Cuba Diaries (39 page)

Alex says short, lower-ranking members of the
nomenklatura
look totally in love when they're with Fidel, whereas medium-sized, higher-ranking members of the
nomenklatura
look less in love.

AN ENCOUNTER WITH FIDEL
, I say to Alex, brings to mind Asian theater: Kabuki, No, Chinese opera, Bunraku, with their carefully contrived movements, stock facial expressions, masks. He speaks for twenty-five minutes, listens for three, speaks for twenty-five, listens for three. Thai dancing, too: reenactments of scenes from the
Ramayanda
, flights over water, the powerful monkey general (Hanumān) of the North. This goes on in daily life, too, as if daily life in Cuba were one long rehearsal for an encounter with Fidel, in the formulaic responses, in the limited movements of
conseguiring
and
resolver
ing, in the dissolving and re-forming line of the permissible, which one must locate, agilely, on a daily basis. Encounters with Fidel are full-dress perfomances: porcelain masks, pointed golden headdresses, false fingernails, dog-faced devils, mice. The room becomes electrified, as if stage lights have gone on, when he enters, and norms of human interaction are dispensed with. The beard and uniform are his masks. He performs and we watch, responding within defined limits, with our own less-splendid masks and stock facial expressions.

There is also the element of religious adoration. He arrives in mysterious, roaring procession, is extracted from a black Mercedes, unfolds, performs his timeless rite. His time is up, he is carried, an animate reliquary, by phalanxes of devotees to another location, to perform again. He is the ark of the covenant, a moving holy Kaaba, the virgin goddess of Kathmandu.

Tennis at the Hotel Nacional. Jimmie lobs a ball over the fence. I go to look for it on the condom-strewn grassy slope leading from the court to the plaza below.

I step in something soft. I look back, hoping that it is mud (it has rained), but next to where I have stepped are some pages of
Granma
, heavily used, uncrumpling in the sun.

I race to the most pristine patch of wet grass that I can find. Luckily it is just one shoe, and a sturdy one. If it were both shoes, I tell myself, I would take them off and leave them for a sexual tourist to find.

WE DRIVE TO MATANZAS
for the launching of a book,
French Memories
, about the French presence in Matanzas. When the French were driven out of Haiti, they went first to Charleston, South Carolina. From there they went to Matanzas. They became rich exporting sugar. The wealthiest Frenchmen built neoclassical houses that you can still see, in an area called Versailles. In addition to becoming wealthy, Matanzas became so culturally developed, its tastes so refined, that Matanzas was known as the Athens of Cuba.

The launching is in the building of the printing house La Vigia. La Vigia makes books by hand and never makes more than two hundred copies. La Vigia printing house is in an ancient and very pleasing building opposite the Teatro Sauto, with stone floors and a stunning clock face, made in London in 1870, capable of telling the hour, the day of the week, the date, and the phases of the moon.

A French writer visiting Cuba makes a speech in which he says that fantasy is more important than gasoline.

At the reception afterward, a vice-director of La Vigia says that the editions sell for ten pesos each—less than fifty cents. They have already been sold out. The money they have made for the whole edition is a little less than one hundred dollars.

“But if they are all sold out, why don't you make some more?” I ask.

“Because the books are hard to make. They require a lot of time.”

“But if they are popular, and people want to buy them—”

“They are hard to make,” the vice-director repeats.

“But here the law of the market doesn't operate!” I say, answering my own question.

“Asi
es
,” he says and the people around us say, nodding their heads in affirmation.

We walk to the Río San Juan. We see where the barges came up the river to be loaded by cranes with oak casks full of sugar. From there the barges would pass through one of the world's first pivoting railroad bridges to the bay of Matanzas, where the oak casks would be loaded onto larger boats bound mostly for Charleston, South Carolina, but also for farther north in the United States and for Europe.

We are driven for miles outside of Matanzas to a 1940s country house, now some kind of official guest house.

The dining room is very clean and the help are cheerful and willing to serve. We are served fruit first, which is typical of Cuban meals, but a Frenchman,
recently arrived in Cuba, makes a face at me over the fruit when no one is looking.

I go into the bathroom. It is a spacious bathroom in a building all by itself. It may have been part of a pool house, for there are rusted supports for benches and partitions still in the walls and on the way to the bathroom I passed a pool-sized depression in the earth, filled with gravel and weeds.

Most of the tiles in the bathroom are missing. There is no toilet paper, no seat, one dripping cold-water faucet, and to one side of the toilet is a gaping hole the diameter of a soccer ball, edged with a white crust.

A fat fly bites deeply into my ankle; I smash it with my hand. Grateful for the small trickle of water, I rinse fly cadaver out of the contours of my wedding ring, wipe my hands on my dress, and retake my place at the VIP table.

Lunch with an acquaintance from X——. He speaks about his meeting with a Cuban vice-minister. He speaks about how agitated the vice-minister became when he brought up the question of human rights and religious freedom. “And I suppose you're also going to ask me whether there is going to be
Christmas
this year or not?” the acquaintance says she said to him. “Why is everyone always asking me whether there is going to be
Christmas?
”

This is the third Thanksgiving we have celebrated here. I am unable to find a turkey in the
agropecuario
this year as I did last year, though. I find one at the Diplomercado for twice the
agro
price.

Corn kernels cannot be eaten straight here—corn grows tough in the tropics, and the fresh kernels have to be ground into
maíz molido
in order to be eaten. I try making a chowder out of it to serve as a first course, with onion, crab meat, and sherry. I think the soup is going to be a failure because it tastes very floury at first, but then it starts to thicken, the fresh crab is added, and it becomes one of the best soups Lorena and I have ever made.

Lorena has been using dried cranberries in the oatmeal cookies because we have run out of raisins, and I have forgotten to tell her to save some, but there are a few left. We mash them in the blender with one orange, skin and all. The pieces swell in the orange juice and make a convincing sauce. Cuban
calabazas
make a fine pumpkin pie.

“The fish-and-corn soup,” I find myself telling our guests, all Cubans and X——ians who have never had Thanksgiving before, “is a reference to the corn Squanto showed the Pilgrims how to grow. He placed a dead fish next to each planted kernel to act as fertilizer in the sandy soil of Cape Cod.”

I don't know whether it's having a third-grader and a fifth-grader at the table with us or being in Cuba that makes me invent this culinary tradition. I don't know, either, whether it's having kids and reading the Squanto story over and over again with them while being in a place that's not the United States at Thanksgiving time—it could be any place—that puts a lump in my throat now when I recount the Squanto story, embarrassing me totally and making me hope people don't notice.

I raise my glass of champagne after the pumpkin pie is served. “
Imperialismo no
, pumpkin pie
sí!
” I say loudly, the lump in my throat mercifully disappearing. This starts rounds of “
Socialismo o muerte!” “Imperialismo o muerte!” “Pumpkin pie o muerte!” “Pumpkin pie y socialismo!
” and “
Pumpkin pie o socialismo!
” delivered around the table with booming voices.

I am aware of Juana at the end of the table, sitting next to Jimmie, who is trying to keep his eyes open, and of her revolutionary father, who died in the eighties.

“I hope in the future people will not have to make such terrible choices,” I say.

“Why is it such a terrible choice?” an X——ian guest says. “I would choose pumpkin pie any day.”

I am aware, too, of Juana's grandfather, the self-made man, who emigrated from Spain to Cuba as a young boy and moved back to Spain after his stores were nationalized. I am aware of how he killed himself after he returned to Spain. This is the part of the story I didn't have until Juana filled it in for me, in a moment when we were alone together, about a week ago.

Miguel tells me on the way to the
agropecuario
that there is going to be a new law that sailors and merchant marines will no longer be able to bring electronic equipment into the country.

I tell him I already know this.

He says he has heard of doctors and academics who received grants and are studying abroad who are cutting their stays short so that they can return to Cuba with the VCRs they bought before the end of the month.

There is silence. Miguel lifts the palm of one hand, as if weighing something. “People get so bored here,” Miguel says, “but at least, until now, they have been able to watch nice movies.”

Nick and I explore an abandoned Catholic old people's home in Miramar. It covers an entire block. The guardian, an elderly
blanco
who lives with his family in the back of it, shows us around. It was closed two or three years after the
triunfo
, the guardian explains, when the Spanish monks, nuns, and priests who ran it were expelled. It was built in 1922 but already a section of it is in ruins, with a large hole in its roof and in the floor below, fringed with bent steel rods.

It's not the buildings built in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries that are in perilous shape—they are in Habana Vieja and are protected by UNESCO; it's the buildings built in the nineteenth century and afterward in Centro Habana and beyond that are in perilous shape. Most often they are the big institutional buildings because their sheer size makes them impossible to maintain. They are the most difficult to keep people from pillaging, because such long fences would have to be built. Bathroom and kitchen fixtures were the first to go, the guardian explains, and then copper roof gutters and copper pipes. People dug holes in the plaster to pull out pipes. Doorknobs and window latches were then taken, and then in the seventies people started digging electrical wires out of the walls, for their copper and other metals. Bathroom and floor tiles were pulled off and taken, and roof tiles, too, as neither could be found anyplace in Cuba for a long time. He was hired as guardian and given the apartment in the back in the early eighties, but by that time it was already too late. People take bricks and cinder blocks now. He tries to keep them out—he has a German shepherd, too—but there is no fence, and the walls are full of holes.

Opening of the Festival del Nuevo Cine Latinoamericano. Alfredo Guevara's speech is back on the mild side. Che is mentioned, but the speech is not shrill. It is also brief. I find myself wondering if the black Lacoste-type shirt he wears tucked in and the blazer he wears draped over his shoulders is in emulation of Sartre.

The floor show this time is a lone musician onstage singing a song, the words of which are, “The problem is not . . . ,” and he sings a list of a lot of problems or reasons for problems. At the end he finally sings, “The problem is love.” The floor show, like the song, is over after a short while.

The movie, kept secret until now, is announced. It is a joint French-Spanish production,
The Cosmonaut's Wife
. It is a situation comedy, stretched out to nearly two hours, with labored humor. The star of it, Victoria Abril, is there. She makes a brief speech before the beginning of the movie. I take a little nap near the end of it.

A statement is released by a group of bishops in Rome in which Cuba is described as a “totalitarian state.”

PIÑEIRO SAYS THE BISHOPS'
statement is no big deal, just some rightist elements sounding off.

Nick has managed to get Piñeiro to come for lunch by himself.

Piñeiro has two
mojitos
before lunch, wine through lunch, and scotch after lunch. We eat garbanzo soup with cumin, grilled snapper, roast potatoes and carrots with rosemary, spinach sautéed with garlic and lemon, green salad, and Lorena's lemon meringue pie. Piñeiro eats hunched over his plate, making low noises of pleasure.

Piñeiro says something toward the end of the meal about Cuba's elections being free. I burst out laughing. Nick turns red in the face. “What are you laughing at?” Nick asks me. It is me getting Piñeiro's tone of voice wrong, but I should know never to laugh when someone like him says something like that. I have had a
mojito
, too, but just one. It
seemed
like an ironic tone of voice he used when he spoke about Cuba's elections being free, as if he were scrunching his body apologetically and putting quotation marks around the word
free
. I should know by now that when he drinks, he is more
duro
. I do a save: I say I hope Cuba is preparing itself for when the embargo ends. The embargo's ending will be the greatest challenge to the revolution, in my opinion. Piñeiro nods. His eyes are heavy-lidded. He makes a contained burp, puffing out his cheeks.

Piñeiro weaves to his Lada and gets in the driver's seat. He shuts the door. The Lada clatters into first gear. Manuel opens the gate. Piñeiro hunches over the wheel, the way you have to over a Lada steering wheel when you don't
have a lot of upper-body strength. We wave at him under the blazing three o'clock sun. I feel as if we are releasing a deadly weapon into the traffic. I tell Nick that Piñeiro is going to kill either himself or someone else.