Cuba Diaries (28 page)

“I don't see any point in staying here another night,” Nick says, his face gray atop the lumpy gray pillow.

Staying in less-than-two-star hotels in Cuba during the
periodo especial
, we realize, means passing below the rock bottom of comfort, to the point where involuntary abuse of guests begins.

We drive back to Havana the next day, stopping at a beach we have heard about, Playa Las Canas. We drive about fifty kilometers, then drive another eight on a deeply rutted road through a cow pasture dotted with royal palms. We come upon another former
campismo popular
, only one that is really abandoned this time. It is much more attractive than the Laguna Grande probably ever was. It is made of real palm-thatched huts, about thirty of them, spread out along a bay with not much beach but with a view of islands strung out along its entrance, all of them uninhabited. The huts have cement floors, which have buckled and crumbled. It is puzzling how in Cuba, when they build huts, they never build them on stilts, with wooden floors, as they are built in other tropical countries, but rather pour cement floors right on the
ground. The slip of beach goes on for several kilometers in both directions. Cows have eaten the grass behind the beach, so that it is like a lawn, dotted with dried cow patties. Shade trees arch conveniently over this lawn and over the beach as well, so that you can choose whether to picnic on shaded grass or on shaded sand.

Every place we hear of and then make an effort to see, we have been telling ourselves, is for future reference, for when friends come. We will take time, we have been telling ourselves; we will load the car with stuff; we will have a convoy, even. The future looks dimmer, though, with each unspoiled, unsqualid,
jinetera-free
place we find, as we contemplate the monumental effort involved in driving many hours and taking everything with us—gasoline, food, tent, grill, and a guard, or two guards, to spell each other—then spending at least two days (otherwise the monumental effort wouldn't be worth it) and in the end feeling ridiculous, with guards to watch our canned tuna, and lonely (we admit it now), even with friends.

Deserted places can be mysterious and exhilarating, or they can make you feel lonelier still; in Cuba, deserted places make you feel lonelier still. We have tried to feel exhilarated, coming to a gorgeous, deserted place, and proud of ourselves for having found it. “Think of how so-and-so would love to be here,” we say to each other, but it falls flat.

A
guajiro
is living in one of the more substantial huts. He is muscular and weather-beaten, in an army jacket with the sleeves ripped off, no shirt, and army shoes worn to a kind of leather latticework on top. His son is with him. We ask him how long the huts have been abandoned. He says they have been abandoned since last year. We say it looks like they have been abandoned for longer than that, and he says that a few people had been there the summer before, living in the huts that were in better shape. He says he's only been here two weeks. He asked the local Consejo del Poder Popular (literally, Council of the People's Power, or local Communist Party council) if he could live here, and they said he could, but he doesn't know how long he can stand it. Water is a big problem. He's requested the tank truck three times, and they've only come once. He says it's just his son and himself. He's been alone, he tells us, with his son since his son was born. The son is about fifteen, willowy, with doe eyes and bad acne. I feel that we are in a Hemingway story. We give them some canned tuna and some chocolate and a bottle of water. We wish them good luck. They wave at us as we drive away. I know I will think about them and about Playa Las Canas long after it becomes a Club Méditerranée.

We drive to the nearby town of Dimas to see if we can find some food
there—a
paladar
is too much to hope for, but we are hoping for an
agropecuario
or a stand selling
yucas rellenas
. We pass a low stucco building with
RESTAURANTE
written on the side of it with fluorishes. I go in. A woman stands behind an empty display case. She looks at me suspiciously. “Do you have any food?” I ask. “We only sell cigarettes,” she says. We drive to the shore, turn right, drive to the end of the street. “Let's get out and walk,” Nick says. “But where?” I ask. There is a military post in front of us. In back of us is a dock leading to a building. A cluster of men stand at the entrance to the dock. One of them seems to be a guard.

“Let's walk on the dock,” Nick says.

“They probably won't let us.”

Nick approaches the one who seems to be a guard. “Good morning. Can we take a walk on the dock?”

“
Es prohibido
.”

“
Ah, prohibido
. That is a word I hear very much in Cuba.”

The guard pushes himself up from the wall he's been resting on.

“What country are you from?”

“It is
prohibido
to tell you.”

“What country? Japan?”

I would like to stop, face him, and ask him if he really thinks we are from Japan or if he is kidding. Sometimes non-Asian people in really, really faraway places (once, in the mountains of Greece) have thought I was Asian because my eyes, though blue, are a little slanty and my hair, though brown, is dead straight. I want to ask him if he thinks people from Japan have blue eyes and brown hair, but Nick yells, “
Prohibido!
” over his shoulder at him as we move to the car.

Danila comes into my little room. She asks me if she can leave early. She was robbed the night before. She has to go to the police.

They took knickknacks from her shelves, she tells me. They unplugged the stereo but they didn't take it. Danila then says darkly that her husband was in the house drinking with a friend while she was at her mother's.

DANILA SAYS THE ROBBERY
was worse than she thought: they took her blender and her electric frying pan, too. Her voice is trembling. The police were at her house. They said it is odd that there was no sign of anyone
forcing his way in. Her husband was in the house drinking with a friend when the things disappeared, she tells me again.

Fidel gives a speech on television about the Clinton administration's recently published
Transition to Democracy
paper, which is a blueprint for Cuba's transition to a democratic system following the death or removal from office of the Castro brothers. Fidel calls Clinton an idiot for proposing it. Never in the history of the world, he says, has one country so blatantly meddled in the affairs of another country. He says the United States is the most racist, violent, discriminatory country in the world. “It discriminates against blacks, against women, against Hispanics, against . . .” He looks at the camera, searching. “Children,” he continues triumphantly.

A South American journalist sitting with us in the
despacho
bursts out laughing. “He is
really
having fun,” the journalist says.

LO NUESTRO ES NUESTRO
(What is ours is ours), reads the slogan on the billboard at the PabExpo traffic circle in Cubanacán.

Tight-fitting knee-high boots along the Malecón after dark now, and in the shadows of the street in back of the Meliá Cohiba Hotel, male
jineteros
in cutoff hot pants with bare midriffs, emerging from among the dead appliances and potted plants on front patios to flash their wares—hot pants hiked high, seams cutting into balls—in the seconds it takes for our lone headlights to pass. The hair is stringier, the scene harder than it was when we first got here: they are becoming pros.

We have gone to a play,
Te Sigo, Esperando
(“I Follow You, Hoping,” which can also mean “I Follow You, Waiting,” for the words for “hoping” and “waiting” are the same in Spanish). It is the first play we have seen about a real situation, not a “symbolic” play set in a vague time that the audience has to read things into and figure out. Here the only thing to figure out is how the play, written by a Cuban living in Cuba, got to be performed in the first place. The play is about families divided by emigration. It is about trying to get by on a minuscule salary and care for an aging parent. It is about how Cubans exploit and blackmail one another. It is about anger and boorishness,
about broken elevators, about the contortions Cubans have to make to acquire enough food, about the lack even of rags to wipe the floor. The audience roars and claps with recognition at the site of a sopping T-shirt slapped down on the floor to clean it. It is about how a person who plays by the rules gets shafted.

Toward the end of the play, the protagonist, facing the audience, asks, “And do you think that with so much paternalism and lack of discipline we can really construct socialism?” The audience roars again and stamps, hoots and whistles. We emerge from the play energized and drive home along the Malecón.

Gonzalo, our swimming teacher, has stopped wearing his diamond ring, though he still wears his gold chain. He has started spending every weekend with his parents, his ex-wife, and their son, Olaznog (which is
Gonzalo
spelled backward), who all live near Trinidad. He always brings back five pounds of shrimp for us, and we pay him ten dollars. The shrimp is piling up in the freezer. After about the fifth week, I offer weakly that we have a lot of shrimp already, but he looks so crestfallen that I buy another five pounds, then another, until I am giving shrimp away to friends.

Ana María Guevara, the stepmother of Che Guevara, whom we met last year at the Argentinian ambassador's, lives in a pleasant house in Miramar. It is nearly bare, with a shiny terrazzo floor and just a few pieces of worn Danish modern furniture. At the back is a room with many windows, which she uses as a studio. The windows look out on a thick grove of banana trees. When I compliment her on the trees, she shrugs and says, “I find tropical a little boring. It's always the same, but what can I do?”

Mrs. Guevara is an artist who works mostly in collage. The pictures she makes are portraits of her state of mind, she says, and of the states of mind of other people she knows. She can read people, she says; she can tell what's on their minds. She teaches some art classes, and she says to her art students, “You paint that way because you feel like this,” and they say to her, “My God, how did you know?” Her work keeps her . . . she hesitates. “Well . . .
balanced
,” she says. Her collages are pieces of faces or human bodies surrounded by dark fields of color. Some of the collages have little jail bars in them.

She has three children who are in the university here. She is battling now for the rights to one of Che's diaries so that she can at least get some money.

Later, Nick says, “She didn't really have jail bars in them,” and I have to swear to him that they did.

Gonzalo is missing. He told us he would be coming back after the school holidays were over. He didn't show up after the holidays. He didn't show up the week after that. In the middle of the second week, I asked Manuel to call Gonzalo's family's home near Trinidad. The man who answered said that Gonzalo's family no longer lived there and he didn't know where any of them were. I called Carlita. Carlita said he'd probably finally gone to Canada. She called Gonzalo's house, and the man who answered the phone said without hesitation that he was Gonzalo's father and that Gonzalo was in the country. Carlita said to give it a little more time, and if we still didn't hear from him, I should call her again and she would find out what really happened.

Lety says that it sounds like Gonzalo is getting ready to leave, if he hasn't left already. Lety says Gonzalo's Canadian wife has probably been in Canada all this time and has probably only now finally arranged for his visa and ticket, and Gonzalo is probably in the final stages of arranging for his passport, letter of invitation from his Canadian “host” (in which she declares that she will be responsible for all his expenses), health certificate, and exit permit, a process that takes months. Lety says people often drop out of sight before they leave, or stay very, very quiet, because if people understand that you are leaving, someone who doesn't like you can always go to your local CDR and say you haven't been behaving yourself—you've been selling things secretly, or you have a child you haven't paid support for, or you owe money to someone, or you've been saying or doing the wrong things—and your CDR can keep you from getting a passport or an exit permit. Then, once you
have
a passport and an exit permit, and you're only waiting for your ticket or to do last-minute things, someone can still denounce you for something—any person with any little bit of power who doesn't like you—and can keep you from actually leaving.

Our neighbor, the Argentinian ambassador, tells us that one of the guards at her residence stopped her as she was walking outside her gate the other evening. “I am so hungry,” he said. He told her that they are given only one meal a day—lunch. For dinner they are given sugar, water, and bread.

NO MORE CRUISE SHIPS
will be coming to Havana. The Costa cruise ship line has been bought by an American company, and American cruise ships are prohibited by the embargo from coming to Cuba.

Costa cruise ships coming to Havana lasted for less than a year.

GONZALO IS IN CANADA
. Roberto stopped at Gonzalo's parents' house on his way through Trinidad with some American friends of friends we had sent off with him. When he returns, Roberto also tells us that Gonzalo's parents showed him a photo of Gonzalo's Canadian wife. We ask Roberto what Gonzalo's Canadian wife is like, on a scale of one to ten. Roberto says that she is a six.

“A s
ix?
”

Roberto blushes through his tan. “Well . . . ,” he says, “
las canadienses
and the others from the North, they are not like Cuban girls. They are more . . .” His face flushes a little pinker.