Cuba and the Night

by Pico Iyer

  A dream of incitations, I thought, around the clock, around the country, in every nook and shadowed cranny. Everywhere you went, it felt as if you were passing through an echo chamber of hisses, a tunnel of whispers. “Ven acá, mi amor. Mi vida, mi alma, mi corazón.” “Ven acá, por qué no?” “Por qué no, mi amor? Por qué no?”

  I left the Russian to his dreams, and wandered around groups of people sitting in the streets, while dancers like parrots and toucans fluttered all around them.

  “Excuse me?” called out a woman from the blanket where she was sitting. “You are from America?”

  “No.”

  “Tourist?”

  “Yes.”

  “Here. Sit down. Meet my brother.” She motioned to the blanket, and the man who was with her—her brother or her boyfriend—made a space for me and handed me a bottle of rum.

  “You study in America?”

  “Sometimes.”

  “I think so. I see from your shoes. Maybe you come to my store sometime. Behind the cathedral. I show you the plaza, Habana Vieja, everything.”

  “Sure, great.”

  “Maybe tomorrow? What is your plan?”

  “I don’t know right now. I’ll look in on you, if I get the chance,” I said, and got up: she was moving way too fast for me. Besides, if I was going to get a guide, it might as well be someone who would shoot well. This woman was too sophisticated, had too much of the hacienda in her already. I needed someone fresher, more like an amateur: a girl alone on a bed in a broken-down hotel and, in the distance, a man along the sea, pointing his son’s gaze out to the horizon. “The Permanent Revolution,” they could caption it, and it could run in any kind of story. Even get resale rights in Spanish Playboy.

  Around Coppelia, the kids were sauntering about like queens waiting to be defrocked, and on the Calle 21 side, near the Vita Nuova, the girls looked so gorgeous I figured that most of them weren’t girls at all. Look for the Adam’s apple, I told myself, and remember why it’s called that. Check out the size of their wrists. In a culture where women had cornered the biggest market, everyone wanted to be one.

  After a few minutes of cruising, I decided to cut into Karachi for a drink. The place was dead tonight—who wanted to dance in a bar when there was an all-night orgy going on in the streets?—and there were only a couple of pros there, watched hungrily by some boozy spies from the Ukraine.

  A girl came up to me, in that slow, hip-swinging way they have, with memories of their grandfathers and hot days in West Africa. She had a big gap in her teeth, but when she didn’t smile, she looked fine. Silvio was singing on the jukebox—“La Prisión”—and we moved around a little in the dark while one of the bartenders slept in the corner and the other changed his pesos into dollars. I had nothing to lose, I figured, and anything was better than returning to my hotel room alone.

  After we’d danced through a couple of slow ones, I bought her a drink at a table in the corner, and she told me how she had a kid, how she lived with her mother, how her boyfriend was in Angola and her brother was in Miami. A millionaire, she’d heard. How she’d had esposos, but nothing serious. I returned the favor in kind—told her I was Robert, from Toronto, a tourist here for a month, and poor, very poor—and she took it all in like it was holy writ, looking at me in that bright-eyed, teasing way the Habaneras have, and I figured I might as well go for it: the night was getting on, and nothing else was developing.

  “You want to go somewhere?”

  She nodded.

  “Round here?”

  “Not here. Habana Vieja.”

  “Okay.” We walked back to the Capri, and found a Turistaxi, and I stuffed five dollars in the guy’s hand. We drove down backstreets—the Malecón was closed tonight for the party—and then Neptuno, and we got off near a place she knew. We went up some creaking stairs and came to an empty reception desk. Past it, there was a door that led out onto a half-lit terrace. A few girls were sitting there in demure white dresses as if lined up at some debutantes’ ball, and the guys beside them were staring at their feet as if on their way to war.

  My girl—she told me to call her Célia—knocked at a door, and it opened, and there was a shout of surprise, and some tired blonde who was in there with an even older guy came out and started babbling.

  We tried the next door down, and it gave pretty easily, and we were alone in a bare room, with a shelf and a chair. There was a naked lightbulb, and a towel at the foot of the bed. There were two pairs of cartoon slippers from Shanghai.

  “You want a shower?”

  “Okay,” I said, and then we went into the bathroom, and it was bare too—just one worn faucet in the wall, and a trickle of cold water. I decided to take a rain check on the shower—a rain check on the whole thing, in fact: she’d taken off her clothes and folded them as neatly on the chair as if she were a schoolgirl, and I saw raw bruises on her side, and scars across her belly, and one of her breasts looked kind of lopped off. It was no kind of body for a girl of sixteen.

  “Look, Célia. This is fine. Enough. How about we talk for a little, and then I take some photos, and we go?”

  “What’s wrong? You don’t like me?” She came up and began kissing my neck.

  “I like you fine. It’s just that I’ve been drinking too much.”

  “No problem. I can help. We have to make love. We cannot leave until we have done it.” Plaintively almost, she moved her mouth down my stomach.

  “I can’t.”

  “Qué pasa, mi amor?”

  “SIDA,” I said.

  “SIDA?”

  “Soy americano.” And then she nodded respectfully and backed off.

  I didn’t have the heart to take any pictures of her then, and just as I was reaching for my pants, the light went off, and she gave a little gasp, and then I heard her sniffling and felt her shivering beside me.

  “It’s okay,” I said. “It’s a blackout. It’s nothing.” But she was shaking now, and I could tell she had closed her eyes, and a sad kind of terrible moan came up from her. “It’s okay,” I said, “don’t worry,” and I reached out to hold her, and she grabbed at me like I was a life jacket, and I thought of nights in Aranya, and the shelling overhead, and some fourteen-year-old in my arms, more scared of me than of the war.

  Célia was helpless in my arms now, just a trembling, terrified bundle of nerves, and I fumbled around for a candle and couldn’t find one, so I got out my lighter and struck a light. From outside, there came the sound of footsteps pacing back and forth.

  “Come on, Célia,” I said. “You can dress by this light,” and I smoothed her hair, and held the lighter out while she put on her clothes, hands fumbling.

  When she was through, I did the same, and we walked out into the street. Kissing her on both cheeks, I pressed a few notes into her palm.

  “Gracias, muchas gracias,” she said, smiling back at me. “You want?” And handed me in return a stick of gum.

  The whole thing had left a kind of sour taste in my mouth, and I knew there was no way I could get to sleep. I needed to talk to someone, to get the whole thing out of my system. I needed to erase the night from my memory. Another romance that fizzled was the last thing I needed.

  So I headed back to the Nacional, and when I went in, Alfredo gave me his usual terse nod and poured me “the usual”: some concoction he’d learned down in Asunción.

  “Your friend?” he asked, and motioned to the other side. It was the Englishman again—the only other single man in Havana—and he was sitting next to some Spanish kid in glasses, who was telling him about Bilbao and the death of Franco and the importance of the Basque struggle, while Hugo was responding in that classic British orchestral tune-up of “Quite so”s and “Really?”s and “Is that right?”s.

  I figured it was time to rescue him again.

  “Hugo.” I raised my glass. “Come and join me for a drink.”

  “Think I might, actually,” he said, getting up, a little unsteadily, and almost bowing to th
e kid. “Very good to have met you. Do hope we’ll meet again soon,” and then coming over to the stool next to mine.

  “So what’s up?”

  “Not a great deal, really.”

  “What’s your poison?”

  “Tropicola ’76. Quite a good vintage, so they say.”

  You couldn’t exactly wet your glass with him, but the guy was better company than none.

  “Seen anything interesting?”

  “Well, I went down to this thing they have called the Humor Museum, but it was closed. ‘For repairs,’ the sign said. Took a few snapshots of the old palacios for the boys—best-preserved colonials in the Caribbean, so they say. And I did come upon a very pleasant jazz bar. Célia Cruz sort of place.”

  “Met any girls?”

  “Cubans, you mean?”

  “Well, they are usually the ones you meet in Cuba.”

  “Can’t say I have. They’re not that easy to meet, are they?”

  “No. Not unless you go out of your hotel. Or walk down any street.”

  “So you do have a local involvement, I take it?”

  “Naw, I’m married, as it happens. We’re separated right now, to make a long story nonexistent, but we haven’t got divorced yet because of the alimony payments.”

  “Oh, I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t be; she isn’t. Photographers aren’t the easiest people in the world to be married to.”

  “Yes. Must be terribly consuming. I suppose you rarely get the chance to spend time at home.”

  “Rarely get the wish to be at home. Home for me is a hotel and an expense account.”

  He looked down at his drink, and I could feel the conversation beginning to flag.

  “Anyway, it’s a way to keep things safe. Anyone starts getting too friendly with you round here, and it’s fifty-fifty they’re playing footsie with Fidel. Look,”—I could see how Alfredo was listening to us, and I knew he could speak as much English as he needed—“how about checking out somewhere else? Have you ever been up to the Capri at night?”

  “Can’t say I have.”

  “Let me take you there. If you’re into ancient history, it’s sure to be your place. Hasn’t changed since George Raft was running the casino and Sinatra was headlining downstairs.” We headed out then, leaving Alfredo muttering in the corner, and wandered down the long avenue of palms, past a couple of soldiers necking in the bushes, and a boy in a leather jacket working undercover, and a few girls on the lookout for foreigners, on their own behalf or someone else’s. As usual, half the people here looked like they were in the slums of Lagos, and half looked as if they were on their way to Vegas, with golden handbags, and scarlet earrings, and eyes glittery with excitement.

  We took the elevator up to the eighteenth floor, and when we walked outside, the place was almost empty: just a couple of fat Colombians in the pool, and the yellow streetlights of the Malecón below. The Capri kept the rooftop bar open round the clock, but the action only started when the other places closed. I loved to come here at one, two, when it was still quiet, and shoot the nightscape from this angle, with the pool eerily spotlit in the foreground, and the grand, lonely towers of the Nacional behind, and the deck chairs lined up, ghostly, in front of the blue-tinted glass, the whole white city receding into darkness.

  “You know,” I said, “it must have been really something in its prime. Going to be something too, after they’ve done some reconstruction.”

  “Deconstruction seems to be more the Cuban way.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Meaning that it’s such a hard place to make out, don’t you think? Everyone here seems to spend half his time complaining about Castro, and half his time glorying in the country’s autonomy.”

  “And half their energy planning to go to Miami, and half their energy bad-mouthing the yanquis.”

  “Quite so. And not many of the people one meets seem to have anything good to say about the Revolution.”

  “Maybe a function of the people you meet. The only ones who hang out with foreigners are the ones with complaints or agendas. The ones who are happy have no need of us.”

  “I suppose you’re right.”

  “I know I am. It’s the same anywhere. I hate my wife, but if you say anything against her, I’ll punch you out.”

  “The wife in this case being the Revolution?”

  “Right. Fidel’s aging lover.”

  We took the scene in without talking for a while. One of the Colombians got out of the pool and toweled himself dry. A Frenchman came up, looked round, snarled, and went down again. It was like being on a film set after they’ve wrapped for the day and everyone else was off at some party or watching dailies, but the soundstage was still lit up, waiting for a scene that’s already gone.

  “You know, sometimes I think Fidel is really on to something here.” He looked at me as I spoke. “I mean, if there’s anywhere that’s crazy and passionate and reckless enough to make a Revolution work, it’s here. And he just plays right into that whole Spanish thing of holding hands and swearing eternal love and promising to shoot the stars down from the sky. You should see some of the other Communist dumps—Beijing or Moscow, even Prague: they’d kill for even a small piece of the energy they have here. Because they’ve got nothing going on there except gray buildings and cold offices and dead slogans. But Fidel, you know, he’s just like this sultry crooner who knows the people are in love—crazily in love—with wild gestures and poetic dreams and love songs. So he just sings them all these pretty melodies that stick in your head like jingles. “Until the Final Victory.” “Ready to Conquer.” “We Will Prevail.”

  I’d had too much to drink, I knew, but I wasn’t in a mood to stop. And I certainly wasn’t in a mood to talk about myself. “And you know the craziest thing?”

  “What’s that?”

  “The people love it. It’s almost like they want to be conned: they want to be wooed with false promises and poems and pretty lies. They want to be given a line, to be told that they’ll be held till the rivers run dry and the moon falls from the sky.”

  “I should have thought they’d much rather have bread.”

  “Sure. But that’s the beauty of it. Making them forget the things they haven’t got. It’s like, who thinks of food and money when he’s on the beach with his girl? Who worries about human rights when he’s singing a love song on his guitar? Who gives a fuck about anything when he’s in the middle of making love?”

  I thought about what I wasn’t talking about, and all the false promises and lies I’d seen in my time. But that was beside the point, I thought: you could help people most by not giving them the burden of your heart.

  “Anyway, if you want to get a feel for this place, you should go to Nicaragua sometime. The whole country’s just like this huge black hole. The main cathedral’s just this big gutted place with crows rooting around in the grass. The capital’s nothing but an empty field. But you read the newspapers, and you think it’s the last frontier of the cold war. East against West, Marx against Ford. And the truth of it is, the whole place is just a few campesinos with shy smiles, sitting around in empty huts and asking how Dennis Martinez is doing with the Expos. That’s the craziness. The contras want dollars so they can get cable TV. The Sandinistas want cable TV so they can learn how to get more dollars. And all the while the people are going down by the handful.”

  I was talking too much, I knew, saying things I wouldn’t believe in the morning. But Hugo was more generous—or polite—than I’d imagined: he just sat there, taking it all in.

  “So it sounds as if you’re on a mission against politics.”

  “Oh, I don’t know. Anyway, politics is kind of beside the point when half the people round you are starving. Listen”—I stopped for a moment, and looked at him—“I’ve been talking your ear off. I’m sorry, my friend. You get so whenever you see someone who speaks English, you go crazy.”

  “That’s fine,” he said. “I know the feeling. Still, think I m
ight be shoving off now.”

  “Okay, you shove off, then. I’ll see you later.”

  “I do hope so,” he said, and left me to my drink.

  In the morning, I felt better: hell at first, but at least Hugo had helped wipe out the memory of the girl and the hotel. That was the great thing about hell: it made it good to be in purgatory again. And the other thing was that it was always good to shoot in Cuba: it must have been the easiest place in the world to make pictures. You just got off the plane, and you were in the thick of it. One guy was making some girl, and the others were trying to swim out, and a woman was weeping for her son in New Jersey, and the guy over there was trying to sell you a pigeon. Everywhere you turned, everything was happening, and everything that was happening took you away from all abstraction and into something human, where answers weren’t so easy.

  I guess the other reason I was happy to be here, if I stopped to think about it, was that it was good to be out of myself for a while. After the separation, things hadn’t been too easy on the home front. I figured the thing to do now was just concentrate on the pictures. Play the part of the photographer that everyone expected; focus on the job and work out the angles. Live by the book for a while. If I had to choose between a partner and a job, it made more sense to choose the one I could make a living out of.

  Besides, I knew it was better not to get too hooked on things. That could only lead to heartbreak. When I was a kid, I’d believed in everything around. Politics and revolution and even love eternal. But after the breakups and the wars and the long nights in Taipei, I’d learned a safer rule of thumb: people let you down, principles don’t. People tell lies, images never do. The first time you come into a foreign country, and everyone looks the same to you, and there’s fighting all around, there’s no way of telling right from wrong. The only thing to do is get out the lens and catch the ambiguity; and when it came to ambiguity, Cuba was the leader of the pack.

  I’d got most of what I needed from the present trip, in any case, and the only thing I needed now was some more intimate shots—the inside of houses, the texture of hopes. So I decided to take José up on his offer and track that crooked wire to wherever it would take me.