Cuba Diaries (32 page)

In a room marked
LADIES ROOM
there is a small bronze statue of a
guajiro
astride a giant penis—his own, but three times the size of his body. The foreskin is pulled back, and out of the head of the penis sprout the antennae of a snail. Testicles trail out the back. It is a plan for a monumental sculpture to be mounted at the entrance to the art school. There is a blown-up photograph of the sculpture, glued onto a photo of the entrance to the art school, so that you can see how it will look.

Dinner at a European banker's house. An American diplomat is there. This is convenient because we want to hear the other side behind the headlines in today's issue of
Granma:
U.S. CONDUCTS BIOLOGICAL WARFARE AGAINST CUBA
. An article states that a parasite is attacking the potato crop in Matanzas just where an American crop duster had crossed the island several months ago, emitting a cloud of black smoke.

The diplomat says the crop duster was on its way to Colombia. A Cuban airliner was getting too close, so it let out some smoke. The diplomat says he remembers Carlos Lage (a vice-president) complaining to him about the parasite a few months ago. The diplomat says the funny thing is that when the crop duster incident occurred, they gave the Cubans the explanation about the airliner getting too close and the Cubans seemed to be happy with that.
Now they send a letter to the United Nations and to all its members, without even bringing it up with the United States first. It's probably because they have had a very bad potato harvest and need to come up with some reason. No news lately about the sugar harvest, so it must be pretty bad, too.

News of the United States' biological aggression against Cuba has disappeared utterly from the news.

NICK DECLARES AT DINNER
that Cuba combines the
souplesse
of Africa with the surrealism of Spain.

A LOW-RANKING
U.S. diplomat speculates that the reason for the appearance and rapid disappearance of the U.S. biological aggression story is that the Cubans are continuing to expand their chemical and biological weapons program, in spite of their having signed a treaty, and if the United States ever calls them on it, they want to be able to point to U.S. biological aggression against potatoes in Matanzas. Making a story appear and disappear is a kind of putting-it-in-the-file, he says, for future use.

ARTICLES APPEAR IN THE
Miami Herald
stating that Cuba may be developing anthrax, and that Cuba has the capability of wiping out three million people in southern Florida before being itself wiped out.

It is true that a few weeks ago Fidel gave a speech about Cuba's being a “poisoned lamb in the mouth of the beast” in the event of U.S. aggression.

NICK ASKS A DOCTOR
who is visiting us how long it usually takes before Parkinson's begins to affect thought processes.

TOMATOES ARE ENDING
now at the
agropecuario
, not to reappear until October.

WE REVISIT LA CABAÑA
, the higher of the two Spanish forts overlooking Havana harbor, where most of the exhibitions of the biennial are taking place. Installations in one sixteenth-century barracks room after another. The theme is memory, and since most of the artists are from Latin America, most of the installations are about violence. Lázaro Saavedra, a Cuban artist,
has a piece near the end of the show, in front of the
paredón
, or wall where enemies of the revolution were shot. The wall is in a grassy, elevated square, reached by a ramp. A flame tree is in flower in one corner. Havana harbor is visible through a crack in the ramparts on one side. A cement wall was built in front of the sixteenth-century wall when the number of executions started accelerating, so as not to further damage the ancient wall. The new wall was made more porous than the fort wall to absorb ricochets. We can see the deep gouges the bullets made, in three lines—head, chest, legs. Nick wonders why they would shoot legs.

In front of the wall, Saavedra has put tombstones, thin slabs embedded in piles of stones. There are about thirty of them. Many of them have fallen over, and whether they were installed already fallen over, or fell over later, or were put in sloppily so that they would fall over, one by one, eventually, we don't know. We walk on a stone walkway to the wall, turn left, and enter a long, narrow, airless, vaulted room. On the way, we pass the title of the installation:
Buried by Forgetting
. There are more tombstones in the room. At the end of the room, painted on its wall, are three figures, mostly human but with some elements of birds in them (their mouths are more like beaks), hurtling headfirst from the sky and spewing stones from their open mouths—actual stones are glued onto the wall below them, leading to a pile of stones heaped on the floor, out of which human legs and arms protrude. The bird-humans are machine guns of vituperation. It is hard to stay in the room. It is hard to breathe in it. Turning to leave, we see a cross, placed over the entrance to the room. The cross is placed so that you see it only as you are leaving.

Fidel gives a speech in which he declares that internal immigration from eastern provinces is a threat to national sovereignty. It is a threat to national sovereignty because it has led to a rise in deliquency in the capital, and a rise in delinquency can lead to instability, instability in which CIA infiltrators can do their work.

The right-wing Spanish newspaper
ABC
writes that three hundred thousand
orientales
have been deported back to Oriente province or trucked to cane fields to cut sugarcane.

Three hundred thousand is nearly one-sixth of the population of Havana.

When, where, I ask Lety on the way to the Tocororo, were the
orientales
rounded up, where were the trucks and buses, driving them off? I ask her if it happened in the middle of the night.

Without answering my question, Lety launches into how
orientales
are the most proud, the most
machista
of macho Cubans: “‘No one is more beautiful, no one more intelligent than I,' that sort of thing.” Lety preens in the car seat. “Their expectations are too high. It's the problem of
tu lo sabes
(you know who).
Es puro orientale . . . Y también es delincuente!
” (“He's a pure Oriental . . . And he is a delinquent, too!”), Lety yells, laughing at her own joke.

“But how were they deported?”

“
Yo no sé
” (I don't know).

LETY CAN NO LONGER
rent out a house her parents left her, which she has been renting to foreigners. There are too many laws and taxes now. She says she knew it was too good to last.

The Palestinian ambassador is annoyed. He says a letter has just been sent to all embassies, stating that ambassadors will no longer be allowed to use the protocol lounge at the airport. The Palestinian ambassador says this is because some diplomats were using it for smuggling items out in their hand luggage.

“What sorts of things were they smuggling?” Nick asks.

“Artwork, antiques, black-market cigars . . .”

“No.”

“Yes.”

The ambassador says diplomats are being blamed for a general problem. Now ambassadors will have to use the VIP lounge and be there with businessmen and their
jineteras
.

“I beg your pardon?” Nick says.

“
Ay, disculpe
,” the ambassador says, patting Nick's arm.

Crowds of people on a street corner in Habana Vieja. Half a building has collapsed. It is the half with the stairwell in it. Men, women, and children stand in every window of the remaining half of the five-story building. Firemen
have pulled an extension ladder out of a truck. They are working the levers, trying to get it to stay up.

“Don't move!” one fireman shouts to the people in the windows. “Don't make any movements, or the rest of the building will fall, too!”

Pretty heated discussion at the parents' meeting at school. The school is a sweet school, but it is not challenging, especially for children whose parents are native English speakers. Two educators have come from Virginia to counsel the teachers, and the meeting is ostensibly for the parents to meet them. There was not going to be any talk of accreditation at the meeting, but the parents raise the topic. They want the school to be up to some kind of standard, somewhere. A representative of the business community says the businesspeople are especially concerned. The businesspeople are concerned because if they cannot find successors—if successors are discouraged from coming because the school is not good enough—it means that they, the present businesspeople, will be stuck in Cuba
forever!

One Norwegian father says that he doesn't understand why they don't just plunk the kids down and give them standardized exams from time to time so that everyone knows where their kids stand.

One educator says it isn't accreditation and standardized tests that are going to get them into MIT . . .

The businesspeople and some diplomats don't let her finish. There is a loud grumbling. “We need exams, we need accreditation, we need standards!” an Indian father says, slapping his hand with a rolled-up magazine on each word.

I put my pearls in my pocket and walk down Quinta after the school meeting to a dinner party we have been invited to, where Nick will meet me. Young Cuban men start muttering things and blowing kisses at me from a bench on the median strip. True, it is dusk, I'm not fat, and they can't make out much about me, but when you get to be forty-five and are beginning to look like a turtle, you wish you felt safe enough to be able to turn and ask them,
Are you doing this because you think I am attractive, because you think I am ugly and need the attention, or just because . . . ?
Just so you'd know where you, or at least they, stand. It, too, is an accreditation process.

At the party, one ambassador's wife says that even if the accreditation process takes five years, they shouldn't worry, because in five years, things are going to be a lot different here anyway, and maybe some of the twenty or
more English-language-based schools that were here before the revolution might find their way back.

“Five years?” I say.

Nick and I are introduced at a lunch to Báez, an official Cuban journalist. He has just written a book called
Secrets of the Generals
. Báez says Fidel didn't read the book before it was published. It was commissioned and organized, though, by Raúl. Lowering his voice and looking around, Báez says that at first the generals didn't
want
to talk, and I am thinking it is not just Reny who makes me think of
Alice in Wonderland
.

RENY AND I SPEAK
about blackouts. He says he never has
apagones
where he lives because he lives near a lot of important people and the Sección de Intereses. I say sotto voce to Reny that
los yanquis
have to pay for the embargo by having
apagones
like everyone else.

Reny looks around and, lowering his voice, speaks about repression at the biennial, about artists who were not allowed to show in some galleries. “This is the
war
they are making,” he says.

Reny is wearing a long-sleeved linen
guayabera
with a blue-and-white polka-dot butterfly necktie and two-tone shoes. I tell him I really like his look tonight, and he says it's men's formal dress from before
el triunfo
.

I say the greater war at the moment seems to be against
cuentapropistas
, against people who work for themselves or rent out houses.

Reny spies a
duro
within earshot and steers me to the side of the room. Reny then says that it is too bad the government is doing that, because people were using the money to restore their houses, to make them presentable for
tourists
, to bring in more money for
everyone
. They don't want to renovate
just for their own selves
.

I know I should stop, but I think I will just say one more little thing, and I say that the government prefers to shoot itself in the foot.

The Cuban Communist Party Congress, which convenes every five years, has just ended, making no concessions and calling for greater sacrifice on the part of the people.

A law was on the table that would have allowed for the creation of private small- and medium-sized enterprises, but it was not passed because it would give too much satisfaction to the United States.

“Oh,
come on!
”

“I am not kidding,” a low-level European diplomat says to me at a cocktail party. “That is how a Cuban official explained it to me.”

“I
can't believe it
.”

“It's not like anyone ever said we were dealing with emotional maturity here,” the European diplomat says after a pause.

Someone asks, at the same cocktail party, if anyone remembers the song “Limbo Rock.”

Others check for Cubans and, when they don't see any, start bending their knees and leaning back and singing, “Every limbo boy and girl . . . and how
low
can you go?”

A MICROPHONE IS FOUND
in the wall behind the bed of the French ambassador, one of the few
viva la revolución
diplomats.

It is said he was so
viva la revolución
that they couldn't believe it.

THE PALESTINIAN AMBASSADOR
says another letter has gone out, saying that ambassadors and their wives and children could still use the protocol lounge, but that lower diplomats and their family members had to use the VIP lounge from now on.

“
MIRA COMO A ELLOS LES PASA TAMBIÉN
”
(“Look how it also happens to them”), Lety says when I tell her about the letters going out to the embassies. “First, the government announces to us we can never have any eggs again, and we say, ‘No eggs! How will we get along?' Then after that, the government says, ‘OK, you can have eggs, but only four eggs a month,' and everyone says, ‘How wonderful! We can have four eggs a month!'”