Cuba and the Night (11 page)

For a while, we made a kind of makeshift home in front of a closed door, and I bought us some beers, and we cuddled and got close. But then things started getting heavy, and she got nervous, and every time I kissed her, she looked around for the security man. So we headed back to the bus station and got into the line. There was nothing to do there, as usual, but hold one another, and gossip, and wait.

“You know, Richard, once there was a long
cola, a super cola
, a
tremendo cola
, the longest
cola
in the history of Cuba. And a guy came up, with a beard, wearing army clothes, and said,
‘El último?’
and they led him to the back of the line. And as soon as everyone else saw him there, they all found ways to leave the line or go back home, until the guy was alone at the front. ‘Hey,’ he said to the last guy to leave, ‘what is this line for?’ ‘Oh, it’s for leaving the island,’ the man told him.”

I wondered why she was telling me this kind of story in a crowded place like this—on the eve of Fidel’s visit, no less—but I figured she knew what she was doing, and decided to go with it.

“Here,” she said, as we were pushed closer together by the line. “Let me show you this.” She pulled out from her pocket her pink wallet, and, searching through it, drew out an old sad black-and-white mug shot, not much bigger than her nail.

“Your
esposo?”

“No. My father. I never told you his story?” She stopped for a moment. “He was a
Fidelista
before; he loved Fidel. He used to say that Cuba was the only country that was free. That had no bosses. He went to Russia to study for him, he gave everything to the Party. And then he fell in love with a woman, and her husband found out, and this husband was in the police, and my father was sent to jail, and that was it. The one true friend of Fidel, and they let him die.

“I believed in Fidel too, before. He had so many dreams; he was so strong; he gave himself only to his country. I was a good
Pionera
in school; I wrote essays about Che. But then they killed my father. And after, I told you, there was one time I was engaged. He was a good boy. Very good. Kind. Patient. Not like the others. It was my first love. And then, one day, it was like this: there was a fiesta, and there was a
cola
, and I was young, and I could not control myself, and the police were trying to command us, and telling women they could go first if they would go behind the wall with them for five minutes, and I got mad, and I kicked a policeman there, and they took me to prison. My
esposo
, he was there, and he shouted at them, and told them to go to hell, and they called him a traitor, an imperialist, and he was in jail for six months. When he came out—it was different. It was never the same again.”

I looked at her then, and saw that it was about something more than bread and plane tickets, and as tangled as any family history. “That is why I learned English,” she went on. “That is why I love Martí. Because he wanted to do something with his life. Not only to wait, to sit, to visit a foreign country and hope that things will change. He tried to change things himself, to make things better.” She smiled up at me then, and said, “Better we kiss. You must enjoy this Cuban evening,” and she relaxed her body into mine.

The minutes passed, the hours passed, it seemed, and the line got longer, and there was never a bus in sight. At one point—it must have been three a.m. or later—someone got out a guitar, and a few drunken boys began beating out a rhythm on the walls, and a girl started singing, and Lula joined in from where she was standing, and, in a faint, high voice, she sang boleros and then Cuban songs, and then Yoruba songs and Beatles songs and even Russian songs. The time moved more quickly then, and the
cola
itself became a party, with frantic strumming and the beating of walls, and voices, two or three, taking melodies for a walk. Then the bus came, and suddenly the line, so patient, broke into ranks, and there was a scuffle, and someone shouted
Hijo e’puta
, and a big white guy took a swing at a black, and someone kicked at Lourdes, and hit her in the leg, and we climbed up amid the mob, and grabbed some seats, and she fell asleep in my lap as we lurched back toward
Havana. It must have been five-thirty then, and the sun was just beginning to rise, but I was too wired to crash out—I had too much to think about—so I just sat there, with her head resting in my lap, stroking her hair and watching her face, and seeing the sun come up over the sugarcane, another morning-after in the glorious Revolution.

T
he next day, I went back to Artemisa to shoot Fidel. I knew I could get him easily this time—the crowds weren’t as big as ten years before, and the backdrops, with all the dignitaries seated on the stage, framed by huge billboards of Lenin and Marx, would be perfect. I went early, by bus, almost as soon as I’d taken Lula home, and I took with me my Olympus OM2, the kind they don’t make anymore: small enough for me to shoot from the hip. It was a good move. There was some other guy nearby—a freelancer, from Tacoma or somewhere—who’d set up a tripod in front of the stage. He’d waited six hours to get this place, I heard him saying. But before Fidel even came out, the security guards moved over, and started hauling him away. He didn’t speak English, he said, in good Spanish, but they knew that trick, and they handed him over to a bystander who spoke English, and who explained to him, “They want to know why you are taking so many pictures.” “This is a great day for me,” he said, deciding that he did speak English, and I almost felt like cheering him on. “Fidel is my hero. All my life I have waited for this moment.” “That’s fine,” said a guard, speaking through the bystander. “Please enjoy this moment,” and he opened the back of the camera, and tore out the film.

I got a few good shots early on—with negative space above, and room for a banner in case someone wanted to use it as a cover—and Fidel kept talking, talking, in a rolling, slow Spanish so clear even I could follow: that was his gift, I thought again, to make a declaration simple enough for even a child to understand. But pretty soon the rain began to come down, really hard, and people started filing away, or just gathered closer in circles on the muddy ground, huddled over their picnics of bread and beer. The light was going
fast now, and Fidel was still standing there, gesturing, roaring, shaking his fist as he recited the year’s harvest statistics, and I decided that I’d had my moment, and began to pick my way around the puddles, and over the people sitting under plastic bags and the kids reveling in the muck.

At the back of the open field, a few boys were practicing dance moves, and the rest were heading home in streams, like a crowd in the fourth quarter of a football game when the home team’s down by 27. I saw a car circling for customers, and I flashed a few dollar bills at him, and he quickly came over to me, and as he did, I saw a couple of kids speaking English—Canadians, I figured—and asked them if they wanted to share, to bring down the costs.

“Great. That’s really kind of you,” said the girl, shaking her head dry, and looking as if she’d just won the lottery.

They crowded into the back, and as we began to thread our way through the crowd, the old Revolutionary battles started up again.

“That was just magic back there,” she said. “I could feel it. Something special.”

“Sure. Because you were with the Rent-a-Crowd guys, the ones who are paid to go and clap.”

“Okay, Greg. That’s fine. You be cynical. That’s great. Fine for you. But I could feel something. Not always, for sure, but sometimes, just for a moment, I could feel what this whole thing was all about. Like being caught up in something bigger than yourself. Caught up in a wave, a current. Like giving yourself for something.”

“Caught up in the rain, more like.”

“Okay. You want to listen to Reagan or Thatcher, that’s fine. That’s your prerogative. It’s just that these people have something else. Five eggs a day, three eggs, two eggs, it doesn’t matter. Because they are happy.”

“Easy for you to say. You have all the eggs you want. And a ticket to Toronto next week.”

“You know I don’t mean it like that. These people have dignity. They take themselves seriously. They’re trying to achieve something. They know it isn’t going to be easy.”

“What dignity is there in waiting in line and bartering? In dressing
yourself up so you can get a foreigner to buy you a tube of lipstick? In selling yourself by soft-selling your country?”

“So you think it’s dignified to live in suburbia with Geraldo on TV and the kids shooting up in the sixth-grade classrooms and the murder rate in Washington higher than in Lebanon?”

“I’m not saying North America’s perfect. But just because our home’s fucked doesn’t mean that this place is any better.”

“At least it’s pledged to something. At least it still has ideals. At least it’s trying to be itself.”

A heavy silence fell. The car grumbled through the rain.

“Okay,” she finally said. “We agree to disagree. Okay?”

“That’s exactly what you can’t do over here. You’ve got to agree in Cuba.”

“Okay, Greg. Will you let it go?”

He was silent for a moment. “It’s just that six hours in a bus to see an old guy speaking in the rain while everyone else is filing out isn’t my idea of a historical moment.”

“Did you see them dancing in the back?”

“Sure. They dance like that at Grateful Dead concerts. Does that mean Jerry Garcia is the savior of the world?”

“He is for me,” I said, figuring I couldn’t take two more hours of dialectical materialism in action. “You should see the kids in Managua.”

“I told you we should go there,” the girl told her friend.

“You go to the Café Lennon, and you see all these students reading the works of the great Roberto Weir. Deadheads of the world unite: you’ve got nothing to lose but your brains!”

That shut them up. And when we got to Havana, I decided just to expense-account the whole thing: this couple had enough problems without being bankrupted by a taxi ride.

W
hen I got back to my room, I lay down to map out the evening. I could shoot nightclubs, I thought, or the old guys with their arms around nubile teenagers. I could try José’s house, or the love hotel. But pretty soon I realized I wasn’t thinking of anything but Lourdes. It was a strange thing; I wasn’t prepared
for it: it felt like I was betraying my job. There’s only one thing in photography, and it’s focus. The only thing that matters is keeping your mind sharp and clear. No distractions. No second thoughts. Keep your mind as polished as your lens. I remember once, in Seoul, I’d been working the same time as Jim Nachtwey, and just the way he stood there, in the middle of all the tear gas and the pellets, completely erect, as motionless as a Zen priest, catching moments in his lens, it was like watching a master at work.

But with Lourdes, it was like something else was coming into the picture. I couldn’t get her image out of my head. She was everywhere: at the edge of every picture I saw, there was her face, or the way her hair fell down, or her eyes in the dark of the bar. I hadn’t even taken a picture of her alone, and yet she was in every picture that I took.

I couldn’t figure it out, this spell: it wasn’t just her face—pretty girls are a dime a dozen. It wasn’t just the way she’d shown me her world, or fallen asleep in my lap. It wasn’t even her mischief. Maybe it was just the fact that I couldn’t figure her out: when I saw her in my mind, I always saw rings of smoke curling around her head, and I could hardly make out her slow smile, her musky eyes. Sometimes, when I was tired, I played our whole time together through, like slides on a carousel, and saw it all as a story about her getting dollars, and some presents for her mother, and a way to join her aunt in America. Sometimes, when I’d just made some picture and was all fired up, I’d think of something she said, or the way she’d broken away from me that first night, and it felt as though the streets were singing. It was like the whole crazy country: look at it one day, and you’d see this grotesque, sharp-featured hag. Then click your eyes into a different kind of focus, and the image resolved itself into a beautiful girl. The kind of optical illusion they teach you in high school.

Now, though, I knew there was no way I could work. I lay on my bed, and the more I thought of the last bed I’d lain in, and the last night I’d spent—without any bed at all—the more I felt so full up that I couldn’t stop moving.

But there was no way of getting in touch around here—no faxes
or answering machines—so it had to be the old-fashioned way, like in the old movies: the long nighttime walk to her house, the pounding on the door, the whispered thanks to anyone who’d open up, the run up the stairs, the quick survey of her kitchen. This time she was there, thank God, and I told her I had to talk, and I almost pulled her with me out into the street.

“We can go to the Central Hospital,” she said. “It is safe there.”

“No,” I said. “It has to be now. I can’t wait. I’ve got to be with you. Something has changed.”

“You mean Santa María?”

“No. I mean Artemisa. The
cola
, the songs, the bus. If I want sex, I can have it with any girl in Havana.”

“So you don’t want me.” Her smile was wicked.

“I want you now.”

“Okay, Richard, come.” She led me down to a local bus station, and there were a few old cars parked outside in the dark. “Dollars,” she said to an old guy, and he opened up his Packard, and we got into the back. “Where are we going?” I whispered. “Nowhere,” she said, and sat close to me. I felt the down on the back of her neck, kissed the soft spot behind her ear. She said something to the driver, and he took us toward the beaches to the east. In the dark, on the seat, she ran her hand under my shirt, and I felt her tongue on the tip of my ear. Soon my hands were under her shirt too, while the driver paused to look around, and we passed through the long, ghostly streets of Havana. “Here,” she said at last, when we were on the Via Blanca. “Maybe you take a walk for fifty minutes, an hour,
compañero
, and then we will give you dollars.” The man got out, taking the key with him for security, and then I was saying, “Come here,
angelita,”
and she was flashing her anarchist smile. “So, Richard, you believe in angels, but you do not believe in God?”