An Innocent in Cuba Read online

  Meanwhile, back in Havana, I put my sock and shoe back on and feel a lot better. They give me the address of a larger polyclinico in Miramar that stocks walking sticks. I hobble up to the street and hail a cab. It’s an old beat-up pale yellow Lada. You have to lift the door a few inches before it will open. It is a terrible wreck, but the driver is very proud of it, in a melancholy hangdog sort of way. We understand and instinctively like each other. His name is Carlo, but he likes it when the tourists call him Charlie. He is sixty-three, and he can’t figure out how to get the car going faster than twenty miles per hour, which gives me the opportunity to observe certain aspects of Cuban traffic. Even the bicyclists are passing him. He keeps as far right as possible, to cut down on the horn-honking from the rear. Our route is lined with old Spanish palaces, which were empty and falling apart ten years ago but are now beautifully restored, sparkling in the sun, and housing embassies, cultural centres, government offices, medical labs, concert halls, lecture halls, art galleries, various non-government organizations, and so on.

  When we get to the larger polyclinico, Charlie kindly comes in with me. There are three canes hanging from hooks on the wall behind the main counter. I choose the black one. It is twelve pesos. So I give the attendant the smallest I have, a twenty-peso bill. She looks very confused. Why doesn’t she just give me eight pesos in return? Then I realize my twenty-peso bill was really the tourist pesos, fixed on the U.S. dollar, so then I am very embarrassed and don’t know what to do. But Charlie, who has been having a little siesta on his feet, suddenly leaps to my rescue. He hands the woman eight pesos (thirty cents) from his own pocket and off we go.

  This was definitely a poor person’s cane. This wasn’t the sort of cane you buy at Shoppers Drug Mart for twenty bucks. It wasn’t black, it was dark green with a black rubber handle that was attached by a screw to the cane and was already coming loose. But it felt good in my hand, I felt ready for anything. I wouldn’t be bothered by touts and hustlers any more, because the chicas would see I had a cane, a sign of aged impotence, and the chicos would be worried I might be a homophobe and hit them with it.

  Charlie took me back to the Havana Libre, where I blew twenty dollars reading Canadian newspapers in the Cyber Café. Southern Ontario is warming up, it’s now zero degrees Celsius, and Paul Martin’s government seems to be going down the drain with a heavy burden of petty scandals. That twenty dollars was wasted because when I got back to the bar, I met two Torontonians, newlyweds who had decided on Varadero Beach for their honeymoon, but it’s been too cold for swimming or sunning, so they signed up for a day trip to Havana. They were wearing identical Toronto Maple Leafs sweaters and black-and-white Canada ball caps. It turned out we live exactly two subway stations away. They filled me in on what I’d already been filled in on, but I didn’t mind because news from home is always worth hearing twice. They also implored me to visit them at their favourite bar in Toronto when I get back, and described it in wonderful detail, but I forgot to write down the name of it.

  —

  Cuban bartenders don’t fanatically measure their drinks, so tipping them liberally pays off very well, as does shaking their hand and introducing yourself, offering them a cigar, etc. I’m now nursing my toe, freshly bandaged and treated, at the main-floor circular bar at the Havana Libre, and I am also nursing my well-deserved gin and tonic with Angostura bitters and about three ounces of gin for the price of one. A waiter is taking three glasses of red wine to a table behind me, and the servings are widely disparate. There will be a bit of a squabble no doubt over who gets which glass. Hard not to love a country like this. Cuba no problemo, as they say, hereabouts, constantly.

  The Restaurant El Barracón is also on the first floor. A. says the food here was wretched, so it better be better than it was ten years ago or it’s no tip from me. The ancient limestone coral walls and pillars of the original building are exposed, for a pleasant multicolour effect, with numerous natural trailings of green and orange leeching through the thin whitewash, and with ancient rings for horses also exposed in the old walls, cut into place long before this early postmodern hotel (formerly known as the Havana Hilton) was dreamt of. There’s an unusually good three-man mariachi band, with a singer who does “My Way” better than Frank Sinatra, followed by “Only You” better than the Platters. They even made that dull old chestnut “La Rumba” sound good. I had a bowl of lobster soup and a large serving of white rice and black beans.

  They have me sitting behind a stout seventeenth-century pillar, so I can listen to the band without having to watch it. And when they finish “La Rumba,” I get up from my table and step out from behind the pillar in order to applaud and be seen applauding. When I sit down, the singer, who looks about fifty, handsomer than Frank but not as rich, in spite of being a great singer, comes to my table and thanks me for my enthusiastic response, which was definitely deserved, he seems to be saying, but seldom forthcoming, because people are so cheesy, and can’t tell good mariachi music from bad these days. The bad bands give the good ones a bad name. I didn’t have any requests, but I had a dollar for him, a good handshake, and a lot of deep eye contact – three things that are still very much appreciated in Cuba.

  —

  Charlie told me today that all the different car-rental agencies are about the same price, the same value, etc. They’re all standardized by the ministry responsible for car rentals. So I think I’ll rent a car tomorrow and just get out of here in search of interesting information and excellent experiences. In the meantime, I’m up to page 232 of Islands in the Stream, where Hemingway says of a certain character: “…He was an excellent car handler with beautiful reflexes in the illogical and neurotic Cuban traffic.”

  Illogical and neurotic, eh? Could Hemingway have been projecting his own death-wish demons onto the poor people of Cuba? I shall rent a car, hit the highways and rural routes, and find out for myself. Till then, my first impressions indicate the motorists aren’t homicidal, or even mildly hostile, as is the norm in cities like Toronto, nor do they have that special resentment toward pedestrians Toronto drivers love to display. Give me neurotic and illogical over homicidal any day. But the more neurotic and illogical the driving is, if it is, the sooner I’ll be back in Havana, returning the keys to the rental agent.

  DAY SIX

  STOLEN NOTEBOOKS

  Thursday, February 19, 2004. Woke up thinking about something actress Carrie Fisher said in some British paper I was reading at the Hotel Ambos Mundos bar: “Resentment is like drinking a cup of poison, then waiting for your enemy to die.” She was supposedly referring to something from her unhappy Hollywood childhood, but it seemed at the moment to capture the essence of U.S. policy toward Cuba.

  A. is still haunted by the memory of a little boy who approached her in a crowd in front of the Capitolio a decade ago. He looked ill, his complexion was deathly grey, he was shrunken and sad. In his belt his mother, supposedly, had securely fastened a transparent plastic envelope with a U.S. dollar inside, on display. Unsmilingly, silently, desperately, he caught A.’s eye, then pointed to the dollar bill, with his eyes glued to hers for signals. She handed him a dollar and he held out his hand for another. He was a walking-talking empty billfold seeking to be filled, a billboard promoting U.S. currency.

  Even in Islands in the Stream, there’s a reference to a man who gives a poor person a twenty-dollar bill out of simple compassion. And that was Perry King’s sole defence, apparently – that he had given the money out of compassion and not for any ulterior motive. Wherever in Cuba there are foreigners, this kind of simple heartfelt gesture is repeated, so it’s driving me nuts to know that Perry is nearby, in a Cuban jail somewhere, with lousy food and crowded cells. At least we know he’s not being tortured, because torture in Cuba went out with Batista. There was before, there might well be again, but for the past forty-five years Cuba has been a torture-free zone. And maybe the food isn’t that bad these days. And the cells not that crowded, if at all.

  —
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  After breakfast I sat in my room reading Islands in the Stream. And trying to figure out why I had such a horrible nightmare. Who fills our minds with such dreadful apparitions? Why, when I’m peacefully sleeping, do I suddenly see two cars colliding head-on at high speed, and the occupants thrown out under the wheels of a speeding bus? In vivid detail, I watched as the wheels of the bus crushed heads and tore limbs off, with many replays, and each replay shown from a slightly different angle. As the bodies flew out of the cars, for the fourth or fifth time, in slow motion, their faces had the horrified look of the horse in Picasso’s Guernica, or the screaming mother holding her dead baby in the same painting, or the silent scream of the dying man in the foreground, with bombs still falling from the sky.

  Does this mean I should cancel my plans to rent a car? Or is it merely a warning that in my driving around Cuba I should be especially aware of the possibilities of such horror. Maybe it was a warning that Hemingway was right about Cuban drivers – or maybe the roads themselves are illogical and neurotic. This was some kind of dreamworld warning, from some deep part of me that I usually am not in contact with, and it definitely was not a pleasant way to start the day. The dream shook me; it was so powerful I was even thinking of cancelling my stay and flying home. What sort of fatality rates prevail on Cuban highways? The guidebooks don’t speak well of the roads or the safety thereof. But for some reason this dream has given me a mad desire to prove them wrong.

  —

  That’s it for the Canadian embassy. I won’t call them again. At first they were out to lunch, then they were at a meeting, then they were out of town. This from three separate calls, each about an hour apart, after the Cuban receptionist took my name and forwarded it to the various secretaries. All I wanted was to chat informally, maybe arrange a meeting with Fidel, get filled in on the Perry King situation, and bring up the issue of the late Greg Curnoe’s notebooks.

  Curnoe was an important and much-loved painter on an official visit, invited by Cuba, along with other Canadian artists, and he was sympathetic with the Cuban government, and with Cuba, which is not to say he wouldn’t have been critical. The visit occurred fifteen years ago. Greg’s notebooks were full of watercolour sketches of beaches and palm trees, pen-and-ink drawings, and interesting little poems executed with rubber stamps and a ballpoint pen. He left them in his hotel room and when he returned a few hours later they were gone.

  I’ve written about Curnoe’s lost notebooks in the past and have called on the Canadian government to make an official request for their repatriation, but nothing has happened. Greg was killed a few years later in a cycling accident, on a quiet country road in southern Ontario. What a hero I’d be if I could return to Canada with his notebooks under my arm! Or at least return with some kind of plausible excuse for their disappearance. Greg would not have made much of a fuss, but the loss of those books was definitely a disappointment.

  I’m tempted to think that the dream, and my inability to get ahold of anyone at the embassy, are dual omens. But for some reason I’m interpreting both to mean I should get out there on the big highway and explore the island as it’s never been explored before. Slowly and carefully.

  —

  Like all great novels, Islands in the Stream is much better the second time. The minute I finished it I threw everything in my bag, said goodbye to Melba (Monica was on duty), and headed for the Hotel Havana Libre, where there is a row of five or six desks devoted to car-rental requests. Each desk represents a different agency, although they are all connected at the ministerial level. I flashed my passport and credit card and was soon off in a grey Peugeot 106 – pretty well the only object of that particular colour in all of Cuba these days. I didn’t know where I was going, but I was determined to do all I could to avoid the fate of those little people in my sour and sobering dream last night. Somerset Maugham used to maintain that the wise traveller travels only in his imagination. But I hereby promise to prove the exception to that rule, if such a thing is in my power. It is true though, there is something unwise about travelling, and most of us do altogether too much of it. The truly wise stay at home, rent movies, and read the odd travel book.

  DAY SEVEN

  EL CRISTO DE JILMA

  Friday, February 20, 2004. Everybody was off to work. They were going into the fields and the warehouses of agriculture. Children and teachers were being dropped off at school. Medics were heading for the hospitals and polyclinicos. Pictures of Revolutionary heroes lined the road, with their names and mini-biographies. I had to stop the car because two skinny old men, who didn’t seem to know what they were doing, had a cable stretched across the road. Instead of doing this the easy way, letting the cable down so I could drive over it and continue on, they insisted on pulling it as tight as they could, one at each end, with all their feeble strength, so that it would be high enough for me to drive under it. Which I managed to do, with a cheery smile, though it scraped the roof a bit. Maybe they thought I’d get a flat if I drove over it.

  The sun was blazing and I was heading back to Santiago de Las Vegas, a bit south and west of Havana, near the José Martí Airport, to look for my glasses. I must have left them in the deep grass at the side of the rocky road where I had my flat tire last night. I also think I left the tire wrench there in the Cuban night. And my watch seems to be missing too.

  I feel like an air-conditioned jerk driving through the centre of a vast number of busy agricultural communities, with everybody rushing off to work. They go on horseback. They go on horsedrawn wagons. They go on bicycles with wide baskets on each side and with sidecars. They go on motorcycles with sidecars and trailers. They go squashed nose to nose on the backs of trucks. They go in Fidel-type uniforms, they go in yellow-and-red school uniforms – and man, do I need a cafecito or two. It was very cold last night to be sleeping in the car. I had to drink a lot of rum to get warm enough to dose off.

  —

  It all started last night around Santiago de Las Vegas. Later when I told the story to Nelson at the car-rental agency, he said, “Oh don’t go down there, that’s where all the potholes are.” He would say that though. Anyway, on a nice paved road with no potholes at all, all of a sudden one huge pothole opened up out of nowhere and – bang! The second I hit it a miserable hissing of air was followed by the bup-bup-bup of a deflated tire. So I pulled over, wrenched all the nuts off the wheel, then worked on that jack for an hour trying to get it to lift the right front corner of the car, but it would go up only so far and then it would stop, so that it was impossible to get the wheel off.

  Out of the darkness came an old man, who told me straight off that he was sixty-three years old, and the big fat beautiful red sow he had on a leash weighed 325 pounds. It loves mashed-up sugar cane, he told me, and cigar butts. He was taking that porker for a walk as if it were a dog, or so it seemed: the real purpose would be more serious, either insemination or slaughter.

  To meet a stranger on a lonely road in such darkness can be a bit disconcerting, but this was fine. The old fellow had just a moment earlier found a razor-sharp machete in the grass. He was testing its sharpness with his thumb. He said people shouldn’t leave these lying around, schoolkids could pick them up and hurt each other. He handed it to me. I pretended to shave myself with it. You’d need a really steady hand, though, or else you’d be perforating a nostril or poking your eye out. So I handed it back to him. Switching the machete back and forth like that was a little ritual of trust, like shaking hands, except more suitable for the middle of the night when evil spirits fly abroad. Now I could trust him not to cut my throat and steal the car, and he could trust me not to cut his throat and steal the pig.

  —

  He started working on the jack and he had the same problem. It only went so far. He said, Wait a minute, don’t go away, don’t do anything, just wait here, I’ll be right back.

  He came back without the sow but with his son, a very tall man, handsome, serious, a strong agricultural worker, a believer in the
Revolution and all the slogans. He was about twenty-eight, and he brought his own jack with him. In a flash he had the car all the way up, the wheel off the ground, the nuts had already been removed – but now there was a second problem. The wheel still wouldn’t come off. We were almost blind in the darkness, but there seemed to be a large nut in the hub that had to be removed.

  Without the slightest complaint, the selfless son, raised on the principle of helping out whenever possible without any thought of reward, went all the way back to the farm and returned with his big tool box. He found a monster wrench that fit that nut perfectly. But the nut, if nut it was, was still unbudgeable. We decided it just looked like a nut, it wasn’t really a nut.

  Since we didn’t know what to do, we just stood there looking at each other. Finally the old fellow got another idea. He told me and his son to wait. He was going to get El Mecánico, the village mechanic. The son and I waited forty-five minutes, trading Spanish lessons for English in the dark. Then the old man returned with an even older man, a skinny little guy about seventy, with well-cared-for long white hair and sandals. He sported a white cardigan and a small white goatee. He seemed to be the village godfather, and he had a massive lead pipe over his shoulder – about five inches in diameter and six feet long.

  With not a trace of excessive dignity, El Mecánico sat down on the grass right in front of the car and started whacking and whacking and whacking the wheel with his big lead pipe. This was insane! Nothing was going to happen! And he just kept whacking and whacking and whacking – and all of a sudden, like a burst of lightning after you’ve seeded the clouds from your biplane for the thirtieth time, the wheel fell off. Wow! All four of us started dancing a little jig around the car. Then I put on the spare and tightened the nuts, while the young fellow lowered the car. Everybody laughingly shook hands and said goodbye. I gave ten dollars each to the old man and his son, and I gave them each a huge hug, and multitudinous muchas graçias, etc. They could buy another pig or two with that money.