THE DRAMA OF THE SUITCASES: HOW TO SMUGGLE A SALMON INTO HAVANA
If I were to add up the list of things that I, my family, my students, and fellow teachers have brought along to Havana, it would fill a warehouse, or at least a paragraph. We repeatedly tell our students that they, for two weeks, are going to live and learn in a country that does not have a consumer economy. But like the Internet or the air, the absence of ready, constant shopping is a bit much for twenty-year-old Canadians to imagine until they get there. I must admit that even after ten years of regular visits, it is for me too. As my Canadian friend Ruth put it sardonically, in Cuba every day is “Buy Nothing” day.
Stores that sell consumer goods are located in the scant malls and shopping streets around the city. A few stores sell hardware, auto parts, furniture, domestic appliances, books, toys, and clothing. As well as the malls, Obispo, a long-time shopping street in Old Havana, caters to both the tourist and the habanero market. Just between Centro and Old Havana, Galiano Avenue (a.k.a. Italia, a name rarely used), the street that used to house several of Havana’s 1950s-era department stores, remains a busy shopping street. I have noticed improvements in the variety and quality of some things in Havana’s stores over the last ten years. Clothes in the stores are poor quality and expensive, but the clothes, shoes, and handbags in various small craft markets around the city are great. There is a terrific handmade shoe market in Vedado (at calle Primero and D street), and another one in the small craft market on Obispo in Old Havana. There are also extremely good art and craft exhibitions held occasionally in the Pabellon on La Rampa and in the Pabexpo Exhibition Complex further afield. In December, an international art and craft market in the Pabexpo features an overwhelming array of artistry. High-end furniture design is on the rise in Havana, and the work is both expensive and beautiful.
Yet in all the stores, whatever the quality or availability of the goods, prices are near impossible in relation to the level of Cuban salaries. Generally, things, almost all things, are in the same range as in Canada, and many are much more expensive. Given that a bottom-end electric fan costs well over a month’s salary, Cubans not surprisingly have a vexed and complicated relationship to shopping. Stores and malls are busy places; habaneros like to shop as much as anyone else. But stores themselves are not the first or last go-to place for finding that necessary something. People find things — from plumbing supplies to matches and brooms — through various other means. Some are legal, some less so; some are visible (broom vendors regularly walk the streets of Havana), some require a labyrinth of friends, contacts, and local knowledge that few visitors possess. The underground consumer economy is so strong it is often the case that the vendors gathered outside the Galleria mall on Paseo, or around the corner from the Carlos Tercera complex, for example, offer more useful products, at better prices, than do the stores inside.
People also get things from family and friends who visit from outside the country. Plenty of Canadian tourists tell stories of friendships they have developed with hotel staff they’ve come to know over years of visits, for whom they regularly bring vitamins or other necessities. Preparations for my own visits have become routine. We call it the drama de las maletas, the drama of the suitcases. My son jokes that we barely need a scale any longer to judge when the suitcases have reached the magic figure of twenty-three kilos, the airlines’ weight limit. When Jordi was younger and we were going for extended periods, packing had to include a wide range of child-related medicines and amusements. These days we are more focused on gifts for and requests from friends. Camomile tea, vitamins, baby wipes, eye drops, latex-free Band Aids, sheets, all manner of children’s medicine, hot sauce, allergy pills, data storage cards for phones or cameras, toothpaste, light bulbs, deodorant, scrub brushes, spices, inner tubes for automobile tires, a bicycle tire, and printer cartridges come to mind as specific necessities people have requested. Sometimes friends ask for bigger ticket items they insist on paying for — laptops, a computer monitor, external drives, once, memorably, a baby carrier. Xenia once asked me to investigate the cost of transporting an Akita puppy by air — a friend of hers in Havana had a lifelong dream of owning one. The conversation went no further when I reported the price, which ran in the hundreds of dollars (before the price of the dog). Of course, we also bring gifts, which over the years have also settled into familiar categories: items from the world of food, children, and school. Aged Canadian cheddar cheese is always really popular, and surprisingly easy to transport.
There is inevitably a moment, sometimes more than one, in pre-Havana preparations when all this packing seems sad, surreal, and futile. I hesitate to ask Cuban friends the question, “What do you need?” because it is so ridiculous and my contribution seems the very definition of a drop in a bucket. I am gratified when people ask me directly for things they need. This has become part of the fabric of reciprocal friendships in vastly unequal circumstances. But I am also fully aware that when people ask for tea or scrub brushes or cough syrup, they are conscious of my capacities, financially and physically.
A great deal of frustration and emotion about the geopolitics of underdevelopment, empire, and the Cold War is attached to every container of vitamins we carefully weigh in our suitcases. There is drama every step of the way: worrying about airline weight limits, and then worrying about what the Cuban customs agents will make of our strange luggage assortment. Generally Cuban customs receives visiting Canadians more graciously than they do returning Cubans. One time, two of my students were stopped for an hour while Havana customs officers tried to make sense of the two suitcases of medical supplies we had brought as donations from a Canadian NGO (actually we had brought three — one got through without incident). Rather than face another hour of Cuban donation bureaucracy, we left them there, which may have been their goal. From that experience we learned never to put a whole lot of the same thing in one suitcase. Another time, I had to convince a customs agent that a student was bringing a large box of paper clips as a donation to the university (another random donation from an NGO in Canada) rather than intending to sell them on the street herself. But because we’ve been so brazen in bringing such a strange assortment of things for so long, Cuban customs agents no longer scare me.
One December holiday visit, we decided to surprise our friends with as Canadian a gift as we could imagine: a fresh salmon. We froze it and wrapped it carefully in newspaper and tin foil. This was back when Jordi was quite young and, as many travelling parents know, you can get almost anything across a border if you have a sweet-faced child at your side. However, we hadn’t counted on the airline chaos that often occurs in December. One piece of our luggage didn’t make the sold-out flight, and, as luck would have it, it was the salmon suitcase. We tried to imagine the disgusting smelly mess that would arrive, not to mention the reprimand from Cuban authorities. But instead, the suitcase arrived intact two days later, with the salmon still partially frozen. We had a fine New Year’s Eve feast in Vedado that year; ten years later Aldo still tells that story, shaking his head at our audaciousness. My nervousness about crossing borders was vanquished forever.
TAKING CUBANS TO COSTCO
I am standing with Joaquín Borges-Triana in Kingston’s Walmart store. He and Xenia Reloba are both in Canada to give lectures to Canadian students and celebrate the publication of the book about Carlos Varela that we worked on together. We are waiting for Xenia and Zaira, a Cuban student at Queen’s, to find something Xenia had just remembered was on her shopping list. As stressful and anxiety-producing as the drama de las maletas can be when it comes to packing and transporting them, it can be pretty fun to fill suitcases headed for Havana, particularly while shopping in the company of Cubans. The agreement my university has with the University of Havana is at least partially reciprocal: we send thirty students annually for our course, and we host one Cuban academic or artist in Kingston for a couple of weeks. Over almost ten years of hosting Cuban academics and artists in Canada, I’ve enjoyed plen
ty of shopping trips like this. Stores such as Costco and Walmart are places I try to avoid, but I permit myself what I call the Cuban exception: I go only when accompanied by visiting Cubans. It is indeed a peculiar aspect of my professional life that I can say proudly that I have accompanied some of Havana’s foremost intellectuals, writers, and filmmakers to the big box stores of suburban Kingston, Ontario.
It’s instructive to shop with visiting Cubans because, in my experience, they are just as blown away by North American consumer culture overdrive as my Canadian students in Havana are by Cuban consumer “underdrive.” They are serious shoppers — in Canada as much as at home — but they have a keen eye for the vast ridiculousness of what fills our stores. Imagine, for example, explaining that the aisles of stuffed toys in a pet store are not actually meant for Canadian children, but intended as toys for dogs and cats. Cubans are also, to generalize, friendly and outspoken with Canadian store clerks. I’ve watched in amusement as my visiting colleagues first pester, then charm the sales staff, many of whom have enjoyed a short visit to Varadero or other Cuban beaches and are delighted to speak to a Cuban in Kingston. Our shopping trips together tend to be really funny and allow me to reflect on my world through an outsider’s eye — which is, perhaps, why Joaquín’s question in Walmart that day catches me off-guard. “Ah, Karen,” he says, “you know Cuba better than many foreigners. Do you think we’ll ever be a normal country?” He is part joking and part wistful, but I still can’t tell the proportions of each.
Mobile Cubans are advantaged Cubans, but there are liabilities that accompany visas and passports. Cubans who live abroad and return for a visit used to be stock buffoonish characters in Cuban popular culture. There’s a dreadfully didactic 1986 film, Lejania by Jesus Díaz, about a Cuban family separated by immigration conflicts. The wickedness of the mother — who left her son behind when she moved to Florida — is underscored by her bulging suitcases as she returns to visit. All the jeans and toys in the world cannot redeem her. Cubans who left the island in the decades after the revolution were derided as gusanos (worms), because when you left the revolution you left the nation (and vice versa). Today, huge suitcases for sale on the streets of Miami are now mockingly termed “gusano bags,” an ironic reference to the importance of what the bags contain when they now arrive, filled, in Cuba. Frank Delgado has a beautiful song, “La Otra Orilla” (The Other Shore), that parodies those bitter days of immigration conflicts, heaping particular scorn on those Cubans — like him — who remained on the island and cursed their friends and family for leaving. “They didn’t say gusano any more,” he sings about his Miami uncle, because upon his return he had become a “communitarian,” another reference to the importance of remittances and gifts from outside Cuba.6 Those bitter days of migration conflicts are mostly over. Cuba relaxed some of its rigid rules in 2013 which had made leaving difficult, and nobody yells traidores (traitors) at Cubans who leave. But vestiges of mean-spiritedness toward mobile Cubans remain, in the complicated regulations facing Cubans returning from longer periods abroad (in the form of visa and luggage charges) and in the nastiness of many customs officials, who, I am told, treat returning Cubans extremely badly, even if they have just been away for a short visit.
I hate Walmart, and I’m still a critic of North American over-consumption. But years of taking Cubans shopping have cured me of any moralistic notions I once had about the nobility of deprivation. I understand what Joaquín’s question about the potential for “normalcy” in Cuba means, I think, when I consider what my Cuban colleagues purchase during their rare North American shopping trips. Their lists are not unlike my own pre-departure list of requests Cuban friends have made, but even more particular and intimate. I’ve helped two colleagues find good quality non-synthetic socks for family members with foot problems. Another spent most of her honorarium from her lectures at Queen’s on expensive orthopedic shoes for her young daughter. One friend bought a dozen simple cloth shopping bags, gifts for each of her child’s teachers in primary school. Others return with boxes of couscous or quinoa or rice crackers; things we’ve served them in Canada that aren’t available in Havana, and they want to share them with family members there. These shopping trips are hardly extravagant buying frenzies. Rather, they fill immediate needs and provide small pleasures. I sometimes try to nudge friends into buying things for themselves that have caught their eye, usually to no avail. The advantage of travel is something to be shared, even in tiny increments.
THE THERMOMETER THAT STRUCK UP MY MOST UNUSUAL FRIENDSHIP
Before I started spending time in Havana, I was, for many years, a Canadian tourist in Varadero. I spent Christmas of 2000 there with my family and my sister’s family. A Queen’s colleague asked me to bring something to a friend connected to the University of Havana and gave me the telephone number of two contacts. I called one of them and we made a plan to meet up in a central location in Old Havana during a day trip we planned to make from the beach.
We enjoyed a beer and French fries together in a restaurant in Old Havana one afternoon. Ines admired the young Jordi, then an adorable one-year-old. I handed over the package we had been charged with delivering. It was a small thermometer wrapped in a resealable plastic bag and a small manila envelope. Ines, a philosophy professor at the University of Havana, was grateful we had delivered it, and explained it was for the young son of a colleague, another philosophy professor. The son was six years old, she told us, susceptible to frequent colds. The family will be really happy to have this, she said.
Some fifteen years later I was gathered with my family at the dining-room table of my colleague Lourdes, another University of Havana philosophy professor. At the table in her Vedado apartment was her son Dairon, a handsome twenty-one-year-old and one of my best friends in Havana. We were idly speaking about our long-standing family friendship and our various visits, and I suddenly remembered the thermometer story. Until then I had never really thought further about who the thermometer was for. “Are you the family we once brought a thermometer for?” I asked, starting to connect some old dots. Lourdes smiled and silently left the table. She returned with the same manila envelope, the same resealable plastic bag, containing the same thermometer. It still works and it’s now an important part of the family medical kit for the recently arrived granddaughter.
These kinds of stories are fun in any circumstances among any group of people who find they are connected through little moments of chance that sometimes grow into relationships. Another Cuban/Canadian gathering at another dining-room table, this time in Canada, produced a similar random but powerful story of connection. Zaira, a Cuban student at Queen’s, was living in our house in Canada while we were in Havana. Marcel Beltrán, a Cuban filmmaker visiting Canada, was passing through town and stopped to visit her for dinner. He looked up from his meal, noticed a small painting on our wall, and his eyes filled with tears. “My mother painted that,” he said. I had bought the beautiful painting of a crab, one of Jordi’s favourite things to chase on the beach, in a small tourist shop in Old Havana the year before.
What the thermometer story illustrates to me is that each package delivered or item purchased and transported to Cuba enters a web of relationships and exchanges that can, if the circumstances are right, generate something that goes way beyond the value of the item itself. It is a story that makes more intelligible the origins of my friendship with Dairon, a twenty-one-year-old Afro-Cuban male — an unusual pairing. Our friendship has grown, since our unwitting thermometer connection, because of our mutual love of contemporary music. I often introduce Dairon as my professor of Cuban Cultural Studies. He calls us his Modern Family (the US TV show featuring a gay couple with an adopted child that he knows from el Paquete). We go to concerts together in Havana and he is single-handedly responsible for a good part of my Cuban musical education. In exchange, I help him expand his English vocabulary beyond what he learned from his first teachers, Kanye West and Jay-Z. My son venerates him as an older, hipper br
other, and now generations of my students spend time with him and his friends and negotiate their own friendships across borders. We keep in sporadic touch through Facebook when he can succeed in finding an Internet connection, and when something really big in Havana is going on Dairon texts me a brief report. “I am the happiest man in Havana today,” he texted a while ago. “I just saw Beyoncé and Jay-Z on the street.”
Boundaries and differences like ours are possible to cross at home, too. But there is something in the nature of this friendship that seems emblematically Cuban to me, perhaps because it began by a combination of a simple gift and multiple relationships.
LOOKING FOR THE ENEMY IN MANHATTAN: HOW MY FRIEND EMILIA ENDED THE COLD WAR
On the morning of Wednesday, December 17, 2014, I was in Havana, walking to an appointment at an office in Miramar. I had been in Cuba for a couple of weeks; I had just come back to Havana from an intense time in eastern Cuba. I had accompanied Ines Rodríguez to that part of the island on a visit we had planned for a long time: retracing her steps from when she was a teacher in the 1961 literacy campaign. She hadn’t returned since that time and she was really keen to see the legacies of the time she spent there, teaching people to read when she was just sixteen years old. I felt blessed that I could accompany her and we experienced some remarkable moments trudging up mountains interviewing former students and teachers. Eastern Cuba, or “Oriente,” is known as the cradle of the revolution, the place where it all began. My savvy Havana friends warned me I was in for a world of more ideological rigidity than I had become accustomed to in relatively cosmopolitan Havana. They did not exaggerate. When I arrived back in Havana after our time in rural Oriente, I was still reeling. Most of the people we spoke with were enthusiastic and warm and spoke from the heart. But we had endured some really didactic, doctrinaire discussions with local officials — the kind of people I am generally able to avoid in Havana. One local history functionary gave us a long speech about how awful it was that the “bandera del enemigo,” the enemy’s flag, was arriving in Cuba through the current fashion for stars-and-stripes-themed T-shirts and other adornments. I felt like I had stepped back in time, at least a couple of decades.
Cuba beyond the Beach Page 14