Cuba Diaries

by Isadora Tattlin

  Mrs. Guevara is an artist who works mostly in collage. The pictures she makes are portraits of her state of mind, she says, and of the states of mind of other people she knows. She can read people, she says; she can tell what’s on their minds. She teaches some art classes, and she says to her art students, “You paint that way because you feel like this,” and they say to her, “My God, how did you know?” Her work keeps her . . . she hesitates. “Well . . . balanced,” she says. Her collages are pieces of faces or human bodies surrounded by dark fields of color. Some of the collages have little jail bars in them.

  She has three children who are in the university here. She is battling now for the rights to one of Che’s diaries so that she can at least get some money.

  Later, Nick says, “She didn’t really have jail bars in them,” and I have to swear to him that they did.

  III. 37

  Gonzalo is missing. He told us he would be coming back after the school holidays were over. He didn’t show up after the holidays. He didn’t show up the week after that. In the middle of the second week, I asked Manuel to call Gonzalo’s family’s home near Trinidad. The man who answered said that Gonzalo’s family no longer lived there and he didn’t know where any of them were. I called Carlita. Carlita said he’d probably finally gone to Canada. She called Gonzalo’s house, and the man who answered the phone said without hesitation that he was Gonzalo’s father and that Gonzalo was in the country. Carlita said to give it a little more time, and if we still didn’t hear from him, I should call her again and she would find out what really happened.

  Lety says that it sounds like Gonzalo is getting ready to leave, if he hasn’t left already. Lety says Gonzalo’s Canadian wife has probably been in Canada all this time and has probably only now finally arranged for his visa and ticket, and Gonzalo is probably in the final stages of arranging for his passport, letter of invitation from his Canadian “host” (in which she declares that she will be responsible for all his expenses), health certificate, and exit permit, a process that takes months. Lety says people often drop out of sight before they leave, or stay very, very quiet, because if people understand that you are leaving, someone who doesn’t like you can always go to your local CDR and say you haven’t been behaving yourself—you’ve been selling things secretly, or you have a child you haven’t paid support for, or you owe money to someone, or you’ve been saying or doing the wrong things—and your CDR can keep you from getting a passport or an exit permit. Then, once you have a passport and an exit permit, and you’re only waiting for your ticket or to do last-minute things, someone can still denounce you for something—any person with any little bit of power who doesn’t like you—and can keep you from actually leaving.

  III. 38

  Our neighbor, the Argentinian ambassador, tells us that one of the guards at her residence stopped her as she was walking outside her gate the other evening. “I am so hungry,” he said. He told her that they are given only one meal a day—lunch. For dinner they are given sugar, water, and bread.

  NO MORE CRUISE SHIPS will be coming to Havana. The Costa cruise ship line has been bought by an American company, and American cruise ships are prohibited by the embargo from coming to Cuba.

  Costa cruise ships coming to Havana lasted for less than a year.

  GONZALO IS IN CANADA. Roberto stopped at Gonzalo’s parents’ house on his way through Trinidad with some American friends of friends we had sent off with him. When he returns, Roberto also tells us that Gonzalo’s parents showed him a photo of Gonzalo’s Canadian wife. We ask Roberto what Gonzalo’s Canadian wife is like, on a scale of one to ten. Roberto says that she is a six.

  “A six?”

  Roberto blushes through his tan. “Well . . . ,” he says, “las canadienses and the others from the North, they are not like Cuban girls. They are more . . .” His face flushes a little pinker.

  “Roberto, por favor . . .”

  “Dry. Son más secas. OK, I said it now. Disculpe.”

  “And how are they in Cuba?”

  “Now it’s my turn to say por favor.”

  “Roberto . . .”

  “OK.” He takes a breath. “Las cubanas tienen más . . .” Roberto outlines two half-moons in front of him, shimmies with his upper body, and makes a little growling noise.

  SOME VISITING FRIENDS of ours—a married couple and their fourteen-year-old daughter—go to the beach. A slender young girl approaches them in the water. Our friends think she could not have been more than eleven years old. “Can I swim between your legs?” the girl asks the wife.

  The wife thinks the girl is a forward child, but she spreads her legs in the water, and the girl swims between them.

  She asks to swim through the husband’s legs. He spreads his legs as well, but they are both feeling uncomfortable about it.

  “Do your wife or daughter speak Spanish?” the young girl asks the husband after she has swum through his legs.

  “No,” he says.

  She then asks the husband if he wants to have sex with her.

  “We don’t need anything,” the husband says.

  She excuses herself and moves to the next foreign couple.

  III. 39

  We drive to Jibacoa with the children. “Do we have to go to the beach again?” the children ask. We search around town for some friends to go with them, but the friends are already too sunburned.

  The beach is nearly deserted. It is bright but not hot. There is a couple making out at our favorite spot under an arching shade tree, but they move after a while and we have the spot to ourselves. The sun shining directly down on the water at noon makes it transparent. Nick and the children build a sand castle. We don snorkels and take off toward the reef. Jimmie really has the snorkel thing down now. We cruise over the reef. “But where’s the beautiful part?” he asks. He means the deeper part, where there are valleys and holes and there is coral—some umbrella-shaped, like trees on an African savanna, some like burgundy-colored phalluses with bright purple heads, others like fans. Suddenly we find it: the magic valley.

  Jimmie raises his head. He takes the tube out of his mouth. “It’s fantaculous,” he says.

  I keep asking Jimmie if he is tired, but he wants to go on and on. We come upon some razorthin iridescent blue fish and follow them through a valley. The razor-thin iridescent blue fish join a school of yellow polka-dot fish, thousands of them. We follow them, enraptured.

  After another half an hour, we move back to the shore.

  “I have found a dollar!” Thea yells, coming up for air.

  She leads us to a spot in three feet of water where a dollar bill is plainly visible, one half of it buried in the sand, the other half waving like a sea anenome. We will carry it home, I say, and dry it, and when we get back to a place where we can have things framed, we will frame it. It will be known from now on as Thea’s Magic Dollar.

  We drive home in silence. The chilrdren are sleepy from the sun. When we are nearly home, Thea says, “It is weird, though, isn’t it, one of us finding the dollar.”

  III. 40

  Lola says that there’s a new kind of Cyclone fence that has been appearing in town, made entirely of plastic. People have put them up in their yards because of all the robberies. There are now bathtubs made of plastic, too. It’s up to Cubalse to sell them, of course, but people have been acquiring them in their own little ways. The new solution the government has come up with is not to go after the people who cause them to disappear from the warehouses, but to go with a truck and a crew directly to the yards where the fences have been put in, and unless the owner of the fence can produce a papelito proving he bought the fence legitimately, the crew rips the fence out of the ground. They go into your house, too, and if they see a bathtub made of plastic and you can’t produce the papelito, they take it, too, ripping it from its pipes right then and there. It has been happening a lot on Ninetieth Street in Miramar, she says.

  III. 41

  Thea comes into our room at 10:45. She s
ays she is so nervous, she can’t sleep. I go back with her to her room and lie down beside her. I ask her what she is nervous about. Thea says she is nervous because every Thursday, when they stay late at school to have piano lessons, and Juana stays, too, she is afraid that Juana will start talking to Yolanda and make a play date and that she will have to go to Yolanda’s house and play with her, and tonight is Wednesday . . . she starts to cry.

  I told Juana that I wanted Thea to try to be friends with Yolanda because she was the only Cuban child in the school, and since Ivan was fired, there has not been another Cuban child in our lives, and you can’t be a child and live in a country and never know children from that country. I told Juana about the dance classes and the attempts to bicycle in a park and Rollerblade in the Prado. Thea and Jimmie know Juana’s nieces and nephews, but they are all older or younger.

  Yolanda lives on the twelfth floor of an ex–luxury high-rise. The first time we went there, the elevator, a blasted shell, looked so precarious that we climbed the twelve stories to the apartment. The stairwell and hallway looked like war zones themselves, but I tried being breezy and unconcerned as we climbed the stairs, taking what I believed was a “when in Havana” approach because Thea, I thought, was still not old enough to notice squalor. Yolanda’s mother seemed like a perfectly reasonable mother, and the apartment itself was, by Cuban standards, outrageously well appointed—freshly painted, with well-stuffed sofas and chairs, a new Sony television in the corner, and a computer. Still, Thea called me one hour after I got home and asked when I was coming to pick her up. The second time I took her there, Thea wanted to leave almost as soon as we got there. Both times I managed to persuade her, speaking X——, to give it a try, at least for three hours.

  Thea is crying hard now.

  I tell Thea she does not have to play with anyone she does not want to play with.

  III. 42

  Juana says she understands why Thea doesn’t like going to Yolanda’s place. It is scary there, she says. The kids in the building ride the elevator up and down by themselves from one floor to another. They ride the elevator to the ground floor and run across the street, in the middle of traffic, to the strip of park on the other side. Thea stands on the sidewalk, not knowing what to do, for we have told her never to cross the street by herself.

  I had heard baboonlike shrieks in the stairwell both times we had gone, as well as the sound of the elevator door rattling open and closed and the clopping of kids’ sandals in and out, but had chosen not to think about it. Then when Thea had come home, both times I had been on my way out and had not stopped to hear from her how it really was.

  I am a white trash mom, it comes to me now with searing clarity. I have also been, and am, the worst kind of non-Cuban, dumping all Cubans together into one messy group, as if it were impossible for one Cuban to be bothered by the squalor and chaos of another Cuban. I have been colonialist and radically chic, too, with my “when in Havana” insistence, and worse, I have been pushing that insistence on my daughter. The kids don’t have to have Cuban friends and hang out in Cuban public spaces if it scares them.

  Then I realize it’s to Juana I have been trying to prove how “when in Havana” I can be.

  III. 43

  An American woman whose husband works at the Interests Section has three little boys who play Little League with Cuban boys at a baseball field off the Malecón. The field is ringed by houses with small porches that face the field. The other day, the American woman tells me, one of her little boys had to do something more than just pee. She was standing with him at the edge of the field, wondering what to do, when an elderly couple, sitting on their porch, seemed to understand their problem and beckoned to them that they could use their bathroom.

  The bathroom, as usual, was barely functioning, but the people were so kind to let them use it that the American woman wanted to give them something. She thought offering them money would be too crass, so she offered them some homemade chocolate-chip cookies that she had in her bag.

  The elderly man took one, bit into it, and started to cry. “I remember this taste,” he said.

  III. 44

  Nick says an X——ian translator was stopped twice by the police—once for not coming to a full stop on the white line drawn on the asphalt. It was a very grievous offense, the policemen said. He would have to pay sixty dollars. The translator managed to negotiate it down to three dollars. Nick didn’t know what the second offense was, but the policeman got really excited because there was a Cuban in the car with no identification. He said they would all have to go to jail. The translator managed to get out of that one for eight dollars.

  AT A COCKTAIL PARTY, we learn that policemen in Cienfuegos and Trinidad now stop tourists’ cars to ask for beer and soap.

  A SIGN PAINTED ON the side of a building: YO ♥ MI C.D.R.

  I PASS AN ART DECO building in a part of town I don’t usually visit. I park my car and enter the lobby. Classical Roman women in togas in aluminum bas-relief decorate the elevator doors.

  III. 45

  Birthday party for the artist Ángel Toirac, combined with a housewarming for their new apartment. They are moving into a part of what was his wife’s family’s apartment, which covered an entire floor in a building in downtown Havana and was broken up into smaller apartments following el triunfo. A communal kitchen was installed in the rear. Meira’s uncle was consigned the apartment they are now in. Meira and Ángel have constructed a loft bedroom and their own kitchen. It has taken them a year to do it.

  Meira and Ángel show us remnants of pre-triunfo niceties, like a special shoe tree that goes into a wall fixture so that you can shine your wing tips at a comfortable level. You can keep the shoe tree in the wing tip the whole time, presumably, then put it back in your closet, alongside your other wing tips, all with their special shoe trees inside them.

  The apartment also contains ingenious gadgets improvised by Meira’s uncle, who was the right-hand man to Che in Santa Clara. He was jailed, though, after el triunfo. After his release, he spent his time producing the inventions that Meira now shows us: one is a small wind-speed indicator, which enchanted Meira when she was a child; another is a simple machine for twisting knotted-together plastic bags into clotheslines. He produced many clotheslines and sold them. They sold quite well.

  They still have one of the clotheslines he made. She holds it up. “This is especially precious to us,” Meira says. “He hung himself with one like this.”

  III. 46

  A U.S. anchorman, Mark, comes for dinner. He is well known in some cities in the United States, though neither Nick nor I have ever heard of him.

  He wants to do a show about how the Helms-Burton Act is hurting the Cuban people. Americans don’t think about Cuba, he says. He is looking for a way to get them to think about Cuba. One way to get Americans to think about Cuba is through kids. He wants to go into hospitals and show how kids are not getting medicines.

  We say that is all very nice but that the most senseless thing about Helms-Burton is that it is only helping Fidel and the hard-liners.

  He listens, and he says that while he understands that to be true, he has to get at the people angle first: showing kids in trouble will get the American people to pay attention. Then maybe, depending on how the show does, he can get more into how Helms-Burton keeps Fidel in power, but for now he doesn’t want to antagonize the authorities.

  Sometimes, talking to newly arrived visitors on the veranda before dinner, I think we are conducting a well-practiced Disney World ride. First the public is ushered by us into an orientation room (cocktails on the terrace, the first course at the dinner table), where they watch an OmniMax movie, The Cavalcade of Cuban History from 1492 to the 1940s. The doors open about halfway through dinner, the public filters through barred walkways onto moving cars, and we wend them through the revolution and its aftermath and the paradox of U.S. policy, which seeks the overthrow of Fidel and Cuba’s rebirth as a democracy but only achieves the opposi
te. The car stops for a moment and turns, and the public faces a fixed stage with holograms moving across it. Here you see Ángel Castro, a Spanish immigrant, and Lina Ruz, his cook, who became his mistress and bore him Ramón, Fidel, Raúl, and other children. Here you see the young Fidel as a university student in Havana in 1948, with a car, an apartment, a sizable allowance, and time on his hands. Here you see the tininess of Cuban prerevolutionary high society, which disdained rich but gauche provincials like Fidel.

  It is at this point that a voice coming from a point somewhere above the holograms tells the public that of course it is not believed that Fidel’s entire motivation comes from the fact that he was not invited to the right parties.

  The holograms continue. You see Fidel running for student body president but losing. You see Batista and the indignities and injustices inflicted on most Cubans. You see the assault on Batista’s palace, the assault on the Moncada barracks, Fidel’s imprisonment on the Isle of Pines, and his release one year later because of his father’s connections. You see the parts the public knows much better: Fidel’s exile in Mexico and his meeting with Che Guevara, the disembarkation from the Granma, the triumph of the revolution, the nationalizations, the Bay of Pigs, and the solidification of Fidel’s position. You see the intransigence of the Miami Cubans. You see the collapse of the Soviet Union and the golden opportunity the United States missed in not dropping the embargo then. And continues to miss. The ride ends with a small, rubbery bump, and the public emerges (in time for after-dinner drinks in the living room), blinking, into banality.

  A DANISH TOURIST is shot by the army. He was drunk and wandered into a military zone.