Authors: Isadora Tattlin
“Who?” I say.
“Him.” She strokes her chin again.
“But how?”
“The army is dying of starvation.”
“Hm . . . ,” I say.
“How long have you been here?” she asks.
“We're into our second year.”
“How much longer will you be here?”
“Probably two more years.”
“I'm sure you will be here for his departure.”
We eat lobster salad, boneless chicken breasts, and a boneless leg of pork marinated in bitter orange and pan-roasted slowly with malt. French wine is served.
Margarita's husband speaks. “A foreign journalist said to me that the problem with Cubans is that they think the world spends all its time thinking about Cuba, but the world really does not think about Cuba very much. We think Cuba is important, but Cuba is not a very important country. Isn't that so?”
“Is this cold wave we're having good for the mango crop?” Nick asks.
More and more foreign firms are moving into Cuba. They take long leases from the government on mansions on Quinta Avenida and put up signs in front of them. They are buying shares in agricultural properties. Mansions in Cubanacán are being offered for sale, too, to any foreigner willing to put up a few million dollars.
Our tour of Pinar del RÃo, the capital of Cuba's westernmost province, begins near the main hospital. Near the entrance to the hospital, there is a big hole with steam shovels beside it. It is a project of tunnels and underground bunkers for Fidel and his commanders to hide in, in the event of a U.S. invasion. It is said that there are tunnels going all the way from Pinar del RÃo to Havana, 150 miles away.
The subject of the tunnels comes up. Are they to protect against Yankee aggression? I ask. Our Cuban guide confirms that they are. After a little while it comes up that I am
norteamericana
. It slips in very gently, though, and, as happens more often than not, causes not a ripple.
Felix, our Danish guide, whispers to me as we are walkingâa little bit ahead of the Cubansâthat he found no
anti-norteamericano
feeling in his work in Pinar del RÃo. He tells me that a local official told him that 40 percent of the population of Pinar del RÃo are
anexionistas
.
“
Anexionistas?
” I have never heard this term.
“In favor of annexation with the United States.”
I tell him I find that hard to believe, but he repeats to me that this is what a local official told him.
We visit a home of the Loynaz family, which is now a museum. Dulce MarÃa Loynaz is considered Cuba's greatest living lyric poet. She is in her late nineties and lives in Havana.
We visit a tobacco farm. It's the farmer's own family farm, from before
el triunfo
. He has been allowed to keep it. Tobacco farming requires great skill and care, so most tobacco farmers were able, following the nationalizations, to stay on their own farms. The farmer shows us the fields. He shows how they pick the leaves from the bottom first. He shows us the barns with the wrapping leaves. They are the most valuable. He stretches one over his hand. You can see his knuckles through it. It is like kid leather. He tells us that there is about $4 million worth of tobacco in the barn we are standing in, but he
has to sell it for what the state tells him to sell it for. We go into his house to drink a coffee. It is a better
guajiro
house than most; the pine studs and boards of the six-foot partitions, which serve as walls, are new. His son is there, but he is a doctor and has no interest in keeping the farm.
We go to a
paladar
âthe only one in Pinar del RÃo. The most important artist in Pinar del RÃo, Oliva, meets us there. He has a jutting jaw and a Mexican face. He shows us the art nouveau building he has been given by the government to have a gallery in, of
pinareño
artists. It will have an apartment for him, too, with his studio in back. He is optimistic; the cement on the walls of his new gallery space is smooth and new. He takes us to the studio where he has been working while the art nouveau building is being renovated. We see a painting he is working on, which is his response to
Guernica:
it is called
El Gran Apagón
(The Big Blackout).
We go to see other artists, then to the home of a man who I think is an artist, too, but when it comes to group movements and everyone is speaking Xââian, I am the last to know. The man is in his fifties, very
blanco
, with a refined, aquiline face; large, liquid eyes; long eyelashes; and abundant, slicked-down hair, like an actor of the 1930s. He is dressed entirely in white. Framed photos of him, in various lights and at various ages, dot a bureau and other surfaces.
The man asks us where we would like to be, in the living room or in the bedroom. I think he is going to show us some paintings, but then someone says, “Let's go into the bedroom.”
In the bedroom is a small, low table with some statues and candles on it. He stands in front of the table, lights a cigar, takes a few puffs, puts it on the edge of the table, takes a swig from a bottle of rum, spits it in a corner. He kneels down and starts talking into the ground, lightning fast, unintelligible. He asks me if I would like to know anything.
“Anything what?” I ask.
“About the future, of course!” Felix, Nick, and our Cuban guide say exasperatedly, in unison.
Later, on the street, I tell the others that I needed to be prepared, that they were all talking before we got there, in Xââian, in Cuban, and I didn't know what was going on. I didn't know we were going to see a
babalao
. The guy starts babbling. Everybody's standing around me. I can't ask a question with everybody standing around me. If I'd known, I would have prepared myself. I would have made a list of questions. I would have made everybody except Nick leave the room.
We end our tour at the home of our Cuban guide. Our guide lives with a female relative who is a dwarf. Our guide says that he has taken us to see many artists, but that he is an artist, too. He shows us his workâcompositions of sand in fanlike grid patterns, like spiderwebs, which have been glued onto Masonite panels measuring about nine inches by eleven inches. The gluey smell and the designs are slightly sickening, like Spider-Man comics leafed through in unaired boys' rooms.
He wraps some panels in copies of
Juventud Rebelde
for us to take home. He puts the panels into my hands, presses my hands around them.
There is a surprise tribute to Natalia Bolivar in Coyula Park, on the occasion of the launching of one of her new books on Santeria.
More police than people are here when we arrive. Loudspeakers are blaring disco at 10
A.M
. The weather is already steamy, but trees have not put out their leaves yet, so there is little shade. We are greeted by a kind-faced female friend of Natalia's who seems to be the mistress of ceremonies. We are seated in velvet chairs along with a handful of old bohemians/revolutionariesâpeople in their sixties and seventies who became disillusioned years ago but have not gone to Miami and have become involved in fields that have nothing to do with politics, such as anthropology, botany, and music.
In front of us is a shelter of poured cement with trees and grass sprouting from its roof, the top layer peeling up from the bottom, like the sole of an old shoe. A distinguished-looking, well-dressed woman in her sixties arrives. “Naty,” someone calls her. It is Naty Revuelta, ex-lover of Fidel and mother of his only daughter, Alina, who left for the United States and was joined later by her own teenage daughter, Naty's granddaughter. Naty and her then husband sheltered Fidel in their home in the early days of the revolution. I try not to stare, I am dying to tell Nick who she is, but I would have to raise my voice too much to be heard over the blaring disco music and she is too close to us. Her well-dressedness is a feast for the eyes in a sea of spandex, broken tennis shoes, cutoff plaid polyester dress pants, gauze-thin T-shirts, no bras, too tight
guayaberas
, and cowboy shirts with hairy tummies sticking through.
Naty looks angry. She approaches one of the officials of the Playa district, which is sponsoring the event: “It's ten o'clock in the morning! We are old people here! This is not Cuban musicâthis could be anything! We can't converse . . .”
It's the first time I've heard a Cuban complain about the musicâloud, blaring music in public places, designed to drive away anyone over twenty-five, except for besotted sexual tourists with their
jineteras
.
“But who loves this music?” I ask the official, emboldened.
“
I
certainly don't,” Naty says, “and I'm going.” And off she goes, Indian dress swinging, stupendous tanned legs striding in bone-colored pumps.
Natalia Bolivar arrives and is greeted with flowers. She thought she was just going to give a talk on her new book today. She didn't know anything about the tribute.
The testimonials begin. The woman who first greeted us speaks into the microphone. She looks down at the ground as she speaks, moving a chair out of the way, and we wonder at first if she is testing the mike, then realize that she is in the process of making a speech and introducing the various speakers.
The microphone is then handed to a man in his sixties wearing a tight cowboy shirt. He speaks about Natalia's
vida clandestina
as a teenage revolutionary, when she wielded a machine gun and was tortured by Batista's police. He speaks about her contribution to the revolution and about her subsequent contributions to the anthropology of Cuba. The ambassador of Nigeria is here, his mouth framed with tribal scars.
The man speaks for a very long time. Natalia leans against a tree, looking at the ground. When she shifts, the mass of necklaces on her chest shift with her. I recognize the colors of Ochún, the
orisha
of femininity and of rivers. Natalia, who, though no longer young, is still very beautiful, has been married many times. She is not married now and lives in an apartment in Vedadoâsome say with eight cats, others say with twelve, and still others, twenty, as well as many dogs and a
majá
(a small boa constrictor native to Cuba) who disappears for months into the walls of her apartment and then, just as unceremoniously, reappears.
The man is still talking. Adolescent girls in biking shorts, popping gum, skate down the center aisle and up onto the platform, oblivious. Wizened elderly people shuffle by on the periphery. Four small
mulato
boys with shaved heads, one with black sores and lumps on his head, in cutoff pants with broken flies held up with string, take four chairs in front, swinging their legs.
Ex-revolutionaries tend to tiptoe among the young so that they won't be asked questions like, “Hadn't you ever read
Animal Farm?
” This morning, though, they are not tiptoeing. They are telling us that they were involved, and I realize, as I watch them and listen to them, that
it is as hard to understand the fervor of another time as it is to understand Swahili in one day
.
A little boy burps. The man keeps talking. The hideous poured-cement structure, which he is wisely standing not under but rather in front of, in spite of the heat, looks like it is going to collapse at any minute. The sun is full on us now. Members of the audience pick their chairs up and move back, looking for new shade.
A NEWSCASTER DESCRIBES THE
massing of U.S. troops in Florida as a menacing act.
We sit up in our chairs, then remember: it's the shifting of the U.S. Southern Command to Florida.
May Day. A quarter of a million people parade. Nick and I watch it on TV.
The head of the student union speaks, and our Cuban baby-sitter, a recent university graduate filling in for Muna, who has gone on a visit to Bangladesh, says, “
Qué horror
,” and runs from the room. Pedro Ross, the president of the Central de Trabajadores, or Cuban Workers' Union, speaks. The camera catches Fidel making a widemouthed yawn as Pedro Ross speaks.
A diplomat who was at the parade tells us it was impressive, how they mobilized marchers through their jobs: if you didn't go, you risked losing your job or being demoted. He says the placards were evenly distributed, a picture of a national hero every hundred people or so, an antiâHelms-Burton slogan every two hundred. They also put the army in it, in plainclothes.
A man outside the
agro
asks Miguel if we would like to buy some eggs. He says they are $3.00 for a carton of thirty. In the Diplomercado, a carton of twelve costs $6.90. The man then indicates to Miguel the alley where we should meet him with the car.
We drive to the alley; Miguel gets out, walks to a high fence, stands on tiptoe, and whistles. The man with whom Miguel spoke and a woman emerge, carrying bags. We say we will buy four cartons. They ask if they can sit in the back of our car. Miguel starts the motor. “We have to go somewhere else, because here . . . ,” Miguel says.
They open their bags and start removing eggs as we drive. They have pieces of egg cartons; we have a hatchback. Miguel says they can set them up on the
shelf in the back of the hatchback. It is in full view of the window, but Miguel says it is no problem. We park on a shady side street. “We've come all the way from Artemisa,” the woman says, pulling eggs out of their bag. Artemisa is seventy-five miles away. “It was really difficult with all these eggs, riding in the back of a truck, trying to keep people from crushing them. The truck was stopped, but the police didn't look in our bags,
gracias a Dios
.”
Miguel keeps his eye on the rearview mirror. “We have to keep moving,” he says.
They can see things that I can't, and yet they keep setting eggsâ120 of themâup on the shelf in back, right in plain view.