Cuba Diaries (18 page)

I ARRIVE BACK FROM
a one-week trip to Miami with five suitcases packed with swimming-pool chemicals, fabric, thread, zippers, a Rubbermaid dish dryer, children's books, car parts, espresso-pot gaskets, kitchen utensils, stove-burner replacement parts, refrigerator replacement parts, shoes of every kind for us and for the help, plastic bags, medicines for us and for the help, and Christmas presents for Nick, the children, and everyone I can think to get Christmas presents for.

I have also brought back a bathing suit with a matching pareo for Carlita. I take it to her uncle's house, where she usually stays now. She is not there, so I leave it with her uncle's girlfriend.

It is a relief to get to Miami, but it is more of a relief, after one week in Miami, to be back in Havana.

IT IS DECEMBER 24
. We have been given a pile of candies, so we contact the director of the school at the end of the block and ask if we can distribute candies in every class. Children, dressed in José Martí Pioneers outfits, meet us in the front hall. They do a show for us. One little girl sings a song from the movie
Aladdin
, in Spanish. Others do a dance number to U.S. rap music.

We visit the classrooms one by one and go from one desk to another, holding a tray of chocolates for the children to pick from. The director moves ahead of us, explaining in each classroom that we are distributing the chocolates “
para n
——,
para el nuevo año
.” Fortunately for her,
Navidad
(Christmas) and
nuevo año
(New Year) both start with the letter n. There are still
quite a few chocolates left over after we have distributed one to each child, so we leave them with the teachers. The teachers and the director kiss us warmly as we leave. “
Feliz N——! Feliz nuevo año!
” they call to us.

WE ARE TOLD THAT
when Christmas was abolished as a holiday in 1969, a holiday called Children's Day was established in September. It was established in September because there weren't any other holidays in September. It was a day on which children were supposed to receive a gift. The rationing of toys, which had already been in place for several years, was systemized further. Families were permitted, through ration books, to buy one “basic” gift, one “nonbasic” gift, and one “additional” gift, for a total of three gifts per year, per child. One gift could be given on Children's Day, one on the child's birthday, and one on a day of the parents' choosing.

At first it was announced on television at which stores and at what times the toys could be bought, the result being that stores were besieged by customers and immediately cleaned out. A system was then devised for reserving by telephone a time for buying a basic, a nonbasic, and an additional toy.

The ultimate solution was a lottery system, conducted zone by zone within the city. Sale periods of six days were established. Lotteries were conducted in stores, bodegas, and local CDRs (Committees for the Defense of the Revolution—neighborhood watchdog groups), where parents went to be told what day, what hour, and in which store they could go to make their purchases. In this way, only those whose reservation was for the first hour of the first day of the sale period were able to buy a good basic toy such as a bicycle.

The system lasted until 1981; after that, people just bought whatever they could find, whenever and wherever they could find it.

A loud noise wakes us up. I wonder, for an instant, if it's the
norteamericano
invasion some Cubans still think is coming. We have seen Cuban troops on a flat patch of land along the sea near Cojímar practicing for it. Sometimes I have an impulse to roll down the car window and call to them, “
Hay un yanqui por aquí!
” (“There's a Yankee over here!”).

I lie there, waiting for more. Moonlight is slanting through the blinds, making white stripes on the tile floor. Our house is utterly screenless and yet, magically, no insects come inside, only the smell of night-blooming jasmine.

It starts again. It's like an old-fashioned siren, the one you crank. The
norteamericano
invasion siren, which they test once a month, sounds more high-tech. It's like moaning, too, and muezzin calling worshipers to prayer. Rising and falling, and at the end, snarl-moans and rustling bushes.

“Cats,” Nick says, rolling over. “Embargo must be in heat.”

I have not heard anything from Carlita yet about the bathing suit and matching pareo I brought her from Miami. I call Davide's house and leave a message for her to call me.

CARLITA NEVER GOT THE
bathing suit. Davide's girlfriend, who received the bathing suit when I dropped it off, kept the bathing suit for herself. Carlita didn't know anything about the bathing suit until I called her. She asked Davide about it, Davide confronted his girlfriend, they had a big fight because of it, and the girlfriend moved out of his house.

“They broke up because of a
bathing suit?
”

“
Eso es
.”

Carlita tells me they had been living together for three years.

Sunday. Manuel is nearly alone with us in the house. Only one maid is on Sunday shift, working upstairs in our room. Manuel says he would like to have a word with me.

We step onto the veranda. Manuel lowers his voice. Some of the help have been abusing their privileges, Manuel says. Concha has been seen taking small amounts of coffee and carrying it home in a plastic bag. She has also been seen taking cloths for cleaning the floor. Danila has been washing her personal things in the washing machine, with our detergent. Miguel is embarrassed because he is the one with the keys to the
despensa
. He is afraid I will think he is the one who has been taking things. But Danila and Concha know where I keep the keys to the
despensa
. . .

I SLEEP VERY BADLY
, thinking about how I will have to speak to the help the following day. I decide to get it over with right away. I call everyone into the pantry.
Trust
, I looked up the night before in the Spanish-English dictionary while I was rehearsing; also,
to abuse
.

“Do not abuse my trust in you,” I say to everyone, trying to scan the range of faces as I speak. “Taking a little or taking a lot, it's still the same thing. The washing machine and detergent are not for your personal use. I cannot live with people whom I cannot trust. If you have a material problem that is making your life difficult, speak to me openly about it, and you and I together can see what we can do to resolve your problem.”

Muna is hiding around the side of the refrigerator. I am wishing I were far away.

After my talk, Muna hands me Miguel's keys to the
despensa
. “He does not want to keep them anymore,” Muna says.

I catch up to Miguel in the garden. “Please keep the keys. I trust you,” I say, thinking that the Delsey napkins at his uncle's house, though really,
really
not available in Cuba, got to his uncle's house from some other source or (I now think) were perhaps taken from the
despensa
especially
for
our trip, Miguel knowing the conditions at his uncle's house—a little stack of them, for traveling—and passed, shortly after our arrival at his uncle's house, to his cousin, who placed them, as invisibly as a fairy would, next to the toilet before I entered the bathroom.

He takes the keys. “Thank you,” he says.

Nicoletta, a half-X——ian, half-Cuban woman, based in Sweden, who is working temporarily in Cuba, comes for dinner. She describes a visit her firm made to Fidel a few days ago. They wanted to discuss the $3 million deal her firm was interested in making—to start a string of Laundromats throughout Cuba—while all Fidel wanted to discuss was China. He kept them standing, nine executives and their wives, for forty-five minutes while he talked. Finally, one of the wives said, “I don't know about anyone else, but I would like to sit down.” Aides stood tensely nearby. One of the executives tried to bring up the subject of the Laundromats. Fidel said, “All problems will be resolved,” and went back to talking about China. They went into another room and were offered
mojitos
and coffee. More talk of China. Fidel held his right hand by the wrist or kept it behind his back the whole time they were with him, Nicoletta tells us. At the end of the session, Fidel insisted on kissing each of the women in the group. Nicoletta says his eyes were heavylidded and unfocused as he went from one woman to another, muttering, “
Dáme un besito, dámelo, dámelo
. . .” (“Give me a little kiss, give it to me, give it to me . . .”).

Some say Fidel had a ministroke in Japan, which is why he stayed an extra day there on his way to China. They say that the “cold” he was supposed to have had in Japan was really that.

A February cold wave in the eastern United States means temperatures in the fifties in Havana. “
Frío, frío
,” people say, walking around hunched over, holding their elbows if they don't have a sweater, or if they do, walking stiffly, unused to the bulk.

Concha runs to open the gate, her arms bare.

I ask Muna if Concha owns a sweater. Muna says she doesn't. I have Manuel and Miguel bring down trunks of heavy and less-heavy clothes from the attic. I find a blue sweatshirt for Concha. I find pants, sweaters, and sweatshirts for the other people at the house, too.

Cool weather means more cocktail parties, art openings, and Americans. I meet U.S. congressional staffers at a party. Republicans and Democrats. Most of them tell me right away that they think the embargo is an obsolete policy. An aide to a Republican congressman says to me, “It's too bad we can't put Fidel and Jesse Helms and Jorge Mas Canosa in a boat and push them out to sea.” He says any calls Cuban Americans make to him begin with their telling him how much money they contribute to the Republican Party.

It is beginning to look more and more like Helms-Burton won't pass.

One of the staffers, a woman, tells me about a strange thing that happened during a photo session with Fidel following a meeting with him that afternoon. Fidel insisted on being surrounded only by women staffers and kept his hands rigidly at his sides as the women were being grouped around him, and as the shot was being taken, Fidel called out to his aides, “See? I'm not touching them!” which was translated to the group as, “I don't want to crowd them.”

It was funny, she says, how the phrase was translated. It was also funny that the translator thought the phrase should be translated at all, because after meeting them, the translator had realized that all of them spoke Spanish and had given up translating after the first few exchanges.

ON THE WAY TO AN
art opening, our Elegguá recounts a recent story involving one of the last surviving men from the disembarkation of the
Granma
, whose nom de guerre was Comandante Universo. Comandante Universo, a retired general, raised pigs. Because of his connections, Comandante Universo had access to better-quality slops—slops from the army's agricultural projects, slops from hotel restaurants (many hotels are run by retired generals). Even more important, he had enough gasoline to drive around to pick the slops up. One day there was a load of milk, which either couldn't make it to the processing plant or was on the verge of going bad. Comandante Universo was somehow able to get hold of it and gave it to his pigs.

This was too much for Comandante Universo's neighbor, who denounced him to his local CDR. Comandante Universo took a gun and shot his neighbor dead in front of a lot of people. He then gathered all the guns in his house in a pile on his front porch and sat in a rocking chair on his front porch until the police arrived. “Here are my guns,” he said, gesturing toward the pile of them. “Do with me what you will.” Comandante Universo was sentenced to thirty years in prison.

“But the neighbor was very stupid,” Nick says. “The neighbor was an idiot.”

“A complete idiot,” our Elegguá agrees.

WE MEET THE STEPMOTHER
of Che Guevara at the Argentinian ambassador's house.

Ana María Guevara is on her way to Europe to promote a miniseries on Che's adolescent years. With her is a slight young man who looks fourteen but is actually twenty. As Ana María (who looks to be about fifty-five) talks, we wonder,
Could this really be Che's stepmother? If the boy is her son, does this mean that we are then looking at Che's half brother?
There is something delicate and Che-like about him. Finally it is explained. Ana María was forty years younger than Che's father. When she met Che's father, who had separated from Che's mother, Che was already in Cuba. She herself never met Che. Che, if he were alive, would be sixty-six. The boy is indeed Che's half brother, the youngest of three children she had by the father of Che. Che, if he had lived, would have been forty-six when his little brother was born.

There is silence as we contemplate the span of reproductive years of the healthy human male.

I HAVE LUNCH WITH
an American group making an art tour sponsored by the Center for Cuban Studies. The Center for Cuban Studies, based in New York, hosts various educational tours for Americans. It is run by Sandra Levinson, who came to Cuba to cut sugarcane in the sixties. She injured herself while cutting cane, and Fidel Castro himself, who happened to be nearby, picked her up in his arms and carried her out of the cane field. She swears she never had sex with him, though—not even once. “Everybody says to me, ‘Come on, Sandra, we know you did,' but I didn't, I swear!”

I ask some of the Americans I know how the art they have seen so far has been.

“Well . . . ,” the Americans say to me.

I take some of the Americans to visit Antonio Nuñez. Antonio's paintings look like wallpaper, with one or two small elements in them repeated many times. One painting shows alligators (Cuba) fighting with bulls (Spain), one shows alligators fighting with bears (Russia), one shows alligators fighting with eagles (guess who), and one shows the alligators chasing their own tails.