Cuba Diaries

by Isadora Tattlin

  “YOUR FRIEND MARK is so simpático,” Roberto says. I am sure Mark gave him a big tip. I threw caution to the wind because Mark called me the day after he came for dinner and said he needed a car and a driver right away. I told Mark about Roberto over the telephone and then telephoned Roberto and told him how to get in touch with Mark.

  Roberto tells me that when Mark first went to the car rental agency to rent the car that Roberto would then drive, he was told that there were no cars available, but there would be one available in the afternoon. When he went back in the afternoon, he was told that there were still none available.

  “That’s too bad,” Roberto says Mark said to the agent, “because I spoke to your colleague in the morning, and he told me there would be a car for me in the afternoon, and I have a fifty-dollar bill here, waiting to be given to the person who finds me a car.”

  “But you didn’t tell us that there would be a cash reward,” Roberto says the agent said, handing Mark the keys to a brand-new Mitsubishi: “Ay, qué simpático es Mark.”

  III. 47

  I go with the kids to say good-bye to Nicoletta, our half-X——ian, half-Cuban friend, at her poolside bungalow at the Hotel Comodoro. Her contract is not being renewed by the Laundromat firm that sent her to Cuba, and she has to return to Europe.

  Sexual tourists and glistening mulatas y negras de pelo lie with the inertness and predictability of seals on the Discovery Channel on chaises along the vast pool’s undulating edge. A limb flips up from time to time to shoo a fly.

  “The stories you could tell,” I say.

  “Someday,” she sings softly, her hands fluttering over the lamps, picture frames, and hems of the curtains where microphones are supposed to be hidden. “Someday,” she sings again.

  I ask Nicoletta who is using the white stretch limo parked outside.

  “It belongs to the prince of Malta,” Nicoletta says. “He comes to Cuba a couple of times a year. He gets his own villa, and a few bodyguards are put in front of it for him. He has girls—two fixed ones, and then others who come and go.”

  “But what does he do for . . . ?”

  Nicoletta rubs her thumb and forefinger together.

  Nicoletta walks among the sexual tourists and their mulatas y negras de pelo, tapping with polished fingernails on a can of cat food. Cats come running from all over the Comodoro, meowing, with their tails up, and rub against our legs. Nicoletta leads them back to the steps of her bungalow and starts opening cans of cat food and spooning it into bowls. The sexual tourists raise their heads, blinking, taking in the sight of two fully clothed middle-aged blanquitas and two children, speaking English and feeding cats.

  I ask Nicoletta what she will do now. She says she will be attending astrology school, of course.

  III. 48

  Two women, more friends of friends, arrived here yesterday from the United States. They will not be staying with us, but they will be coming for lunch. They faxed us from the United States before they left, asking if they could bring us anything.

  I faxed them back, asking them for three things. I faxed them to bring me the smallest Ziploc bags available in the supermarket (outside measurements 5½ inches by 3½ inches, officially called “snack bags”), clear plastic pages (available from photography supply stores) to hold 3½-by-5-inch photos, and some tennis balls.

  The women arrive at the house at 2 P.M. For two weeks I have been pleasantly anticipating the arrival of those Ziploc snack bags in particular. They are the perfect size for the children’s school snacks. There are no prewrapped kid-portion snacks to speak of in Cuba. Everything they take to school is either homemade or bought in bulk in the United States or in Europe and brought in—kilos of nuts, industrial quantities of raisins. That’s where the little bags come in. They hold just the right amount of raisins, nuts, cookies, and so forth for school. The children enjoy opening the Ziplocs; it makes them feel they are getting something closer to store-bought prewrapped snacks. Lately we have had to improvise with plastic wrap and rubber bands. The children have no patience for the rubber band packages: they tear at the wrapping, spill the contents, eat less, and come home in bad moods. We find flattened raisins and smeared chocolate in the bottoms of the lunch boxes. Ziploc snack bags will make everything better.

  Sandwiches, we put in pint-sized Ziploc bags, but we have plenty of those. I have been thinking happily, too, about how, when the right-sized photo pages arrive, I will be able to continue organizing the boxes and boxes of loose family photos (going back to the births of our children) that I have vowed to myself I will organize, a little every day. It is something that it’s possible to do only in Cuba, because in Cuba there is often nothing—absolutely nothing—going on, and there is time, time like people had a hundred years ago, when they quilted or tatted or carved, a little bit every day, and who knows how much longer we will be here.

  The women extract what they have brought me from a carrying bag. They bring out four containers of tennis balls, a box of pint-sized Ziploc sandwich bags and a large box of Ziploc quart-sized freezer bags. They also bring out two packages of photo pages to hold 4-by-6-inch photos.

  I have plenty of 4-by-6-inch photo pages.

  “Are the sizes all right?” they ask.

  “Oh fine, these are great. Thank you,” I say, but inside I want to cry. And this is not the first time this has happened.

  Not receiving something you need is bad, but receiving something you don’t need is somehow worse. Why do people think I go through the trouble of writing specific sizes in my faxes to them? Doesn’t it occur to people that I go to the trouble of writing specific sizes of things because I actually need those sizes and not other sizes? Is it not possible for people to imagine that I have spent two whole weeks thinking of all the progress I would be able to make once those things arrived?

  I go into the powder room, wash my face, say “Shit!” to the mirror as loudly as I can without other people hearing me. I grip the edge of the sink. “I am a privileged foreigner,” I repeat to myself. “I am a privileged foreigner and I will be out of here someday.” I take a deep breath and move back, smiling a smile that only I know the meaning of, onto the veranda.

  The next time friends of friends come, I tell myself, I will write them the reasons for needing one size of a particular thing and not another size, all the reasons for needing a particular size, in long, obsessive, run-on sentences, not caring what they think, sentences that end with the ultimate reason, that of the well-being of the entire family, so that they, especially people from the United States, with stuff up to their eyeballs, will understand the reality here.

  It’s amazing what people think people need here.

  People need anything made of rubber here. People need anything made of plastic. People need Tupperware boxes and Ziploc bags and coated rubber bands for hair, Brooklyn Bridge cable kind of hair. People need Rubbermaid dish drainers—the metal kind, coated with rubber, and the rubber trays that go underneath them—so that the wooden counters on which dishes drain don’t stay perpetually humid and rot. They need solid Rubbermaid garbage cans, with snap-on lids to keep rats away. People need things to stack, conserve, preserve, classify, label, repair. People need things to make the things they already have last, to repair them and organize them, for two-thirds of the population of Cuba was middle class and has devolved. If a Rubbermaid store opened in Cuba, people would be lined up around the block six lines deep. People need ties for plants. People need tomato stakes. People need gaskets. They need gaskets very badly. They need the thick gaskets that go around refrigerator doors and insulated gaskets for oven doors, and they need the rubber rings for espresso pots and canning jars. People need coated wire that bends. People need golf tees to pound into worn screw holes so that they can insert screws again, and the springs and tiny screws that go inside locks and door handles and window locks so that the rain doesn’t come in more than it already does. People need sheets of expanded metal to repair the seats of broken outdoor furniture
so they can sit and play dominoes and wait for things to change, and they need Rust-Oleum so that the outdoor furniture doesn’t rust through again. People need Thompson’s Water Seal. People need burner parts for gas stoves, and new burners for electric stoves, so that they don’t have to cook over fires in their backyards and cut down more trees and make their asthma worse than it already is. People need asthma medicine. Cuba has the highest rate of asthma in the world, from the dust and the mold and the humidity, which they can’t get rid of or escape from, for lack of parts.

  III. 49

  Tomorrow is Thea’s ninth birthday. I dig in the trunk and find some presents, from the stash of kid presents I buy for future use every time I go abroad. I wrap them with used wrapping paper, blow up some balloons I bought in Mexico, put them in her room while she’s sleeping, and then sleep myself until she and Jimmie start yelling at 7 A.M.

  Plastic toys from China, the very cheapest kind, which fall apart after a few weeks, are available in only a few stores attached to tourist hotels here and cost five to ten times what they cost in Mexico or the United States.

  III. 50

  Very few vendors at the agro today. Miguel explains on the way home that it’s because the smallest farmers can’t make it anymore, with the new taxes they have to pay.

  Miguel tells me that because of a continuing low hemoglobin level and asthma, his wife can’t have the operation yet to take out the plate they put in her bone after she broke it. The government is giving her special ration cards to buy lamb, to keep her hemoglobin up. She is running a fever sometimes, because of the plate, but it is too risky to take it out.

  I tell Miguel that a Canadian doctor I talked to in the United States who was in Cuba recently told me that Cuban medicine was good, but that it was about twenty years behind the times.

  III. 51

  I spend the next few days feeling bad that I said that to Miguel.

  III. 52

  I go with Carey and another visiting American woman, a friend of a friend whose handicapped husband is an advocate for the handicapped in Washington, D.C., to Pinar del Río to visit the Social Integration Laboratory of Vulnerable Groups—the first of its kind in Cuba. It is a cooperative project, sponsored by the Italian government, to rehabilitate and integrate groups that have been marginalized, either through handicaps, age, deformities, or the barrios (neighborhoods) in which they live.

  Our Argentinean guide, Sergio, who works with the project, explains that several years ago Cuba approached Italy to buy rehabilitation equipment, but Italy, examining the health situation in Cuba, convinced the Ministry of Public Health to try something much more far-reaching.

  “Cuba’s approach since the triunfo,” Sergio quietly explains to us as we are walking to the hospital, “has been to classify infirmities and to relegate them to specific institutions—a school for the retarded, a school for children with discipline problems, a school for deaf children, a school for blind children. There was a school for each infirmity in each province. This was very expensive, and when the periodo especial started, all special institutions were in crisis. Italy convinced Cuba to try, in an area of the country selected by the Cuban government, the general and specific ideas of a program that had been tested in northeastern Italy and had resulted in the successful closing of many institutions in Italy and large savings of public funds.

  “The idea of the program,” Sergio continues, “is to use Cuban institutions already at hand—of the médico de familia, the CDR, the Consejo Popular (Peoples’ Council, or City Council)—and to introduce them to slightly new ideas and ways of operating.”

  “You mean—”

  “The idea is ultimately to demonstrate the effectiveness of the bottom-up, rather than the top-down, approach.”

  We look at him.

  “The Italian psychologists, physicians, and sociologists who have been involved in the program have had to tread so delicately,” Sergio explains softly.

  We are at the hospital. Sergio introduces us to Lidia, the pinareña doctor who is the coordinator of the program, and Rigoberto, who is the head of the Consejo Popular. Rigoberto is a blanquito in his early thirties, with the close-cropped hair and well-pressed madras shirt and khaki pants of a young cadre member.

  Pipo, the spokesman for the handicapped, sits propped up by pillows in a wheelchair. He is severely handicapped, suffering from progressive muscular dystrophy, which causes his limbs to atrophy. He has already had one leg amputated and will soon be losing the other. We also meet his wife, a woman with cerebral palsy who sits next to him, holding his hand. They met at one of the first citywide meetings of the handicapped, and married recently. Pipo describes some of the programs.

  “There were living, in Pinar del Río,” Pipo says, “many handicapped people who had never seen the ocean, which is forty kilometers distant. Those who had never seen the ocean were taken to the beach. Buses were found. Food was prepared. Those who couldn’t walk were carried onto the sand. Compañero (comrade) Rigoberto carried many handicapped compañeros himself.” Pipo’s eyes grow liquid; his wife squeezes his hand.

  “Seeing those people see the ocean was the most beautiful thing I have ever seen in my whole life,” Rigoberto declares strongly.

  Rigoberto stands before us in the tiny community center of Comandante Pinares, in front of a giant “Map of Challenges and Resources.” Comandante Pinares, a neighborhood built in 1982 to house those left homeless following Hurricane Andrew, was, until the introduction of the Social Integration Laboratory, the area of Pinar del Río that produced the greatest number of juvenile delinquents. Any streetlight in Comandante Pinares, Rigoberto tells us, would be broken by delinquents as soon as it was installed.

  The map, a visual aid to community involvement, is a keystone of the laboratory’s program. It is a map made by the residents of the Comandante Pinares neighborhood and surrounding neighborhoods. Above it, on one side of the map, is a list, compiled by the residents, of the community’s needs and challenges; on the other side is a list of the resources the community has that can be used to address the problems.

  In the audience are the médico de familia (local doctor) of Comandante Pinares, the head of the CDR (a black grandmother who, she tells us, lives in a house with twelve other people), a sanitation engineer, and a youth representative. This last is a tall, good-looking fifteen-year-old black girl who has had one arm amputated below the elbow.

  Rigoberto is half-turned so as to read the map and speak to us at the same time. One of the challenges, Rigoberto reads, pointing to the map, is “fecality in the air.” Fecality in the air, Rigoberto explains, is, after crime, the thing that bothers people most in Comandante Pinares.

  All heads nod affirmatively.

  The grandmother who is the head of the CDR explains to us that her greatest challenge was getting people to open up to her, to tell her what bothered them. “I would go from house to house, and the people, they weren’t used to someone coming to them, they were suspicious, they were used to decisions coming from on high, but I said to them, ‘You can be part of the decision-making process, you can help us make our map.’”

  “And since people from here have gotten involved,” Rigoberto says, genuinely impressed, “new streetlights have been put in and not one of them has been broken.”

  Sergio softly explains to us on the way back to the car that low-level and midlevel administrators have been very receptive.

  Carey mentions Dolly the cloned sheep at lunch with Sergio, Lidia, and our group. Lidia keeps eating her soup tranquilly. Lidia is an M.D. She also meets foreigners. Carey’s Spanish is not perfect, either, and neither of us knows how to say cloning. Sergio translates. Lidia says she knows about genetic engineering.

  Carey says she’s not talking about genetic engineering; she’s talking about the making of a genetically identical copy of a complex organism. She says it has been done, in Britain, and that there is now this duplicated sheep named Dolly. The news came out two weeks ago, in newspape
rs and magazines. Lidia drops her spoon. Her eyes open wide. She looks at us. Carey describes how the cloning was done. Lidia’s eyes open wider. “No me diga,” Lidia says.

  III. 53

  Nick and I are greeting the first dinner guests when Piñeiro enters the room. When you invite Cuban officials to dinner, they often say they can come and then don’t come, and you end up with an empty place. But sometimes you invite them, and they say they can’t come, then show up anyway. Now here Piñeiro is, making thirteen at the table. It is very bad luck in X——to have thirteen at a table.

  Nick stands in the pantry, cursing and dialing the telephone. He calls Fritz, his number one assistant, and orders him to come to make it fourteen. Lorena turns the flames down, and Manuel makes another round of mojitos as the table is unset, expanded, and reset by Danila and Concha, rubber soles squeaking excitedly on the marble.

  Piñeiro, alias Barbaroja (Redbeard), the former head of intelligence, recently brushed aside (it is said, for favoring reforms), sports the classic orthodox look of neck hairs growing untrimmed upwards out of his collar to meet a tobacco-scented, untrimmed beard, and tight guayabera with stomach hairs poking through. Some say Piñeiro is responsible for hundreds of deaths; others say thousands; still, Piñeiro remains the favorite of the international set in Havana, because if you have to have an old revolutionary over, Piñeiro is the most schmoozeworthy. He listens well, of course—he has spent his life listening. His conversation, on good nights, is not the spouting of prejudices and platitudes. He speaks English well. He attended Columbia University, was kicked out, he says, for “improper activities,” and is the ex-husband of Lorna, the blond woman from Connecticut who teaches dance at the childrens’ school and is perpetually on the lookout for oatmeal to make cookies. Some even find Piñeiro charming, on good nights.