“You never told me that.”
“It would take a lifetime for me to tell you everything there is to tell.”
He sighs.
“There were other chances after that too. You know marriage is a negocio here. People come from other countries offering to marry a person. At that time, it was five or six thousand dollars for a European or Mexican. Two or three thousand for a Peruvian or Costa Rican. Men, women, it doesn’t matter. Sometimes they disappear with the deposit, but sometimes it’s a legitimate transaction. I never considered it but I know plenty of people who left that way. After the Maleconazo, life became even more difficult. With the Special Period, we were all the thinnest we had ever been in our lives. I was at Santa María del Mar with a friend. People would go there hoping a tourist on the beach would buy you lunch. I was just there to swim, to forget about things for a while. But a woman swam over to me in the water. She said she’d been watching me. She was from Barcelona. She liked me, it was obvious. She was a pretty good-looking temba, at least forty-five. I wasn’t interested but she kept talking. She told me she worked with a theater company and could send a letter of invitation for me so I could get a visa to travel to Spain. She said she had a big apartment and I could stay with her. She didn’t want money. She said she didn’t want anything except to help me because she saw how miserable things were for us here. She would pay for everything until I got settled. She would give me a job at her theater or help me find work doing something else. I didn’t believe her but she later sent the letter and the money for the plane ticket and I was lucky and got the tarjeta blanca and permission from the Spanish embassy to travel. Even Yanai wanted me to go so I could send for her and Sandro later and we could have a new life together in Spain. But people kept telling us horrible stories about Cubans who went to Europe and ended up sleeping on the streets, in bus stations, how people abroad hated them and mistreated them and wouldn’t give them jobs so they had no choice but to become criminals or prostitutes. They said the cold weather would kill us and we’d beg to come back home to Cuba but by then, maybe the government wouldn’t let us in. They terrorized us. We didn’t sleep thinking about it.”
“So what happened?”
“I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t leave. In the end, I was too scared. Things were so bad on the island in those days, but I still believed it couldn’t get worse. By the time I realized how wrong I was, it was too late. Yanai had opportunities to leave too. She had a cousin in Chile who said he could bring us both there. He had a restaurant and said he would put us to work. But Yanai was afraid to go so far away, almost to the end of the earth, so she told him no. And then, after we divorced, she married the German. She said he was a good man and all he wanted was companionship and that he promised he would send the kids to a good school and they would live in a beautiful house in the countryside. Sometimes I think she didn’t study enough for those language tests on purpose. But when she said she’d marry me again herself so I could bring her and the children over together, I believed she was serious. Now I see she never wanted to leave and she’s only being honest about it now. She says she’d rather live in her family’s house, keep up with the daily lucha because she already knows how to survive here. She’s afraid of the world out there, even in a place as close as Florida. I understand because I was afraid for so many years too. Everyone here is.”
“Didn’t you tell her you’d help her?”
“She knows I can only help so much. She’d have to get a job.”
“What’s wrong with that?”
“Here she can go to her job at the women’s clinic and earn the equivalent of twelve dollars a month, but she would spend more than that on the buses or almendrones she’d have to take to get there. So she is able to not work and earn the same, which is to say, nothing.”
He points across the dark water and night horizon.
“There, everyone has to work and hard. Nothing is free. You get a small amount of help through the Adjustment Act but beyond that, you are on your own. She’s scared. She says she doesn’t want to drown out there. She prefers to drown at home even if our children drown with her. I tell her, ‘Yanai, there is nothing for them here,’ and she just says, ‘Look at you. What have you accomplished there in La Yuma? You’re a nobody over there just like you were over here.’ I don’t have anything to answer to that because she’s right. I am a nobody. But I only want for my children to be what they want to be, say what they want to say, have what they want to have. It’s a small ambition for anyone else, but for me it’s everything.”
I know there are no words that I can offer to comfort him, so I slip my hand over his as it rests on the smooth stone wall and we sit together a while longer in silence as the Malecón of the night begins to take form: pale Europeans walking by, arms draped around much younger local girls provocatively dressed; foreign women marked by sunburns and tan lines, elbows linked with dark, muscled young men. Farther down the road and a little deeper into the night, Nesto tells me, the real body commerce begins.
We start the long walk up Paseo del Prado to my hotel, passing prostitutes in arched walkways, the shadows of joined bodies in dim alleyways between crumbled buildings, behind graffitied barricades under signs indicating reparaciones, though Nesto says it takes an eternity for anything to get repaired, and often a building simply collapses, taking the lives inside with it.
The hotel bar is full of foreigners and a few locals among them. Once in the room, Nesto flops onto the bed as if it’s already his and I lie beside him, kissing him. He won’t stay the night. He wants to see his kids in the morning to walk with them to school. We enjoy each other for the part of the night we do have together.
“I have to admit, I didn’t think you would come.”
“I told you I would.”
“I thought you would change your mind, or you would lose your way somehow. I didn’t think there would ever be a day when I’d see you in Havana, with me.”
That night, my first on Nesto’s island, I dream of walking at dusk through a thick green forest where trees burn down to their roots, each one spiraled by smoke and fire. In my dream, I don’t run or panic, but remain still, heat on my face, watching the forest burn until all that is left is seared earth.
Two days in Havana. Nesto says he can take me where the tour groups go—to see the lovely painted and restored plazas of Old Havana where musicians perform “Chan Chan” and “Guantanamera” on street corners, where tourists drink daiquiris at government-run cafés and buy communist memorabilia from government-licensed vendors running shops out of their living rooms. The Havana of illusions, he calls it, packaged for foreign consumption.
“I’d rather see your Havana.”
“You will. Tonight I’ll take you to dinner at my mother’s house.”
“What do they know about me?”
“That you’re important to me. And that I invited you here.”
“Okay,” I say. “But what can I bring? I don’t want to show up empty-handed.”
“You won’t. You and I are the ones bringing the food.”
Today Nesto has borrowed another car from a friend, a boxy brown Russian Lada with windows that don’t roll up or down, and a backseat that slides off its rails hitting the car’s unpadded and oxidized metal shell. We are on our way to the tree-lined streets of Vedado, on what Nesto says is the daily mission of every citizen on the island, to put food on the table that night.
We start at an agropecuario, a market built on a lot amid mansions in varying states of disrepair and decay, abandoned by the rich who once inhabited them. The better-maintained ones are government offices or foreign firms, but most have been split from single-family homes into tenements holding up to twenty families. Nesto buys a plastic bag from a lady selling them on the curb and inside the market, and we make our way down rows of produce piled onto crates and tables. Nesto picks onions, yuca, malanga.
“Are there potatoes?” Nesto asks a vendor.
“No, amigo. Maybe next month or the month after.”
“How about lemons?”
“No lemons in the markets since November. Only for tourists.”
At the back of the market, Nesto buys several pounds of rice and beans.
“I thought you got that stuff free,” I say.
“The State gives just five pounds of rice and beans per month, and it comes full of pebbles and worms. Even the coffee they give us is cut with peas.”
We pass the butcher stand where a man with blood on his apron swats flies gathering around thin slabs of beef hanging on hooks and fillets resting on his splintered wooden counter, Todo Por la Revolución painted in red across the front.
Outside the market, as we walk back to where he parked the Lada, a man approaches Nesto with a stack of egg crates on his shoulder. Nesto negotiates for four dozen eggs and the man helps him arrange the cartons on the floor of the Lada so they won’t crack.
“Do you really need that many?” I ask.
“With the Libreta, a person is only allowed five eggs a month, but right now there are no eggs in any dispensary or market in all of Playa or Marianao. So we have to get them here while they have them. Next week or next month, there might not be any.”
Just as the egg vendor walks off with the money Nesto paid him, another man arrives at Nesto’s side whispering that he has in his possession potatoes, which only tourist restaurants have had access to in months.
“Bueno, amigo,” Nesto says. “Show me what you’ve got.”
The man disappears around a corner, reappears a few minutes later with a paper sack in his arms, and presents it to Nesto, who pushes down the flaps to get a glimpse of what look to be real potatoes, fat as fists.
“Give me a dozen,” Nesto says, and the man is thrilled to be paid in CUCs.
“Black market potatoes,” I say, once we are in the car and on our way again.
“Black market everything.”
We hit three supermarkets where you can buy food, clothes, furniture, and appliances at inflated prices in the tourist currency, but are unable to find milk for Nesto’s children beyond condensed or the powdered kind. Finally, at a diplomercado out in Miramar where the expats and diplomats shop, we find real boxed milk and Nesto buys an entire case along with a few other luxuries—cheese, salami, pasta sauce, cookies, and crackers—food he says will hold up after he’s gone and won’t spoil easily in the tropical heat. We wait in line to pay among foreign-looking shoppers, their carts full of bottled water, wine, and packaged meats.
“You do this every time you come here?”
He nods. “This is what I save up for. I try to leave my mother’s and children’s refrigerators as stocked as I can. They go through it quickly though. When you live with rationing you panic because what remains uneaten today might not be where you left it tomorrow.”
Nesto takes me into the hills where a forest folds around the Río Almendares, the river that slices through Havana and pours out to the ocean through the end of the Malecón. Here in the bosque, spreading into a grassy field curtained by trees feathered in Spanish moss, air lush and clean, as if we’ve traveled very hard to get here, away from the noise of the city and smell of diesel and petrol, Nesto tells me people come to meet with the orishas, for a limpieza or a despojo, bathing for purification in the waters of Ochún, laying down offerings of fruit and flowers on the riverbank, gathering stones, beating drums, singing alabanzas for the orisha’s continued blessings.
Others, he says, come to conjure Ogún who dwells in forests like this one. Some come to place ofrendas at the feet of the Changó’s Ceiba trees—the only tree resistant to lightning and left untouched when the great flood covered the earth, giving shelter to mankind and animals so that life would endure—with bark so potent it can cure infertility: a tree so sacred one should not dare cross its shadow without first asking permission.
Nesto says the bosque is a popular place for small sacrifices, under trees dripping with branches and vines. People arrive to feed the saints with live chickens in cloth bags, leaving behind bloody ones, and nobody, not even one of the guards at the military post across the road, looks twice. At our feet are pieces of broken animal bones, even some chicken claws intact, shards of broken pottery, knotted ropes of all colors, decomposing fruit, and small pools of dried blood staining the soil. In dusty patches on the forest floor are painted white lines and circles among branches and twigs, which Nesto says are interpretations of the cowries, and in the gentle river current, I see sunflowers from upstream glide past us.
It’s because so many come here to meet with the orishas that Nesto says nobody would ever suspect we’ve actually come here to meet with the beef broker.
We watch a man walk down the hill sloping evenly like a set of stairs and make his way toward us on the edge of the river. He’s an older guy, maybe in his fifties, who Nesto told me is a trusted manager of one of the government slaughterhouses, running his negocio by slipping cuts of beef into a briefcase or satchel and taking them on the three-hour drive back to Havana for distribution. There are other men who run the same enterprise for fish, which comes from Africa, unavailable in the island food dispensaries for months, and another guy who brokers the plump chicken breasts meant for tourists, since the only cuts available with the Libreta are bony thighs or legs, and each person is only entitled to up to a pound per month.
The man arrives at our side and presents a newspaper-wrapped bundle to Nesto, who peels back a corner to get a look at the quality, counting six fillets.
“You’re looking at Fidel’s best,” the man tells Nesto. “Canadian Holstein crossed with Indian Zebu.”
A few vultures gathered around a chicken carcass farther down the riverbank seem to have noticed the smell of the steaks and move toward us.
“Not bad,” Nesto tells the meat man. “I’ll take them all.”
He slides a few bills of CUCs into the man’s palm with a handshake.
The beef broker heads back up the hill to his car, but Nesto stalls a bit, wrapping the bundle in a plastic bag he brought with him.
Through the trees I see the afternoon light is starting to dim, casting the forest in a pale golden film, similar to the forest of my dream. I try to picture the fires I saw last night in my sleep, try to feel for a connection.
Nesto walks to the edge of the riverbank, handing me the bundle of beef as he slips off his shoes and steps into the water, getting wet up to his knees. He leans over and dips his hands into the current, pulling smooth round stones off the river floor. He rubs them on his arms and neck, and places them on the ground by my feet.
“Many years ago in Africa, when the orishas watched as the first slaves were being packed into ships to be taken across the ocean, Ochún asked her mother, Yemayá, where they were going and Yemayá told her to a faraway island called Cuba. Ochún begged to be allowed to accompany the Africans on their journey. She didn’t want them to travel alone. This is why we love her so much. And they say if you are alone and wait patiently next to her rivers, you can hear her sing the song her father, Obatalá, taught her, which holds the secret of life. To hear it with your own ears is a special blessing.”
“You and your stories, Nesto.”
“I prefer this history to the one they force on us.”
“So, what’s the secret of life?”
“You don’t know? It’s so simple.”
I shake my head.
“Love.”
He stands in the river, his legs haloed by the current. He waves me over to him. I step as close as I can with my feet still on the hard earth. He cups water into his palms and lifts it to my face so the water drips off my forehead and cheeks.
“For protection.” He lets his fingers linger on the curves of my face, cool with water, running them over my lips, down my collarbone, a
nd over my heart.
With the day’s errands out of the way, Nesto says it’s time to go home. He drives along Quinta Avenida, past former residential palaces turned-embassies and ministries, where police monitor street corners. One has to drive fast, Nesto explains, since the early eighties when a bus crashed into the gates of the Peruvian embassy, killing a guard and opening the doors to thousands of asylum seekers, setting off the events that led to the boatlift. If caught slowing down suspiciously in this area, one can be fined. We pass through Miramar and Nesto points out the aquarium where he worked, and the cafeteria down the road where he says young girls hang around, selling themselves for a few dollars to anyone who comes in for a coffee so they can buy minutes for their cell phones.
“Every time I see them I think of my daughter,” he says. “And I think I have to do whatever it takes to get her out of here before she starts getting offers for her body.”
Soon he turns onto another road and up a long hill where the neighborhood has clearly changed, turning from slick and smooth paved avenues to broken, potholed streets. A barrio of colorless buildings wasted by time and neglect to their original plaster and concrete tones. Houses like blocks haphazardly arranged by a child, built one on top of the other. People walk in the middle of the street. Children carry smaller children. Skeletal dogs sleep belly up in small patches of shade under tin awnings. Garbage accumulates on street corners. There are few trees around here and the salty ocean air doesn’t reach this far up the city slope.
The Veins of the Ocean Page 27
