Cuba and the Night

by Pico Iyer

  • • •

  When I woke up, I took a shower, and headed out to find her. The still blue morning seemed almost a mockery to me. The big guy’s sex appeal was almost down to zero now, but still he wouldn’t take no for an answer. Once upon a time, he’d seemed the romantic hero of every politico’s dream. The ideologue with a passion for baseball and cigars. The only guy who could play footsie with Barbara Walters and Brezhnev and find a way to charm them both. A Revolutionary straight out of the Radical Chic catalog. Now it was as if he belonged to a teenybopper group that hadn’t been heard of for ten years. And yet, I thought, the Ortegas had come and gone, Gorbachev was history now, the dreaming kids had moved from Managua off to Prague, and the other Communist cities—Beijing and Saigon—were famous for their free markets; but Fidel was still in control, thirty-three years and going strong.

  Lula’s door, when I got there, was locked. Every now and then, some neighbor came by, heard “Lula?” and then said No sé and walked on down the peeling street. Finally, I heard steps inside, and the door opened up behind me. Her mother was in the kitchen, as if time hadn’t moved at all, wasting cigarettes and waiting for the news, and when she saw me, she came up and kissed me, and said, “Richard, Richard.” A cousin was doing her makeup in the next room. There was no sign of Lourdes, or her life.

  “Sit, sit, Richard. How have you been? How are things with you in America?”

  “Fine.” It always seemed the safest answer down here.

  “My mother in Miami—you saw her?”

  “Miami is a long way from New York.”

  “But she sent you the money?”

  “No. No money.”

  “Ay!” She shot off something to the cousin, and the girl peeped out and smiled, and then some neighbor came in and said, “Oye! Qué pasa?” and then everyone in the building wanted to hear about how her mother had not sent the money and how in the land of plenty people forgot about their families and how this stranger from New York had come to give presents all around.

  “And Lourdes—have you seen her?”

  “No. I only got here last night. That’s why I came here.”

  “In New York?”

  I didn’t follow this. “I guess I’m often not there.”

  “She said she would call. You didn’t hear nothing?”

  “Maybe she tried and couldn’t get me.”

  “Oh, that girl! She said she would call. New York is not so far from England, right?”

  “England?”

  “Inglaterra, no? That is her new home. With that English boy.”

  “Hugo?”

  “Claro. Every week she sends me money. In England, you can have anything, she says. Here”—she spat out—“nothing.”

  “You have her address?”

  “Sure. Somewhere here.” She got up and went to the cupboard.

  “And Cari?” I asked, while she was fumbling through her papers.

  “She’s gone.”

  “Where? To her mother’s?”

  “Where? I don’t know. After Lula got married, she left. I never heard nothing from her.” She muttered something to herself as she went on sorting. “I can’t believe you never got her letter. She wrote to you, I think.” Then she found what she was looking for, and came back with Hugo’s address. “You know, Richard,” she said, as I copied it down again, “before, I thought it was you that would be her husband.”

  “You’re not the only one.”

  She took the address back from me, and put it back in the coffee can where she kept a couple of wrapped-up Alka-Seltzer tablets someone had given her years ago, and a card from some acupuncturist in San Francisco, and a couple of tiny photos, taken in machines.

  “That’s funny,” I said. “I came here to find Lula. And she’s away in England.”

  “Sure,” said her mother. “But now you are here. Stay, have lunch. Maybe we go to the Tiendas this afternoon.”

  “Maybe,” I said, but my mind was already out the door.

  I didn’t know what to do then: the charter flights only left on Sundays, and I had six days to kill, in a city full of memories I didn’t want. I got out my camera, and thought I might go to work, but I wasn’t seeing anything, or else seeing only things that weren’t there: maybe I’d finally become a true Revolutionary.

  I went down to the Prado, but the place felt like a swirl of ghosts, a whole cola of spirits, some mine and some the Revolution’s, and sometimes I didn’t know which ones I was seeing, and which ones imagining: that figure on the staircase, that olive-skinned girl with the smile, that couple in the plaza. The band was still playing, but the dance floor was all empty.

  Down near the British Embassy, I remembered the time I’d come down here with Hugo, on our way to the Sevilla, and he’d pointed out to me how you could see the original writing on the sidewalk, which said “Mann, Little Co.” right outside the boarded-up Hotel Siboney, and that, if you looked real hard into the dark, you could see, way, way up in the gloom, “The Happy House, Open Day and Night. Prado 331.” And the NO HAY BAÑOS sign in the window of the Hotel Packard, and the Martí slogans scrawled across the walls.

  And then we’d taken in the other phantoms of the Prado: the outline of the old Cine Shanghai, famous for its shows, and the building where the Casa de Negros had been. There was the shadow of the Blue Moon, with its high-priced dancers, and the famous gambling houses, La China, La Central, the place where President Prío held his infamous nights of white powder and tall showgirls. Beside one doorway, you could see where Superman had performed his stunts before half the guys in Skull and Bones, and along the Paseo de Martí, you could still imagine all the sailors walking beneath the laurels to the Marriage Palace.

  A little way on, in the park, I felt her by my side again, tucking her hair behind her ears, and giving me her slow, sly smile, and leading me up to a room where I couldn’t make out the shapes, and the sound of our things as they fell to the floor.

  I went off into the refurbished Hotel Plaza, where there were four times as many waiters as customers, and every time I moved, a couple of them came forward, and bowed, and said “Excuse me,” and showed me all the other tricks they’d learned from their Spanish masters. A band was playing “Cielito Lindo” in the next room—the fancy dining room—before an audience of empty chairs. “Excuse me,” said the waiters, “I’m sorry,” as I waited fifty minutes for a beer.

  I walked up the street again, and I saw her coming toward me, breaking into a smile. She was leading me now toward the Hotel San José, and she was taking off her earrings in a side street. I followed her up the grand triumphal steps of the university, and through its heroic columns, and past the tank, where groups of pretty students twittered away like students anywhere, and then down into the backstreets of Vedado. At one point, I heard a whisper from the bushes, and turned to see a dark-eyed girl beckoning me toward her: Lázara, I thought. She must be eighteen now, out to help her mother.

  Around the parks on Calle 19 and 21, the cars with empty sockets for headlights looked like sightless men, and the dull shells of buildings like bodies whose souls have long ago departed. On the grand, white-columned monument above the Avenida de los Presidentes, the young were still pouring out their hearts, and commemorating their own private acts of Revolution. But the counterrevolutionary messages were as full of bravado and desperation as the ones they were rejecting, and it was like seeing one mirage replaced by another. “Any idea that isn’t dangerous isn’t an idea,” someone had written, and “Purity of the head doesn’t come without sterility of the heart. A person rich in ideas is always poor in virtue.”

  At the bottom of one column, I read, in a girl’s careful scrawl, “Sometimes the stars come down and walk among us as people. Since I’ve known you, life feels happy and full of possibility. These words were written after meeting Carlos.”

  I felt I needed to be anchored then, brought down to earth and reality, so I sought out José, and went along Calle J till I came to his house.
I could tell from the picture of Che outside his door that things were getting harder.

  I rang the bell, and it was the same as ever: the yapping dog, the heavy footsteps, the sudden swinging open of the door. Inside, though, the place was almost empty for once: just his santería altar in the front room and, at the stove, a grumpy-looking woman making beans while a curly-haired girl, with a cataract in her eye, played with a broken doll.

  “Come, Richard,” said José. “Meet my wife and child.”

  “Mucho gusto,” said the woman, and the girl looked up at me from where she played. “Vilma, give Richard some coffee. Strong and sweet, right?”

  “Strong and sweet.”

  “So how are things, José?”

  “Great.”

  “Fiddling while everything around you falls apart?”

  “Why not? You know what they say: we got good news and bad news. The bad news is that everyone’s got to eat stones. The good news is that there aren’t any.”

  “But, José—”

  “You know, Richard, before I was always talking of going outside—to America, Spain, the Dominican. Now I see is better here: we don’t have to work, we can drink and dance and make love. Is good. The other places are not so good. On TV, they show pictures of Peru, Guatemala: there are people starving there!”

  “But, José, as long as I’ve known you—”

  “Look, Richard,” he said, leading me out onto the terrace. “Let me show you my city.”

  He maneuvered me out onto the roof, and said, more quietly, “Is better we talk here. Vilma is the daughter of a general. I had some problems with the government, and so now I am a married man. We were married before one time—a long time before, when we were in college—but then we were separated. Now is better for me like this. Like you too, no? Her father is a Hero, very high in the army; he fought with Fidel in the mountains. A good man; he likes me, he gives me his poems to read.”

  “And he looks after you?”

  “Sure. Más o menos. He looks after her. She looks after me. Is good.”

  Just then, the woman came out, and touched me, smiling, on the arm. “José, let me talk to your friend. For a moment only. Un momentico.” She watched him go back inside, and then she took me to the very edge. It felt like something from the Bible—“All this I will give to you”—in reverse.

  “I have heard much about you, Richard. I feel we are friends already. José is always talking about you. His best stranger friend. A true compañero.” She gave me an imploring smile, this woman I’d never met before. “I do not want to ask you for your help; I am not like the others. You are our friend. But I want to tell you we have nothing in our kitchen. If you want to give us anything, we will always remember you in our thoughts. It is not for me; it is for the niña.” She ran her fingers along my arm. “I never ask for me. Only for my daughter. She is so young.”

  “I’ll think about it.”

  “For her, Richard. Not for me.” She smiled again at me. “But don’t tell José, okay? He will not understand.”

  “Richard,” he called out from the kitchen. “Come and see my photographs.” He was seated before the TV, the paterfamilias tuned in to some program from Miami with the sound off. He had an old photo album in his hands. “You see? This is my brother. My mother. Me.” As usual, the pictures were all blurred, and the identities even more so. The one José called his “son” looked exactly the same as him, the one he called his “father” looked nothing like the old guy in Santiago. I remembered how writing captions in Cuba had always been a bitch.

  Then the little girl came out and showed me her box of condoms—the only kind of balloons they had left—and a stack of photo albums stuffed with scraps of foreign papers: torn pieces of Carnation labels and Nescafé ads and stickers that said “Knorr’s Soup,” status symbols in the local elementary school.

  “That’s really nice,” I told her, smiling. “But I need to see the house where Abel and Haydée lived.”

  “Sure,” said José quickly, taking the hint. “I show you.” And we went out into the street and took a taxi to the Inglaterra, where we could talk. The stained-glass windows in the refurbished lobby dappled the tables in color, bathing the faces of Irish boys in red and blue and yellow lights, turning the German professors’ hair purple, dropping circles of color around us like petals.

  “This is like something from Our Man in Havana, no? From the time of Batista.”

  “When Cuba was the Land of the Almighty Dollar.”

  “Sure. When the yanquis were king.” I looked around at the cooing couples at every table. “You know, Richard, one week before, I found a book on Obispo, from twenty years before, about the Revolution. It was telling us all that Fidel had achieved. Now there are no prostitutes, it said,” and he motioned with his eyes around the lobby, filled with girls. “Now there are no tips, it said,” and he looked toward the waiters, angling for gifts. “This is the only country without any alcoholism, it said, and I thought, That is true, if you do not count the drunks; this is a country where telephones are free, and I thought, That is true, if you do not want to call anyone. Everyone goes to work, it said, though nobody here has a job; everyone has vacations, it said, but there is nowhere to go.”

  “I know. They say every son comes to resemble his father; I guess every Revolution comes to resemble the one it overthrew. Reminds me of that old joke they tell in Moscow. You know, ‘Capitalism is the exploitation of man by man. Communism is the opposite.’ ”

  He gave me his wry smile. “Sure. Is crazy now. The ones who think too much about the future, they go crazy. They are like the Apostles around Jesus; for them, if Fidel dies, Cuba dies. There is no after. So for me, I just make love and stay quiet.”

  We went on drinking our beers.

  “So anyway, Richard, how is Lourdes?”

  “I don’t know. She’s not here.”

  “She’s with the Englishman, right?”

  “I guess. You’ve heard from her?”

  “No. When a Cuban leaves Cuba, Cuba leaves the Cuban. After they leave, they never think of us.”

  “It’s like that everywhere.”

  “Sure. Is better like this. Is better for her. You remember Myra? She is working in the cola now. Every day, she gets in the line, and she gets ten, twenty pesos. And Rosita? Lourdes’s friend? She is now married with a North American. A criminal. He was on this TV show—‘America’s Most Wanted,’ right? Because he killed a guy up there, and so he comes down here for a quiet life.”

  “And you, José? You can eat?”

  “Sure. I can always eat. Now, the government says, is the Período Especial. Time for heroic sacrifice. In one month, one piece of meat. One box of matches. Three hours a day, no light. But for me, I make business, is not so bad. You have seen the new fifty-peso note?”

  “Don’t think so.”

  He pulled one out. “Mira. Before, fifty pesos was too much money. Now, is nothing. So Fidel makes new fifty-peso notes like promises. If you look at this note, you can see, like a ghost, a picture of Célia. Célia Sánchez. This place is crazy now.”

  Crazy indeed, I thought: a whole nation holding banknotes up to the light to see the silhouette of its president’s long-dead girlfriend.

  “Before, I had some problems. Big problems. In the Habana Libre. The police catch me. I was in Combinado before; if I go again, is not so good for me. So I find a lawyer, and get out.”

  “And a wife.”

  “Sure. A wife helps too.”

  “You were buying stuff?”

  “Sure. As usual. I was with a guy from Panama that time. But he gets scared, and then he says he does not know me, and I am taken to the police office.”

  “What were you buying? TVs?”

  “No. Only shoes.”

  “How much?”

  “One hundred.”

  “A hundred bucks for a pair of shoes? No wonder the cops came down on you.”

  “No. One hundred shoes.”

 
“Come on, José.”

  “Is true. Why not? Everyone does it. That’s the way here. Usually is no problem. I go to the store, I talk to the guard. Everybody knows me. I give the girl five dollars. Then, when I am finished, I go into a Turistaxi, and speak English. If the guy doesn’t understand, I say, very slowly, Yo quier-o ir a emba-jada. Then, if anyone sees me get out, they think I am a foreigner.”

  He grinned. Life was a crossword puzzle that José solved every day over breakfast. “But this time they stop me. And the guy from Panama says, ‘It’s for him.’ ”

  “So why don’t you do the buying yourself?”

  “Sometimes I do. At the Diplotienda, where my brother works—my religion brother, not my prison brother—is easy. But with a foreigner is better. There are many foreigners here. You give them a hundred pesos, they do anything.”

  “That’s a hell of a lot of money.”

  “No. Now, for one pair of shoes they pay four hundred pesos. For jeans seven hundred. I make good business. Some people say to me, ‘Why don’t you go to America?’ I say, for me is better here. See, if you work for the government, you get one hundred twenty pesos in a month. One dollar thirty. But if you got dollars, you can live like the president.”

  I bought him another drink. A girl came over, and set my beer before me with a smile.

  “See,” he said, and I caught the edge in his voice again. “For her is easy. She can meet foreigners, she can meet policemen. If the policeman stops her, she says, ‘I’m sorry. What can I do? Why go to court? Why give money to the government? Maybe you and I meet tomorrow, in my room. Drink some rum, have some fun.’ Then the policeman is like a doll she keeps in her pocket.”

  “That’s why Cuba’s losing all its beauties.”

  “Sure. Everyone is leaving.”

  He paused to sip his drink. “You remember my cousin? She is not my cousin; she is my wife’s sister. She meets this man from Spain, very rich. Every time he comes to Cuba, he takes her everywhere, like his wife. Brings her TV, camera, anything. He tells Fidel, ‘If she don’t come with me, I don’t sign the contract.’ ”