An Innocent in Cuba Read online

  The dapper godfather with the sandals, he wouldn’t take a cent, he just absolutely refused, it was against his socialist principles, even if I was a rich tourist, practically on my knees begging him to take my money. He didn’t mind the other guys pocketing the dough if that’s what they wanted, but he didn’t want any part of it. He must have had the wisdom to know that money always leads to trouble, for nobody knows when enough is enough. Maybe he had some money once and didn’t like it. It’s a strange feeling when a poor person won’t take money after they’ve done you a big favour. You feel so helpless. Especially if you’re just passing through. You know you’ll be in this man’s debt forever.

  —

  So it was still pitch dark, and there were some wonderful Cuban stars up there, but their light wasn’t reaching the ground. Venus was looking a bit sleepy, quite high in the west, when I first got the flat, but by the time the flat was fixed she had dropped below the horizon. Exhausted, I drove into a church parking lot and slept there, even though I knew I’d left some of my important belongings behind. There was a school with an alabaster bust of José Martí out front keeping watch over me. At first, while having a pee, I thought it was a ghost watching me, and was so startled I peed on my foot. But it was just a bust. Real ghosts aren’t quite that gleamingly white. Not even an albino ghost could be.

  Most of the morning I spent trying to find the same spot again. And finally I found it, after driving through much scenic beauty, but the glasses could not be found. I hoped someone found them who could use them. Lucky I had this old pair, but they didn’t work so well. Also my watch must have fallen off my wrist as I was trying to get the wheel off, but I gave up searching for it in the tall grass. In retrospect I may have mistaken the spot.

  So I had no choice but to drive back into Havana, to get a spare. I had to keep giving Nelson more details about what happened to the tire in order to convince him that I shouldn’t have to pay the damages, and that he shouldn’t charge me for the tire, which was shot. He understood perfectly what I was saying, all these things that were no fault of my own, including the problem with removing the wheel, which is not common but does happen, and everything worked out okay.

  My powers of persuasion succeeded with Nelson. I told him when my friends come to Cuba I will now have no choice but to tell them not to go to Panautos for their automotive needs because I had a terrible problem with that agency. Nelson was rubbing his chin and thinking hard. I would do it, he said, if it were my company, but I am not the boss. I told him the boss would be proud of him for making such a decision on his own. Also I told him that I had heard that in the matter of car rentals anything that goes wrong is automatically assumed to be the tourists’ fault. But this malfunctioning jack was most definitely not. Et cetera. My nerves are shot. I’ve had a whole day of my precious time in this beautiful country stolen from me. He twitched when I said “stolen.”

  And so he bit the bullet and offered me an extra day free. I took it. And gave him a cigar. And shook his hand warmly. And called him compañero. I told him about my dream of the traffic accident and with his Cuban wisdom he said, “That’s good luck!”

  When I gave him the cigar, he refused it. I don’t smoke, he said. Then give it to a friend, I said. Well, he just beamed, he thought that was a nice idea, and he took it from me. But then he thought of an even better idea, he wouldn’t give it to a friend, he would keep it forever on a little shelf in his parlour, and he would put a little sign on it saying, David W. McFadden of Toronto, Ontario, gave me this cigar. I bet he does too. He seemed like the type to enjoy having a commemorative cigar on his shelf. Nelson had a dark, handsome, round face, with a widow’s peak, and he had that applelike Lorca look about him. And he had quiet eyes with no bottom to them.

  —

  The west window at Melba and Monica’s had provided me with many lingering looks at the Plaza de la Revoluçion, the fabulous Hotel Naçional, and a soaring bronze statue of the Virgin Mary holding the Baby Jesus with his arms outstretched and eyes closed, as if saying, “Like it or not, here I am.” The statue is twenty-five feet tall and stands atop the high tower of the Convent and Church of Our Lady of Carmen, so that Mary’s halo is about 225 feet above the Calzada de Infanta, which separates Centro Habana from Vedado. Wherever you stroll in those two neighbourhoods, the Virgin seems to sail along in the sky, accompanying you, like a guardian angel holding her baby out front and centre.

  But I left there yesterday and am now here, on the far side of Havana Bay, standing high on a cliff leaning my head against the base of a massive white marble statue of El Cristo de la Habana. El Cristo is sixty-five feet high, overlooking the city to the west, his empty eyes peering into every window, and he stands on a height of land a hundred feet above the harbour below. Just as the Virgin sails along with you as you walk through Vedado, Christ will play peekaboo with you as you wander the streets of Havana Vieja. From this distance, the Virgin seems about the size of a fingernail clipping. El Cristo is facing her way. Unfortunately, she is not returning his gaze because she too is looking westwards. If someone were to climb up there and somehow manage to turn the Virgin and Child around to look eastwards, she and El Cristo would be gazing into each other’s eyes across half the city and the harbour. That couldn’t hurt.

  This is a physically powerful Jesus with a lantern jaw and the great strongly veined hands of an agricultural worker. He looks as if he could reach up and pull King Kong down from that skyscraper without missing a breath, and with hands so huge he could squeeze the breath out of a Tyrannosaurus rex. He is a King Arthur without a sword, an Alexander without an army, a superhero without a comic book. This fearsome Christ is also known as El Cristo de Jilma, after the sculptress, Jilma Madera, from Pinar del Rio, who happened to have finished the work just as Fidel Castro and Che Guevara were advancing on Havana, and Batista was getting his suitcase packed. A miracle! No way she could have planned it like that. The statue was erected in the final days of December 1958. It’s billed as “the largest sculpture of white Carrara marble ever made by a woman.” It’s not quite as famous as the Christ the Redeemer atop the Corcovado in Rio de Janeiro, and it must be said that the latter, which dates from 1931, is more spectacular, almost twice as tall, and stands on a summit two thousand feet above the sea.

  But when El Cristo was consecrated, Jilma Madera told the crowd, “I made it for you to remember him, not to adore him: it’s marble.” She described herself, ironically, as an atheist, an early follower of José Martí, and an admirer of Fidel. But she sympathized with Christ’s politics, and his concern for the poor in spirit. You can see this attitude very clearly in the statue itself. Christ looks down on Havana not as if he wants people to pray to him, or to accept him as their saviour, as much as he just wants people to know that he’s watching, like a celestial police chief, a United Nations peacekeeper, whatever your beliefs may be, and he’s also conferring blessings on anyone who thinks of looking his way.

  And even though Jilma’s Christ is almost blindingly white, he’s not just for the white people of Cuba. With his Asian eyes and African lips, he’s for everyone. Jilma also is said to have left Christ’s eyes empty, to symbolize that he is there to watch over all the people, everywhere, not just in Havana, not just in Cuba.

  —

  There’s an artist sitting on a folding chair behind the statue. He’s having a little nap. No, he’s just listening to music on his tape player with his head down. He’s done some watercolours of El Cristo for people to take home as souvenirs. Also still lifes with oranges, views from a window, etc. A portrait or two of Che, a moonlit lagoon. These are bright and colourful, minimal and untutored, not laboured at all, but executed with grace and enthusiasm.

  He and his girlfriend started guessing where I was from. “Los Angeles! New York! Florida!” No no no. “England?” No. I’ll give you a hint, it’s on my hat. They look. “Ohhh! Canadá,” they exclaim with great pleasure. Then they keep repeating it, “Canadá! Canadá!” A man
goes by with a long stick and four brown goats. In the beautiful countryside there are little buildings in the least likely places, and here comes a very fat short woman about fifty wearing a T-shirt showing a dinosaur riding a bicycle. The T-shirt says, Cyclosaurs.

  In Cuba One Can Grow Old with Dignity and Security, says a billboard in Guanabacoa showing a smiling elderly couple. And in Regla I spot my first 1947 Studebaker, my favourite car from childhood, the first streamlined family car, equally pointy at the front and the back, like a Buck Rogers spaceship. And the big kids would say, “You can’t tell if it’s coming or going,” which sounded dangerous and ambiguous. This one is original sky blue, not rusty at all but very shabby and dull, and the front and back points seem to be sagging like a bankrupt Concordia. Before getting out of town I spot two more. They used to have a lean and hungry look, now they have a hangdog look front and back.

  —

  Hemingway should have called the Cuban police the “illogical and neurotic” ones, rather than the motorists. I’ve just been flagged down and stopped, at full highway speed, in the fast lane, by two cops, one on either side of the road. One pointed at me to pull over into the slow lane and the other pointed at me to pull over into the fast lane. I told them they were going to get somebody killed this way. But they misinterpreted me and thought I was complaining about them committing the horrible sin of stopping a tourist.

  “We are the police and we can stop anybody we want,” said one. The other said, “We wanted to give you a small inspection, but because you are a tourist, you can go – so keep going.” Just as I went to take off they stopped me again and wanted to know where I was going – just to see if they had guessed right and I was really a tourist and not a terrorist. I said San Francisco de Paolo. They’d never heard of it. It was world famous as the site of Hemingway’s Finca Vigía and it was right in the area, but these skinny bozos had never heard of it.

  So I got off the highway and onto a secondary road, got out of the car, and found another cop. I was going to keep pestering the police till I found one who knew where San Francisco de Paolo was. There were no signs, but I knew it was very close. So the next cop glared at me and said, “Where’s your car?” He came over and gave it a small inspection, then said, “Just go down there and turn right.” I caught him smirking at another cop, in such a way that I got the impression that’s what they always say when tourists ask directions, down there and turn right.

  Then at a stoplight a woman came running up and asked for a lift. I said I was only going as far as San Francisco de Paolo. She said, “Oh, all right, no problem,” and walked away. Wait, I said. Did she know where it is? She said, “Just go down there and turn right.”

  Yesterday, before my rendezvous with the pothole and the pig, I managed to find the Finca Vigía, but that was by coming up the other way. Coming this way it seems impossible to find. I will have to go to where I started yesterday, and then I will find it. But when I found it yesterday I was a bit late. It closed exactly at 5 p.m. and even when I got down on my hands and knees and begged them, the two handsome Afro-Cuban teens guarding the gate laughingly said, No can do.

  So now I’m trying to get there again, but nobody has ever even heard of San Francisco de Paolo, it’s not on the map, and it’s not signposted. I spoke to an old man with a bright red T-shirt with this cutting slogan: Mr. Imperialist, you are causing genocide on the Cuban people.

  He said go down there and turn right.

  Finally things started to look familiar, and I found the place, but again it’s after five o’clock and I’m snookered two days in a row. True, there’s nobody guarding the gates this time, but the gates are closed and heavily padlocked.

  —

  This four-lane divided highway is called the Circuito Norte, and while cruising along you can look out over the Straits of Florida and down at a string of hotels along the coast. A police officer and a blonde in a miniskirt are sitting under a bridge eating strawberry ice-cream cones. A young man has brought two cows to graze along the side of the road, and another fellow a bit farther has thirty-seven goats grazing on the thick green grass. The sea is bright deep blue with patches of green closer to shore, and some choppy foam as the waves hit the breakwater. The water is cold. The only person I’ve seen swimming was one fellow whose fishing line got snagged and he dove in to free it. A very tall industrial chimney with red-and-white stripes is emitting a great cloud of black smoke that will fly southwest over the island of Cuba. Let’s hope it’s dispersed before it reaches Honduras, which is where it seems to be heading.

  In Islands in the Stream, Hemingway tells a story about a Cuban fellow in the San Francisco de Paolo area who cut his girlfriend up in six parts, wrapped them in paper, and dropped them off at different spots along the road. So Mr. Hemingway the writer, in his role as Mr. Hudson the painter, used that as an excuse not to go jogging. Not because he was afraid of slipping on a body part, but because of not wishing to be shot. People would say, Oh look, somebody running (highly unusual in Cuba), it must be he who did it – where’s that rifle?

  There are some soul-stirring mountains over there, beyond the coastal plain. They’re the magic mountains Hemingway would have seen from the Pilar, weaving among the islands off the north shore looking for German U-boats, and he would observe that these mountains looked exactly as if they were topped with snow. They become very steep at the top and the vegetation falls away to expose vast patches of limestone as white as the Carrara marble of El Cristo, or the chalk-white cliffs of Dover, or the glaciers of Greenland under the midnight sun. But the actual tops of the mountains are capped with thick green grass and palm trees.

  Two black children are taking wicker birdcages home with them. A skinny white campesino standing in the middle of the highway under a hot sun with no sombrero is hoping to sell a couple of bunches of the most delicious bananas, those little ones Hemingway thought looked like fingers on a hand. The smallest bananas are the sweetest, as mother used to say. I gave him three dollars for two bunches. Put them on your cereal, he advised. Another fellow appeared with a heavy tray laden with a bright yellow mountain of nicely cut cubes of butter for sale.

  There’s a guy with flare. His car broke down on the road, and his entire family is with him, so in order to protect them as he tries to repair the engine he gets a large dead leafless branch from a tree and places it about forty feet behind the car to make sure nobody will plough into him. Clever fellow!

  This is still the province of La Habana – and behold the wondrous landscape. I’m looking at the landscape of Cuban painters – they’ve been painting these rolling hills forever, with lots and lots of little palmettos, and rivers lined with a wild array of deciduous trees, many in blossom, and giant royal palms. But we’re out of Hemingway’s transcendent area of seemingly snow-capped mountains already. The limestone here is yellow, tending to brown. You see trucks loaded with pulverized yellow limestone, for all your construction needs.

  —

  And now here’s the great old Cuban city of Matanzas, on its lengthy and magnificently curved seafront, a vast half-moon bay with a seawall spiffier than Havana’s (perhaps because marginally more protected from storms). I didn’t know that Matanzas meant “slaughter,” and that it was in former times the site of the stockyards, the Chicago of Cuba.

  Two little girls about eleven or twelve, black girls with pigtails and wearing shorts, are shamelessly strutting their stuff along the highway, and they glance over their shoulder to see if anyone’s noticing them. Coincidentally, Matanzas was where Perry King had been working. Can’t get my mind off that poor guy. I hope Perry’s cell isn’t crowded and he has a bit of room to stretch out. Not that I have any way of ascertaining his guilt or innocence.

  —

  There’s an attractive but modest three-storey hotel and restaurant from about 1952 on the beach a bit east of Matanzas. I am now driving back to this hotel after making a U-turn halfway to Boca de Camarioca. Too tired, plus I just want to go back whe
re everybody’s so happy. The happiest person of all is a bright skinny woman in her fifties with lots of pep and lots of lovely laugh lines on her face. The hotel was fully occupied, but she said if I don’t find anything suitable in Boca de Camarioca to come back and we’ll take you to our casa particulare and we’ll feed you and you can stay the night, etc. I don’t even know why I left after that except that I was a bit tired of casa particulares and was hoping for a hotel. It would be wonderful to spend the night in this hotel, you’d be able to see the sun coming up over the sea, and I was hoping for another one just like it but with a vacancy, but there was nothing so I turned back.

  This woman is very funny. She doesn’t laugh as much as Melba, but her laughter is more contagious and makes me feel happy. She doesn’t speak a word of English and her Spanish requires more concentration than I can muster, but she definitely wants to take me home with her and her husband, Pepé, who is busy pacing the floor waiting for her and who is always bugging her to bring amusing people home for the night when the hotel is full. The weird thing is, it’s not a real casa particulare because they won’t take any money for it. It’s just for the friendship, and the laughs, and seeing what I think of their lifestyle.

  —

  Manacas Clara. This is my favourite Cuban beer so far, with its festive label of a red ribbon around a white egg on a green background, brewed in the town of Manacas in Villa Clara province, a light India Pale Ale sort of beer, but it’s hard to find. At this point I wrote in my notebook, “In Cuba everything is politics” – but I can’t remember the context. It is true, though: politics as in the art of being polite and civilized and with a feeling of being connected with people no matter who they are, what their politics are, or where they’re from: simply a matter of caring for the world.