This blog was tough to read here - it was all backwards and difficult to navigate. So I've moved it to a newer, spiffier location! You can now read the full blog at www.notesfromasmallisland.com. Please update your bookmarks and such accordingly.
Thanks!
Tuesday, October 6, 2009
Saturday, December 27, 2008
Wrap-Up
So now, on December 27th, 2008, I'm officially closing the Cuba blog. This was a much more protracted affair than I meant, really, and now it's done.
The blog will remain up and available for reading, and I'd love to hear what you think. You might notice that reading the blog like this is a little difficult, since this is meant to be one continuous story and, as per blog style, it is told backwards. The text of this blog (without this post, of course) is now available in book format from lulu.com. You can get it on paper or, if you prefer, you can download a digital copy of it for slightly less money. Whichever method you choose, I'll get $8, so thanks in advance.
Additionally, I'm going to be running a more regular, normal blog over at fitfulmurmurs.wordpress.com. This blog will feature plenty of posts on Cuba and on other things, and should generally be pretty entertaining. So check it out! (Please?)
Thank you all very much for reading. It really was a blast, and I hope you enjoyed it as much as I did.
The blog will remain up and available for reading, and I'd love to hear what you think. You might notice that reading the blog like this is a little difficult, since this is meant to be one continuous story and, as per blog style, it is told backwards. The text of this blog (without this post, of course) is now available in book format from lulu.com. You can get it on paper or, if you prefer, you can download a digital copy of it for slightly less money. Whichever method you choose, I'll get $8, so thanks in advance.
Additionally, I'm going to be running a more regular, normal blog over at fitfulmurmurs.wordpress.com. This blog will feature plenty of posts on Cuba and on other things, and should generally be pretty entertaining. So check it out! (Please?)
Thank you all very much for reading. It really was a blast, and I hope you enjoyed it as much as I did.
7. Reckoning
The next day, on Sunday, April 20th, 2008 -- exactly three months after we arrived on the island -- we filed aboard a small, rickety prop plane, and forty-five minutes later we landed at Miami International Airport.
At first it was strange to be back, and for a time I went about marveling at relatively normal things: showers that could be relied upon to regularly and quickly deliver hot water; billboards that did not feature the word "revolution"; restaurant entrees that did not involve pork. But I was not in Cuba for time enough for these things to be very foreign. This was always my home, and things in Cuba only seemed strange because I was comparing them to this.
I talked about Cuba quite a bit in the months after I came home, and at some point the conversation would inevitably turn to the future. And while I don't know better than anyone else what the future holds for the islands, I have seen things that give me some hope.
Raúl's appointment as the President of Cuba is a temporary measure; at seventy-seven, it's unlikely that he'll govern for long even given Fidel's seeming immortality. So far his tenure has been mostly unremarkable, and his reforms - like allowing Cubans to purchase cell phones or stay in hotels formerly open only to tourists - are mostly symbolic, given the prohibitively high cost of those items to normal Cubans. But for his whole life Raúl has inclined toward pragmatism. As a commander in the army that pragmatism earned him a reputation as being cold-hearted and cruel, but now, as an old man, it could serve him better in his future negotiations with the United States.
As I write this, Barack Obama is twenty-seven days away from being sworn in as President of the United States, and whatever that means for the country as a whole, it will probably signal a shift in policy toward Cuba. During the campaign Obama made cautious overtures toward repairing ties with Cuba, including calling for unrestricted travel for Americans with Cuban relatives and a loosening of the restrictions on remittances sent back to the island. The fact that he won Florida (and in particular Miami-Dade County) in the election is indicative of how much attitudes there have changed toward Cuba, and in general support for the embargo seems to be waning across the board.
I think, then, that we're going to see a major change in the next five years with regard to Cuba, and it would not surprise me if by 2015 the Communist government had fallen (or at least undergone serious changes) and U.S. - Cuban relations had been normalized.
Formal diplomatic relations, though, will not be sufficient to fully heal the rift between our two countries, and I worry that many Americans expect that, when the Communist government falls, the situation will return to where it was before the revolution. This is simply not so, and the expectation could prove harmful.
In 1959, Cuba was the most American country (outside the United States, of course) in the world. Business interests controlled the country so completely that we may as well have annexed the thing. Havana got color TV well before most of the rural United States. American movies opened simultaneously on the island and on the mainland. Habaneros drove cars as nice or nicer than their American counterparts.
This, more than anything else, explains why the Revolution succeeded so completely. Since 1492, Cuba had been ruled by others - the Spanish first, and then the Americans. Before he was a Communist, Fidel ran on a strongly Nationalistic platform, and to the people he was speaking to, the words he used - independence, patriotism, self-determination - were unfamiliar, and exciting. And when the Revolution went south (as it was doomed to from the start), most Cubans recognized it. How could they not? But they thought: it is a mess - but at least it's our mess.
The Cubans I spoke to about this are decidedly ambivalent about the future. They realize that their government can't - and shouldn't - last for much longer, but they're worried about what normal relations with the United States will mean. They've been told for years that their long-departed family members have been gathering in Miami, scheming, waiting for the embargo to fall so they might return and take back their houses - houses that might have been assigned to others, houses that might have been occupied by the same families since the Revolution. And while that doesn’t seem likely, no Cuban has any information to the contrary, so their suspicion grows.
But they're most worried about their culture. Cuba has been defined, for as long as they can remember, by Communism and by the embargo. With the floodgates open, will any of that survive? How hard will people work to keep the Packards and the Buicks running when they could just go buy a Ford Focus? Will anyone listen to son when Kanye West is on the radio?
The answer is: of course these things will survive. Because societies don't die; they adapt. That adaptation will be a painful process, and it is one that Cubans are taking on with no small amount of trepidation. But they are ready to take it on nevertheless.
So I tell people: I'm optimistic. I tell them: change is coming. Now, it's just a matter of time.
At first it was strange to be back, and for a time I went about marveling at relatively normal things: showers that could be relied upon to regularly and quickly deliver hot water; billboards that did not feature the word "revolution"; restaurant entrees that did not involve pork. But I was not in Cuba for time enough for these things to be very foreign. This was always my home, and things in Cuba only seemed strange because I was comparing them to this.
I talked about Cuba quite a bit in the months after I came home, and at some point the conversation would inevitably turn to the future. And while I don't know better than anyone else what the future holds for the islands, I have seen things that give me some hope.
Raúl's appointment as the President of Cuba is a temporary measure; at seventy-seven, it's unlikely that he'll govern for long even given Fidel's seeming immortality. So far his tenure has been mostly unremarkable, and his reforms - like allowing Cubans to purchase cell phones or stay in hotels formerly open only to tourists - are mostly symbolic, given the prohibitively high cost of those items to normal Cubans. But for his whole life Raúl has inclined toward pragmatism. As a commander in the army that pragmatism earned him a reputation as being cold-hearted and cruel, but now, as an old man, it could serve him better in his future negotiations with the United States.
As I write this, Barack Obama is twenty-seven days away from being sworn in as President of the United States, and whatever that means for the country as a whole, it will probably signal a shift in policy toward Cuba. During the campaign Obama made cautious overtures toward repairing ties with Cuba, including calling for unrestricted travel for Americans with Cuban relatives and a loosening of the restrictions on remittances sent back to the island. The fact that he won Florida (and in particular Miami-Dade County) in the election is indicative of how much attitudes there have changed toward Cuba, and in general support for the embargo seems to be waning across the board.
I think, then, that we're going to see a major change in the next five years with regard to Cuba, and it would not surprise me if by 2015 the Communist government had fallen (or at least undergone serious changes) and U.S. - Cuban relations had been normalized.
Formal diplomatic relations, though, will not be sufficient to fully heal the rift between our two countries, and I worry that many Americans expect that, when the Communist government falls, the situation will return to where it was before the revolution. This is simply not so, and the expectation could prove harmful.
In 1959, Cuba was the most American country (outside the United States, of course) in the world. Business interests controlled the country so completely that we may as well have annexed the thing. Havana got color TV well before most of the rural United States. American movies opened simultaneously on the island and on the mainland. Habaneros drove cars as nice or nicer than their American counterparts.
This, more than anything else, explains why the Revolution succeeded so completely. Since 1492, Cuba had been ruled by others - the Spanish first, and then the Americans. Before he was a Communist, Fidel ran on a strongly Nationalistic platform, and to the people he was speaking to, the words he used - independence, patriotism, self-determination - were unfamiliar, and exciting. And when the Revolution went south (as it was doomed to from the start), most Cubans recognized it. How could they not? But they thought: it is a mess - but at least it's our mess.
The Cubans I spoke to about this are decidedly ambivalent about the future. They realize that their government can't - and shouldn't - last for much longer, but they're worried about what normal relations with the United States will mean. They've been told for years that their long-departed family members have been gathering in Miami, scheming, waiting for the embargo to fall so they might return and take back their houses - houses that might have been assigned to others, houses that might have been occupied by the same families since the Revolution. And while that doesn’t seem likely, no Cuban has any information to the contrary, so their suspicion grows.
But they're most worried about their culture. Cuba has been defined, for as long as they can remember, by Communism and by the embargo. With the floodgates open, will any of that survive? How hard will people work to keep the Packards and the Buicks running when they could just go buy a Ford Focus? Will anyone listen to son when Kanye West is on the radio?
The answer is: of course these things will survive. Because societies don't die; they adapt. That adaptation will be a painful process, and it is one that Cubans are taking on with no small amount of trepidation. But they are ready to take it on nevertheless.
So I tell people: I'm optimistic. I tell them: change is coming. Now, it's just a matter of time.
6. Lunch, and A Few Words On The Embargo
Before I had gone to Mosquito Island, I had received a phone call from Irma Deas, Ilia's sister, and she had invited me to lunch at her house. The day we settled on was my second-to-last in Cuba.
Almost as soon as I came back Douglas called me and invited me to ice cream on the same day, and I accepted. So on Saturday, April 19th, I met Douglas at Coppelia.
Coppelia is one of the strangest, and most awesome, institutions to come out of Communism. In the early days of the Revolution, Fidel was searching for ways to boost the morale of the Cuban people. So he ordered the construction of an enormous, public ice-cream parlor and called it Coppelia.
Coppelia is truly huge. It occupies an entire city block, and has multiple sections. One area is for sitting; another is standing-room only; and a third is for those paying in convertible pesos (read: tourists). In a cruel twist of irony, this most communist of ice cream stands now provides shorter lines and better ice cream to those who can pay with convertible pesos, but it remains an intensely beloved place for the Cuban people and is widely considered to serve the best ice cream on the island.
I met Douglas there in the early-afternoon, and he greeted me warmly. We got in line for the standing area -- not the tourist line, but with normal Cubans. He rubbed his hands together in anticipation.
"I can't decide," he said. "Do I want two ensaladas, or three?" Ensaladas are literally ice cream salads: three scoops of different ice cream in a bowl.
I told him about my lunch at Irma's, and invited him to come. He accepted, but his face fell. "I guess I will only have one ensalada," he said, before brightening again. "Luckily, I am in Havana for three more days."
We ate our ice cream -- and it was, I must admit, quite good -- and then continued on to Irma's house, which wasn't far from the cementerio.
Irma turned out to look very different from her sister. Ilia had been short and, if I may say so, rather round. Irma, on the other hand, was considerably older, and she was frail in a way that her sister was not: thin, with white hair and wrinkles around her eyes. She hugged me and Douglas (who, as it happened, she had never met) and invited us inside.
I was surprised to find her cooking beef. In Cuba, cows are highly prized for their milk, and it is illegal to kill any cattle for meat. All of Cuba's beef, then, is imported, and extremely expensive -- I had almost never seen a local eat it. Little did I know how guilty this little bit of beef would make me feel.
Months earlier, when I was in Santiago, I had been talking with Ilia about Cuban food, and she asked me if my family cooked Cuban food often in California. Of course, I responded, and went on to name my favorite Cuban dishes -- fried bananas, black beans and rice, and, of course, ropa vieja, a kind of stew made with strips of beef.
Well, Ilia had felt rather guilty about not having any beef to offer me, so as soon as I had gone she called up her sister on the phone and told her that, when I came to lunch, she had to make me ropa vieja. So the day before we had lunch Irma had traversed the city by bus (in and of itself no easy feat), searching high and low for beef until finally she had found it, an hour from her house. The thought of this tiny old lady, who would almost certainly not weigh in at over a hundred pounds, combing the city on my account made me feel terrible, and I apologized profusely. But she waved it off and, when the food was finished cooking she brought it to the table and we all sat.
I took a few bites, and it was good. I told her so and she was happy. Douglas was also excited to be eating beef, and he tucked in eagerly. A short time into the meal Irma leaned over the table and me and said, "Kyle, tell me: why does everyone in America hate Cuba?"
I laughed a little bit, uncomfortable, and glanced at Douglas. But he offered no help: he seemed to be as interested in the answer as she. I breathed in deeply and considered how best to answer.
It was a difficult question for me in particular because I was convinced then, and remain convinced now, that the embargo is a terrifically bad policy. My reasons for thinking so are threefold:
It doesn't hurt the right people. Conditions in Cuba are bad across the board, but the people most hurt by the embargo -- the people without food, clean water, or, in some cases, shelter -- are not the leaders of the revolution. They are our family and friends, long-lost but not forgotten, and we are condemning them to a life of pain for a cause they may or may not have supported fifty years ago. And in all those years I guarantee you that Fidel has never gone hungry or unsheltered.
It gives Fidel the perfect scapegoat. For the last fifty years, the Communist government in Cuba has not had to take responsibility for a single one of its failures. Don't have any food? Those greedy Americans are the ones who won't sell it to us! Did a hurricane blow away your house? Blame the imperialists to the north! So the government receives a disproportionate amount of credit for its successes - some of which, like the literacy program and the medical system, are legitimate - while never once taking the blame for its manifold failures.
It simply does not work. There is perhaps no single U.S. foreign policy that has failed so spectacularly as our policy toward Cuba. Not only have we utterly failed to bring about any kind of regime change, we haven't been successful even in fomenting the seeds of any kind of opposition or resistance. As bad as the Communist government has been to them, the Cuban people look north and see -- what? Not a shining beacon of democracy, but instead a punitive, vengeful country, still punishing the island for offenses no longer relevant or, perhaps, even remembered.
A reasonable argument could have been made for the embargo during the Cold War, when the possibility of weapons (nuclear or otherwise) was a real one. But for the last twenty years it has existed simply because it has always existed. The embargo is petty. It is small. And it is beneath us.
I was, then, put in the awkward position of defending a policy I myself do not agree with. I couldn't decide which answer she would be happier with. Would it comfort Irma to know that most Americans don't unilaterally hate Cuba -- that indeed, most people in, say, Kansas have no opinion on Cuba whatsoever? Or would their apathy only make her angry?
So I deflected the question, and the conversation moved to other topics. But the core issue was one that would stay with me after I left Cuba. It is inevitable that, someday, the Cuban government will fall, and the United States will adopt a normal policy toward Cuba. But I think there's going to be a rift between Cuba and the United States for a long time over our conduct over the last half-century, and we're going to have a lot of things to answer for, and only feeble answers to give.
Almost as soon as I came back Douglas called me and invited me to ice cream on the same day, and I accepted. So on Saturday, April 19th, I met Douglas at Coppelia.
Coppelia is one of the strangest, and most awesome, institutions to come out of Communism. In the early days of the Revolution, Fidel was searching for ways to boost the morale of the Cuban people. So he ordered the construction of an enormous, public ice-cream parlor and called it Coppelia.
Coppelia is truly huge. It occupies an entire city block, and has multiple sections. One area is for sitting; another is standing-room only; and a third is for those paying in convertible pesos (read: tourists). In a cruel twist of irony, this most communist of ice cream stands now provides shorter lines and better ice cream to those who can pay with convertible pesos, but it remains an intensely beloved place for the Cuban people and is widely considered to serve the best ice cream on the island.
I met Douglas there in the early-afternoon, and he greeted me warmly. We got in line for the standing area -- not the tourist line, but with normal Cubans. He rubbed his hands together in anticipation.
"I can't decide," he said. "Do I want two ensaladas, or three?" Ensaladas are literally ice cream salads: three scoops of different ice cream in a bowl.
I told him about my lunch at Irma's, and invited him to come. He accepted, but his face fell. "I guess I will only have one ensalada," he said, before brightening again. "Luckily, I am in Havana for three more days."
We ate our ice cream -- and it was, I must admit, quite good -- and then continued on to Irma's house, which wasn't far from the cementerio.
Irma turned out to look very different from her sister. Ilia had been short and, if I may say so, rather round. Irma, on the other hand, was considerably older, and she was frail in a way that her sister was not: thin, with white hair and wrinkles around her eyes. She hugged me and Douglas (who, as it happened, she had never met) and invited us inside.
I was surprised to find her cooking beef. In Cuba, cows are highly prized for their milk, and it is illegal to kill any cattle for meat. All of Cuba's beef, then, is imported, and extremely expensive -- I had almost never seen a local eat it. Little did I know how guilty this little bit of beef would make me feel.
Months earlier, when I was in Santiago, I had been talking with Ilia about Cuban food, and she asked me if my family cooked Cuban food often in California. Of course, I responded, and went on to name my favorite Cuban dishes -- fried bananas, black beans and rice, and, of course, ropa vieja, a kind of stew made with strips of beef.
Well, Ilia had felt rather guilty about not having any beef to offer me, so as soon as I had gone she called up her sister on the phone and told her that, when I came to lunch, she had to make me ropa vieja. So the day before we had lunch Irma had traversed the city by bus (in and of itself no easy feat), searching high and low for beef until finally she had found it, an hour from her house. The thought of this tiny old lady, who would almost certainly not weigh in at over a hundred pounds, combing the city on my account made me feel terrible, and I apologized profusely. But she waved it off and, when the food was finished cooking she brought it to the table and we all sat.
I took a few bites, and it was good. I told her so and she was happy. Douglas was also excited to be eating beef, and he tucked in eagerly. A short time into the meal Irma leaned over the table and me and said, "Kyle, tell me: why does everyone in America hate Cuba?"
I laughed a little bit, uncomfortable, and glanced at Douglas. But he offered no help: he seemed to be as interested in the answer as she. I breathed in deeply and considered how best to answer.
It was a difficult question for me in particular because I was convinced then, and remain convinced now, that the embargo is a terrifically bad policy. My reasons for thinking so are threefold:
It doesn't hurt the right people. Conditions in Cuba are bad across the board, but the people most hurt by the embargo -- the people without food, clean water, or, in some cases, shelter -- are not the leaders of the revolution. They are our family and friends, long-lost but not forgotten, and we are condemning them to a life of pain for a cause they may or may not have supported fifty years ago. And in all those years I guarantee you that Fidel has never gone hungry or unsheltered.
It gives Fidel the perfect scapegoat. For the last fifty years, the Communist government in Cuba has not had to take responsibility for a single one of its failures. Don't have any food? Those greedy Americans are the ones who won't sell it to us! Did a hurricane blow away your house? Blame the imperialists to the north! So the government receives a disproportionate amount of credit for its successes - some of which, like the literacy program and the medical system, are legitimate - while never once taking the blame for its manifold failures.
It simply does not work. There is perhaps no single U.S. foreign policy that has failed so spectacularly as our policy toward Cuba. Not only have we utterly failed to bring about any kind of regime change, we haven't been successful even in fomenting the seeds of any kind of opposition or resistance. As bad as the Communist government has been to them, the Cuban people look north and see -- what? Not a shining beacon of democracy, but instead a punitive, vengeful country, still punishing the island for offenses no longer relevant or, perhaps, even remembered.
A reasonable argument could have been made for the embargo during the Cold War, when the possibility of weapons (nuclear or otherwise) was a real one. But for the last twenty years it has existed simply because it has always existed. The embargo is petty. It is small. And it is beneath us.
I was, then, put in the awkward position of defending a policy I myself do not agree with. I couldn't decide which answer she would be happier with. Would it comfort Irma to know that most Americans don't unilaterally hate Cuba -- that indeed, most people in, say, Kansas have no opinion on Cuba whatsoever? Or would their apathy only make her angry?
So I deflected the question, and the conversation moved to other topics. But the core issue was one that would stay with me after I left Cuba. It is inevitable that, someday, the Cuban government will fall, and the United States will adopt a normal policy toward Cuba. But I think there's going to be a rift between Cuba and the United States for a long time over our conduct over the last half-century, and we're going to have a lot of things to answer for, and only feeble answers to give.
5. Mosquito Island
In this story there are a number of obvious points at which the situation might have been avoided -- or, at the very least, improved upon -- had any of us thought twice about what we were going to do. All I can say is: we were caught up in the moment, and we learned a number of valuable lessons in the process.
Sometime in early February -- the same weekend, I believe, as I was careening around Las Terrazas on a moped -- eight of the students had rented cars and driven to a remote beach, where they spent a few nights sleeping under the stars, catching fish, and drinking tremendous amounts of rum. Faced with our impending return to the States, they decided to recreate the weekend at a different beach. It ended up that they had a few seats extra for the trip, and they invited me along. I went.
We set off early Friday morning, driving east. Our general plan was to keep inland through Santa Clara, and then cut up to the northern coast of the island near Remedios. We had been told that at Cayo Santa Maria there was a fabulous, beautiful beach, perfect for what we were looking for.
There were seven of us in the van and five in the smaller car; I was in the van. It was a tremendously hot day and the van's air conditioner was broken, so the guys shucked their shirts not long into the trip. We made our way down the autopista, hot but happy, the windows rolled down and sunglasses on. In Santa Clara, the only one of us who hadn't yet visited the Ché memorial asked if we could stop, and we did.
The eleven of us who had already visited the Ché memorial were, truth be told, a little bored; there's only so many times you can visit a giant statue of Ché in a two month period without getting the impression that you've seen all there really is to see. I'm not going to say anything more about the stop but this: if you really want to insult a bunch of people at once, arrive en masse, shirtless and rambunctious, at their most beloved national monument -- and then act really uninterested. Trust me. It irks people.
We all piled back in our cars and drove to Remedios, and from kept going north until we came to a small checkpoint. A guard examined our passports, then waved us through, and we drove across the land-bridge, through miles and miles of mangrove swamp, to Cayo Santa Maria.
Remember that bit about the mangroves. It will prove to be of import.
Cayo Santa Maria was, as promised, incredibly beautiful. But for some Russian tourists, we were the only people there, and when we tried to talk to the Russians they got very anxious and then left. We didn't quite know what to make of that, but we were happy to have the beach to ourselves. We went swimming and floated out on the waves.
There was a small hut not far from where we were, and after a few minutes an old man came out of it and made his way toward us. He introduced himself as the caretaker of the beach, and asked how long we were planning on staying.
Overnight, we answered.
The old man's eyebrows were completely white and had a surprising range of motion; when he raised them they almost seemed in danger of disappearing into his hairline. "All night?" he asked, his tone incredulous.
"Yeah," one of us said. "We're going to camp out on the beach."
The conversation was then interrupted for a moment while we explained the concept of "camping" to the old man. Camping is not a big thing in Cuba. For one thing, it's almost always warm enough to sleep outside, so they don't have any of the requisite equipment - no tents or sleeping bags or kerosene stoves. But more importantly, it's still seen as a bit of a privilege to have a place to sleep indoors at all; the concept of voluntarily sleeping outside, on the ground, is one that simply never crosses most Cuban's minds.
The old man nodded along gravely along with our explanation until we got to the bit about a campfire, when he sucked in a breath and shook his head. He explained that people seeking to leave the island sometimes lit signal-fires on the beach, and if the Coast Guard should happen by and see our fire, they might assume people were trying to escape and act accordingly.
It seems remarkable to me now that this didn't convince us to abandon our plan, but we persisted, and he finally agreed to let us have our campfire in small clearing, set twenty-feet or so back from the beach. We set about gathering firewood and, just before dusk, sat down to a lovely dinner of hot-dogs and rum around a crackling campfire. We were young, drunk, on the beach and on an adventure, and we were happy.
Then the sun went down, and from the mangrove swamps behind us rose approximately twenty-seven million mosquitoes. And they moved, as one, toward blood.
Now, I have a fair amount of experience with mosquitoes, and while I've never been particularly troubled by them, I'm also not among those who claims to be immune to their bites. They've always been a minor nuisance, nothing more and nothing less, and I while I expected we would encounter them that night on the beach, I didn't expect to be much troubled by them.
But these mosquitoes were unlike any I have ever seen.
To begin with, they were huge, fully three times larger than any mosquito I had ever seen. They had long, spindly legs and a proboscis like a hypodermic needle. They were aggressive and fearless and they came in unimaginable numbers.
Ten minutes after the sun had gone down we all had scores of bites. We slathered on extra-strength mosquito repellent, but it had no apparent effect; if anything, it seemed to act as a kind of perfume, and attracted them in greater numbers. We threw brush on the fire and stood, coughing, in the smoke, but they kept coming. I was wearing jeans and a long-sleeved tee, and they bit at every exposed bit of skin, and even stuck their suckers through the thin fabric of my shirt.
Miserable and drunk, we huddled in the dark around our feeble campfire, unsure of what else to do.
The final straw for me came when the old man came to check on us. It had been about two hours since the sun went down. He came suddenly out of the woods, a bulky mask over his face and a fogger in his hand, like some kind of mad, beekeeping troll, and it wasn't until he came close to the fire that we recognized him as the old man at all. His expression behind the mask was absolutely unreadable, and to this day I cannot understand why he hadn't warned us about the mosquitoes earlier. Had he assumed that we already knew? Was he getting back at America in general for the embargo? Or was he simply some kind of a sadist?
In any case, when he turned to walk back to his hut I followed, along with Katie and Sam. We retreated to the car, leaving the others to fend for themselves around the campfire.
We got in, shut the doors, and spent a few moments slapping at the mosquitoes that had accompanied us into the car. When they were mostly dead we arranged ourselves in the van -- Katie got the driver's seat; Sam spread out across the middle row of seats; and I took the back row. It was uncomfortable but mercifully mosquito-free, and we all breathed a sigh of relief, and though it was only perhaps seven-thirty, we tried to get to sleep.
It was, as I said, a hot day, and in Cuba the nights don't necessarily bring the temperature down. After a couple of hours the heat had become unbearable.
"Guys," said Katie. "Do you think it's safe to open the windows? Just a little?"
Her tone was one usually employed only by soldiers pinned down under heavy fire, or those who have recently lived through a particularly violent and lengthy earthquake.
"I suppose so," I said. "If they start coming in we can always close them again, quickly."
We cracked the windows, and a slight, soothing breeze stole into the van. A few mosquitoes came with it but, mercifully, not as many as we had expected. It was a reasonable compromise, and I fell back into an uneasy, fitful sleep.
I awoke shortly before dawn to Katie's voice:
"Oh my god, they're everywhere! They're everywhere!"
Almost as soon as I processed her words I realized she was right: they were everywhere. I could feel them on me, clustering around patches of exposed skin. At my ankles, in the narrow space between the cuffs of my jeans and my socks. On my hands, between every finger, and inside the arms of my shirt. And most disturbingly I felt them crawling and biting all around my face and neck, in the hollow beneath my jaw line and above my eyebrows and in my ears.
I sat up and a cloud of them rose off me, flew crazily for a moment, and then settled again. I slapped at myself again and again, and the air was literally thick with mosquitoes. In the dim light I saw Katie and Sam doing the same, twisting in their seats.
"Katie!" said Sam. "Roll down all the windows and drive around really fast! Maybe we can get them out that way."
Katie started the van and rolled down the windows. Impossibly, the van filled with even more mosquitoes; I had a tough time seeing the other two in the front of the car. Katie gunned the engine and the wheels spun for traction on the dirt road, and then jerked into motion. Off we went, bouncing crazily down the rutted land-bridge, the three of us screaming in terror and disgust.
The van hit a particularly large pothole and was (I swear) airborne for a brief moment. Then we landed with a bone-jarring thud and I suddenly had an image of the axle falling right out the bottom of the van, and of us stranded on what I had come to think of as Mosquito Island.
"Katie!" I screamed. "We've got to stop!"
She slammed on the brakes and, after a nauseating swerve, we came to a halt. She quickly rolled the windows up.
There were still mosquitoes in the car, but not the almost unbelievable number that there had been before, and we took a couple minutes to kill as many of them as we could. Then, shell-shocked and silent, we drove in the growing light back to the beach.
We parked the car, and even with the windows closed we weren't safe. Before encountering these mosquitoes I hadn't before believed any creature on Earth to have supernatural powers, but these mosquitoes seemed almost to have a sixth sense for blood. They threw themselves against the windows of the van and, when that didn't work, they set to work on the thin rubber strip between the window and the car frame. Some even made it through, and the bottom strip of the window soon became smeared with mosquito guts as I killed the ones that made it, over and over and over.
Finally, the sun rose above the ocean, and like the vampires they were the mosquitoes fled from the light, and the beach was beautiful and calm once again.
A few minutes later some of our friends stumbled, bleary-eyed and blemished, from inside the mangroves. They came over and got into the car, and it was a moment before any of them could speak. Then, one of the girls opened her mouth.
"Let's get the fuck out of here," she said, and we agreed.
It was at this point that our party split into two opposing factions. Just over half of us wanted to leave immediately, and put as much distance between ourselves and Mosquito Island as humanly possible. The others wanted to stay, splash around at the beach all day, and then find someplace in Remedios to stay, in the evening.
In the end, the differences were irreconcilable, and seven of us left in the van just after nine o'clock in the morning.
We didn't have any clear idea where we were going. Returning to Havana midday on Saturday was akin to admitting defeat. There was little to the east within driving distance save farms. So we turned the car toward Santa Clara and figured, if nothing else, that we could see the Ché memorial again.
As we were coming into Santa Clara we passed a turnoff for Cienfuegos. "Man," I said out loud. "Cienfuegos was really nice. We should go back there."
It wasn't a serious idea, but the more it got batted around the car, the more sense it made. So in the end we made for Cienfuegos, and we pulled into town in the mid-afternoon, tired and swollen and very much looking for a place to sleep.
I was the only one present who had been to Cienfuegos, so I guided us through the center of town to the residential district where I had stayed before. We parked and went into the only particular I remembered how to get to - the one that, the last time I had been there, had been infested with geckos.
We all trooped inside and waited while a small girl fetched her mother, a very nice woman who I had met previously. She came down the stairs and, when she saw us, put a hand to her mouth.
"Madre de Dios," she said. "What happened to you?"
We looked at each other and saw what she was talking about. The drive had given the bites time to swell, and we now each had clusters of bites wherever our skin had been exposed. Often the bites had fused together to form a continuous, puffy mass. We looked like outpatients from a scabies clinic. She must have thought we were carrying some kind of plague.
We explained about the camping and the mosquitoes, and at the end of it she looked a little more amused and a little less sympathetic. She was booked up, but when we mentioned that we wanted three of the nicest casas she knew of, she hurried off to the phone and within twenty minutes had secured lodging for all seven of us.
We went our separate ways. I took a long shower and then a long nap. That evening we met up and ate a huge dinner, and then walked down to La Punta and had a mojito in the gazebo and listened to the waves lap gently at the shore. Nowhere was there a mosquito to be seen. The next morning we slept late, breakfasted well, drove into the city center and shopped for a time, and then drove back to Havana.
It was the most unspeakably luxurious twenty-four hours I have ever experienced, made all the better coming, as it did, after one of the worst nights of my life. When I die, I want to go to Cienfuegos.
Sometime in early February -- the same weekend, I believe, as I was careening around Las Terrazas on a moped -- eight of the students had rented cars and driven to a remote beach, where they spent a few nights sleeping under the stars, catching fish, and drinking tremendous amounts of rum. Faced with our impending return to the States, they decided to recreate the weekend at a different beach. It ended up that they had a few seats extra for the trip, and they invited me along. I went.
We set off early Friday morning, driving east. Our general plan was to keep inland through Santa Clara, and then cut up to the northern coast of the island near Remedios. We had been told that at Cayo Santa Maria there was a fabulous, beautiful beach, perfect for what we were looking for.
There were seven of us in the van and five in the smaller car; I was in the van. It was a tremendously hot day and the van's air conditioner was broken, so the guys shucked their shirts not long into the trip. We made our way down the autopista, hot but happy, the windows rolled down and sunglasses on. In Santa Clara, the only one of us who hadn't yet visited the Ché memorial asked if we could stop, and we did.
The eleven of us who had already visited the Ché memorial were, truth be told, a little bored; there's only so many times you can visit a giant statue of Ché in a two month period without getting the impression that you've seen all there really is to see. I'm not going to say anything more about the stop but this: if you really want to insult a bunch of people at once, arrive en masse, shirtless and rambunctious, at their most beloved national monument -- and then act really uninterested. Trust me. It irks people.
We all piled back in our cars and drove to Remedios, and from kept going north until we came to a small checkpoint. A guard examined our passports, then waved us through, and we drove across the land-bridge, through miles and miles of mangrove swamp, to Cayo Santa Maria.
Remember that bit about the mangroves. It will prove to be of import.
Cayo Santa Maria was, as promised, incredibly beautiful. But for some Russian tourists, we were the only people there, and when we tried to talk to the Russians they got very anxious and then left. We didn't quite know what to make of that, but we were happy to have the beach to ourselves. We went swimming and floated out on the waves.
There was a small hut not far from where we were, and after a few minutes an old man came out of it and made his way toward us. He introduced himself as the caretaker of the beach, and asked how long we were planning on staying.
Overnight, we answered.
The old man's eyebrows were completely white and had a surprising range of motion; when he raised them they almost seemed in danger of disappearing into his hairline. "All night?" he asked, his tone incredulous.
"Yeah," one of us said. "We're going to camp out on the beach."
The conversation was then interrupted for a moment while we explained the concept of "camping" to the old man. Camping is not a big thing in Cuba. For one thing, it's almost always warm enough to sleep outside, so they don't have any of the requisite equipment - no tents or sleeping bags or kerosene stoves. But more importantly, it's still seen as a bit of a privilege to have a place to sleep indoors at all; the concept of voluntarily sleeping outside, on the ground, is one that simply never crosses most Cuban's minds.
The old man nodded along gravely along with our explanation until we got to the bit about a campfire, when he sucked in a breath and shook his head. He explained that people seeking to leave the island sometimes lit signal-fires on the beach, and if the Coast Guard should happen by and see our fire, they might assume people were trying to escape and act accordingly.
It seems remarkable to me now that this didn't convince us to abandon our plan, but we persisted, and he finally agreed to let us have our campfire in small clearing, set twenty-feet or so back from the beach. We set about gathering firewood and, just before dusk, sat down to a lovely dinner of hot-dogs and rum around a crackling campfire. We were young, drunk, on the beach and on an adventure, and we were happy.
Then the sun went down, and from the mangrove swamps behind us rose approximately twenty-seven million mosquitoes. And they moved, as one, toward blood.
Now, I have a fair amount of experience with mosquitoes, and while I've never been particularly troubled by them, I'm also not among those who claims to be immune to their bites. They've always been a minor nuisance, nothing more and nothing less, and I while I expected we would encounter them that night on the beach, I didn't expect to be much troubled by them.
But these mosquitoes were unlike any I have ever seen.
To begin with, they were huge, fully three times larger than any mosquito I had ever seen. They had long, spindly legs and a proboscis like a hypodermic needle. They were aggressive and fearless and they came in unimaginable numbers.
Ten minutes after the sun had gone down we all had scores of bites. We slathered on extra-strength mosquito repellent, but it had no apparent effect; if anything, it seemed to act as a kind of perfume, and attracted them in greater numbers. We threw brush on the fire and stood, coughing, in the smoke, but they kept coming. I was wearing jeans and a long-sleeved tee, and they bit at every exposed bit of skin, and even stuck their suckers through the thin fabric of my shirt.
Miserable and drunk, we huddled in the dark around our feeble campfire, unsure of what else to do.
The final straw for me came when the old man came to check on us. It had been about two hours since the sun went down. He came suddenly out of the woods, a bulky mask over his face and a fogger in his hand, like some kind of mad, beekeeping troll, and it wasn't until he came close to the fire that we recognized him as the old man at all. His expression behind the mask was absolutely unreadable, and to this day I cannot understand why he hadn't warned us about the mosquitoes earlier. Had he assumed that we already knew? Was he getting back at America in general for the embargo? Or was he simply some kind of a sadist?
In any case, when he turned to walk back to his hut I followed, along with Katie and Sam. We retreated to the car, leaving the others to fend for themselves around the campfire.
We got in, shut the doors, and spent a few moments slapping at the mosquitoes that had accompanied us into the car. When they were mostly dead we arranged ourselves in the van -- Katie got the driver's seat; Sam spread out across the middle row of seats; and I took the back row. It was uncomfortable but mercifully mosquito-free, and we all breathed a sigh of relief, and though it was only perhaps seven-thirty, we tried to get to sleep.
It was, as I said, a hot day, and in Cuba the nights don't necessarily bring the temperature down. After a couple of hours the heat had become unbearable.
"Guys," said Katie. "Do you think it's safe to open the windows? Just a little?"
Her tone was one usually employed only by soldiers pinned down under heavy fire, or those who have recently lived through a particularly violent and lengthy earthquake.
"I suppose so," I said. "If they start coming in we can always close them again, quickly."
We cracked the windows, and a slight, soothing breeze stole into the van. A few mosquitoes came with it but, mercifully, not as many as we had expected. It was a reasonable compromise, and I fell back into an uneasy, fitful sleep.
I awoke shortly before dawn to Katie's voice:
"Oh my god, they're everywhere! They're everywhere!"
Almost as soon as I processed her words I realized she was right: they were everywhere. I could feel them on me, clustering around patches of exposed skin. At my ankles, in the narrow space between the cuffs of my jeans and my socks. On my hands, between every finger, and inside the arms of my shirt. And most disturbingly I felt them crawling and biting all around my face and neck, in the hollow beneath my jaw line and above my eyebrows and in my ears.
I sat up and a cloud of them rose off me, flew crazily for a moment, and then settled again. I slapped at myself again and again, and the air was literally thick with mosquitoes. In the dim light I saw Katie and Sam doing the same, twisting in their seats.
"Katie!" said Sam. "Roll down all the windows and drive around really fast! Maybe we can get them out that way."
Katie started the van and rolled down the windows. Impossibly, the van filled with even more mosquitoes; I had a tough time seeing the other two in the front of the car. Katie gunned the engine and the wheels spun for traction on the dirt road, and then jerked into motion. Off we went, bouncing crazily down the rutted land-bridge, the three of us screaming in terror and disgust.
The van hit a particularly large pothole and was (I swear) airborne for a brief moment. Then we landed with a bone-jarring thud and I suddenly had an image of the axle falling right out the bottom of the van, and of us stranded on what I had come to think of as Mosquito Island.
"Katie!" I screamed. "We've got to stop!"
She slammed on the brakes and, after a nauseating swerve, we came to a halt. She quickly rolled the windows up.
There were still mosquitoes in the car, but not the almost unbelievable number that there had been before, and we took a couple minutes to kill as many of them as we could. Then, shell-shocked and silent, we drove in the growing light back to the beach.
We parked the car, and even with the windows closed we weren't safe. Before encountering these mosquitoes I hadn't before believed any creature on Earth to have supernatural powers, but these mosquitoes seemed almost to have a sixth sense for blood. They threw themselves against the windows of the van and, when that didn't work, they set to work on the thin rubber strip between the window and the car frame. Some even made it through, and the bottom strip of the window soon became smeared with mosquito guts as I killed the ones that made it, over and over and over.
Finally, the sun rose above the ocean, and like the vampires they were the mosquitoes fled from the light, and the beach was beautiful and calm once again.
A few minutes later some of our friends stumbled, bleary-eyed and blemished, from inside the mangroves. They came over and got into the car, and it was a moment before any of them could speak. Then, one of the girls opened her mouth.
"Let's get the fuck out of here," she said, and we agreed.
It was at this point that our party split into two opposing factions. Just over half of us wanted to leave immediately, and put as much distance between ourselves and Mosquito Island as humanly possible. The others wanted to stay, splash around at the beach all day, and then find someplace in Remedios to stay, in the evening.
In the end, the differences were irreconcilable, and seven of us left in the van just after nine o'clock in the morning.
We didn't have any clear idea where we were going. Returning to Havana midday on Saturday was akin to admitting defeat. There was little to the east within driving distance save farms. So we turned the car toward Santa Clara and figured, if nothing else, that we could see the Ché memorial again.
As we were coming into Santa Clara we passed a turnoff for Cienfuegos. "Man," I said out loud. "Cienfuegos was really nice. We should go back there."
It wasn't a serious idea, but the more it got batted around the car, the more sense it made. So in the end we made for Cienfuegos, and we pulled into town in the mid-afternoon, tired and swollen and very much looking for a place to sleep.
I was the only one present who had been to Cienfuegos, so I guided us through the center of town to the residential district where I had stayed before. We parked and went into the only particular I remembered how to get to - the one that, the last time I had been there, had been infested with geckos.
We all trooped inside and waited while a small girl fetched her mother, a very nice woman who I had met previously. She came down the stairs and, when she saw us, put a hand to her mouth.
"Madre de Dios," she said. "What happened to you?"
We looked at each other and saw what she was talking about. The drive had given the bites time to swell, and we now each had clusters of bites wherever our skin had been exposed. Often the bites had fused together to form a continuous, puffy mass. We looked like outpatients from a scabies clinic. She must have thought we were carrying some kind of plague.
We explained about the camping and the mosquitoes, and at the end of it she looked a little more amused and a little less sympathetic. She was booked up, but when we mentioned that we wanted three of the nicest casas she knew of, she hurried off to the phone and within twenty minutes had secured lodging for all seven of us.
We went our separate ways. I took a long shower and then a long nap. That evening we met up and ate a huge dinner, and then walked down to La Punta and had a mojito in the gazebo and listened to the waves lap gently at the shore. Nowhere was there a mosquito to be seen. The next morning we slept late, breakfasted well, drove into the city center and shopped for a time, and then drove back to Havana.
It was the most unspeakably luxurious twenty-four hours I have ever experienced, made all the better coming, as it did, after one of the worst nights of my life. When I die, I want to go to Cienfuegos.
4. Viñales
Anyway.
We came back to the Hotel Riviera in mid-March and almost immediately fell into a deep malaise. There were a couple of reasons for this but, personally, I think it mostly had to do with our lack of a routine. It really seemed like the Ludwig Foundation had spent so much time and energy figuring out how to get us to Cuba that when we got there, they didn't really know what to do with us. As such, our classes were almost pathetically easy. In the three months that I was in Cuba I had no reading to do outside of class, I only ever had one-page homework assignments for my Spanish class, and no one really cared whether we came to class or not. I had it a bit easier than the Documentary kids, too - I was in a program where I was ostensibly studying Cuban music, but my teachers stopped showing up soon after we returned from Santiago and were missing in action until two days before the end of the trip.
So we had a bunch of free time, but we were a little beyond the stage where we were incredibly excited to be in Cuba - we had been on the island now for two months, and it's tough to go out and find something new to explore every single day. We got lazy. We hung around. We played a lot of card games. It got hot, and the air conditioning in the hotel broke, and we took to lounging in the pool. We still went places, of course, but the pace slowed down significantly.
And then all of a sudden it was April, and we realized we had only three weeks left in Cuba and everybody freaked out.
The first weekend in April I went west again, this time with Bruno, Sam, and Sara. We rented a car and drove (stopping only briefly for a meal at El Romero in Las Terrazas) to the town of Viñales.
It's a little strange that I ended up going to Piñar del Rio twice in my time in Cuba - there really isn't all that much there. But Viñales is home to some of Cuba's strangest - and most striking - natural formations: mogotes, which are strange, block-like hills, not tall but distinctively shaped. The area has historically been too mountainous to be good farmland, although the best of Cuba's tobacco is produced here; with the influx of tourists, though, the mogotes have become a veritable attraction.
We left Havana in the midmorning, and the sun was high in the sky. Three hours later, we drove into Viñales - the midst of a torrential downpour.
Viñales is a relatively small town, and the highway is the main drag through town. On either side of the road there are lines of casas particulares, most with small signs out front saying the names and the number of rooms available. It was impossible, though, for us to see those signs, so heavy was the rain. It was a downpour unlike any I have ever seen; the windshield wipers flapped in vain as multitudes of the fat droplets fell from the sky. Eventually we managed to find one with two rooms available. We parked the car outside and argued about who would have to dash the five yards or so to the front door.
After a spirited game of rock-paper-scissors, I was chosen. I put my hand on the door handle and braced myself for the rain.
There was a bright flash and the air was split by a terrific crack. A bolt of lightning struck a power pole about twenty feet from the car; it gave off a shower of sparks and swayed worryingly for a moment before deciding, on reflection, that it rather liked being upright. A few seconds later there was another peal of thunder, further off but still loud.
We decided to wait until the rain let up.
After about twenty minutes, the rain had slackened somewhat and the lightning had stopped. I ducked out of the car and jogged up to the front porch, where the entire family had gathered, curious. A graceful woman of about forty-five stepped up and shook my hand. She introduced herself as Nery Hernandez Rodriguez, and asked if I was interested in staying in her house. She then introduced me to approximately nine of her children and/or nephews, whose names I forgot nearly as quickly as they said them.
She gave me a tour of the house - and it really was a lovely house. Beautiful tiled floors, tastefully decorated bedrooms, clean. She walked me back out onto the porch, where there were several tables and a swinging bench, and we sat down. She told me the price, and it was reasonable. She mentioned that she was an excellent cook and would provide breakfast and dinner for a similarly reasonable price. I told her that we would love to stay there, and she nodded - not surprised, but pleased.
As I turned to go back to the car she said, almost as an afterthought: "Of course, you all have your passports and visas, yes?"
"Of course," I said, and at that moment that I realized that my passport was in fact locked safely in the safe in my hotel room, three hours to the east.
If it's not immediately evident how stupid this was, let me tell you: it was really stupid. It was extremely important to the Cuban government that all the tourists in its borders were properly documented and traveling legally; otherwise, Cuba would have been overrun by hippies in Ché t-shirts sometime around 1982. A passport was necessary to rent any sort of respectable room. And yet somehow I had completely neglected to bring it with me - had, indeed, neglected even to bring my photocopy with me. It was a monumentally boneheaded thing to do.
I jogged back to the car and explained the situation. Needless to say, they were not entirely pleased. We went inside and explained the situation to Nery. Her husband wandered in midway through the conversation, clad only in boxer shorts and a white t-shirt.
"Wait a minute," he said, pointing at me. "Are you saying you left Havana without your passport?"
I nodded.
"Did you bring any kind of identification at all?"
I shook my head.
"Nothing?"
What could I do? I shook my head again. He stared at me for a moment in bemused disbelief, and then chuckled - a low, deeply amused chuckle that shook his belly.
"Son," he said. "You left the house without your pants on."
Coming as it was from a pants-less man himself, this was particularly galling, but I held my tongue and in the moment even managed, I think, to laugh with him a bit. We asked Nery if there was any way that we could still stay in the house, promising that the three Americans who were obviously smart and responsible would keep an eye on the other. But she shook her head. She went out to the porch and pointed to the house next door.
We went and looked - and saw why it was she couldn't let me stay.
The house next door had a small sign above the door that read, "Comité de Defensa de la Revolucion" - and then, in smaller letters, "Viva el socialismo." I'd seen these signs before, all over the island. There was a C.D.R. in every neighborhood, and though they had all sorts of secondary activities - they often organized classes, or distributed medicine - they were primarily concerned with monitoring the people in their neighborhood. They were the Communist party's local ground force; they kept files on every person in the neighborhood, and if someone was judged to be a bad communist - if, say, they were neither working nor in school, or if someone is spreading anti-communist information - the C.D.R. alerted the local police.
In my time in Cuba I learned many things about the Communist government. In some ways it worked better than I had been led to believe; in other ways, worse. But nothing was quite so alien to me as the idea of a C.D.R.
(Speaking of things that work reasonably well - there has been a lot of talk about the Cuban health care system since Michael Moore's film Sicko came out a few years ago. Here's the thing about the Cuban health care system: it's very good at keeping its population reasonably healthy. Much more emphasis is put on treating serious conditions or illnesses, and so Cubans only go to the doctor when they're really sick; when they do go, though, the quality of the care they get is very good. The situation is creates is strangely opposite from that in the United States: in Cuba, it costs nothing to get, say, a kidney transplant, but to buy aspirin on the black market is quite expensive.
Here's the catch: the Cuban government's magnanimity only extends to its citizens. Since the end of the Special Period, Cuba's entire health care system has been funded by tourist dollars. There is an entirely different set of hospitals set up in tourists areas; these hospitals are nicer, cleaner, better-stocked, and expensive. In addition, a Cuban doctor has developed a rather unique surgery for night-blindness that brings many people to the island specifically for the treatment. So if you travel in Cuba, don't expect that your medical treatment will be free - the best thing that you can possibly do, from the Cuban government's point of view, is to visit the island and then fall deathly ill.)
So this, then, was why I could not stay at Nery's house: the C.D.R. was not just close, it was next door, and if they found out that she had let me stay she could lose the license on her palidar. But she held up a finger and said: let me make a few calls.
A few minutes later a man walked up and introduced himself to Bruno and I, and we followed to him to another, altogether poorer neighborhood. He led us to one house in particular; I noticed, as we entered, that there was no palidar certificate in the window. We were led to a back room with two thin cots in it. The paint was faded; the single window was small and set far up in the wall; cockroaches skittered at the corners of the room. But they would let us stay without asking to see our passports.
What else could we do? We took it.
We waked back to the first house and spent the evening drinking wine and playing Spades on the front porch. We went to bed early, and the next day got up and drove to la Cueva de Santo Tomas.
The hills of Viñales are riddled with caves, and throughout Cuba's history they've been militarily important: the Native Americans first hid in them to launch attacks on the invading Spaniards; hundreds of years later, Ché Guevara set up his headquarters in them during the Cuban Missile Crisis. La Cueva de Santo Tomas is actually a huge cave system, extending some forty-two kilometers into the mountains. When I learned this I was filled with admittedly unrealistic expectations - would we stumble, I wondered, over the skeleton of a long-dead Taino warrior? Or a handful of miraculously-preserved pages from the diary of Ché himself?
Of course, although the cave system extends back forty kilometers, they only take you through a well-traveled kilometer or so of it, so my grandiose hopes were dashed. But we donned spelunking helmets and set off into the caves anyway, with only our guide and two giggling Swedish girls (with whom communication was, sadly, rather difficult) for company.
It was a fun way to spend a morning. There's something inherently unsettling about caves, and it was fun to poke around in one without any real chance of hurting ourselves. We startled a gaggle of bats; we giggled childishly at a remarkably phallic stalagmite; and we clambered around on rocks. (We did not, unfortunately, find any of the blind, albino creatures that Animal Planet had led me to believe lurked in every cave.) A few hours later we emerged, blinking, into the daylight, and set off for Cayo Jutiás, twenty miles to the north.
You would think that after nearly three months in Cuba, I would have grown tired of beautiful beaches. You'd be wrong. Cayo Jutiás was a nearly perfect beach: warm, beautiful, almost empty. I fell asleep on the beach with A Farewell to Arms over my face and woke a few hours later covered in small, colorful crabs, which was less unsettling than it sounds. We drank a bottle of wine, scrawled a note on a bit of scratch paper, and threw the bottle back out to sea.
When the sun had dropped below the horizon we made our way back to the car and drove back to Viñales. The next day we woke up, got in the car, and drove home - stopping only briefly for a lunch at El Romero.
It was a calm, uneventful couple of days - and so I offer it in stark contrast to the weekend that followed.
We came back to the Hotel Riviera in mid-March and almost immediately fell into a deep malaise. There were a couple of reasons for this but, personally, I think it mostly had to do with our lack of a routine. It really seemed like the Ludwig Foundation had spent so much time and energy figuring out how to get us to Cuba that when we got there, they didn't really know what to do with us. As such, our classes were almost pathetically easy. In the three months that I was in Cuba I had no reading to do outside of class, I only ever had one-page homework assignments for my Spanish class, and no one really cared whether we came to class or not. I had it a bit easier than the Documentary kids, too - I was in a program where I was ostensibly studying Cuban music, but my teachers stopped showing up soon after we returned from Santiago and were missing in action until two days before the end of the trip.
So we had a bunch of free time, but we were a little beyond the stage where we were incredibly excited to be in Cuba - we had been on the island now for two months, and it's tough to go out and find something new to explore every single day. We got lazy. We hung around. We played a lot of card games. It got hot, and the air conditioning in the hotel broke, and we took to lounging in the pool. We still went places, of course, but the pace slowed down significantly.
And then all of a sudden it was April, and we realized we had only three weeks left in Cuba and everybody freaked out.
The first weekend in April I went west again, this time with Bruno, Sam, and Sara. We rented a car and drove (stopping only briefly for a meal at El Romero in Las Terrazas) to the town of Viñales.
It's a little strange that I ended up going to Piñar del Rio twice in my time in Cuba - there really isn't all that much there. But Viñales is home to some of Cuba's strangest - and most striking - natural formations: mogotes, which are strange, block-like hills, not tall but distinctively shaped. The area has historically been too mountainous to be good farmland, although the best of Cuba's tobacco is produced here; with the influx of tourists, though, the mogotes have become a veritable attraction.
We left Havana in the midmorning, and the sun was high in the sky. Three hours later, we drove into Viñales - the midst of a torrential downpour.
Viñales is a relatively small town, and the highway is the main drag through town. On either side of the road there are lines of casas particulares, most with small signs out front saying the names and the number of rooms available. It was impossible, though, for us to see those signs, so heavy was the rain. It was a downpour unlike any I have ever seen; the windshield wipers flapped in vain as multitudes of the fat droplets fell from the sky. Eventually we managed to find one with two rooms available. We parked the car outside and argued about who would have to dash the five yards or so to the front door.
After a spirited game of rock-paper-scissors, I was chosen. I put my hand on the door handle and braced myself for the rain.
There was a bright flash and the air was split by a terrific crack. A bolt of lightning struck a power pole about twenty feet from the car; it gave off a shower of sparks and swayed worryingly for a moment before deciding, on reflection, that it rather liked being upright. A few seconds later there was another peal of thunder, further off but still loud.
We decided to wait until the rain let up.
After about twenty minutes, the rain had slackened somewhat and the lightning had stopped. I ducked out of the car and jogged up to the front porch, where the entire family had gathered, curious. A graceful woman of about forty-five stepped up and shook my hand. She introduced herself as Nery Hernandez Rodriguez, and asked if I was interested in staying in her house. She then introduced me to approximately nine of her children and/or nephews, whose names I forgot nearly as quickly as they said them.
She gave me a tour of the house - and it really was a lovely house. Beautiful tiled floors, tastefully decorated bedrooms, clean. She walked me back out onto the porch, where there were several tables and a swinging bench, and we sat down. She told me the price, and it was reasonable. She mentioned that she was an excellent cook and would provide breakfast and dinner for a similarly reasonable price. I told her that we would love to stay there, and she nodded - not surprised, but pleased.
As I turned to go back to the car she said, almost as an afterthought: "Of course, you all have your passports and visas, yes?"
"Of course," I said, and at that moment that I realized that my passport was in fact locked safely in the safe in my hotel room, three hours to the east.
If it's not immediately evident how stupid this was, let me tell you: it was really stupid. It was extremely important to the Cuban government that all the tourists in its borders were properly documented and traveling legally; otherwise, Cuba would have been overrun by hippies in Ché t-shirts sometime around 1982. A passport was necessary to rent any sort of respectable room. And yet somehow I had completely neglected to bring it with me - had, indeed, neglected even to bring my photocopy with me. It was a monumentally boneheaded thing to do.
I jogged back to the car and explained the situation. Needless to say, they were not entirely pleased. We went inside and explained the situation to Nery. Her husband wandered in midway through the conversation, clad only in boxer shorts and a white t-shirt.
"Wait a minute," he said, pointing at me. "Are you saying you left Havana without your passport?"
I nodded.
"Did you bring any kind of identification at all?"
I shook my head.
"Nothing?"
What could I do? I shook my head again. He stared at me for a moment in bemused disbelief, and then chuckled - a low, deeply amused chuckle that shook his belly.
"Son," he said. "You left the house without your pants on."
Coming as it was from a pants-less man himself, this was particularly galling, but I held my tongue and in the moment even managed, I think, to laugh with him a bit. We asked Nery if there was any way that we could still stay in the house, promising that the three Americans who were obviously smart and responsible would keep an eye on the other. But she shook her head. She went out to the porch and pointed to the house next door.
We went and looked - and saw why it was she couldn't let me stay.
The house next door had a small sign above the door that read, "Comité de Defensa de la Revolucion" - and then, in smaller letters, "Viva el socialismo." I'd seen these signs before, all over the island. There was a C.D.R. in every neighborhood, and though they had all sorts of secondary activities - they often organized classes, or distributed medicine - they were primarily concerned with monitoring the people in their neighborhood. They were the Communist party's local ground force; they kept files on every person in the neighborhood, and if someone was judged to be a bad communist - if, say, they were neither working nor in school, or if someone is spreading anti-communist information - the C.D.R. alerted the local police.
In my time in Cuba I learned many things about the Communist government. In some ways it worked better than I had been led to believe; in other ways, worse. But nothing was quite so alien to me as the idea of a C.D.R.
(Speaking of things that work reasonably well - there has been a lot of talk about the Cuban health care system since Michael Moore's film Sicko came out a few years ago. Here's the thing about the Cuban health care system: it's very good at keeping its population reasonably healthy. Much more emphasis is put on treating serious conditions or illnesses, and so Cubans only go to the doctor when they're really sick; when they do go, though, the quality of the care they get is very good. The situation is creates is strangely opposite from that in the United States: in Cuba, it costs nothing to get, say, a kidney transplant, but to buy aspirin on the black market is quite expensive.
Here's the catch: the Cuban government's magnanimity only extends to its citizens. Since the end of the Special Period, Cuba's entire health care system has been funded by tourist dollars. There is an entirely different set of hospitals set up in tourists areas; these hospitals are nicer, cleaner, better-stocked, and expensive. In addition, a Cuban doctor has developed a rather unique surgery for night-blindness that brings many people to the island specifically for the treatment. So if you travel in Cuba, don't expect that your medical treatment will be free - the best thing that you can possibly do, from the Cuban government's point of view, is to visit the island and then fall deathly ill.)
So this, then, was why I could not stay at Nery's house: the C.D.R. was not just close, it was next door, and if they found out that she had let me stay she could lose the license on her palidar. But she held up a finger and said: let me make a few calls.
A few minutes later a man walked up and introduced himself to Bruno and I, and we followed to him to another, altogether poorer neighborhood. He led us to one house in particular; I noticed, as we entered, that there was no palidar certificate in the window. We were led to a back room with two thin cots in it. The paint was faded; the single window was small and set far up in the wall; cockroaches skittered at the corners of the room. But they would let us stay without asking to see our passports.
What else could we do? We took it.
We waked back to the first house and spent the evening drinking wine and playing Spades on the front porch. We went to bed early, and the next day got up and drove to la Cueva de Santo Tomas.
The hills of Viñales are riddled with caves, and throughout Cuba's history they've been militarily important: the Native Americans first hid in them to launch attacks on the invading Spaniards; hundreds of years later, Ché Guevara set up his headquarters in them during the Cuban Missile Crisis. La Cueva de Santo Tomas is actually a huge cave system, extending some forty-two kilometers into the mountains. When I learned this I was filled with admittedly unrealistic expectations - would we stumble, I wondered, over the skeleton of a long-dead Taino warrior? Or a handful of miraculously-preserved pages from the diary of Ché himself?
Of course, although the cave system extends back forty kilometers, they only take you through a well-traveled kilometer or so of it, so my grandiose hopes were dashed. But we donned spelunking helmets and set off into the caves anyway, with only our guide and two giggling Swedish girls (with whom communication was, sadly, rather difficult) for company.
It was a fun way to spend a morning. There's something inherently unsettling about caves, and it was fun to poke around in one without any real chance of hurting ourselves. We startled a gaggle of bats; we giggled childishly at a remarkably phallic stalagmite; and we clambered around on rocks. (We did not, unfortunately, find any of the blind, albino creatures that Animal Planet had led me to believe lurked in every cave.) A few hours later we emerged, blinking, into the daylight, and set off for Cayo Jutiás, twenty miles to the north.
You would think that after nearly three months in Cuba, I would have grown tired of beautiful beaches. You'd be wrong. Cayo Jutiás was a nearly perfect beach: warm, beautiful, almost empty. I fell asleep on the beach with A Farewell to Arms over my face and woke a few hours later covered in small, colorful crabs, which was less unsettling than it sounds. We drank a bottle of wine, scrawled a note on a bit of scratch paper, and threw the bottle back out to sea.
When the sun had dropped below the horizon we made our way back to the car and drove back to Viñales. The next day we woke up, got in the car, and drove home - stopping only briefly for a lunch at El Romero.
It was a calm, uneventful couple of days - and so I offer it in stark contrast to the weekend that followed.
3. A Bit More About The Special Period
If Cuba's long-term problems stem from slavery, their short-term problems are a direct product of the Special Period. I've talked about the Special Period before, but it's almost impossible to overstate the effect of the Special Period on Cuba. It was a ten-year-long economic recession that resulted in the almost-complete breakdown of Cuba's infrastructure, and though Fidel formally announced the end of the Special Period in 2000, the country has really only begun to recover.
It was a time of terrific hardship. There were rolling power outages that sometimes left people without electricity for days. Sewage treatment and disposal methods broke down, and clean water was hard to come by. Food was strictly rationed, and the average Cuban lost twenty pounds.
It's almost impossible to overstate the effect that the Special Period had on Cuba.
On the corner of 17th and G, in Vedado, there's a small, wooden food stand. It's right in the residential part of the neighborhood; before the Revolution, the area was second in luxury only to Miramar, which lies a little to the west. Now, though, the area has the same air of decay that the rest of the country does. The houses are slouching, crumbling things, their paint cracking and flaking in the humid air. The streets are rutted and strewn with potholes. And the mighty banyan trees have gone to work on the sidewalks, their roots upending the concrete slabs.
The stand is a popular one, and throughout the day people drift by to drink a cafecito and talk with their neighbors. I went there often; my caffeine addiction had led me to map out similar stands in the neighborhood, but this one was always my favorite. One day, though, I ordered a juice instead.
The woman in the stand handed me the glass, and I noticed that it was an odd shape - skinny and tall. I looked closely and saw that it was imprinted with a Corona label, cut off a bit from the top. I tapped the glass and asked the woman where she got it.
"People made them," she said. "During the Special Period."
I thought of asking her more, but there were other customers in line, and I moved aside. A few weeks later, though, I was in my Arts and Culture of Cuba class, and Helmo came in with a large crate. Helmo is the head of the Ludwig Foundation, and a respected member of the Cuban art world; he's also publicly gay, which is no easy thing to be in Cuba. He has lived a difficult life, but an incredibly interesting one for all that, and when he lectured, everybody listened.
He set the crate down on the table and began to take all manner of recycled objects out. More beer-bottle-glasses, yes, like the one I had seen at the stand, but also a wind chime made from cut-up soda cans, a candle holder made from a bent toothpaste tube, a garden gnome with a tin-can for a head. When he finished the table was full, and it was an extraordinary collection: everything thoroughly recycled, but still recognizable for what it once was.
He held up a home-made wine glass. "Why," he said, "do you think someone would make this?"
We shrugged, but he pressed on. "There was no wine during the Special Period," he said. "But still, someone made this, and then someone else bought it. Why?"
He put the wine glass back down on the table. "Do you know how we got through the Special Period?" he said. "It was because we never lost our dignity." He leaned toward us, his voice quiet but full of emotion. "We may never have had any wine to drink," he said. "But we never stopped believing that we deserved the wine."
A few weeks later I was at the Cementerio de Cristobal Colon, helping a friend of mine shoot his documentary project. The Cementerio is a truly huge cemetery in the middle of Havana - it has an area of a couple square miles, and some 800,000 graves in it. I was standing somewhat in the middle of the cemetery, so graves stretched almost as far as I could see in each direction. The landscape of tombstones was interrupted only occasionally by a larger crypt, carved and ornamental, that housed somebody who had been a little more rich than the average person.
Space is at a premium in the cemetery, though, so the bodies buried there now are in temporary storage more than anything: after three years, they bodies are dug up and cremated. On the day that I was there, the unenviable task of digging up the bodies fell to three middle-aged men in overalls. They seemed pretty used to it, though - they joked and laughed as they transferred the remains (bones, hair, a few scraps of clothing) into a large wheelbarrow.
Later, when the grisly work was finished, the burials started. At about one, the first funeral procession started to make its way slowly through the cemetery.
There were a dozen or so people. The pall-bearers, of course. A young woman in a black dress, not much more than a girl, really. In front of her were two middle-aged couples, arms linked. And leading the procession was an old man with white hair and a slow, shuffling gait. In his arms he was cradling a picture of an old woman and, from the way his eyes were leaking, I guessed that it was his wife.
The procession stopped in front of one of the empty holes. The old man stood very still as the pall-bearers brought the coffin around. His shoulders were straight. He was wearing a suit, a nice one, and it fit him well; when I looked closer, though, I saw that it was dusty and threadbare. The jacket was missing a button. The old man reached down and straightened it, tugging at the bottom and raising his chin.
They never stopped believing they deserved the wine.
It was a time of terrific hardship. There were rolling power outages that sometimes left people without electricity for days. Sewage treatment and disposal methods broke down, and clean water was hard to come by. Food was strictly rationed, and the average Cuban lost twenty pounds.
It's almost impossible to overstate the effect that the Special Period had on Cuba.
On the corner of 17th and G, in Vedado, there's a small, wooden food stand. It's right in the residential part of the neighborhood; before the Revolution, the area was second in luxury only to Miramar, which lies a little to the west. Now, though, the area has the same air of decay that the rest of the country does. The houses are slouching, crumbling things, their paint cracking and flaking in the humid air. The streets are rutted and strewn with potholes. And the mighty banyan trees have gone to work on the sidewalks, their roots upending the concrete slabs.
The stand is a popular one, and throughout the day people drift by to drink a cafecito and talk with their neighbors. I went there often; my caffeine addiction had led me to map out similar stands in the neighborhood, but this one was always my favorite. One day, though, I ordered a juice instead.
The woman in the stand handed me the glass, and I noticed that it was an odd shape - skinny and tall. I looked closely and saw that it was imprinted with a Corona label, cut off a bit from the top. I tapped the glass and asked the woman where she got it.
"People made them," she said. "During the Special Period."
I thought of asking her more, but there were other customers in line, and I moved aside. A few weeks later, though, I was in my Arts and Culture of Cuba class, and Helmo came in with a large crate. Helmo is the head of the Ludwig Foundation, and a respected member of the Cuban art world; he's also publicly gay, which is no easy thing to be in Cuba. He has lived a difficult life, but an incredibly interesting one for all that, and when he lectured, everybody listened.
He set the crate down on the table and began to take all manner of recycled objects out. More beer-bottle-glasses, yes, like the one I had seen at the stand, but also a wind chime made from cut-up soda cans, a candle holder made from a bent toothpaste tube, a garden gnome with a tin-can for a head. When he finished the table was full, and it was an extraordinary collection: everything thoroughly recycled, but still recognizable for what it once was.
He held up a home-made wine glass. "Why," he said, "do you think someone would make this?"
We shrugged, but he pressed on. "There was no wine during the Special Period," he said. "But still, someone made this, and then someone else bought it. Why?"
He put the wine glass back down on the table. "Do you know how we got through the Special Period?" he said. "It was because we never lost our dignity." He leaned toward us, his voice quiet but full of emotion. "We may never have had any wine to drink," he said. "But we never stopped believing that we deserved the wine."
A few weeks later I was at the Cementerio de Cristobal Colon, helping a friend of mine shoot his documentary project. The Cementerio is a truly huge cemetery in the middle of Havana - it has an area of a couple square miles, and some 800,000 graves in it. I was standing somewhat in the middle of the cemetery, so graves stretched almost as far as I could see in each direction. The landscape of tombstones was interrupted only occasionally by a larger crypt, carved and ornamental, that housed somebody who had been a little more rich than the average person.
Space is at a premium in the cemetery, though, so the bodies buried there now are in temporary storage more than anything: after three years, they bodies are dug up and cremated. On the day that I was there, the unenviable task of digging up the bodies fell to three middle-aged men in overalls. They seemed pretty used to it, though - they joked and laughed as they transferred the remains (bones, hair, a few scraps of clothing) into a large wheelbarrow.
Later, when the grisly work was finished, the burials started. At about one, the first funeral procession started to make its way slowly through the cemetery.
There were a dozen or so people. The pall-bearers, of course. A young woman in a black dress, not much more than a girl, really. In front of her were two middle-aged couples, arms linked. And leading the procession was an old man with white hair and a slow, shuffling gait. In his arms he was cradling a picture of an old woman and, from the way his eyes were leaking, I guessed that it was his wife.
The procession stopped in front of one of the empty holes. The old man stood very still as the pall-bearers brought the coffin around. His shoulders were straight. He was wearing a suit, a nice one, and it fit him well; when I looked closer, though, I saw that it was dusty and threadbare. The jacket was missing a button. The old man reached down and straightened it, tugging at the bottom and raising his chin.
They never stopped believing they deserved the wine.
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