Cuba Diaries (20 page)

Everywhere on the street, there are poor
negros
and poor
blancos
and poor
mulatos
. (In Cuba, technically everyone is poor, but in Siboney, where we live, people on the whole manage to look and act less poor.)

We turn on Calle Cuba and start heading for the Church of La Merced. There are fewer people on the street now, and I am no longer walking between Sam and Bill, but to the left of them. “Isn't it relaxing,” I say to Sam and Bill, “—how you can walk down a street like this and not feel any kind
of menace?” Just then I feel a gentle unburdening, and I am thinking about how light I feel, how relaxed, when the next thing I know, I'm looking at a familiar shoulder strap, trailing gaily from the hand of a thin young man who is running past us. I wonder what my shoulder strap is doing, trailing along in front of us, and then I realize it's trailing from my purse, which is in the hand of the boy running in front of us, my purse with the $650 inside it and a latch attaching the strap to the purse that you can undo with a flick of the finger. I was insane to take a purse with a strap like that to Habana Vieja.

I start running. “What the hell?” Sam and Bill say, and they start running, too. I am trying to think of the word for “thief” in Spanish as precious seconds tick by. Finally it comes to me:
ladrón. “Ladrón!
” I start yelling. “
Ladrón!
” The thief turns up a deserted street. We follow. An old man lunges at the boy, but the boy easily skirts him. A woman leans out of a coffee shop. “
Cógelo!
” (“Get him!”) she yells. There's supposed to be a policeman or an undercover agent on every corner, and they
were
there near the
catedral
, but now there is no one. Bill moves ahead of us and is gaining on him. Bill has very long legs, but he's fifty years old. “
Ladrón!
” I scream every time I have breath.

The thief turns another corner. The street is fuller now—children, people lolling in doorways. They will catch him now for sure. He is moving away from Bill. “
Ladrón!
” There are some able-bodied people, but they do not move from their lolling positions. I am aware of how
blanco
we are, how touristy in our baggy clothes and enormous, stark white jogging shoes—I was of course aware of it before, but now I
really
am. Bill and the thief are so far ahead of Sam and me now that we can't see them anymore. I stop, panting.

Little children crowd around me. “Were you robbed?”

Sam returns. Between pants, Bill says that the thief had a friend on a bicycle waiting for him about halfway down the block. The thief jumped on the back of the bicycle, and together they rode off in the direction of the waterfront.

A little boy guides us to the police station several blocks away. Sam puts his arm around me as we walk. “Poor sweet pea,” he says.

“Better me than you,” I say.

Bill tips the boy one dollar. “That's a lot of money—” I say before I can stop myself.

We are led upstairs to a room where there are two plainclothesmen sitting at ancient typewriters. I sit down in front of one of the plainclothesmen. “
Un momento
,” he says. He is working on an earlier report. Sam and Bill sit
nearby, in low-slung vinyl-covered chairs with stuffing coming out of them. Sam grins tenderly. “Poor sweet pea,” he says again.

The plainclothesman introduces himself. His name is Orestes. I tell Orestes what happened.

“Was it a
negrito?
” Orestes asks. He himself is a
negro de pelo
, slightly
chinito
.

“He was not very black.”

“Was he like him?” Typing, he gestures with his head toward a medium-brown man sitting in front of the other desk. The man turns and looks at us indifferently.

“Like him.”

“
Mulato
,” he says while typing.

Orestes asks me if I can describe the thief. I say I only saw the back of him. Orestes gives me a stack of about seventy-five mug shots to look through—all black or
mulato
boys between the ages of thirteen and twenty-five, looking like deer caught in headlights. He asks me if I would be able to identify the thief in a lineup. I shake my head no. I translate Bill's description of the clothes the thief was wearing. Orestes asks me to describe the contents of my purse. I have to tell him that there was $650 in it. There were credit cards in it, too, and a driver's license and some mementos. Keeping U.S. credit cards, which cannot be used in Cuba, in my purse is further evidence of my staggering lack of judgment.

“Sweet pea . . .”

“Hey, it could have been worse . . .” I say breezily, while thinking painfully of the mementos in my wallet, which are now gone, too—blood-type cards for the children made after they were born (the blood that was tested drawn from their tiny heels), the fortune from the first Chinese restaurant I went to with Nick, a two-dollar bill.

I took a purse with that kind of strap and with $650 in it to Habana Vieja, I realize, because Sam is my big brother.

Orestes has to type the report twice because he does not have any carbon paper. It takes about an hour.

When Orestes has finished typing, he tells us he wants to return with us to the scene of the crime. We are led back down the stairs to where there is a dented Lada police car, its trunk held down with twine.

I ask Orestes if we can take photos of my brother and Bill in front of the police car, then of my brother and me. Orestes says we can, as if to show how relaxed he is. We pose, grinning broadly.

A tall, pockmarked uniformed policeman pushes himself off a backless kitchen chair, propped against a wall under the shade of a
yagruma
tree, where he has been dozing. He ambles toward us. He is going to be our driver. We ask this uniformed policeman if we can take a photo of him, too, in front of the police car, but he refuses sternly and sidles away.

Bill sits in the front seat of the Lada with his knees under his chin. I scoot forward in the middle of the backseat to give Sam and Orestes more room, but still the backseat of the Lada is so small that I am practically in Orestes' lap. “Can you believe this?” Sam and Bill say to each other for about the twentieth time.

I tell Orestes the robbery occurred between the Convent of Santa Clara and the Church of La Merced. I had wanted to show Sam and Bill the Church of La Merced's dim baroque interior. We stop in the middle of the block, get out, and start to walk.

“Here?”

“No.”

“Here?”

“No.”

At the intersection, just before the Church of La Merced, I see the street with the long, blank wall running along it. It's where the thief chose to turn because there were few people on it. Bill, Sam, and I reenact the scene for Orestes. Orestes looks for a doorway where there might have been witnesses. He approaches a take-out
paladar
. “Oh, it's you
señora
,” the vendor says, noticing me behind Orestes. “Yes, I saw it all.” Orestes has made contact. It is a tiny ray of hope. He says to the witness that he will return.

He offers to drive us anywhere we would like to go. I ask him to take us back near the cathedral so that we can continue our tour of Old Havana.

I shake Orestes' hand as we get out of the Lada. I have gone from feeling angry and trying to feel cheerful back to feeling foolish and ashamed.
Orestes is a good man: he will help me
. I imagine our children's newborn feet, miniature bendable bananas, in Orestes' thin hands: Orestes will save the memory of their feet from the bottom of Havana harbor, along with my American Express gold card, which does not work in Cuba anyway.

“It's not the money—it's the cards and papers that are the most important to me,” I say earnestly as I shake hands with Orestes. Orestes nods with what looks like understanding, though we and Orestes and the uniformed policeman all know what Orestes (whose extreme thinness gives him and other Cubans the air of unwitting ascetics) would choose.

Sam and Bill and I eat an excellent lunch at the gallery-cum
-paladar
. Sam has to pay, for I have no money.

We walk to the Prado. Children ask us for money. I tell them my money has all been stolen.

“Really?” they say. “You don't have any money? Any money
at all?
”

“
Mira
.” I turn my pockets inside out and spread the lining out for them to see.

The children crowd around me. The boldest children finger the empty lining, then carry the message to children waiting at the back of the crowd: “It's true! She has
no money!
”

Sam and a Canadian friend of mine, Marianne, and I go to the airport to fly to Santiago. Sam's friend Bill flew back to the United States yesterday. Our plane to Santiago is delayed three hours. We drive home, have a sandwich, and drive back. The plane is a Russian Tupolev, with wires dangling inside the cabin, seats and armrests missing, and steam emerging from under the seats and fogging the cabin.

We are met in Santiago by a man who can only communicate with us in grunts and hand signs. We refuse to go anywhere with him, until finally an airport official appears who assures us that the man is indeed from the travel agency, which was contacted before our arrival. He drives us to a hideous modern hotel on the outskirts of Santiago, but it is too late at night to complain, and anyway, it turns out the driver is also deaf.

Today's driver can speak and hear. We tour Santiago. It's a kind of Jerusalem of the New World, so much started here. It's also a relay point between two worlds, or three worlds if you count the Arab world, too, Santiago having been founded just a decade after the Arabs left Granada.

We visit the main square and the house of Governor Velazquez, with its
mosharabia—
Arab trelliswork in place of windows—and a gold smelter built right into the house. In addition to being much older than Havana, Santiago is also more dramatic and more Caribbean, with its hills turning into mountains, its heat, and its black majority. We see the balcony from which Fidel gave his first major address following the liberation of Santiago.

We visit the Moncada barracks, which Fidel and his companions assaulted in 1953. The wide bullet holes scarring the face of the building were repaired after the assault. The scars were put back in after the
triunfo
. We visit San Juan Hill. Its summit is studded with monuments. We read about the charge of San Juan Hill from a 1953 Baedecker I bought in Havana. There are statues of soldiers with mustaches and hats that are pinned up in the front, and plaques in Spanish. There is one statue of a soldier without a mustache, with a hat pinned up on the side instead of the front, whose profile is like Grace Kelly's. There is no plaque, only four screw holes where a plaque used to be.

We return to the main square. We sit on the wide front porch of the Hotel Casa Grande, overlooking the square, and drink
mojitos
. A guard with his arms outstretched keeps dolled-up young Cubans of both sexes off the steps leading from the street to the porch. The young Cubans crane their necks around the guard, marking which foreigner to approach the moment he or she leaves the balcony.

We find a
paladar
. It seems to be the only one in Santiago. Sam drinks too many
mojitos
and goes back to the hotel after dinner. Marianne and I ask the driver to let us off a few blocks from the Casa de la Trova, or concert space for the promotion of traditional music, in downtown Santiago. We saw Cubans hanging on the bars of the windows of the Casa de la Trova earlier in the evening. They are still hanging on the bars. We slip down the street unnoticed, pay, and enter a brightly lit room. There are few people actually in the audience. The musicians are wearing jeans and straw cowboy hats. They are playing
son
—traditional country music for three voices with guitar, bass, and drums. It is plaintive, sweet, and charming. Marianne and I would be happy to sit there all night, listening to Eliades Ochoa and his group, but after a few songs, they announce that they will continue playing in an adjacent bar. Most of the audience leaves, but a few people move to the entrance to the bar.

Two Cuban men in their thirties approach Marianne and me. “Can we go into the bar with you?” they ask.

We don't know what to say to them. They do not seem like
jineteros
, but it has been so relaxing, slipping down the street and having no one attach themselves to us, relaxing being ignored, the way middle-aged women generally are, the world over.

They follow closely behind us and sit at our table. Finally one of the men says, “We have to sit with you because we have to look like we are your friends. Otherwise, we can't get into the bar.”

We look around. It is true: there are no Cubans in the bar, just one or two others, trying to seem like they are with groups of foreigners.

“Ah, tourist apartheid,” I say.

“Shhhhhhh!” they say.

Nick and I have heard of tourist apartheid, but this is the first time one of us has been so thoroughly on tour.

Marianne and I buy them beers. Before Marianne and I leave, an hour later, one of the men writes a poem for us on the back of the evening's program.

THE ROAD TO BARACOA
from Santiago is the most dramatic in Cuba, winding through steep mountains and virgin forest. Boys wait at scenic turnouts selling
mamey
(a fruit the shape and consistency of an avocado but orange-fleshed and sweet),
guayaba
(guava), and strings of small bananas warm from the sun.

Telephone reservations were made by Nick's firm at the hotel where we are supposed to stay; confirming faxes were exhanged; but when we get there, they have never heard of us. Even so, the desk clerk manages to find rooms for us.

The hotel is in a converted Spanish fort overlooking the town. Its windows are sealed now, and air-conditioning units have been installed, seemingly in the middle of each window.