An Innocent in Cuba Page 2
Her English is very advanced, she is well into the verb tenses – but she thinks that she is part of a dying breed. “People are getting tired of English,” she says. “Even the kids, they prefer to learn French.”
We get all serious in a long discussion of boring tourism statistics, of which all I can remember is that after all these years Canada is still the source of most Cuban tourism, with Latin America second, and Europe third. So Canada gets a gold medal for tourism.
Úrsula seems in no rush to leave. In fact, everyone in the cafeteria seems in a trance. Everyone is moving so slowly. People get up slowly and take their trays to the buffet for refill, then return to their tables slowly. People eat slowly, chew slowly, and stare into the distance forever before going for another mouthful. Even the children play with their food slowly. Cafeteria workers slowly wheel in new platters full of exotic breakfast fare, with eyes slightly lowered and steady, like Tibetan monks. If someone drops a fork, it falls slowly. And it makes no sound. There is perfect silence. Úrsula slips away.
—
An old white-skinned, white-haired cabbie with a new red Toyota parked in the hotel forecourt promises to get me and my bag to the Deauville and he didn’t have to look at any map. I’m curious to see if these hotels really were “overbooked.” And if they were all booked up, I’d for sure find something in that area just off the Prado. Havana looked wonderful coming in through Miramar – a dizzying display of neo-classical, Spanish baroque, and art deco palaces that were in a moribund state ten years ago – grey, windowless, empty – and are now spiffy as all get out, and home to numerous embassies, government agencies, and a multitude of polyclinicos.
The driver is Lázaro, and he is giving me a grand tour, with excellent commentary in slow Spanish, and feeling me out a bit as to who I am and what sort of dirty rotten business I am involved in, before offering me a splendid suggestion. He knows of a casa particulare in Centro Habana and he knows in his deepest heart, from chatting with me, that it’d be better for me than the Deauville. It’s unlucky to say no on your first day in Havana, and the Deauville would still be there tomorrow. The casa is on the fifth or sixth floor – a long winding climb – of an old art deco Arab mosaic block of airy flats with balconies galore on the legendary Calle Zanja, in the west end of Centro Habana, in the centre of a vast maze of streets throbbing with life and death in all directions, and providing easy proximity to the Hotel Havana Libre, the Plaza de la Revoluçion, the Teatro Naçional, the Parque Coppelia with its famous ice cream, and many other interesting locales crying for my closer attention.
Lázaro has taken me to the spacious two-bedroom apartment of a mother and daughter, nothing resembling a commercial enterprise, and very proper but relaxed. They have a large back bedroom that looks cool and comfy. They go for long periods without anyone. I had the impression Lázaro was their only tout, and they didn’t advertise, though they offered me a modest business card, as did Lázaro, who had delivered me into a quasi–Humbert Humbert situation when you think about it. Daughter, for instance, is a very attractive and charming young woman, but hardly a Lolita given that she is twice Lolita’s age and a very dedicated well-trained physician to boot. Her name is Monica and she works at the Clínico Quirúrgico Freyre de Andrade. But she is just now dressed in white shorts and a white blouse and wet flip-flops as she wetwashes the floor with great energy. She is also wishing that Lázaro had arranged to give them a bit more warning.
Monica says she’s working the night shift at the clinic this week, but could find herself switched at any moment with little warning. Her mother, Melba, always with the zaniest smile and often with a madcap laugh to match, is a doctor too, but now retired. The beautiful paintings throughout the house (except for the guest room, alas) are by Melba in her youth. She no longer takes an interest in painting, but she never tires of looking at her own. If nothing else her canvases are a testament to the fiery young woman she was thirty years ago – very Cuban in spirit, sophisticated, intellectual, metaphysical, angst-ridden. But now she seems more interested in watching a tele-novella: a stressed-out motorist on the lam from the Mob runs over a pedestrian, then jumps out of his car and starts pounding the roof and screaming. I offer M. and M. a bottle of Havana Club from the airport as un obsequio. They laugh and Monica says, “You must drink it yourself. We do not drink. We are doctors.”
If I were Humbert Humbert I’d love Monica and hate Melba, both at first sight, but I’m not, so I love both of them the same.
—
The room is nicely cross-ventilated, two north windows, two west windows, and a small south window, all with wooden shutters thick with old paint. There’s a double bed and a single, with a lovely dark-wood antique wardrobe and a cute little chest of four drawers bearing intricately carved and inlaid abstract patterns from the 1930s. Two oil paintings each show a seascape with the full-moon setting, or maybe one is setting and the other rising, or maybe both are rising. These are not Melba’s style at all. They must have been specially selected for Canadian tourists.
The rest of the place is spacious for two people, there’s a small dining room off the kitchen, with two large parlours, and a balcony with a great view of the street, which I shall notice will become very noisy and then very quiet at oddly unexpected times of the night and day. And there is a pair of parakeets chirping away in one cage, and a pair of canaries warbling away in another. The ladies let me know I have the run of the place. It’s all mine. They are all smiles.
Monica is halfway through Les Misérables. I tell her it’s my favourite big fat novel of all time. She shrugs, as if to say that’s easy for someone from a capitalist country like Canada to say, but how could a gringo possibly relate to this book the way a Cuban could? She thinks I’m faking it, or being condescending, or trying to present myself in a bright light, or a bit puffed-up. As a trained scientist, she refuses to believe she just happens to be reading my favourite book.
Later she spoke of the “brain drain” of Cuban doctors to Venezuela (and Haiti too, working all through the recent coup), which is putting a lot of strain on the doctors who choose to remain in Cuba for now. And she smiles at her ironic use of the term “brain drain.” She realizes she’s using it differently than in non-socialist countries, and that the doctors are in Venezuela for compassionate reasons rather than fatter incomes. They’re into areas where people live an entire life without knowing what a doctor looks like. President Hugo Chávez wants to establish medical care for the poor people of Venezuela, who haven’t been able to afford it. So at least a thousand Cuban doctors volunteered. It’s been a big success among the poor people, but the middle-class Venezuelans think the Cuban doctors are doing more indoctrination than doctoring. Same with the urban garden venture, transforming balcony and rooftop into little patches of fertile farmland, making the lives of the poor easier. This too is disliked by the middle class.
It seems odd that Chávez would refer to Cuba as a “sea of happiness.” Other bright people have made similar remarks at different times. I’m interested in finding out what they mean.
DAY TWO
TWO STEPS AHEAD OF THE LAW
Sunday, February 15, 2004. On my first long stroll I stopped to listen to some high sweet trumpet notes drifting from the direction of the Teatro Naçional across the busy four-lane Avenida Carlos Manuel de Céspedes. There was a close-knit crowd of about thirty people surrounding a man tooting on a trumpet. The man seemed to be demonstrating the proper execution of long steady high notes, free of vibrato, and the open air is the best place for that.
“Yes, that is the professor of trumpet playing,” said a thin dark-skinned fellow who had been trying to figure out what I was looking at across the wide avenue. “He is teaching the younger people.” He tried not to seem eager to make my acquaintance, even while hustling me past the front entrance of the Plaza de la Revoluçion and under the giant two-dimensional steel sculpture of a ghostly black Che Guevara, who seemed a bit weary of having to wait around for
the next massive anti-imperialist demonstration or five-hour speech by Fidel.
We were closing in on the theatre, and I casually asked my amigo if he liked baseball. He instantly came to a halt, stood very straight, and cocked his head back with a shocked look on his face. He said, “How could you ask such a question? What are you trying to insinuate? Of course I like baseball, there is no bigger baseball fan in the world than I.”
He soon forgave my slur on his manhood and confessed that he played second “bass” for many years but didn’t have what it took to get into the big leagues. Just then, as if by ESP, another man joined us, a friend of the first, taller, with darker skin and African features, except for his thin Irish lips. “He means ‘base,’ ” he said. Each of the fourteen provinces has its own team, they told me. Some of the more heavily populated provinces have two teams, they told me. Thank God for our linguistic limitations. If we spoke the same language we’d have been talking about something much drearier no doubt. And less believable.
They wanted to know my taste in music. I liked Cuban classical music and Cuban jazz but hadn’t consciously listened to a lot of it. I did not like nightclub jazz usually, and I wasn’t interested in the festivale folklórico sort of thing. I preferred Pérez Prado to Desi Arnaz, and maybe even Arturo Sandoval to his one-time mentor, Dizzy Gillespie. They liked it that I liked Cuban jazz, and they took me to a cellar nightclub behind and below the 1950ish Teatro Naçional, which looks something like a three-quarter mockup of a domed stadium, even though it doesn’t actually have a dome, and it’s surrounded by serene parkland and clumps of magnificent royal palms so close together that the sun could hardly squeeze through. This nightclub was the darkly subterranean Café Cantanté Mi Habana, with its serpentine walnut bar long enough for any crowd, and it was a very famous place for jazz. The upstairs was famous for performances of the Danza Contemporánea and the National Symphony.
Although Fidel is pretty well the only one with a beard, the beatnik era is still strong in Cuba, and the aura lingers on here in El Café Cantanté like the glow after the lights go off. The long bar was closed for the afternoon. There were no musicians in evidence, and there wasn’t even a CD player or radio to be found. But some people were lounging with their feet up on empty tables, and others were standing or wandering here and there, engaging in serious conversations, and most seemed to be long-term habitués of this threadbare club.
My friends were very insistent that I be here at ten this evening, for that was when the jazz started. I should have been thrilled, but oddly I wasn’t. Maybe it was because they didn’t seem to be thrilled either, just insistent. They couldn’t tell me who’d be playing. The place lacked the sort of buzz one would expect if something really interesting was happening tonight. Missing a good performance is never as regrettable as having to sit through a bad one.
We three came up out of the dark bar into the bright day. We walked along the broad avenue. They complained pointedly about the heat, as if it were an old script they’d memorized. They asked if I had ever had a mojito Hemingway. I confessed that I had not, but I had heard that they were all the rage among the tourists this year. I knew someone in Toronto who flew all the way to Havana just to have one, but to their credit these bright guys knew I was testing their credibility. Soon we were sitting in a little no-name bar, one I vividly remember A. telling me looked ten years ago as if it had been bombed out. But it was now renovated, a nice little place, cool and breezy, neat and clean, surrounded by tall trees with great green fanlike fronds brushing the windows. The bartender kept looking at me with a sorrowful eye, as if to say, “If I were a tourist like you, buddy boy, I wouldn’t be buying these bozos expensive drinks.” I indicated that I had caught the message, and I understood his concern. I relaxed and waited for them to tell me exactly what was on their minds.
As we drank our mojitos it began to unravel. These fellows wanted to tell me about an exciting new way of getting rich fast, though they didn’t put it quite that way. It was nice of them, and I appreciated it, and I didn’t want them to think that I was crazy for not being interested in getting rich, and it wouldn’t do to have them think that I distrusted them in any way. So I listened as they told of a certain local supermarket, the owners of which were a tad counter-revolutionary (they didn’t actually use that term), and they liked to commute back and forth to the United States for special events like funerals, weddings, and the occasional picnic.
At the airport last night I was expecting to get U.S. cash from the bank machine, but instead I got crisp new three-peso notes, which were artificially pegged at the same value as the dollar, and were referred to as the convertible peso, or chavito. I’m not sure what it was I said, but my friends started snickering. Then they said that they wished to propose that in spite of the supposed one-to-one ratio of the Cuban peso and the U.S. dollar (they snickered some more), they would be interested in presenting any amount of U.S. dollars – any amount at all – to this supermarket in exchange for the same number of those fancy new convertible pesos. Then they got serious and put a great deal of time into explaining how simple this would be, and how I would be providing a great service to the poor people of Cuba by getting involved in this harmless little scheme. Any money I was willing to convert in this way, say a thousand U.S. dollars, they would gladly take the commission – it might have been 3 per cent – and split it between poor worthy Cubans such as these two and myself. When I finally understood this scheme (to the extent that I did), I had no choice but to tell them I could not get involved. I had heard many sad tales of life in a Cuban jail and had no desire to test their factuality. This would never happen, they exclaimed, as if they couldn’t believe what they were hearing. Tourists enjoy complete impunity in Cuba, they insisted. Tourists are never thrown in jail. The worst that could happen, and it would be very unlikely, would be for you to be escorted to the airport.
It was my turn to snicker, and I told them that there are many Canadians who have believed such talk and who have nevertheless found themselves in a Cuban jail. They scoffingly demanded an example. The only one I could think of was the sad case of Perry King, of Edmonton. King worked for a Canadian oil company in Cuba, in the port city of Matanzas. In his off-hours he happened to “befriend” a fourteen-year-old girl and, when he found out how poor her family was, gave her a twenty-dollar bill “as a goodwill gesture.”
The court in a very short trial sentenced him to a very long twenty-five years for corrupting a minor. He has been in jail a year and his sister says he is innocent, sick, depressed, and has lost fifty pounds. His Canadian lawyer said that King is innocent and was convicted on insufficient evidence presented in a one-day trial. This is based on information in two brief news reports.
The guys stared at me silently. My story was obviously a perfect justification for not wanting to mess with dirty currency tricks, no matter how innocent I might be. With great sincerity I told the fellows I’d get a second opinion on the legality of the scheme and then get back to them if I decided to dive in. They looked rather hurt, maybe even close to tears. They drifted away. It was sad.
—
On the Malecón I breathed the salt air as many have before me. Lovers strolled by locked in tender embraces. Even married couples, with their kids along, would be starry-eyed and in a high state of romance, as the waves licked the smooth igneous boulders at the foot of the seawall. A very young fellow and an older girl were walking in step with me. The fellow was about fourteen, but he had the cocky mannerisms of an experienced pimp twice his age. He had a horrible scar on his left shoulder, as if he had been trying unsuccessfully to burn off a small skull-and-bones tattoo. But he had just missed the tattoo, and it was even more noticeable now, and uglier. He spoke excellent English, but his girlfriend remained silent. She was much taller than he, and pretty, with dark skin and Spanish features. “Do you like her?” said the fellow. “Yes, but I’m too old for that kind of thing” – which is my usual reply in such situations. He protested,
so I held my hand out with my index finger hanging down limply. This was usually all it took, but this young fellow was determined. I tried to tell him that as a single male Canadian in Cuba the only way I could avoid being stereotyped as a sex tourist was not to indulge. “But do you like her?” he said, as if my excuses might just be covering up the fact that I didn’t find her to my taste. This was a sophisticated young guy, who could be ambiguous in both languages. “Yes, but does she like me?” I inquired, not wishing to offend them in any way, and knowing what the answer would be.
He repeated my question to her in Spanish. Her dull face lit up, she looked me deep in the eye, and said, “Oh, sí!” She said it so sweetly I almost succumbed. “She likes you,” he said. It appeared that I was checkmated. But at that very moment, a shiny black 1958 Oldsmobile pulled over and, as I watched, the girl got in with only the slightest hesitation, if that, and the car raced away, west along the sea and into the setting sun, leaving me trying not to show my relief. The young fellow had a smug look on his face, as if mocking me for not jumping when I had the chance. The classy car made it perfectly obvious I’d been undervaluing the merchandise.
—
Night fell and the long legendary Calle Zanja was very dark, the only illumination from the open windows and doors of the bars and shops and houses that lined the street, with everything on ground level except for the roofs. The houses, open as they were to full public view, would be very neat and clean and tidy and well organized, and maybe a bit spartan, but with paintings on the wall, and bookshelves – well, books yes, but no bookshelves, not really. A small pile of books atop a chest of drawers maybe. Everybody reads, but people tend to keep books and magazines moving from hand to hand, in mutual exchange. A book on a shelf was a book not being read.