Cuba Diaries (36 page)

Megan's mother calls just before we leave. Megan has a sore throat and a temperature. We set off on a grimmer trip.

We enter Varadero. Jimmie says he is hungry. We pass a corner open-air restaurant that looks like a regular restaurant: people are sitting at tables, there is a freshly painted sign at the entrance, there are freshly thatched palm-leaf umbrellas, and the chairs look new. There is a menu on a sandwich board. They have plates of food for one dollar—meat or fish, rice and beans, french fries. And sandwiches. There are about twenty-five items on the list. We have not been in a state-run restaurant since the trip we took to Trinidad soon after arriving in Cuba. Maybe they have improved.

The restaurant looked cool from the outside, with its palm-leaf umbrellas, but when we sit down we realize the palm-leaf umbrellas trap heat blasting from the kitchen. There is music playing, too, which I didn't hear at first. It is Barry Manilow. A gift shop tucked in one corner sells T-shirts with cartoon characters on them, the bottoms of the T-shirts shredded to look like fringe. Geezers and
chicas
for customers, I now make out, and jet-lagged, stalwart, but slightly angry mittel-European retirees. A sullen
mulata
shuffles to our table, the light changes, and swaths of grease and flies are visible on every table.

They have no pork. They have no chicken. The fish is two fish fillets stuffed with ham and cheese and fried.

“What
do
you have, then?”

“Ham-and-cheese sandwiches. French fries.”

We order those.

We see a sign across from the hotel:
MONTE A CABALLO
(Horseback riding). I speak with a man named Bigote (Mustache). He says he can take all of us on a ride that will last two hours. We will ride for a little while along the highway, then cut through to a place where there is white virgin sand. His voice lilts over the “white virgin sand” part and his hand flutters like a hula girl's, but I still trust him. We arrange to ride tomorrow.

I take the children to a Chinese restaurant in the hotel for dinner. Even Chinese
paladares
in Cuba are terrible, but I'm still in the where-do-I-think-I-am mode.

The food is terrible, but there is beer, fried noodles out of a bag, soy sauce, and little bowls to pour the soy sauce in, and the children have fun dipping noodles in the soy sauce. I keep hoping “less squalid” means “better,” even though I know that's not what our friends meant.

Four young men sit down next to us. They hear us talking and ask me if I am Canadian or from the States. I say I am from the States. They say they are, too. They say I am the first person from the States they have seen on their trip. Two have dark eyes and dark hair, and two are blond. The two dark-haired boys, who are brothers, have Cuban parents who left in
'61
. They are visiting Cuba for the first time. Their parents have never been back.

They ask me where they
can
get a good meal. I tell them about
paladares
. They were only in Havana for one day, then headed out. They are on their way back to Havana now. They write the names of
paladares
I recommend on napkins. The Cuban Americans say Spanish words with strong American accents.

“We have no relatives left in Cuba,” one of the Cuban American brothers says to me. “But we came with a list of friends of my parents from the old days and distant relatives. We drove up to this one place. The guy was up on his roof, nailing something. ‘Do you remember Davide, the
hermanito
(little brother) of Omero?'
‘Si.'
‘We are his sons.' The guy almost fell off the roof. We stayed with the guy and his family. The family really put themselves out for us. They gave up their
beds
for us. We didn't want them to do that, but they insisted. They cooked pork. As we were leaving, we didn't want to exactly
pay
the people for the rooms, we thought they would be insulted, but we thought we should make a contribution. We gave them a hundred dollars. Only when we opened our suitcases at the next place did we discover they had taken our shoes, some shirts, some shaving stuff . . .”

“But maybe the stuff was taken by someone else between the time you left
and the time you got to the next place,” I say. “Maybe someone got into your car.”

“No way that could have happened. There was someone with the car the whole time. We know not to leave the car alone. After we packed, the bags were sitting in our rooms for like about an hour. That's when they took our stuff. They were nice to us, and then they took our stuff. I'm telling you”—he points at his chest and leans forward—“it makes me ashamed to be Cuban!”

The other brother nods. “Me, too.”

I feel a flash of uptightness and see in my mind's eye the wide stripes of the red, white, and blue Cuban flag: Cubans and foreigners who live in Cuba can say things like that, but not people who are just
visiting
, even if they
are
Cuban Americans. I find myself making up more rules: People who have left Cuba can say things like that, too, but they have to have left in the past five years, they have to have stood in line for hours on end, they have to have
conseguired
and
resolvered
until they were ready to drop, they have to have experienced new shoes only in the imagination. Then they could say things like that, if they still felt they had to.

I tell the brothers they just had bad luck. Then I tell the brothers that it was a lot better that the people they stayed with were nice to them, then took their stuff, than it would have been if the people they stayed with were mean to them, then took their stuff.

HORSEBACK RIDING WITH BIGOTE
. The children are gung ho before we actually get there, but after Jimmie is put on his horse, he starts to cry. “It's so high up!” he says. Bigote says this is no problem: he will ride with him. Thea looks like she is about to ask for company, too, but I cut her off, for I can barely stay on a horse myself.

Most of the trip turns out to be on the road. Massive hotels in various stages of completion on the beach side of the road, cement-block sheds with images of Che and revolutionary slogans on the other side of the road, tour buses blowing soot in our faces. We pass a Club Méditerranée that has just opened. We turn in to a construction site and make our way to the beach. An official-looking car passes us. Bigote dismounts, has a conversation with the man inside the car. I am sure we are going to be turned away; it is evident that no one has paid Bigote to ride this far in a long time, but Bigote remounts and we go on. We come to a gate. There is a padlock on it. “They didn't tell me . . . ,” he says. We ride along a wall to where there is a gap. A pile of sand is
filling the gap. We dismount; Bigote leads the horses over the pile of sand one by one.

We remount, duck under some branches, and step onto the beach. For a moment in our sight, if we don't move our heads or use peripheral vision, it
is
paradise, magazine-type paradise: the sea is clear, then turquoise, then violet. The sand is just short of blinding white. Turn our heads a little to one side or the other, though, and there is one construction site after another.

Varadero is a series of beaches separated by small bluffs. On one bluff is a former vacation home of the du Ponts. There used to be no hotels or houses beyond it. It is now a restaurant, and on the beach beyond it is the Meliá Varadero. On the beach beyond the Meliá is the Club Méditerranée. We are on the beach beyond that, which is the last beach to be developed. Beyond it are rocks, trees, and mangroves. It is a
zona militar
. There is a small
cayo
(island) in the distance. It, also, is a
zona militar
.

“
Ojalá
(God willing), they will be able to save some of the natural parts,” I say to Bigote.

“
Ojalá
, they will,” agrees Bigote.

It is like riding stuffed animals across a bag of sugar, riding on sand, and for us it is yet another original sensual experience, taking its place alongside “orange grove in full bloom” and “evening breeze on upper arms.” These are the last few weeks people like us will be able to experience it here, this unintended nice thing, the last few weeks kids and horses will be able to ride through gaps in walls and find no one on the beach on the other side.

I GO WITH THE
children to check out the new shopping mall in Varadero with the game center Megan's mother told us about.

The windows are clean. There's a small dollars-only food store and a small dollars-only department store. We are the only ones in the department store. There are the fringed T-shirts and wooden items with images of Che burned into them for tourists; bike shorts, bras, cheap shoes, and stonewashed jeans for Cubans; and one sixty-dollar toilet seat displayed on a kind of plate holder for visitors to buy
for
a Cuban, for a visiting Cuban American to buy for his or her relative, or for a tourist to buy for his or her Cuban
marinovia (-o)
or
jinetera (-o)
.

There is a room with electronic games in it; another room contains a bar and a six-lane bowling alley; an air-hockey table sits on the patio outside; and on a back lot are bumper cars.

Hotel workers' pay at Varadero is 230 pesos a month—about $10.00. On
top of that, every month they receive a
jaba
—a plastic bag containing soap, shampoo, and toothpaste. They also receive a percentage of the service charge, which amounts to about $35.00, making their total monthly pay about $45.00 plus the
jaba
.

The cashier at the bar of the game center, where tokens are sold, is surrounded by Cubans pulling $5.00 and $10.00 bills out of thick wads of bills for bowling, at $3.00 a game, and for bumper cars, at $1.50 a turn.

The bowling alley is Brunswick, with automatic setup and ball return and brightly colored balls in a variety of weights. The noise of the bowling balls, of salsa at high volume, and of girls in
jine
wear and their boyfriends (mostly Cuban, with some Europeans), screaming and jumping up and down as they bowl, means you have to yell to be heard.

“
You can bowl barefoot or with special shoes!
” the bartender screams.

“
Just one game!
” I yell at the kids.

“
OK!
” they yell back.

We pay and find an empty lane. It's new, the bowling alley, but you can already see gaps between the boards of the lanes as well as warping in some boards. The wood has been finished with a lumpy varnish, leaving gaps and air bubbles, as if they got a kit but didn't follow the instructions or used the flooring that came with the kit for someplace else. Our balls keep veering to the left.

We buy more tokens and go out to the bumper cars and go seven or eight times—for a total of a hotel base salary. The bumper cars look pretty new also, but three are already out of commission, with the rods that are supposed to connect them to the electrified roof rusted and bent.

Roberto drives us through a barrio in back of the shopping complex—dozens of tiny concrete houses packed together, with patched tin roofs.

“Here's where they live, and there's where they suck it out of them,” I say.

“
Hay una pipa directa
” (“There's a direct pipeline”), Roberto says.

Caligula
is playing at the same theater where we saw
Te Sigo, Esperando
. It is a Cubanized version of Sartre's play.

At the end, a woman in traveling clothes picks up a suitcase. “
Me voy
” (“I am going”), she says. The crowd responds mightily.

There is no flour at the Diplo. I do manage to buy 191 rolls of toilet paper, though. The ones we brought from our last country are finished and we are into the Kleenex, so I buy all the rolls on the shelf. They are twenty-five cents each, speckled, made in Cuba. There are no perforations, and the beginning of the roll is fixed to the rest with a swath of yellow glue. You have to toss the first foot or so away. We have enough toilet paper now to last until we leave. If we run out, we will move back to the Kleenex. We have had lots of diarrhea in Cuba, but not that many colds.

LORENA DRAGS A
fifty-pound bag of flour in through the door. “
No fue fácil
” (“It wasn't easy”), she says, letting go of the bag, straightening her back, and wiping the sweat from her forehead with her hand. “But it's good quality. I told them it had to be good quality for the
comandante in jefe
(commander in chief).”

Radio Martí has announced that the Cuban American National Foundation will be sending a flotilla to just outside the twelve-mile limit, from which they will project a laser show, which will be seen in the sky above Havana. The laser show will begin at 9
P.M
., after the
cañonazo
(traditional nightly canon salute from the fortress of La Cabaña). At nine
P.M
., all
habaneros
are requested by Radio Martí to start banging cooking pots to express their solidarity with the democracy movement, as they did in East Germany. There is even a rumor that they are going to beam the words
LIBERTAD Y DEMOCRACIA
in the sky.

We go to the
paladar
Prado 20, with its view over the harbor. We think that it will be the best viewing spot.

We stand on the terrace waiting for a table to be free, watching a laser test in the sky. A waitress serves us water, explaining to us that water is the only thing she can serve on the terrace. Prado 20 has just opened again after having been closed for several months. It was closed for serving drinks on the terrace, where they did not have a bar license.

We are called in to eat. I keep watching out the window.

The
cañonazo
sounds. We rush outside.