Cuba and the Night

by Pico Iyer

  But soon the stories ran out, and the rain started up again, and somehow I got to thinking about what was waiting for me back home: a couple of contact sheets, a few carousels, some images of war. A suitcase packed for emergencies and a Radio Shack beeper. A pile of unanswered mail. Last year looked like next year, and the year after that, and the next. The images stretched on and on. Like Lourdes with her bottle, in a way; like Fidel with his textbooks.

  “I don’t think I ever told you,” I said, as we drove through the downpour. “The last time I went to see my friend José. There was a girl there, in the kitchen, called Myra. She laid out some tarot cards on the table, to tell my destiny. I was living in a big house, she said. With a girl. I had found the partner of my dreams.”

  “I expect she was thinking of herself.”

  “I’m sure she was. But still, you know, I think she might have been onto something. Because after a while you get tired of this job. Feel like you’ll go crazy if you keep doing it, living for the moment, swallowing lithium by the handful, waiting for the next disaster. The last guys in the world shooting stills in the age of motion pictures.”

  Outside, the rain had let up, and the light was silver and blue above the fields. Like the whole island had been washed clean, and returned to its infant self.

  “So you’re thinking of a career change?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know what else I could do. But I see some of these guys, and they become such adrenaline junkies, there’s no way out for them. And some of them get out, and then they can’t make pictures anymore. Because suddenly every starving kid in Ethiopia is your kid, and you don’t want to be away too long from your wife, and you’ve got to look out for yourself because you’ve got a family to protect. No way I could do that: for me, I’ve got to give it everything, or not do it at all.”

  “So what have you got in mind?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe try to hook up with the Geographic for some three-month jobs. Or go into advertising. Maybe try videos.” We passed a group of boys smiling by the road, and a village of bare houses, with people sitting on their porches; we passed small parks with ice cream stalls, and empty stores, and lines.

  “I ever tell you about the girl in Paraguay?”

  “I don’t believe you did.”

  “Well, she was really from Brazil. And Brazil with a big B. You know, that wild, sun-bleached hair; sweet, lush mouth; golden skin. And a way of whispering those sexy Portuguese gutturals so that everything sounded like a come-on. Brilliant too, in her way.”

  “Sounds ideal.”

  “She was ideal. One of a kind. I met her at the Presidente Hotel one day. She told me she’d been living up in Ciudad del Este for four years, with some Lebanese guy, into import-export, if you know what I mean. He’d had to return to Lebanon to take care of business—liquidate the assets or something—so she was on the loose. So anyway, I lost no time, gave her a ticket to come to Rio with me, kind of set up house there. Two blocks from the beach, in this Ipanema apartment complex. I started working for one of the newsmagazines—I knew the bureau chief from Southeast Asia—and she just worked on her tan. Went like a dream. Weekends, we’d go to Búzios, Parati, Foz do Iguaçú; the rest of the time we’d spend on the beach, or in the golf club at Gavea.”

  “Very nice.”

  “It was. And then one time I was on assignment, and I called in for my messages, and I got a man’s voice, saying she wasn’t there right now. And then I ran into a guy from the Intercon, who said he’d met her over there one night, in the disco. And then I found these boarding passes in her drawer.”

  “Had you been planning to marry her?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Did you tell her that?”

  “I was waiting till I was sure.”

  “Could have been a long wait, by the sound of it.”

  “How can I marry someone who’s always flying off? I’ve been through that already.”

  “Why should she not fly off when you’re not going to marry her?”

  “So what do you suggest, Dr. Ruth?”

  “I suggest you marry your Cuban lady.”

  “I suggest you do.”

  He looked at me blankly for a moment, and then laughed. A little farther on, we picked up two girls by the side of the road, a blond beauty and her friend. Dolores and Esperanza, they said their names were. Sorrows and Hope. Too perfect yet again.

  When we got to town, I dropped Hugo off in Céspedes Park, and told him we’d meet up again at seven in the Casagranda: there was still a lot of daylight, and I wanted to use the light after the rain. I parked the car in the plaza, and then I began working the streets, the samba bars and cobbled alleyways around the cathedral, the houses along the slope, the place where Frank País used to live. I got the two girls to pose in front of the Venus Hotel, and asked them to come back at sunset, and I’d pay them for their time. I rode the buses, shooting blind with a wide-angle lens, pretending I was just another local returning from Miami.

  I walked the streets till they were imprinted on my feet and I could have found my way with my eyes closed. Sometime around noon I took a break in the Casa de los Estudiantes, downtown, and a woman came out to talk to me, a woman with a gray bun and a kindly face. “Where are you from?” she began, in English. “Do you like our country?” But before I could answer, she was going into her spiel. “Before, it was all poverty. Beggars, prostitutes, people who lived in the street. We had money, sure, but there was nothing we could buy. Now I have in my room TV, a refrigerator, an air conditioner. We do not have money, but we are rich.” As I got up to leave, she asked me if I could spare a present for her kids.

  In the main plaza, the old guys were sitting on benches, not smiling, not talking, just watching the world go by, though there wasn’t much world, and it wasn’t going by. They’d canceled Carnival this year, some guy told me, because of the Games, and they needed the money for the foreigners: Cubans were reminded again that the only thing there wasn’t a shortage of was sacrifice. A true egalitarianism: everyone had the same amount of nothing. At the best restaurant in town—the only restaurant—the one thing on the menu was “Roast Feef,” and when I ordered that, the waiter brought me a burned-out piece of water buffalo.

  I went to the Casagranda for some coffee, and the waiter told me there was no coffee today. No milk. No water. No tea.

  “Hey,” said a man in a white guayabera at the next table. “No salt, no sugar, no pepper, no bread. But we got dancing girls!”

  I looked back at him, and he wasted no time.

  “May I join you?” he asked, in perfect English, and he came and sat down at my table. “Pleased to meet you.” He extended a hand. “My name is Faust.” I guess he’d gauged his audience already.

  “Faust can tell you everything, my friend. Whatever you want to know, Faust will tell.”

  “The first thing I’d like to know is what you’re doing here.”

  “Business, pleasure, a little conversation. Cuba is not easy for the Cuban, my friend.” He ran a nervous hand through his thinning hair.

  “Where did you get your English?”

  “In the old days. Guantánamo. Used to fly for the Cuban Air Force. Way back, the good old days. Everybody used to speak English then. Before, I used to live in Florida. You know the Club Number 4 in London? You know the Copa in Coconut Grove? Sure. I know all the places. Get a look at this.”

  He pulled out, from his wallet, an old black-and-white photo of someone dressed as a devil in some long-ago Carnival. “Me.” He chuckled. “Faust must always come as the devil, no? Santiago, 1957. What a party we had! With the Yankees. All the guys from Guanánamo, me, what a week!”

  He put the photo back. “Used to be married to a Dade County girl too. A model. A beauty queen. My mistake number one was to divorce the girl by proxy in ’67. That was how I got stuck over here. My mistake number two was to lose her address. I tried to contact her family, but, as they say in America, ‘No dice!’ ”


  He sat back, and then pointed to the huge holes in the ceiling, and let out a terrible toothless cackle.

  “So what do you think of Cuba, my friend?”

  “Interesting. Real interesting.”

  “You are a diplomat, I see, as well as a photographer. My friend saw you taking pictures in the street. Who do you work for? Miami Herald? New York Times?”

  The guy was coming on too strong: whichever side he was on was the side I didn’t want to be on.

  “Turista.”

  “Sure. A tourist with a 1947 Canon. I don’t think so, compañero.”

  “And you? What kind of work are you in?”

  “Work? Who works in Cuba? Only the stupid and the blind. Me, I just try to get by. I deal in poison.” He waited for a reaction. “In contamination of the mind.” He picked up a pocket transistor, and pressed a button. I heard the ads on Miami radio. I figured the guy was so far gone, he had nothing to lose. “You see this? Poison! Contraband! If they see this, it is worse than a gun. A radio Revolutionary!” He threw back his head and laughed.

  “So, my friend, what would you like to see? Faust will show you everything. Faust is at your service. You want photographs? Photographs of the true Cuba? Photographs of the country that nobody ever sees? What say we drive? You got a car?”

  “You work for the government, right?”

  “Heh-heh, not so fast, compañero. I work for myself. Who does not?”

  It was like playing chess with a blindfold master: he had the whole game in his head.

  We got into the car, and I began driving.

  “Hey, I tell you I had a ticket out in 1962? But I told myself I’d wait a little. Look at where it got me! In a pickle, as you say.”

  He laughed and laughed, dementedly. “You see, my friend, I am Catalan! That is why I am so strong. If you call a Catalan a Spanishman, he will call you the worst names in the world! Sure. We Catalans are tough and wily. You cannot fool us. Not us. Not me. There’s no fooling Faust!” Again, the ratchety laugh.

  “Just like your leader, then?”

  “Sure. You know, when our friend was young, he read Nietzsche, Robespierre, Mein Kampf!” There was silence; I wasn’t going to make it easier for him. “Sure. Listen to Faust! Faust knows everything! You know that time our friend was in the cornfields in Alegría del Río, with only two others? And they had to lick the dew from the leaves to stay alive. That time when he said, ‘Nobody surrenders here!’ You know the names of his friends, my friend? They were Faustino and Universo. Not this Faust, oh no! But the same name!” He went on and on, like a record that was jumping. “When he was young, you know, our friend was reading Mein Kampf.”

  “And yet you admire him?”

  “Of course, my friend, why not?” He looked around the car hungrily. “I say many things, many things. More things than you can know. You cannot stop me. Faust knows everything. And in Cuba, it is always best to have many points of view. Just like a girl needs different dresses for every day of the week.” He cackled horribly. “To some we say Fidel is a god. To some we say he is a Hitler.”

  “And to yourself? What do you say to yourself?”

  “I say, ‘Be quiet.’ Walls have ears.”

  “Shit!” A bicycle came out at me, and I swerved the car off the road, into the grass. With a shrieking of tires, the car rolled up the incline again, and we went on.

  “Be careful, my friend,” said Faust. “You need more patience. Chinese patience.”

  “That’s the trouble with you guys,” I said, angry with myself for taking on this guy and thinking it might lead somewhere. “Too much patience. Everyone is patient with everything. Waiting in lines to wait in lines. Waiting for someone else to spring the trigger. This is an island of goddamn waiters.”

  “You are wrong, my friend. That isn’t the problem. What Cubans have isn’t patience. It’s a lack of something—call it balls.” He looked around. “Hey, you got a McDonald’s hidden away in here? You got a hamburger in this car? How about we stop and eat?” He started foraging under the floor mats.

  It was horrible to see, more horrible in its way than the kids in East Africa or the Sahel: the hunger had made him desperate, craven, and instead of just a kind of slow withering and silence, there was this terrible speeding up, and this chatter, like the feverish death throes of some animal. Toothless Faust was grinning as he whored for bread.

  “Give me the McDonald’s,” he shouted. He was losing it. “Give me some food. Faust needs food. Faust hasn’t eaten anything today!”

  I turned the car round and headed back to town.

  “Look, my friend,” he began again as we passed some buildings. “Look at the apartments. They aren’t homes. They aren’t houses. They are carton boxes. That’s what they’ve given us. Shit and then more shit. When do we see a black in power? When was the last time we saw a black with any power?”

  I stopped the car where I was, and opened the door to let him out. “The ride ends here, Señor,” I said, and gave him a couple of dollars. He grabbed at them hungrily, and opened up his little transistor, and took out the batteries, and stashed the money away in the battery compartment.

  “Okay, my friend,” he said. “I’ll see you later. When the shooting starts, I’ll meet you under the bed.” And then, weaving crazily, he veered off into the distance.

  I got back into town in time to shoot the girls, and then, in the long twilight, I picked up Hugo and drove up to the Las Américas, to satisfy anyone who was watching us. It was Mad Night that night (“Here you will have chance to Sing, Dance, Jump, Cry Out,” said the notice on the bulletin board), and there were some old ads—maybe they’d been put up only yesterday—for Happy Hour and Blind Night (“with your Accustomed Participation”). Blind Night seemed pretty much the story every night in Cuba.

  After we’d filled out all the forms, and left the key in an envelope for José, sweetened by ten bucks for the guy at the desk, we followed José’s directions to his father’s house, a few blocks away, on Avenida de los Libertadores. We parked around the corner, as he’d told us to do, and then followed the brass plaques till we came to the door: the same as all the others, an ancient Spanish-style numeral by a bell that didn’t work, a door that had lost its paint. Inside, one big dark room, a couple of icons on the wall, and a small passage-way, leading through a courtyard past a series of rooms.

  “Señor Cruz?”

  “Great to see you,” said the muscular old man, shirtless, who greeted us at the entrance, his close-cropped hair gray under his cap, his body still sturdy and firm. “My son told me you were coming. Hey, Luis.” He turned and shouted back into the interior. “Run along to Raúl and see what you can get in the way of rum. Maybe we’ll have a party tonight. I’ll tell Pastor to rustle up a pig.”

  The man spoke Spanish to his sons; to us he spoke the kind of English I’d only heard in sitcoms, a kind of jaunty, Rotary Club English that came straight out of “I Love Lucy.”

  “Here, come and see the palace,” he said, and he led us out into the courtyard and past the drab and darkened rooms. Inside the first of them, a pudgy boy all in white was methodically arranging offerings around a kind of altar. “You see,” said the old man, in a low voice, “Pastor has gone the voodoo way. He knows I don’t like it, but what can I do? You’ve got to have something to believe in when things are hard. So he talks about it to his mother. I don’t like this voodoo thing, but for him, that’s where the hope is.”

  He led us back into the main room, and Hugo sat in one corner of the sofa, I in the other, checking it all out for light. “Here, let me get you guys some beer,” he said, and pulled a few cans out of the freezer. He handed us a couple, then sat back in his rocking chair and popped open his Labatt.

  “I guess José has told you my story. You probably heard more stories in this town than you could read in the Reader’s Digest. Enough stories to fill a book. Mine’s not so different. Used to work with the Yankees on the base over there: listen to the Dodgers o
n the radio; catch some shows on TV; just havin’ a good time. Then one day my commander says to me, ‘Hey, Peter. Give me some guns.’ So I do, and he says, ‘I’ve given them to the guys up there in the mountains.’ And a few days later—maybe a couple of weeks—I get this message, ‘You better join us.’ My mother says to me, ‘Son, don’t join them. It’s only trouble.’ But what do I know? I’m twenty-five years old, it sounds like an adventure.”

  Hugo was sitting spellbound; I was getting restless.

  “So anyway, I go up there, work with Fidel, grow a beard, train with a gun: the whole thing. Then, when they take Havana, one of the guys say to me, ‘You’re a captain now, you can have anything you want. What’ll it be?’ They give me a job, high up, runnin’ everything, tell me I can take any car I want, any girl from the cabarets too, and pretty soon I’m findin’ that it isn’t so much fun anymore, not like in the mountains. Like with a girl, y’know? When you’re after her, everything is romantic and exciting, and you’re always thinkin’ of the girl. Then you get her and—kerboom: it’s back to the same old routine.

  “I was young then, like I say, but I could see where things were headin’. They give me a big house in Miramar, anything I want, any position in the government, any food and drink. And after a while I say, ‘No, sir. I’m goin’ back to Oriente, where I can live in peace.’

  “That’s the way for me now. Just keep quiet, keep your head low, don’t talk back to no one, don’t ask for nothin’.”

  “Till what happens?”

  “Till you die, I guess. Or he does.” He laughed. “See, I can talk to you. With you guys, I can say anything—it’s like a vacation for me, speaking English. José tell you I was born in Jamaica? Never spoke a word of Spanish till I was fifteen. Now I never speak a word of English. Never speak a word of truth, either. ’Cause maybe one day I’m mad, and I say something to the wife, and she doesn’t like it and she tells her sister, and the sister tells her husband, whose brother’s in the Party, and next thing you know, there’s a knock on my door. ‘Mr. Cruz. We hear you have a complaint against the Party. Come with us.’ So you can’t talk to no one here: not your wife, not your kids, no one. Why do you think Fidel ain’t got no wife?”