An Innocent in Cuba Read online

  —

  In the small coastal village of Tortuguilla, a dry area where turtles are plentiful and the newly hatched often get crushed under the wheels of motor vehicles or snatched up by birds as they make their way from egg to sea, the Caribbean looks different today. It’s speckled with whitecaps all the way to the horizon. For an island nation it’s amazing how few boats are out there. I can’t remember seeing any fishing boats in my travels over the past while. Maybe the boats have all been taken by fed-up folks fleeing to Florida, and simply haven’t been replaced, because the replacements will likely meet a similar fate.

  This is still the flat-tailed southern end of Cuba, it’s actually the eastern end of Cuba, but because of Cuba’s crescent curve it is also the south end. And the mountains plunge straight into the sparkling emptiness of the sea, through its radiant hypnotic facade, and they keep on plunging dramatically down to the great silt mines at the unimaginable bottom of the deepest watery gully, where explorers claim to have found the ruins of cities fourteen thousand years old.

  Along this south-shore route, between Tortuguilla and San Antonio del Sur, one encounters a beautiful low-slung wall of stone. This wall seems to be of Aboriginal construction, is composed of pale yellowish stones, and follows the straight line of the sea. It’s pleasant to look at, with the sea on one side and a stretch of dry grassland on the other, before the high rocky hills start springing up. It’s hard to imagine the reason for this wall. What is it supposed to be keeping out or keeping in? Nothing. It’s something like the cold grey two-thousand-year-old Pictish Walls one sees all over the highlands and islands of Scotland. But in these walls (the Guantánamo Walls?), the stones, though all alike, are placed more haphazardly, and with less finesse and patience than the Pictish Walls. So it may not be that the Aboriginal Guantánamoans lacked the technical skills of the Picts, but that they were more in a hurry, and there were fewer of them. But it’s a pretty damn good wall. Also, behind the walls, at the foot of steep rockfaces, can be found occasional caves, with windows and benches that suggest human occupation in the remote past.

  Past the villages of Macambo and Yacabo Abajo, I stopped for a cold bottle of mineral water, and someone must have overheard me saying I was on my way to Baracoa, where Columbus landed uninvited on October 13, 1492, and straightaway started raising hell. When I got back to my car, just as I turned on the ignition someone whipped the back door open and said, “You going to Baracoa?” And before I could answer a battle broke out, with about six people trying to get in the car.

  The strongest man managed to get in, followed by the second strongest, who very roughly pushed the first man’s wife out of the way, and the two guys managed to get the door closed, and sat there with pursed lips and an air of total innocence. Others were beseeching me to unlock the front door, but I refused for any number of reasons.

  The woman who had been separated from her husband was crying and pleading not to be left behind. So I asked the man if that was his wife. He said yes. But when I asked him how he could leave her out in the cold (so to speak) like that, there was no answer.

  At the same moment a well-dressed black man, who might have been a minister of the Baptist church, motioned me to roll down my window. When I did so he stuck his head in and said, with the elegant manners of the elderly, “Excuse me, sir. Are you taking these riders for money?” He was the only black person, everyone else in the crowd was white.

  “No, no money at all. Free.”

  And he said, “Well that’s not right. Because it’s necessary for you to pay for your gas and everything.”

  He obviously understood my problem and was very kindly trying to encourage me to attempt to negotiate a way out, also he was sub-textually informing me that these guys were sort of ignorant, illiterate louts, and I shouldn’t be bothered with them. But I said, “Thank you, sir, but please don’t worry about it.” I was afraid they would leap out of the car and physically abuse him. He walked away.

  I looked back at the husband, straight in the eye, and said, “Your wife’s there crying. Wouldn’t you rather be with her?” He looked straight ahead with his lips tightly closed.

  So I turned to the other guy and said, “Do you want to separate this man from his wife?”

  “Sí!” he said brightly.

  I had a lot of important but messy junk on the front passenger seat, and could have put it in the trunk and let the woman into the car, but if I did that I’d be allowing other people to fight their way in. Some people are just born to be pushed out of the way, and many of them would do anything for a ride to Baracoa. They’ve been living all their lives in Yacabo Abajo and had often heard fabulous stories about Baracoa and who could resist the chance to visit it?

  And then everybody who wasn’t in my car went flying toward a bus that had just pulled up, including the wife who was still sobbing. Everything seemed to be happening at once. No idea where the bus might be going, but it was pointed in the same direction I was going, and maybe it was eventually going all the way to Baracoa.

  So I drove off with the two guys, and it was very unpleasant. I felt more and more bummed out, their silent weight was dragging me down, and I knew the climb up through the spectacular eastern-most mountains of the Sierra Maestra would be spoiled with these astronomical anomalies in the back seat. I just did not want to be with them one minute longer. One can be a good socialist without wanting to have uninvited people in his car, his house, or his bed.

  Soon I found my window of opportunity and crashed right through it. There was an artless hangdog little sign indicating a beachfront motel and restaurant, down a long lane from the main road. It was just for Cubans, but sometimes you can get lucky, particularly if there’s not much going on. So I stopped and told my uninvited guests that I had to go down this road because I was very tired and required a little nap. Which was true. It’s not easy to get to sleep in a noisy convent.

  So I got out and opened the back door, but they wouldn’t get out. Not even when I told them I would return after having my nap and pick them up unless they had taken another ride by then. They just sat there looking straight ahead. So I finally shouted at them, “¡¡¡¡VAMOS!!!!” Then they got out in a hurry, and they immediately sat down under a shade tree, looking forlorn and sheepish, and expecting they’d never see me again, and they’d have to walk back home, and what would the one guy’s wife say? He’d be in the casa de perro for weeks over this escapade.

  So I offered them an almost full litre bottle of fizzy mineral water, and they refused to take it. They were miffed because I’d shouted at them.

  There were a lot of peso people down there at the beach motel, so it wouldn’t be cool to provide a room for a tourist. It’s almost like a matter of not knowing how to deal with something like a tourist wanting to have a nap, or feeling shy about having a tourist hanging around, and maybe I was a motel inspector from the government, or a Talahassee terrorist. They seemed about as happy to see me as I had been to see the two bozos in my back seat. To them, I spelled trouble somehow. Besides, everyone was drinking rum. And there was no coffee available. Cuba is a nation of Sunday drinkers, and they were getting warmed up for the big day.

  So I had no choice but to drive back to the highway, and there were the two guys still sitting under the tree. But I cleverly avoided looking at them, and willed myself to forget about them. I pretended that I had forgotten about them or that I was assuming they had got a ride already. I looked to the left for traffic instead of to the right for them, didn’t even glance their way, although peripherally I could sense them jumping to their feet and waving their arms.

  And almost immediately there was a billboard bearing an excellent suggestion: Abolish the Genocidal Blockade.

  —

  The scenic road that crooks its perilous way up into the mountains is lined with elegantly dressed campesinas, tall and black, who have heard the car chugging up the long incline. These beautiful women are holding out great bunches of bananas, coconuts, papay
as, or whatever is on hand, plus beautiful cucuruchos, which are coconut puddings, mixed with papaya and orange and various nuts and spices, intricately and ingeniously wrapped in dried palm leaves, with a palm-leaf loop for carrying them over your wrist like a fashionable Parisian handbag.

  The villages along this climb through the mountains to Baracoa are solidly African. People are washing clothes, carrying wood, and working on little repairs to their little thatched-roof houses, often without walls, just four poles with a thatched roof, or sometimes a hammered tin roof, surrounded by dense palm forests. When they hear a car coming, men-women-children all grab strings of fruit and cucuruchos and run down to the road hoping (and fully expecting) to make a sale. A very handsome black man about thirty is walking along the road wearing a green singlet, a pair of khaki shorts, and flip-flops, and he’s holding on to about twenty ropes in his hand, and each rope on the other end is tied around the neck of a goat.

  Steep hills, lush valleys pulsing with botanical splendour, amazing flowering trees I’ve never seen before and couldn’t begin to identify. The clouds are a shiny gold colour in the late blue afternoon, and it looks like rain. And a veritable phantasmagoric fiesta of mountains whichever way you look.

  This is the kind of landscape that can be seen, in dramatic black and white, and shot from a helicopter, in the Kalatozov/Yevtushenko movie, I Am Cuba. This is what all of Cuba must have looked like when Columbus arrived. What a profusion of nature’s wealth, and beautiful jagged mountains way off in the distance. And so clement is the weather that trees go straight to the very peaks of the tallest mountains, and sometimes right at the peak of a tall mountain you’ll see a proud royal palm standing there like a cross after Jesus has been taken down, while the thousands of palm trees along the slopes more closely resemble strange little green windmills from another planet.

  —

  A young woman had her thumb out with a sweet smile on her face. As I selfishly passed her by, wrapped in my own thoughtlessness, I looked in the rear-view mirror and saw her look turn to one of absolute hatred. She was standing outside a very nice Baptist church with an ochre roof and saffron walls.

  We’re almost down to sea level, and the people around here, healthy looking, beautiful, with a full spectrum of skin colours from black to brown, brown to white, pink to yellow – and everybody gets along the way God intends people to get along, if God’s alleged goodness is not an illusion.

  And there’s a tall white-pink guy with a red handlebar moustache sitting on his bicycle and picking his teeth with a toothpick. Another man is yanking at his horse, who is attached to a milk wagon, and who will not budge no matter how angry the boss gets. A fellow on a bicycle whispers something a bit indecent to the girl sitting on his crossbar as he pedals, so she turns, aims, and slaps him hard across the face. He laughs and keeps pedalling. What a dream this place is, with Revolutionary slogans everywhere, and everyone is doing their bit for the ozone layer by getting around on horseback and bicycles.

  It occurs to me that the woman who was pushed away from my car in Yacabo Abajo, maybe that bus she hopped into was going to Baracoa and she’s here by now, or soon will be. She’ll be waiting for her husband, with forgiveness in her heart perhaps, but she’ll be waiting for a long time because he is probably still sitting under that shade tree by the old seaside motel, wondering what to do. Maybe at my hotel in the morning that woman will be cleaning my room or serving me breakfast. Then too, maybe her husband will be serving me breakfast. All made up. Forgive and forget. I hope they don’t recognize me.

  —

  This is a dreamlike unspoiled area of flowers and fruits, colour and beauty. It’s like living in a government botanical garden or a nature preserve. Usually such beautiful surroundings are saved for the rich. Everything is so perfect, nothing is out of place, there’s no garbage anywhere.

  This is where those brightly coloured polymites are found. Polymita pictas: a species of tiny snails native to the Baracoa region. Christopher P. Baker relates a pre-Columbian legend: The snails’ shells were originally colourless. One lonesome traveller of a snail climbed a hill (slowly, slowly) and was so taken with what he saw he asked the mountains for some of their green, he asked the sky for some of its blue, he asked the sands for some of their yellow, and the sea for some of its jade and turquoise. “And that’s how the polymites get their colours, which are as unique to each individual polymite as fingerprints are to humans.”

  —

  Che Guevara spent a night or two in room 203 of the romantic little seaside Hotel La Rusa in Baracoa some time in the early 1960s. He was here to inaugurate a sugar refinery or something. A handcrafted picture of Che, in leather and black ink, hangs on the wall, and a white tassel hangs from it, and the tassel continues on all around the picture, so it forms a frame. El Yunque is the unusually bare, flat-topped mountain behind the town, which Columbus is said to have seen from far out at sea, and which drew him to land here. This was his second landing in the New World, the first being in the Bahamas. It’s not known which hotel Columbus stayed in, but he raved about the beauty of this area in 1492, and nothing much has changed.

  —

  Máximo is watching my car, which is sitting on the street at the main entrance to the hotel. He wanted two dollars. I said I’d give him one now and one in the morning, but he outsmarted me and wanted the two now. When I came down later to have a look around, three guys were sitting on the roof of my car, and one of them was fooling around with the windshield wipers and had one of them pulled right out but not broken. As soon as they saw me, they jumped off the car and pretended to be whistling happily, nonchalantly. I told them that was a funny way to watch a car, and they started laughing and looking embarrassed. Máximo is twenty-five years old, and he makes a good living watching cars, if he gets two bucks every time somebody wants their car watched. Mind you, there are only two cars out there tonight and we’re getting close to the high tourist season.

  One fellow in the pint-sized bar seems to be from Italy, and even though he’s well into his sixties, he has two hot-blooded young bosomy black women, one under each arm, and he’s bought them dinner, and they finished their dinners off real fast, then got up and left him sitting there looking glum. There might have been some kind of language problem, and he was mumbling to himself, if I heard correctly, “Oh my God, I spent all that money on those women and now they’ve gone home and they’re not even going to stay over in my room tonight and keep me warm and cozy. What a fool I am. Mama mia!” But then they came back and he brightened up considerably.

  So there are lots of people down here, and the manager is a jolly fat young fellow named Enrique. It’s unusual to see a fat man in Cuba; he’s not all that fat by Canadian standards, just sort of pleasingly chubby. But he’s short so it makes him look more like a basketball than a basketball player, and he’s also very white. The waitress has the most soulful eyes, she’s about forty, and I’m trying not to show how attractive I find her to be. There comes a time when we older folk try to recapture the rapture of youth, but it’s just not recapturable if you ask me. Best to just turn your back on it, and move forward on the lookout for deeper raptures, like the rapture of not giving a damn about rapture any more.

  —

  So imagine little old Dave staying in the same room Che Guevara stayed in. Wowie! Not much of a room. Pretty small. Two single beds. Window looking out over the sea and overlooking the Baracoa Malecón (just like Havana but smaller). It’s nicely cross-ventilated, a north window and a west window both facing the sea, because the shore takes a curve past the hotel, and the waves are smashing over the mini-Malecón tonight, and the wind is whistling like a thousand Whistler’s mothers. The wind is more worrying than the waves.

  Downstairs, couples continue to come and go, mostly old guys with young women. One of the women, I think she’s a Brit, I’ve seen her in several different places, each time with a different male tourist. She’s not wildly attractive, she just likes to pick up men I g
uess, and go places with them, and have long conversations about Bertrand Russell or maybe even George Sand.

  But it’s mostly Cubans in here. Enrique told me about an old man who lives down the street a bit, who might give me some background about the place, which he’s known intimately for fifty years. Máximo comes in and shows me a scar on his arm, he does a lot of fishing, mostly from the shore, and for reasons that will become clear as I continue, he can’t afford a boat. This is a young man and the sea story.

  He pulled in a fish one day, and it was bigger than he was. He was trying to land it, for his three kids (each from a different woman), and it pulled so hard on the line it cut him all down the arm. So he now has a long straight white welted scar on his dark brown arm. And he tries to spend one-third of his time with each woman, and each kid. So that’s a good story, and he’s a very handsome young guy, skinny, with fine features, and he’s ambitious to learn languages and other things. It was important for him to know that I could understand every word of English he spoke, with the exception of one word – he kept confusing the word “song” and the word “son.” But even better, whenever I tried to speak Spanish, he got it right away. He understood my Spanish better than anyone has so far. He always understood exactly what I was trying to say.

  As for Enrique, it’s as if he owns the hotel, and it’s very important that he keeps everybody happy. He’s a bit too anxious about things. It’s as if he’s under pressure from the government to start turning a bigger profit from this place. Both Enrique and Máximo work in three or four different hotels in town, and they move, independent of each other, from one hotel to another, as needed, just as Máximo goes from one wife and child to another. We’re as far as can be from Havana, but it seems to be a good loyal Fidelista area around here. Just like any country, the more you favour the government in power, the more the government in power favours you. There is still pressure to create profits, of course, except that they’re not called profits, they’re called cost under-runs, or income over-runs, or black ink, something like that. Even Cuba needs all the liquidity it can get, in a cruel world of blockades and bad will.