Cuba Diaries (17 page)

It also means few Cuban tenants. They are removed when a building is restored and are generally not permitted to move back in again. To this end, the buildings are usually restored not as living spaces but as boutiques selling items Cubans can't afford and foreigners can buy cheaper and better at home, or bleak, expensive, empty bars, or bad, expensive restaurants, or offices for the joint-venture foreign capitalists the government thinks will come, lured by 51-percent-for-the-Cuban-government, 49-percent-for-them deals. Most restored offices so far are empty. The effect is one of a stage set depicting a central business district, but without businesses—real businesses, of the kind that compete with one another and with a local middle class being allowed.

It also means Eusebio Leal. Now in his fifties, Eusebio Leal is the self-taught
historiador de la Ciudad de La Habana
. First known for his compelling historical television lectures using Havana buildings or neighborhoods as his starting point, Leal awakened average Cubans to the beauty and significance of the architecture of their
pre-triunfo
urban heritage and (it is said) single-handedly convinced Fidel of the importance of not letting Habana Vieja rot into the ground. Before the emergence of Leal, there was a tendency to portray whole stretches of Cuba's pre
-triunfo
past as a kind of dark ages, in which nothing of cultural significance was achieved. So inspiring and effective was Leal that he was permitted to found an entire corporation for the restoration of Old Havana, Habaguanex, which he runs with the assistance of various foreign partners; and if some of the buildings are tacky on the inside, if the streets are sterile, and if it's suspected, at least in Miami, that Leal has gotten rich restoring Old Havana, he is at least doing
something
.

Eusebio Leal wears a blue
guayabera
during the day, but at night he wears a black suit, with a black tie, as if in mourning. He has worn a black suit and tie for years, he says, and will wear it for many years more.

A miniskirted all-girl Cuban chamber-music group, the Camerata Romeu—all of them very young and very good looking—stride like panthers onto the stage of the seventeenth-century Church of San Francisco. The deconsecrated church, with its elongated Catalan vaults permitting a wide nave, is well suited to concert music. The sacristy was destroyed in the eighteenth century by the English, who used the church as a powder magazine during the brief period they occupied Havana. The domed sacristy has not been rebuilt, but its interior is tastefully depicted in trompe l'oeil on the church's back wall. Unlike other buildings restored by Habaguanex, deconsecrated churches and convents are generally well restored on the inside as well as on the outside. A dull terracotta tile floor is in perfect keeping with the church's austere elegance.

The musicians are followed by their conductor, Zenaida Castro Romeu, very young also, miniskirted, with buzz-cut hair. All the music we will hear, Ms. Romeu announces, is by Cuban composers. The first two pieces are played well, but it is hard to tell that there is anything Cuban about them. The last two pieces, though, one by Lecuona and one by Lopez-Gavilan, really swing. In the Lopez-Gavilan piece, the players drum an Afro-Cuban beat on the backs of the violins and bass. The crowd applauds mightily. The group plays many encores. I find myself missing friends, wishing they could all be with me in the Church of San Francisco, listening, too. I find myself thinking, too, about how little there is in Cuba that is just so-so: it's either totally
dispiriting, or just so wonderful that I want to have all our friends from all over the world instantly at our side:
Listen to this! Look at this! Smell this!

ABOARD THE CRUISE SHIP
, Mrs. Costa, the wife of the owner of the Costa line, approaches our dinner table, which is dotted with empty places, and with a perplexed and embarrassed air explains sotto voce to Nick and me that she is sorry, but that many Cuban officials did not say whether they were coming or not, even though “RSVP” was clearly written on the invitations. Then, to the whole table, Mrs. Costa says in an apologetic voice that she would like to move us to another table, to fill it.

In his speech, Mr. Costa refers to today's date, December 2, the date of the disembarkation of Fidel from the boat
Granma
(now in its own special house behind the Museum of the Revolution—a reproduction, for the original one fell apart—
Granma
was sold to Fidel in Mexico by an American who was evidently fond of his grandmother) onto the island of Cuba to begin the decisive struggle against Batista (the Cubans make approving noises), as a propitious date for the arrival of the first cruise ship to Havana in thirty-eight years (more approving mumbles).

At the end of the dinner, the waiter circulates, taking orders for coffee. We have just given the order at our table when the minister of transportation rises and starts shaking hands. All the other Cubans rise, as if on cue, and start shaking hands. “They're leaving
now?
Before we've had our
coffee
?” Mrs. Costa says under her breath. They file past us, a blur of tight green uniforms. Mrs. Costa, who is sitting in their path, pushes herself in her chair as close to the table as she can get in order to let them get by. She looks at us wide-eyed, holding her breath.

“Keep them dogies movin',
rawhide!
” a middle-aged Canadian businessman sings.

The opening of the seventeenth annual New Latin American Film Festival at Karl Marx Theater. There's a red carpet in front of the main entrance. Two doormen in white uniforms with gold braid on their shoulders open the doors of the cars of the arriving guests, while celebrity watchers gape behind velvet ropes. In the lobby, a television anchorman interviews celebrities as they arrive. This is simultaneously shown on a TV screen in the theater. The cavernous theater, however, is poorly lit and smelly, and the
red carpet and the red plush on the seats are worn in most places to dull black. A Chinese diplomat dozes on my shoulder. The dim lights dim further. There is a ballet skit. People in turn-of-the-century costumes. They dance here and there, eventually settling into some turn-of-the-century theater seats. A small screen descends. A silent movie is projected onto the screen. It shows scenes of Havana in about 1915. We see a bustling neighborhood of elegant shops and well-dressed people. There are electric streetcars and lots of automobiles. We wonder what the organizers of the film festival are trying to do, showing a spiffy Havana.

Alfredo Guevara (no relation to Che), head of the Instituto Cubano del Arte y de la Industria Cinematográfica, or Cuban Film Institute, a soft, pale, fragile-looking man, addresses the audience. He hails the festival as a Dionysian and Apollonian event.

People in the audience lean forward, their faces straining. I wonder if it's because they are trying, as I am, to remember what
Dionysian
and
Apollonian
mean. I wonder, too, if it's because they are trying to figure out, as I am, what
it
means, someone close to Fidel giving a speech about opposing Greek gods.

The film—
Put Your Thought in Me
—is the first work by a young filmmaker whom Guevara is said to be in love with. It is a story of Jesus in a kind of semi-Renaissance time into which the modern age intrudes in the form of bicycles, eyeglasses, guys in Batista-era white linen suits and two-tone shoes. There are borrowings from Fellini, from Buñuel, from Terry Gilliam. Suddenly, Christ is in a motorcade and is shot, like Kennedy.

After the film, Nick and I say to some Cuban acquaintances, who are walking with us to the same parking lot, that we probably would have appreciated the film more if we were Cuban and were able to understand all the references, but the Cubans say they thought the film was very bad, too.

We'd like to know what the films of the film festival will be, where they will be shown, and when, but the organizers of the film festival cannot publish an accurate schedule more than a day ahead of time because they are never sure whether a film they have ordered will arrive in time, or at all, and then, even after the schedule is published, there are always changes at the last minute and unscheduled blackouts.

On a slow evening in early December, Nick and I escape the children and go downtown to a
paladar
that we were shown by a roving
paladar
guide the
week before. We have gotten used to it by now, being led by young men down dark alleys. This one is a
paladar
we think visitors will like because you have to go through a garage to get to it, but before we take anyone there, we want to check out the food.

A guide tells us that he thinks the
paladar
is closed. We cannot believe him.
Paladares
are always open. He knocks on the door. The owner appears. The
paladar
is closed, he says, because the two children of a couple who worked there have been murdered, strangled by a maniac in Pinar del Río (a city more than a hundred miles to the west of Havana) and left in a restaurant refrigerator along with the bodies of four other children, who were also strangled. The couple had left the children in Pinar del Río with their grandparents and had come to work in Havana to make some money.

Nick and I don't feel like eating anymore, but we don't feel like going home, either. We end up standing outside a state-run restaurant that calls itself an Arab restaurant. It is in a lovely colonial building with a cool, beautiful courtyard, and there is a menu outside with the words
hummus
and
tabbouleh
and
falafel
written on it, and there
are
forty thousand people in Cuba who consider themselves of Syrian or Lebanese origin—
Turcos
, they are called, because their forebears immigrated to Cuba when the Ottoman Empire still existed.

They have no hummus. The tabbouleh, when it comes to the table, consists of carrots, peas, and potatoes. The falafel turns out to be hamburger and fried chicken. The main course is supposed to be meat, but it is unidentifiable. There are some Egyptian paintings on the walls and a couple of dirty rugs on the floor. A belly dancer comes out and shakes some bells on her waist, disconsolately, to canned music.

IN
GRANMA
, AN ARTICLE
describes how six children were found dead in a refrigerator, but there is no mention of a maniac or strangling.

We go to see an Italian movie, part of the film festival. We are invited by the Italian ambassador and his American wife, Carey.

The director of the film and an actor in the film get up and talk before the show. The movie is called
The School
and the director says, very sheepishly, that unlike Cuban schools, Italian schools have a lot of problems and the film is about that.

Carey tells me about letters her husband receives from Italian men in Cuban prisons: “Mr. Ambassador, I am being unjustly imprisoned. True, I knew she was fourteen, but I had a business relationship with her aunt . . .” She tells me about Italian wives who call or write the embassy from Italy. “I thought I knew my husband. We have been happily married for eighteen years, or so I thought, but my husband went on a business trip to Cuba, saying he would return in two weeks. That was two months ago, and he still hasn't returned. Every time I call him and ask him when he will be returning, he is evasive . . .”

In the film there's a reference to Italian students making a long-distance call to Fidel Castro with a message of support.

Carey says the problem with a lot of the male Italian tourists is that they fall in love. They fall in love and throw themselves heart and soul into getting Italian visas to remove Cuban girls from Cuba, a country they purportedly admire, but with a crusading vigor spurred (the men sometimes confess) by a desire to “save” the girls from Cuba. It's confusing. Carey says you can see the girls they fall in love with standing on the median strip in front of the embassy every morning—stacked heels on the ends of pacing, endless legs have destroyed the grass and carved a kind of bowl in the dirt—with striving Italian men of all ages next to them in Che Guevara T-shirts.

Carey says the problem is that a lot of the male tourists are ready to fall in love before they even get to Cuba: all Cuban girls have to do is nudge them over the edge.

A directive has been issued to all ministries, banning Christmas trees in all government offices. It's a pagan tradition, the directive says. Then, confusingly, the directive also says it's a way for the church to assert its power.

It's a fight, it is generally agreed, between the orthodox and the not-so-orthodox while Fidel is in China.

I ASK LETY ABOUT
the Tienda de los Novios (the Store of the Fiancés). Nick and I have passed one on Avenida Galliano many times, and we have seen others around the city. Lety explains that engaged couples are allowed to shop in the Tienda de los Novios between the time of their application for a marriage license and the wedding ceremony. They are given a
papelito
(little paper) allowing them to buy from the
tienda
, for half price,
basic home items, many of which are often not available in regular stores. They are allowed to buy two sheets and two pillowcases; two towels; an electric fan; glasses, plates, bowls, cups, and saucers for four; assorted pots and pans; a set of kitchen spoons; a spatula; two night tables; a broom; a dust mop; and some brushes.

Then the engaged couple can go with another
papelito
to the specialized
bodeguita
of their barrio (neighborhood) for bread for sandwiches, cake, beer, rum, ice, and soft drinks. They are also given, following their marriage, two free honeymoon nights in selected hotels.

Lety tells me engaged couples are given
tienda
and
bodeguita
privileges no matter how many times they may have been married before. Five, six, seven times, it doesn't matter—she doesn't know why. She says some
locos
get married just for the sheets, the beer, and the free honeymoon nights.