Cuba Diaries (15 page)

“What exactly do you mean?” I ask.

“Anything. You can do anything. There is freedom . . .”

Ten pairs of blue eyes are on me.

“There are not the controls that there are here. But there is not the social safety net that there is here, either. In the United States, you are free to succeed, but you are also free to fail.”

The engineer considers this. There is an approving murmur around me.

We branch out in our search for chickens. We even go to a non–family member. “Everyone takes their chickens to Varadero, to the tourist hotels,” it is explained to us. A man in an olive green uniform with red epaulets jumps behind a tree as we pass. I wonder if headlines in tomorrow's
Granma
will read
EXECUTIVE'S YANKEE WIFE CAUGHT BUYING ILLEGAL CHICKENS
. We find an aunt who has another fat lamb. The shuttling around works out perfectly because while we are away from the first uncle, they kill that lamb, and then, as we are returning to him, the aunt kills her lamb. The first uncle serves us lunch—one of the bigger chickens, black beans, rice, avocado, fried bananas. I serve Jimmie chicken. “You mean they had to kill a chicken for our lunch?” Jimmie asks.

“I think they bought it in the supermarket,” I lie.

The headless lambs, as big as medium-sized dogs, are placed in black plastic garbage bags and stacked on the floor of the front seat, between Miguel and me. The children are too bored by the rain to be inquisitive. Peanuts, we take also, as well as avocados, limes, and yuccas; Miguel will return in two days for the chickens and a pig, after the weather has gotten better and the pig can be scalded and fat chickens located. The peanuts and other foods are piled on top of the lambs in the front seat because the children have taken over the space in the back, sprawled on cushions, listening to tapes. “It's a big, big world,” their song goes. They sing along.

I think of how even though there is lamb in the
agropecuario
, it is out of the reach of most Cubans, and I wonder if when we serve lamb for the first swimming-pool construction workers' lunch, it will be the first time some of them will have eaten lamb in years. I don't know why I am enjoying planning the swimming-pool construction workers' menu so much. I don't know why it causes me so much pleasure, imagining the swimming-pool workers' reactions to the food we will serve them, but it does.

I think, also, of how much better off Miguel's family will be with the thirty-five dollars they have been paid for everything so far, and with the money they will be paid for the pig and the chickens, and about how much more prosperous they will probably always be than the
guajiros
in the houses we passed on the way here, because of connections, planning, coordination, and a solid family network.

I start to think, also, about the Delsey napkins showing up there beside the toilet, then decide not to think about them anymore.

Alexis Esquivel lives in a small porticoed house in the Vedado with his
marinovia
(a Cuban word combining the word for spouse,
marido
, with
novia
, the word for fiancée, meaning a live-in girlfriend) María del Carmen, a psychologist, and her daughter, a psychology major at the university. Alexis looks to be in his late twenties. María del Carmen doesn't look over thirty, but her daughter is twenty-one, so María del Carmen has got to be at least in her late thirties. Alexis is a good-looking, light-skinned black man with dreadlocks, his girlfriend is even lighter, and her daughter, with straight blond hair and blue eyes, could be German. An old lady, entirely Spanish-looking, enters the house. “This is my great-grandmother,” Maria del Carmen's daughter says. We sit in rocking chairs in a circle under a single fluorescent tube.

It is a jumble of colors, Cuba at its best, and of ages—copper-colored skin showing not a wrinkle, people having gone through the joy and pain of having children almost without a trace.

Hanging on the wall is a plaster bas-relief head of Fidel as a red Indian, smoking a cigar. All around the room there are paintings for an upcoming exhibition,
Hysteria del Arte
, to be shown at Vasquez's gallery-cum-paladar.

We wonder if Vasquez will be able to put the paintings up without a problem. There's the Karl Marx–Groucho Marx painting again, back from the same gallery but returning to it. Another painting is of Marat, murdered this time in a baroque purple bathtub with
IN GOD WE TRUST
engraved on the side of it. Intravenous tubes come from his fallen arm, held by tiny, frolicking female nudes. Behind him, Robespierre talks on a cellular phone in a business suit, crowned by mystic symbols—the Masonic pyramid with an eye on top of it and the Star of David, among them. Marx hovers near them, in a lotus position.

Alexis shows us a folder of photos of earlier paintings. One shows Alexis as a newborn baby being looked at by Fidel (once again in Indian headdress), John Wayne, and Brezhnev. Its title is
The Adoration of the Magi
.

I ask Alexis, María del Carmen, and her daughter if there is a natural impulse among psychologists in Havana or in Cuba to analyze people in the government.

Alexis says young people are mainly interested in psychology because they feel crazy themselves these days. They were educated to believe one thing, and now there are many different messages coming at them. María del Carmen's daughter says that all their psychology texts used to be translations of Russian texts, but now they study the writings of the North American Carl Rogers. There is only one book per class. The whole class shares it.

Work on the swimming pool begins. The workers set up a board on saw-horses in the garage for a dining table. We serve lamb for the first meal. One worker says he has not eaten lamb since Easter of
1958
.

THE DIGGERS ARRIVE
. The hole for the swimming pool will be dug by hand because the gate is too narrow to get heavy equipment through. Heavy equipment would also destroy the lawn.

The diggers are not how I thought they would be. I have been expecting four or five muscular young men—brown or white, like coiled springs—but instead I see only a pair of slender, elegant, jet-black men. There is something about their skin, too, that is not the way I thought it would be: it has a papery quality, and it sags a bit, under their shoulder blades and from their pectorals. A few sprigs of white hair on their chests, and many white sprigs on their heads. They are old, I realize. About fifty-five. It is strange for the engineer to have sent old guys when there are so many young men needing work.

I do not want to watch them work. I am afraid they will have heart attacks in the heat.

MUNA TELLS ME THAT
Manuel has told her that one of the diggers—the shorter one—is seventy-two.

I am appalled: grandfathers jackhammering all day long under the sun in our backyard! I start planning the speech I will make to the contractor when he shows up. The estimated two weeks to finish digging is of course a complete lie.

I spy on them from my lookout post on the second floor as they work. They are very efficient. The hole now big enough for both of them to stand in, the taller one jackhammers a chunk of rock off like a piece of Parmesan cheese, and the shorter one shovels it out. A sewer line, a water line, and an electrical cable have been revealed. Rougher young men would have broken them.

The diggers sit in the shade, smoking cigars. The word
edad
(age) is mentioned—I don't know by whom. The shorter digger squints up at me in my lookout post. “How old do you think I am?” he asks.

“Um . . . fifty-five?”

“
Gracias
,” he says, “I was born in 1921.”

The taller one says, “And I was born in 1928.”

“
Felicidades
,” I say.

“
Gracias
,” they say.

Suddenly everything seems OK to me, I don't know why.

There are two basic kinds of Negroes in Cuba, Lety tells me in a combination of English and Spanish:
negros de pasas
(Negroes with raisins) and
negros de pelo
(Negroes with hair).
Negros de pasas
are black people or brown people with kinky hair.
Negros de pelo
are black people or brown people with straight or wavy hair. To be
un negro de pelo
in Cuba is to get the best of both worlds. “
Ay, qué hermosa (o hermoso) es esta negra (o negro) de pelo
” (“Oh, how beautiful is this negress [or negro] with hair”), people say, sighing. Foreigners, too, love
negras de pelo
. “Italian and German men are
locos
for
negras y mulatas de pelo
. They are
locos
for them
una barbaridad
(a barbarity, meaning very much).” Lety says, shaking the fingers of one hand. “They see them and they want to marry them and take them out of Cuba right away! They are fascinated by them. They look good in their apartments, in,
yo no sé
(I don't know) . . . Frankfurt.
Los norteños
(men of the North), they can't get a tan, but they want to
look
at a tan. It's like having sunshine in their houses.
Ay
, being
una negra de pelo
in Cuba is as good as having a visa to Canada or western Europe, guaranteed. And being
una negra
with blue eyes”—Lety shakes her fingers again, like they have been scalded—“when the girl turns fourteen, people say, ‘El
norteño
is coming,
chica
, pack your bags!'”

Then in addition to the
negros de pelo
and
negros de pasas
categories, Lety says, there are skin-color gradations:
Leche con una gota de café, leche con café, café con leche, café con una gota de leche, negro, muy negro, negro azul, negro trompudo, negro azul y trompudo
(milk with a drop of coffee, milk with coffee, coffee with milk, coffee with a drop of milk, black, very black, blue black, thick-lipped black, blue thick-lipped black), so that a medium-brown black person with kinky hair, for example, would be
un café con leche y pasas
.

There are two basic kinds of
blancos
, Lety says.
Un blanco
is a blond- or light-brown-haired person with blue or green or gray eyes. “
Pero
if a
blanco
has dark hair, or has dark eyes,” Lety says, grimacing slightly, bobbing her head, and holding one hand out in front of her, which she tilts one way, then the other, “
eso no es un blanco. Es un blanquito.”

NICK COMES HOME
with the news that a new person has been placed in charge of the council of plastic arts, a woman named Ruiz, who has issued a statement declaring that artists can no longer paint nudes, Fidel, or symbols of national sovereignty.

Coming back from the
agro
on this November Sunday in our car, Manuel, who usually never says anything to me about his personal life, tells me that he and his
mujer
(woman or wife) have been living nearby, in the home of an elderly doctor, for more than fifteen years. Last year, the doctor died. The doctor, who had no family, left the house to them, but Manuel says that he is worried because the house is in a good neighborhood, and houses in good neighborhoods are often taken over by the government for the
nomenklatura
. Manuel says that when that happens, he will go to the United States.

Manuel is fifty-five.

I ask Manuel if he has any family in the United States. He says he doesn't.

I tell Manuel that life can be very difficult in the United States. It's hard to get a job, and there's no guaranteed universal health care, as there is in Cuba.

“But in the United States, there is liberty,” Manuel says.

Nick has told me to always be careful.

“There is liberty,” I say, “but you could end up on the street, in the worst of cases.”

We arrive home. Manuel gets out of the car to open the gate.

I park my car in Habana Vieja. I make sure to have only one dollar in my purse, as I am alone. A young man starts to follow me.

“Do you want to buy some cigars?”

“No, thank you.”

“Can I wash your car?”

“No.”

“Would you like to buy a T-shirt with Che on it?”

“No.”

“Can I have
una fula
(a dollar)?”

“No.”

“Do you want a boyfriend? Just for tonight, though . . .”

“
I do not want a boyfriend!
” I yell, standing on the curb. People at a nearby café turn and look at me. The young man scuttles away.

Lety says that
realmente
(really), for average Cubans, things were not so bad in the seventies and eighties. “There was a lack of freedom, true, people couldn't travel, and there was Cuba's involvement in the internationalist campaigns, which no one understood. Still, on three hundred pesos a month, people could buy what they needed, they could go out a couple of times a week, they could take taxis. Each profession had its
círculo
, or club, with a tennis court, a swimming pool, a little bar. It was a limited life, but people were happy. There were not that many things available to buy, and there was no variety and not very good quality, but still,
no fue tan malo
(it wasn't so bad).”

WE GO TO ALEXIS'S
exhibition at Vasquez's gallery-cum-paladar. The gallery has just been filmed by CNN for a special on Cuban
paladares
. The paintings we saw in Alexis's studio are now on the walls. We ask Vasquez if anything happened. In a quiet voice he tells us that someone from the Ministry of Culture appeared and “invited” him to remove the paintings from the walls, but here they are, still on the walls. He says it was very good that CNN had been in the gallery a few days before.