Cuba Diaries (16 page)

TWO X——IAN COMMUNISTS
come for dinner. They say they are shocked—
shocked
—by the condition of Havana, by the low level of intellect of many of the officials they have met, by their lack of information, by the outright senility of some of the older officials. They say that a dissident they met—a Communist who called for reform in the party—had his telephone disconnected immediately after their visit and was called in by the political police. They ask us what these people think they are trying to do.

We have watched Fidel earlier in the evening on CNN, wearing a dark blue, double-breasted business suit, having cocktails in New York with U.S. businessmen and journalists.

We tell the X——ians we don't know what these people are trying to do.

WE HEAR THAT VASQUEZ'S
gallery-cum-paladar has just been closed by the police.

Moles are appearing on Thea's back and neck, and some of them growing quite large. There is one on the edge of her hand, too, which is very black.

Dr. Silvia says she can take us to the greatest skin doctor in Cuba, Dr. Millares Cao. Dr. Millares Cao is world renowned for treating for vitiligo and psoriasis. People come from all over the world to the clinic he runs. There are days for foreigners, who have to pay, and there are days for Cubans. We will go on one of the days for Cubans, of course: Dr. Silvia will use her pull. I tell Dr. Silvia we really don't mind paying, but she says there is absolutely no point in paying. We'll have to spend a little more time in the waiting room, that's all.

WE SPEND TWO AND
a half hours in the waiting room, Thea, Dr. Silvia, and I, with Thea missing school and Silvia apologizing. We play hangman, “I spy,” and twenty questions, and toss coins. We are finally ushered into the inner sanctum. Dr. Silvia moves ahead of us, talking about her pull and our pull.

Gnawed, stained, beige-gray wall-to-wall carpeting. Functioning air-conditioning. No natural light whatsoever, and lamps that are so dim that it takes us a while to make out the doctor, far off in a recess of the room, behind a big desk. A couple of people in white coats, flanking him. Some drooping rubber plants.

We approach the big desk. Dr. Millares Cao is scowling. Dr. Silvia called me after she called Dr. Millares Cao last night, and said that everything would be fine. Dr. Silvia is still talking, a barrage of words, about how important we all are. I feel like I am with my mother and I am twelve. At best, it's the people flanking him who are making Dr. Millares Cao scowl: Dr. Millares Cao
has
to look annoyed to be seeing foreigners on a Cuban day, in case one of the people in white coats should talk.

In my halting Spanish, I tell the doctor about the moles of Thea's that worry me.

Still seated behind his desk, he asks me to take off Thea's shirt.

I look for an examining table; I wait for a light to go on. No light goes on. The doctor stays seated behind his desk, about eight feet away from Thea, still in semidarkness.

I turn her back toward him, show him the constellation of moles there.

“
Normal
,” he says.

I turn her to face him, show him the moles on either side of her neck, just under her jaw.

“
Normal
.” He doesn't even lean forward in his seat.

I show him the fleshy part of her hand, where a mole, very black, is growing out of unpigmented skin. I say that I heard it was the kind to watch.

“
Normal
.”

We slink out of the office. Dr. Silvia is sheepish.

I tell Dr. Silvia that the next time we see a specialist, we have to try to do it in another way.

Dr. Silvia nods.

WE HAVE AN EXCELLENT
dinner at Vasquez's gallery-cum-paladar. It's not closed at all. That was just a rumor, Vasquez explains.

Miguel calls me on the intercom, asks to see me in the upstairs hall.

His wife has fallen down and broken her leg. Broken her leg in the place where the cyst was removed. His mother stands behind him, biting her lips. He must take his wife to the hospital.

I tell them they can both go home immediately.

Embargo, who is female, and Bloqueo (Blockade), who is male, are now preadolescent. They are loping and rangy. I fear incest because of the babies they might produce, but most of all I fear them escaping to
jinetear
(cruise like a
jinetera)
on our
avenida
and getting run over by trucks.

Bloqueo
is what the U.S. embargo is sometimes called on billboard-sized slogans:
NO AL BLOQUEO ESTADOUNIDENSE
(No to the United States blockade), though a blockade is really when ships from one country surround another country and prevent all goods from getting into or out of that country. There was a U.S. blockade of Cuba, but it ended in 1962. Now there is just an embargo. Whatever it's called, we have named one cat Embargo and the other cat Bloqueo so we can say “No!” to either one of them when they scratch on the furniture.

I don't know how it happened, but I have gotten to be in my mid-forties without ever having been involved in the neutering of any animal.

Once again, the Cubans we talk to, even though it's only about cats, are adamant about our never going to a actual
clinic
. We are supposed to go
to a veterinarian who
works
in a clinic but then works after-hours in his home: these veterinarians are the ones who have access to medicines. The out-of-it, newly arrived foreigners who go to clinics, the Cubans we talk to say, are the same ones who buy five-dollar-a-pound tomatoes at the Diplo. I think of making the point that foreigners are more likely to walk off planes and buy tomatoes than they are to neuter cats, but I don't have the energy.

I make the rounds of veterinarians to find the most plausible one. One veterinarian lives in an apartment building on Calle 13 in Miramar in a three-room apartment he shares with his wife, daughter, and grandmother. He is taking a nap when we come in and wraps a chenille bedspread around himself for the interview. He shows us the room where he operates—the steel table is fairly clean looking, but there are bloodstains on the walls and on books in bookshelves lining other walls, which are festooned with cobwebs.

Another veterinarian lives in a spacious house in Lawton. He is a professor of veterinary medicine. He shows me the place where he will operate. It is in his living room, on a carved mahogany coffee table, next to a Louis XVI–style display case with porcelain lords and ladies in it. When I act surprised, he says he will cover the coffee table with a towel.

Another veterinarian works in a house not far from ours, with a front veranda that serves as a waiting room. There are other families waiting on the veranda, with pets. The veterinarian, it is explained to us, used to work in a state clinic but now works full-time on her own.

One patient after another is called. There is a consulting room and an operating room at the back of the house. The veterinarian greets us. She is a woman in her sixties, with tightly curled steel gray hair and glasses, wearing a white coat over a checked shirtwaist dress and light blue plastic clip-on earrings. She takes us into the operating room. The operating table is stainless steel and the room is clean. There are bottles of what look like disinfectant or medicine on the shelves. Syringes are sterilizing in a stainless-steel pan.

The door opens. In walks another woman in her sixties, with tightly curled steel gray hair, glasses of the same style, a white coat over a shirtwaist dress in the same checked pattern, and light blue plastic clip-on earrings.

“You are twins,” I say.

They nod together, smiling.

“And you're both veterinarians.”

“
Claro
,” they say in unison.

I tell them that I am new to neutering, but I have the notion that I don't want a lot of surgical violence being done on our cats.

They tell me—in unison—that the simplest thing would be to remove the womb of Embargo but leave her ovaries intact. That way she would still have her sexual desire . . .

I jump in without waiting for them to finish. “And we should leave the . . .”—I search for the polite word—“
testiculos
of Bloqueo, and that way they can have sex together and won't need to go out on the street.”

They nod, smiling. “
Eso es
.”

We take Embargo and Bloqueo out of the laundry basket we have brought them in. The veterinarians say Embargo is too young yet and that I should wait to have her ovaries removed until after her first heat.

“How will I know when Embargo goes into heat?”

“You will know.”

Ivan is the other Cuban I can relate to at the firm, besides our Elegguá. Ivan is in his early thirties, with a small red goatee and a receding hairline. He's called Ivan because he was born at a time when Russia was really popular. He lives with his parents and a son Jimmie's age, whom Jimmie and Thea play with sometimes. I don't know what happened to the son's mother. Ivan had the opportunity to go on his own to Miami, he said, but he couldn't leave his son. “There is nothing more important to me than my child,” he said simply, which of course hooked me right away. I don't know why only he had the opportunity to go to Miami, and not his son.

Ivan speaks Spanish, X——ian, colloquial American, French, German, and Russian. In addition to being the
conseguidor
of material things, Ivan is also the firm's technical
resolvedor
—of computers, telephones, and appliances. In a country of no yellow pages (nor of any telephone books whatsoever), this means that he knows who to call to fix what and, more important, that he knows when to cajole Cubalse repairmen, when to threaten them, when to show up at their places demanding service, and when to dangle the possibilities of cash rewards, rum, or food in front of them, or in front of their bosses, in order to get them to show up, and when to not struggle and just hire independent
cuentapropista
repairmen. Keeping after Cubalse repairmen is an art, but still it seems beneath Ivan's capabilities. It is assumed, therefore, that Ivan is an informer.

Ivan and I spend a lot of time in cars, going to see repairmen and appliance dealers.

“Did you see that
jine?
”

“My God . . .”

“And no support garments.”

“No support garments whatsoever.”

“How do they keep them up?” I know, but I want to hear him explain it.

“It's latex spandex. It squeezes them so tight they have no place to go.”

“If they went around like that in X——ia, or even in the United States . . .”

“Oh,
señora
, you don't know the half of it . . .”

“It's sad,” I say after a while.

“Cuba is
very sad
. . .”

Ivan studied computers in East Germany, but that's the only foreign place he says he's ever been. He has lots of foreign friends, though, he says. That's how he is able to speak so many languages and see Cuba with more . . .

“Detachment?” I ask, completing Ivan's sentence.

“
Eso es
. Detachment.”

I want to believe, but I know it's impossible, that Ivan learned so many languages and his detachment simply from talking to foreign friends.

We are invited to the opening of the terminal for the first cruise ship to enter Havana harbor in thirty-eight years. The ship, of the Italian cruise-ship line Costa, is due tomorrow.

We drive to one of three terminals at which ferries from Miami and Key West used to dock. All three terminals were completely dilapidated. Costa restored the terminal to which its cruise ship will arrive tomorrow in only six months; the other two are still dilapidated. It has been renamed the Sierra Maestra, after the mountains from which Fidel began the revolution. On the outside, the terminal is a faithful restoration of early-twentieth-century Spanish-style industrial architecture. The inside of the terminal, however, has been made serviceable with aluminum-slat ceilings, rolled-on imitation parquet flooring, and cast-iron columns sheathed in ready-made aluminum tubes. Looking at the inside, it is easy to see how the restoration was accomplished in six months.

The
nomenklatura
—military, this time—stand before us in their uniforms
and small paunches. Fidel has declared that tourism must be developed. Fidel is in China. Raúl is not here, either. Speeches are made. Plaques are presented. The military men stand staring straight ahead, moving only to make a speech or to present or receive a plaque.

THE SEVEN-HUNDRED-FOOT-LONG
cruise ship sits at the terminal with every porthole and window lit. Festoons of lights have been strung from its central funnels to the bow and stern. In the streets and buildings around it are only feeble and occasional bits of light. People crowd the shore. It's as if the Magic Kingdom has been air-dropped in their midst.

Nick and I are reminded that what we first notice about the First World when we go back for our summer breaks and for quick shopping jaunts to Miami are all the
lights
.

We drive one block from the restored cruise-ship terminal to the newly restored church of San Francisco for a concert given in honor of the arrival of the cruise ship. The concert is to be followed by a dinner aboard the cruise ship.

The restored church sits in a restored plaza. A cruise ship's arrival means a restored terminal; a restored terminal means a restored plaza for tourists to walk to along restored streets. One restored plaza means more restored streets leading to a second restored plaza, and so on.

In Havana,
restored
usually means everything made nice on the outside. It means drainage and plumbing, reinstalled cobblestones, roofing, facades remade faithful to history, but interiors made serviceable (we assume because of cost restraints) with only the cheapest European materials. A restored building may be a seventeenth-century Spanish colonial baroque palace or an early-twentieth-century McKim, Mead, and White Renaissance-revival office building, bank, or club on the outside; but inside it usually looks like a low-rent office or apartment building in the suburbs of Milan.