Cuba and the Night

by Pico Iyer

  I signed his visitors’ book and gave him a card—one a carpet salesman had given me on the plane coming down—and in exchange, I got some shots of him, smiling rheumy-eyed against the multicolored posters. He asked to take my picture too, in his house, and laboriously wrote out his address, so I could send him copies, and then we went on to the Sailors’ Store, the only place in Cuba where you could get most Cuban goods.

  “Compañero,” Lourdes said to the fat guard at the door. “This is a very important man from Italy.”

  “Very important,” I said, and he let us in with a smile. “Niña,” he called after her, “remember me next time your brother has a chicken!”

  In the aisles, they were selling telephones shaped like red high heels.

  “In America, how much does this cost?”

  “Too much.”

  “Nothing is too much in America,” she said, and we went upstairs, to the eating area, where all the Africans were hanging out, sipping guava juice or dusty bottles of flat 7-Up while they traded stories. This was how they lived here, the students from abroad, using their dollars to buy goods they could resell to Cubans, or buying fans and juicers they could take back to the Isle of Youth to trade for human company.

  “Now, Richard,” she said, “I show you the true Revolution. The one the bearded one never talks about.”

  And then we went back out into the street, and she led me up to a small brown door. A woman with glasses opened up, brushing her hair back, and waved us hurriedly in, then led us through the darkness of a corridor. We passed a circle of chairs, set around some bottles of Jack Daniel’s—a homemade, private bar. We passed two chihuahuas from Mexico and a Siamese cat she was raising in order to sell. Then we went through a door, and she flicked on a switch, and I was standing in a room full of spooky treasures: porcelain figures, elephant vases, the masks of African gods, crammed into every spare inch of glass cases that reached all the way to the ceiling. A whole cathedral of voodoo, with eerie dark faces on seven different levels, and different colors for every god. A sanctuary of darkness.

  “The only one in Cuba!” said Lourdes proudly. “Nowhere is there anything like this.” I wandered farther in, and took a few close-ups of the coconut faces and model cars on display. “This is Shango,” she said, pointing to one deity. “The same god as El Jefe. And this is Obatalá,” fingering another mask. “And this one is Oshún.”

  “And you believe in all this?”

  “Sure. Why not? Even Fidel believes in this. Even Fidel went to Africa to learn from the gods.” She stopped, and let her voice go down. “Usually, of course, I believe in Jesus Christo. But how long was Jesus Christo on the cross? Three days. And how long have we been on the cross? Twenty-eight years! How can I believe in him?”

  While she spoke, two men came in, and as we moved into the shadows, the first of them threw himself flat out on the floor and started babbling something, muttering so fast I couldn’t make it out, and shaking a maraca as he did so, and then stuffing some money into a jar. And then the next man came up and did the same, shaking the instrument wildly in his hand, and then the woman came in, and gave them both some pieces of cake and wine. There were bows, and whispered thanks, and smiles. It was like some ungodly inversion of a first communion.

  “And over here,” said Lourdes, motioning me toward a corner, after the men had gone out, “over here is my religion. My altar. Now you can see what I believe in.” And she pulled open the lid on a huge Chinese vase. Inside, there was a mass of papers. There were scraps of faded newspaper clippings like the one I’d already seen, old pictures of the Prado when it must have been like Patpong, a few tattered copies of Bohemia. There were copies of ancient guidebooks telling New Yorkers where they could find whites-only clubs, and ads for nightclubs from the time of Prío and Batista. There were old articles from the New York Herald Tribune.

  “You see, Richard? You understand? This is my bank account. This is my dream: one day, when he is gone, to make the true story of our country. The story the government never tells us about. This is my private Museum of the Revolution.”

  “I see,” I said, though it seemed to me that the whole island was one dusty, glass-cased Museum of a Revolution that had faded long ago. “And so the Catholic churches are a cover for santería. And santería is a cover for this.”

  “Maybe,” she said, and then, carefully, put the clippings back inside the jar, just the way she’d taken them out. “This is my secret treasure. This is why I learned English.”

  “And you keep it here because …”

  “Because it is more secure. If they find it, they think it is from some traitor who went to Mariel.”

  I looked around again, at the grinning gods and the scraps of meat, at the broken axes and clunky pots, and then she led me back through the darkened corridor and out into the street. We passed rooms with their doors open, where old men were strumming guitars, and a man was selling copies of The Godfather. We passed North Koreans in white guayaberas, with pictures of Kim Il Sung pinned to their lapels. We passed boys selling ice creams from behind the bars of ground-floor windows, and kids from Chernobyl off to see their doctors.

  “Hey, Lourdes,” I said as we passed a poster of Che. “ ‘Ser Como Él.’ Be like him.”

  “That’s easy,” she replied. “He’s dead.”

  It was getting dark by then, and when we walked past the old Cine Payret downtown, where Falling in Love was playing, Lourdes grabbed at my arm and asked me if we could see it. I ought to be shooting Carnival, I thought, I ought to be working the streets, but this was more intriguing and might lead to some more unexpected places. So I gave the guy a few pesos, and then we were back in the usual Cuban darkness. It was like high school again, all over again: that same sense of furtiveness and borrowed passion, and promises made in the shadows. Lourdes held my hand fiercely during the film, and she wasn’t the only one sniffling as it went on; but all around us there were other kinds of noises: slow kisses and long secrets, and unfastening buttons, and rustlings and murmurs and gasps. It was weird in there, as if the darkness itself were whispering, and everything was charged: fingers on thighs, lips on flesh.

  Lourdes’s eyes were glazed when we came out, in the shadow of the old Capitol building—a perfect replica of the one in Washington—and I was heated up.

  “Look,” I said, “let’s go to my hotel. It’s not the Nacional, but it’s got air-conditioning, and we can get some drinks, and it’s private. No one watches the St. John’s.”

  “I can’t, Richard. I am not like the women in Coppelia.”

  “But where else can we go?”

  “Anywhere. Not a hotel. It is not right.”

  “How about a club, then?”

  “Okay. Not here. Here, everyone knows me. In Vedado.”

  So we took a taxi back up to Coppelia, but the Karachi was closed, and Scheherezada wouldn’t let me in. The Tikoa wouldn’t let her in—it felt like we were the first interracial couple in Jo’burg. At the Karabali, I went to the head of the line, and a black guy with a beard told me to go to El Coctél, across the street; at the Coctél, Lourdes went first, and they told her she was in, as long as she paid in dollars. We slithered in through the nine-inch crack in the door—these places could make Area seem democratic—and took two stools at the bar. The place was so dark you couldn’t see the drinks; when the bartender gave the couple next to us the bill, they needed a flashlight, like in the cinema.

  Around us, in the booths, couples were necking, and writhing, and who knows what else. Some Iglesias was on the system, and the guys behind the bar were slipping bottles of rum to their neighbors while telling customers they were out of rum. We sat on our stools, looking into the dark, and Lourdes was ready to slip five bucks to someone to kick some couple out of a booth, when I decided I’d had enough.

  “Come on, for chrissake. I’ve had it with this darkness thing. I didn’t come all this way just to be with a woman I can’t see. You could be anyone, for all I know
. Let’s just go back to the hotel.”

  “No,” she said. “Don’t you understand? This is Cuba. What does a Cuban and a foreigner mean? What kind of couple is that? And what kind of woman do you find in a hotel?”

  “Great. Why do married couples go there?”

  “Only so they can get rum, and maybe hot water, and eat in the tourist restaurants. Their wedding is the only time in their lives when the government allows them to live like tourists, like outsiders in their own home. So they go there and sit in the bar, and then make love at home. To make love in a hotel—it is like giving your novia a card with a love poem already printed.”

  “So you would prefer the street?”

  “I would prefer America.”

  “Mi vida, the street is the closest to America you’re going to get.”

  “Thank you, Richard,” she said, and slamming down her glass, she walked out, and I was left alone in the dark, in a room full of shudders and moans.

  When I got back to my hotel, I couldn’t get to sleep at first. I thought and thought about what was going on: I liked the girl, but I didn’t want to get in too deep. I thought she was on the level, but that only made things harder. I could cut my losses right now, I figured, get out while the going was good, and just concentrate on the shoot with Fidel. I could go for it, and hope we wouldn’t get too close. But something was still nagging at me, like when you’re trying and trying to remember someone’s name, and you can’t settle on anything else till you’ve got it. There was something here I had to retrieve; it was like Lourdes was something on the tip of my tongue.

  The next day, when I got up, I figured I’d take my mind off her by going to José: his apartment was kind of like the AP wire, I always thought, spitting out rumors around the clock, fresh gossip, the latest “facts” about the state. Plus, it was like a nerve center for the underground and for all the writers, good-for-nothings and members of the shadow economy who liked to hang out around the fringes of the world.

  “Hey, Richard, qué tal?” he said, as soon as he opened the door, as if I’d been away two days. “Come into the kitchen, have some coffee: strong, and with sugar, right?”

  “Right.”

  I looked around me: some students were stretched out on the floor, listening to Tracy Chapman on the record player and arguing about whether she was a woman or not, and a pretty girl was at the stove, cooking up some pork and beans, and a couple of others were sitting in the corner, waiting to see if the day was going to end up in the Tropicana or the Salón Rojo, and Ricky, the dog, was yapping, and backed away when I came toward him, a Cuban right down to his untended coat.

  “So how you doing, Richard?”

  “Great. And you?”

  “Fine. Is always the same with me. Hey, you remember Luis?”

  “Sure.” The tall, handsome black boy came up to me with his smile.

  “Look, Richard, my brother is living here. We make a room for him,” and taking me out to the roof, he showed me where they had constructed a complete bedroom since the last time I was here, and erected an outside sink, and bought a coffeemaker. Their apartment was as full of remodelings as Trump Tower.

  His “brother” was a frizzy-haired mulatto from Santiago who looked nothing like Luis, and compensated for his lack of English with a smile. “Don’t worry,” he said. “Be happy.” I had long since stopped trying to figure out family relations here, and how Chinese-featured José from Camaguëy had a black brother from Santiago, and was introducing me to a mother who was all white in Havana. José’s attempts to explain all this had only made things worse: he and Luis were brothers, he’d told me; they were raised by the same wet nurse; they were brothers in Combinado jail. Even the simplest things were complex here. Like when Lourdes told me “Yo te quiero.” Did that mean “I like you” or “I love you”? Come closer or stay put?

  His “brother” went back to playing dominoes with a friend on one corner of the roof.

  “You see,” said José, with his wry smile. “True Revolutionaries.”

  “How come?”

  “They are following El Jefe. You know Fidel once played this game from five in the evening until ten in the morning?”

  “Sure. And never stopped talking all the time,” said one of the boys, looking up, smiling.

  Then there was a knock on the front door, and Luis opened up, to a boy who looked like a Greek god, his frilly shirt open to the navel, a tangle of dark curls, soulful eyes: the kind of guy Helmut Newton would have cast as Pan.

  “Richard, this is Carmelo. He was a dancer in Tropicana. But now he is an underground man. You know Mariel? Fidel sends all the maricones—the gays—to Mariel. But Carmelo doesn’t want to leave. So he becomes an underground man—like Dostoyevsky, you know? He marries a dancer and they live in Vedado.”

  “Better than prison, I guess. Better than Florida.”

  “I think it is the same as prison.”

  Carmelo, understanding nothing, sat down and ran his fingers through his curls.

  José led me to the edge of the roof, and we looked out at the whole city stretched out under the blazing Havana sun, still and warm in the silent morning. It was a strange feeling, being on top of Havana, in this blue vacuum, out of time, out of space. No way you could imagine the rest of the universe here; no way you could see beyond the moment. Just one big sensuous waiting room, where some people slept and some made out and others played dominoes, and a kid asked his mother if it would all be over soon.

  “So, José, how come I never see you working?”

  “Working?”

  “You’re always free.”

  “You call it free. I call it work. It’s not easy to live like this. But I work. I walk up La Rampa sometimes, and if I see strangers, I give them my card. And maybe I give ten people my card, two come here. And with these two I make work.”

  “What about a job?”

  “A job! Five pesos a day! Forget it! I can get some old guy—a Fidelista—to do my job for me. For him, five pesos makes him a millionaire. For me, it’s nothing.”

  The coffee boiled on the stove.

  “In Cuba, you understand, you don’t need to get money; you need to get friends. M’entiendes? So it’s better to work in the hospital, because then you can get food. It’s better to work in a restaurant, because then you can get rum. In the United States, I know, it’s different. Maybe you work hard, you get money. But here, you work and you work and you don’t get nothing. I have many Cuban pesos—I am a millionaire in Cuban pesos—but with pesos I can only buy things I do not need; anything I need is only in the dollar stores. So maybe I’m a millionaire here, but still I’m living like a beggar.”

  “Sounds like friends are a kind of currency.”

  “Sometimes. Sometimes, no. With you, Richard, is no need. I like you.” He clapped me on the shoulder and smiled. “Compañeros, no? I don’t need your money.”

  Just then there came another knock on the door. José motioned me with his eyes to the bedroom, just in case, and I went in and checked the place out for light. At first, I couldn’t hear anything. Then José’s broadest chuckle, and two softer voices, and he was speaking English. I came out and saw two girls, one pale and freckled, in a red T-shirt and baggy pants, the other cool, blond, in some kind of Nepali harem trousers.

  “Richard, this is Anna, right? And Ilse? From Germany.”

  “Hi,” they said, all smiles. I knew a lot about them already, I figured: vegetarians, disciples of Petra Kelly, semi-Buddhists, studying despair in the Third World.

  “You want some coffee?”

  “Ja. This is great.”

  We sat down, the three of us, around a little table on the rooftop.

  “You’re tourists here?”

  “Ja. You can say this. We are here to see the Revolution. We were trying to go to Nicaragua. But maybe this is better.”

  “I think it is. I live in Managua now and then. Most of the people you’ll meet there are from Berkeley or Düsseldorf.”
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  The girls laughed. They would have looked pretty if they hadn’t been so serious.

  “Here.” José put three cups down before us.

  The girls looked around them in the sun-baked morning. No noise in the air, no factories, no planes. No sense of purpose, no hurry, no direction. Every day a day off here, a day for daydreams and reminiscences.

  “This place is like heaven,” said the freckled one. “I would like to stay here. I know, you do not have everything here. But you do not need to have everything. You have history. You have spirit. Human warmth. This place is real. No plastic, no videos. You know, in Buddhism they say that life is suffering. You taste life only when you taste suffering.”

  “Sure,” said Jose dryly. “This is Paradise.”

  “If we were truly free, we could come here, and live and help you.”

  “And if we were truly free, we could go to Germany to help you.”

  Then there was another knock on the door—this place was like Grand Central Station—and there was no point in all three of us running for cover, so we sat there, while José opened up, and a kid in a clean white shirt came in, looking like he was on his way to meet his future father-in-law: the latest model in Communist Yuppie.

  “Ignacio. This is Richard. Anna. Ilse.”

  “Swell,” the kid said in fluent English. “How’s it going?”

  “Great. We are here to see your history.”

  “Then you must know about our friend?”

  We looked at José. “Sure. I am a piece of history. Richard, I told you before, no? I am a grandson of Martí.”

  “Grandson! Martí died in 1895.”

  “Sure,” he replied smoothly. “Son of the grandson.”

  “José Marti’s children are known.”

  “You think he never slept with another woman? He was a true Cuban—the father of the nation right down to his pinga!” José and Ignacio laughed, and I thought that José was a true Cuban too, right down to his chutzpah: a self-styled great-grandson of the Revolution, who played his cards both ways.