An Innocent in Cuba Page 8
Josefa of the laugh lines comes down to tell me she’s on bartending duty upstairs and to come up when I’ve finished my meal. Everybody who works here changes jobs constantly. A cook one day, waiter the next, bartender the next, floorsweeper, washroom attendant, chambermaid, then back to cook.
The dining room boasts a vast window facing the sea, but the sopa de polo is nothing short of inedible. The frijoles negros are fine except they have a slight taste of something they shouldn’t have: a bit of dish soap maybe. But the rice is okay. And the Manacas is excellent. The waitress noticed I had abandoned the soup, wondered if there was something wrong with it. I told her, mildly, that it was fine, it just wasn’t to my taste, no problem. She seemed to agree that the soup was no good. So she very unkindly told another waitress that I didn’t like the soup, and this waitress promptly stormed over to my table, brokenhearted, in tears, waving her arms around, because apparently it was her very own recipe, and she can’t believe I don’t like the soup. The soup is fine, I tell her, excellent in fact, very well made soup – it’s just not to my taste at this particular moment. Any other moment, I’m sure I’d love it. I can’t stand to see a woman upset. I stood up and gave her a consoling hug. The first waitress, still on my side, stood in the background rolling her eyes and pretending she was vomiting in the sink. Everybody in the dining room hushed up and stopped eating to watch the fun. Finally the second waitress calmed down and I helped wipe her tears away. But she still had the look on her face of a very hurt pussycat who is smiling through her pain. She still senses in her heart that I didn’t like her wretched soup, no matter what I say. If I liked it I’d be eating it. That’s all there is to it.
So now in order to make her feel better and to get rid of my guilty conscience about being so fussy about food in such a poor country I decide to eat the soup, all 340 grams of it ($2.20). Both waitresses eagerly lean forward as I work up my courage for a second spoonful. Excellent, I declare (even though I wish I could spit it out), but it needs a touch of salsa piquante. They look at each other. No salsa piquante. I suggest maybe some…salsa inglese? They look at each other again and shake their heads sadly. I’m about to ask for ketchup when the second waitress disappears and comes back proudly holding a little bottle of Tabasco sauce made in Louisiana. She cautions me it’s very hot, much hotter than salsa piquante. I very cautiously and obediently put one tiny drop in the soup, then smilingly shake out a dozen more. She was shocked, but the soup was transformed. I took a few spoonfuls and then with great gusto picked it up and began drinking it straight from the bowl and smacking my lips. Her sadness turned to happiness, with just a touch of embarrassment for having shed tears prematurely, and she said she’d add Tabasco sauce to her recipe for sure. I pointed to the tiny “made in U.S.A.” and said I was just doing my bit to mend fences. She said the fences are indeed in need of mending.
I got talking to an Italian-speaking Israeli at the next table, who had no problem claiming to be in Cuba solely for the chicas, and he wanted to know what I thought of the menu. There was a whole page of drinks that start with the word Ciego. He thought it must mean “gin.” I thought it meant “blind,” but that didn’t make sense. Blind soft drinks? Drink this and go blind? Oh wait, maybe it’s pop, soda pop, and the plant is probably in the city of Ciego de Ávila, commonly known as Ciego. I’m thinking out loud and the Israeli isn’t missing a word. Oops, I’m wrong again: it’s not Ciego de Ávila, it’s the famous mineral water known as Ciego Montero, and it’s from a spring – a blind spring? – in the city of Cienfuegos on the south coast, and it’s a mineral water you can get doctored, as on this menu, with different flavours such as pineapple, lemon, orange, cola, maté – in 40-cent, 45-cent, $1.20, or the giant two-litre size for $1.45.
And under the heading Platos Principales, the affluent can gnaw on the 120-gram “steack de jamón viking” for $15, the 348-gram grilled chicken for $9.60, or the 315-gram fried chicken for the same price, while a 232-gram bowl of moros y cristianos (moors and christians, or black beans and white rice) will be $2 with or without Tabasco sauce.
So this is a hilariously lovely hotel/restaurant right on the edge of the sea, you can even see the twinkling lights of Varadero Beach on the distant horizon, and on my table is a very nice pot containing a daisy and a rose, both artificial. And the bartender wants to take me home with her! Her deeply lined face is as ready to laugh as a tiger ready to pounce. She looks as if she was born skinny as a rail and stayed that way. She’s got almost no lips at all, she’s got a skinny face, and a skinny body, and she’s about five-foot-six, and funny.
One of the members of tonight’s three-man mariachi band must have got sick of the soup, so to speak, and sailed off to the States, and they haven’t found a replacement yet. So it’s a fifty-year-old man on guitar and a twenty-year-old man on bongos. They’ve been murdering everything in their repertoire tonight. The Israeli and I encouraged them in their pathetic version of “La Rumba” by playing air bongos and air piano, then we each gave them a dollar, which inspired the other diners to cough up some tips for them as well if only to save face.
My infusione arrives (30 millilitres, 40 cents) and it’s cold. There’s only one dessert on the menu and it’s marmalade with rum in cream cheese (145 grams for $2).
—
When we got to the casa, Josefa and Pepé turned out to be newlyweds in spite of their advanced age. Pepé enjoyed drinking glasses of clear cheap dry Havana Club rum, with no mix, no ice, no chaser, and so did I (on occasion), and in their spacious, very clean and orderly second-floor apartment in Boca de Camarioca on the road between Matanzas and Varadero, closer to the former than the latter, this little vice we shared created an instant bond, as shared vices often do. There was a balcony on the south side overlooking the starlight-strewn sea, and a balcony on the north side overlooking vast stretches of agricultural land and hills farther back. If I’d been thinking right I’d have brought a bottle for Pepé. He is now telling me the stories behind all his prized possessions, but there weren’t that many and they weren’t that prized. There was a framed photo of Che and Fidel walking side by side in the mountains and seemingly gazing into each other’s eyes as if they were lovers, which I’m certain they weren’t, except platonically perhaps. But Pepé just smiled, he hadn’t taken it, he didn’t know who had. It looked like a photo I should know, because it was a great shot. But I knew I’d never seen it before.
DAY EIGHT
VARADERO BEACH AND THE BATTLE OF IDEAS
Saturday, February 21, 2004. Last night, when I first saw handsome Pepé, who was also very skinny, and medium height, about an inch taller than Josefa, he was just getting up from a sound sleep. He had stopped pacing the floor some time ago, and had fallen asleep with the TV on. They could only get one channel, and very bad reception, but they still watched it. They had no phone and he hadn’t been expecting company. He looked dazed, with his droopy Jockey shorts and his slightly receding jaw. He didn’t like it at first that I was there, but Josefa with her womanly ways soon had him smiling. Revolutionaries never know when they’re going to have to leap out of bed and look sharp. You don’t see Fidel snoring away when he should be up.
They gave me a pair of lightweight, ultracool baggy khaki shorts to wear. And a pair of Zico flip-flops. I felt transformed; over the next hour or two Pepé and Josefa stood in the kitchen, pouring out glasses of rum for the three of us, with powerfully uplifting cafecito chasers, waving their hands around and laughing. Both were born in 1950, she was married before, he was never married. We married in old age, said Josefa, and we’re very happy together, for sure, no doubt, seeking confirmation from Pepé. They smiled fondly at each other. They were both of the same type somehow. They had a movie-star quality about them. Pepé could have been the Scarecrow in The Wizard of Oz. And Josefa could have been the Cuban Auntie Mame. Her teeth when she smiles are excellent, but they are black in places, and you can see fillings here and there. And she’s actually nicer than Mame.
Pepé was very youthful and amiable for an old soldier. He was the only Cuban to show me his little red card, the one proclaiming him a member of the Communist Party of Cuba. He had amusing stories about his two years in Angola in the mid-1970s, with the Cuban army successfully defending the government against the invaders from South Africa and the United States, and causing Henry Kissinger to rail against the effrontery of a small Third World country like Cuba daring to change world history. Pepé was definitely in the thick of it, for two years, firing madly in the heat of battle on occasion, “shooting imperialists.” He makes a funny but fierce face, starts firing an imaginary rifle, and goes “pop-pop-pop-pop,” then he makes a peaceful saintly face and pretends to be injecting drugs into his arm, then shaking his head emphatically, then pretending he is smoking pot, then shaking his head and saying no no no. What he was saying was that he could understand, and maybe even be involved in, drug use in other countries – Africa maybe, or Iraq. Particularly in time of armed struggle. But not in Cuba, because – he spun around ecstatically with arms outstretched – everything’s so beautiful here, no need to get high.
He had no pension. Nobody gets a pension from the African wars. They weren’t paid a peso for their courageous and noble service abroad. But any job that they left in order to serve in Angola, when they got home they would get their entire wages from all the time they were away. That was a vast amount of money, he suggested, but I wasn’t quite sure what his job was that he resigned from in order to go to war. It was hard to imagine what either of them would do with a vast amount of money, or any money at all for that matter. People are poor, but their needs seem pretty well as few as their options. And their primary needs are twofold: freedom from the fear of another invasion and the end of the sanctions.
Pepé showed me an intricate gadget that looked like some arcane instrument of torture. But it turned out to be an oil heater. Very economical, he said proudly. And then there was his monster oil tank that magically never goes empty, as if Venezuelan elves sneak in and top it up in the middle of the night. Josefa put the strange little antique oil heater in the sink. It was like a Russian samovar from the Chekhov era. Then she filled a can with water and put it on the heater. When the water boiled she poured it in a pail, and then topped the pail up with cold water. She placed it on the floor of the shower for me and said that since I had been travelling all day I would require a shower before sleeping.
In the morning, all three of us got up at the same time. After breakfast, it was time to go. But they refused to take any money from me. So I went downstairs to talk to Yandys, Josefa’s son-in-law, who works for a hotel at Varadero and whose English is perfect. He says he never knows which hotel he’ll be working that day when he gets up in the morning. He is a very soft-spoken gentleman in his midthirties, a totally unlined face, handsome and serious, loves to fish. And he’s modest for a fisherman. He catches a certain fish that is about a yard long, the wahoo, and he will catch twenty or thirty wahoos in a day if he works at it. But he has never been able to hook into one of those big marlins Hemingway specialized in. He not only takes tourists out for the wahoo and maybe the sea bass, but he also goes out on his own. Anything he catches this afternoon will be on the tourist’s plate tonight. “Very good fishing off Varadero,” he says.
There’s a large rapt audience for this little chit-chat – his three kids, his wife, his mother, his mother-in-law – and I’m not sure what happened to Pepé. Oh yes, and an older very sad, quiet woman. Mi madre, said Josefa with a worried smile. Yandys says the Canadians pay $250 for a day’s fishing. He thought they wouldn’t enjoy it as much if it was free.
Should I continue pressing the money on Josefa or would she be insulted? Oh no, he said, she’ll take it probably if you keep working at it. So I went back up and told her that Yandys had given her permission to take the twenty dollars. Her face beamed. Then I gave her an extra ten and said it was for Pepé. I looked around. He seemed to have disappeared. She seemed very happy, but I had the sense she was going to keep the ten to herself. Something in her eye told me Pepé and that ten would not get to know each other. But that wouldn’t bother me at all. I also gave her all my little baby bananas. And a big jar of vitamin C tablets.
—
Varadero is a magnificent imitation of a working-class paradise, with perfect pointy-roofed thatched Polynesian cottages and various extravagantly ultrapostmodern hotels painted in wild combinations of primary colours and pastel hues. The only problem is, they’re going through a bad patch weatherwise: the sun is too hot and the water is too cold. I’m walking along the beach, with the sea just as faded as my jeans, a startlingly placid other-worldly white with a single drop of blue tincture for the entire sea out to the horizon, like a freshly laundered sheet of faded denim. As for the horizon you can almost reach out and run your finger along it, as if we’ve accidentally stepped into a different universe where different rules of the horizon apply. And just to put a focal point into this strangely captivating and dreamlike scene, a fellow comes flying by in a little one-person seaplane, with just a surfboard on the bottom and a smaller surfboard on top, and a ten-horsepower outboard motor. The fearless pilot is sandwiched between the two surfboards, and this surfboard seaplane is climbing beautifully. The pilot, as if he knows that he will meet his fate somewhere among the clouds above, can cut the engine and float down to land on the flat surface of the sea, but he’d prefer to continue climbing just now, in his flat-out passion, flying eastwards parallel to the beach, about fifty yards off shore and fifty yards off ground, climbing steadily at about two o’clock, striving always to dwell in that quivering little penumbra that separates life from death.
I won’t bother you with my banal thoughts about Varadero, except that although the hotels lack the sublimity of an ancient Zen temple, they are pleasant to look at, to be in, to wander through, and the silence and serenity can be transformative. Some of the hotels may be a bit flashy, but they’re super-friendly, airy, spacious, and full of transparent colour. The architecture is reminiscent of the pavilions at Expo 67, though more solidly built, and they provide for an interesting interface between the workers of the capitalist countries and the Cuban hotel workers, musicians, artists, construction workers, and so on. People are getting together, comparing mythologies, punching holes in each other’s propaganda systems, hearing the other side of the story first-hand, until there’s nothing left but unlimited peace on earth. They even have information kiosks where news-starved Canadians can find out all about Volverán! – Los Cinqos Innocentes.
But the happy holidayers do of course look terribly silly riding along in their off-track choo-choo train, and gawking at the palm trees, and pretending not to feel too obviously uncomfortable when they pass gangs of Cuban construction workers slaving shirtless and shining with sweat under the hot sun – building hotels, roadways, golf courses, information kiosks, and shopping malls.
But when you work year-round at some mind-numbing job in a capitalist state you have to go somewhere for your vacation. Somewhere you can relax and forget all your miseries, and where whatever it costs will go to the benefit, more or less, of the long-suffering Cubans. The five-star Maritime Varadero Beach Resort would be perfect, if I can say so after such a short afternoon visit. The devout have their temples, the secular masses have their beach resorts. It would be a very boring two weeks, but boredom can be nice. You could bring along your copy of The Tale of Genji to help you slow time down even more.
News alert! On the flat sea there are three beach balls halfheartedly racing each other toward the horizon. People in shameless bodies lie on blankets and coat each other with cream. Now there are three people reading books on chaises longues under palm trees, while three others swim slowly in the sea. Also, why is it that everything associated with paradise has to be boring? It looks so benign, so timeless. Maybe the swimmers are looking for their beach balls that have disappeared over the horizon. Also there is a gigantic, bright blue-and-yellow inner tube, which
could hold about thirty people on its pretty canvas deck, and it is anchored and being ignored by the guests for now, the sun being too hot.
Everybody here seems to be either Canadian guests or Cuban hosts. Six Canadians were standing in the lobby chatting as I strolled by. Somebody made some reference to “home” – and a very short, stout lady about forty said, irritably, almost panicky, and a little too loudly, “Oh, I wish I was home – now!” The tone of her utterance was so anguished and heartfelt, I automatically turned to look at her, and my jaw innocently dropped, and I knew that this utterance of despair came from the deepest level of her soul. But when she saw me gaping at her, the shallower level kicked in. “Oh, I didn’t mean that,” she said. “I was just joking of course.”
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In the central part of Cárdenas (est. pop. 98,500), the Museo Oscar María de Rojas contains, among thousands of items on display, three that I will remember as long as memory lasts. First there was the garotte, the instrument of slow execution used in Cuba during the colonial repressions and wars of the nineteenth century, between 1830 and 1880. I actually tried it on for size and it was dead scary.
Second, there was a collection of fabulous seashells – including many polymites, astonishingly bright, small, red and orange and yellow concentric seashells that look like shining little eyes warning predators to lay off. Third, the stuffed lioness, of which something must be done – it’s very sad. It appears to have been shot twice in the head and once in the side. The bullet holes have been corked and painted over with red nail polish. She’s such a gentle beast, the wimpiest lion imaginable, a harmless creature who didn’t deserve to die.