Cuba Diaries

by Isadora Tattlin

  “The world may be dominated by one standard of beauty, but this is changing.”

  “Sí, señora.” Lorena smiles indulgently at me, waiting for me to continue translating the instructions.

  “I always wanted to have curly hair,” I say untruthfully. “One is never happy with what one has.”

  “This is true!” Lorena says, shrugging indulgently and raising her eyebrows. “One always wants to be something else!”

  II. 68

  In the Diplo, a seventeen-dollar cabbage.

  The Third School Year

  III. 1

  “How are you, Manuel?” we ask him upon entering the house after summer vacation.

  “Not very well.”

  “Why?”

  “Because someone entered the garage and stole the spare tire out of la señora’s car . . .”

  “What about the guard in front? What was he doing?”

  “The thief climbed over the fence in the back.”

  “With all the things there are to steal here, why would he choose that?”

  “It was the easiest thing to get at.”

  LOLA’S BROTHER’S NEIGHBOR’S father-in-law has been kicked to death for his car. He was a man in his sixties, a retired orthopedic surgeon, who drove his car as a taxi in the evenings to make money. He waited for customers in the evenings just off the Plaza de la Revolución.

  III. 2

  Coming back from trips to the United States is almost “fun” in the beginning. The seven in help. The swimming pool. The lime tree. The avocado tree, which has not yet borne fruit. The papaya tree. Embargo and Bloqueo. The first dinner outside in the night breeze. Six suitcases bursting with much-needed basics. The sense of novelty, relief, and security as each item is taken out of the bursting suitcases and put where it belongs. The delight of the help as they are handed the things they have asked me to find for them—medicines, dresses, shoes, shirts, support stockings, underwear, car-engine parts. The first visits to the agro and the Diplo. Seeing what is there and what is not, and trying to infer larger meanings from what is there and what is not. The delight to be had from finding an eggplant or some watercress in the sparse agro of September. The first visits to the antique dealers. Upholsterers, dressmakers, manicurists, and masseuses ministering to us at home. The roving fish vendors. The roving vegetable vendor and his sack full of avocados the size of footballs. The jinetera count on Quinta, on the Malecón.The artists and what’s happened to them over the summer. Who is in jail. Who is out of jail. New laws and loopholes. The most recent live sightings of Fidel and of Raúl. Every scrap of gossip about everyone and everything, and reading into it as if the gossip were a novel composed solely of inferences, which one has put down and taken up again after several months. Mojitos. Daiquiris. Daiquiris naturales. A patch of jinetera-free beach. Sunsets over Havana viewed from the seaside bar just under the fortress of La Cabaña. Three whole hours of uninterrupted time every weekday when the children are in school, after I finish telling the help what to do and going to the agro and the Diplo. My well-lit writing room.

  III. 3

  Muna went to Bangladesh for a visit. She decided to stay there. It was too hard for her in Cuba. “The climate is like Bangladesh,” she would say, “but we don’t have such broken-down houses,” or “in Bangladesh, people work.” Muna was lonely, too, for other Bangladeshis. The total population of Bangladeshis in Cuba is six—two diplomats, one embassy secretary, and four Christian Bangladeshi women who met their Cuban husbands when they were students in Russia. One, who lived near Playa Giron, told Muna she cried every day.

  We have started interviewing potential nannies. We have asked the help in our house and the staff at Nick’s office to recommend women. One is a student, who comes for the interview in a halter top and short shorts with the cheeks of her behind peeking out below. One (very young) comes driving a brand-new Jeep with her name emblazoned in bold script across the back. The Jeep was a present from her papa, she says. No one in Cuba has a new car. She wears a plaid miniskirt with matching purse and tam-o’-shanter and keeps tossing her hair and giggling during the interview. One barely speaks above a murmur, and another one, a psychologist, tells me that she will only be able to be here between appointments.

  A VIOLENT RAINSTORM ERUPTS. Fine spray blows on our legs, but we are too full of food to move. We hear a crash, then scurrying in the vines climbing metal grillwork framing the veranda where we sit having dinner with friends from Argentina. A large rat swings headfirst through the grill-work and lands on the floor near our feet. It runs under the sideboard. We jump up. “Get a cat, Manuel!”

  Embargo is set down in front of the sideboard. She sniffs. There is a loud squeak. Embargo backs up. The rat, black, huge, with a pink tail, makes a dash for it, squeaking and baring its teeth, back out into the rainstorm. Embargo stays where she is, back arched, fur raised.

  III. 4

  Juana is thirty-six, married, with no children. She has a short, neat hairstyle and a lithe body and dresses modestly without being nerdy. This in itself is enough to put her ahead of all the other candidates, but Juana is also a former elementary schoolteacher. She seems calm, responsible, and educated, and she seems to have other qualities that, if she were from another country, would mean she came from a good family—qualities that we are beginning to realize mean that in Cuba as well.

  III. 5

  Carlita comes to see me during the day, when the children are in school.

  “I’m here to tell you that Gonzalo got married to a Canadian, he has gone to Canada, and he will not be able to teach the children anymore.”

  We have seen Gonzalo since we have been back. He didn’t say anything special to us, and the only thing different about him was that he had grown a goatee.

  “But he left? He left since we saw him yesterday?”

  “You saw Gonzalo? Gonzalo has been here?”

  “Yes. He’s been here twice since we’ve gotten back, to give the children swimming lessons.”

  Carlita falls back against her seat with a crooked smile on her face. “Ay, Gonzalo . . .”

  “What is it?”

  “Gonzalo called me in July. He said he had gotten married to a Canadian and he was going to Canada. He told me to let you know that he wasn’t going to be able to teach the girls anymore.” She continues smiling her crooked smile. “Ay, Gonzalo . . .” Carlita writes the number of the relative she is now staying with (she moved out of her uncle’s house) on a piece of paper. “The next time you see Gonzalo, tell him to call me.”

  Cuba is a novel and a soap opera, too. Nothing of substance can be spoken about over the phone. People visit one another back and forth in order to say what they have to say. Just as on the soaps, if people didn’t visit one another back and forth, if they said what they needed to say over the phone, there would hardly be any scenes to show. It keeps the action moving forward, the visiting back and forth, on multiple tracks.

  I DON’T KNOW WHETHER he wore them the first few times he came, but Gonzalo, I notice now, has a large diamond ring on his wedding finger and a gold chain with a gold medallion on it around his neck. I hang around the pool, waiting for him to say something about a wedding, or a Canadian, or about the big ring on his finger, which flashes even in the late afternoon sun, but he says nothing about any of it.

  III. 6

  I find myself praying that Juana will take us.

  I tell Nick, before Juana comes for her second interview, that offering her $200 isn’t enough, but he goes ahead and offers her $200 anyway. Juana counters, saying she can’t work for less than $300 per month. Nick says that is all right, but then asks her not to discuss her salary with anyone else at the house.

  I can’t sleep, wondering whether the children will be happy with Juana and whether Juana will be happy with us. I worry that the $200 we offered Juana got us off to a bad start. Juana is more responsible and more dignified than I am, and she seems serene, too, and not desperate, as if in this land of no jobs she
might find another job anytime she wanted to. I’ve seen the house she lives in, too: it’s a nice house, with a banana grove in back of it and a late-model Lada in the carport.

  III. 7

  They have caught the boys who kicked Lola’s brother’s neighbor’s father-in-law to death—two seventeen-year-old orientales (literally, Orientals, meaning people from the former Oriente province, on the eastern end of the island of Cuba, where the city of Santiago de Cuba is, or from any place east of Camagüey) have confessed.

  “Take my car!” the orientales said the old man said to them. “You don’t have to kill me.”

  The orientales told the police they killed him because “the dead don’t talk.”

  A FROG NO BIGGER than a nickle is found, alive, in the middle of Thea’s high, old-fashioned, neatly made bed at 2 P.M. on a school day. I ask the help if they put it there, as a present to Thea when she came home from school, but they look just as surprised as I do to see it there.

  THE SEVENTEEN-YEAR-OLD orientales who kicked Lola’s brother’s neighbor’s father-in-law to death have been executed by firing squad.

  III. 8

  Nick and I go with Nicoletta to visit Bibi Sebaya. Bibi Sebaya is one of the few surviving residents of the Country Club area—all elderly women now—who never left Cuba and have held on to their houses.

  The Cyclone fence is rusty, but the grass is mowed and the trees are clipped. The spacious rooms, spreading out in a V from the entrance, are long and low, paneled in dark wood, with brand-new upholstery on the furniture, all of it covered with clear plastic. A short, stout lady greets us speaking rapid Cuban. I think she’s trying to tell us that her husband has died three months ago. I turn to Nicoletta to ask for help, and the lady breaks out in perfect American—she attended the Spence School in New York City.

  It’s just a tad funkier than a normal rich person’s house. A bent-over maid shuffles by in a housedress. The floor could be cleaner, the outdoor furniture brighter, but still the effect is making me forget where I am. Bibi is like some rich friend of my mother’s except for the enormous portrait of her young self in strapless tulle on an easel smack-dab in the middle of the living room: my mother’s friends’ portaits were usually over the mantel.

  Her tale comes in fits and starts, but you can tell that she never tires of telling it.

  She had two children with her first husband, then fell in love with a revolutionary, a rich boy who was with Fidel in the Sierra Maestra. He stopped being a revolutionary when Fidel became a Communist. He spent two years in prison on the Isle of Pines. She went with him to the Isle of Pines. She went through almost everything you can go through in a revolution. The revolutionaries looted everything. “This house, that house.” She gestures with her hand around the Country Club compound. “There was one. A nigger named Manolo. Took the car of the old ladies across the street. ‘You rich people are fat. A revolutionary has to be thin,’ he told me. I took my daughter to the doctor a few years later, and I saw him in the waiting room. He had a big belly, and his wife, a nigger in a red knit dress, was fat, too. ‘Qué tal, Manolo?’ I said. ‘You said a revolutionary was supposed to be thin, but look at you! You’ve become fat! What happened? And the car you stole from the old ladies, I saw it outside. You really wrecked it. And your wife’s fat, too!’” Her grandson had been with her in the house but went with his mother (Bibi’s daughter) to Canada. The boy was scared of his mother. His mother speaks four languages but works as a house cleaner in Canada. “She’s a terrible girl,” Bibi says. She doesn’t have good relationships with her daughters, who have characters like their father. One of her daughters denounced her second husband. Said he was CIA. They spent five days going through her house. He was sentenced to twenty years. Bibi wrote Fidel that he was falsely accused, and he got out the next day. She has had an account at a bank in New York ever since she was at Spence. The U.S. government won’t let her touch it, though, because she lives in Cuba. She transferred as much as she could to Switzerland. Her mother lived in Rome for fifteen years. She shows us a picture of her with her mother in Rome. “My friends said I wouldn’t recognize Rome anymore. It’s full of niggers.” She’s had cataract surgery. Even so, she can see only shadows. She loves her cats, especially her Siamese, which was given to her by the Lebanese ambassador next door. Every day, when her husband was dying, the cat would come and sit on the edge of the bed and stare at him. And the cat had never sat on the bed before. Bibi got diabetes late in life. Because of stress. Stress because of her other neighbor, the Finnish ambassador. She always got along so well with her neighbors. They were always lovely to her. She was great friends with the previous Finnish ambassador and his wife, but then they left, and Bibi says the ambassador’s wife told her, “‘I would introduce you to the new ambassador and his wife, but I’m not going to do that because they’re just horrible.’ The new ambassador’s wife kept trying to be friends with me, but I avoided her, saying, ‘My husband’s just gotten out of jail and it wouldn’t be right, to go to an ambassador’s house.’ She got more and more angry with me, until finally she was climbing up in the tree with a pair of binoculars, spying on me. She denounced me to the police.”

  “Why?”

  “For having geese. I had a flock of lovely geese. She said they made too much noise. They had never bothered anyone before. The police came and said they were going to cut off their heads. That sent me to bed with my first diabetes. I finally found a farm in the countryside to keep them, but we had to go every day to feed them. But I got my own back. I got that Finnish ambassador fired. My husband and I were in Switzerland, and in Geneva we met the Finnish foreign vice-minister and I told him what they had done, and he said his ministry would look into how they were behaving over there. They sent inspectors there, found all kinds of abuses, and the Cuban police caught them trying to smuggle five sets of silverware out of the country. They weren’t just transferred; he was fired! And I got his little secretary fired, too—a fairy who used to have masked balls with all the other fairies.”

  We are in a paladar by now, so good that we eat escabeche and roast pork. Bibi has fish and saves a piece for herself, wrapped in aluminum to take home.

  Geese, fairies, and niggers, I think in my bed as I try to digest the escabeche, the roast pork, and the disturbing terms that Bibi used in English, and I find myself wondering if the word negrito really was as breezy as all that.

  III. 9

  Juana starts, but it is an unusual day, for there is the twice-monthly Polar Bar, a kind of open-house barbecue at the Canadian Embassy where children eat hamburgers and swim and chase one another around on the tennis court. Cubans are not allowed at the Polar Bar. Juana comes for an hour before the children go. I cop another mom at the Polar Bar to look after the kids there and drive them home to Juana, who will be waiting for them. We have to go to five events—two cocktail parties, an art opening, a dinner, and a dance concert.

  When we come home, Juana is watching TV with Thea and Jimmie, who are both so tired from the Polar Bar that they won’t go to bed. Juana looks at a loss. “This is not a typical night,” I whisper to Juana as I carry Jimmie upstairs.

  Jimmie and Thea sprawl on beanbag chairs in their rooms, nightshirts hiked up above their waists, private parts challenging me in grim judgment as I demonstrate to Juana the telling of a bedtime story.

  III. 10

  The allergist who saw Thea last year for her skin blotches, Dr. Yamila Lawton, calls me over the weekend to say she wants to see me.

  Now she sits with me on the veranda. We speak about Thea. I tell her about the findings of the specialist we saw in New York. She compliments me on my Spanish. There is a pause. Her eyes, magnified by her glasses, look sheepish. “I suppose you’re wondering why I am here.”

  “Of course . . .”

  “I have something to ask you.”

  “That’s all right.”

  “I feel ashamed . . .”

  “You can tell me.”

  “You know th
e situation in this country . . .”

  “Of course.”

  “My son has just graduated from medical school. Look.” She reaches into her bag and pulls out a photocopy of the diploma. “This is gold,” she says, tapping a medallion shape, black on the photocopy, at a corner of the diploma with her finger. “They only give the gold medallion to the best students. He worked so hard. I want to give him something, a present for his diploma, but . . .” Her voice breaks. “I feel so bad.” She opens her pocket-book, pulls out a handkerchief, blows her nose. “I’m sorry.”

  “It’s all right. Tell me.”

  “You know how it is here.”

  “I know.”

  “What he would like more than anything, he says, is a radio–cassette player. They are so expensive for Cubans, but foreigners, I know, can get a discount.”

  I tell her I will try to get a discount at the electronics department of the Diplomercado. It will have to be included with the purchase of other electronic items from the Diplo so that it doesn’t look suspicious, but we do need an iron. Then I think again and tell her I can pick one up when I go to Orlando in two weeks. I say I also have to think about the weight they allow me to carry onto the plane in Miami. I ask her how large she would like the cassette player to be.

  She says it doesn’t have to be big at all, just as long as it has room for two cassettes.

  “No problem.”

  More tears, openings and closings of the pocketbook.

  After she leaves, I realize that it hasn’t been established whether I am supposed to pay for the cassette player or whether she is going to reimburse me. I have to wait and see what happens, I guess.