Cuba Diaries (14 page)

We go home with two of Querido Vecinos!'s kittens cupped in our hands, our hair still wet from the Comodoro. One is tiger-striped, and one is black with white patches.

We walk one block home in the orange dusk, rubber sandals flapping, tiny claws and teeth worrying our fingers, and feel for a few moments as if we are in some kind of ordinary surburbia in some kind of First World place, but then the guard, seeing us coming, flips a switch, and the wrought-iron gates open with a creak worthy of the rue Morgue.

The first store to be refurbished on Calle San Rafael has been open for a few days. It was a peso store, selling, like all stores before the collapse of the Soviet Union, goods from Communist-bloc countries as well as goods made in Cuba. Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, it limped along for a few years selling (for pesos) goods made in Cuba, its display windows dispiriting, its salesgirls lolling on broken stools. Dollar stores selling quality imported goods to Cubans became possible following the legalization of the dollar in 1993, but it has taken such stores a while to get going. Expensive, isolated household items in tourist stores, such as the Black & Decker sandwich maker we spotted in one store, it is finally explained to us, represent a kind of “transitional” period: they are meant to be bought by visiting Miami relatives
for Cuban family members, or by sexual tourists for their
jineteras
. Expensive items such as the sandwich maker can't be in dollar stores for Cubans yet, it is explained to us, because Cubans can't afford them, and seeing something so beyond their reach in the newly opened dollar stores (the Cuban friends who are explaining to us speculate) only depresses Cubans. Our Cuban friends remind us that they are talking only about entirely state-run stores. The
cuentapropista
stores, like the one in the old Woolworth, in which individuals rent spaces and sell what they are allowed to sell, are another category, as are the artisans and old-book vendors on the Malecón and in the Plaza de la Catedral.

Cubans line up in a short line outside the store on Calle San Rafael and are let in one by one, while small support groups of friends and/or relatives wait outside, biting the corners of their thumbs and craning their necks around the heads of other people looking through the window.

Nick and I finally find a space to look between support-group members' shoulders. The store has clean bowfront windows, an aluminum-slat ceiling, and fluorescent lights. The shelves are nearly filled. Gillette shaving cream we see, Johnson's baby shampoo, Palmolive soap, packs of double-edged razor blades, baby socks, pastel-colored men's socks, an alarm clock, an extra-long shoehorn, three hairbrushes, boxes of toothpicks, cologne, nail polish, a folding, magnetized backgammon game for traveling, some airmail letter paper, a lone box of Tampax, a lone box of panty liners, some bedside lamps, some stonewashed jeans, some organza baby dresses and
guayaberas
hung up on a rack at the back of the store, an invalid's toilet suspended in an aluminum frame. Customers emerge smiling, clutching one or two things in a bag.

Farther down the street, a long line is forming in front of one of the few peso stores still open. The shelves in the window are bare but for a travel poster of Kraków. The line goes through the empty store to a barely lit counter in the back of the store.

“What's going on?” Nick asks one of the people waiting in line.

“They just got a shipment of talcum powder.”

Lety says it was so beautiful after the triumph of the revolution. People were so happy. She was in Florida, in a gymnastics competition. “When news came that Batista had fled, all the people who had left Cuba because of Batista were trying to get back. The ferries were full, the airplanes, everyone rushing
to get back.
Estaban locos
.” She laughs. “People were hiring fishing boats, people were hiring anything that floated, just to get back.”

At a party I chat with Alex, a diplomat who lived in New York in the seventies. He wonders if Fidel loves men more than women. He does hang out more with men than with women: the diplomat wonders if I have noticed that. I say I haven't noticed because I haven't seen Fidel yet, only on television and once speeding down Quinta in the back of a black Mercedes. Old hippies and the Fab Four do come to mind when you see him, he says, but also gays in the West Village of Manhattan, circa the late seventies, with the uniform stuff and the boots.

I cough from some drops of
mojito
that have gone down the wrong way. “But the untrimmed beard?”

“That's meant to put you off the track.”

There is a school at the end of our block. Every morning you can hear the children reciting
Pioneros del comunismo, Seremos como el Che!
(Pioneers of communism, We will be like Che!)

The director of the school and an assistant come to our door this morning. The director tells us they need detergent, rags for cleaning the floor, disinfectant, a broom. There are little children in the school. She and the teachers are afraid for their health. They have had nothing to clean the school with for months.

Concha says to just give them a little bit because no matter how much you give them, they will always ask for more. I send Concha to the school with some detergent, rags, and disinfectant. Concha says we can't send them a broom, though, because we only have one and won't have any if ours breaks.

The director says she doesn't know how she can thank us—then asks us if we have any lightbulbs.

I spy a movement in the jar containing the tarantula.

I grab the jar and start running down the stairs.

The children run behind me. “Mommy, why are you running?”

“Creatures need air to live, they need food and water. The tarantula has lived without air, food, or water for two weeks . . .”

We nail holes in the lid. We get some grains of hamburger and a cup of water. I throw the grains of hamburger in the jar and sprinkle water over the tarantula, which is moving animatedly now.

“Eat, Charlotte, eat!” the children and I tell him or her, whom we have decided to name after the spider in
Charlotte's Web
.

We raise the jar to be able to look at Charlotte's underside. Charlotte is squatting over the hamburger and stuffing hamburger into a masticating orifice with its two front legs.

“It's a miracle!” I say to Miguel and Lorena, who are watching us, bemused. “Two weeks without air, food, or water.”

Miguel and Lorena shrug. “
Es una tarantula cubana
.”

Lorena says she has to tell me something. She is telling me because she, José, Concha, Miguel—they are all concerned. She is telling me because she feels like a sister to me. “Yes, like a sister,” she says, patting her chest. “And the children, I feel like I am their aunt. I hope you don't mind me saying this . . .”

“On the contrary. I feel very complimented.”

“
Bueno
.” Lorena tells me I should not let the children take swimming lessons at the public pool in the park. They do not put enough chemicals in the pool. The children will become sick again. Jimmie has already been sick once—maybe he got it from the pool. There are too many rough children there, too. José has told them how other children jump in the pool, big boys, not looking where they are jumping. She and the others are afraid the children will be injured. Many Cuban mothers do not send their children to that pool anymore, nor to any public pool.

The children and I go to the countryside with Miguel to get food to feed the swimming-pool construction workers.

Construction on our swimming pool will start soon. Cubalse, the state conglomerate, that's supposed to provide all construction materials and do all construction work (supplying workers who are paid the equivalent of two dollars a day) has given an estimate of $40,000 for the construction of a pool. An independent contractor has given an estimate of $11,000. We don't know how much the independent contractor is paying his workers, but he reduced the price by $1,000 when we told him that we would provide the workers with a good lunch every day.

We don't know if it is completely legal to do work with an independent contractor. It seems to be the kind of thing that you are not supposed to ask. We got the name of the contractor through a series of whispered conversations at the school gate and notes written back and forth between me and other families who have installed pools. The contractor talks to me sotto voce even in our own garden. Trucks slide in and out with materials, workers looking both ways past the gate as they move through it. Still, there is always a guard at the gate, provided, as all employees are provided, by a state agency. The help presumably continue to make their reports. Digging is going to involve jack-hammers, which are not exactly discreet.

Building the pool means fifteen for lunch every day, counting the pool people, our regular help, and now Walter, an upholsterer who has moved in with his sewing machine and has been working in the attic on slipcovers and cushions for one month.

Miguel says that his neighbor, the plumber, doesn't have any more pigs. Miguel then tells us that his family has a farm near Matanzas and that we can get what we need for the lunches—pigs, chickens, lambs, turkeys—from them. Later, when the plumber is actually
at
our house, Manuel calls me aside and says that Miguel has
said
the plumber didn't have another pig, when the plumber actually
does
have a nice, fat pig. Manuel says he doesn't understand it. Cubans usually help one another . . .

LOS TIEMPOS DIFÍCILES REVELAN LO MEJOR DE CADA UNO
(Difficult times bring out the best in people), reads a sign on the road to Miguel's family's farm.

I laugh. Miguel laughs, too.

Some have said that if we feed the workers, the work will go faster because they will not have to go out to look for lunch. Others have said that if we feed them, the work will go on longer, and the better the food is, the longer they will stay.

Nick asks Miguel the day before we are supposed to go if it is legal or illegal to go into the countryside and buy food directly from a family. Miguel says there is no problem. Nick says he wants to be sure that it isn't a problem with—he doesn't know who—the People's Power, the Committee for the Defense of the Revolution, the Martyrs of the Twenty-sixth of July . . .

“There will be no problem. My cousin's father-in-law's brother's wife's uncle is a vice-secretary of the Communist Party of the region.”

It's been raining since we left Havana. The Toyota Land Cruiser dives into mud holes and out again with a sucking sound. Farmworkers file by under the rain, wearing garbage bags, the corners pointy on their heads.

We stop the car and remove the jar with Charlotte in it. We walk through a fallow field to a stand of trees and bushes. We open the lid, put the bottle on the ground. Charlotte remains in the bottle. We tilt the jar up. Charlotte slides out onto the dirt. She gazes at a tuft of waving grass and disappears around a large clod. “Good-bye, Charlotte! Have a good life!” Thea and Jimmie and I call after her. We get back in the car.

From the windows of the Land Cruiser, we look into
guajiros'
(farmers') houses—dark rooms with curtains (which serve as doors) blowing into them, babies scrabbling on floors.

We pass through a provincial town, its elegant square ringed by colonnaded buildings, the stores under the colonnades empty, and at last come to the luxuriant hollow where the ten brothers and sisters of Miguel's family live, in scattered houses.

Kisses on both cheeks for the children and me in front of the first house we come to, from a blue-eyed, narrow-faced uncle, his wife, and three blue-eyed, narrow-faced teenage children.

Turquoise walls and a kitchen counter of powder blue and yellow tiles, a single cold-water tap. A 1950s refrigerator painted turquoise. In the living/dining room, a solid neo-Gothic caoba sideboard, a table with six chairs, and some rocking chairs, and off one bedroom, a bathroom with a real door.

The toilet has no seat, the lid is off the tank, and inside the tank there is no mechanism left, just a tin can covering a pipe end. Some paper napkins are produced to serve as toilet paper and are placed discreetly beside the toilet by one of Miguel's cousins before I shut the door. The lower part of the bathroom door has a lacework of holes in it made by termites, so that I can peer through to the bedroom (from which all family members have withdrawn, to give me greater privacy) as I crouch over the seatless bowl.

My eyes fix on the paper napkins serving as toilet paper perched on the lid of a plastic trash can nearby. They are very good quality paper napkins—two ply, with tiny shells embossed in the corners. Delsey. They are the kind you can't find in Cuba. They are the kind we brought in our shipment from Southeast Asia.

I find myself wondering how Miguel, who is loath to drive his 1957 Buick to Guanabacoa (five miles outside of Havana), let alone to Matanzas (seventy-five miles away) or his family, who have no visible means of transportation, were able to get the napkins all the way from the
despensa
to here.

In the yard outside the house, pigs, chickens, lambs, ducks, turkeys, a garden of roses and mariposa lilies. Papaya, peanut, yucca, avocado. Our children follow Miguel's cousins on planks through the mud, play with sticks, chase chicks, and peer through the planks of a nearby shed at a black Canadian sow with twelve piglets at her teats. I sit in a rocker on the veranda, admiring meat on the hoof and claw. Nothing like paying through the nose at the Diplo for a scrawny chicken to make you look at a barnyard and drool.

It's too wet to kill a pig, they say. They have to boil water under a big pot outside to scald the pig after it's been killed, and it's too wet to build a fire. We agree on a lamb. Their chickens are too small. We will have to ask another uncle or aunt for chickens. Off we go in the Land Cruiser to ask at one house after another of blue-eyed, narrow-faced people, whose ancestors came from Asturias, in northwestern Spain. More houses with wonderful color sense, red coffee beans, sacks of unhusked rice, cherries and corn fermenting to make wine, peanut butter fudge from their own peanuts. The children, tired now, refuse to get out of the car, but the relatives keep pressing peanut butter fudge on us, so I pass the fudge to Thea and Jimmie through the car window. I am embarrassed by the children's inertia and by the size of the Land Cruiser. “Must consume a lot of gas,” the relatives speculate. One cousin, a doctor, asks me how much a car like that costs. “About twenty thousand dollars,” I lie. Another cousin, a very young engineer who is studying English, asks me if it is true that in the United States, people can do what they want to do.