An Innocent in Cuba Read online

  There is a handsome black fellow named Pérez who speaks flawless English, has just graduated from the University of Matanzas, is working as a guide here, and he seems to be resented by the other guides, who are white, speak no English, and take little interest in anything except tips from tourists. Pérez tells me that the lion was spending a life sentence in the Cárdenas Zoo, and in 1922 escaped and was shot to death by a police officer, afraid it was going to attack someone. What an injustice! She just happened to wander away from the zoo because someone had forgotten to lock the gate. She began to wander around town, innocently going to see the homes of the very people who were always coming to see her in her home. Now here was her chance to repay the visit. Then suddenly a loud bang followed by searing pain and death!

  “In those days, you know,” said Pérez, “they didn’t have tranquilizer guns. The officer didn’t know what else to do, probably. He didn’t want the lion to attack anyone, and so as a cautionary measure he shot her several times.”

  Pérez’s English was so precise and eloquent, perfectly intonated and modulated, with a fine choice of words and expressions. He was pleased, but he’d heard it all before, and he modestly said he was very “interested in languages” and studied very hard. His skin colour was closer to caffe con leche than espresso. He seemed to think black people weren’t usually “capable” of the hard work needed to learn a language, and it would have been foolish for me to argue with him. He thought his father, who was French and spoke excellent English and Spanish, would have been the source for his linguistic preoccupations. I was disappointed that Pérez hadn’t been on tap to be my guide when I arrived, and I had to endure the much older Antonio, who wouldn’t stop talking in a screechy voice an inch from my ear as he rushed me from room to room in spite of my protests. Oh, how I tried to get rid of him. I even told him, in many different ways, that I would like to continue the tour by myself now, but he refused to stop mouthing a memorized spiel about the various collections.

  Now, as I chat with Pérez, Antonio is sitting on a chair in the corner glaring at us. I asked the young fellow for his favourite thing in the museum. He said it might be the garotte, but he wasn’t sure. That would certainly be the item one would be most likely to have a nightmare about.

  He decided it was the butterflies he liked the best. I could appreciate that, but for me it was the polymites, the ones from the waters around Cuba. I hoped my dreams tonight would be more about polymites than garottes.

  —

  In Cárdenas I’ve just seen the kindest human gesture imaginable. An older gentleman in a blue jumpsuit is watering the grassy Parque Colón with a long black hose. He’s lost his nozzle, he’s just controlling the flow with his thumb. He was watering patches of flowers rather than the lawns, or where there are young trees growing, but now he’s giving special emphasis to the fully mature trees. They have red flowers and green leaves at the same time.

  There are two boys on the street playing catch with a yellow ball about the size of a golf ball. It has quite a bounce to it, but it’s lighter than a golf ball. One boy misses it and the ball bounces through the iron fence and comes to rest at the foot of the man in the blue suit. The man has his back turned, and he doesn’t notice the ball. The boys say to him, “Excuse me, señor, my ball!” And the man turns around, looks at the boy, finds the yellow ball in the wet green grass, and picks it up. But before he throws it back to the boys he wipes it off on his trouser leg, then tosses it to them. That automatic gesture was so touching. It would have been bad manners, at least in his mind, for him to have thrown the ball in such a way that the boy might get his nice clean school outfit spattered with mud. Or some muddy water might splatter on his face.

  And then the ball came flying back again. He picked it up, and this time he didn’t dry it off on his trouser leg, he just washed it off with his hose, then threw it to them. Then along came a fellow on an old beat-up Chinese bicycle wearing a T-shirt that said, Canada Beef Export Federation, and he was looking very serious, scratching his head, and adjusting his eyeglasses.

  Cárdenas’s predominant style for girls between twelve and sixteen is flat sandals, with cross-hatching of very long thin yellow shoelaces all the way up to the knee, then nicely tied in front of and immediately above the knee. Also it helps to be wearing a pair of cut-off jean shorts, and a very sheer, transparent black blouse with a solid black brassiere under it and clearly showing through. And I was not to see this particular style elsewhere in Cuba though it’s ubiquitous in Cárdenas. All the males, from age twelve to ninety, ogle these young girls with great glee, and sometimes they will even sneak up behind them and pat them on the behind, causing the girl to squeal and scream with great joyful anger.

  In addition to the sexy young fashion models, there are many serious-looking young people around Cárdenas today. They wear reddish-maroon silk scarves, white blouses, blue miniskirts – and the boys wear white shirts and blue trousers with red scarves. Would these be the José Martí people – youthful scholars devoted to Martí’s teachings?

  Dressed in that manner was the woman who guided me around a beautiful old fire hall that has been transformed into The Battle of Ideas Museum. She spoke personally, and told me about a Canadian friend of hers, from Montreal, whom she misses terribly, and who is the godmother of her child. She allowed me to tape her:

  Dave: How did you get to meet her?

  Dania: Well I used to work as an entertainer in Varadero. So I met her there when I was pregnant and I wasn’t working. And she is a person who cannot have children, she is not allowed to have children.

  Dave: She was a Canadian on vacation?

  Dania: Yes. And we met each other. And I made her to participate with us in the carnival time we had in Varadero. And she become very close to me, you know. She called me every time she wanted to go somewhere or those kind of things.

  Dave: What was her age?

  Dania: A little bit older than me, maybe two or three years, but not that much. We were very close. And then in the second time she was in Cuba she went to meet me at the hotel and she saw me pregnant. And she was so happy! And she wanted to be my baby’s godmother. And I said to her if you will be that, it will be the biggest present of my life.

  Dave: I’m getting goosebumps.

  Dania: Yeah!

  Dave: Where does she live?

  Dania: She’s from Quebec. She speak French. But she’s very fluent in English. She’s a hairdresser. And she works a lot in many different things, you know. But she’s such a good person. I like her very very much. Her name is Linda Rochefort. I was with my daughter here today. She’s six years old. I’ve been writing to Linda and she is crazy to come back to Cuba. But she fell down, and she was having an operation because of that. And it’s been three years that she hasn’t been to Cuba, and she’s very sad because of that. She send me pictures and letters but she’s crazy to see her daughter, that’s the way she call her, her daughter.

  —

  Dania showed me some precious documents of early Cuban history, relating to the rivalries between the United States and Spain for possession of Cuba. And she showed me some old photos dealing with various atrocities committed upon the civilian population of Cuba down through the years. For some reason she brought up the subject of Isla de Pinos and I asked if she had by chance ever been there. She seemed to be trying not to show her sadness at being unable to travel freely. “Unfortunately, I have not had the pleasure to be there yet,” she said. And I, in a moment of extreme insensitivity, said I was thinking I might head down there next week, and I could sense a flash of envy added to the sorrow. And yet she is, obviously, a very dedicated Cuban socialist and profound admirer of Fidel.

  “Lucky us!” she said. “The store were closed at this moment, and they were counting all the currencies and other kinds of things – and there were not too much people in there. Lucky us!” She was remarking on the photos of the wreckage of Havana’s largest department store, El Encanto, blown up by U.S.-sp
onsored terrorists in April 1961. Eighteen people were injured, one killed. By “us,” she didn’t mean herself among them, it was her way of identifying herself with the people who were in the store.

  Another photo: “This one, it was a plane that came from Florida to put a bomb in the sugar factory here in Perico [a few miles southeast of Cárdenas]. But the plane exploded in mid-air. Those things over there are part of the airplane, the fragments they could get back after the explosion. And on the other side there is a big picture of Playa Girón [Bay of Pigs]. Maybe you’ve heard something about that? We won this battle in only three days.

  “And this was a big ship that brought some armaments to Cuba, and the United States put in there two bombs set for separate times. They had a spy in the ship, so when they arrive here, he leave the ship, and the two bombs were planted already in the ship. So when the first one explodes, some people die, and the other ones run there to help those people who were in the ship, the second bomb explodes, and so, many more people die in that action.”

  There was also an exhibit devoted to the life of a young volunteer teacher who was hanged by a counter-revolutionary band. Many young literacy advocates in the early days of the Revolution were harassed and murdered for trying to teach people to read and write, inspired by Fidel’s stirring command: “If you don’t know, learn. If you know, teach.”

  “He was teaching the Cuban people to write and read, and this is the piece of wood where the young teacher, Conrado Benitez García, how can I say, was hung up, you know?” “He was hanged?” “Yes, on January 5, 1961. And they also killed another one younger than this one, he was only fifteen years old. Terrible!”

  There is a large three-part exhibit, colour co-ordinated, and devoted to the Elián González story. “You can see three different colours. Blue is the time when he was found on the sea. Red is all the actions that we were doing to bring back the boy to Cuba. And the white area is about the boy when he comes back finally, with his family, to Cuba. Here you can see a T-shirt that the fisherman was wearing the day he found Elián on the sea.”

  Dave: Ah, Elián González was from Cárdenas?

  Dania: Yesss!

  Dave: Is he still here?

  Dania: Yes. Well, he used to live near here, I don’t know where he’s living now. Because they moved. If you want [to talk to him] we can try. He study near here. Next block on the corner you will find the school where he study. He’s big now, more or less. And he’s very happy. He’s been here because he belongs to the computer club here in the museum. He come here sometimes to practise and learn something about computers and all that kind of things.

  Dave: Does he realize how famous he is?

  Dania [laughing]: Yess! He knows!

  Dave: Does he strut around?

  Dania: No. He’s normal. He has another two brothers, younger both than him, and the three of them, they’re on fire, they’re moving all the time, running around – terribles. [She laughs.]

  Dave: But not really bad.

  Dania: No, I mean it in the best way. You don’t have to be pushing them to do something, like some kids in their homes. They are not that kind of kids, they are active. They are always running, laughing, making noises.

  Dave: What is the uniform you are wearing? There are many young people in Cárdenas wearing that uniform.

  Dania: This is just the uniform the people who work at the museum wear. So all the workers here should dress in this way. But we have here many associations, you can belongs to José Martí Association or Nicholas Guillén Association, it depend on your inclinations.

  Dania said if kids show interest in writing, for instance, they are invited to join associations devoted to journalism and poetry. “But it doesn’t matter what association you belong to. It’s more or less all the same, because they all fight for the same thing – Cuban freedom.”

  She showed me a photo of the chubby-faced José Antonio Echevarría, the anti-Batista student who was shot in the back at the age of twenty-five in 1957.

  Dania: He was from this town. He was shot, but not in this town. In Havana. He died in Havana.

  Dave: What a waste! José probably had three times the IQ of the man who shot him.

  Dania: You’re right! You’re right! You’re right! Human beings! You’re right. I don’t know how I can explain that. But they have no sense.

  Dave: It’s pretty hard to understand.

  Dania: Yes, it is.

  Dave: It’s as if they have no control over their own blood lust. Nobody with a mind could be that senseless.

  Dania: They don’t think about it. They just took this decision and never realized how hard it is for us. They have the power so they do it, that’s all.

  —

  I was admiring the photo of Camillo Cienfuegos, who was very close to Che and Fidel. He was killed at age twenty-seven. “He died in a plane” – she paused for effect – “accident. He was missing in the sea – and no, we never found the plane or anything. So every twenty-eighth of October all the Cuban people go to sea and we throw flowers to him. Because we never found him. But he was a very popular leader here in Cuba, and very brave.”

  We keep wandering. There are guitarists, at first they were playing classical guitar music, now they are playing popular songs. People come in and out of this bright and beautifully restored and renovated fire hall. I seem to be the only non-Cuban on the entire island, population eleven million, land area 42,803 square miles, or 110,860 square kilometres, for a population density of 256 Cubans per square mile, or 99 Cubans per square kilometre.

  We stop at the foot of a larger-than-life statue of José Martí with his arm around a young boy.

  “So,” said Dania, “José Martí, he used to say that kids were the heart of the world, you know? And that’s why José Martí is hugging the boy against his chest, and with his other hand he is pointing in the direction of the embassy of the United States, and his attitude is, well, he is accusing the imperialismo for all the things that is happening here, and in the world, with the kids, and the poor persons in the world. And here is a picture of Fidel, on the day that we opened this museum. Yes, Fidel Castro was here, and he wrote these letters for the workers here.”

  She showed me Fidel’s letters, in a hand reminiscent of a famous letter he wrote at age twelve to President Franklin D. Roosevelt, asking for a ten-dollar bill: a very distinguished handwriting style, then and now, with many artistic curlicues.

  “He says something about this being the first museum of its kind in the world, but there must be many other ones like this one in the future. He is referring to the concept of a museum devoted to the ‘Battle of Ideas.’ ”

  “He is no stranger to ideas,” I said.

  Dania said, “He was born with ideas. And he says in the letter that the Battle of Ideas cannot die, because the humankind depends on that – on our ideas, what we think about the world, and what we think we can do to make it better.”

  I asked if she could translate the final paragraph from the letter. She read, “The first in Cuba and in the world. There will be another ones but this one is the first one. The idea, it will be like in a school an example for the rest. The Battle of Ideas will lose but it won’t be lost. The humankind depend on them. Honour and gratitude to all the persons who created this historical museum. July 14, 2001. And he sign it Fidel Castro Ruiz.”

  Dania is fighting back a tear or two after such a feat of spontaneous translation and remembrance. She is very proud to be part of the Battle of Ideas. And in a photograph on display you can see Fidel busy writing the very same letter that we now have in our hand.

  Did she meet him?

  “Yesss,” she breathed. “It was very impressive. You don’t know what to say, you don’t know how to move. It’s, it’s incredible.”

  “Did he look into your eyes?”

  “That’s the worst part, because you are sh-sh-shaking! Yeah, he did. And also he touched some persons with his hand on their shoulders. And you didn’t know what
to do.”

  “And he’s so tall and intimidating.”

  “Yes he is six-foot-three more or less, he’s tall, and yes it is intimidating, believe me it is.”

  “Yet there’s nothing to be intimidated about, really.”

  “That’s right. That’s the problem. And he speak to you so kindly, you know. Later on you can go and relax in yourself, but in the beginning you don’t know what to do.”

  We move on to a display devoted to the Volverán issue, the plight of the five men known all over Cuba and elsewhere as Los Cinqos Innocentes. They have been given lengthy sentences in U.S. prisons on espionage charges. While working in the United States they got word to Fidel that they had evidence an attempt was about to be made on his life. There are billboards all over Cuba with pictures of the men and with the single word Volverán, which literally means “They will return.”

  “Now this is the part of the museum dedicated to the five heroes, maybe you heard about this, that they are in the United States in five different prisons.”

  I confessed to being slow on picking up on this issue and still didn’t have the full picture.

  “Well, they work in the United States for our government. They give us information about what the United States is planning to do against our president, against Cuba, and all that kind of things. But they weren’t doing anything against the United States people, not at all. It was to try to avoid, how can I say, to try that they don’t do anything against our people, you know. Like killing our president, and all that kind of things. That was all they were doing. They couldn’t demonstrate in the trial anything against them, but anyway.”

  “Were they all working in the same place?”