My Kind of Place: Travel Stories from a Woman Who's Been Everywhere

by Orlean, Susan

  That was years ago now, and the place is not the same. My new friend drove me there, and we parked and walked along the building’s long, blank eastern side. It was once an elegant, filigreed building. Now its ivory paint was peeling off in big, plate-size pieces, exposing one or two or three other colors of paint. Near the door, I saw something on the sidewalk that looked like a soggy paper bag. Close up, I saw that it was a puddle of brown blood and a goat’s head, with a white striped muzzle and tiny, pearly teeth. My friend gasped and said that it was probably a Santería ritual offering, common in the countryside but hardly ever seen on a city street. We looked at it for a moment. A few cars muttered by. I felt a little woozy. The heat was pressing on my head like a foot on a gas pedal, and the goat was pretty well cooked.

  Inside the building, there were burst-open bags of cement mix, two-by-fours, bricks, rubble. An old barber chair. A fat, friendly, shirtless man shoring up a doorway. On the wall beside him was a mural of Castro wearing a big hat and, above that, a mural from the first day of the revolution, showing Castro and his comrades wading ashore from a cabin cruiser. This room had been the old Centro Vasco’s kitchen, and its dining room had been upstairs. Now the whole building is a commissary, where food is prepared and then sent on to a thousand people working for the government’s Construction Ministry.

  After a minute, a subdirector in the ministry stepped through the rubble—a big, bearish man with shaggy blond hair and an angelic face. He said the workers’ lunch today had been fish with tomato sauce, bologna, boiled bananas, and rice and black beans. He wanted us to come upstairs to see where the old Centro Vasco dining room had been, and as we made our way there he told us that it had been divided into a room for his office and a room where the workers’ gloves are made and their shoes are repaired. He had eaten there when it was the old Centro Vasco, he added. It had had a great view, and now, standing at his desk, we could see the swooping edge of the Gulf of Mexico, the hulking crenellated Morro Castle, the narrow neck of the Bay of Havana, the wide coastal road, the orange-haired hookers who loll on the low gray breakwater, and then acres and acres of smooth blue water shining like chrome in the afternoon light. The prettiness of the sight made us all quiet, and then the subdirector said he had heard that some Spanish investors were thinking of buying the building and turning it back into a restaurant. “It’s a pity the way it is now,” he said. “It was a wonderful place.”

  That night, my friend and I ate dinner at a paladar, a kind of private café that Cubans are now permitted to own and operate, provided it has no more than twelve chairs and four tables and is in their home. This one was in a narrow house in Old Havana, and the kitchen was the kitchen of the house, and the tables and the chairs were set in the middle of the living room. The owner was a stained-glass artist by trade, and he sat on a sofa near our table and chatted while we ate. He said that he loved the restaurant business and that he and his wife were doing so well that they could hardly wait until the government permitted more chairs, because they were ready to buy them.

  I went back to Centro Vasco one more time before leaving Cuba—not the old place, in the wedge building, but the new, Moorish one, in a section of Havana called Vedado, which is now a jumble of houses and ugly new hotels but for decades had been a military installation. I wanted to go once more to be sure I’d remember it, because I didn’t know if I’d ever be back again. I went with my new friend and her husband, who was sentimental about the restaurant in the Vedado, because during the revolution he had fought just down the street from it. While he was driving us to Centro Vasco, he pointed to where he’d been stationed, saying, “Right there! Oh, it was wonderful! I was preparing a wonderful catapult mechanism to launch hand grenades.” In front of the restaurant someone had parked a milky white 1957 Ford Fairlane, and some little boys were horsing around near it. On the sidewalk, four men were playing dominoes at a bowlegged table, and the clack, clack of the tiles sounded like the tapping of footsteps on the street. The same apologetic waiter was in the dining room, and he brought us plates of gambas a la plancha and pollo frito con mojo criollo and tortilla Centro Vasco. The restaurant was nearly empty. The manager came and stood proudly by our table, and so did the busboys and the other waiters and a heavy woman in a kitchen uniform who had been folding a huge stack of napkins while watching us eat. Toward the end of the meal, someone came in and warned us that our car was going to be lifted and carried away. I thought he meant that it was being stolen, but he meant that it was being relocated: Castro would be driving by soon, and because he was worried about car bombs, he became nervous if he saw cars parked on the street.

  As we were leaving, the waiter stopped us at the door. He had a glossy eight-by-ten he wanted to show me—a glamorous-looking photograph of Juan Jr.’s wedding. He said that it was his favorite keepsake. The Saizarbitorias had left nearly everything behind when they left Cuba. Juan was allowed to take only a little bit of money and three changes of clothes. In Miami, Juan’s daughter Mirentxu had remarked to me on how strange it was to have so few family mementos and scrapbooks and pictures—it was almost as if the past had never taken place. I admired the wedding picture for a minute. Then the waiter and I talked a little about old Juanito. I couldn’t tell whether the waiter knew that Juanito had died, so I didn’t say anything. Meanwhile, he told me that a friend of his had once sent him a napkin from Centro Vasco in Miami, and he had saved it. He said, “I’ve had so many feelings over these years, but I never imagined that Juanito would never come back.”

  THERE HAD BEEN one other Centro Vasco, but it wasn’t possible for me to visit it. It had been the first Centro Vasco that Juanito opened in the United States, on the corner of Ponce de Leon and Douglas Road, in a building that straddled the border between Miami and Coral Gables—a place that might have been satisfactory except that the two cities had different liquor laws. If you wanted a drink, you had to be sure to get a table on the Miami side. The border had come to be too much trouble, so Juanito moved to Southwest Eighth Street, and eventually the old building was torn down.

  But I did go back to the Centro Vasco on Southwest Eighth one more time after I came back from Cuba. It was a Saturday night, and it was busy: People were coming for dinner and to hear Malena Burke sing. I wanted to tell the Saizarbitorias about my trip, to tell them that the Basque boy was still there and that the food wasn’t very good, but that the restaurant was just as they had left it and, in spite of the thirty-three years that had passed, was still in fine shape. Then I realized that I didn’t know whether they would be glad or sorry about what I would tell them. In Havana, everyone I met talked constantly about the future, about what might happen when the United States lifted its embargo and when Castro retired, both of which events they expected soon. To the people I met in Cuba, the present seemed provisional and the past nearly forgotten, and their yearning was keen—charged with anticipation. In Miami, the present moment is satisfying, and thought is given to the future, but the past seems like the richest place—frequently visited and as familiar and real and comforting as an old family home.

  The music wasn’t to start until after midnight, so for a long time I stood in the foyer and watched people parade in: the executive of a Latin American television network, in a tight white suit and high white shoes; an editor from a Spanish soap opera magazine; a Puerto Rican singer who had just performed at Dade County Auditorium, followed by her entourage; another singer, named Franco, who called out to someone while he and I were talking, “Hey, man, you look great! I thought you were dead!”; and dozens of good-looking couples speaking in bubbly Spanish and all wearing something that glistened or sparkled or had a satiny shine. Toward midnight, Sherman Hemsley of The Jeffersons came in with a television producer, and Iñaki wrote “Cherman Jemsli Del Show Los Jeffersons” on a little slip of paper for Malena, so that when she pointed him out in the audience, she’d know what to say.

  Malena came onstage at one in the morning. She began with a ballad that had been made f
amous in Cuba in the fifties by a singer called La Lupe, who used to get so emotional when she reached the crescendo that she hurled things at the audience—usually her shoes and her wig. The room had been roaring before Malena came out, but now it was hushed. Malena had left Cuba just a few months earlier. Someone told me that the tears she sheds when she’s singing about lost love are real. By then, I was sitting at a table in the back of the room with Totty. I had some snapshots with me that I had taken in Havana for the family, because I’d thought they might like to see the old home again. Just as I was about to slide the pictures across the table to Totty, the singer sobbed to her crescendo, so I decided to wait until another day.

  Rough Diamonds

  Most of the time, the boys in categoría pequeña—the Cuban equivalent of Little League baseball—play on days when there hasn’t been a coup in Latin America, or at least not in a country that supplies a lot of oil to Cuba. Unfortunately, the Ligeritos, a team made up of kids from the Plaza de la Revolución neighborhood of Havana, had a practice scheduled for the Sunday in April after the president of Venezuela was deposed. The uprising evaporated in a matter of days, but when I went to watch the Ligeritos play, it was still fresh news, and many people were staying home and watching television reports on the crisis. Kids who wanted a ride to the practice had to wait out the developing story of the coup.

  The practice was supposed to start at nine, but when I arrived there were only a few boys at the ball field. The Ligeritos play at a big and fitfully grassy park called El Bosque, at the end of a narrow neighborhood road. The park is flat and open, bracketed by tall, weary trees, and it has an unevenly paved basketball court at one end and enough room for a few baseball games at the other. That day, a loud game between two government ministries was already under way on the best diamond, and a couple of military police officers were on the basketball court taking foul shots with a flabby orange ball. The handful of boys who’d managed to get to the field had gathered on an overgrown area near the basketball court. One had a ball, one had a bat, and another had the most important equipment for playing baseball in Cuba—some sixteen-inch-long machetes, for grooming the field. While the boys played catch, a few of their fathers stripped to the waist and started slicing through the tall grass.

  I had obtained an introduction to Juan Cruz, the Ligeritos’ shortstop, through a friend in Havana. Juan is a slip of a kid, eleven years old, with dark, dreamy eyes, long arms, big feet, and the musculature of a grasshopper. His thirteen-year-old brother, Carlos, plays for the Ligeritos, too, but it is Juan who woke up at four every morning during the 2000 Olympics to watch the baseball games and who cradles his glove as if it were a newborn and who always wears a baseball cap, indoors or out. When his stepfather, Víctor, is asked about Juan, he says,”Oh my God, this one dreams in baseball.” In spite of the morning’s news, Juan had persuaded Víctor to drive Carlos and him to the ball field at nine. He popped out of the car almost before Víctor had finished parking and ran onto the field.

  The morning was soft and wet, just on the verge of summer. In Havana’s Parque Central, a daily assembly of old men were arguing fine points of Yankee and Red Sox history and the likelihood of Havana’s Industriales sweeping the upstarts from Camagüey in the national series. The Havana baseball mascot—a fat, placid dachshund wearing a baseball shirt, sunglasses, and a Greek fisherman’s hat—was brought to a spot near the trinket market every afternoon for souvenir snapshots. And everywhere boys were playing baseball. They were playing in the parking lot of Estadio Latinoamericano, home of Havana’s two teams, the Industriales and the Metropolitanos; and alongside the Malecón seawall, observed by the snobby young hookers who like to line up there and smoke; and in the dense downtown of Old Havana, wherever some building had finally completed its gradual and melodramatic collapse, opening up just enough room to field a pickup game. Every time I came in or out of my hotel, a group of boys were in the street, dodging potholes as big as washtubs, and, whether it was the bright start of the morning or the half darkness at the end of the day, they were always in the middle of a game.

  THERE HAS BEEN BASEBALL in Cuba almost as long as there has been baseball anywhere. Introduced in the 1860s, it has been the dominant sport in the country ever since; volleyball and basketball are distant seconds, and soccer, the prevailing sport in the rest of Latin America, is hardly played. From the start, baseball has been strangely tangled up with politics. Cubans embraced it as a statement of rebellion because it was a modern and sophisticated export from democratic America, rather than an imposition of imperial Spanish culture on the island. It was also played by people of all races, not just the white elite, which added to its political allure, and Cubans fleeing Spanish oppression took it with them to Venezuela, Puerto Rico, and the Dominican Republic.

  In 1911, the Cincinnati Reds drafted two Cuban players, the first of more than a hundred to be recruited to the American major leagues over the next fifty years. In the 1940s and 1950s, some teams even had full-time scouts in Cuba. It has long been rumored that, in 1942, a scout working for the Washington Senators met with a promising teenage pitcher named Fidel Castro, a rangy right-hander with velocity but no technique. Castro claims that the team gave him a contract, which he turned down; baseball historians say the Senators never made him an offer. It has also been rumored that he passed on a five-thousand-dollar signing bonus from the New York Giants in order to go to law school. There is no dispute, however, that he remained passionate about the game.

  After the revolution, Castro banned most aspects of American popular culture, but baseball was so embedded in Cuba and in his own life—he sometimes pitched for an exhibition team called the Bearded Ones—that it persisted and even expanded, although Castro remade it in the revolutionary spirit. In 1961, he enacted National Decree 83A, which outlawed professional sports in Cuba. Henceforth, all competitive sports would be played by amateurs, the best of whom would receive a small government stipend equivalent to a worker’s salary. This would end, as Castro took care to point out, American-style “slave baseball,” in which players were bought and sold like property and in which players and owners—especially owners—were enriched at the expense of the public. Cuban players would represent their home provinces, would never be traded, and would never get rich. The first Cuban national series, in 1962, was, according to Castro, “el triunfo de la pelota libre sobre la pelota esclava”—the triumph of free baseball over slave baseball. Cuba’s gold medals in the 1992 and 1996 Olympics were celebrated as vindication of revolutionary baseball, and the loss to the United States in Sydney was regarded as a calamity. Castro has said he would like two major league franchises in the country, so that Cuban teams can regularly prove themselves against Americans. “One day, when the Yankees accept peaceful coexistence with our own country, we shall beat them at baseball, too,” he said in a 1974 speech. “Then the advantages of revolutionary over capitalist sport will be shown.”

  Baseball, with its runs to home, its timeless innings, its harmony between the lone endeavor and the collaboration of a team, has always implied more than athletics. In Cuba, it has also come to describe a social history: The version of baseball you are part of is also the version of Cuba you are part of. There are still scores of retired ballplayers in Cuba who remember the game before the revolution, who hosted American players in the Cuban winter leagues, who might have played a few seasons in Texas or Florida, and whose superstar teammates were scooped up, legally, by American teams. There is a middle generation, players in their twenties and thirties, who were born after Decree 83A and grew up knowing only la pelota libre, who saw friends defect to play up north, and who have Castro as an occasional pitching coach and de facto commissioner of the game. Finally, there are the kids like Juan, in categoría pequeña, who are now learning to play. Unless Castro lives to be a hundred, these kids will reach their prime without him—the first generation in three who will have baseball without having Castro telling them how to play the game.

&nbs
p; JUAN DREAMS ABOUT both Cuban and American baseball. It is illegal to watch American games in Cuba—that is, it is illegal to have satellite television on which you could see the games. But for years Cubans have been sneaking small satellite dishes into the country by painting them to look like decorative platters, and those people who haven’t managed to get their own dish often barter for tapes of the major leagues at categoría pequeña games. As a result, Juan is now equally loyal to the Yankees and to the Industriales. “My favorites are, for the Cubans, Omar Linares, Germán Mesa, and Javier Méndez,” he says, “and, for the Americans, Derek Jeter, Tino Martinez, and Baby Ruth.” When I asked him whom he had rooted for during the Olympics, he just grinned and said, “My team.”

  That morning, he was wearing the Ligeritos’ uniform, a white jersey with purple raglan sleeves and the team’s name in jazzy blue letters across the front, and his favorite hat, an old Albert Belle Cleveland Indians cap that he had got from a friend. I asked him if he was an Albert Belle partisan. “No, I don’t really even know him. I just like the picture on the hat,” Juan said, referring to the Indians’ Chief Wahoo logo. The Ligeritos’ neighborhood rivals are the suspiciously counterrevolutionary-sounding Coca-Colas, and the Brigada Especiales, a team sponsored in part by the Special Brigade police, whose barracks are across the street from El Bosque. Even teams with sponsors just squeak by when it comes to equipment. You rarely see wooden bats in Cuba, because of their cost—until two years ago, even the major league teams used aluminum ones—and new leather gloves are a luxury. Many of the kids I saw playing on the street were bare-handed or had gloves that were so limp and splayed that they looked like leather pancakes. The most popular street game in Cuba, four corners (or its variant, three corners), is super-economy baseball—you play it without gloves, and it involves whacking a round thing (rock, bottle cap, ball, wad of tape) with a long thing (tree branch, broom handle, two-by-four) over the heads of your opponents.