Havana Twist

by Lia Matera

  “I am the chief of the prison,” she said in Spanish. “I am sorry I do not speak English better.”

  Beside her, smiling hugely and insincerely, was a short, dark-haired older woman in a plain civilian dress and grandma-style leather shoes, probably the best shoes I’d seen on nonmilitary personnel in Cuba. The warden didn’t introduce her.

  The warden began an obviously canned rap. “The prison holds nine hundred inmates, but we are fortunate never to be full. Just now, we have not even four hundred, the majority convicted of economic crimes which carry sentences usually of a few years’ time.”

  We walked into a drab box of a building and up a corridor with a locked grille at one end. As she unlocked the door, she continued, “Over there are the conjugal visit rooms.” The walls had vented slats six feet up so sounds from inside could be heard in the corridor.

  She continued walking me down the hall. “And here is the infirmary.” A room with four cots, all empty. “And the nursery for babies up to one year old.” Another empty room, this one with a few cribs and play pens.

  The warden sighed as if this weren’t going nearly quickly enough. I knew the feeling. God, I hate prisons.

  She walked me to another locked door with yet another Chinese soldier standing guard. While she unlocked it, her civilian companion continued smiling.

  The door opened onto a corridor whose outside wall was made of cinder blocks with flower-shaped cutouts. The sun beat in, making bouquet shadows in the prison cells across the corridor.

  “The women are working now. Sewing. That is why the cells are empty.”

  Each had three cots, a curtainless shower, and a hole-in-the-ground toilet.

  It took all my strength of will not to visualize myself in there.

  We rounded a corner and entered a big room that smelled of steam irons and hot fabric. “This is the workroom,” the warden said.

  At the back of the room, two guards, one Cuban and one Chinese, stood impassively watching.

  The room was about fifty feet long, with several rows of old-fashioned sewing machines. Perhaps forty inmates were sewing dolls or purses or dirndl pants. A few cast listless glances at us.

  I was surprised. Surely the sight of someone new would arouse curiosity in an environment of sameness and dull stitchery?

  In the San Bruno Jail, where an antiwar protest had landed me for two long months, the warden had forced us to sew curtains, endless blue curtains, for some purpose I never learned. With every stitch, frustration had wound me tighter. I’d been a slave, and I’d hated it. And I’m certain I’d never looked as passive and incurious as these women.

  They were drugged, I was sure of it. And god knew what life was like for the hundreds of prisoners not on display today. And for the prisoners not in showcase jails.

  Standing beside the sewing machine closest to me, one young woman was doing virtually nothing. She wasn’t cutting anything out, she was just handing another woman fabric. She looked flushed, upset, and embarrassed. Her skin was European pale, and her hair, once bleached, had an inch of dark root showing. She was clearly on display and just as clearly hated it.

  It had to be Myra Wilson. The prison must have assumed I’d come here to check on the American. I supposed American journalists trooped through regularly to make sure she was all right.

  She glanced at me with a glint of tears in her eyes. She continued handing fabric to the other woman.

  The warden stopped in front of her. “Are you well today, Myra?”

  The woman nodded. Then, because she seemed to know it was expected of her, she lifted her chin and said to me, “I have six and three quarters years left in my sentence. I tried to smuggle cocaine, which isn’t tolerated. Drug use isn’t tolerated here.” Her voice was high-pitched and girlish.

  “Where are you from?” I asked her.

  A slight frown. “Jersey City.”

  “Great town,” I said. The warden was motioning me to come along, but I persisted. “You ever eat at June’s Diner? A relative of mine owns it, a blond woman in her sixties.”

  “No.” She kept her eyes averted, smiling slightly. “But I used to cook for Ernest Hemingway.”

  A Chinese soldier stalked up, glowering at her.

  The warden said, “There is no conversation during work hours.” Her companion smiled and nodded. “Or no work would get done. With four hundred women, you understand that gossip can be an enemy of productivity.”

  The smiling woman moved to my other side to block my view of Myra Wilson. I heard Wilson sigh when I walked away. Ernest Hemingway? What could she have meant by that?

  We continued through the sewing room, where more young women worked listlessly without looking up. The warden was saying, “It is true that Cuba has no tolerance for drugs. We have refused to become a stopping place between Colombia and Florida.”

  The warden took me downstairs to her office, which opened into a courtyard ringed with thriving schefflera plants three stories tall, their broad leaves glistening in the sun.

  She offered me coffee, which I drank quickly and gratefully, pretending to admire the plants while I took stock. The building was four stories and built to house nine hundred.

  I’d seen ten cells and a workroom containing no more than forty women. Where were the rest of the inmates?

  It was all I could do to suppress a shudder. It was all I could do, recalling my two months behind a sewing machine, not to cry.

  I was hot and cross and tired. And what had I really learned?

  I was relieved, when we walked through the fenced area, to see the Moskvich right where I’d left it.

  Five minutes down the road, I was even more relieved to find Dennis and Cindy waiting.

  “Any luck?” Cindy asked.

  I climbed into the back, gratefully relinquishing the wheel to Dennis. “Myra Wilson looks miserable. She gave me a set speech, obviously memorized.”

  “About how Cuba doesn’t tolerate drugs?”

  “That’s right. I mentioned my mother’s name to her. I said it was the name of a restaurant in her hometown. I asked if she’d ever eaten there.”

  Dennis grinned, looking at me. It hardly mattered if his eyes left the road. Ours was the only car in sight. “Did they give her a chance to say anything?”

  “The guards were on her right away. But she did say, ‘I used to cook for Ernest Hemingway.’”

  They exchanged glances.

  “Do you know what she meant?”

  “Ernest Hemingway’s house is here on the island,” Dennis offered. “He lived here in the forties and fifties. The place is a museum now.”

  “I wonder if she had that in mind?” But Cindy didn’t sound as if she wondered. “Association of ideas or something.”

  Dennis mused, “Maybe it’s an Ochoa situation?”

  “That’s what I was just thinking,” Cindy agreed.

  “What’s Ochoa?” It sounded more like a plant than a predicament.

  “He was a member of Castro’s original revolutionary cadre. He led Cuba’s army all around the world—Nicaragua, Zaire, Angola, you name it. He was wildly popular with his troops. Castro leaves it to his generals to finance his foreign wars—he can’t be bothered with details. So Ochoa used to export natural resources, ivory and diamonds in Angola, for instance, to maintain and supply his troops. After Angola, Ochoa came back to Havana and started pushing for better treatment of veterans—fifty thousand of them hit the streets with no jobs waiting, no pensions, nothing. Angola was Cuba’s Vietnam. People wanted to believe Ochoa could do for all of Cuba what he’d always done for his soldiers—namely, get them food and fuel and basic amenities.”

  The air was cooling down, and lush roadside plants caught the evening sun, their exotic fronds and blooms glowing. Above fields of six-foot grasses and shrubs, tiny insects sparkled like sequins.


  “So?” I prompted.

  “So meanwhile high-ranking officers in the Interior Ministry had been doing exactly that: making drug deals to pull in enough money to keep Cuba afloat. Remember, the USSR had been subsidizing Cuba to the tune of about four billion dollars a year. When that dried up, well, they had to do something. But when the U.S. got wind of it, Castro had to choose between loyalty to his ministers and a reputation for being antidrug. He had to choose between the Revolutionary Idea and the cash to make it work.”

  “I gather he remained ideologically pure?” It didn’t look to me as if there’d been an infusion of money here recently.

  “When Castro arrested the Interior Ministry people, he pulled in Ochoa, too. But Ochoa was old guard, what they call an histórico. He wasn’t one of the Rolex-wearing, drug-trafficking, world-traveling Yummies from Interior. He didn’t line his own pockets like they did. And Castro knew it. He was afraid of Ochoa’s popularity and charisma. Ochoa supported perestroika and glasnost, a loosening of the communist chokehold, which the people favored but Fidel absolutely opposed. So Fidel had him put before a firing squad on trumped-up drug charges. After his execution, there was a moment when we thought there might be riots here. Even now, you still see the graffiti.”

  Graffiti? I’d only seen 8A. “Eight is ocho in Spanish,” I realized. “Ocho-A, Ochoa.”

  “You’ve seen it, then. The people are bitter. They think Fidel didn’t want them to have the freedom and goods Ochoa would have brought them. That Fidel couldn’t bear anyone to be more popular than he was. He executed a Hero of the Revolution, someone who’d fought beside him like a brother, like Abel beside Cain.”

  “Why does this remind you of Myra Wilson?”

  “Virtually everything that goes on here is authorized—not always legal, but authorized,” Cindy offered. “So how would an American go about smuggling drugs in a fishbowl like this? She’d have to be working with someone in Interior. Either that or the drug charge was a pretext.”

  “And like Ochoa,” Dennis finished her thought, “Wilson’s being punished for something else entirely.”

  10

  Cindy and Dennis dropped me off at the sea wall so I could return to the hotel on foot, as if returning from a solitary walk. They had to hustle off to a film-festival event—an evening of what they described as the Cuban version of lounge singing. The whole group would be there drinking rum and singing “Guantanamera,” so they felt they should show their faces.

  That was fine with me. As usual, I wanted to be alone. In fact, I was in no hurry to return to the hotel. I moseyed along the Malecon, watching young Cuban couples kiss and grope in the darkness.

  All of a sudden, I heard Ernesto’s voice, “I was insane with fear for you, Señora!”

  I turned to see him standing at a distance of about ten feet, leaning against the wall as if looking out to sea.

  “You lost me on purpose,” I snapped. “You sped up without any reason.”

  “No, no, I swear to you! I became distracted only for a few moments, and then I could not find you. My compañero is ready to tear away my skin because his bicycle is lost. For his sake, you will tell me where you left the bicycle? Please?”

  “I have no idea where I was.” I dug in my pocket, pulling out a twenty. From what I’d seen, that would be a huge sum here. “Tell your compañero to buy himself a new bicycle. And bring your friend, the one who saw the American woman, bring him here. Have him meet me at the Malecon.”

  I walked away, wondering whether he would. Wondering whether, instead, he’d take the twenty and stay away.

  Before I reached the hotel, I paused. My mother would have been a sucker for a kid like this. She’d have emptied her pocketbook and wandered anywhere with him.

  I was still feeling disturbed and mistrustful—part of the Cuban tourism experience—when I wandered into the hotel lobby and was immediately confronted by last night’s “reporter” with the tape recorder. He stood before me, full attention on my face. His hair was pulled into a tight ponytail, so curly it looked like a rabbit’s tail. His skin was grainy, with a grayish cast. He stank of tobacco.

  When he smiled, he looked like he was going to try to take a bite out of me. “I was hoping to escort you to the evening of boleros.”

  “I’m not feeling well. I’m going to skip it.”

  He stepped closer. It was all I could do not to recoil. “Oh no, you must not miss it!” Then, in a more conversational tone, he added, “These are the finest singers in all of Cuba.” There was a coy lilt to his voice.

  I noticed his tape recorder hanging by his side. Was it turned on?

  He tried again. “There will be many reporters there anxious to hear your opinion of the films.” As if he thought that would be a turn-on.

  “I’m sorry, I’m just too tired.”

  “There will be in particular one from Radio Havana. His English is very excellent, much more than mine.”

  Did he really think I’d change my mind in order to hear excellent English? It wasn’t like I’d been away from home a long time.

  I smiled pleasantly, no easy feat, and tried to step around him.

  “You must meet the reporter from Radio Havana,” the man insisted. “He is very good with Americans.”

  “Look, I’m just—”

  “With American women. Blond women of more advanced years.”

  For a second, I took offense. Thirty-seven is hardly “advanced years.” Then his words sank in.

  “Like members of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom? Women like that?”

  He nodded. “His English is very excellent to speak with women like that, yes. I think you would be very happy to meet him. His English is most excellent.”

  I looked at him, my skin literally crawling with mistrust. But he was making it as plain as he could in this crowded lobby. The Radio Havana reporter wanted to talk to me about my mother.

  I said, “Let me go upstairs and change my clothes. I’ll meet you back here in fifteen minutes.”

  He nodded, turning away and walking out.

  I hurriedly washed up and changed into clean clothes. But when I went downstairs, the reporter—or whoever he was—was nowhere in sight. I waited in the lobby for a while. I considered going back up to my room.

  Finally, I asked the desk clerk if she knew where the film festival group had gone.

  She looked almost wistful, as if she would happily take my place at the event. She gave me directions to a nearby hotel. “Very deluxe,” she assured me.

  The very deluxe hotel was, luckily, within walking distance. It looked like a cement box. Its lobby was only a little too clean to pass for an American flophouse. A man at a podium asked what my business was.

  When I told him, he handed me a piece of paper with a prestamped floor number. I thought it was odd he didn’t just tell me, but I took it around the corner to the elevator.

  I punched the button and almost leaped with fear to hear the loud creaking and grinding in the shaft. When the door jerked open, an elevator operator in an organ-grinder’s monkey suit held out his hand. I wondered whether he wanted a tip.

  In rather labored English, he asked for my elevator pass. I handed him the slip of paper I’d been given. Jeez, an elevator pass. To keep out Cubans trying to sneak into a tourists-only nightclub?

  The minute I stepped off the elevator, I knew I was going to have a rotten time. I was tired, unsociable, unwilling to elbow through the crowd spilling through the nightclub doors. And the music, though enthusiastically received by a roomful of people singing happily along, was not very hip. Through the doors, I could see a long U-shaped bar with a small stage at the center. Under colored lights, a heavy woman with a bubble hairstyle and two guitar-playing older men were crooning a sentimental ballad.

  The U-shaped bar was crowded, every stool was occupied, an
d people were standing between them. There were small tables all around, equally crowded. Where there was room, people danced. I noticed several scantily dressed Cuban girls with older tourists.

  I didn’t want to go inside. If I could endure the cigarette smoke out here, perhaps the Havana Radio guy would spot me. If he really was here.

  Almost immediately, I became aware of a light-haired man with an Andy Gibb haircut making his way toward me. In his white sportcoat and new blue jeans, he looked like a trendy European ready for a disco evening.

  He said, “May I ask five minutes of your time?”

  “Radio Havana?”

  He nodded, taking my elbow and steering me through knots of people to a corner near the elevator. Inside, people were cheering and stomping and whistling out their appreciation. The club obviously didn’t water the rum.

  He leaned close to my ear. “Let me speak plainly. We have a very bad situation, you see. A situation in which a certain … involving the return to you of something you have been most desirous of finding.”

  I instinctively grabbed the sleeve of his jacket to ensure he’d stay with me until he finished his thought.

  “It is to no one’s advantage for this … to remain lost. But we would be most interested in your assurance that further discussion could be accomplished in strictest confidence. And that this confidence would continue to be maintained indefinitely, for the equal benefit of all parties.”

  I wondered if this guy was a Cuban lawyer.

  “My only agenda is to find what I’ve been looking for,” I assured him. “Period. I have absolutely no desire to talk to anyone at all about it, ever. I just want to make this as short a trip as possible.”

  His frown made it clear he didn’t think it would be quite so simple. It suddenly occurred to me that the problem might be my mother. Maybe the Cubans didn’t trust her to shut up about something. Maybe they didn’t want to let her go without some guarantee.

  “I have enough influence,” I lied, “to make my wishes prevail.” Like hell.

  But I’d worry about that later. With our passports and my law degree at stake, I’d lock Mother in a soundproof room if I had to.