An Innocent in Cuba Read online

  Ana’s place was in a poor part of town, but it was fortunately on the highest hill in town, just high enough to catch the breeze. Every breeze comes first to those who live on the hill. It was a family-oriented neighbourhood, and in fact the whole city had an aura of calm and quiet about it today. It was okay to leave the car unlocked.

  Adolfo kept asking where I was going next. He wouldn’t take “I don’t know” for an answer. Orestes had been like that too. I told Adolfo that I can’t make plans, because when I do then El Diablo steps in and screws everything up. When I don’t make plans, then El Signor steps in and guides me in the paths of righteousness and keeps me out of trouble. We also talked about the Will of God and all that sort of thing, and he told me that he had no problems understanding the concept of God’s Will. I told him the Canadian poet Leonard Cohen has problems with the word “repent” and the Canadian poet Susan Musgrave claims not to understand the word “soul.” Many times have I asked to have the term “Will of God” explained to me, but the explanations never seem to make sense. Sometimes I seem to understand it, but not for long. All I have is a sense that as long as I don’t plan ahead too much, everything’s going to be fine. And I love that old saying, “Man proposes, God disposes.”

  Adolfo’s wife came out from the bedroom where she had been resting. She was the prettiest little granny imaginable, about sixty years old. She was just glowing with health. I jumped out of my chair, I couldn’t believe it, I said I thought you were sick. She said, Oh no, I feel much better now. She was radiant, I gave her a kiss on each cheek, and I told her it was obvious she had many more years of life. She was only about five-foot-two, but she was standing quite erect, like a teenage footsoldier being inspected by Fidel. Adolfo, very portly with his little white moustache, said he was fifty-eight and his wife was two years older. And there was a small metal plaque on his old briefcase saying,

  THE JET SET

  LONDON * PARIS * TOKYO

  I asked if he’d been out of the country and he said no. Had he been to Havana? Yes, but just on business, and apparently just once. He was a religious man, but it was as if in his heart of hearts there is only black and white, there are no greys, no pinks and blues. The universe is one big faceoff between a zillion hockey teams in white sweaters and a similar number in black, each player seeing which can outstare the other, or outfox the other, and score the most goals. And if Adolfo seemed like a religious man, his wife seemed like a saint. She glowed, and so did their daughter the dentist. She seemed like a veritable daughter of God, somebody who had really seen the light. Adolfo didn’t glow. Not on this particular day at any rate. Not with his house all wrecked.

  —

  The parlour here was very spacious, clean as a whistle and sparsely furnished in a very pleasant way, with the small console TV set having a very nice silk Indian print cloth, with a red border, hanging over the screen when the TV was not on, because it’s kind of ugly to have a screen there with the telly turned off, like a dead man with one eye open. When you were finished watching, you turned off the TV and then pulled the silk cloth over the tube like closing the eyes of the dead. It seemed very civilized. Maybe a bit too civilized.

  Ana was about twenty-eight, short and rotund. And when she found out my name started with an Mc, she got out a whole collection of books, all very new and with pristine dust jackets, seemingly unread, by a fellow whose name also started with an Mc. These books were beautifully printed and produced Spanish editions of books by a Baptist Scotchman inspirational preacher, telling people how to get on God’s side and take pre-emptive action against Satan. The books had memorable titles, but El Diablo has caused me to forget every single title and the full name of the author. She had about twenty of them all by the same guy. Each had a circle on the front cover, divided in half, with the word BUENO in the top half and MAL on the bottom half.

  Adolfo presented me with a little blue breastpocket book called Nuevo Testamento, by a guy named Salmos Proverbios. It’s published by Este Libro No Sera Vendido. I’m joking of course, it was the New Testament in Spanish, including the Psalms and the Proverbs, and it is not to be sold. Adolfo wrote my name in it, followed by “Hermano de Canadá” – and then he wrote his name and address. I flipped it open at random and read, “Bienaventurados los pobres en espíritu, porque de ellos es el reino de los cielos.” Whew! It gave me the shivers and I told him I was going to read it front to back and every word I didn’t understand I’d look up. By the time I was finished I’d be ready to come back to Cuba and see if he had his house fixed up yet.

  And then Ana’s little boy came in, having woken from his nap – a plump darling about seven years old. He walked straight to where I was sitting and gave me a very serious kiss on each cheek. Then he went over to the television, undraped the screen, and began watching a cartoon from the 1940s, with Tom and Jerry chasing each other around in black and white.

  So Adolfo let me witness certain things, but wisely left me to make my own interpretations. I think his young friend in the hospital was trying to stop some anti-Baptists from wrecking Adolfo’s house, and accidentally or not a brick landed on his head. On both sides of the equation the passions are beyond my ken, as they would be for the vast majority of Cubans, no doubt.

  —

  In the very busy ground-floor dining room of the Hotel Santiago, in Ciego de Ávila, I’m the only non-Cuban. My waitress is a young woman named Gina who looks as if she has the lost blood of the extinct Taíno Indians of Cuba flowing through her veins. She is short, thin, and her skin is very pale with a slight golden glow.

  By now I was getting hooked on Cuban cigarettes. I hadn’t smoked for years, but at some bar somewhere along the line, I bought a pack of Populars (fifty cents), because everyone else was smoking, and then promptly got semi-addicted. Unlike Canadian cigarettes, one puff of which can cause me to have chest pains, they seemed very rich, delicious, harmless. Pure black Cuban tobacco, but mild, benign, and very fine. Each puff seemed to be adding another day to my life.

  Gina is working the other side of the dining room, but she notices my unconsciously admiring gaze from a distance and insists on serving me. I have an unlit Popular in my hand and she offers me a light. But I look at the flame in her eye rather than in her hand and accidentally blow her match out. She snatches the cigarette from my hand in mock impatience, puts it between her thin but charmingly curved lips, and lights it herself. She takes one puff, then hands the cigarette back to me. I burst out laughing, and so does she, and so do several of her co-workers who happen to be watching, and a whole family at the next table. In a rather provocative tone, she asks if I would like anything else. Hah, I told her, I’d like you!

  When she went back to her work station, her co-workers wanted to know what I’d said. Then they all started laughing and looking at me very fondly for having told her I wanted her, especially since they knew it was just a flirty joke. What a sexy country!

  DAY THIRTEEN

  CHICA CHICA? CHICA CHICA CHICA?

  Thursday, February 26, 2004. The windows in my room on the second floor were shuttered, with nothing between me and the noise from the street, causing me to lie awake for hours listening to a wild cacophony of frenzied yelling back and forth, ambulance sirens, kids kicking cans, and a tourist car that got stuck in a gutter that took three or four men thirty minutes to push back onto the road, with the engine gunning and squealing with a decibel rating far above the recommended level. If this was Ciego de Ávila, what must Baghdad be like?

  In Cuba if one sees a toilet with a lid on it he or she must be sure to use it, if possible, because it may be a long time before another shows up. They do tend to get stolen. In fact so many have been stolen they’re practically extinct.

  If the United States really wished to impress the Cubans, it would immediately send them totally gratis a small gift of five million unbreakable plastic toilet seat lids. It wouldn’t cost much, but every time a Cuban went to the toilet he’d send a little song of loving g
ratitude to the United States of America. Bombs create enemies, toilet lids create friends.

  And light bulbs too. This is one of the few Cuban hotels I’ve been in where there are reading lamps, one on each side of the bed. But there were no bulbs in them. The bulbs weren’t burnt out, they were AWOL.

  I paid six dollars for the all-you-can-eat special last night and when I took my plate to the food table there was nothing that tempted me, not even the salads. So, in spite of the noise, and the bad food, the people were nice, and they were quite aware their service was, in general, lousy. The chef went into the kitchen and whipped up a “chicken supremo” plate just for me, but even that was tough going. The staff wasn’t apologetic, but they kept glancing into my eyes for signs of displeasure. I insisted that everything was fine.

  —

  The menu for the free breakfast has all sorts of wonderful things on it, but when you go to place an order in the morning all the interesting items are unavailable – no eggs, no this, no that. But the coffee’s hot. So I managed to have four cafecitos and some bread. Gina handed me a little slip of paper on the way out, all it said on it was orange juice, and she asked me to sign it. Why? I didn’t even have orange juice. But then I woke up and realized it was just so that I couldn’t come back and order another free breakfast. You never know what some scoundrels will try. But not this one.

  As I was gobbling up the chicken supremo last night, in came a blind man who had his hand on the shoulder of his friend guiding him. The blind man was a medium-height middle-aged white man, very sloppily dressed and with hair sticking out all over, and his seeing-eye human was a tall and very happy-looking well-groomed black man. Neither carried a white cane. They both took a table next to the piano, and after they got settled and had some coffee, the black man got up and helped the blind man to the piano, sat him down, and placed his hands on the keys.

  This happy black man probably worked full-time for the pianist, and they seemed to appreciate each other a lot. As the blind man played numerous romantic songs from the 1940s, mostly of Cuban origin, his friend would bounce in his chair, keep time with his hand, smile, close his eyes with spasms of pleasure, then leap to his feat and lead the applause at the end of each song. About eleven o’clock he took his first break, and his friend lead him to the bathroom. Everybody was hoping he’d come back and play some more, but when they reappeared his friend lead him outside and they disappeared into the darkness.

  —

  Ciego de Ávila and Sancti Spíritus are both interesting little ciudads. Peaceful, family-oriented, but Ciego is deafeningly noisy all night long. Sure, I was only there one night. But you could tell this was an every-night sort of thing. And I will probably be returning to prove it.

  It did quieten up a bit around one o’clock. I went out. There were people milling around on the street, but pretty well everything was locked up. There was a dance club playing loud disco music, but there were no dancers and the bar was closed. When I got back, most of the hotel staff were sleeping on sofas or soft armchairs, waiting for the morning shift. I spotted Gina snoring away, but very sweetly, of course, almost completely drowned out by the heavy-duty snorers. It was amazing how her skinny yellow arms were covered with fine black hairs, that with all the snoring going on would rustle like little leaves in the wind.

  —

  In El Parque Agramonte, in the light of the impressive Catedral Santa Iglesias of Camagüey (est. pop. 348,000), a man sits on a bench playing very quietly on his guitar with his case open, even though tourists are few. In strolling around the park, feasting on the faces of the people and the facades of the surrounding edifices, only one tout, a man with a very silly smile, came up to me. He was dancing and circling me, crouching over while keeping his distance, snapping his fingers, and saying, “Chica chica? Chica chica chica?” repeatedly. And behind him, sitting on the base of a stone wall next to an antique cream-coloured roadster, were two skinny twin girls about sixteen very nicely dressed and as cute as buttons with bright red lips and huge white-toothed smiles on their dark black faces, hoping that I would say yes. I apologetically declined, claiming to be on important business.

  There was a barbershop adjacent to the park, with three tall black barbers sitting there in their white smocks waiting for business. I’ve never had a shave from a barber, and I haven’t come across any decent blades or shaving soap in Cuba so far. So here’s my chance. I kept walking all the way around the park, psyching myself up for my first big shave administered by a professional, and in passing I said hello to a guy smiling behind the wheel of a 1928 Model A Ford with the top nicely cut off so that it looked like a hot rod from old Archie comics. When I got back to the barbershop, just a few minutes later, all three barbers had become wide awake and busy with customers, and there were three more customers waiting. There’s a moral here somewhere. Don’t walk around the park till you’ve had a good shave.

  So I head back to find the guy with the old Ford, see if he’ll give me a tour of the town, but he’s disappeared. He probably would have loved to give me a tour. He was otherwise occupied, like the three barbers, except that with them I knew where they were and what they were doing, but as for this guy with the Model A, I think he went for a little tour all on his own. I’d forgotten that you have to be able to strike like a rattler if you want to be a good travel writer.

  Two Canadian guys were sitting on an Agramonte park bench. I’d walked right past them, unnoticing, in a tropical daze, although I did vaguely notice English being spoken. A pot-bellied red-haired fellow yelled out, “Hey, Eaton’s Centre.” He was referring to the silver logo on my black shoulder bag, which happened to be over my shoulder at the time. So I turned and looked at him with my Team Canada logo on my bright red baseball cap, and they said, “Team Canada! Eaton’s Centre! You must be a Canadian.”

  So I sat down with them. The skinny fellow, maybe a bit older, stood up all the time his friend and I were sitting on the bench. He was from Sault Ste. Marie. “See, I’m a steamfitter, eh?” he said. “So I make a lot of money, eh?” But then he lost 150 grand in the Nortel disaster. It was his life savings, and the loss changed his life. So now he works at his trade, and when he’s accumulated enough money he comes down to Cuba for a few months. He usually comes to Camagüey, in fact he married a woman here and they had a child together. But then he became increasingly disaffected with his wife, because she was basically a chica, a street hooker, and he thought he’d saved her from that, and given her a whole new life of respectability and freedom from hunger. But now she was slipping back into it. She missed the old life, working the streets, hustling tourists.

  “Heartbreaker,” I said, full of sympathy. It doesn’t take long for a young woman to get bored with an old guy, even if he is a generous Canadian. “There’s a lot of heartbreakers around here, man,” he said.

  The red-haired fellow was a chubby real-estate agent, from Hamilton, and he too works part of the year and spends the rest of the time here. Both were about fifty. The real-estate guy knew a cousin of mine. When I told them I love to pick up hitchhikers, then put on the air conditioning full blast to see the looks on their faces, they said, “Cubans hate the cold. When the air conditioning is on they hate it and beg us to turn it off.” But in my experience, they are overjoyed when I switch it on full blast in the car, and when I ask if it’s too cold they say, No, no, we love it!

  The guy from Hamilton was an opinionated person in the disparaging redneck style made famous by Don Cherry in sports or the various right-wing columnists in Canadian tabloids. He wanted an update on Canadian news, so I went over all the new scandals I could think of. When I mentioned the Governor General, Adrienne Clarkson, was having her expenses checked, he said, “I hate that broad.” When I mentioned that former cabinet minister Sheila Copps had lost her riding, he said, “I hate that broad too.” And so on. But he was okay. When I told him about the old Model A Ford I’d seen a few minutes ago, he told me he knew that guy and he had a little Suzuki engin
e under the hood: “You never know what you’re going to find under the hood of a Cuban car, except that you can be pretty sure it won’t be what you would expect there to be. Good old Cuban know-how. Engine-uity.”

  It seemed odd that he spoke well of the Cubans in general, but his attitude toward Canadian politics, except for the most right-wing party, was intolerant, and he also hated unions, except for the police union. He hated environmentalists period, and he wasn’t very happy about Canada’s unwillingness to join President Bush in his various invasions of little countries. But he had much sympathy for Cubans, although he insisted that anyone wearing shiny black-leather shoes was a spy. He and the steamfitter had met Christopher P. Baker, the author of Moon Handbooks: Cuba, and had a few drinks with him. They hadn’t seen the book so I showed them my copy and they were very impressed. The chubby chap said Baker knew a lot about Cuba, and he was a very interesting guy to drink with, but there was one thing about Baker that he found disturbing: his ponytail. “I don’t know what to say,” he said, “about a guy who is sixty years old and has a ponytail.” He looked as if he was going to spit. I said I’d love to meet him, he seems to know every square inch of Cuba, he’d be a spellbinder over a beer or two. “For sure, but that ponytail’s gotta go.” Why? “A guy sixty years old with a ponytail? You gotta wonder about a guy like that.” I didn’t care how he wore his hair, my only beef about the book is that he seems to interpret certain things in as negative a way as possible, but he never goes overboard with his positive statements about things he likes, and he emphasizes too much the dangers of being mugged and otherwise cheated and robbed. He stops short of referring to Cuba as a “communist hell-hole,” however.

  The chubby fellow said he used to go to Santiago de Cuba every year, but he switched to Camagüey because Santiago was “too poor, you can’t do anything with the people, you just have to be saying no all the time, and that’s no fun, you can’t help everybody, you just can’t.” They’d be waiting at his front door when he woke up in the morning. So he had to get out. Soon he’d be getting out of Camagüey probably, though so far he hasn’t had such problems. When I mentioned Havana, he adopted a contemptuous look and said he had no time for that place. But he wouldn’t say why. I figured it would be because a foreigner can’t spend pesos in Havana as easily as he can in the smaller cities, and maybe the people there are too sophisticated for his tastes.