Cuba Diaries

by Isadora Tattlin

  At first it was announced on television at which stores and at what times the toys could be bought, the result being that stores were besieged by customers and immediately cleaned out. A system was then devised for reserving by telephone a time for buying a basic, a nonbasic, and an additional toy.

  The ultimate solution was a lottery system, conducted zone by zone within the city. Sale periods of six days were established. Lotteries were conducted in stores, bodegas, and local CDRs (Committees for the Defense of the Revolution—neighborhood watchdog groups), where parents went to be told what day, what hour, and in which store they could go to make their purchases. In this way, only those whose reservation was for the first hour of the first day of the sale period were able to buy a good basic toy such as a bicycle.

  The system lasted until 1981; after that, people just bought whatever they could find, whenever and wherever they could find it.

  II. 40

  A loud noise wakes us up. I wonder, for an instant, if it’s the norteamericano invasion some Cubans still think is coming. We have seen Cuban troops on a flat patch of land along the sea near Cojímar practicing for it. Sometimes I have an impulse to roll down the car window and call to them, “Hay un yanqui por aquí!” (“There’s a Yankee over here!”).

  I lie there, waiting for more. Moonlight is slanting through the blinds, making white stripes on the tile floor. Our house is utterly screenless and yet, magically, no insects come inside, only the smell of night-blooming jasmine.

  It starts again. It’s like an old-fashioned siren, the one you crank. The norteamericano invasion siren, which they test once a month, sounds more high-tech. It’s like moaning, too, and muezzin calling worshipers to prayer. Rising and falling, and at the end, snarl-moans and rustling bushes.

  “Cats,” Nick says, rolling over. “Embargo must be in heat.”

  II. 41

  I have not heard anything from Carlita yet about the bathing suit and matching pareo I brought her from Miami. I call Davide’s house and leave a message for her to call me.

  CARLITA NEVER GOT THE bathing suit. Davide’s girlfriend, who received the bathing suit when I dropped it off, kept the bathing suit for herself. Carlita didn’t know anything about the bathing suit until I called her. She asked Davide about it, Davide confronted his girlfriend, they had a big fight because of it, and the girlfriend moved out of his house.

  “They broke up because of a bathing suit?”

  “Eso es.”

  Carlita tells me they had been living together for three years.

  II. 42

  Sunday. Manuel is nearly alone with us in the house. Only one maid is on Sunday shift, working upstairs in our room. Manuel says he would like to have a word with me.

  We step onto the veranda. Manuel lowers his voice. Some of the help have been abusing their privileges, Manuel says. Concha has been seen taking small amounts of coffee and carrying it home in a plastic bag. She has also been seen taking cloths for cleaning the floor. Danila has been washing her personal things in the washing machine, with our detergent. Miguel is embarrassed because he is the one with the keys to the despensa. He is afraid I will think he is the one who has been taking things. But Danila and Concha know where I keep the keys to the despensa . . .

  I SLEEP VERY BADLY, thinking about how I will have to speak to the help the following day. I decide to get it over with right away. I call everyone into the pantry. Trust, I looked up the night before in the Spanish-English dictionary while I was rehearsing; also, to abuse.

  “Do not abuse my trust in you,” I say to everyone, trying to scan the range of faces as I speak. “Taking a little or taking a lot, it’s still the same thing. The washing machine and detergent are not for your personal use. I cannot live with people whom I cannot trust. If you have a material problem that is making your life difficult, speak to me openly about it, and you and I together can see what we can do to resolve your problem.”

  Muna is hiding around the side of the refrigerator. I am wishing I were far away.

  After my talk, Muna hands me Miguel’s keys to the despensa. “He does not want to keep them anymore,” Muna says.

  I catch up to Miguel in the garden. “Please keep the keys. I trust you,” I say, thinking that the Delsey napkins at his uncle’s house, though really, really not available in Cuba, got to his uncle’s house from some other source or (I now think) were perhaps taken from the despensa especially for our trip, Miguel knowing the conditions at his uncle’s house—a little stack of them, for traveling—and passed, shortly after our arrival at his uncle’s house, to his cousin, who placed them, as invisibly as a fairy would, next to the toilet before I entered the bathroom.

  He takes the keys. “Thank you,” he says.

  II. 43

  Nicoletta, a half-X——ian, half-Cuban woman, based in Sweden, who is working temporarily in Cuba, comes for dinner. She describes a visit her firm made to Fidel a few days ago. They wanted to discuss the $3 million deal her firm was interested in making—to start a string of Laundromats throughout Cuba—while all Fidel wanted to discuss was China. He kept them standing, nine executives and their wives, for forty-five minutes while he talked. Finally, one of the wives said, “I don’t know about anyone else, but I would like to sit down.” Aides stood tensely nearby. One of the executives tried to bring up the subject of the Laundromats. Fidel said, “All problems will be resolved,” and went back to talking about China. They went into another room and were offered mojitos and coffee. More talk of China. Fidel held his right hand by the wrist or kept it behind his back the whole time they were with him, Nicoletta tells us. At the end of the session, Fidel insisted on kissing each of the women in the group. Nicoletta says his eyes were heavylidded and unfocused as he went from one woman to another, muttering, “Dáme un besito, dámelo, dámelo . . .” (“Give me a little kiss, give it to me, give it to me . . .”).

  Some say Fidel had a ministroke in Japan, which is why he stayed an extra day there on his way to China. They say that the “cold” he was supposed to have had in Japan was really that.

  II. 44

  A February cold wave in the eastern United States means temperatures in the fifties in Havana. “Frío, frío,” people say, walking around hunched over, holding their elbows if they don’t have a sweater, or if they do, walking stiffly, unused to the bulk.

  Concha runs to open the gate, her arms bare.

  I ask Muna if Concha owns a sweater. Muna says she doesn’t. I have Manuel and Miguel bring down trunks of heavy and less-heavy clothes from the attic. I find a blue sweatshirt for Concha. I find pants, sweaters, and sweatshirts for the other people at the house, too.

  II. 45

  Cool weather means more cocktail parties, art openings, and Americans. I meet U.S. congressional staffers at a party. Republicans and Democrats. Most of them tell me right away that they think the embargo is an obsolete policy. An aide to a Republican congressman says to me, “It’s too bad we can’t put Fidel and Jesse Helms and Jorge Mas Canosa in a boat and push them out to sea.” He says any calls Cuban Americans make to him begin with their telling him how much money they contribute to the Republican Party.

  It is beginning to look more and more like Helms-Burton won’t pass.

  One of the staffers, a woman, tells me about a strange thing that happened during a photo session with Fidel following a meeting with him that afternoon. Fidel insisted on being surrounded only by women staffers and kept his hands rigidly at his sides as the women were being grouped around him, and as the shot was being taken, Fidel called out to his aides, “See? I’m not touching them!” which was translated to the group as, “I don’t want to crowd them.”

  It was funny, she says, how the phrase was translated. It was also funny that the translator thought the phrase should be translated at all, because after meeting them, the translator had realized that all of them spoke Spanish and had given up translating after the first few exchanges.

  ON THE WAY TO AN art opening, our Elegg
uá recounts a recent story involving one of the last surviving men from the disembarkation of the Granma, whose nom de guerre was Comandante Universo. Comandante Universo, a retired general, raised pigs. Because of his connections, Comandante Universo had access to better-quality slops—slops from the army’s agricultural projects, slops from hotel restaurants (many hotels are run by retired generals). Even more important, he had enough gasoline to drive around to pick the slops up. One day there was a load of milk, which either couldn’t make it to the processing plant or was on the verge of going bad. Comandante Universo was somehow able to get hold of it and gave it to his pigs.

  This was too much for Comandante Universo’s neighbor, who denounced him to his local CDR. Comandante Universo took a gun and shot his neighbor dead in front of a lot of people. He then gathered all the guns in his house in a pile on his front porch and sat in a rocking chair on his front porch until the police arrived. “Here are my guns,” he said, gesturing toward the pile of them. “Do with me what you will.” Comandante Universo was sentenced to thirty years in prison.

  “But the neighbor was very stupid,” Nick says. “The neighbor was an idiot.”

  “A complete idiot,” our Elegguá agrees.

  WE MEET THE STEPMOTHER of Che Guevara at the Argentinian ambassador’s house.

  Ana María Guevara is on her way to Europe to promote a miniseries on Che’s adolescent years. With her is a slight young man who looks fourteen but is actually twenty. As Ana María (who looks to be about fifty-five) talks, we wonder, Could this really be Che’s stepmother? If the boy is her son, does this mean that we are then looking at Che’s half brother? There is something delicate and Che-like about him. Finally it is explained. Ana María was forty years younger than Che’s father. When she met Che’s father, who had separated from Che’s mother, Che was already in Cuba. She herself never met Che. Che, if he were alive, would be sixty-six. The boy is indeed Che’s half brother, the youngest of three children she had by the father of Che. Che, if he had lived, would have been forty-six when his little brother was born.

  There is silence as we contemplate the span of reproductive years of the healthy human male.

  I HAVE LUNCH WITH an American group making an art tour sponsored by the Center for Cuban Studies. The Center for Cuban Studies, based in New York, hosts various educational tours for Americans. It is run by Sandra Levinson, who came to Cuba to cut sugarcane in the sixties. She injured herself while cutting cane, and Fidel Castro himself, who happened to be nearby, picked her up in his arms and carried her out of the cane field. She swears she never had sex with him, though—not even once. “Everybody says to me, ‘Come on, Sandra, we know you did,’ but I didn’t, I swear!”

  I ask some of the Americans I know how the art they have seen so far has been.

  “Well . . . ,” the Americans say to me.

  I take some of the Americans to visit Antonio Nuñez. Antonio’s paintings look like wallpaper, with one or two small elements in them repeated many times. One painting shows alligators (Cuba) fighting with bulls (Spain), one shows alligators fighting with bears (Russia), one shows alligators fighting with eagles (guess who), and one shows the alligators chasing their own tails.

  WE GO TO REYNALDO and Eddie’s. Eddie opens the gate. He looks stricken. “The paladar is closing for always.”

  “Why?”

  “Because . . .” Eddie twists his hand in the air as he walks into the back of the house to get Reynaldo.

  Reynaldo appears. We sit in rocking chairs in the living room. All the tables and chairs are pushed to the wall.

  It’s the new law, Reynaldo says. Every paladar is going to have to pay $300 plus 400 pesos a month for a “license,” as well as a portion of its earnings in taxes if the paladar makes more than $3,000 in a year.

  “But who can pay that?”

  “No one.”

  Reynaldo tells us that there is another new law, too, that people who run paladares from now on are going to have to show police the receipts from whoever sold them their food. The only legal receipts are those from the Diplomercado and the agropecuario.

  “But who can run a paladar and pay the prices they ask at the Diplo and the agro?”

  “No one.”

  “CAMARONES, LANGOSTAS, FRESAS, queso blanco” (“Shrimps, lobster, strawberries, fresh cheese”), thin brown men murmur all day long outside the Diplo, the market on Forty-second Street, and the agro on Calle A in Vedado. You murmur back to them. They disappear around a corner and appear within a few minutes with battered gym bags.

  II. 46

  We have a new swimming teacher, Gonzalo. Carlita found him for us. We stopped going to the pool in the park after a few times there, and it was too complicated, after our own pool was finished, for Carlita to come here.

  II. 47

  Manuel brings things to the house that he thinks might interest us. He brings us a photo of a gathering of Bacardi employees in Santiago de Cuba in the 1940s. The men wear linen suits and two-tone shoes.

  We know that Manuel managed part of a farm outside Camagüey before the revolution, for a man whose family is now living in Miami. The man had a big farm, but he spent most of his time in Havana. We ask Manuel now what else the man who had the big farm did.

  “He was the chief of police under Batista.”

  “Oh.” We change the subject.

  “Did he really say that?” I ask Nick later.

  “That’s what he said.”

  CONCHA BRINGS MAIL to me in my writing room. She clears her throat. “Con su permiso . . . ,” she says.

  “Yes?”

  Concha asks me if I would like to buy a Stradivarius violin.

  “What?”

  Concha says she has a friend who has a friend who has a Stradivarius that he would like to sell.

  “But they cost hundreds of thousands of dollars!”

  Concha says the violin is worth $3 million, actually, but the man she knows will sell it for $2 million. She says it’s not stolen, that it belonged to his greatgrandfather, that he has papers from that town in Italy, Crema, Croma . . .

  “Cremona?”

  “That’s it.”

  “I’ll have to ask my husband about it,” I say.

  I’ll have to ask my husband about it is a phrase that still works very well in Cuba.

  AT DINNER, NICK TELLS me that he has heard that Muhammad Ali, when he was in Cuba recently delivering humanitarian aid, had dinner with a woman, a former Black Panther, who is wanted for murder in the United States.

  I ask Nick if he could pass the hot sauce.

  Nick asks me if I don’t think that’s shocking and revolting.

  “What?”

  “Cassius Clay, one of the greatest American athletes who ever lived, in Cuba on a humanitarian mission, having dinner with a fugitive from American justice, a murderer . . .”

  I shrug. “I don’t think we know all the details,” I say, but I can see Nick’s expression darkening.

  “We’re just not communicating,” Nick says. “We’re having a communication gap.” The chair grinds back. He starts to leave the table.

  “Ni-ick . . . I’m not saying I condone murder—of course I think it’s revolting, if indeed she did murder someone.” This seems to be the right thing to say, for I can see him softening somewhat. “I’m just saying I’m . . . not surprised, knowing how things work in the United States. Besides, maybe he is trying to get her to give herself up.”

  I’m happy I can come up with something, but Nick, too, should make allowances for a little moral laxity on my part, for after all, our maid (who, when I brought her a $4.95 rain jacket from the United States, acted like it was the crown jewels) just this morning tried to sell me a Stradivarius for $2 million.

  II. 48

  We go to see a movie, the first Cuban movie ever made, about transvestites in Havana. It’s a movie about how, yes, they had to struggle, with society and with their parents, but now society accepts them, and their parents love them no
matter what. (The most heartrending part of the movie is when it shows how transvestites make false eyelashes out of carbon paper, which is toxic, and wear them, risking their eyesight.)

  If it were a movie made and shown in the United States, France, or Mexico, for example, you’d say, “Big deal,” about the whole thing, but the movie theater is packed, people shout and cry all through the movie, and at the end, there is a standing ovation.

  II. 49

  I descend the steps of the Meliá Cohiba Hotel, ready for beggars, male jineteros, or freelance car watchers, but surprisingly, no one approaches me.

  My eye falls on an object on the sidewalk. It is a watch. I look to see if there is anyone nearby who looks as if he has lost something. There are some regular hard-up-looking people around, but they are at a distance and strangely distracted. I pick up the watch and slip it into my bag. Still no one looks my way.

  Once in the car, I take the watch out of my bag and look at it. It is a man’s gold watch. If I were in a normal country, I would turn it in at the hotel desk, but here the desk clerk would probably keep it for himself. I will give it to a Cuban who doesn’t have a hotel job. I put it in my bag and start the car. Still no one approaches, and a newish car, revving up outside a hotel is always a magnet for someone needing something. It is as if there is a force field around me, causing time to stand still and keeping other humans away from me and semiparalyzed, allowing me to pick up the watch, examine the watch, think of whom to give the watch to, making me woozy from the strangeness of it.