Kingdoms in the Air

by Bob Shacochis

  By noon we’ve been provided with a van, a burly middle-aged driver named Eric, and Roberto, a young mustachioed rake of a guide whose services we at first decline, not wanting to be chained to some ideologically rabid government minder.

  “Give me a chance,” Roberto says with pained sincerity. “You’re my first Americans.” I ask him if he thinks his country will survive what Castro is calling this “special period.”

  Who knows? he says with body language, looking untroubled. “The future is the future.”

  “And right around the corner,” I add, “seeing as you’re catching on to capitalism so nicely.”

  “Ah!” says Roberto, touching my elbow lightly, and again with each of his exclamations. “Karl Marx says to take what you can of your ­enemy’s good points and use them for yourself.”

  “That’s not how my mom told me to run a revolution.”

  “What—your mother?”

  “It’s a little joke.”

  “Okay, good, I like the North American sense of humor. But listen,” he says, tapping my arm in a brotherly way, “we are very aware of the dangers of tourism and how careful we must be to maintain the principles of the Triumph of the Revolution.”

  Our van is appointed with a cooler full of juice, cola, and Hatuey beer on ice, with several cases of beverages packed in reserve, including a crate of seven-year-old Havana Club rum. “If we need a little drink,” says Eric. With his thick book of gas coupons, we appear adequately outfitted for a Homeric ten-day binge, if nothing else.

  As we head east out of Havana I ask Eric to sidetrack off the main highway to the fishing village of Cojimar, home port of Gregorio Fuentes, the now-ancient captain of Hemingway’s Pilar. As we draw close, the land begins to roll a bit, its soft hills lined with cottages not unlike the conch houses and art-deco bungalows of the Florida Keys. We stop at the turquoise cove where once the Pilar was the undisputed queen of the fleet. A small austere park pays tribute to Cojimar’s most illustrious friend and patron. After the village heard of Hemingway’s death, every fisherman donated a brass fitting off his boat, and the collection was melted down to create the bust of the writer that stands watch over the quay.

  We locate Gregorio’s modest house, and he invites us to crowd into his living room. Throughout the last thirty years, he has been harassed by curiosity seekers and schemers, but now it seems everyone believes he is dead, and he lives in the isolation he has always sought. Still, he appears pleased for the chance to unscroll the past once more, remarking that it might be his last opportunity, and he talks for hours in firm and measured speech, the incarnation of Hemingway’s protagonist in The Old Man and the Sea, though the writer couldn’t have had any idea back in 1931 that his true subject, twenty years later, would be Gregorio himself, stepping transcendently into the portrait:

  The old man was thin and gaunt with deep wrinkles in the back of his neck. The brown blotches of the benevolent skin cancer the sun brings from its reflection on the tropic sea were on his cheeks. . . . Everything about him was old except his eyes and they were the same color as the sea and were cheerful and undefeated.

  From 1935 to 1960 the two men were in many ways inseparable. During World War II they patrolled the coast for German U-boats; during the struggle against Batista, Gregorio tells us, he and Hemingway kept an eye on the local waters to assist Castro and his rebel armies. Hemingway even took Gregorio to Africa to hunt lions.

  “Hemingway is the only North American in the world for me,” Gregorio says, sitting erect in his chair. He wears a wristwatch with a marlin on its face, though he hasn’t fished since saying good-bye to the man he still refers to as Papa.

  “Before he died,” says Gregorio, “he made his last will and left me a document to hand to Fidel Castro. I was called by Fidel to read the testament, and everything, all Hemingway’s property, was for the revolution, but the yacht and the fishing equipment were for me. Fidel said to me, ‘When you get tired of the yacht, bring it to me.’ And I answered, ‘I’ll never be tired of it.’ After that, many bullshitters came to this house to try to get the Pilar, and they left the house in silence. That’s why Hemingway chose me to work with him, because I understand things. I want to avoid people who think I should get money from my relationship with Hemingway. I can walk anywhere.”

  In six weeks, Gregorio will be ninety-three years old, and Hemingway, were he alive, would turn ninety-two eleven days later. They used to celebrate their birthdays together, sharing dinner and a bottle of whiskey on both dates.

  “After Hemingway died,” Gregorio says, “I maintained the tradition on his birthday. I would go down to his statue by the harbor. I would have one drink of whiskey for myself, and Hemingway’s I pour on his head. But I haven’t done it for years, because you can’t find whiskey anymore in Cuba.”

  I say I will bring him a bottle—the tourist shops are well stocked. He gives me an abrazo, an embrace, and we leave the old captain to puff on his cigar in solitude, bound to the myths he had helped create.

  The afternoon wanes; the light on the sea is harsh and tiring as we motor along the pastoral coastal highway toward the resort beaches of the narrow peninsula called Varadero. We pass a coastline too plain for a postcard, strung with clusters of plebian bungalows or dreary cement-block hotels, catering to the domestic trade mostly by means of work bonuses and incentives. Then the shore turns ugly, carpeted with spiky sisal plantations, shelved with razor-sharp ironrock at the water’s edge, and punctured by filthy oil wells, Cuba’s own Saudi Arabia. Whatever riches lie underground, Cuba seems desperate to suck them forth. Varadero, meanwhile, is presiding over its own oil boom, the kind associated with suntans. On one of the longest (twelve miles), most user-friendly beaches in the Caribbean, every business conglomerate in the industrialized world (except the United States) is vying to see which can build the plushest hotel fastest and cheapest. The French, the Germans, the Spanish, the Italians, even the Jamaicans are building here.

  We pull into the drive of a swank, four-star compound, Hotel Tuxpan, a bewildering temple to the gods of generic pleasures. The price is peanuts—half of what it would cost elsewhere for identical accommodations adjoining similar splendors—but it’s too expensive in concept, too immoderate in sensibility, for yeoman travelers like us, so tropo-cosmo that it has inflated itself right off the map, out of the Cuban landscape and into an artificial capsule of brochures and charter jet packages, its character now as universally digestible as baby formula.

  Over the lobby’s pipes, Sinatra sings, “I did it my way,” as we check in. I feel hostile, an agent provocateur, more so when Roberto and Eric say that they will be leaving us for the night, since as Cubans they are barred from staying at a Varadero resort. “Tourism apartheid” is what the people call it. Roberto reasons with us to understand, but the fact remains. They are, in theory and in practice, second-class citizens in Cuba’s new order.

  The Tuxpan is owned fifty-fifty by Cubanacan and a group of Spanish investors, was constructed by Mexicans, and is operated by Germans; Cubanacan retains the supply contract for itself. Five of its staff of 213 are foreigners, and except for a Belgian entertainment director, each foreigner has trained a Cuban understudy who will someday inherit his or her respective position: manager, chef, housekeeper, bookkeeper. The system works: Cuban tourism has one of the best reputations on the European market and the Tuxpan is humming along at 95 percent occupancy in season. “In Varadero,” Roberto notes ingeniously, “you see new things every day. You might ask yourself, ‘Is it Cuba?’” The answer is unfortunately obvious.

  The night sparkles with the gas flares of the oil-drilling platforms across the water. We venture to the disco, where we find the hotel manager, an ebullient, shock-haired Irishman named Eamonn Donnelly, hunkered down in the blast, a giant music disco projected above a dismally empty dance floor. “You can’t really get a discotheque off the ground with only twenty-eight German
guests,” Eamonn shouts through the music. He’s pressing to have Cuban locals authorized to come in on weekends, because they’re the only ones who could breathe life into the place.

  “I can’t take any more irony,” Caputo screams over the music. “The Cubans are trying to keep the Cubans out. The Irish are trying to get them in.”

  Cuba has 289 beaches set like diamonds in its twenty-five hundred miles of coastline, and three rugged mountain ranges utterly compelling in their beauty. But unless you’re near the shore or around the sierras, Cuba’s topography is dominated by its llanos, its flatlands, which seem to stretch forever, level as a gridiron and just as parceled out, one agricultural co-op after another. Mile after mile on our way south to Bahía de Cochinos, Bay of Pigs, we watch sugarcane fields and malanga farms pass like continuous yawns, the geography as monotonously fecund as South Florida’s, the distant ridges sentineled by royal palms.

  From the tourist town of Guamá, where Fidel headquartered himself in an old sugar mill and commanded the counterattack during the Bay of Pigs invasion, the road narrows through mangrove swamp and thick palmetto-scrub forest, the pavement in fluid motion with thousands of insect-size land crabs, their shells black and their legs vermilion, crunching under the tires. As we near Playa Larga, the beach at the top of the bay, solemn concrete monuments rise from the bush, intermittently at first, then with greater density. They honor Castro’s troops, 161 killed in action, and they stand where the soldiers fell during the three-day battle in April 1961. Some fifteen hundred Cuban exiles, sponsored by the CIA, were defeated in their attempt to invade the island, and that was the end of diplomatic relations between Cuba and the United States.

  “This is a most beautiful place, yes?” Eric observes, with such serene feeling that I turn to look at him. His feeling can only be echoed. The bay, rectangular like an Olympic swimming pool, its waters equally blue, is majestic, and Castro was correct, I think, to turn a place so rich in nature yet so polluted with bitterness into a tourist haven. “Yes, I love the beaches here. I love the water—it’s very pretty,” Eric continues, something peculiar in his tone.

  We drive on toward Playa Girón at the mouth of the bay, where some of the worst fighting took place. We park beneath a billboard PLAYA GIRÓN—THE FIRST ROUT OF IMPERIALISM IN LATIN AMERICA.

  “I was with them,” Eric reveals matter-of-factly. We stop. “I was a nineteen-year-old student when the invasion happened. I came with the militia brought by Fidel to the final battle. Here, right here.” Afterward he had helped guard the captured men. “Yes,” he laughs softly, without malice or regret, “I became a major in the air force, but I’m retired now.” He fishes out his wallet to show us his identity card—a younger Eric in an officer’s uniform, someone who has found thirty years sufficient to quell the hatred, if not the sorrow, no matter what his allegiance.

  Eric decides to remain in the van while we tour the museum of the battle with Roberto, whose own father had been tortured by Batista’s army before escaping to fight in the Sierra del Escambray. We stroll quietly among the photographs and dioramas, the flags and thirty-year-old weapons, the carefully preserved detritus of the revolutionary process. Eric, meanwhile, has lowered his seat back and is listening to the radio, an old warrior absorbing new music, hearing a new beat.

  As fast as possible, we speed through the visually tedious province of Ciego de Avila, numbed by its unbroken succession of cane plantations, pineapple farms, banana groves, and citrus orchards, though the air is fresh with Cuba’s omnipresent smell of jasmine. We cross into the province of Camagüey, Cuba’s largest, where sugar remains king but cows and cowboys register a more poignant effect on lifestyle. Daily flights from Havana bring turistas to the city of Camagüey, from there the pale hordes are bused to the encampments at Playa Santa Lucia, and our own destination for the day, three miles of secluded sand and a staging area for access to Cuba’s northern archipelago—thousands of keys and sandbars spread over hundreds of miles, most deserted, many unexplored, connected by an underwater system of reefs dwarfing its counterpart to the north and second in size, we are told, only to Australia’s Great Barrier Reef. No one has to tell us that those translucent waters provide some of the last unspoiled snorkeling and diving in the hemisphere. At least we could bless the revolution for that, the gift of obscurity to a utopia of coral.

  The following day, after a morning dive through coral fields prolific with game fish and lobsters, we leave Santa Lucia pronto to make it to Santiago de Cuba, on the southeast coast, before nightfall. As twilight paints the countryside, we begin to carve our way through the valleys of the Sierra Maestra, the birthplace of Cuban independence and, in the following century, revolution. In 1956, returning from a one-year exile in Mexico, Castro, his brother Raul, and the young asthmatic Argentinean doctor Che Guevara, with seventy-nine other men, were shipwrecked west of Santiago de Cuba and battled their way up into the seemingly impenetrable peaks of the Sierra.

  “We identified so completely with the natural surroundings of the mountains,” Fidel later recalled to biographer Tad Szulc. “We adapted so well that we felt in our natural habitat. It was not easy, but I think we identified with the forest as much as the wild animals that live there.”

  Castro’s strategy, to nibble away and demoralize his foes, triumphed, but the one enduring mistake he made was to allow himself to become obsessed with the United States. After Batista’s aircraft raided a rebel base in the mountains, dropping US-supplied bombs, Castro wrote to a friend:

  I have sworn that the Americans will pay very dearly for what they are doing. When this war has ended, a much bigger and greater war will start for me, a war I shall launch against them. I realize that this will be my true destiny.

  It was. Four years later, Kennedy positioned a naval blockade around the island, and Castro brought the world to the brink of nuclear holocaust during the Cuban Missile Crisis, securing his nation’s place as one of the pariahs of modern times.

  We reach the end of the line, Santiago de Cuba, after nightfall, yet even in darkness it’s clear that this is a city surviving on finesse and brinkmanship. The municipality is plagued by a breakdown in its water service; when we check into the Hotel Versailles the taps run, more or less, but stop for good by midnight. The hotel’s extensive menu has been reduced to three stewy dishes, and there’s no bottled water, though you can drink Miller beer out of the can. There are no cigarettes, no cigars, no medicine, few buses, yet despite the comprehensive crunch, Santiago, Cuba’s Hero City, “the cradle of the revolution,” is not brittle but resilient. Most of the citizenry appears to be in the streets, celebrating the annual Caribbean music festival.

  The day’s journey has turned into a grueling marathon, and we have become slap-happy, proposing to our Cuban friends a revolutionary theme park, Fidel Land—in the Sierra Maestra, a roadside attraction for the charter-package hordes that would one day overrun the island. It’s a blasphemous tease, and after we stop howling, we apologize, because you don’t have to respect a government to respect or fall in love with a country and its people.

  Our plan is to spend the night in Santiago de Cuba and then to have the eternally amenable Eric haul our penitent yanqui selves sixty miles toward the western coast and 6,476-foot Pico Turquino, Cuba’s highest mountain and a revolutionary shrine. We ask Roberto about the possibility of procuring supplies—food and water—for the climb.

  “No problem,” he says, which, in a country that has so many problems, is the phrase most spoken. Soon, however, we’re ensnared by the hotel’s cabaret, the canopy of trees sprinkling us with flowers knocked off their stems by the vibrations of M.C. Hammer on the sound system, and Roberto, a third rum collins in his hand, seems to be smitten by one of the women in the chorus line. I retire around midnight, in the sobering knowledge that we’ll be ill prepared to climb anything higher than a porch stoop.

  In the morning, as we load the van, squalls bruise the sout
hern horizon. Roberto, bleary-eyed and disheveled, shuffles from his room to the parking lot, an expression of relief brightening his sleepy face.

  “Hey, what’d I tell you locos, you can’t climb El Pico during the rainy season.”

  We’ll do the drive anyway, I tell him, and maybe the weather will clear up by the time we get to the mountain’s base. We’re Heroes of Tourism, I say, so we have to try, even though Roberto has not kept his promise and we will be hiking all day on empty stomachs.

  The coastline is a geologic symphony, the 1812 Overture: the mountains crescendoing with spectacular force into cushiony mulberry clouds; the muscular flanks of the range, thickly wooded and sheer, diving straight into a booming sea; bolts of lightning punctuating the drama off in the direction of Haiti, two hundred miles to the southeast. The road snakes around paradisiacal bays and harbors, each with its rustic fishing village. On occasion the pavement ends where the interface of mountain and sea is too radical to prevent the roadway from washing out during tempests.

  We reach the trailhead, finally, after endless delays manufactured by Roberto, who seems to be stalling, unwilling to confront the mountain. Into his water bottle the Professor pours a nauseating mix of Tropi-Cola and energy crystals. I fill mine with all the juice remaining in the cooler and stuff it into my day pack along with my raincoat and a half liter of bottled water. Caputo is married to his sixty pounds of camera gear, but there’s nothing else to carry anyway. Behind us, the sea thunders; in front of us, so do the mountains, their tops swaddled in ominous clouds. Suddenly, there’s a crack in the overcast and sunlight shoots through. “I’m coming with you,” says Roberto. “I’m a Cuban. It’s my duty.”

  We file out of the van and up the first foothill, where we wait for Roberto to catch up. He’s sweating and puffing and looks ready to be taken away on a gurney.

  “Okay, I’m not Che,” he says. “I cannot be a guerrilla. Well, maybe in the city.” He walks back down to sleep in the van.