Cuba Diaries (8 page)

Even though Nick said “no ideology,” Olga, the Spanish teacher, still sometimes tries to fit it in, in little phrases we have to practice, and we encourage her with our repartee.

Us: “In the United States, there are more goods.”

Olga: “In Cuba, there is more equality among people.”

Us: “But some are more equal than others.”

Olga looks around. “I just read
Animal Farm
,” Olga whispers in English. “Oh, how perfect it is for the present situation . . .”

Olga was a committed party member at one time, she tells us. She worked as a translator for the Venceremos Brigades of American college students when they came to cut cane in the seventies.

“They're all stockbrokers now. Or real estate agents,” we say.

Olga purses her lips. “I don't want to hear about it,” she says tiredly in English. She looks around, then continues in a lowered voice, still in English: “I have been outside the socialist world only once in my life. For one day in Saint John, New Brunswick. I was on a boat that had gone to pick up Venceremos people, just on the other side of the U.S. border. Only one day, can you believe it?”

“How was it with the Venceremos people?”

“I never heard that ugly word—I can't say it in English, it is so ugly—so much in my whole life . . .”

“What word?”

“I can't say it . . .”

“Oh yes you can.”

“Oh, you know, that Anglo-Saxon word . . .” She takes a deep breath, looks around.

“What word?”

“
Fuck
,” she whispers in the quietest voice possible.

We have a swimming teacher for the children, Carlita. Carlita is a teacher at the Escuela de Natación Marcelo Salado on Primera Avenida. The Escuela de Natación is a boarding school. Promising swimmers are sent to the school from all over Cuba from the age of eleven. They have regular classes, but they also swim at least three hours a day.

Carlita tells me the children won't be able to use the dressing room at the
escuela
, but she will be able to teach them there. She says it's also better if José lets us off
not directly in front of
the school, but a block or two to one side or the other of the school, and for us not to talk too much in the lobby. It was better, in fact, for us not to talk in the lobby at all.

“Are foreigners not allowed to take lessons?”

“This has not yet really been decided.”

Carlita is waiting for us in the lobby. She ushers us quickly through a side door to an Olympic-sized outdoor pool. The water of the pool is cloudy and greenish.

“Is the water clean?” I whisper to Carlita in Spanish, stopping a few feet back from the pool.

“Oh yes, clean,” Carlita says. “The school lacks chemicals right now to keep the water
transparente
, but it is clean.”

In all lanes but one, the students of the Escuela de Natación are ripping back and forth faster than I have ever seen human beings, let alone not fully grown ones, move in water. At the shallow end of the free lane, there is a gaggle of mothers and small children. We join them. I take off the children's clothes. They have swimsuits on underneath.

“Can I talk now?” I whisper to Carlita.

“Now it's OK. They don't care out here.”

TU EJEMPLO VIVE, TUS IDEAS PERDURAN SIEMPRE
(Your example lives on, your ideas are everlasting), reads a billboard with an image of Che on it.

Nick doesn't attend our Spanish lesson today.

“I am not a Cuban American, and I never had anything to do with Cuba until I got here, but I will be so happy one day when it all opens up, I think I will cry,” I find myself saying to Olga, my voice breaking slightly.

“But I don't think it will be as simple as that . . .” Olga's eyes fill with tears. “My brother is in Miami. He left a year ago and I don't know when I will see him again . . .” She reaches into her handbag for a handkerchief. “Sorry.”

I pat Olga's hand.

Berti, the wife of the man who used to have Nick's job, is back for a visit. She misses Cuba, she says. She says I will miss Cuba, too, when I go.

Berti goes to the Diplo, buys some steaks to give as presents, and takes me to meet her Cuban friends. One is Lola, whom we visit in her new house, which she has
permutaed
with her old house. “If she were in Miami, she would be a millionaire,” Berti whispers to me, ringing the doorbell.

In Cuba you can't buy or sell property, but you can
permutar
(exchange) it. You can exchange up (to a bigger, better house or apartment) or down (to a smaller, crummier house or apartment). If you exchange up, you give money, goods, or services to the person who is exchanging down to your crummier house or apartment to make up the difference (without telling anyone, of course).

Berti walks into Lola's house, taking everything in. “But this is a
palace!
” she says. Lola beams. It
is
the nicest house I've seen a Cuban living in: spotless
terrazzo floors stretching to a patio overlooking a stand of royal palms, not a bit of grime anywhere, a terrazzo staircase with a molded-aluminum balustrade, polished glass louvers allowing breezes from every direction, a kitchen with a vast counter, a full stove with every burner working.

Lola has giant breasts, a compact figure, smooth, hairless olive skin, and hair dyed a solid reddish brown. She moves slowly, duck-footedly, through the house, showing us its various features, paunch and breasts thrust before her like a trophy, and I am reminded of how the Arabs were in Spain for almost a thousand years. Lola walks as if she were in Moroccan slippers, kicking a caftan out of the way. I am reminded, too, of how 20 percent of Spanish words are Arabic, and of how nearly all words in Spanish relating to home comforts—the words for
rug
and
cushion
, for example—are of Arabic origin. I find myself thinking affectionately of an Arab friend, Iman, and her three refrigerators—one for drinks, one for meat and vegetables, and one for leftovers—their shelves with plastic doilies on them, lace borders gracing the edges. I have the feeling that Lola is basically an Arab woman, one who truly reigns at home, who raises housekeeping to an art form and cooking to the sublime and finds the power of the position she has attained in late middle age (her husband and children being utterly dependent on her, for where else would they find such a spotless home and such good food?) far more fulfilling than the willowy charms of youth.

Lola serves us coffee, then leads us into a bedroom. Berti has been trying to explain to me what Lola does, but between the X——ian and the Spanish, I haven't really made out what it is. Lola pulls gym bags out of a closet and sets them near the bed. She opens them, and a powerful smell of cedar and mildew fills the bedroom. She puts her hands in the gym bags and starts pulling cloth out of them, white cloth mostly, but tea-colored, too, and also pastel and black. We are soon able to make out embroidered sheets, pillowcases, tablecloths, napkins, hand towels, infants' baptismal clothes, layettes, booties, coasters, place mats, runners, lace shawls, mantillas, antimacassars, bloomers, slips, and other oddly shaped bits of linen and lace, their purposes known only to the Creole chatelaine of the 1890s.

Lola holds one item up, then another, for the light to shine through. “
Look
at the work,” Berti marvels, caressing them. They are antique, Spanish, and elegant, and they speak of a time light-years away yet lingering still in people's closets, of nuns, plantations, slaves, high ceilings, endless corridors, giant families, and babies like precious icons, wrapped and rewrapped fourteen times a day by untiring
niñeras
(baby-sitters).

Some of the linens are more than 150 years old, Lola says. The people who are selling them are trying to raise money to go to Miami.

We are on our way to the city of Trinidad on our first unescorted trip outside Havana, just Nick, me, the children, and Muna. It is dark. There is something in the road. It is orange and moving. There are many orange pieces, moving slowly on an orange road. Some pieces swivel in the beam of our headlights as we approach, while a current of other orange pieces streams through the mass slightly faster, away from us, pushing still other pieces out of the way. Nick stops, leaving the headlights on. We get out.

They are orange crabs and they are on the road ahead of us as far as the eye can see. Orange crabs moving over orange crab bodies already flattened on the road by earlier cars. The living crab bodies are the size of Little Leaguers' baseball mitts. They are moving from one side of the road, where the sea is, to the other side, where there is sandy soil and bushes and trees. They move with their claws raised, as if they are the victims of a holdup, their eyes on stalks, swiveling. We wonder, for a split second, if they can attack, but they scuttle from us as we approach, and we quickly realize that we can herd them. “Gee-ha,” I say, waving my arms, pushing a stream of them ahead of me. “Gee-ha!” the children say tentatively, waving their arms and stepping gingerly on pulverized crab, steering their personal herds. The crabs move ahead of us, but just as soon as we herd some off the road, others move onto the road to take their place. It is some timeless mating or egg-laying ritual, crabs attracted by the heat of the asphalt, and judging from the number of crabs stretching into the darkness on either side of the road, the thick orange carpet of pulverized crab, and the vast scuttling noise, which nearly drowns out our own voices, it doesn't seem to be something that has just begun or is going to be finished soon.

We get in the car. Crush, crunch, we hear under the tires. We do not speak.
Yes, life is sacred, but sometimes
. . . I rehearse saying to the children, but they are too tired to grill me.

We get to Trinidad and stop several times to ask for directions to the Hotel Ancón. Each time we are directed farther away from town. Finally there are no more buildings, and we find ourselves driving on a completely empty, dark road. No one in the tourist office explained to us that the Ancón is so far out of town. We continue to ask lone bicyclists and horsemen if we
are truly on the right road, until in the end we have gone fifteen kilometers.

We arrive at a monstrous building. “There must be some mistake . . .” Nick and I start to say simultaneously, but flickering panels atop the structure spell out
AN ÓN.

The style is part European auto grill on pylons with a cavernous breezeway underneath, part to-be-renovated airport in Uzbekistan, with the smell of a rest stop on the New Jersey Turnpike. Images of armless and legless men, women, and children on fluorescent panels announce an array of services in grim internationalese. A surly desk clerk completes our welcome. In our minuscule room and in the minuscule room of Muna and the children, a sticky, cigarette-burned TV table blocks the way to the door that leads to the balcony overlooking the sea. The bathroom door cannot be opened all the way, either, because it bumps into the bed.

We realize how much we have been shielded so far. Our thoughts turn to the tourist office and the thousands of tourists who have already been sent by it to the Ancón. We should not be surprised, though: we visited the Soviet Union. Still, it's impressive that such ugliness—harrowing ugliness in the building design and miserable ugliness in the rooms—has been achieved next to what is supposed to be one of the loveliest towns on earth. It's impressive, too, that wave after wave of tourists do not come out of the Ancón talking about its ugliness, writing about its ugliness, becoming Anita Hills in their exposure of its ugliness: it's almost as if there were a conspiracy or as if the Ancón were some kind of afterlife and the tourists who came here before us were dead souls.

THE COLUMNS DELINEATING
the central square in Trinidad are topped by baroque ceramic jars. The treelessness of the square brings to mind early photos of urban American areas just completed, as well as the spareness of Spanish, Greek, and Italian squares.

We visit the cathedral, where a mass is being held. The congregation is singing hymns accompanied by maracas, guitars, and drums. The people sway back and forth to
son
, salsa, and mambo rhythms. We listen, enraptured. It is light, joyful, and a ton more fun than other masses I have attended. The bishop delivers a sermon. We can hardly understand a word, but the packed congregation becomes very silent and listens with an air of intense concentration. We wonder how alternative the message is, but we cannot tell. We intended just to visit but end up staying for the whole mass, then get in line to shake the bishop's hand on the way out. The children are getting
squirmy. Nick says he wants to speak to the bishop. I see a horse-drawn carriage waiting outside and tell Nick I will take Muna and the children for a carriage ride, then we'll meet him in half an hour in front of the cathedral.

We pass one splendid block after another, peeking through doorways to tiled courtyards lush with bougainvillea and through the grillwork of floor-to-ceiling windows to high-ceilinged rooms with painted wainscoting. The wainscoting is either delicate Pompeian, with vines and spare classical motifs, or meaty baroque, with formal topiary gardens glimpsed through trompe l'oeil balustrades.

A group of women and children are standing in the square when we return. Their eyes are fixed on us. It is noon and very hot, and there is no one in the middle of the shadeless square but them. They put their hands on the sides of the carriage. “Soap, soap,” they plead. I open my mouth, but only a strangled “No” comes out. We get out of the carriage and push through them. More of them come out from the shadows at the sides of the square. “Soap, soap.” They are almost moaning it. They put their hands on us.

Muna and I grab the children and run to a half-open door in which a priest stands, motioning to us. He opens the door wide, and in we shoot, the women and children at our heels. He pushes the women and children back and closes the door in their faces. Nick is behind him, looking worried.