An Innocent in Cuba Read online

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  I hold my tape recorder out the window like a mouse, and on replay later the waves sound like a cat in heat: “Meooooww, pshhh. Meooooww, pshhh. Meooooww, pshhh.” Also the wind at times sounds exactly like thunder, but thunder that just keeps on thundering for five minutes at a time. In Havana, when the waves hit the seawall they will flood out over the entire wide road, but here there is no road separating the sea from the hotel, the hotel is right on the seawall, so the waves hit the little seawall here, and then explode all over the hotel. It’s amazing the hotel is still standing after all the hurricanes it has had to withstand over the past seventy years or so.

  DAY SIXTEEN

  FROM BARACOA ACROSS THE RÍO TOA TO MOA

  Sunday, February 29, 2004. At 1:33 a.m. I’m sitting in Che’s room on the second floor, listening to the waves smack the mini-Malecón and splash against the walls of the Hotel La Rusa. Someone seems to be pounding at the door – but it’s only the effect of the hot-blooded wind. I have to drag the refrigerator up against the door to stop it from banging. The storm is bringing warm air up from the lower Caribbean, and pushing the cool air back up to Canada where it belongs. On a midnight tour of inspection, I discovered that my door is the only one that is banging. The bar downstairs is closed tight, I can’t get a beer, and I’d go for a late-night walk around town but if I open the front door it’ll disturb the bartender snoring on the lobby sofa.

  Back in my room, the film version of Jorge Amado’s Tieta the Goat Girl is playing on television, with Sonia Braga as Tieta. My two windows have bright red curtains and the two beds bright red bedspreads. Both the curtains and the spreads have little wallpaperlike windmill motifs, with images of bells and flowers and mountains all over the place.

  The wailing wind keeps my brain spinning. At first sight of this hotel I imagined how pleasant to be lulled to sleep by the pounding waves. But there’s nothing lulling about this storm. Cachita, Virgin of Charity, let your storm abate a bit, so that I will be fully rested in the morning and less likely to be in a bad mood when people start fighting each other to get into my car. Men and women flee their spouses from time to time, but excuse me if I don’t want to be involved. It wasn’t as if I’d abandoned those guys in the middle of nowhere. It was a shady spot by the sea, and there was a cheap resort for Cubans just down the walk. They both had backpacks, and I’m sure they had a few pesos in their pockets. It’s unlikely I’ll ever find out what happened to them, but who can predict? I’ll imagine them having a great day at the resort, then spending the night there as well, with luck.

  It’s odd that as I lie here in a room where Che once spent a night, I spend hours trying to improve it, pushing the bed against the wall so the pillows won’t slip to the floor, trying to devise a way of keeping windows with the latches broken off from blowing open in the stiff winds, and pushing a fridge against the door in order to stop it from banging. It took Che longer to improve Cuba, but I’m trying to do the same thing, one room at a time. Everything’s perfect here for now.

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  Hours later, after a leisurely breakfast, I visited the studio of the old painter René Frómeta, who, as a child, born in Baracoa to unlettered campesinos, was adopted by a fabulously wealthy Russian opera singer. It’s a Cinderella story with the genders reversed. Her name was Magdalena Rovenskaia Manacer, but most were content to call her La Rusa, or sometimes La Mina, or La Mina of the Hotel La Rusa. She had as many names as Cachita. Amazing that after spending all those years with the polyglot La Mina and her foreign friends, René still only speaks Spanish. But he understands my English a bit now and then, as I do his Spanish, and somehow he never fails to laugh at my little jokes. Maybe he’s like Fidel, he understands English perfectly but prefers not to speak it.

  Old René sat there watching intently as I studied the thirty or forty various-sized watercolours and oils on his studio wall. He modestly called himself a primitivo, but seemed pleased when I insisted he was more of a realistico. His subject matter was the bright beautiful colours, shapes, textures, and history of Baracoa, which is suspected of having been an inspiration for Gabriel García Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude.

  He said that La Rusa was muy artistico, an opera singer in fact, and she fled the Bolshevik Revolution when her whole family was killed. But she eventually embraced the Cuban Revolution. Some suggest it might not have been successful without her embrace. Accompanied by her husband, Albert, she spent several years giving concerts all over the free world, but one night she arrived in Havana and gave a concert there. It was 1930, the economy was in terrible shape, and somehow she stumbled upon Baracoa, which was isolated from the rest of Cuba, no communication, no roads, a little country all on its own. Except that it was owned by the United Fruit Company.

  She apparently didn’t get along with the United Fruit Company, nor did she care for Batista and his friends. Fidel and Che were another story. When they arrived on the scene she jumped at the chance to have clandestine meetings with them, and she made numerous large deposits to their bank. She also bought the hotel, and René showed me pictures of what the place looked like at the time, before she added a bar, a restaurant, and a third floor, transforming a seedy seaside villa into a romantic seaside hotel. One woman, two revolutions. Fidel visited the hotel twice, Che three times. They all came to Baracoa to meet with La Rusa. She gave them $25 million in gold to help finance the Revolution, according to René.

  La Mina died of cancer in 1978. Not sure how old she was, but René, who was a keen photographer in those days, was a mere fifty-two. He gets out the albums and shows photos of her, some by him. The camera loved her, even in old age. He showed me her well-preserved lighter. “Too much smoke and coffee too,” he said. He also showed me a bound photocopy of the manuscript of La Consagraçion de la Primavera, by the late Cuban novelist Alejo Carpentier, and said that Vera is the name of the character based on La Mina.

  Everybody’s beautiful here. René shows me a photo of La Mina’s long-dead mama, and even she was beautiful. And the photo of himself at age twenty-three was extremely handsome, in the García Lorca mould, with slicked-back hair.

  René was not inspired to paint by La Mina, but much earlier, by his real mother, rather than his adopted one. He has a painting of Columbus coming into Baracoa, plus a lot of paintings of Baracoa from odd angles, including from great heights, perhaps remembered from airplane rides. He is very much a slave of the town he has lived in all his life. He paints the town more often than Picasso painted his mistresses. He is more interested in the town as a whole, and as seen from different angles, and the people in his paintings seem to play a secondary role.

  He met and spoke with Che in the hotel in 1959, and the year that he was killed, 1967. What was he like? He shook his head frowningly and said, “Too intelligent.” The Baracoa area is famous in Europe and Japan for its “ecological coffee,” grown without chemicals. About 2,500 tons of it are exported each year. But it was the cocoa plant in Baracoa that Che inaugurated, and it is still going strong. Maybe that’s what he was doing at the Hotel La Rusa. But according to René, Che was there for two nights and all he did was drink, eat, and sleep. He was probably recovering from a period of strenuous labour, or maybe from an asthma attack. It’s hard to imagine Che doing nothing unless it was for health reasons. René had no memory of Che and Fidel being here together.

  As for the late great Errol Flynn, it was “drink drink drink, too much drink.” He would come in on his yacht, along with six or seven beautiful young women. Of the poet Nicholas Guillén, “I don’t remember too much.” René seemed to think there was nothing memorable about him, even though he’s the Cuban poet today you most often hear about.

  “La Rusa was a member of one of the richest families in Russia,” said René. She would have been a White Russian, the rough equivalent of the Batista gang who gathered up their cash and jewellery and got out of the country when Fidel rolled into town. When René met her, she was forty-one, and a great bea
uty. “She became very special to me. She opened my eyes to art, and poetry, and fine music, and culture. I am the son of poor farmers. Everybody admired La Mina in Baracoa. She could speak eight languages. English, Italian, French, Portuguese, Spanish, Russian, and two more. Albert had a heart attack and died in Santiago de Cuba in 1956. She lived another twenty-two years.”

  René said he likes to paint the ghosts of long ago. He claimed to be “a painter naturale, no academico. I poeta too. Oh yes, maybe twenty libros.”

  He showed me some of his books of poems, he showed me stacks of letters to La Mina bearing stamps from different countries, he showed me old first-aid manuals from before the Great Depression, also some dazzling polymites. I started reading some of his poems aloud. I told him this is real poetry, because I have no problem understanding it even in Spanish. He repaid my compliment by saying, “Your pronunciation is very good!” Whenever I tried to praise his poems he would tell me I was mistaken. Many of his poems were composed of eight rhyming quatrains. But he even denied that, and he said no, it’s merely sentimental free verse.

  I protested. Not sentimental, impassioned! The poetry of a man who is deliriously happy about living in Baracoa. Yes, he sighed. He asked if I were a poet of the academies. No, I said, I’m just like you, except that I am not deliriously happy about where I live.

  When I said farewell and got back to the hotel I remembered I hadn’t given him any money. He’d shown no concern. Enrique and others told me it would have been better to give him a little token of my appreciation, everyone else does, so I went back. From the street his eyes were closed and his head slumped down slumberingly. I said, Señor? René? He snapped to consciousness, and I passed five dollars to him through the window. He was very happy about that. And I told him I’d try to translate his poem into English and send it to him.

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  At the bank the teller said he wasn’t allowed to change dollars to pesos, but he wrote down the address of a bank where it would be possible. I hopped on a bicycle taxi, and just as we were about to take off a lovely young lady put her face very close to mine and told me in impeccable English that I shouldn’t park right in front of the bank, I should pull ahead about twenty feet. So I did, and just then the armoured car pulled up right in the spot where I had been parked. Guards jumped out brandishing pistols with very long barrels, and started toting bags of money back and forth from their armoured car to the bank.

  “If you think I speak good English,” said the lovely lady, “it is because I teach English at the language school. You would be welcome to come and see what we do there.” She smiled very sincerely and I made some lame excuse. This will be a big regret, I realize it even before we’ve said goodbye. But for some damn reason I thanked her and said I wouldn’t be able to. Some other time maybe. And I don’t know why I didn’t do it. It would have been really interesting.

  The bicycle taxi guy waited faithfully for me in the second bank, then he took me back to the bank where I had parked my car. It was a long ride, from one end of this big town (est. pop. 48,300) to the other, and I was pretending to help him. Whenever he had to pump hard to get up to speed or to get up a little incline, I’d be grunting and groaning right along with him, and pretending I was desperately rowing a boat to help speed him along, as if by magic. Other cyclists would catch up with us and have a little chat with the driver, and to get a good look at the crazy gringo. English-speaking tourists in Cuba are not noted for their sense of humour, and even the most pathetic joke goes a long way. When we got back to the first bank, and when I considered how he had sweated his heart out on my behalf, I gave him, tentatively, a twenty-peso note, and he was absolutely blown away. Was he being facetious? No, he was genuinely in a state bordering on shock; he was, in a word, astonished. He must be used to getting one peso max for such a trip. In Havana twenty pesos for all that work would have been received with an air of contempt.

  Apparently the language school is just a little place where the lovely lady teaches English to the locals. Maybe she’s the reason so many Baracoans do speak English. She seemed to be a very fine person, about thirty-five, and I still do not know why I instinctively turned down her invitation. The mature freshness of her face, the wide-open friendly intelligence of her eyes – maybe in my subconscious heart I knew if I spent an hour or two with her I’d be unable to leave. Could that be it? Good enough reason, I suppose. That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.

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  On the way out of town I became disoriented and stopped to ask a cop for directions. Big mistake! I asked how to get to the airport, because I could see on the map the airport was on the way I wanted to go, and if I could get to the airport it would be clear sailing. He ignored my request for directions and said I’d driven the wrong way on a one-way street. It’s not a huge crime, there’s very little traffic, and the street I turned down had many parked cars facing the wrong way. At first the officer shook my hand, which was a good sign. But then I noticed he hadn’t removed his black leather glove, which was a bad sign. I thanked him for pointing out the tiny one-way sign that I had overlooked. So everything was fine. I was about to take off, without having received any help with directions, when he came back and asked to see my passport.

  He was a handsome tall slender black guy on a motorcycle. He asked me many questions about my passport, and wrote everything down. Then he asked to see the lease agreement for the car, so I took my passport back to the car, left it in the car, and took the lease back to him. He scrutinized the lease, and scribbled on it a note to the effect that I had been looking for the airport and went down a one-way street. Then he wanted to see my passport again, so I went to the car and retrieved it. Then he wanted to see my driver’s licence. So I went back to the car, put my lease and passport in the glove compartment, and came back with my driver’s licence. Then he wanted to see my passport again, and so on.

  By this time several locals and even some tourists had gathered around, biting their lips and wondering when I was going to lose my cool. Finally the blood started draining from my face, and I told him, in very slow, precise, frigid, and unfriendly terms, “No matter how long I live and no matter how hopelessly lost I may be in the future, I shall never again ask a Cuban cop for directions.” He heard what I said, it definitely registered, especially when I turned, hopped in the car, and without asking permission took off real fast, leaving him to eat my dust.

  He had the class and intelligence not to hop on his motorcycle and chase me down, or pull his gun on me. I think he was basically innocent, just a guy hoping to get some dirt on a single male tourist, who could very well have been heading for the airport to pick up a shipment of drugs or explosives. He was looking for that big promotion that makes all the difference in life. Everyone knows single male tourists are slimy bastards up to no good. Even Errol Flynn, when he sailed to Baracoa, had an entourage, perhaps to avoid suspicion.

  Speaking of innocence, there on the main street of busy Baracoa stood a young boy about five years old proudly having a powerful piss, with people walking around him with little smiles on their faces, and he had a little smile on his face too. A few blocks later I saw a full-grown man having a pee on the side of the road. I shall keep my eyes peeled and report any other examples of outdoor urination.

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  For the next few hours I drove, slowly and calmly, absorbing impressions and soaking up the biodiversity, along the coastal highway running north and west from Baracoa to Moa. The broad and rhyming Río Toa was studded with pretty islands, and people were standing in the water up to their waist and doing their laundry. Now and then there would be a brilliant bay, and when I stopped and looked out to where the bay opened up into the sea, the waves would be breaking like dazzling white eyebrows on a bright green face. At one point several men from young to old had set up tables and chairs and were having a domino tournament in the cool shady mouth of a massive limestone cave. One guy spotted me coming and ran like mad to the side of the road, trying to wave
me down, and pointing in the direction I was going. But I just wanted to be alone, and I suspected he just wanted to ride with a tourist in an air-conditioned car and maybe get dropped off at the next village where he could visit with his cousin. The situation makes me feel a bit like God, deciding who gets picked up and who doesn’t. Not a pleasant feeling.

  The sea is very chocolatey in toward the shore, as if someone has dumped a thousand tons of cocoa into the bay, with its little lakelike ripples, protected from the ocean waves by a reef that causes them to break prematurely. This is near the town of Punta Gorda, where the Río Cayo Guam flows into the sea, and there is a small-bore pipeline that starts up here and runs along the shore for ten miles. It appears to be a cocoa pipeline. It runs along the side of the road, and it is painted green, very expertly constructed, and with no signs of leakage. In fact there are two pipelines, side by side, like a two-lane highway, and each one is about two feet in diameter. Whenever there is a road leading down to the sea, as there is every mile or so, the twin pipelines take a dip and run underground for the width of the road, then pop up on the other side. And whenever I catch a glimpse of the sea, there is what appears to be cocoa sludge hugging the shore, like a benign oil spill.

  Then along comes a sign saying that it is prohibited to take photos of the pipeline. I can see why, because any pipeline, even if it is just for cocoa, would be an inviting target for the enemy. No wonder the pipeline is painted green, it’s harder to see from the air. Imagine how proud you’d be if you were to score a direct hit on a cocoa pipeline in a poverty-stricken country. You could gloat for the rest of your life.