An Innocent in Cuba Read online

  One could theoretically get to know Santiago (est. pop. 556,000) in about one-quarter the time it takes to get to know Havana. But sometimes larger cities are easier to get to know than smaller cities. Maybe all cities, and even all towns, take about the same amount of time to get to know – i.e, forever. Santiago is a city where one could spend his life contentedly, where motorists obey crosswalk signs, and pedestrians can hold out a forefinger and walk across the street confident that all traffic will stop, and won’t start again till you’re safely across, a slow-moving town, where even the motorcycles just putter along content to get there when they get there.

  It’s an interesting town atmospherically, people have time to gawk at strangers, walk with friends, and talk with tourists. There’s something terribly benign about it, a pleasantly sweet town that seems to run on – I don’t know what – sex, yes sex would be number one, and music, music would be number two. The two engines that drive the Santiago de Cuba economy: sex and music! Don’t like to see happy people having fun? Don’t come to Santiago de Cuba. Coincidentally, it’s said to be the most African of Cuban cities.

  I left the city knowing the longer I stayed the harder it would be to leave, and wishing I had the rest of my life to explore it. It seemed to be more mysteriously attractive than most cities, even Cuban ones, and everybody seems to have interesting things going on in their lives.

  —

  When you come over the mountains from the west and get your first glimpse of Santiago de Cuba, you’re probably mistaken, what you’re actually seeing is El Cobre, a three-spired cathedral with three prominent red domes and a vibrantly pale yellow exterior, a graceful vision perched atop a high hill on the coast twenty miles west of Santiago, in the town of El Cobre, visible from much farther down the coast, and dedicated to the Patron Saint of Cuba (as those who are mystified by her call her), the Black Virgin (as those who respect her call her), Cachita (as those who adore her call her), or La Virgen de la Caridad de El Cobre (as she is officially called).

  When I left Santiago I was planning to head east to Guantánamo province, but the Black Virgin seemed to be drawing me, pulling me toward her, and by her distant presence calming the tossing waves of my heart. So I drove straight to the church.

  Cachita’s colour is amarillo, and her saint’s day is September 8, when a giant effigy of her is paraded around town. The Sentería people identify her with Yoruba, the goddess of love and dance, a sort of sanctified Aphrodite. She is usually depicted with darkish skin, and sometimes more African in appearance than in others. The church was very full, and the children were making a lot of noise. In Canada, the churches are always silent and the libraries noisy. In Cuba, it’s the opposite. This cathedral is dedicated to Cachita, and she is one of the small circle of patron saints who never really existed on earth, except in one single solitary vision way back at the beginning of the seventeenth century.

  One of the three boys whose life she saved, in the year before Shakespeare had probably even begun to think about writing The Tempest, was a slave boy, and the other two were the sons of prosperous slave owners. When you see a small boat in a wildly tempestuous sea, with three people in it, with a young white man at either end and a young black man in the middle, desperately praying, it will refer to this event. The three were out in the boat, a major storm came up, they became frightened, the Black Virgin appeared as a vision in the sky, the storm calmed itself, or rather she calmed it, and the boys were saved. She appeared with her feet just grazing the waves, and with a baby at her breast, a crown on her head, and wearing a yellow robe. She said, “I am the Virgin of Charity,” and the sea became calm. In hearing for the first time about this blessed vision it must be difficult to avoid taking it seriously, at some level, no matter how skeptical one may be.

  In the fascinating vestibule of the cathedral hangs a framed Amnesty International map of Cuba giving the names of all the prisoners of conscience and showing where they were being held as of June 10, 2003. Displayed in glass cupboards are numerous odd little items that people have donated not because of their material value but because of their magical value. There are photographs of people who were saved through the miraculous intervention of the Black Virgin, and several paintings of the church by amateur artists whose lives have been touched in some way by her. There are numerous medals and pins associated with La Virgen, a crushed orange motorcycle helmet worn by a fellow who was in a serious accident and survived, about thirty baseballs and one soccer ball signed by famous players who won important games, flags and sweaters of various teams, and a record album signed by Juan Carlos Alfonso, the leader of the famed Cuban band Dan Den. But the most famous gift came from Ernest Hemingway, when he won the Nobel Prize for The Old Man and the Sea. I don’t think he hesitated for a split second before heading for El Cobre and donating his gold medal to the Virgin of Charity who calms the waters just when you think you are heading for the bottom of the sea.

  It was 1954, about the time Fidel was thinking of attacking the Moncada Barracks. At the press reception for Hemingway at the Hotel Naçional in Havana, he’s pictured wearing a guayabera, and he has his eyes closed just at the moment of this photograph, and he has shaved his beard. He’s in his early fifties, and looks ten years older. He is announcing that his Nobel Prize medal will be donated to the church at El Cobre, in honour of the Patron Saint of Cuba. The medal was sitting here in one of the display cases among all the other donations until 1988, when somebody stole it. The loss was a big story around Cuba for a while. But they finally collared the crook and retrieved the medal. I like to think he was caught trying to sell the medal to tourists at the Finca Vigía. It must have seemed like a good idea at the time. But some things even tourists won’t buy.

  Meanwhile there’s a little service going on in the church. Four aged nuns in white are in the first row, and in the second row an ordinary, middle-aged laywoman is reciting lines from scripture, while the four old nuns do the responses. Even though the nuns have been doing this all their lives, you get the sense that they are deeply into it even today, just as a baseball player or a poet, who may have been at it for decades, can still get deeply into each game or into each sonnet.

  —

  I pretended to be shocked and astonished to see that my car hadn’t been stolen, and vigorously shook the hand of the fellow to whom I’d given a dollar to watch it. I was Fidel and he was a Revolutionary hero who had performed a great service to humanity, and he seemed very pleased to have had a medal pinned to his shirt even if it was an imaginary medal. The other guys were all watching and laughing. This is the kind of humour Cubans like. Maybe I’ll get a nomination by the El Cobre Car Watching Society for tourist of the week.

  Behind the cathedral, on the other side of the parking lot, there’s an ancient convent, highly colonnaded, beautifully constructed, in a perfect state of repair, and going back to the early eighteenth century, though it has never been restored. The wide corridors, porticos, and dazzling marble staircases, baroque columns, and rococo railings are as they always were, festooned with faded religious paintings, engravings, prints, and reproductions. It’s in good shape and well cross-ventilated. It’s cool and breezy up here in the higher foothills of the Sierra Maestra, and the breezes blow right through the building. I’m sitting wrapped in a blanket on the spacious second-floor porch, watching the stars. I thought about Fidel having stayed here for a week prior to the Moncada Barracks affair, and also about Lina Ruiz, who donated a small golden statue of a guerilla fighter to El Cobre, to provide some spiritual protection for her son, Fidel, when he was up in the mountains engaging the Batista boys in deadly combat.

  When I asked for a room for the night, the large Afro-Cuban woman on the night desk said yes, that will be eight pesos. I asked if eight dollars would do. She looked at me as if I was crazy. Eight pesos is thirty cents, eight dollars is 216 pesos. Do you wish to pay 216 pesos for something that is only worth eight pesos?

  When you put it like that, I guess not.r />
  She had her chance to fleece a tourist but resisted. You won’t find her in hell with the demons when she dies.

  But maybe not, because when I first got there she had been having some kind of a squabble with a nun. Everybody was in a bad mood, and angry about something. It seemed more than a squabble, more like a long-standing grudge.

  A room for the night?

  Sí, sí, sí. Un minuto, por favor. We have to keep fighting for another minute if that’s okay with you.

  So I wandered away and looked at some paintings, and drank in some views of the cathedral, and the mountains, and the parking lot, from various windows. When I came back a middle-aged Cuban couple was there; they were booking a room, and they took forever. I had that left-out feeling. When they got straightened out, the registrar, not knowing what to do about the peso problem, had to call her rival over again. The nun scolded her for not waiting on me first because I was way ahead of that couple from Santiago. And as for my eight dollars, just give him 216 pesos in exchange, and then take eight pesos for his room. Could anything be simpler? So now I have pockets full of pesos. If nothing else I can give them out to the moscas.

  Speaking of which, my car watcher has gone home. He has a dollar bill now. He could blow it all tonight on a big Saturday night party in the town of El Cobre or he could be a tightwad and make it last till Wednesday.

  So then I was free. I went into the dining room and had an excellent meal consisting of a hard-boiled egg cut in half and smothered in red-hot chile sauce. Everybody gets the same thing. And just when I thought that was it, along came a big plate of white rice, with some rather sweet salsa on another plate, to pour over the rice. Plus a bowl of highly salted spaghetti soup. Plus a pitcher full of freshly drawn well water. Trouble was, the water came late, and before I could finish my first little glass of it, the dining room was closed down, everything was picked up and taken away, and the diners all got shooed out.

  So that left me terribly thirsty. I didn’t know what to do. There was no bar, of course. I didn’t want to go downtown. I just wanted to go to my room and have a contemplative evening, in a cloistered room with no distractions, do some good thinking inspired by the spiritual presence of La Virgen, and the spiritual absence of television, revved-up motorcycles, and squealing brats.

  Turns out there is a lot of noise, but it’s just the kids running along the marble colonnades. It would appear that some families have moved in for the night, and even though there are signs saying SILENCIO, that just encourages the locals to be anything but. Oriente Province, as this part of Cuba used to be called, is famed for its rebels.

  So although I keep telling myself it doesn’t matter, it doesn’t matter, the kids keep up their relentless screaming as they run in stockinged feet along the polished marble floors of this wonderful second-floor colonnade. Doesn’t matter, doesn’t matter. If a kid can’t scream, what can he do? We all have to be free to scream when we have the need to scream. Even kids, one of whom is screaming to his papa to hurry up and get off the toilet. One does untold harm to a future adult when one stops a kid from screaming or laughing or doing anything that’s loud.

  Yet one can’t help but try to imagine what this old palace would be like if there were nothing but SILENCIO. I imagine it would be even more beautiful than it is now, in the clear clean cool moonlight and the breezes. I’m on the second floor, in Room 18, and there are faded water-stained ecclesiastical prints on all the walls. Colours may fade, like the joyful screaming of children, but the blacks and whites remain, and a bit of the greys. Here’s a picture of Baby Jesus lying on the ground, looking up at Mary, who is deep in prayer, standing over him, with an oversized halo around her head. The look on Baby Jesus’ face is priceless. He has his hand over his heart as if he is in deep prayer as well, but he also seems to be staring rather crossly at Mary, as if he’s saying, “What the heck are you doing?” That’s the look on his face. “Can’t you see I want to be picked up and cuddled?”

  —

  It’s a cool night. There are only two guys left to watch four or five cars. These two are really desperate, one more than the other. The less desperate had small items to sell, little plastic icons, portable offerings, a bag full of El Cobre souvenirs. The other had nothing to offer, and had long given up the fakery of the car-watching scheme. Besides, a scheme like that would take more brain power than this fellow seems to have on tap at present. Every time he catches my eye he scrunches up his face and goes over and over till I turn away, “Mi mi mi mi mi! Gimme money!” And to add emphasis, he points at himself. All this stuff was really getting on my nerves. I told him to stop washing my windshield with that dirty dry rag. I told him to calm down. When I asked him if he was hungry, he just fell apart. He burst into tears and fell against the car. I told him I would go in and see about some food.

  I got shunted back and forth between three different nuns, and then all four of us got together. They decided they couldn’t provide a meal for this fellow, even though I had offered to pay for it. They wanted to be kind, but food was scarce and there were things about this situation it wouldn’t be proper to discuss. They agreed with me that it was the duty of the church to feed the poor when they knock on the door. But they wanted to assure me that they do practise plenty of charity toward these poor destitute lads, some more destitute than others.

  I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t want to give him money because he seemed so crazy and in so much pain he might wind up in worse shape with money in his pocket. It seemed as if he had run out of charity, he’d gone too reliant on it over the years. I don’t know.

  So I gave him the big fat tomato and big fat red onion I had on the dashboard. He accepted them, but he had a curiously expressionless look on his face as he stared in my eyes. Any gratitude he felt was cancelled out by something else, just for a moment. What would it be? I can’t say. I went for a walk, and when I came back he had gone home. I guess he went home and ate the tomato and onion. For all I know he shared the food with his wife and six kids. Or maybe he invited a neighbour or two over, and they brought some carrots and, as a special surprise, some Tabasco sauce, and maybe a bit of rum left over from the last time something nice happened.

  —

  And then I acquainted myself with skinny old white-haired José, a very amusing coffee-coloured Afro-Cuban. He was fifty-six, and was the night clerk. By now everybody else had gone home. He loved my impressions of sexy women on the streets of Santiago, and he started doing some of his own. The way they eye you with maximum voltage. The kind of sexy stride these señoritas adopt, or the kind of eye contact, and sometimes they make funny little fishlike motions with their mouths.

  So there we were strutting around like cheap whores, and flirting outrageously with each other. But one of us, I forget which, put his forefinger in his mouth, and that did it. All of a sudden we both stopped and looked kind of embarrassed and started talking about the weather. A special kind of divinely sexual magic is everywhere in Cuba, it will reach right into the convent, and it can even turn the sexual preference of a man or a woman around in a flash.

  José confirmed that the nuns from the convent are in the habit of being charitable to these car-watching guys. I can’t help wondering why people are hungry when there is food everywhere. On the surface, with numerous goats prancing about in your front yard what’s to stop you from grabbing one, slitting its throat, and inviting all your friends over for dinner? It’s a tough one. I did see a guy walking along the highway with a dead unplucked chicken under his jacket. He’d grabbed the chicken, twisted its neck, and was taking it home. Let’s hope that this sort of thing is overlooked nine times out of ten, except when perhaps the same person does it too often.

  One fellow I picked up hitchhiking insisted that when things get that desperate you can borrow someone’s car and run over a chicken or a goat or whatever, then take it home and eat it with impunity. He said, “If you run over one of those lambs, it’s lamb fricassee right away.”


  —

  I’m still terribly thirsty and ask José where I can get some of that delicious well water. He takes me behind the counter in the dining room, furnished in pretty well exactly the same way it would have been a hundred years ago. He shows me a great silver coffee and tea machine. He tells me it’s been in continuous use on this counter for 120 years. One spout’s for tea, one spout’s for coffee. Next to it, breaking the mood of ancient times, there’s a sky-blue plastic five-gallon picnic container for fruit juice.

  Here, have some Cuban water, says José. And he fills a glass for me, right up to the brim, and it looks like thick muddy water. He smiles slyly. Yech! What is this? So I take a very cautious sip, and by golly it’s really good! Fresh mango juice! Every bit as good as at the Captain’s place, maybe better. It goes down fast and I ask for more.

  DAY FIFTEEN

  THE ROAD TO BARACOA

  Saturday, February 28, 2004. It’s five o’clock in the morning at the old convent at El Cobre. The kids are still running and screaming in the halls, cars in the parking lot are still gunning their engines, and the cocks are crowing with a passion as foolish as it is admirable. It’s cold in here. I have one winter blanket, but it seems very thin. I could ask for an extra blanket, but I don’t want to disturb José at this hour, he’s already been so kind, and so generous with the mango juice.

  Cuban roosters in the middle of the night scream like men who can’t take it any more and have snapped and gone insane, or like the man in the famous Fellini film Amarcord who climbs a great tree in a beautiful meadow and proceeds to scream out, “I want a woman,” over and over so loudly that women from all over the countryside start climbing the tree to present themselves to him. But even that man didn’t scream with the intensity of an El Cobre rooster at five in the morning.