So it was that the day before the tournament was to end, we boarded an Air Cubana flight out of Cancún sobered by the caveat of the agent behind the counter. Protect yourself from your government, she advised; don’t have your passports stamped in Havana. After a seemingly endless delay our flight was called, and we were bused to an isolated corner of the tarmac to board an ancient Soviet-made flying steam-bath. The cabin thundered with the noise of the Ilyushin’s four propellers. Minutes later we listened in dread as the engines were cut one by one, delivering us into a terrible silence. The flight crew abandoned the cockpit, mopping cascades of sweat from their brows, muttering about electrical failure.
Sitting in front of us, a trio of extremely merry Mexicans, undaunted by the drama, appointed themselves social directors. “Don’t worry,” the most extroverted muchacho declared grandiosely. “Everything’s under control.” They passed around a calming bottle of tequila. “We are making a study of Cuban girls,” explained their point man. His two companions nodded wolfishly. “We are very concerned about our addiction to these girls, and have decided to analyze the situation further.” This news cheered the Professor, who admired their academic spirit. By and by the electrical failure was repaired, the brave pilots returned, the engines cranked over, and we began to lumber down the runway. “Go, go, go,” chanted the muchachos, rocking in their seats as if we were puttering up the hill in a Volkswagen.
“Well,” observed the Professor, plumbing the bright side of the delay, “at least we got a sauna out of it.” As we reached altitude, it began to snow inside the plane, icy flakes blowing out of the air vent onto Caputo, who took the change of weather in stride. Cuba, after all, was the home of magical realism.
Once on the ground, we queued in front of the immigration booths, anxious and humble, and advanced together like three lost lambs. The official who examined our passports unsettled us profoundly: I can’t say we ever quite recovered. She was young and lovely, and she flirted with us—sweet chat and welcoming smiles. We cleared customs without the agents displaying the slightest interest in our gear.
“This siege mentality,” said the Professor, “is going to wear us down fast.”
How clever of these die-hard Marxist-Leninists, I thought, to lull us like that, but surely the charade would end once they were confronted with the boys from Mexico City, three horny, half-drunk, and totally irreverent specimens of the type border guards love to turn away. If Cuba accepted the muchachos, then the place was wide open.
We pushed through the terminal doors into a muggy, overcast afternoon. There were the Mexicans. Their leader ambled over to us, all mischievous eyes and conspiratorial grin, wagging his finger as if we were the naughty ones.
“Sooner or later,” he crowed, “we knew you were going to come.” Someone had just told him we were North American tourists.
In the beginning was the word, and the word was Ernesto himself, the progenitor of the marlin tournament, and an honorary god in the Cuban pantheon of machismo. Off and on throughout the 1930s, Hemingway leased room 511 at the Hotel Ambos Mundos, conveniently around the corner from La Bodeguita del Medio—a bar crazy enough to let writers drink on credit—and a ten-minute wobble from a more sophisticated watering hole, El Floridita. Papa found Cuba a resourceful environment to pursue his three addictions—writing, billfishing, and boozing—and he immortalized each pursuit. His alcohol-infused wisdom still adorns the wall above the bar in La B del M—my mojito [a rum-based mint julep] EN LA BODEGUITA, MY DAIQUIRI EN EL FLORIDITA.
In 1934 Hemingway commissioned a Brooklyn boatyard to build the Pilar, his legendary thirty-eight-foot marlin hunter. Five years later, a fifteen-acre farm south of Havana caught the eye of Hemingway’s third wife; they rented the Finca Vigía, and Hemingway spent much of the next two decades there, purchasing the place in 1940 with his first royalty check from For Whom the Bell Tolls. By 1950 Hemingway’s own ascent to fame paralleled Havana’s burgeoning notoriety as the New World’s most decadent amusement park, a saturnalia orchestrated by Cuba’s corrupt military dictator, Fulgencio Batista. Batista’s Babylon offered a standard buffet of sin—prostitutes, drugs, gambling at mafia-owned casinos, live sex shows at the seedier nightclubs, and a more restrained extravaganza of tits and ass at the dazzling Tropicana—and well-heeled tourists poured onto the island to be thrilled by the wicked ambience. Down at the Finca Vigía, Hemingway finally figured out what to do with all of his wealthy friends, the celebrities and playboys, the hunting buddies and would-be heroes who kept circling through Havana. He herded them into a bona fide fishing tournament.
There’s a fascinating photograph, shot from the bridge of a sportfishing boat on the event’s tenth anniversary in May 1960: a young Fidel Castro is hunkered over Che Guevara, who sits in the fighting chair; two lines are in the water, but Che’s legs are stretched out, his booted feet rest on the transom, and he’s reading a book. Hemingway had invited Castro as his guest of honor, hoping to convince the charismatic warrior, who seemed permanently attired in olive fatigues and combat boots, to present the winner’s trophy. But Castro himself, the luckiest man in Cuban history, won the tournament, hooking and boating the largest marlin.
There’s a second photograph: Hemingway and Fidel, macho a macho, beaming, Papa surrendering the trophy: two men who helped define their times. They had never met before and never would again. That day Hemingway rode the Pilar out into the Gulf Stream for the last time; soon he would leave Cuba for good and go to Idaho, where a year later he would commit suicide. That same year, 1961, his tournament disappeared behind an iron curtain of ill will manufactured by uncompromising ideologies. There were far worse casualties, to be sure, but once Hemingway came ashore off the Pilar, no other North American boat would participate in his tournament for three decades. Not until a good-natured, tenacious, fish-crazed, egomaniacal heart surgeon from New Jersey chutzpahed his way onto the scene.
“The Americans are in a position to win this tournament,” Dr. David Bregman proclaims as we breakfast with him on Saturday, the final day of the competition. The Cubans at the table suppress laughter. The US team—three boats from New Jersey, two from Florida, one from Maryland—have managed a paltry two fish between them even though the action has been hot thus far. Naturally, since the Cubans know the fishing grounds, a Cuban boat is in first place, and two Mexican boats are not far behind. But in the end, the Hemingway tournament is no more Cuban than an international bankers’ convention in Miami Beach. The theme is Cuban, the stage set is neo-Floridian, and far below the surface creak the worn-down gears of everyday Cuban life. But the tournament unravels somewhere else.
Over eggs, the Professor, Caputo, and I receive our sailing orders. The three of us will ride out with Doc aboard his forty-eight-foot Viking, the Heart Mender. We will observe to our hearts’ content, but Doc will attend to any fishing—after all, he reminds us, it’s his boat. As the last Cubans drift out of the dining room, Doc snatches a platter of sliced pineapple off the serving table and foists it upon the Professor.
“Quick,” Doc urges, “don’t let them see you.” He requisitions two more platters—cold cuts and watermelon—and, chuckling, he and the Professor make a mad dash for the rental car. Clearly, Doc and his crew are having a splendid time.
“My Spanish is great,” explains Doc as we rocket past the police checkpoint at the landward entrance to the marina, barreling toward a gas pump at the back of a gravel lot. We slide to a halt just before we hit the attendant. “I took a couple of years in school and—it’s amazing—it’s all coming back to me. ‘Donde is el gasoline?’” he queries the pump jockey, who shrugs his shoulders, and off we speed at an alarming velocity toward the Heart Mender, the first US registered vessel to enter Cuban waters legally (except for the Mariel boatlift, which doesn’t count) since the early years of the revolution. It’s almost nine a.m.—starting time—and Doc is in the mood for battle.
On the way out the chann
el, we split a flotilla of kayakers, the Cuban Olympic team in training. At the marina’s headland, the captain opens up the engines, but no sooner does the boat plane, it seems, than he throttles back to trolling speed. The mates ease six lines into the water. We’re only a quarter-mile offshore and the depth sounder reads 1,000 feet; another four hundred yards out and the bottom drops to 6,000 feet. And yet we can see people walking onshore. It’s like hunting elk in the suburbs.
I retire with our host and the Professor into the boat’s swank, air-conditioned salon, and without much prodding Doc launches into a soliloquy on the two subjects he finds most praiseworthy: himself and fishing. It so happens that after he coinvented the intra-aortic balloon pump in 1969, he became a brain in demand, addressing international medical conferences and training surgeons in the Soviet Union and China. In 1989 the Cuban government wanted to enroll his expertise and asked him to be one of the headliners at a national medical conference. Doc said he would if he could bring his boat from Key West and fish. The Cubans thought about it and said, why not? The US State Department said no. But Doc had once operated on Armand Hammer’s brother, and . . .
“Doc!” both mates holler simultaneously—the divine interruption. Doc bolts from his seat. It’s nine fifteen, and the Heart Mender is hooked up, the unlikely champion Dr. Bregman on center stage, a fighting belt strapped around his sizable waist.
The first mate spikes the rod into the holder above Doc’s groin, creating a literal connection between the fisherman’s masculinity and the furious instinct of the unseen beast. “Tip up,” coaches the captain from the bridge. “Let him dive.” This is a kill tournament; there’ll be no cavalier tag and release. Sweat pours down Doc’s torso as he bows forward and reels back, bows and reels. After five or six minutes the beast rises, blasting through the indigo surface, its bill parrying the lethal air. It’s a marlin, a stand-up blue big enough to take the trophy, and it dances with magnificent rage for fifty feet or more, the iron-black sword of its bill slashing the Havana skyline.
After twenty minutes, the fish is just off the transom, ready to boat, panting as it lies twisted on its side in the transparent seas, one fierce eye condemning the world above. The mate extends the gaff over the side, maneuvering for the right mark, the perfect moment. Then the marlin spits the hook. With cool contempt he throws the line into Doc’s face and is gone, leaving us a silenced, awestruck crew. Doc hands the rod to his mate, accepting the loss with grace.
“A brave fish,” he declares in fluent Hemingwayese. He unbuckles the plastic belt, tosses his baseball cap aside, and retreats to the comfort of the chilly salon, dismissing his crew’s efforts to console him. He plops down on the couch, the good sport, reflective, storing away the memory.
“Did I have on my red hat or my orange one?” he asks. “I’m a very colorful figure.” With a tiny smile of satisfaction, he speculates that a year’s maintenance on the Heart Mender comes to about twice the Professor’s salary.
From the beginning, the Professor offers a dissenting viewpoint to our initial impression of Havana. “No, no, no, senor,” he says, which is the extent of his involvement with the Spanish language. What he sees from the balcony is not the city’s imminent disassemblage but something on the order of an exotic passion permanently flaunting the edges of self-destruction, semiferal but with a hip intensity, sidling up to disaster and then fluttering away, a city like a Latin woman, beautiful but exhausted, dancing through the perfumed night with a gun in her hand.
We mobilize for an assault on the city’s ambiguous appearances, walking first to the Plaza de la Revolución, a vast open space resembling the Mall in D.C. but dropped into the middle of a massive empty parking lot in a tropical Newark. To one side sits a reviewing stand made of white stone, with a marble podium facing out on a macadam lot, its field of telephone poles wired with spotlights and loudspeakers. Here Fidel enacted, in the early days of the revolution, his “democracy of the people,” tutoring the masses for hours on end, haranguing them like a fire-and-brimstone preacher, making them laugh like a stand-up comic, building them up to whatever emotional pitch the day’s challenges required, until—and this is the vital and democratic part of the ritual—they shouted back to the Maximum Leader in unison: Okay, have it your way, Jefe, we want to go home. If you’ve seen televangelists browbeating an audience, you won’t be shocked to learn that this system works, more or less, nor will you be thunderstruck to hear that all domiciles throughout Cuba’s cities and countryside, even the humblest shacks—have antennas on their roofs and, down below, old black-and-whites burning blue through the evening hours.
We stroll into Old Havana down narrow cobbled alleys eerily Neapolitan, though Havana’s streets are by far the more tranquil and nonthreatening of any I have walked in the Latin diaspora. Urchins flutter around us hoping for Chiclets, but by Monday they’ll be uniformed and back in school. In the stone-paved Plaza de la Catedral, a man approaches me, asking for a cigarette. He wants a light, then the lighter, and though I give it to him I take it back, since I have no other and Cuba is out of matches. He gasps when I say we are from the States. North Americans, rare as pots of gold—he loves them, hates Castro.
“Life is very bad in Cuba.”
“If you say so,” I say, but in truth he looks no worse off than his blue-collar counterpart in Miami. If he had been in Mexico City or Port-au-Prince, or Lima, or Kingston, if he had a context in which to place his misery, perhaps he wouldn’t be so quick to claim it. What is absent in his denunciation, what is absent throughout Havana, is the dead tone that marks deep suffering and despair.
Like so many others, my new friend wants to change money, my dollars for his useless pesos. With dollars, a habanero can supplement his government rations—one shirt, one pair of pants, one pair of shoes a year; one pound of meat, five pounds of rice each month—with goods from the astronomically expensive black market. Illegal, of course, but Cubans are being forced by shortages and the government’s rigidity to turn themselves into hustlers and sneaks.
Undaunted by my refusal, the fellow offers to sell me cigars—Cohibas, the best—at half the price of the tourist shops. When I don’t say no, he suggests we walk down Empedrado, a street as old as the New World, to La Bodeguita del Medio and negotiate over a drink. The Bodeguita is just opening its doors, but already a crowd has assembled outside the establishment, a joint instantly recognizable as one of the solar system’s last repositories of cool, a neighborhood hangout with global traffic, a place where dialectics and rum fuse into a collective, joyous, cacophonous blur. Behind the counter two bartenders manufacture endless mojitos, twenty at a time, for the relentless tide of thirsty turistas who churn through, sweeping in and sweeping out, glancing cross-eyed at the ubiquitous graffiti and taking deep dizzying whiffs of the proletarian smells of bohemian Cuba. Across the street, three plainclothes police officers stand like statuary, arms folded, glowering at the escalating euphoria.
My new friend displays a tremendous appreciation for both rum and drama. “Let’s get the cigars,” he stage-whispers repeatedly, peering anxiously toward the door. The bartender has adopted Caputo, challenging him with free mojitos in exchange for baseball updates. The Professor sponsors English lessons for two saucy dreamettes who are instructing him in a language of their own: Cognac, they say; champagne. “The cigars, let’s go,” my friend mumbles. I nod and we’re out the door, he walking a half block in front, broadcasting guilt, cringing in posture, the worst black marketeer I’ve ever encountered. I feel like arresting him myself.
Down Old Havana’s strange and marvelous streets I follow him until he ducks into a made-to-order shadowy portal, the arched entrance to a decrepit palace divided long ago into apartments. We ascend a marble staircase, right-angling up through medieval space, musty and decomposing. Sensing our arrival, an old woman, his mother, opens the door. Only a television set places the apartment in any world I know; otherwise, the precise honey-colo
red shafts of light, the glassless windows, the crumbling textures and bare furniture, the provisional quality of its humanity are, in their extremeness, too unfamiliar for me to recognize except as Hollywood augury.
The deal takes less than a minute. The seller needs dollars; as a skilled tradesman he earns 200 pesos a month—the price of shoes on the black market. The buyer—well, the buyer doesn’t need, doesn’t even like cigars. The buyer is simply seduced. The buyer finds official Cuba enigmatic, the image formulaic, but how easily and swiftly the rhetorical veneer is scratched and another secret revealed. Bedding Cuba: The historical precedents are countless, large scale and small; it’s a North American tradition. Scruples barely make it as a footnote, a tiresome annotation. I zip the wooden box of cigars into my knapsack, and, warned by the dealer’s mother to be careful, we return to the Bodeguita, where silence and fear are obsolete.
The question of whether or not we will be able to drive the 780-mile length of this apparently gasless island is resolved the following morning, thanks to Abraham Maciques, the president of Cubanacan, to whom Dr. Bregman had introduced us at the tournament. Cubanacan is the muscle behind Castro’s tourist trade, an autonomous government agency not unlike a corporation, free to engage in multinational commerce, free to invest, free to be profitable, free to construct a second society, albeit a ravenously capitalistic and exclusive society—onto but separate from the old system, all in hopes of keeping the revolution solvent. When I inquired if there might be a way to help us secure fuel in the hinterlands, Maciques said not to worry, that he’d have someone take care of us.
Kingdoms in the Air Page 20
