An Innocent in Cuba Read online

  The filling station on the autopista sells cigarettes but no matches or lighters, and it sells toothpaste but no toothbrushes. The young fellow behind the counter tells me he has a degree in industrial engineering from the University of Santa Clara, but pumping petrol is the only job he can get just now. He hasn’t quite found his bearings yet. Like many of us. And sometimes we think we have found our bearings, and a brick will fall on our head, or we will come down with stomach cancer. Which reminds me that when I dropped Orestes off at home, his wife happily told us that their son-in-law had come out of the surgery with excellent chances for a complete recovery.

  There are always people hitching rides on the roads in Cuba, and one should pick up as many as possible. You never know who the person you pick up is going to be. It might be Jesus, just testing your compassion for the poor, as mother used to say. But right now my car is too messy, I’m trying to take notes, and talk into my tape recorder, and flip through my book of maps, and watch out for cyclists and cattle on the road, etc. Please don’t be angry with me, Jesus. I promise to pick up two hitchhikers tomorrow, okay? It’s just that the hitchhikers – particularly the females – look so profoundly sorrowful when you sail by without stopping. I realize they’re just putting it on, at least to an extent, but it still hurts. And there’s a billboard saying, Siempre Con Fidel. Fidel Forever.

  But I’ve been drawn back to Santa Clara, and have taken a room at the Hotel Santa Clara Libre. And now it’s midnight and I’m under the covers but not very sleepy.

  Those girls with the photo albums at the ball game yesterday reminded me of a few days ago in Havana Vieja, when a pretty young girl in a black evening gown got out of a spiffy car while tourists gaped. She would have been fifteen, this would have been her coming-of-age party, her quinze, black would have been the colour she chose. A good choice! Black is a fiery colour. With black you never know whether the fire is out or still dangerously hot. This girl in black, however, did not have a very happy or even fiery look on her face. She looked bored and depressed. She looked as if she considered the quinze ritual a waste of time. Maybe she chose black to represent her dislike of anything frivolous.

  Even old Orestes was remembering to admire the pretty young girls at the game – from a distance, of course. “Look at that one, Dave!”

  —

  Advice to English-language guests at the Hotel Santa Clara Libre on the subject of “What to Do Before, During and After Hurricanes.”

  1. Do not drink alcoholic beverages or pills.

  2. Keep your five senses alert.

  3. Remain calm, a very well-trained team will take care of you.

  —

  Men bled and died in this very room plus others, Batista’s men, many of whom probably wished, belatedly, that they were fighting on Che’s side. They took bloody hits from Che’s ragtag beatnik bearded rebels in El Parque Vidal several storeys below. The official religion of the Cuban Revolution may be atheism, but they always seem to have God on their side. The bullet holes are all around my window. I can stick my head out and turn my neck and see them. And through it all (it’s now five-thirty) the view is heavenly. Two little stars are peeking out from behind the cloud cover. An old man in white shoes, a white shirt, and black trousers is sweeping the street. The park is paved and there is a slight partition, easy not to notice, all the way around, dividing the pavement into two circumambient sections. According to the history books, in the colonial era the European people walked along the inside section, and there would have been a fence separating the inside section from the outer section, where the African people walked around. Also, the Africans weren’t allowed to take mass, but they would stand outside, listening to the music and stretching their necks to catch glimpses of whatever could be seen through the open doors. Even today you still see groups of ordinary Cubans, from whitest white to blackest black, standing outside dollar stores, restaurants, bars, hotels – looking in, but unable to get in because they don’t have the right kind of currency, or not enough of the wrong kind.

  Directly across the square from my window is the grand marble library I strolled through late yesterday afternoon. Each book has been read a thousand times, each time more carefully than the time before. Nobody has scribbled in these books. To put any kind of ink mark in a library book is to insult the next reader, though some of these books are badly soiled, from much earnest reading. And if you accidentally tear a page, you take it to the librarian for repairs. Cuban libraries seem short of books. They have plenty, but nothing at all current. Suddenly I feel like one of the Nigerian anthropologists touring southern Ontario and grossly misinterpreting absolutely everything they see, as in André Alexis’s hilarious play, Lambton Kent.

  The library was very quiet, with numerous scholars in deep concentration. A short nondescript woman in her late forties was studiously taking notes from what appeared to be a highly advanced textbook on metallurgy, or maybe climatology, from the glance of the charts and diagrams as I passed and repassed her table. Also many kids in school uniforms are studying intensely. I didn’t see anybody in this grand old library who wasn’t deep in silent concentration.

  More silence. From my hotel window I can see all the way out beyond the city to the autopista. If any traffic goes by on the autopista, I will see the lights. I saw something go by about ten minutes ago. I can also see the baseball stadium from here, everything bathed in silence.

  Of the old colonial palaces surrounding El Parque Vidal, I’ve already mentioned the library, and to my right here’s a massive ancient stone colonnaded building now used as a secondary school. And to my left is the Decorative Art Museum, which I visited a mere twelve hours ago. I was the only visitor. My first guide and I couldn’t communicate, and unlike in Cárdenas, she told me she had a better idea. She presented me with the prettiest, smartest, cutest, most studious, smallest, and most serious eighteen-year-old girl imaginable, and her English was excellent. It was no fault of her own, but she was a fair-skinned Cuban angel, with the power to turn the toughest hombre into a rank sentimentalist.

  She was very shy, but she had trained herself well and had a head full of all kinds of interesting information about the Limoges china, the Tiffany lamps, the seventeenth-century armoire desk with thousands of tiny drawers inlaid with ivory, the paintings and the prints, and so on. When we came to the nineteenth-century French photos of naked women in unusual poses, and she blushed, it gave my heart an odd twist. And each time I would try to get a closer look at these barenaked ladies, she would blush a little more.

  There were many romantic paintings from classical mythology. Some were faded and cracked. Cuba needs serious help in the artrestoration department. But there was one romantic painting that I was taken with. My little friend said, “The title of the painting is I Am Yours Forever.” She looked deeply into my eyes as she said it, and I just stared back at her, dumbfounded.

  And then she said, “How would you say that in French?”

  I looked into her eyes and said, “Je suis à vous pour toujours.”

  And she blushed again!

  —

  The annual Spanish literary festival is being held all over Cuba. So far I’ve seen it in Havana Vieja, Cárdenas, and here in Santa Clara. And in every stop there will be a table with hundreds of copies of the newly published green-covered novel called Celia. It looks like an interesting read, but for some reason it doesn’t have the author’s name on the cover. You have to look inside to find out who the author was. And then you forget.

  There was a heavily attended literary event, with presentations and readings, in an old auditorium at the side of the park, but I was late getting there, didn’t make it till 5:30 (the sign said 5). I got stopped at the door and they didn’t want me to go in. It couldn’t have been invitation only, or they would have said so on the sign. Could it have been because of my linguistic shortcomings? Or did they think I just wouldn’t like it? But I rather rudely insisted and they relented.

  It was a beaut
iful old circular auditorium with fabulous acoustics and the place was jampacked, standing room only – there must have been more than a thousand people. So I stood, while a woman onstage read something, it sounded like a lengthy biography of the prize-winning author she was introducing. It was very flat and boring. The entire audience seemed to agree with me. But then when the author got up and started to talk about his early development as an author, the boredom increased until the audience was breathing oddly, looking around, and shuffling their feet.

  So I left after ten minutes, and the very stern man and woman at the front door smirked as I went by. A little gloating look that said, “See? Didn’t we tell you?” At first glance they knew this was not my sort of thing. The only people in the audience were people who had to be there, or felt they did.

  Discovery Channel episodes have been featured all night long on the telly. This time they’re proving that the Battle of Agincourt was such a disaster for the French not because of Henry V’s superior military genius or English superiority in the archery department, but because of a simple fluke of topography that neither side understood in the least at the time. I’m told that these Discovery programs are bootlegged through the rooftop antenna at the Hotel Havana Libre, dubbed into Spanish, then rebroadcast all over Cuba on the educational channel. Fidel, you’re a genius!

  —

  Everywhere you go in Cuba you see kids in uniforms, different colours for different schools, or for different scholarly specialties, etc. There may be forty kids walking down the street wearing a blue shirt with white checks, and green trousers, or green skirts. It seems as if the uniforms are chosen at random, and then everyone in that particular school dresses that way. Or maybe different colour combinations are nominated by the students, and an election is held to choose the most popular one. The colour combinations aren’t that numerous though, to be truthful, and they never get very wild. It’s mostly red, blue, white, mustard, and occasional pink. It’s neither fascist nor in any way militaristic, as is sometimes charged. It’s just an extra way of forging a bond between the kids who go to the same school. A feeling of solidarity. Imagine forty kids walking through the Parque Vidal all wearing mustard trousers and a pink shirt. It’s beautiful, it’s a sight to behold! It’s like a field of flowers – which is not original, some famous poet used that line in connection with Cuban schoolkids, I think it was the Nicaraguan priest-poet, Ernesto Cardenal. If you see one kid wearing mustard-coloured trousers and a pink shirt, it’s no big deal. But when you see twelve all dressed the same it’s very pleasing to the eye, and calming to the mind. All flowers on the same bush wear the same colour petals, and they do okay – why can’t all kids in the same school do the same?

  I heard one young boy having some kind of an argument with another, they were dressed identically, they were about nine years old, and one of them glanced at me as we passed, figured I was a gringo, and switched to English. Then he said to the other kid, very loudly, in English, “What the f**k do you know about Vietnam?”

  —

  Okay, it’s 6 a.m. I’m not a great drinker, but have put away almost a half-litre of Havana Club over the past eight hours and that’s a real lot for me, and I still can’t sleep. Let me check the checkout time. The bedside card says, “Guests must be out at two o’clock and if they’re not out by two-fifteen an additional charge will be made.”

  Blame it on the rum, but suddenly it occurs to me that the dead can fly through walls. If I tried to fly through the wall I might bump my head so severely I’d die, and then I’d be able to fly through walls. When you die, your spirit comes out of your body and enters a different dimension and it can fly through any wall anywhere, even the Great Wall of China; in fact, there could be spirits of the dead looking at me right now, like cats, naked and furry, knowing I’m thinking about them, and trying to figure out if I will maybe stay another night here at the Hotel Santa Clara Libre, given my sleeplessness and probability of falling asleep at the wheel if I try to venture on into the unknown.

  But I certainly feel more wide awake than Alina Fernández, of Castro’s Daughter fame, who writes at one point, “Not even amphetamines or a cup of bitter, thick black coffee could dispel my narcolepsy.” She’s a good writer, really, she’s almost embarrassingly up front with her own sexuality, and even though she employs an overly self-revealing tone, far beyond my feeble attempts, she makes it all terribly interesting, and not just because of who she is. You can’t help like her wild spirit. She’s reminiscent at times, in his critical attitudes toward Cuba, of novelist Reinaldo Arenas, that other member (deceased) of the Cuban community in exile (formerly known contemptuously as los gusanos). It would be hard to decide who was the more sarcastic, for they’re both over the top. She’s very sarcastic when it comes to her father, but Fidel gets off lightly compared to what she has to say about her daughter (“meringue face”/“troll”/“delivered to the wrong address”), her brothers (“The Five Vegetables”), and what she has to say about the Union of Writers and Artists of Cuba (UNEAC) (“fallen into mediocrity”). Her visits with Fidel are engrossing, and it’s easy to forgive her for perhaps at times thinking she understands him more than she really does. You have to leave some slack with your parents. You can’t know everything about anyone, not even your own dad. End of lecture.

  My favourite scene is when she’s recovering in the hospital from some illness or other, and Fidel shows up with two crates of hydroponic cauliflower for her. He shows the staff exactly how to cook and season it, then spoils everything by telling Alina he bought it with his own money.

  She also says Fidel told her that he has been studying medicine and is convinced that in order to keep children’s food from contamination, they should have their own little refrigerators, separate from adults.

  Vive Fidel!

  —

  No sleepless sonnets tonight, but I did write what I consider a clerihew (the poet Kildare Dobbs says it’s not a true clerihew) about the events of yesterday, the visit to the mausoleum followed by the baseball game:

  Baseball’s the best, and any old day

  It beats sitting around sniffing the ashes of Che.

  Yes, going to the game is a whole lot better

  Than watching the dead getting deader and deader.

  By the way, the Holguín team is staying at the hotel again tonight. They are very subdued, wearing their casual uniforms, black trousers, black shoes, and white shirts with a big H on them. A silent H.

  DAY ELEVEN

  HOW THE UNIVERSE WORKS

  Tuesday, February 24, 2004. Near Santa Clara there was a small medium-security prison. Forty men, middle-aged, dressed in grey, and with hangdog looks on their grey faces, were milling around behind a chainlink fence. It was remarkably like the animal enclosure at the zoo, especially since it was exposed to people passing along the main highway, like myself, and rudely gawking in at them.

  Some of the men were pacing, others were sitting, and there was a large old tree of great circumference in the middle of the enclosure, with men sitting around that. Some men were silent and alone, some were in groups of two or three talking quietly, and there was a row of wooden cells that looked like an old unpainted motel from 1948. I didn’t notice any bars on the windows or doors. The men looked educated, intelligent, handsome, rather peaceful, and very normal, but sad and resigned. One would expect to sense anger, or that they would appear to be certain they were right and Fidel was wrong. But it wasn’t like that at all.

  I stopped and was shyly looking at them, and debating whether to go over and have a chat with them. Then a little green threewheeled truck went by with the back loaded down with a ton of great blocks of pure ice, each perfectly cut and fresh from the freezer. All the prisoners, plus me, looked up to watch it go by. That ice would soon be in the freezers of various hotels and restaurants around town. That little three-wheeler was going as fast as it could, naturally, which wasn’t very fast, and the ice hadn’t noticeably started melting yet. I was smiling
and so were the prisoners.

  —

  Placetas is a country-and-western sort of town liberated from Batista’s forces by Che’s forces the day before the latter’s assault on Santa Clara. South of Placetas one enters an area of very pointy hills, some of them resembling pyramids covered in vegetation right to the top, with the occasional palm tree growing on the sides or sometimes two or three growing out of the pointy summit. This would be the Sierra Escambray. On my left is a perfect ancient pyramid of a mountain. I’m sure it’s been excavated, and they know it’s a natural formation, but it doesn’t look natural. It looks like a pyramid to me. Too symmetrical for anything else.

  A big black pig is snuffling along the road, then she starts climbing up a steep pathway. A mother and a little boy approach me as I look at my map. I thought they were going to ask for a ride, but they just wanted to see if they could help with directions. Then they ran over to the other side of the highway and started following the pig as it snuffled its way up the steep laneway to some farmhouse atop the hill. The little boy, who was about five years old, ran after the pig, and his mother ran after him. But the faster the kid ran, the faster the pig tried to get away from him, and the more slowly the mother ran.

  The Cuban countryside doesn’t seem all that dry, but apparently it is dry, so dry there is worry about fires. In a few more days without rain, fire is expected to be breaking out all over the eastern provinces, destroying crops and maybe worse. I’ve just spotted the first little fire, along the side of the road here. A couple of roadside acres have been blackened, seemingly from a carelessly discarded cigarette. It seems to be cooling off now. But in the blackened part that is still warm there are about twenty beautiful white egrets, perched precariously on long skinny legs, picking away in the black steaming soil, searching for and feasting on barbecued bugs, roasted roaches, warmed-over worms, and other tasty treats straight from nature’s oven. I’ve never eaten a roasted insect of any kind knowingly, but friends who have done so tell me they taste terrible. It must be a great treat for the birds, though. They occasionally lift their feet to cool off.