Cuba Diaries (23 page)

We pick up Miguel's wife from the asthma clinic on the way home. She walks on crutches because the bone, since she broke it, is not growing back, possibly because of a vitamin deficiency, Miguel says. His wife had to go to a clinic today because her asthma was so bad, and she needs to be picked up by us because there are no buses.

A CUBAN WHO COMES
for lunch says that the general belief among physicians is that the true problem lies with Fidel's hypothalamus—hence the torrents of words, the illogical behavior.

“If I see pole beans on my plate again, I'll scream,” I say.

“
Ay señora, disculpe
” (“Excuse me”), Lorena says, “but we have no other vegetables in the
despensa
.”

Pole beans, carrots, cucumbers, and Swiss chard are the only vegetables you can count on in Cuba in the hot, tomatoless months, and it's living in Cuba that makes you realize how you really need more than four kinds of vegetables, day in, day out, to put some brightness in your day.

Tomatoes grow only six months of the year. You see them dwindling and becoming mottled and sickly from the middle of April until May, when they have disappeared from the
agro
entirely. By October I find myself dreaming of them. “But they manage to grow tomatoes
in India
all year long,” I find myself saying baselessly, but only to myself or to Nick or to some receptive foreigner, for speaking of tomatolessness or other vegetablelessness to a Cuban doesn't help them any, and even to foreigners I can talk about it for only so long without being branded a weirdo or a bore. Back come the tomatoes in October, puny at first, then increasingly large and full, and the price
comes down until, by December, you are dragging home ten pounds of tomatoes at a time from the
agro
and making soups and sauces and fresh tomato juice. Fat the world becomes again, moist, and I think about the whole winter ahead of us with onions in it, lettuce, cabbages, eggplants, beets, and leeks.

A Cuban writer favored by the government comes with his secretary for dinner.

Bleh!
and other sounds equivalent to “Yuck!” our Cuban artist-and-writer-friends-not-favored-by-the-government said when we told them who was coming for dinner. One wiped his fingers, as if he were trying to remove some viscous substance from them. Our friends said the writer and his secretary would level a wearying litany, especially at me. That is what they are told to do when they go to a foreigner's house.

In the garden after dinner, the secretary tells me about how things were before the revolution. “No black girls were allowed in our school, but there was one, almost white, adopted by a white lady. She went to the hairdresser regularly, so they were able to keep her hair under control. Since she was a very religious girl, our Catholic club in school voted for her to play the Virgin Mary in our Christmas pageant, but the Spanish priest we had vetoed it. ‘The Virgin was a white girl,' he told us, and he put in the role of the Virgin a silly girl who wasn't religious at all, just because she had long blond hair.”

Racism, our friends said they would talk about, as if in 1959 this was news.

She goes on: “Ninety percent of the population was analphabetic, and I don't mean to offend, but you can't imagine how
terrible
the Americans were here, walking around like they owned the place.”

“I am sure they were terrible,” I say.

She smiles sheepishly. “I am sorry to be saying this, because
you
are an American.”

Analphabetism, our friends said they would talk about, and they would say it was 90 percent, when the real figure was 30 percent. Everyone knows
pre-triunfo
analphabetism was 30 percent, our friends said, but still they say 90, as if no one knows anything.

I shrug. “When you travel as much as I have, you get used to hearing how terrible Americans were, or are.”

She is silent. I wait for her to start reciting pre- versus
post-triunfo
infant mortality statistics, which is the other subject our friends said they would bring up, but she seems blocked. I know I should try to get her on some other subject—cooking, grandchildren, giant pandas—but instead I repeat, “I am sure they were terrible. And seeing the problems that are here now and what people put up with—it makes someone like me understand how bad things must have been under Batista . . .”

She sits up, recharged. “That's not why we put up with the situation we have now. We put up with it because what alternative do we have? To become like Puerto Rico? To let the Miami exiles come back? Have you seen what Miami is like? They are all mafiosos there.”

They would refer to the Miami exiles as mafiosos. They can't leave a party, our friends said, without calling them that.

“But isn't there an alternative?” I ask. “Does it have to be only a choice between the way it is now and a mafioso-run state?”

She is silent and shifts in her seat.

“Can't you imagine something different?”

She mumbles something, shifts in her seat.

“What would you like to see here?”

“People being able to determine their own future. People being able to preserve their identity. To be able to live with dignity.”

LORENA ASKS ME TO
translate from English the instructions on the back of a box of hair straightener. I haltingly translate the big letters at the top of the instructions:
This product contains strong chemicals, which, if used improperly, can cause burns, eye damage, ear damage, and other injuries. Please read the instructions carefully. If product should come in contact with eyes, wash eyes immediately under running water for no less than five minutes. If product should enter ears, flush with water repeatedly, using bulbed syringe or washed turkey baster
. . .

“This is a violence you are doing to yourself, Lorena.”

“It's a strong product.”

I am silent for a minute, then say, “There is an expression in English in the United States: ‘Black is beautiful.'”

“I have heard this expression!” Lorena says. Lorena speaks a little English, and her pronunciation is good.

“You don't have to do this, you know, because you are beautiful.”

“Thank you,” Lorena says.

“The world may be dominated by one standard of beauty, but this is changing.”

“
Sí, señora
.” Lorena smiles indulgently at me, waiting for me to continue translating the instructions.

“I always wanted to have curly hair,” I say untruthfully. “One is never happy with what one has.”

“This is true!” Lorena says, shrugging indulgently and raising her eyebrows. “One always wants to be something else!”

In the Diplo, a seventeen-dollar cabbage.

“How are you, Manuel?” we ask him upon entering the house after summer vacation.

“Not very well.”

“Why?”

“Because someone entered the garage and stole the spare tire out of
la señora's
car . . .”

“What about the guard in front? What was he doing?”

“The thief climbed over the fence in the back.”

“With all the things there are to steal here, why would he choose that?”

“It was the easiest thing to get at.”

LOLA'S BROTHER'S NEIGHBOR'S
father-in-law has been kicked to death for his car. He was a man in his sixties, a retired orthopedic surgeon, who drove his car as a taxi in the evenings to make money. He waited for customers in the evenings just off the Plaza de la Revolución.

Coming back from trips to the United States is almost “fun” in the beginning. The seven in help. The swimming pool. The lime tree. The avocado tree, which has not yet borne fruit. The papaya tree. Embargo and Bloqueo. The first dinner outside in the night breeze. Six suitcases bursting with much-needed basics. The sense of novelty, relief, and security as each item is taken out of the bursting suitcases and put where it belongs. The delight of the help as they are handed the things they have asked me to find for them—medicines, dresses, shoes, shirts, support stockings, underwear, car-engine parts.
The first visits to the
agro
and the Diplo. Seeing what is there and what is not, and trying to infer larger meanings from what is there and what is not. The delight to be had from finding an eggplant or some watercress in the sparse
agro
of September. The first visits to the antique dealers. Upholsterers, dressmakers, manicurists, and masseuses ministering to us at home. The roving fish vendors. The roving vegetable vendor and his sack full of avocados the size of footballs. The
jinetera
count on Quinta, on the Malecón.The artists and what's happened to them over the summer. Who is in jail. Who is out of jail. New laws and loopholes. The most recent live sightings of Fidel and of Raúl. Every scrap of gossip about everyone and everything, and reading into it as if the gossip were a novel composed solely of inferences, which one has put down and taken up again after several months.
Mojitos
. Daiquiris. Daiquiris
naturales
. A patch of
jinetera-free
beach. Sunsets over Havana viewed from the seaside bar just under the fortress of La Cabaña. Three whole hours of uninterrupted time every weekday when the children are in school, after I finish telling the help what to do and going to the
agro
and the Diplo. My well-lit writing room.

Muna went to Bangladesh for a visit. She decided to stay there. It was too hard for her in Cuba. “The climate is like Bangladesh,” she would say, “but we don't have such broken-down houses,” or “in Bangladesh, people work.” Muna was lonely, too, for other Bangladeshis. The total population of Bangladeshis in Cuba is six—two diplomats, one embassy secretary, and four Christian Bangladeshi women who met their Cuban husbands when they were students in Russia. One, who lived near Playa Giron, told Muna she cried every day.

We have started interviewing potential nannies. We have asked the help in our house and the staff at Nick's office to recommend women. One is a student, who comes for the interview in a halter top and short shorts with the cheeks of her behind peeking out below. One (very young) comes driving a brand-new Jeep with her name emblazoned in bold script across the back. The Jeep was a present from her papa, she says. No one in Cuba has a new car. She wears a plaid miniskirt with matching purse and tam-o'-shanter and keeps tossing her hair and giggling during the interview. One barely speaks above a murmur, and another one, a psychologist, tells me that she will only be able to be here between appointments.

A VIOLENT RAINSTORM ERUPTS
. Fine spray blows on our legs, but we are too full of food to move. We hear a crash, then scurrying in the vines climbing metal grillwork framing the veranda where we sit having dinner with friends from Argentina. A large rat swings headfirst through the grill-work and lands on the floor near our feet. It runs under the sideboard. We jump up. “Get a cat, Manuel!”

Embargo is set down in front of the sideboard. She sniffs. There is a loud squeak. Embargo backs up. The rat, black, huge, with a pink tail, makes a dash for it, squeaking and baring its teeth, back out into the rainstorm. Embargo stays where she is, back arched, fur raised.

Juana is thirty-six, married, with no children. She has a short, neat hairstyle and a lithe body and dresses modestly without being nerdy. This in itself is enough to put her ahead of all the other candidates, but Juana is also a former elementary schoolteacher. She seems calm, responsible, and educated, and she seems to have other qualities that, if she were from another country,
would mean she came from a good family—
qualities that we are beginning to realize mean that in Cuba as well.

Carlita comes to see me during the day, when the children are in school.

“I'm here to tell you that Gonzalo got married to a Canadian, he has gone to Canada, and he will not be able to teach the children anymore.”

We have seen Gonzalo since we have been back. He didn't say anything special to us, and the only thing different about him was that he had grown a goatee.

“But he left? He left since we saw him yesterday?”

“You saw Gonzalo? Gonzalo has been here?”

“Yes. He's been here twice since we've gotten back, to give the children swimming lessons.”

Carlita falls back against her seat with a crooked smile on her face. “Ay, Gonzalo . . .”

“What is it?”

“Gonzalo called me in July. He said he had gotten married to a Canadian and he was going to Canada. He told me to let you know that he wasn't
going to be able to teach the girls anymore.” She continues smiling her crooked smile. “Ay, Gonzalo . . .” Carlita writes the number of the relative she is now staying with (she moved out of her uncle's house) on a piece of paper. “The next time you see Gonzalo, tell him to call me.”

Cuba is a novel and a soap opera, too. Nothing of substance can be spoken about over the phone. People visit one another back and forth in order to say what they have to say. Just as on the soaps, if people didn't visit one another back and forth, if they said what they needed to say over the phone, there would hardly be any scenes to show. It keeps the action moving forward, the visiting back and forth, on multiple tracks.

I DON'T KNOW WHETHER
he wore them the first few times he came, but Gonzalo, I notice now, has a large diamond ring on his wedding finger and a gold chain with a gold medallion on it around his neck. I hang around the pool, waiting for him to say something about a wedding, or a Canadian, or about the big ring on his finger, which flashes even in the late afternoon sun, but he says nothing about any of it.