Cuba Diaries (31 page)

Rigoberto stands before us in the tiny community center of Comandante Pinares, in front of a giant “Map of Challenges and Resources.” Comandante Pinares, a neighborhood built in 1982 to house those left homeless following Hurricane Andrew, was, until the introduction of the Social Integration Laboratory, the area of Pinar del Río that produced the greatest number of juvenile delinquents. Any streetlight in Comandante Pinares, Rigoberto tells us, would be broken by delinquents as soon as it was installed.

The map, a visual aid to community involvement, is a keystone of the laboratory's program. It is a map made by the residents of the Comandante Pinares neighborhood and surrounding neighborhoods. Above it, on one side of the map, is a list, compiled by the residents, of the community's needs and challenges; on the other side is a list of the resources the community has that can be used to address the problems.

In the audience are the
médico de familia
(local doctor) of Comandante Pinares, the head of the CDR (a black grandmother who, she tells us, lives in
a house with twelve other people), a sanitation engineer, and a youth representative. This last is a tall, good-looking fifteen-year-old black girl who has had one arm amputated below the elbow.

Rigoberto is half-turned so as to read the map and speak to us at the same time. One of the challenges, Rigoberto reads, pointing to the map, is “fecality in the air.” Fecality in the air, Rigoberto explains, is, after crime, the thing that bothers people most in Comandante Pinares.

All heads nod affirmatively.

The grandmother who is the head of the CDR explains to us that her greatest challenge was getting people to open up to her, to tell her what bothered them. “I would go from house to house, and the people, they weren't used to someone coming to them, they were suspicious, they were used to decisions coming from on high, but I said to them, ‘You can be part of the decision-making process, you can help us make our map.'”

“And since people from here have gotten involved,” Rigoberto says, genuinely impressed, “new streetlights have been put in and
not one
of them has been broken.”

Sergio softly explains to us on the way back to the car that low-level and midlevel administrators have been very receptive.

Carey mentions Dolly the cloned sheep at lunch with Sergio, Lidia, and our group. Lidia keeps eating her soup tranquilly. Lidia is an M.D. She also meets foreigners. Carey's Spanish is not perfect, either, and neither of us knows how to say
cloning
. Sergio translates. Lidia says she knows about genetic engineering.

Carey says she's not talking about genetic engineering; she's talking about the making of a genetically identical copy of a complex organism. She says it has been done, in Britain, and that there is now this duplicated sheep named Dolly. The news came out two weeks ago, in newspapers and magazines. Lidia drops her spoon. Her eyes open wide. She looks at us. Carey describes how the cloning was done. Lidia's eyes open wider. “
No me diga
,” Lidia says.

Nick and I are greeting the first dinner guests when Piñeiro enters the room. When you invite Cuban officials to dinner, they often say they can come and then don't come, and you end up with an empty place. But sometimes you invite them, and they say they can't come, then show up anyway.
Now here Piñeiro is, making thirteen at the table. It is very bad luck in X——to have thirteen at a table.

Nick stands in the pantry, cursing and dialing the telephone. He calls Fritz, his number one assistant, and orders him to come to make it fourteen. Lorena turns the flames down, and Manuel makes another round of
mojitos
as the table is unset, expanded, and reset by Danila and Concha, rubber soles squeaking excitedly on the marble.

Piñeiro, alias Barbaroja (Redbeard), the former head of intelligence, recently brushed aside (it is said, for favoring reforms), sports the classic orthodox look of neck hairs growing untrimmed upwards out of his collar to meet a tobacco-scented, untrimmed beard, and tight
guayabera
with stomach hairs poking through. Some say Piñeiro is responsible for hundreds of deaths; others say thousands; still, Piñeiro remains the favorite of the international set in Havana, because if you have to have an old revolutionary over, Piñeiro is the most schmoozeworthy. He listens well, of course—he has spent his life listening. His conversation, on good nights, is not the spouting of prejudices and platitudes. He speaks English well. He attended Columbia University, was kicked out, he says, for “improper activities,” and is the ex-husband of Lorna, the blond woman from Connecticut who teaches dance at the childrens' school and is perpetually on the lookout for oatmeal to make cookies. Some even find Piñeiro charming, on good nights.

The true fascination of Piñeiro, of course, lies in the contemplation of the size and scope of the secrets contained in one unkempt head. He
knows
how Camilo Cienfuegos died, he
knows
how on purpose it was that Che was not resupplied in the Bolivian jungle, he
knows
up to what level Cuba's leadership was aware of drug trafficking out of Cuba in the eighties.
He
knows
all these things
, the foreigner thinks,
and here he is, in
my
living room, enjoying
my
scotch, sucking
my
food out of his dentures
. It is minuscule, Havana.

Some foreigners think,
Here he is
, and try to crack him—through charm, food, and drink—like a safe. He winks, drinks, smokes, guffaws, eats, insinuates, and drops phrases of American slang. They urge him to write his memoirs. He smiles crookedly, squeezes elbows. He is told that he can write his memoirs and put them in a box and seal the box for a hundred years. “You think so?” he asks, cocking his head.

This is on good nights. Tonight, though, he asks the European ambassador sitting on my left if his country is against the common position recently taken by the European Union regarding investment in Cuba (which ties investment
to improvements in human rights and is more in accordance with the position of the United States). The European ambassador states that the position recently taken is a
common
position. Piñeiro says that he knows that is what they
say
, but his European country was really against it, right? The European ambassador, his face reddening, repeats that the position the European Union took is a
common
position. Piñeiro then says that he hopes that the ambassador's particular European country is not sacrificing its dignity and its sovereignty on the issue. Piñeiro's voice is raised, and his speech is slurred.
Dignidad
and
soberanía
are favorite words in orthodox speeches. The European ambassador looks at Piñeiro incredulously and says that his country remains
very independent
of the United States in its decision-making process . . .

A Spanish woman sitting beside Piñeiro bumps him with her shoulder. “Leave it,
hombre
,” she says to Piñeiro.

Piñeiro slaps his chest. “We have balls!”

“Ay, balls again,” the Spanish woman says, sighing. “Don't be this . . . thing that everyone expects you to be . . . like something out of
National Geographic
.”

Piñeiro looks at me, ignoring her. He leans forward. “I have nothing against the American
people
. It's the politicians—”

“But the politicians are elected
by the American people!
” the Spanish woman says, cupping her hands around her mouth and speaking into his ear.

“Only thirty percent of the people!” Piñeiro leans back smiling against his seat.

An empty tanker has sunk—Italian, registered in Panama, with six Cuban crew members lost; another tanker on the way to Cienfuegos has sunk (the word is there was “an explosion on board”); there was a bomb in the nightclub Aché, attached to the Meliá Cohiba Hotel; and a munitions warehouse blew up in Pinar del Río, sending bullets flying.

The Cuban government has asked the press not to write about the bomb in the Meliá Cohiba Hotel.

Nobody except the army can have explosives here.

There is speculation that the United States'
Transition
document, which details the role the armed forces could play in Cuba's transition to democracy, is being considered.

WE ARE TOLD BY
a friend who was there that Eusebio Leal, the city historian and head of the corporation restoring Old Havana, gave a speech in Old Havana in which he declares that there needs to be greater respect in Cuba for human freedoms.

Some officials, we are told, looked down at their shoes as he spoke. We are also told Leal swept out of the room without shaking anyone's hand when the speech was over.

“
PE PE HAY, PE PE HAY
. . .” (“PPG,” an anti-impotence drug, pronounced
pe pe hay
). Young men and boys follow us and others in their forties and older in the Plaza de la Catedral muttering the name of the drug, trying to sell it to us.

“
No, gracias
,” Nick says sunnily.

“
Pe Pe Hay, Pe Pe Hay
. . .” They will not stop.

I turn to the two following us. I put my hands on my hips. “
Mi marido
no
necesita PPG!
” (“My husband
does not
need PPG!”).

“
Señora, felicidades! Estamos tan contentos para ustedes!
” (“Congratulations! We are so happy for you both!”).

A SWEEP OF
JINETERAS
before the May Day parade: The agents go in plain cars, with license plates that say
TUR
for
turista
. They pretend they are customers, then take the girls to waiting buses.

THE BIGGEST MAY DAY
parade ever.

Jineteras
are back on the street hours after it's over. I don't know how it is possible with the sweep that happened just days before. When they are picked up,
jineteras
are usually trucked into fields to harvest sweet potatoes and other tubers and stay out of circulation for weeks. These must be other
jineteras
, waiting in the wings.

Also hours after the parade, while we are stopped at a streetlight, a man shoves his arm into the car. “Give me money! Give me money!” he screams.

Mrs. Fleites—the Bette Midler look-alike at the school, whose parents “went to Brooklyn because of Batista and returned to Cuba because of Castro”—and her husband catch up to me on the street, just outside of the school. She says she has a favor to ask of me.

Mrs. Fleites says she wants to travel to the United States this summer, but she needs an invitation from a U.S. citizen. There is a person she knows, a U.S. citizen, who is going to go with her tomorrow to the Consultoria Juridica (the place that certifies invitations to travel abroad), but the person may not be able to make it. She is wondering if, in case the person doesn't show up, I would be able to go with her to draw up an invitation letter. The place is just down the street from the school. It is just a formality.

I look from Mrs. Fleites to her husband. They are both nearly hopping, from one leg to another.

MRS. FLEITES CATCHES UP
to me outside the school. She says the person she thought was going to go with her to the Consultoria Juridica is going to be able to make it after all. I will not have to go with her.

I am relieved.

Juana tells me how her brother Ernesto, who now lives in Texas, got out of Cuba and into the United States.

Ernesto was determined to get to the United States in style: he didn't want to get in a
balsa
or be a wetback. Ernesto is an engineer. He has blond hair and blue eyes. Ernesto was often sent by the Cuban government to Mexico. Ernesto contacted some relatives in Texas. The relatives studied the situation in some border towns. They found a town—Juana doesn't remember the name of it—where U.S. college students go over the border into Mexico for the weekend, to drink and visit prostitutes. The relatives drove over the border in their car on a Sunday afternoon. They took with them some
yanqui
clothes: chino pants, a Lacoste shirt, Nike sneakers. They met Ernesto. Ernesto dressed in the
yanqui
clothes. He sat in the backseat of their car, between some relatives. The only American word Ernesto knew was
yup
. They went back over the border on Sunday night, when all the college students were returning from their weekend. There were so many people going back to the United States that the border guards couldn't check every car; they only checked the cars with Mexican plates or the cars with people in them who looked like Mexicans.

A guard shined a light in the backseat. “You all Americans here?”

“Yup,” Ernesto said, and in they went.

“This is racism in action,” I say to Juana.

Nick and I go to a performance of Tania Bruguera, plus a show of the works of fifteen other artists at the Faculty of Arts and Letters. It is one of the shows that is not part of, but is taking place around, the Havana Biennial.

The artists who are in the show lie in a circle on the floor. Tania, dressed vaguely as a sheep, walks on the bodies, planting red flags on them as she walks. At each body, she also binds either their mouths, their eyes, their hands, or their feet with red cloth. She then steps out into the audience, planting red flags and binding mouths, eyes, hands, and feet.

Alexis Esquivel has a piece in the show called
The Machine for the Fabrication of Tradition
. It consists of a row of Plexiglas boxes filled to varying degrees with water. A fighting fish is in each box. Above each box, a tube leading from a suspended intravenous bag drips water. Soon the fullest box will overflow, carrying a fighting fish with it into the adjacent box, to fight with the other fighting fish until death.