendes?”
“Entiendo,” I said, and hightailed it out of there, figuring I didn’t have the time or the energy for more of this. Outside, on the street, I heard a car honk, and I looked up to see two guys from Canada I’d met at the airport, and I was so tired I decided I’d go with them, and we ended up at a table in the Pompero tango bar, drinking water.
At the next table, a CIA man was talking about his jobs in Venezuela and the University of the Andes, while his willowy punk daughter, in a flowery peasant skirt, was handing round copies of the review her performance piece had got in the Boston Phoenix. “You know,” said the entrepreneur from Toronto, “they say the story of Cuba is the story of sugar. A story of exploitation. By the Spaniards, Americans, British, even the Cubans themselves.” Across the table, his friend, the semiotician from the University of British Columbia, was quoting Foucault on power while his Cuban girlfriend—a slim black beauty with a Sinead O’Connor cut—was talking about her days in Kiev. “For me, Russia was marvelous. Like a dream. For material things they have so much. But for spirit—nothing! They are like ants, like worker ants there. Every man looks out for himself; if you walk behind him, the door will slam in your face. They are so directed. Not like here. In Russia, if I fall down in the street, nobody stops to help me. Here in Cuba, it is the opposite: people catch you before you fall.”
Then she joined her girlfriend from Canada—they both lived in the Granma towers—in a sweet, soaring rendition of “Qué Linda Es Cuba,” their voices alive with hope and light as they sang, “Con Fidel, que vive en la montaña …” I could hear the CIA man saying, “We’re here to have fun,” and explaining how easy it was for Americans to come down here—the U.S. had no rule you couldn’t visit Cuba, only that you couldn’t spend money here. The sweet, honey-haired dreamer from grad school was telling us now about the Salvadoran guerrilla she’d fallen in love with here, and her hopes for working for the FMLNF in San Salvador.
As the night went on, the other four kind of paired off, and there were giggles and exploratory kisses, and the semiotician was buried in the black girl’s neck. “Hey,” his voice came out at one point. “Conchita wants to know what ‘entropy’ means.” The Canadian girl was saying, “Some people say—though it’s a bit too cynical for me—that in Cuba people think of making love as casually as smoking a cigarette.” At the piano, some guy in a faded tuxedo was playing “Try to remember the kind of September …”
By three in the morning, I figured it was bedtime, so I took my leave of the festive group and set out on the long walk home: there was still music pulsing out of vacant lots, and the outline of groups of figures along the Malecón; CUBA—JOY UNDER YOUR SUN, said the first sign I saw. The Nacional was closed for renovation, though—it was going to be closed during the Games, the only time in thirty years when they’d have a chance of filling it—and a cop on duty in the driveway told me that Alfredo had gone back to Asunción. There were some rickety excuses for samba bands now even in the cheap hotels, and an air of fake laug
hter and light, like Las Vegas rebuilt in Siberia.
In the hotel, there was a steady procession of unattended girls, like in some police lineup: blondes in flimsy hot pants, ebony women in see-through blouses, teenagers with Oriental features. The joke now, Mike had told me when he came back to New York, was that any place just for foreigners was about 30 percent foreigners and 70 percent Cuban girls.
In my room, I went into the bathroom, and the door locked me in by mistake. “Qué linda es Cuba,” I remembered the Canadian girl singing as I set about breaking it down.
When I went down to breakfast the next morning in the hotel, it was the same old craziness. “No hay.” “No hay.” “No hay nada.” Fat old mammies sitting on their asses, and waiters smiling in the hope of getting a piece of spare bread, and girls who snarled when you asked them for some juice. Cuba must have been the only tropical country in the world where all the juice was canned and the fruit tasted like it had been sent over, sea mail, from Pyongyang.
Around me, the local beauties were telling the hippies from Munich and Vancouver how good they had it, while the ponytail brigade was trying to tell them the same. By eleven o’clock, I knew, the guy in the black tie would be back at his piano, playing “As Time Goes By” without a trace of irony, and the waitresses would be looking at you like mothers who’ve heard their kids tell the same bad joke once too often. Even now, there were people fighting for the seats in the lobby, where the air-conditioning was free and there was a suggestion, a faint hint, of the world outside.