Cuba Diaries (19 page)

WE GO TO REYNALDO
and Eddie's. Eddie opens the gate. He looks stricken. “The
paladar
is closing for always.”

“Why?”

“Because . . .” Eddie twists his hand in the air as he walks into the back of the house to get Reynaldo.

Reynaldo appears. We sit in rocking chairs in the living room. All the tables and chairs are pushed to the wall.

It's the new law, Reynaldo says. Every
paladar
is going to have to pay $300 plus 400 pesos a month for a “license,” as well as a portion of its earnings in taxes if the
paladar
makes more than $3,000 in a year.

“But who can pay that?”

“No one.”

Reynaldo tells us that there is another new law, too, that people who run
paladares
from now on are going to have to show police the receipts from whoever sold them their food. The only legal receipts are those from the Diplomercado and the
agropecuario
.

“But who can run a
paladar
and pay the prices they ask at the Diplo and the
agro?
”

“No one.”

“
CAMARONES, LANGOSTAS, FRESAS
,
queso blanco”
(“Shrimps, lobster, strawberries, fresh cheese”), thin brown men murmur all day long outside the Diplo, the market on Forty-second Street, and the
agro
on Calle A in Vedado. You murmur back to them. They disappear around a corner and appear within a few minutes with battered gym bags.

We have a new swimming teacher, Gonzalo. Carlita found him for us. We stopped going to the pool in the park after a few times there, and it was too complicated, after our own pool was finished, for Carlita to come here.

Manuel brings things to the house that he thinks might interest us. He brings us a photo of a gathering of Bacardi employees in Santiago de Cuba in the 1940s. The men wear linen suits and two-tone shoes.

We know that Manuel managed part of a farm outside Camagüey before the revolution, for a man whose family is now living in Miami. The man had a big farm, but he spent most of his time in Havana. We ask Manuel now what else the man who had the big farm did.

“He was the chief of police under Batista.”

“Oh.” We change the subject.

“Did he really say that?” I ask Nick later.

“That's what he said.”

CONCHA BRINGS MAIL
to me in my writing room. She clears her throat. “
Con su permiso
. . . ,” she says.

“Yes?”

Concha asks me if I would like to buy a Stradivarius violin.

“
What?
”

Concha says she has a friend who has a friend who has a Stradivarius that he would like to sell.

“
But they cost hundreds of thousands of dollars!
”

Concha says the violin is worth $3 million, actually, but the man she knows will sell it for $2 million. She says it's not stolen, that it belonged to his greatgrandfather, that he has papers from that town in Italy, Crema, Croma . . .

“
Cremona?
”

“That's it.”

“I'll have to ask my husband about it,” I say.

I'll have to ask my husband about it
is a phrase that still works very well in Cuba.

AT DINNER, NICK TELLS
me that he has heard that Muhammad Ali, when he was in Cuba recently delivering humanitarian aid, had dinner with a woman, a former Black Panther, who is wanted for murder in the United States.

I ask Nick if he could pass the hot sauce.

Nick asks me if I don't think that's shocking and revolting.

“What?”

“Cassius Clay, one of the greatest American athletes who ever lived, in Cuba on a humanitarian mission, having dinner with a fugitive from American justice, a murderer . . .”

I shrug. “I don't think we know all the details,” I say, but I can see Nick's expression darkening.

“We're just not communicating,” Nick says. “We're having a communication gap.” The chair grinds back. He starts to leave the table.

“Ni-ick . . . I'm not saying I
condone murder—
of course I think it's revolting, if indeed she did murder someone.” This seems to be the right thing to say, for I can see him softening somewhat. “I'm just saying I'm . . . not surprised, knowing how things work in the United States. Besides, maybe he is trying to get her to give herself up.”

I'm happy I can come up with something, but Nick, too, should make allowances for a little moral laxity on my part, for after all, our maid (who, when I brought her a $4.95 rain jacket from the United States, acted like it was the crown jewels) just this morning tried to sell me a Stradivarius for $2 million.

We go to see a movie, the first Cuban movie ever made, about transvestites in Havana. It's a movie about how, yes, they had to struggle, with society and with their parents, but now society accepts them, and their parents love them no matter what. (The most heartrending part of the movie is when it shows how transvestites make false eyelashes out of carbon paper, which is toxic, and wear them, risking their eyesight.)

If it were a movie made and shown in the United States, France, or Mexico, for example, you'd say, “Big deal,” about the whole thing, but the movie theater is packed, people shout and cry all through the movie, and at the end, there is a standing ovation.

I descend the steps of the Meliá Cohiba Hotel, ready for beggars, male
jineteros
, or freelance car watchers, but surprisingly, no one approaches me.

My eye falls on an object on the sidewalk. It is a watch. I look to see if there is anyone nearby who looks as if he has lost something. There are some regular hard-up-looking people around, but they are at a distance and strangely distracted. I pick up the watch and slip it into my bag. Still no one looks my way.

Once in the car, I take the watch out of my bag and look at it. It is a man's gold watch. If I were in a normal country, I would turn it in at the hotel desk, but here the desk clerk would probably keep it for himself. I will give it to a Cuban who doesn't have a hotel job. I put it in my bag and start the car. Still no one approaches, and a newish car, revving up outside a hotel is always a magnet for someone needing something. It is as if there is a force field around me, causing time to stand still and keeping other humans away from me and semiparalyzed, allowing me to pick up the watch, examine the watch, think of whom to give the watch to, making me woozy from the strangeness of it.

I take a field trip with the children to visit a newspaper.

All newspapers—
Granma, Juventud Rebelde
(Rebel Youth),
Trabajadores
(Workers)—are in one building, behind the Plaza de la Revolución. All newspaper production has been cut back since the beginning of the
periodo especial. Granma
is still published daily, but it is just a few pages.
Trabajadores
and
Juventud Rebelde
are published once a week.

A newspaperman greets us at the entrance and takes us up unswept stairs to the offices of
Juventud Rebelde
. We see the newsroom, which consists of fifteen desks with manual typewriters on them. Only three desks have people working at them; the other desks are absolutely bare but for the typewriters, which look about forty years old. Dead malanga plants serve as decoration.

“Please speak slowly and clearly,” the teacher leading the field trip says to the newspaperman. “The children are very small.”

We visit the pasteup room, the corrections room, the room where the pasteup is fed into a computer, the telex room. These rooms are smaller and have more activity. One man sits at a desk reading
Time
magazine, a Spanish-English dictionary beside him. Some of the children start getting restless. We walk upstairs to see where the printing plates are made. The rooms are nearly abandoned. Two fluorescent lights still working out of a line of ten barely illuminate the dark hall. A tall, elderly
negro de pasas
pulls a large black barrel on a dolly, his face grim. He pauses in midstride to let the children pass. The toes of his shoes have been cut away to give his feet room. He stays frozen in midstride even after the children have passed.

Nobody else in the hallway seems to notice the catatonia and carry on as if it's normal to see him frozen like that.

It's very active in Cuba, this random time-standing-still, people-being-paralyzed thing. It's like in fairy tales: some people frozen or turned to stone, others very much alive among the statues.

I look back: still frozen.

We enter a cavernous room where the printing and folding presses are, twelve of them lined up in a row. Only one is working. We look inside the machine where pages are being printed and folded. A long conveyor belt carries them out, folded, to the floor above. The printer gives each child a copy. They are pages of an English textbook. The newspaperman explains to us that now that not as many newspapers are being produced, the presses are being used for other jobs.

We go back down the unswept stairs, under sunlight that filters weakly through unwashed windows, to the main floor, where there is a model of the building we are in, on display in honor of its tenth birthday. The building is modern, just recently built, but without the model and the sign underneath it, it would be impossible to know this.

I RETURN TO THE
house earlier than I said I would, to find Danila, dressed in street clothes, ready to leave for the day. Beside her on the curb is a container of green liquid. She stumbles over the curb when she sees me. Miguel and Concha are near her, watching.

“Hello, everyone,” I say, then go into the house.

The container of green liquid doesn't look like something we have in the
despensa
, but I am not entirely sure.

The next day, Danila comes up to me and starts mumbling. “I'm sorry I left early yesterday,” I manage to make out.

“If you would tell me ahead of time when you have to leave early, then you would never have to apologize,” I say, surprising myself, for I sound as if I am taking the situation coolly in hand, or as if I have spent the last eighteen hours thinking about how Danila left early, when in fact I haven't been thinking about it at all.

I don't work up the nerve to ask her about the green liquid.

THAT NIGHT, AT A
dinner party at which there are no Cubans, someone mentions a Stradivarius for sale.

“Oh, that old Stradivarius. It's been around for years,” someone else says.

NUESTRA FORTALEZA ESTÁ EN LA BASE DE LA SUPERVIVENCIA DE LA PATRIA Y DE LA REVOLUCIÓN SOCIALISTA
(Our strength is the basis for the survival of the country and of the socialist revolution), reads the slogan on a billboard placed in front of the parking lot at the Diplomercado. Underneath the words are images of children in military uniforms, lifting Cuban flags. One child holds a sign on which is written
¡VIVA LA REVOLUCIÓN SOCIALISTA!

The billboard is placed next to two other billboards, one for Adidas and one for Bagley S.A., which is, I believe, a biscuit manufacturer.

I'm pretty much inured to big slogans by now, but some of them still manage to catch my eye.

My brother Sam is here. He is six foot one and weighs 220 pounds. His friend Bill, who is six foot four and probably weighs about the same, is here with him. I never take my purse to Old Havana, or if I do, I take it with just a few dollars in it and nothing else, but today I would like to stop on the way home and pay for a painting that I have bought for Nick for $650. I have Sam and Bill with me to protect me, and I know Sam and Bill won't mind my stopping for a moment on our way home to pick the painting up.

We make a reservation for lunch at Galería Vasquez. Bill and Sam are impressed, I can tell, by my savoir faire as we enter the foul, dark hallway, the
kind of place where you would be sure to be mugged in the States but in Havana never are, and climb up a winding outdoor staircase in a courtyard full of dripping pipes, screaming children, tomato plants in coffee cans with eggshells in them to ward off the evil eye, broken birdcages, bicycle parts, shreds of clothes drying in the wind. Squid guts are splattered over the last flight of stairs.

Cultivated, gentle Arquitecto Vasquez takes our order for lunch, which we will return for in a few hours. We go down the stairs again and into the Plaza de la Catedral. A gaggle of people trail behind us as we cruise the vendors. They are asking to be our guide, trying to sell us cigars or PPG, an anti-impotence medicine. When they get to be too insistent, I turn to them: “
Si, somos extranjeros, pero que culpa tenemos nosotros? Si no pueden dejarnos en paz, voy a llamar a un policia
” (“Yes, we are foreigners, but what fault is that of ours? If you can't leave us in peace, I am going to call the police”). They scatter before I am able to finish. We tour the Plaza de Armas and enter the Palacio de los Capitanes Generales to see the Basura de la Historia, or “dustbin of history”—a room in which busts of past Cuban presidents are scattered at random on the floor. There is also a broken headless eagle from the top of the monument to the USS
Maine
, and a case of Coca-Cola placed underneath a Spanish colonial armchair as if it were a chamber pot. An ornate ivory telephone on a table by the side of the armchair is mysteriously off the hook. On the wall is a death announcement for Fulgencio Batista.

We continue to the Plaza Vieja, where the first slave market was, which became, around the turn of the last century, the Jewish wholesale section. So busy was it that an underground parking lot was installed in 1946, creating an ugly cement platform where the square had been. It is now being smashed by the army with pneumatic drills. We gaze at the porticoed colonial buildings (some restored and devoid of Cubans, others with a hundred people living in them, in buildings no bigger than generous three-story town houses) and at the deeply funky Palacio Viena, an art nouveau hotel built in 1912, divided infinitely into teeming living spaces.