Cuba Diaries (38 page)

Nick, sighing and closing his eyes, says he
knows
this, but the X——ian National Chamber of Commerce
asked
him, “elite tourist” doesn't mean
quality
tourism, of the standard of
Mme. Isadora B. Tattlin
, it doesn't mean people wanting to get out and experience a new country; it means hardworking, lower-middle-class people from some blighted place wanting to change their social status for a while in a place that's different, but not
too
different.

I tell Nick he doesn't have to get mad.

Lola tells us how a foreign man will pay a
jinetera
a hundred dollars a month or more as a retainer to have her on hand for his return. The only trouble is most valid
jineteras
get their hundred dollars or more a month from several sources, and sometimes two of a
jinetera
's “sponsors” show up in Cuba at the same time.

A BOMB IS FOUND
at the airport and defused.

THE TRIAL OF THE
crazy American Van der Veer, who handed out anti-Castro leaflets at intersections, begins tomorrow.

Van der Veer has said that he has asked Cuban authorities to execute him 159 times.

Miguel is not at work today because his wife is being operated on to have the plate in her leg removed, the one that was put there after she broke her leg. Her hemoglobin was up, she had no fever, and she had not had an asthma attack in a long time, so the new doctor Miguel and his wife found felt that it was finally the right time to operate. Miguel and his wife changed doctors because her hemoglobin was not going up. The new doctor told them that she could eat all the lamb in the world, but if she didn't eat tomatoes with the lamb, to fix the iron in her system, it just went out. She started eating tomatoes
and
lamb, and now she can have the operation.

The cocktail party we are supposed to give with the X——ian haute cuisine products has been canceled.

I do a jig. We will invite Cuban friends.

Nick says not to touch the food until we hear from the X——ian trade show organizers.

“You don't really think that they will come and
take the food away
,” I say, even though I don't know why I think we should be entitled to keep the food. Then I know: it's because we live
here
that I think we should be entitled to keep the food.

“Could be . . .”

Nick's calls later in the day to tell me that a truck will be coming on Saturday to pick the food up.

Juana's brother Frederico, a Cuban doctor on loan to Angola,
se quedó
in Spain. He was on a stopover in Spain on his way back to Cuba from Angola and
se quedó
. He is the third sibling out of six to
quedarse en el exterior
.

We go in the afternoon with Ramón, our antique finder and sometime intermediary, to El Viejo Loco's. El Viejo Loco lives with a male companion in an almost windowless downstairs flat in Centro Habana, and once you're in it, you literally can't take a step, for on the floor, on chairs, in display cases, on beds, in the pantry, on every piece of available furniture except the toilet and hanging from hooks on the walls are porcelain lords and ladies, harlequins, flappers, Swiss peasant kids, Moors, a few caricatural blacks (but very expensive, as they are in demand), every kind of dog or bird you can name, lions, tigers, elephants, horses, Indians, geese, fish, clowns, cowboys, and all the tchotchkes no one thought of taking out of Cuba or bothered to try to sell until now. No child under fifteen has ever been permitted inside El Viejo Loco's, and if you find yourself at El Viejo Loco's for more than half an hour in any month except November through February, you want to run screaming out of it because it is so steamy and so obsessive.

El Viejo Loco, a very pale, expressionless sixtyish
blanco
with a sparse comb-over and a sizable paunch, dressed in shorts, flip-flops, and an undershirt, moves ahead, grunting, shifting objects to make room for us to pass. In addition to the figurines, there are vases, vases with every kind of bacchanal or pastoral scene on them, Chinese urns and busts of Homer, Pasteur, Beethoven, Marx, Lenin, Martí. There are boxes, lamps, bronzes, books, and paintings. There are decanters, punch bowls, Murano bowls and ashtrays, and glasses for champagne, port, liqueurs, and punch. There are candelabras and cut-glass hurricane lamps and a Tiffany table lamp that belonged to Batista, worth ten thousand dollars. We skirt wide past a snarling mastiff, straining against his chain, around a basket full of sweet potatoes, and enter a back room hung with ceiling lamps and wall sconces. There are twenty-five thousand things there that anyone would be hard-pressed to live with,
but El Viejo Loco has a fast turnover of the more beautiful and more fashionable pieces—Murano glass and art nouveau and art deco items. He has Lalique glass, too, and Steuben. It's worth it, when it's not hot, to visit him. When it's hot, you might as well be in a sauna. El Viejo Loco wheezes as he pulls still more things out of locked cabinets and grunts rhythmically when he is at rest.

The only thing that is not for sale is an oil portrait of a little girl. It's his sister, he takes the trouble to tell us between wheezes, every time we go there, who died of typhus when she was five.

Nick and I select some Murano ashtrays, two Victorian lamps, and one art nouveau lamp. El Viejo Loco wants seven hundred dollars for everything. We argue and cajole, we go into the other room for consultations with each other and with Ramón, we pretend we're going to leave, but El Viejo Loco remains firm. Nick got mad at me last time for saying I was hot and leaving in the middle of a negotiation, so I tell him to handle it. Nick handles it by agreeing to pay seven hundred dollars. El Viejo Loco nods, grunting, his expression unchanged.

“You've got your price, so why aren't you in a better mood?” Nick asks.

“I
am
in a good mood,” El Viejo Loco answers.

Nick and I tell Ramón on the way home that the guy's name should be not El Viejo Loco but El Viejo Deprimido—the Old Depressed Guy. We ask Ramón why he's depressed when he probably makes more money than twenty-five Cubans put together.

“Because he has no other life than his stuff. His kids are all in the United States.”

“But he's a homosexual, isn't he?”

“
O, eso
,” Ramón says, batting the subject off as if it were a fly. “He's got money, he's got a house full of stuff, but it's not enough, even for someone as materialistic as him. And he's going to die, and who cares?”

“But he loved his sister,” Nick says.

And I love Nick. He makes me live in these weird places, but I really did the right thing, marrying him.

We go to visit one of the two members of the Arte Calle (Street Art) movement still remaining in Cuba. Arte Calle was a movement begun by students at the San Alejandro High School of Art at the end of the 1980s. They performed their most notable works when they were seventeen. One of their
works was a large poster of Che, exhibited on the floor of a gallery. The words of a poem were at the top and the bottom of the poster: “
Dónde estás, caballero bayardo / Hecho historia o hecho tierra?
” (“Where are you, courageous gentleman / Have you made history or have you soil?”—i.e., nothing, blended with the soil).

At the 1988 opening, as the crowd became larger, people finally had no place to go and were obliged to walk on the face of El Che. A teacher became enraged and fought with some of the artists. Police were called. One policeman drew a gun. Several women took off their shirts in protest (which, we are told, was a form of female protest in the 1980s and before). The gallery was compelled to remove the piece. The director of the gallery was fired and now lives in Venezuela. All the other artists involved in the show (except the two in the apartment we are visiting) now live outside Cuba.

The upper half of the poster has been pinned up on the wall for us to see. The lower half is unrolled on the floor. We see a video of the 1988 opening. As we are watching the video, a couple emerges from a back room marked
OFFICE
. They mumble something to our host, who accompanies them down the stairs.

“That was a love couple,” our Elegguá confirms rapidly in a whisper to us while our host is downstairs. “They have no privacy where they live. They have to go to other people's apartments.” Then, about our host: “His family begged him to give up art after the exhibition. He has just started painting again.”

Our host (a thin and still very young
blanco
, with dark circles under his eyes, who hardly speaks) shows us a painting he is working on now. It is hanging on the wall next to the portrait of Che. It is a picture of a crying woman who, though crying, continues to put on makeup in front of a compact mirror, blue mascara lines running down her face.

There have been almost constant
apagones
lately and no explanations. Finally an explanation comes: it's to save gas for the visit of the pope.

Sunday. Rain almost the entire day. Take the children to the nearly normal pastry shop in Siboney as a way of going somewhere and run into Kcho,
the artist who won UNESCO's young artist prize three years ago, for his piece representing a
balsero's
raft as a crown of thorns. One of Kcho's teeth has been knocked out. It was knocked out in a brawl at a bar called the Fox and the Crow, and Kcho did have—it was agreed by all who knew him and heard about the brawl—the whitest, the squarest, the healthiest-looking teeth imaginable. It was what you noticed about him, after his eyes and his large
leche con una gota de café
head, and you didn't expect it, that someone who was capable of producing art of such urgency and profundity could have teeth out of a toothpaste ad.

Kcho's show of five hundred terra-cotta boats is now on display at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles. The U.S. Interests Section in Havana denied him a visa to attend the opening, for having entered the United States illegally the time before. He was on his way back to Cuba from Korea a few months ago, after having won first prize at the Seoul Biennial. He had bought a plane ticket from Korea to Cuba through the United States, not realizing he needed a transit visa. He had gone through Korean immigration, and the Korean immigration officer, excited, had said, “I know you! You are Kcho! You are famous!” and had not looked thoroughly at his passport. He was put in handcuffs when he got to the United States and kept in them until he was put on a plane home.

Sunday again, and absolutely nothing going on. It is as if more than oil is being saved for the visit of the pope. Nick goes for a walk by himself on the Malecón. He runs into an American diplomat he knows, who is in Havana on a visit. They start walking together. They are asked the time by two
jineteras
, and when they actually tell them the time, the
jines
start to giggle and pull on the men's clothes. They have to shout at them to get them to stop.

The diplomat, whom Nick invites for dinner, says things have gotten a lot better than they were in the early nineties. He used to go to the church of San Antonio de Padova in Miramar. The authorities tried to discourage Section diplomats from going to churches then. Once, they smeared the contents of a diaper on the door. Another time they got a woman to come in and start yelling and disrupting the service. He says they've stopped doing most of that kind of stuff.

The diplomat says the shooting down of the planes was not something
planned. He says it was a gross miscalculation. Fidel gave an order to use “whatever means necessary” to prevent territorial incursions, and the commanding officer was following what he thought were orders. The Cubans now say that Helms-Burton (which has been signed but not yet implemented) is a sure thing, but the diplomat says it is not a sure thing. He says they have an opening again now with the visit of the pope. He says the shooting down of the airplanes is well enough behind everyone now.

LETY TELLS ME IT'S
going to become illegal now for a Cuban to buy a videocassette recorder or to bring one in from another country. Worse than that, merchant marines, from whom everybody bought their VCR's, will not be allowed to bring them into the country any longer, either. “And this is strange,” she says, shrugging, “because everyone knows that all we want to do is tape speeches of the
comandante!
“

“And socialism,” Fidel says at a dinner we are attending, speaking of his visit with the pope in Rome and of their discussion about Poland, “coming to a country that was ninety percent Catholic, it must have been
terrible
for them . . .”

The foreign guests watch Fidel with clinicians' half-smiles on their faces as he says this; the expressions on the faces of the Cuban guests (low-ranking members of the
nomenklatura)
, however, remain in the range they've kept all night, from admiring, through rapt, to in love.

Three years it has taken us to see Fidel in person, and suddenly we're seeing him all the time.

Alex, the same diplomat who, two years ago, told me Fidel's outfit reminded him of gays in the West Village circa 1978, who remains convinced that there is an unexpressed, subliminal homoerotic thing going on between Fidel and the men around him, has asked me to notice the next time I am with Fidel, the
height
of the Cubans Fidel has been surrounding himself with lately: they are all short.

It is true: except for one five-foot-tenish man in Fidel's entourage, all the other Cubans (I noticed in the living room while we were having cocktails) are under five foot six, and there is one man tonight who is under five feet tall.

This smallest Cuban guest, a kind of human dormouse, whose nose barely pokes above the table, and whose hair, unbrushed, sticks straight up from his
head, does give one widemouthed yawn as Fidel speaks, but then goes back to looking totally in love.