The Best American Travel Writing 2013 (6 page)

“Everybody cooperate with Fidel,” she said. “Everybody was happy that we had the opportunity to have all the freedom that he promise.” She taught adult literacy classes at night.

Change came with the arrival of the
comites
, one house per block, appointed as the government representative for its households. The rapidity with which that degenerated into spying and becoming complicit in spying had been breathtaking to watch play out in stark anthropological terms. Within months, they were taking children aside at school and asking them about their parents. The parents started pulling the children out. The first nonpolitical families started to flee. People betrayed their neighbors to the
comites
. A woman who lived in the neighborhood, a woman named Solita, “somebody accuse her of having fried pork in her house. And they make—she was a teacher—they make a public,
¿come se llama?, juicio?
” Trial. “Exactly. Accusing her of having pork.”

My wife’s grandfather had let it be known that he was against the Castros—not because he had preferred Batista; in fact, the family had some obscure connection, that I’ve never been able to get anyone to be forthcoming about, to one of the other revolutionaries in the mountains, a rival who was executed not long after the uprising—in any case it was known that the family’s sympathies did not lie with the communists. “I remember one time we going to the farm,” she said, “and when we was coming back, we stop in Mario’s grandmother’s house, and we saw my brother passing on the road very fast. We get scared. We say, ‘What happened?’ He says, ‘The police is going to ask for, getting into your house.’ And at this time we was already saving some American money to come here. And you believe or not? The first thing that I do in the house was burning the dollars. To be sure that they don’t find it out.”

The party came and took away the family business. They took the store. They took the car, covered in tobacco advertisements. They took “a house of birds.” Not yours anymore. They took a little dog, named Mocha. They took pictures off the wall. They came in and counted the number of pictures, and took a certain percentage of them. Absurd things. They took away the family’s tiny beach house in Playa del Rosario, “gave it to some fishman.” But this succession of losses came to seem indistinct against what was happening outside. The picture had darkened. “So bad, so cruel all the things that they do it,” she said. “The television was on all day long.” She meant both that they were watching all day long and that the revolutionaries were transmitting constantly. There was “a man that the name Blanco,” she said. And his trial concerned “if he abuse the farmers, if he do all these things that accuse him to do it.” They found him guilty. “Then the people go to the street, singing,
‘Paredon paredon paredon!’ Paredon
means ‘kill in front of the wall.’ And then they put this in television. And you see the brain of this man jumping out. It was getting gross and gross and gross.” She resigned her job, and they essentially went into hiding.

She got her two children out first, my mother-in-law and her brother, on waivers made possible by the CIA-initiated, Catholic-sponsored airlift known as Pedro Pan. The story goes that the CIA started spreading rumors on the island that the government was about to take away the children, raise them in camps. People panicked, and the planes were waiting to fly them away. The children wound up living with Catholic families all over the United States or, in this case, with an aunt in North Carolina. Eventually Wei-Wei and her husband got out, through Mexico, and joined the children. But Pedro Pan tore apart many families.

We arrived at the house of some cousins, two twins, small men now in their 50s, one with a mustache and one without, who live with their mother, whom they tend to hover about protectively. Their father died after having walked himself to the hospital, after a heart attack. Nobody had a car, nobody’s phone worked. The revolution is famous around the world for its health care, but for a Cuban, that care can be hard to access, especially if you live far from one of the major cities.

The six-year-old and her cousin were sitting on the sofa, ignoring everyone. They were holding up dolls to each other in different poses, sort of: “What do you think of this? Do you approve of this?” We unloaded the presents we brought for the twins. They handed my wife a book of socialist Cuban film reviews from before the revolution, actually a rare and useful book—one of them is a from-home bookseller, and he had come across it somewhere.

As we were standing around he said, “Did you know that my brother”—the one with no mustache—“was on a game show?”

They brought forth a VHS tape and started reconfiguring the wires to make the VCR work. Soon a picture of the studio appeared, three contestants behind their buzzers. The tape had been recorded over many times. There was a constant flickering of white meteors across the image. Felipe to the far left, smiling, looking confident in a light green short-sleeved shirt. The game had to do with rhyming. They would say, “Two words: one of them describes a fruit, one describes a family member.” Answer:
lima
and
prima
. Felipe didn’t win, but did well enough, as I understood it, to be invited back. He looked onscreen like he was having a great time. The show had a carefree attitude, compared with something similar in the United States. The stakes were very low. You can’t have games of chance or leisure games involving any amount of money, they said. It was outlawed by the revolution, as part of the purifying backlash against the mob-led casino power. So the prizes were things like a signed poster of a famous Spanish pop singer or a decorative mirror. Nobody was going to cry over losing. We congratulated Felipe on having held his own. He brought out the small metal lamp-sculpture he won.

Before we left the country, we spent a last day and night in Havana. Heaven weather. We stepped into the grand cathedral, on one of the main squares in the old part of town, and listened to a women’s choir that was practicing for the pope. I saw blue-and-red signs announcing his impending visit,
VIENE EL PAPA!
The women and girls were dressed in their everyday clothes. They sang beautifully. I’m sure that they were the best that Cuba had.

In the evening, we stood on the Morro, the Spanish castillo across the bay from the Malecón, and looked at the city. There is a Havana—this was the second time I saw it, a confirmation—that cannot be captured in photographs, because it involves a totality of light from symphonic Caribbean clouds and the way they play on the whole city, and that appears often enough to represent one of the characteristic faces of the city. The diffused light turns all the buildings a range of pastels. Then as the sun reddens, it becomes rose-colored.

It was 9:30 by the time we got back to our hotel. Normally that would have been past the six-year-old’s bedtime, but my wife had a telephone interview—meant to happen during the day, it got bumped—so she needed us out of the room for an hour.

Downstairs we sat and listened to the band do the inescapable (in Havana) “Hasta Siempre, Comandante,” with its strange lyrics, “Here lies the clear/the precious transparency/of your dear presence/Comandante Che Guevara.” Cats were slinking around. The people going by were of every shade, and many with striking faces. In the most Spanish faces you could see flashes of the Old World stock that supplied the island with settlers: the equine noses, the long mouths, at times a Middle Eastern cast, features I knew from my wife’s family pictures.

On the sidewalk a young bicycle-taxi driver named Manuel approached us, a well-built kid in jean shorts and a tank top, about 19. He said he knew an ice cream place that was still open. We set out through the night. Many of the streets were dark. It was chilly already, and the six-year-old huddled against my side. It was one of those moments when you know that you are where you’re supposed to be. If your destiny wavered, it has at least momentarily recovered its track. We ate our chocolate ice cream at an outdoor bar, under a half-moon.

On the way back to the hotel, Manuel asked what I did. When I told him I was a reporter, he said: “You’d hate it here. There is no freedom of expression here.”

He launched into a tirade against the regime. “It is basically a prison,” he said. “Everyone is afraid.”

The things he said, which I had heard many times before—that you can go to prison for nothing, that there’s no opportunity, that people are terrified to speak out—are the reason I can never quite get with my leftie-most friends on Cuba, when they want to make excuses for the regime. It’s simply a fact that nearly every Cuban I’ve ever come to know beyond a passing acquaintance, everyone not involved with the party, will turn to you at some point and say something along the lines of, “It is a prison here.” I just heard it from one of the men who worked for Erik, back in the hometown. I remarked to him that storefronts on the streets looked a little bit better, more freshly painted. It was a shallow, small-talky observation.

“No,” he said, turning his head and exhaling smoke.

“You mean things haven’t improved?” I said.

“There is no future,” he said. “We are lost.”

The six-year-old kept asking me what Manuel was saying. I was doing my best to describe
el sistema
. Interesting trying to explain to a child educated in a Quaker Montessori school what could possibly be wrong with everyone sharing.

We passed the museum with the
Granma
, the leisure boat that in 1956 carried Fidel and Raul and Che and Camilo Cienfuegos and 78 other Cuban revolutionaries from Mexico to a beach on the island’s southeast coast. The cruiser was all lighted up with aquamarine lights, in a building made of glass. It looked underwater. Manuel stopped the bicycle-taxi and gazed on it with obvious pride.

“There’s always an armed guard in front of it,” he said, nodding his head toward a young man in a green uniform, who was standing with a machine gun over his shoulder.

“They’re worried that someone will try to blow it up or something?” I said.

“They’re worried that someone will steal it and go to Miami,” he said.

There was a time Mariana took me to Cuba, and we went to a town called Remedios, in the central part of the island. It is one of the most ancient Cuban cities. The church on the main square dates from the Renaissance. When it was restored in the 1950s, the workers discovered that under the white paint on the high ceiling was a layer of pure gold. The townspeople had safeguarded it from the pirates in that manner. We stayed in the home of a man named Piloto. A friendly bicycle-taxi driver, who introduced himself as Max, told us that Piloto worked for the government and rented out his spare room only in order to spy on tourists, and that we should be careful what we said there. But all we ever got from Piloto and his wife was a nearly silent politeness and one night a superb lobster dinner. My most vivid memory of Remedios is of being taken to the house of an artist who lived there, a woodcarver. The bicycle-taxi driver told us that anyone who had “a great interest in culture” needed to visit the home of this particular artist. The next day he took us there, in the afternoon. We rode behind a row of houses that had strange paintings and animal figures hanging in their breezeways. After what seemed a long time for a bicycle-taxi ride, we arrived at the woman’s place. Taking out a cigarette, Max told us to walk ahead, he would wait. At the door of a small, salmon-colored house, an old woman met us. Not the artist, it emerged. This was the artist’s mother. We sat with her in a kind of narrow front parlor, where she made sweetly formal small talk for maybe 20 minutes, telling us every so often that the artist would be out soon.

At a certain moment, a woman appeared in the passageway that led from the front room into the main part of the house, a woman with rolls of fat on her limbs, like a baby, and skin covered in moles. She walked on crutches with braces on her knees. She had a beautiful natural Afro with a scarf tied around it. She was simply a visually magnificent human being. She told us the prices of her works, and we bought a little chicken carving. She said almost nothing otherwise—she had difficulty speaking—but when we stood up to leave, she lifted a hand and spoke, or rather delivered, this sentence. It was evidently the message among all others that she deemed most essential for U.S. visitors. “I know that at present there are great differences between our peoples,” she said, “but in the future all will be well, because we are all the sons and daughters of Abraham Lincoln.”

KEVIN CHROUST

FROM
The Morning News

D
AN IS IN
, Brian is out, and I suppose I am 51 percent in and 49 percent out. I am going with Dan into a walled-off, maybe 25-foot-wide street. People above us, in positions of safety, gaze down with looks of concern.

“Give me your stuff,” Brian says, and Dan and I empty our pockets and hand him our sunglasses.

I keep my credit card, my driver’s license, 50 euros cash, and my insurance card in the buttoned back pocket of my white linen pants. We shake hands and he pats us on the back. We don’t try to convince him to reconsider because this is not the kind of thing you can fault someone for skipping. And if we convince him to do it and he gets hurt, we have to pay a doctor to fix him and a therapist to fix us.

“See you outside the stadium at the ticket window,” I say, and turn and walk into one of the more famously dangerous places to be on July 7 every year.

The faces of people down here with us tell a story much more pertinent to my situation. Some look fast, well prepared, dressed almost exclusively in white with red accessories—neckerchiefs and shawls in San Fermín tradition. Some look drunk, like they haven’t been to bed since this 204-hour party started 19 hours ago; many of them will be thrown out of the route by the
policía
before 8
A.M
. We fall somewhere between. We are not drunk, but our white clothes are soaked in red sangria from the opening ceremonies. We went to bed early, but did not sleep well and do not feel well. If we were still 22 we’d be drunk.