In Havana, the party was at its peak. There were splendid women who sang on the balconies, luminous birds in the sea, music everywhere, but beneath the joy you could feel the creative conflict of a way of life already forever condemned, that was struggling to prevail against another different way of life, still ingenuous, but inspired and devastating. The city continued to be a sanctuary of pleasure, with slot machines even in the pharmacies and aluminum automobiles too big for the colonial corners, but the appearance and behavior of the people was changing in an incredible way. All the sediment of the social subsoil had come to light, and an eruption of human lava, dense and steamy, scattered without control into all the twists and turns of the liberated city, and spread with a tumultuous vertigo to its last traces. The most noticeable was how naturally poor people sat in the seats of the rich in public places. They had invaded the lobbies of the luxury hotels, were eating with their fingers on the terraces of the Vedado cafés, and baking in the sun at the swimming pools with luminous colored water in the formerly exclusive clubs of Siboney. The blond porter at the Hotel Havana Hilton, which was starting to be called the Habana Libre, had been replaced by obliging militia kids who spent the day convincing the campesinos that they could come in without fear, showing them that there was one entrance door and another to exit, and that they didn’t run any risk of catching tuberculosis from entering the air-conditioned lobby while sweating. A swaggering dude from Luyanó, very dark and slim, in a shirt with painted butterflies and patent leather shoes with Andalusian dancer heels, had tried to enter backward through the revolving glass doors of the Hotel Riviera, just when the succulent, dolled-up wife of a European diplomat was trying to leave. In a flash of instantaneous panic, the husband of the latter tried to force the door in one direction while the flustered militiamen outside tried to force it the opposite way. The white woman and the black man were stuck for a fraction of a second in the crystal trap, squashed in a space meant for a single person, until the door began to spin again and the confused and blushing woman ran, without even waiting for her husband, and hopped into the limousine that was awaiting her with the door open and which took off instantly. The black man, without really knowing what had just happened, was left confused and quivering.
“Coño!” he sighed. “She smelled of flowers!”
There were frequent setbacks. And this was understandable because the buying power of the urban and rural population had increased by a considerable extent in one year. Electricity, telephone, transport, and general public service rates had been reduced to humanitarian levels. The prices of hotels and restaurants, as with transport, had been lowered drastically, and special excursions were organized from the countryside to the city and from the city to the countryside, which were often free. Besides, unemployment was going down by leaps and bounds, wages were going up, and urban reform had alleviated the monthly anxiety of rent, and education and school supplies cost nothing. The twenty leagues of marble flour on the beaches of Varadero, which used to have just one owner and the enjoyment of which was reserved for the excessively wealthy rich, were opened without conditions for everyone, including the rich. Cubans, like Caribbean people in general, had always believed that money was only for spending, and for the first time in the history of their country they were proving it in practice.
I think very few of us were aware of the stealthy but irreparable way shortages were gradually intruding on our lives. Even after the Bay of Pigs landing the casinos were still open, and some little hookers without tourists hung around hoping some guy who got lucky at roulette might save their night. It’s obvious that as conditions were changing, those solitary swallows were getting gloomier and cheaper all the time. But in any case, the nights of Havana and Guantánamo were still long and sleepless, and the music from parties for rent went on till dawn. Those vestiges of the old life kept up the illusion of normalcy and abundance that neither the nocturnal explosions nor the constant rumors of vile aggression, or even the real imminence of war, managed to extinguish, but it’s been a long time since they were true.
Sometimes there was no beef in the restaurants after midnight, but we didn’t care, because there might be chicken. Sometimes there were no plantains, but we didn’t care, because there might be yams. The musicians from the neighboring clubs, and the undaunted pimps who awaited the night’s yield in front of a glass of beer, seemed as distracted as we were at the uncontainable erosion of daily life.
At the shopping center the first lines had appeared, and an incipient but very active black market began to control industrially produced articles, but no one thought very seriously that this was happening because things were lacking; rather the opposite, they thought it was because there was a surplus of money. At that time, someone needed an aspirin after we’d been to a movie and we couldn’t find one in three drugstores. We found one at the fourth, and the pharmacist explained without alarm that aspirin had been in short supply for three months. The truth is that not just aspirin but many essential things had been scarce for a while, but nobody seemed to think that they would run out completely. Almost a year after the United States decreed a total embargo on trade with Cuba, life continued without very notable changes, not as much in reality as in the spirit of the people.
I became aware of the blockade in a terrible, but at the same time a bit of a lyrical, way, as I’d become aware of almost everything in life. After a night shift at the Prensa Latina office I left alone and slightly sluggish to look for something to eat. Dawn was breaking. The sea was in a tranquil mood, and a yellow breach separated it from the sky on the horizon. I walked down the middle of the deserted avenue, against the salty wind of the Malecón, looking for some open place to eat under the corroded and seeping stone arcades of the old city. Finally I found a small restaurant with the metal shutters down but unlocked, and I tried to raise them to go in because there was light inside and a man polishing glasses at the counter. I had barely attempted it when I heard the unmistakable sound of a rifle being cocked behind me, and a very sweet but steadfast voice.
“Hold it, comrade,” she said. “Hands up.”
She was an apparition in the morning mist. She had a very beautiful face, with her hair tied back in a ponytail at the nape of her neck, and a military shirt drenched by the wind off the sea. She was startled, no doubt, but she had her heels separated and well fixed on the ground, and she held her rifle like a soldier.
“I’m hungry,” I said.
Maybe I said it with too much conviction, because only then did she understand that I hadn’t been trying to break into the place, and her distrust turned into pity.
“It’s very late,” she said.
“Just the opposite,” I replied. “The problem is that it’s too early. What I want is breakfast.”
Then I made hand signals through the glass and convinced the man to serve me some food, even though it was two hours before he was going to open. I ordered eggs and ham, coffee with milk, bread and butter, and fresh fruit juice, whatever kind he had. The man told me with a suspicious precision that there hadn’t been any eggs or ham in a week and no milk for three days, and the only thing he could serve me was black coffee and bread without butter, and maybe a bit of reheated macaroni from last night. Surprised, I asked him what was going on with foodstuffs, and my surprise was so innocent that it was he who felt surprised.
“Nothing’s going on,” he told me. “Just that this country has gone to hell.”
He was no enemy of the revolution, as I imagined at first. Just the opposite: he was the last of a family of eleven who had all fled to Miami. He had decided to stay, and indeed he stayed forever, but his trade allowed him to decipher the future with more realistic elements than a sleepless journalist. He was thinking that in less than three months he’d have to close his diner due to lack of food, but he didn’t mind too much because he already had very well defined plans for his personal future.
I
t was a very accurate prediction. On March 12, 1962, when three hundred and twenty-two days had passed since the beginning of the blockade, drastic rationing was imposed on foodstuffs. Each adult was assigned a monthly ration of three pounds of beef, one of fish, one of chicken, six of rice, two of lard, one and a half of beans, four ounces of butter, and five eggs. It was a ration calculated so that every Cuban could consume a normal quota of calories daily. There were special rations for children, according to age, and everyone under fourteen had the right to a liter of milk a day. Later there began to be shortages of nails, detergent, light bulbs, and many other urgent household articles, and the authorities’ problem was not regulating them but acquiring them. The most admirable thing was seeing to what extent that scarcity imposed by the enemy was strengthening social morale. The same year that rationing was established saw the October Crisis, which the British historian Hugh Thomas has qualified as the gravest crisis in the history of humanity, and a huge majority of the Cuban people remained in a state of alert for a month, immobile in their combat sites until the danger seemed to have been warded off, and prepared to confront the atomic bomb with shotguns. In the midst of that massive mobilization, which would have been enough to unhinge any well-positioned economy, industrial production reached unusual figures, absenteeism ended in factories, and obstacles, which in less dramatic circumstances would have been fatal, were avoided. A New York telephone operator said to a Cuban colleague on one occasion that in the United States they were very frightened about what might happen.
“Whereas here we’re very calm,” the Cuban operator answered. “After all, the atomic bomb doesn’t hurt.”
The country then produced enough shoes so that every Cuban could buy a new pair every year, so distribution was channeled through the schools and workplaces. Only in August 1963, when almost all the stores were closed because there was absolutely nothing to sell, was the distribution of clothing regulated. They began by rationing nine articles, among them men’s trousers, underwear for both sexes, and certain kinds of textiles, but within a year they had to increase it to fifteen.
That was the first Christmas of the revolution celebrated without suckling pig and turrón, and the first time toys were rationed. However, and thanks precisely to rationing, it was also the first Christmas in the history of Cuba when every single child, with no distinction whatsoever, had at least one toy. In spite of the intense Soviet aid and the help from the People’s Republic of China, which was no less generous in those days, and in spite of the assistance of numerous socialist and Latin American specialists, the blockade was then an unavoidable reality that would contaminate the most recondite cracks of daily life and hasten the new irreversible course of Cuban history. Communications with the rest of the world had been reduced to the essential minimum. The five daily flights to Miami and twice-weekly Cubana de Aviación flights to New York stopped with the October Crisis. The few Latin American airlines that flew to Cuba gradually canceled them as their countries suspended diplomatic and commercial relations, and only a weekly flight from Mexico remained that for many years served as the umbilical cord to the rest of the Americas, though it was also a channel for infiltration for the services of subversion and espionage of the United States. Cubana de Aviación, with its fleet reduced to the epic Bristol Britannias, which were only maintained by way of special accords with the English manufacturers, provided an almost acrobatic flight over the polar route to Prague. A letter from Caracas, less than a thousand miles from the Cuban coast, had to go halfway around the world to get to Havana. Telephone connections with the rest of the world had to go through Miami or New York, under the control of the United States secret services, by way of a prehistoric undersea cable, which was broken on one occasion by a Cuban ship that left Havana harbor dragging the anchor it had forgotten to weigh. The only source of energy were the five million tons of petroleum that Soviet tankers transported every year from the ports of the Baltic, eight thousand miles away, and at a rate of one ship every fifty-three hours. The Oxford, a CIA boat equipped with all the latest espionage equipment, patrolled Cuban territorial waters for several years to make sure no capitalist country, apart from the very few who dared, contravened the will of the United States. It was also a calculated provocation in everybody’s sight. From the Malecón in Havana or the higher neighborhoods of Santiago, people could see the luminous silhouette of that ship of provocation anchored in territorial waters.
Maybe very few Cubans remembered that on the other side of the Caribbean sea, three centuries earlier, the inhabitants of Cartagena de Indias had suffered a similar drama. The hundred and twenty best ships of the British navy, under the command of Admiral Vernon, had besieged the city with thirty thousand select soldiers, many of them recruited from the American colonies that would later become the United States. A brother of George Washington, the future liberator of those colonies, was one of the chiefs of staff of the assault troops. Cartagena de Indias, which was famous in the world then for its military fortifications and the frightful amount of rats in its sewers, resisted the siege with an invincible ferocity, despite its inhabitants eventually having to eat what they could find, from the bark of trees to the leather of stools. After several months, crushed by the bravery of the besieged, and decimated by yellow fever, dysentery, and the heat, the English retired in defeat. The inhabitants of the city, on the other hand, were healthy and full, but they’d eaten everything down to the last rat.
Many Cubans, of course, knew about this drama. But their rare sense of history prevents them from thinking it could be repeated. Nobody could have imagined in the uncertain New Year of 1964 that there were still worse times to come with that tight and heartless blockade, and that they’d reach such extremes as running out of drinking water in many homes and in almost all public establishments.
November–December 1978, Alternativa, Bogotá
The Specter of the Nobel Prize
Every year, around these days, great writers are unsettled by a specter: the Nobel Prize for Literature. Jorge Luis Borges, who is one of the greatest and also one of the most assiduous candidates, once protested in an interview about the two months of anxiety he had to undergo due to the conjectures. It’s inevitable: Borges is the writer of the highest artistic merits in the Spanish language, and they can’t expect him to be excluded, if only for pity’s sake, from the annual predictions. The bad thing is that the final result does not depend on the candidate’s own right, and not even on the justice of the gods, but on the inscrutable will of the members of the Swedish Academy.
I don’t remember an accurate prediction. The prizewinners, in general, seem to be the most surprised. When the Irish playwright Samuel Beckett received a telephone call informing him of his prize, in 1969, he exclaimed in consternation, “Oh God, what a catastrophe!” Pablo Neruda, in 1971, found out three days before the news was made public, by way of a confidential message from the Swedish Academy. But the following night he invited a group of friends for dinner in Paris, where he was then the ambassador for Chile, and none of us found out the reason for the party until the evening papers published the news. “I just don’t believe in anything until I see it in print,” Neruda told us later with his invincible laughter. A few days later, while we were having lunch in a clamorous restaurant on the Boulevard Montparnasse, he remembered he hadn’t yet written his speech for the presentation ceremony, which would be held forty-eight hours later in Stockholm. So he turned over a page of the menu, and without a single pause, without worrying about the human uproar, as naturally as he breathed and with his usual, implacable green ink, in which he wrote his poetry, he wrote his stunning coronation speech right there.
The most common version among writers and critics is that the Swedish academics reach their agreement in May, when the snow begins to melt, and they study the work of the few finalists during the heat of the summer. In October, still bronzed from the southern sunshine, they issue their verdict. Another ver
sion claims that Jorge Luis Borges was the chosen one in May of 1976, but not in the final vote of November. Actually, the prizewinner that year was the magnificent and depressing Saul Bellow, quickly chosen at the last moment, in spite of the fact that the prizewinners for other subjects were also North Americans.
The truth is that on September 22 of that year—a month before the vote—Borges had done something that had nothing to do with his masterful literature: he visited Augusto Pinochet in a formal setting. “It is an undeserved honor to be received by yourself, señor presidente,” he said in his ill-fated speech. “In Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay liberty and order are being saved,” he continued, without anyone having asked him to. And he concluded impassively: “This is happening on an anarchized continent undermined by communism.” It was easy to think that so many successive verbal atrocities were only possible to pull Pinochet’s leg. But the Swedes did not understand the Buenos Aires sense of humor. Since then, Borges’s name has disappeared from the predictions. Now, at the end of an unjust penance, it has reappeared, and nothing would please those of us who are his insatiable readers at the same time as his political adversaries more than knowing him at last freed from his annual anxiety.
The Scandal of the Century Page 21
