Authors: Isadora Tattlin
When Nick comes home for lunch, and then later, at dinner, after the children are in bed, we search each other's eyes, looking for scraps of informationârumors, secrets, speculations, anecdotesâto use as indicators of how much longer things will go on this way, to give some significance to our being here, to make us feel that we are in an unfolding drama instead of a dull slog.
“Muhammad Ali will be coming here . . .”
“Fidel kept his hand behind his back during the meeting. There's a rumor that he has Parkinson's . . .”
“Elizardo Sanchez”âa Cuban dissidentâ“was arrested, and while he was being taken away, a group of people outside his house sang the Cuban national anthem . . .”
“There were only half as many vendors in the
agro
today . . .”
“M. says Raúl Castro is called La China because he is supposed to be gay and his real father was the family's Chinese cook. He
does
look entirely different from Fidel and Ramón . . .”
“There was white spittle in the corners of Fidel's mouth when he spoke. R. says a doctor told her Parkinson's medication can cause that . . .”
“A group of Republican senators' aides will be visiting . . .”
“Cooking oil will no longer be subsidized . . .”
“A Spanish priest was expelled . . .”
“A vice president was caught with ten thousand dollars cash in his home . . .”
MIGUEL ASKS US IF
he can take tomorrow off. His wife has to have an operation, to remove a benign cyst on her femur. She has asthma, and so it has been hard to find the right moment for the operation, but she hasn't had any asthma attacks lately, so the doctor wants to operate on her tomorrow.
We spend the first night of our first overnight trip outside of Havana since arriving five months ago at Hotel Rancho Faro Luna, which is just outside of Cienfuegos. The trip is a combination of business and pleasure. Hotel Rancho Faro Luna is modest, but clean and recently renovated. We take a swim in the sea with a teenage girl who is a relative of the hotel's director. I have the sensation of being stung in the water, but Nick says he doesn't feel anything. The girl pulls her hand out of the water. She has raised welts like mosquito bites on her forearm. “Microorganisms,” she says, “they come in the spring.” I have itching, raised welts on my skin, too. She tells us it's called
agua mala
(bad water).
We leave the children with Muna, who will take them to have dinner in the dining room of Hotel Rancho Faro Luna.
We have been invited to dinner by a member of the local
nomenklatura
(a Soviet word meaning “Communist leadership”). His house is modest, but very clean. Our host, a short, stout, clean-cut man, yells heartily to us in Spanish. I do not understand most of it. We are served snapper, shrimp, and lobster, grilled, fried, in
enchilado
sauce (a moderately spicy tomato sauce), and flambéed. The lights are dimmed when the flambéed shrimp comes out, glowing with a blue flame. We have two
mojitos
each and move on to beer.
Our host wants to give us each another
mojito
, but we say we'd better not. He keeps yelling. Nick eggs him on. They are all laughing, so I start laughing, too. “
Qué simpático es este señor
,” our host says, about Nick. Ladisel, our guide on the trip, and Flora, his wife, smile timidly. We are also served yucca
con mojo
(a root vegetable similar to a potato, with a garlic sauce), a salad of avocado, cucumber, and tomato, and a dessert of
cáscara de toronja
(pressed grapefruit rind in syrup) with cream cheese, followed by coffee and
ron añejo
(rum aged over seven years). The rum is like hot silk. Nick is offered Cohibas, which are the finest Cuban cigars and sell for four hundred dollars a box.
We roll back to the Hotel Rancho Faro Luna, feeling like we need wheelbarrows under our stomachs. Nick puts a hand on the small of my back to push me up the stairs.
We stand on the balcony of our hotel room. A nearly full moon is rising out of the sea. First it is orange, and then it becomes white. It shines on the sea and on our very full stomachs, which protrude over the aluminum railing and over the sea below like the prows of pirate ships. The children snore in the next room. We burp. We have done nothing we approve of, but still, we are happy.
Standing inside the unfinished nuclear reactor outside of Cienfuegos (which has sat three-quarters complete since the Russians pulled out) is like standing inside a dark, nearly dried-out navel orange, cracked open.
The reactor is explained very rapidly to Nick in Spanish. We walk on catwalks over rods that stick up, and I remember what I can of Chernobyl and make a note to ask Nick later: were those
the
rods? Water drips and I make a note: was that
the
water?
Flojos
(literally, “loose guys”âthin guys with bad posture who pretend to work but just lounge around) hover in the shadows. Everything is covered with grease to keep it from rusting, but it's still like a dried-out navel orange.
Nick's firm has told him not to
touch
the nuclear issue, but we have to be polite.
“It will make a wonderful discotheque,” Nick says to Ladisel, Flora, and the head of the suspended works. “Put a Plexiglas floor over this whole level.” Nick indicates the level we are standing on. “Light the rods up from below.”
Ladisel, Flora, and the head of the suspended works laugh uneasily.
Driving from Cienfuegos to Varadero (this is our reward for having visited the reactor) on the second leg of our trip, we pass through a citrus-growing region. It is neither cold nor hot, and the smell of the orange blossoms blows in through the open windows of the van. The children put their noses at the edge of the window and start breathing and breathing with little moans of delight, like they do when they eat guava ice cream. Jimmie says, “There's perfume all around, Mommy,” and I feel like swooning and jumping out of my skin, all at once; it's the same pleasantly panicky feeling I get sometimes at dusk on our back patio.
Flora is telling me that the hardest thing to find right now is clothes.
Flora and I have gotten to the point of talking about how things areâmateriallyâfor her family. It takes longer, usually, to get to this point with a Cuban official, or a Cuban official's wife, but we've had nearly two solid days together. Some will never say that they lack for anything, or if you mention material hardship, they will launch right into education and health care, as if no other country in the world offered free education and health care.
“Food, we have,” Flora says. “It's a bit boring because it's always the same thingârice, beans, rice, beans, sometimes chicken or meatâbut there are practically no clothes or shoes.”
Flora is wearing a shirtwaist of flowered cloth. It looks brand-new.
“That's a nice dress.”
“This cloth was given to me by a friend who traveled to Spain. It's the only way.”
We drive over a rise, and a thick black plume of smoke appears. It is an affront in the middle of the orange groves. The smoke is not behaving in the same way as other paleoindustrial smoke we have seen in Cuba, though. It is intermittent but regular, and it is coming toward us. I am trying to think of what it could be or where I have seen smoke like it before, when suddenly, a huge black . . . thing appears in an alley between the orange trees. I feel my hand go up to my throat and my mouth drop open. “Look!” we yell to the children.
It's got a bulbous burner, a gaping funnel, a cowcatcher, a big number on the side, arms pushing the wheels round and round, and an engineer hanging out the side, and it's pulling ten railroad cars on a track I haven't noticed before. It's huge, it's magnificent, and it's every cowboy movie I've ever seen and every American history book, and it's in front of us in the bright light of
the middle of the day, in the middle of an orange grove in Cuba, just as casual as you please.
“Does it burn wood? Does it burn wood?” we ask Ladisel. We are practically bouncing up and down on our seats.
“Wood. And also sugarcane fibers.”
“Fantastic!” Nick says.
Ladisel smiles.
The engine is gliding majestically in front of us now, metal screeching against metal, an operatic aria out of the Industrial Revolution, and I want to remember everything about it, forever. It is matte black, there is not a spot of rust on it, the number 1 is painted on the side of the engine with nineteenth-century flourishes, and the smoke and soot (of the kind Grandma used to make, with cinders in it) is blowing back on the soot black railroad cars.
There's paleoindustry, and then there's paleoindustry.
“It's like something out of a museum!” I yell over the noise.
Ladisel's smile turns sheepish and he gets the beat-up, hollow-chested, chain-smoking look that some Cuban officials have. “It's just for freight, you know,” he says. “Passenger trains are more modern.”
“My wife's never seen one,” Nick says, “but in Xââ we had them up until a few years ago. I used to ride them when I was a little boy.”
“But it's beautiful,” I say quickly, “and it's exciting for us to see it.”
I want to look and lookâthere is never enough timeâbut the steam engine is curving away from us now. It is at the angle trains are always at when Indians or robbers jump onto them in movies.
“You realize what you have, don't you?” Nick asks Ladisel.
Ladisel looks at us looking at him. He nods uncertainly.
“You musn't throw it away. Even after things change.”
Ladisel still looks beat-up.
“In the United States, an engine like that would be very valuable.”
Ladisel sits a little straighter on the seat.
THEA AND JIMMIE RETURN
breathlessly to us in the downstairs hall of the government-protocol house we have been given in Varadero, complete with cook and maid, for the remainder of the weekend, informing us that there are no toilet seats on any of the toilets, just like I had said there wouldn't be!
Ladisel and Flora mercifully do not speak any English, nor do the cook or maid, who are standing by.
“
Disculpe
” (“Excuse me”). I take Thea and Jimmie by the wrists and lead them to the far end of the hall.
“They're so
cold
. . . ,” Thea says, meaning the rims of the bowls.
I tell Thea and Jimmie that they will have to stand over them every time, then, like they do over public toilets.
“You mean I am going to have to stand
the whole weekend?
” Thea persists.
“Thea . . .”
Lunch, we are told, is ready for us on the table.
Ladisel and Flora reveal during lunch that this is the first time they have been in Varadero since their honeymoon, and their children are now twelve and fourteen. Ladisel says he has been to the Soviet Union, though.
I ask Ladisel what Cubans thought of the Soviet Union when they got there. Did they really like it? I say that I went there in the time of Ronald Reagan, and that before I got there, I heard what Reagan said about the Soviet Union, and since my politics are left of center, I thought, of course, that what he said was an exaggeration . . . but then when I got there and I saw how it was, I thought,
Dios mÃo
. . .
(My God . . .)
.
He says most Cubans thought,
Dios mÃo
, about it, too.
Thea and Jimmie go into the garden of the guest house after lunch and pick large, flexible, waxy leaves, which they drape over the rims of the toilet bowls in every bathroom. “There!” they say.
“
Genial
” (“Very smart”), Ladisel and Flora, who have been pulled by Thea and Jimmie to inspect the toilets, say.
Nick steers Jimmie and Thea into their room. He shuts the door. Nick gets down at eye level with them and tells them that if they are ever in a Cuban's house againâand this, too, is a Cuban's houseâand they see that something is broken or that something is missing, they are not supposed to complain about it or even mention it, that it is not nice to point out to people what they are lacking.
“But
Mommy
talked about it . . .”
“Mommy talked about it among
us
, but Mommy shouldn't have talked about it at all. Mommy was a little bit naughty, but more than being naughty, she was tiresome, which is kind of like being naughty.”
“It's true, I was tiresome,” I say.
DRIVING HOME PAST
the U.S. Interests Section, we see the
SEÃORES IMPERIALISTAS
sign has been taken down.
“They've taken it down!” I exclaim.
Ladisel and Flora smile uncertainly.
There is no flour in the Diplo, no sugar, and no salt.
Lowering her voice and looking around, Lorena says she is sure she can
conseguir
some flour for us.
Resolver
(to resolve) and
conseguir
(to get, obtain, attain, find) are two of the most frequently used verbs in Cuba and are used more often than the word
comprar
(to buy), for more often than not, it is not mere buying that you have to do in order to acquire material things.
A REPAIRMAN WHO VISITS
the house regularly, lowering his voice, says his brother-in-law's uncle's second wife's present husband can get us three-hundred-dollar boxes of cigars for twenty dollars.
THE SEÃORES IMPERIALISTAS SIGN
has been put back, freshly painted and with its trusses reinforced.
The flour arrives, Lorena dragging a big sack in through the door.
Manuel tells me later in another room, also in a lowered voice, that I shouldn't buy flour from the
calle
(street). They cut it with poor-quality flour and chemicals and it can be bad.