An Innocent in Cuba Page 18

  The roosters are off in the distance, but they have the convent surrounded. There are so many of them it sounds like the screams at a ball game when the home team is behind four runs but has the bases loaded in the bottom of the ninth. I’ve taken a relaxing pill, and am about to drift off back to sleep, and the roosters have changed their tune. They now sound as if the umpire has made a bad call against the home team. “He was out by a mile, ya bum,” they scream over and over. It’s amazing what you hear when you lie awake listening to the animals.

  “The umpire is senseless,” screams out a rooster who seems to have been misreading a Kathy Acker novel. “Quit pushing, you stupid bastard,” a short-tempered rooster calls out. The roosters are screaming because they want to have sex. The fans at a ball game are screaming because they want to have runs. Not much difference really.

  —

  In such a sad land as Cuba it’s thrilling to see the bright intelligence of the children. One very serene and lovely nun about fifty was around till late last night. She oozed kindness and saintliness, in every fibre of her body there was no sense of selfishness, everything she did was for others. One of the families visiting from Santiago de Cuba had two little boys, one about eight, with glasses, and the other about three, without. And the nun and the two little boys were sitting together on the wide flat marble balustrade at the grand main entrance. The younger boy sat with his legs crossed and his spine erect for long periods of time without being uncomfortable. His brother seemed already the family intellectual: they were talking about José Martí and the Beatitudes. It was their first visit to the convent, and their first meeting with a nun. The nun took to them with great warmth and they were responding beautifully. They were fascinated; she was the most interesting person they had ever met.

  And it got me thinking of poor Fernando, yesterday, the twelve-year-old I picked up hitchhiking, and he got sent home by suspicious Ministry of the Interior officers at a checkpoint, in the shadow of Pico Turquino, and there was nothing I could do about it. The boy was in the back seat of an air-conditioned car having a friendly chat with me as I drove along, and he was genuinely interested in practising his English, and helping me with my Spanish, and telling me jokes, and laughing at mine. The police imagined the worst; man and boy, just met, in a car together, not a good thing. They had a stern talk with him, maybe caught him in a lie, found out that he wasn’t really going anywhere, and so they told him to go back home. I suppose he just stuck his thumb out because he liked the look of the shiny new car. And there he goes, walking away sadly without even looking back at me. Just a few minutes earlier we were going to be amigos forever. It seems wrong of the police, but checkpoints are where questions get asked, and they probably asked him where he was going, and he had no idea, and that would have been their reason for sending him home. It’s all perfectly understandable. Obviously when the police questioned him he told them he lived farther south, and he was hitchhiking home, but the car was so nice, and the air conditioning was so nice, and the Canadian was so nice, that he wanted to stay in the car, and talk with me, and figure out how to get home later.

  I turned around, and there he was, walking home, back the way we’d come, staring at the ground in front of him. And there was nothing I could do about it, because the police still had my passport, and I was guilty of forgetting that Christopher P. Baker at one point in his book says one should never let the police walk away with one’s passport. You can let him see it, but if he tries to walk away with it one should scream blue murder. And now I’m drifting off, the cries of the roosters are getting softer and less annoying, like in the final scenes of a bad movie, and I am mumbling into the tape recorder, and then silence…except for the occasional little snore.

  —

  That relaxing tablet took effect and I went into the deepest loveliest sleep. All of a sudden there was a lot of noise outside, and it kept getting louder and louder until I woke up. And it was José, outside my door, yelling in at me, and then he started hammering on the door, louder and louder. Did I make the mistake of telling him I was in Room 18? No, he probably found out in the ledger book. I opened the door a crack, and he said he had to go home to sleep now. All right, José. Thanks for letting me know. Good night. And he didn’t want me to forget to give Carlo the money for watching my car. Okay, I won’t forget. And then when I went to close the door, he said, “Money for me, money for me.”

  So I woke up a bit more and said omigod, this is terrible. I’d offered him money last night for all that mango juice but he refused. Could this be the same guy? I looked at him. It looked like his evil twin. He seemed as desperate as the guy who’d been scratching my windshield with a dry rag and cried when I asked if he was hungry. And I’m sure the personality switcheroo José had engineered was perfectly logical in his mind. So I gave him a dollar bill, and the old José smile returned to his face, though his eyes were bulging out more than might be good for them. “Ohoho!” he said. “Oh whoa ho!” A whole slide show of things he could do with that money flashed through his mind. And off he went. But not before pushing the door all the way open and giving me a nice big hug, even though I was starkers.

  He knew I’d be asleep at 5:30 in the morning. Why couldn’t he have taken the money for the mango juice last night when I offered it to him, begged him to take it, in fact? It may be more complex than this, but I think I have it figured out. If he had taken the money at the time he gave me the juice, he might find himself duty bound to turn it over to the convent. By going for it now, when he was about to leave, he could keep it. If the nuns later noticed the shortfall in the juice department, they might very well have questions. If he told them that he had taken money for it, he would have been required to turn the money over to them. But if he had told them he didn’t take any money for the juice, which was true, they might have been a bit annoyed, and they would have suggested he not be so generous with the juice of others.

  But I shouldn’t worry about José, a family man, with one wife and two kids, and they’ll be so happy to see the dollar bill when he gets home this morning. My only wish is that he’d called a bit earlier, when I was wide awake, rather than spiralling downward into dreamland. May the Virgin of El Cobre forgive this fellow his sins. And José’s as well while she’s at it.

  “Money for Me.” Sounds like a hip-hop album. Bound to be a big hit. Soon you’ll be able to download it for seventy-nine cents. And if you ever decide to stay over at this convent, whatever you do make sure José has all the money he needs before you retire for the night. It’s 10:21 a.m. Had a very bad night’s sleep, and I’m lying here trying to translate a poem about Santiago de Cuba, by García Lorca, which is printed in the tourist guide. I’m having problems. It doesn’t sound right in English. Maybe my friend A., who enjoys this sort of thing, can try her hand at it upon my return to snowbound Toronto. I give up. Federico García Lorca spent almost two months in Cuba in 1930, from March 7 to the end of April 30, visiting churches and giving lectures all over the island. He visited Santiago toward the end of his visit, and he must have been very much impressed because he wrote this ecstatic poem just before heading back to Spain. Some people didn’t like García Lorca. Jorge Louis Borges, for example, sneeringly referred to him as a “professional Andalusian.” García Lorca was cruelly assassinated in Spain eight years after his trip to Cuba (and New York), a greased pistol was stuck up his anus and fired, at the beginning of the Spanish Civil War, shortly after he had announced on Spanish radio that he was gay.

  When I got downstairs at eleven, breakfast was over. I asked the nun if I might at least have a cafecito. No no no, she said grumblingly, in a foul mood. But then it seemed as if the Virgin of Charity whispered something in her ear, you could see a change come over her face, her eyes became merciful, and she said yes yes yes. The cafecito really hit the spot, and so did the tip I gave the nun. Her face lit up like a beam when I handed her twenty-five pesos in gratitude.

  But then another man, a harried and flustered so
rt of guy, noticed me drinking my cafecito. He went running up to the counter and loudly demanded one for himself as well, pointing at me in a rather rude fashion. No no no, said the nun. He stayed here overnight and didn’t get any sleep because of the noise. So the poor fellow got very unhappy and stormed out, glaring at me as he passed.

  Things change fast in Cuba. Shortages one day, surpluses the next. Yesterday young men lined the route to El Cobre holding up large bouquets of artificial yellow flowers for sale as votive offerings to the Black Saint. But today it’s real sunflowers they’re holding up. Who knows what it will be tomorrow? So now there is a long row of Cuban males receding in the distance, each one holding up a freshly harvested sunflower and with a hopeful look on his face. All because of three sixteen-year-old boys who four hundred years ago almost drowned at sea. “I Am the Virgin of Charity!” said the saint, floating above the waves with her baby in her arm, the waves became calm and the boys were saved. Funny how as we age we learn to be believers and non-believers at the same time.

  —

  I decide to make a dash for Guantánamo, and get a hotel there. I want to see the U.S. base. I’ve heard there’s a hilltop restaurant where Cubans and tourists can dine and gaze down at the camp through coin-operated telescopes like at Niagara Falls or the rooftop of the long-gone World Trade Center. I’m told Guantánamo Bay is built to resemble an idyllic midwestern U.S. small town of the 1940s, with a cinema showing old Ronald Reagan movies on the main street, and husbands and wives lining up for tickets when they’re not busy guarding the many inmates who have not been charged with any crime, and where nobody would know habeas corpus from a hole in the ground.

  —

  There is a huge statue of Antonio Maceo in Santiago de Cuba, in the Revolutionary Square, and right across from it is a little service station. There is only one attendant and he has his head on the desk and is sleeping. I just need air for my tires, but there is a big lineup of cyclists at the pump. The guy just keeps on sleeping. But as soon as it came my time to put air in my tires, he woke up, came running over, and insisted on doing it for me. So I smilingly asked him why he didn’t offer to help the others, but he’s eager to help me. He drew open the breast pocket on his shirt to show me he had lots of money and didn’t need mine. He did the air on all four tires. He explained that if he didn’t do that for me, I might leave without getting any gas. But I had to inform him, sadly, that I had a full tank already, so I had no choice but to leave him without a sale.

  In the suburbs of Santiago, there are numerous old colonial buildings with signs indicating what each was now used for, such as the home of the Italian-Cuban Friendship Society, the Jewish Society of Eastern Cuba, the National Institute of Sugar Cane Research, and so on. But no signs pointing to the highway. I’m lost in another barrio, a very posh barrio this time, with stately old homes in terrific shape. There was a car just like mine, with an almost identical licence plate, obviously a tourist car, and a red-haired Dutch fellow about fifty had pulled over to buy some bananas from a roadside stand. He had two extremely elegant and beautiful black-skinned Afro-Cuban women in his car. Plus a very pretty fair-skinned slightly mulatto blond girl about four years old, possibly his daughter. He put the bananas in the car, then went across the road for a dozen eggs. He spoke perfect English with a slight Dutch accent. At first he thought I wanted a ride, but then he saw I had a car just like his, and he understood exactly what my problem was. He too has had a hard time learning to navigate around Cuba in the absence of good maps and directional signs. So he gave me some superb directions, and very patiently asked me to repeat what he had told me to make sure I had it right, while his three ladies sat patiently in the car. He said in the four years he’s been in Cuba he has never had even a fender bender. But he’s had many close calls.

  I have to continue along the road I’m on till I get to the punta control. Do you know what a punta control is? Yes, a checkpoint? Right! And then about a kilometre past the punta take the road to the right, and it will lead me to La Maya, and then along to Guantánamo. And then he said, “It’s true, there are many signs for many places, but there are no signs for Guantánamo.” He cautioned me to beware of the Sunday drivers tomorrow. He said there is a tradition among truck drivers to do a lot of drinking on Sunday. Sunday in fact has become the big drinking day for Cubans, whether they drive or not. There are a lot of inebriated drivers on the roads on Sunday, and many of them are driving big trucks.

  All the time we were talking, the two black ladies and the little girl were sitting in the car watching us, with very sweet looks on their faces. When the conversation was finished, and he turned to get back into his car, they were still looking at me, all three of them, and so I told them they had un bueno hombre there, and they smiled and said they knew.

  —

  After I passed the checkpoint and was heading toward La Maya, en route to Guantánamo, there was a red-haired man tilling a field for spring planting. He was with his son, who was much darker. In this area there seem to be many red-haired natives, or blondes, with fair skin, and they would be referred to as los ingleses, the descendants of the English copper miners who settled in Santiago in the nineteenth century. Most of them apparently speak no English, couldn’t even find England on the map, but they vaguely know that they are fairer of skin than the others and are distinguished also by being called the ingleses.

  There’s a good-sized town not on the map, and not at all signposted, and the houses seem dumpy and uncared-for, though lived in. There is a tiny rather unkempt park with a small Russian tank sitting in it rusting and rotting. Three nasty-looking boys are walking down the main street with gleaming machetes in their hands. It’s not just that humanity is the same all over the world. That’s to be expected. But also men are men all over the world, and women are women. It seems odd that as I pass through these towns, which I’ve never seen before, I have the sense I have been here before. I will pass through a town, and say, Holy cow, what’s going on here, I know I’ve never been here before but I’ve seen this town before. The feeling is so strong I’m racking my brains trying to figure out why I think I’ve seen before something so seemingly identical to this place. Maybe it stems from dimly remembered visits to rural old Florida and Georgia in my childhood. And the chubby Canadian from the park in Camagüey was complaining that the Santiago area was, for him, too reminiscent of the poor U.S. “deep south.”

  Along these roads, and even in Santiago de Cuba, there are a lot of what seem to be U.S. military vehicles. They look like a lot of fun to drive, and the people driving them seem to be young males having a lot of fun. It’s a bit alarming really. The people in the vehicles are well-dressed and bright-eyed young men and I’m certain they must be somehow connected with the base at Guantánamo Bay. Which is not to say they are from the United States, because numerous Cuban nationals are hired for support-staff positions on the base, much more cheaply than bringing support staff from the United States would be, so I’m informed.

  It would appear that these young men are Cubans who are working on the base, and who are very well trusted, and who are allowed to borrow these U.S. military vehicles on the weekends. The vehicles have blue Cuban licence plates, and they always start with the letters US, followed by one other letter, and then three numbers. I’ve seen a USE and a USF, but I’ve never seen a USA. The drivers are immaculately dressed and groomed. They tend to be slow, careful drivers, and they tend to pick up hitchhikers. And the vehicles are sparklingly brand new, although one that just passed by had a rear left wheel that was wobbly, and the driver is going slow, and has a worried look on his face. He is a large black man with a shaved head.

  —

  Everything seems to be going well in the pleasant town of La Maya. They even have a cinema. Nicely painted houses, no two colours the same – except for two houses that have been just recently painted bright red. They are not side by side, but merely separated by two other houses less flamboyantly hued. The sign says fifty miles
to Guantánamo, but I don’t know if that’s to the border of Guantánamo Province or actually to the centre of Guantánamo City. My copy of the World Reference Atlas has Cuba as being European African (formerly mulatto) 51%, white 37%, black 11%, Chinese 1%. (In the same atlas, it would appear that the United States recognizes neither European African nor mulatto as ethnic categories, for that country is listed as being white 84%, black 12%, other 4%). So in the black sweepstakes the United States is beating Cuba 12-11, if one adopts the U.S. categories, or Cuba is beating the United States 62-12 if the Cuban categories are used. The busy little town of La Maya, however, would probably be, at a guess, about 60% black, 30% European African, and 10% white. If that seems high in the black proportion, it may have something to do with the proximity to Haiti, Santo Domingo, and Jamaica.

  —

  At Mirador de Malones where the Guantánamo Lookout is located, the gate is locked. Next to the gate is a little military checkpoint, with a Cuban flag flying, and out comes a fellow with an extremely nasty look on his face, a twin of the fellow who helped me out of the barrio two nights ago. Instead of a pistol on his hip this fellow has a machine gun in his hand. He said that I can’t go up there, the restaurant is closed, and even if it were open I couldn’t go up there with my car, and furthermore I can’t walk up there, he can’t take me himself, I can’t hitchhike up there. But I can come back tomorrow, he said, and if I do I have to come in a taxi, or on some kind of a guided tour, I can’t bring my car in.

  But again he wasn’t sure if it would be open tomorrow. Yesterday, for instance, he didn’t know if it would be open today. It seemed to me that I should head for Baracoa today and forget about taking a chance of being able to get to the lookout tomorrow.