An Innocent in Cuba Read online

  It’s the subject matter that gives the game away. The tourist paintings, or souvenir art, will be geared to the soul of the tourist. For instance, here’s one showing an old black guy with a white moustache standing next to a 1957 De Soto in front of a Cuban hacienda with a Cuban flag in the window. This is obviously a souvenir painting for the starry-eyed tourist who will gladly fork out sixty dollars for it, so that he can take it home and hang it on the wall. And feel warm and soulful in the middle of winter.

  The one serious painting on the wall, by the same painter, with the same style and palette, shows a vast cemetery, with the skyline of Havana behind it, and black people are coming up out of their graves, with big smiles on their faces, and bright sparkling eyes, as if they are being reincarnated into a happy new world. But the happy new world is the New Cuba, and all you can see is their heads, like radiant coconuts, coming up like spring flowers. I love the strange mystery of that painting. It seems so simple but it’s anything but; in fact it made me shiver to look at it and I’m shivering anew thinking of it.

  —

  Numerous chicas one after the other along the dimly lit Prado and the Malecón were accosting me later that evening. Finally I came up with the perfect rebuttal. A pair of scantily clad Lolitas tried to interest me in a two-for-one special. Sorry, I have to rush off to meet my wife, I lied. A stroke of genius! They immediately laughed at themselves for having read me wrongly, and then they went back into the shadows. Except that I have perhaps caused them to lose confidence in their ability to read a tourist. “He just didn’t look the type to have a wife.”

  But it didn’t work with one woman. It was turning cool. I had my hands in my pocket. A warm body came up behind me, put its arm in mine, and said, “Howdy, sailor, how ya doin’?” When I turned to look at her she burst out laughing. Aha! A whore with a sense of humour!

  She was a long-legged, lightweight Afro-Cuban racehorse of a woman, very attractive, in her late twenties, chocolate brown. Smart as blazes. We walked and we talked and we stopped for a beer. Her name was Yamílet and she spoke of her life. She had red tresses woven into her black hair. She said her mother had done that. She lives with her mother and her baby brother. Her father left Cuba when she was ten years old. He is now teaching physical education at the University of California. He sends a card at Christmas. She can’t visit him and he can’t visit her.

  Several days a week she goes to the University of Havana, where she studies English on the Internet. She also probably exchanges e-mail with friends from other countries, well-heeled tourists who might have befriended her in the past, and given her their e-mail address, and are now being asked to send money for food perhaps, although not in a crass way at all. I didn’t suggest she try to get through to her father on the Internet. You’d think he’d send more than a card at Christmas. Maybe he should know that his darling daughter is now f**king foreigners on the Prado for U.S. dollars and English lessons. Maybe he thinks his wife and daughter are perfect little Revolutionaries, making do with the ration card.

  So we were drinking beer and talking. She seemed to know a bit about Canada, that Canada was a friend of Cuba, and she was currently most upset about the unsurpassed nastiness of the United States in refusing a visa to several old-time jazz musicians from the Buena Vista Social Club who had won Grammies and had been expected to come to the United States for the Grammy ceremonies. She said it was yet another new offence against Cuba, and these astounding international insults never seem to get any easier to take.

  All of a sudden I looked at her with more clarity. I liked her a lot. We were sitting at the bar and I smiled and looked deeply into her eyes in the friendliest fashion. In return, she gave me some very profound kisses, which had my barstool spinning, with the bartenders looking on with great amazement. “I’ve never seen a barstool spin like that,” one said. I refused to go with her to one of those little casas particulares that is set up for girls to bring the tourists for sex, where the people who run the casa watch the action through peepholes, or gaze down from an unnoticed upper level. It was out of the question. So I just wanted to listen to her talk. She said it was very hard to get a good meal on pesos. She gets sixty dollars from a tourist when she scores but has to split that with her pimp.

  It finally dawned on me that she might not have eaten today. You’re not hungry, I said, are you? And she just rolled her eyes and sighed. She was very cheerful for someone half-starved.

  So I said let’s go and have something to eat. She happily chose her favourite restaurant in the neighbourhood, a dark little place, crowded with tables but not with people, just west of the Prado and south of the Malecón. We went in, were seated, and looked at the multilingual menu. She was happily showing off her German and Italian, which seemed right up there with her English, but her French was poor. Another lover, another language.

  But then I realized I wasn’t very hungry, it was too hot in there to eat. I had no appetite. So I suggested that instead of ordering something, I should give her thirty dollars, say, as a goodwill gesture, à la Perry King. It would be like scoring except she didn’t have to perform the deed, and furthermore she didn’t have to give half the dough to her pimp. I told her I just remembered I had to meet someone. She said okay. I suggested she get the restaurant cook to prepare a big box of food and take it home to her mother and her baby brother. I gave her the money. She solemnly promised she would do that. I think she meant it. Off I went.

  —

  Mimi was definitely not a chica, and definitely not in her twenties. But on the way to meet her I made a wrong turn, and I got there late, and I waited at her corner for half an hour, but she didn’t show up. She would have been nervous anyway about being seen with foreigners socially. A. had told me about meeting a nuclear physicist, Moscow-educated, who lost his teaching position at the university because it was judged that he had “too many foreign friends.” But that was ten years ago. It may not be so bad now, but it still exists, and there are self-appointed spies lurking in the shadows.

  As I waited, a skinny Afro-Cuban, a bit old for chasing tourists, approached and beseeched me to go into a store with him and buy him some milk for his baby. It would be three dollars. I said why don’t I just give you three dollars and you go in and get it. No, he said, they wouldn’t sell it to me. He kept looking sideways into my eye to see if I believed him. So I thought, Aha, I’ll just give him a dollar and say I have to go, so I did. [Note: This was only the first of many encounters with the very interesting “milk for my baby” scam. It seemed to be exclusively the property of Afro-Cuban Habaneros. The three dollars will become five dollars as we get further into the high season.]

  —

  On her first afternoon in Havana, A. met an ancient mariner, an old black sailor who spoke excellent English with a Brooklyn accent. He told her he was born and raised in Brooklyn, New York, and joined the United States navy in his youth. He fell in love with Havana one weekend in 1954 during a stopover, never returned to his ship, and he’d been here ever since. He hadn’t been in touch with anyone from home. Didn’t know who was dead, who was alive, and didn’t seem to give a hoot. He was a funny old guy with deep-set eyes.

  Immediately after his ship had departed he discovered Sentería, and became seriously religious, mystical, shamanistic perhaps, more Catholic than the Pope. He didn’t want any money from A., or anything else, he just wanted to show her his apartment, and his collection of large plain wooden Sentería crosses, each sitting in its ritual glass of pure water, as if waiting to sprout into a Tree of Life. His room was on the third floor of a decidedly open-concept apartment building, a voyeur’s paradise, with a view of pretty well everything that was going on in every apartment on every floor. A. pinpointed the place on the map for me, and I tried to find it, but it’s all been transformed into offices now. A lot of dilapidated residences have become sparkling commercial enterprises over the past decade. I’ve heard that most of the Havana Vieja residents from ten years ago would have been
relocated to a less favourable area west of Havana.

  —

  I was crossing the Prado over to the Hotel Inglaterra, thinking maybe I should go in there for an icy-cold Cristal, then hop in a cab back to Melba’s for the night. And halfway across the street someone slipped her arm in mine – again! And said, “Howdy, sailor, how ya doin’?” – again! The look on Yamílet’s face told me she was more than merely happy to see me. She was purring with pleasure. She pulled up her shirt to show off her dark-chocolate slightly rounded belly, not slightly rounded as in early pregnancy but rather slightly rounded as in full of the yummiest tender morsels, and with her navel sticking out cheekily, and a little forest of black hairs growing around her navel and in a narrow band disappearing into her skintight jeans.

  And she said, smilingly, sighingly, “Here…feel…I’m full of food.” As if it was the first time in years. And she took my hand and stroked her tummy with the tips of my fingers. And she said she got a big box full of chicken and all kinds of wonderful things for thirty dollars and she took it home and they stuffed themselves, she, and her mother, and her baby brother, and they had lots left over for tomorrow. The people in the restaurant were happy, but my mother was overjoyed, she said, and more so because it was not required that I have to have sex. And my mother said, You should marry that guy.

  Let me think about that, I said. So then we locked eyes and smiled dreamily. As if I were her dad just returned from California. Then I kissed her on the forehead, hopped in a cab, and waved goodbye.

  DAY FIVE

  DEDO DOLOROSO

  Wednesday, February 18, 2004. Can’t get a cab this morning, every cab is occupied. The smart people are wearing quilted jackets with hoods. Some seem fairly comfortable in light jackets. People in T-shirts only have their arms crossed and are shivering as they walk. Another cool morning in Havana. Some would call it cold. The ones without jackets, for instance. It’s somewhere between twenty-seven and twenty-six degrees Celsius. From my window I see that everyone who has a jacket is wearing one and everyone who doesn’t have one is envious. And cold. I am very privileged. I have three jackets with me and three others at home. Disgusting! How the bourgeoisie gets a bad name. But all six are rather scruffy and from the early 1970s. Nobody will mistake me for Bret Easton Ellis.

  My green fountain pen is even older, but not scruffy at all, like an old car from the 1950s that has been lovingly maintained, and it seems to love Cuba. Upon arrival, the pen immediately started producing a richer flow of ink and with a longer time between fill-ups. Even on a coolish day like today it’s working more smoothly than when I bought it for two dollars at age seventeen.

  All morning someone in a large block of flats across the street has been playing the drums, perhaps to keep warm. The drumming is good-natured, intricate, impossible to dislike.

  —

  Melba adores my T-shirt. It shows a pair of belugas, mother and baby, swimming together in a pristine sea with blissful smiles on their faces. She doesn’t ask me to translate the caption – Wildlife at Risk – but she asks if I have any children, which makes sense, because it’s the kind of T-shirt a daddy would wear. Melba has very thick hair, well brushed, with only a few streaks of grey, and close-cropped at the sides and back. She is small and with a mode of dress that is carefully chosen for a mature woman with flair. The jacket she is wearing this cool morning would seem a bit loud on a man, even a young man, with its multicoloured checks, but it looks perfectly fine on Melba.

  —

  Yesterday in Havana Vieja I came across numerous old Afro-Cuban grannies dressed up in floral hats and brilliant Aunt Jemima dresses, sitting here and there on concrete steps or little wooden boxes and puffing away on extra-long, extra-large Cuban cigars. Actually they’re not really puffing, they’re just holding those cigars cold for atmospheric effect, and as visual aids to amateur photographers with no time to spare. They probably have to give them back to the boss at the end of their shift.

  One of these grannies had a medium-size brown dog, with short hair, and it was very well behaved, almost too well. The poor pup had also been decked out in a little Aunt Jemima junior dress, and with a floral cap on its head – and a pair of overlarge sunglasses with thick white plastic frames. When I spoke to this mutt, and tickled him behind the ears, he looked over his glasses at me very sadly with deep soulful eyes and not enough energy to move his neck or wag his tail.

  Could these dogs have been sedated for the benefit of the tourists, to facilitate easier snapshots? Or perhaps because Cuban dogs have an instinctive dislike for tourists, and tend to be snappy with them? Now and then a Cuban will make a sudden unexpected move, but tourists do this constantly. Makes a dog kind of nervous and in need of a good doggy Demerol. Not a knockout drop, just a little something that will stop the average hound from giving a hoot about anything.

  The numerous other elderly Aunt Jemimas, similarly attired, included skinny women with skin like leather, and others corpulent and shining, smiling like the tropical sun, and they may be sweeping the streets with brooms, or tending to the trees and flowers in the various parks that were apparently such an eyesore ten years ago but now are just so pretty and so dreamlike, as beautiful as they had been in all their ancient colonial splendour.

  —

  My dedo doloroso is killing me. At the Hotel Havana Libre I painfully wait in a long lineup at the front desk. When I finally get up to the cashier, she tells me they don’t do cash advances any more, though they used to, when A. was here. I have to go outside, turn left, and go down the road a bit. So I hobble to the little bank, trying to keep my mind off my agony, and there are two long lineups in there, one for the cash machine and one for the counter. I get into the one for the counter as it seems slightly shorter, but after a minute or so a big serious-looking cop, in his fifties, shoulders me out of the one lineup and into another. I think he’s trying to even up the lines, but he’s doing a poor job of it. When I ask why he’s taken me out of the short lineup and put me in the long one, he puts me back into the short one (except it’s now longer than it has been but still not longer than the other lineup).

  So now I just wait motionlessly while an exceedingly lengthy transaction is taking place. Then the cop brings in a pregnant woman and escorts her to the front of the queue. Then two women from a store with lots of cash to deposit come in the back door and are ushered likewise to the front of the queue. Then one of the cash machines breaks down, so that line is placed at the end of my line. But when the people complain about being put at the end, they are given a lineup of their own, parallel to my lineup, even though there is just one teller, so the teller has to make sure he takes one person from one line followed by one from the other.

  When I finally get my cash I go out looking for a polyclinico. And now I’m sitting in a cool shady waiting room waiting for the doctors to see my dedo doloroso, which sounds more dignified and serious than “sore toe.” I’m close to tears thinking of others somewhere in the world whose toe may be even sorer than mine.

  There are two elderly ladies in the waiting room and they have lost something. They had been having a quiet chat and now they have the sofa upside down and are shaking it. It’s the white woman’s gold hoop earring that has been lost, but her black friend is looking for it every bit as hard. I have one shoe off for the pain, but am hopping around, lifting up the other sofas, then I get down on my hands and knees searching for the earring, which must have rolled somewhere. The black woman points to the white woman’s ear, the one with the hoop in it, and says the one we’re looking for is just like that one. Now they are giggling, so we give up, straighten the sofas out, and sit down. The white woman is trying to remember where she last noticed she had both hoops. Next thing I know they’ve decided my toe is more important than the lost earring. They get down on their knees and examine the damage. They ooh and aah and commiserate tenderly. They make me feel I’ve come to the right place already, and I haven’t even seen the doctor yet. You can really te
ll you’re not in Canada.

  Dr. Melba and Dr. Monica, when I earlier showed them the state of my toe, were not at all impressed. They seemed to think it was nothing. So when I got in to see the polyclinico doctors on duty (two, both female and youngish), even they managed to give me the impression I was overreacting to a very minor wound. Lazily, between much chit-chat of a personal nature, both on the phone and off, they disinfected and bandaged the toe. Then they gave me a spool of medical tape to take with me. And a half-litre bottle of cloruro de sodio .9%, enough to last a lifetime of sore toes. And of course it was all on the state. They didn’t even require my signature, or to fill out any forms. They didn’t even want to see my passport. The only thing they forgot was the extra cotton batten to go with the extra tape and I was too shy to ask for it.

  But it all seemed right somehow. I kept thinking this is truly ideal, there is no valid reason why it shouldn’t be like this in Canada, and everywhere else. The only time I had more impressive medical treatment was in a tiny Fijian hospital in a remote village up in the hills where I went with dangerously infected sunburn sores on the tops of both feet. The very large and kind female Fijian doctors had to fight with the skinny little snobbish male Indian pharmacist who insisted they were treating me wrongly, I should be given drug A rather than drug B. “They want to put antibiotic eyedrops on your feet?” he said. But the doctors won out. “Don’t worry,” they merrily told me, “he doesn’t know what he’s talking about, we’re doctors, he’s just a pharmacist who thinks he’s smart.” And I was right as rain the next day. Cuba isn’t the only country where the doctors seem more serious and well informed, and with a kind of boundless dedication to the sick and injured, rather than to their bank balance.