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.
Saturday, December 27, 2008
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.
Friday, December 26, 2008
2. March
On the ninth of March, after four days in Santiago and six in Baracoa, the Tisch Study Abroad Cuba group boarded a small prop plane and flew back to Havana, and proceeded by bus from the airport to the Hotel Riviera.
We weren't entirely pleased to be back. From the first we had an uneasy relationship with the Riviera: it offered just enough amenities to remind us that we were not exactly living the authentic Cuban experience, and just few enough that we never mistook it for an American hotel. Had I been living with a Cuban household I would have eaten anything and slept anywhere, and been grateful for it, but in what was ostensibly a luxury hotel the Riviera's many flaws (unpredictable hot water, terrible food, and, in the case of our unlucky TA, giant mushrooms growing on the bathroom ceiling) seemed almost like personal affronts.
It was the first time I had ever stayed for a significant length of time in a hotel, and it was a strange experience. We became sensitive to the number and makeup of the other guests in the Riviera; we knew that, say, this week there were a large number of Spaniards in town, and that we had to get down to dinner at seven sharp if we were to get any dessert. For ten memorable days a group of perhaps four dozen German choir boys invaded, in Havana on some kind of tour, and believe me, you have no idea what that many hungry prepubescent German schoolchildren can do to a buffet table. (Seriously. It was like something out of Shark Week.)
(The choir-boys did redeem themselves somewhat, though. On their second-to-last day at the Riviera they put on a performance for the guests of the hotel, presumably as some sort of apology for eating all our food. The performance was supposed to be in the bar (go figure) but when the hour came the conductor noticed that most of the attendees, myself included, were sitting in-stead in the lobby area. So he told the boys to, very quietly, form a circle around the seating area. They were quite sly, and no one really noticed what they were doing until they broke into 'Silent Night'. Trust me: it's more than a bit disconcerting to look up and find that you're surrounded by fifty blond-haired, blue-eyed, eleven-year-old carolers. They were actually quite good, though their late-set covers of "Guantanamera" and "Chan Chan" were examples of creative reinterpretation gone horribly, horribly wrong.)
We also became awkward but good friends with our maids. They cleaned the rooms every day, generally waiting until we'd left for class but occasionally just wandering in. For hotel staff they were endearingly stern with us: if we left our rooms a mess, we would get chastised or made fun of. (Once, I locked myself out of my room late at night, and had to call one of the maids - the night shift, not one I knew very well - to let me back in. And per hotel procedure she asked to see my passport, to check my name against the guest list, and when I handed it to her she glanced at the picture - taken when I was maybe seventeen - and gave a small but definite giggle. I asked her what was so funny. "Oh, nothing," she said, "You just look a little..." She trailed off. "Younger?" I said. "Fatter," she replied.)
The other thing the maids would invariably do is ask after a guy named Dain - or, as they called him, el Chino. There were two Asian-American guys with us: Dain, who was born and raised in Brooklyn, and Sam, who was from just outside Los Angeles. Both of them were born in the United States and both of them were Korean, but to the maids, it didn't much matter: they were both chinos. The maids were absolutely fascinated with Dain in particular, because he lived on our floor: if he happened to be in they would mention the fact to us, as if it were privileged information, and if he weren't they would ask excitedly where he was and what he was doing.
The interest in Sam and Dain was hardly confined to the maids, though. Although Havana used to have quite a few Asians, they almost all fled following the revolution, leaving behind little more than some incomprehensible signs in el barrio chino, Havana's Chinatown. So only the very oldest Cubans had ever seen an Asian before, and when Sam or Dain walked down the street it wasn't unusual for them to be subjected to a strangely well-intentioned form of racism. Upon seeing them, people would yell things like, "Domo Arigato!" or "Jackie Chan!", repeatedly and at a high volume. Small children would stare openly or, if they were particularly bold, they would pull at the corners of their eyes and stick out their tongues. None of it was mean-spirited - everyone seemed genuinely excited to see them - but coming from the United States it all seemed pretty offensive.
Race relations in Cuba are a complex thing, though - especially between blacks and whites. I was sitting once with one of the Cuban students, and we were trading jokes - I was badly translating jokes I knew in English into Spanish, and he the opposite, and sometimes we would even laugh at the punch-lines. At one point I was trying to explain to him what a blonde joke was. "There's a stereotype," I said, "that for whatever reason, blonde women are viewed as being particularly dumb - past the point where it's even believable." His eyes lit up. "Oh!" he said. "We have those too, except about black people."
When the Communist government came to power in 1959, eliminating racism was one of their chief goals, and today they will tell you that they have succeeded. This is not really true. While it does seem that on an institutional level Cuba has made some progress - there are blacks all throughout the various levels of government - on a personal level they still have a very long way to go. Complicating the situation is the fact that few people on the island can really claim to be purely white or purely black; the population of Cuba is said to be about 70% mixed-race, but that is almost certainly too low a number. And there is still a definite correlation between the shade of someone's skin and the quality of life that person will have, and in Cuba people who appear blacker will generally also be poorer, live in more rural areas, and will have more trouble with the police.
Much as there is in the United States, there is a tremendous amount of guilt - especially among the more privileged Cubans - over their treatment of blacks and particularly over slavery. If anything, that guilt is amplified by the sheer importance of the slave trade to Cuba's development. In the United States, the cotton industry was a major component of the country's economy; in Cuba, the sugar industry was the only component of the country's economy. And the island was also the hub of the slave trade in the New World: every slave who was brought to the Americas came to Havana first. Cuba was built on the backs of kidnapped Africans, and they know it, too. "All of Cuba's biggest problems," one of my professors told me, "come from slavery."
We weren't entirely pleased to be back. From the first we had an uneasy relationship with the Riviera: it offered just enough amenities to remind us that we were not exactly living the authentic Cuban experience, and just few enough that we never mistook it for an American hotel. Had I been living with a Cuban household I would have eaten anything and slept anywhere, and been grateful for it, but in what was ostensibly a luxury hotel the Riviera's many flaws (unpredictable hot water, terrible food, and, in the case of our unlucky TA, giant mushrooms growing on the bathroom ceiling) seemed almost like personal affronts.
It was the first time I had ever stayed for a significant length of time in a hotel, and it was a strange experience. We became sensitive to the number and makeup of the other guests in the Riviera; we knew that, say, this week there were a large number of Spaniards in town, and that we had to get down to dinner at seven sharp if we were to get any dessert. For ten memorable days a group of perhaps four dozen German choir boys invaded, in Havana on some kind of tour, and believe me, you have no idea what that many hungry prepubescent German schoolchildren can do to a buffet table. (Seriously. It was like something out of Shark Week.)
(The choir-boys did redeem themselves somewhat, though. On their second-to-last day at the Riviera they put on a performance for the guests of the hotel, presumably as some sort of apology for eating all our food. The performance was supposed to be in the bar (go figure) but when the hour came the conductor noticed that most of the attendees, myself included, were sitting in-stead in the lobby area. So he told the boys to, very quietly, form a circle around the seating area. They were quite sly, and no one really noticed what they were doing until they broke into 'Silent Night'. Trust me: it's more than a bit disconcerting to look up and find that you're surrounded by fifty blond-haired, blue-eyed, eleven-year-old carolers. They were actually quite good, though their late-set covers of "Guantanamera" and "Chan Chan" were examples of creative reinterpretation gone horribly, horribly wrong.)
We also became awkward but good friends with our maids. They cleaned the rooms every day, generally waiting until we'd left for class but occasionally just wandering in. For hotel staff they were endearingly stern with us: if we left our rooms a mess, we would get chastised or made fun of. (Once, I locked myself out of my room late at night, and had to call one of the maids - the night shift, not one I knew very well - to let me back in. And per hotel procedure she asked to see my passport, to check my name against the guest list, and when I handed it to her she glanced at the picture - taken when I was maybe seventeen - and gave a small but definite giggle. I asked her what was so funny. "Oh, nothing," she said, "You just look a little..." She trailed off. "Younger?" I said. "Fatter," she replied.)
The other thing the maids would invariably do is ask after a guy named Dain - or, as they called him, el Chino. There were two Asian-American guys with us: Dain, who was born and raised in Brooklyn, and Sam, who was from just outside Los Angeles. Both of them were born in the United States and both of them were Korean, but to the maids, it didn't much matter: they were both chinos. The maids were absolutely fascinated with Dain in particular, because he lived on our floor: if he happened to be in they would mention the fact to us, as if it were privileged information, and if he weren't they would ask excitedly where he was and what he was doing.
The interest in Sam and Dain was hardly confined to the maids, though. Although Havana used to have quite a few Asians, they almost all fled following the revolution, leaving behind little more than some incomprehensible signs in el barrio chino, Havana's Chinatown. So only the very oldest Cubans had ever seen an Asian before, and when Sam or Dain walked down the street it wasn't unusual for them to be subjected to a strangely well-intentioned form of racism. Upon seeing them, people would yell things like, "Domo Arigato!" or "Jackie Chan!", repeatedly and at a high volume. Small children would stare openly or, if they were particularly bold, they would pull at the corners of their eyes and stick out their tongues. None of it was mean-spirited - everyone seemed genuinely excited to see them - but coming from the United States it all seemed pretty offensive.
Race relations in Cuba are a complex thing, though - especially between blacks and whites. I was sitting once with one of the Cuban students, and we were trading jokes - I was badly translating jokes I knew in English into Spanish, and he the opposite, and sometimes we would even laugh at the punch-lines. At one point I was trying to explain to him what a blonde joke was. "There's a stereotype," I said, "that for whatever reason, blonde women are viewed as being particularly dumb - past the point where it's even believable." His eyes lit up. "Oh!" he said. "We have those too, except about black people."
When the Communist government came to power in 1959, eliminating racism was one of their chief goals, and today they will tell you that they have succeeded. This is not really true. While it does seem that on an institutional level Cuba has made some progress - there are blacks all throughout the various levels of government - on a personal level they still have a very long way to go. Complicating the situation is the fact that few people on the island can really claim to be purely white or purely black; the population of Cuba is said to be about 70% mixed-race, but that is almost certainly too low a number. And there is still a definite correlation between the shade of someone's skin and the quality of life that person will have, and in Cuba people who appear blacker will generally also be poorer, live in more rural areas, and will have more trouble with the police.
Much as there is in the United States, there is a tremendous amount of guilt - especially among the more privileged Cubans - over their treatment of blacks and particularly over slavery. If anything, that guilt is amplified by the sheer importance of the slave trade to Cuba's development. In the United States, the cotton industry was a major component of the country's economy; in Cuba, the sugar industry was the only component of the country's economy. And the island was also the hub of the slave trade in the New World: every slave who was brought to the Americas came to Havana first. Cuba was built on the backs of kidnapped Africans, and they know it, too. "All of Cuba's biggest problems," one of my professors told me, "come from slavery."
1. An Explanation
It's been almost nine months since I came back from Cuba, but in all that time, this blog has remained unfinished.
This takes a little bit of explaining. For the last few months I've been dodging questions from my friends and family about why I hadn't yet finished the story of my time in Cuba - had barely made it to the halfway point, with over a month left unchronicled. It certainly wasn't due to lack of demand: this blog is the most widely-read and popular thing I've ever written. It wasn't because I had nothing left to say; that month was as full of activity and experiences as the others.
I returned from Cuba with every intention of finishing the journal immediately. I had ten days at home with a wide-open schedule. My plan was to wrap up the blog and head back to New York City in early May.
What I hadn't anticipated, though, was the fierceness with which I would miss Cuba in the weeks after I left, and how disinclined I would be to 'wrap-up' the experience in those ten days at home.
This was unexpected because in my final weeks in Cuba I had greatly missed the United States. I had been looking forward to going back; it had got-ten to the point where I felt as though another pan con bistec or lecture on Cuban culture would make me scream. But the moment the plane set down in Miami I underwent an instant change of heart: I was depressed to be back in America, and wanted nothing more than to go back to Cuba.
In the month after I came back I sat down to finish the blog no less than a half a dozen times, but this seemed to me like the ultimate admission that the experience was actually over. As long as it was in front of me then the book on my semester abroad wasn't closed, it was still an ongoing thing. I didn't want it to be closed.
But then time passed and I readjusted to life in the city. I moved into my apartment and started working, watched Ninja Warrior on TV and caught up on the webcomics I'd missed in my three months away. And though I still thought of Cuba often I didn't miss it as much, and the experience started to fade a little, and seem like something I did a long time before, or like some particularly odd and vivid dream.
This made the idea of wrapping up the blog doubly terrifying. I had written the other entries very much in the thick of things, so to speak - on my bed in Room #1701 at the Hotel Riviera, munching on a guayaba pastry, with the sounds of the sea and the Malecón drifting in through my window. I worried that I wouldn't be able to capture the same level of detail from my apart-ment in New York, or that I would leave things out completely. And so I put it off further.
But as the year went on I realized that if I didn't write the rest soon then it would never get written, and I decided that my time in Cuba meant too much to me to let that happen. And the act of writing about Cuba meant too much to me. I like what I've written for this blog, I think it's among the strongest things I've ever done, and I didn't want it to become another in a long line of Things I Started But Never Finished. (Other entries include: two screen-plays; a novel; and no fewer than four films, one of which nearly claimed Nelson's big toe.)
So: here it is. The rest. The wrap-up. The finale. It may not be as good, but it is at least as long. Thanks for bearing with me through it all, and I really am sorry about the wait.
This takes a little bit of explaining. For the last few months I've been dodging questions from my friends and family about why I hadn't yet finished the story of my time in Cuba - had barely made it to the halfway point, with over a month left unchronicled. It certainly wasn't due to lack of demand: this blog is the most widely-read and popular thing I've ever written. It wasn't because I had nothing left to say; that month was as full of activity and experiences as the others.
I returned from Cuba with every intention of finishing the journal immediately. I had ten days at home with a wide-open schedule. My plan was to wrap up the blog and head back to New York City in early May.
What I hadn't anticipated, though, was the fierceness with which I would miss Cuba in the weeks after I left, and how disinclined I would be to 'wrap-up' the experience in those ten days at home.
This was unexpected because in my final weeks in Cuba I had greatly missed the United States. I had been looking forward to going back; it had got-ten to the point where I felt as though another pan con bistec or lecture on Cuban culture would make me scream. But the moment the plane set down in Miami I underwent an instant change of heart: I was depressed to be back in America, and wanted nothing more than to go back to Cuba.
In the month after I came back I sat down to finish the blog no less than a half a dozen times, but this seemed to me like the ultimate admission that the experience was actually over. As long as it was in front of me then the book on my semester abroad wasn't closed, it was still an ongoing thing. I didn't want it to be closed.
But then time passed and I readjusted to life in the city. I moved into my apartment and started working, watched Ninja Warrior on TV and caught up on the webcomics I'd missed in my three months away. And though I still thought of Cuba often I didn't miss it as much, and the experience started to fade a little, and seem like something I did a long time before, or like some particularly odd and vivid dream.
This made the idea of wrapping up the blog doubly terrifying. I had written the other entries very much in the thick of things, so to speak - on my bed in Room #1701 at the Hotel Riviera, munching on a guayaba pastry, with the sounds of the sea and the Malecón drifting in through my window. I worried that I wouldn't be able to capture the same level of detail from my apart-ment in New York, or that I would leave things out completely. And so I put it off further.
But as the year went on I realized that if I didn't write the rest soon then it would never get written, and I decided that my time in Cuba meant too much to me to let that happen. And the act of writing about Cuba meant too much to me. I like what I've written for this blog, I think it's among the strongest things I've ever done, and I didn't want it to become another in a long line of Things I Started But Never Finished. (Other entries include: two screen-plays; a novel; and no fewer than four films, one of which nearly claimed Nelson's big toe.)
So: here it is. The rest. The wrap-up. The finale. It may not be as good, but it is at least as long. Thanks for bearing with me through it all, and I really am sorry about the wait.
Monday, March 17, 2008
A Quick Note
Okay.
It’s been far, far too long since my last update, and I’m sorry if I’ve been keeping any of you in suspense. Looking back, I see that the last thing I wrote about was the Las Terrazas trip, now over a month distant, and though what I’m about to give you is only a summary of my activities since then, it’s still going to be a monster.
In the interest of organization, I have decided to split this post into two parts, each based around a trip – the first, in late February, to Cienfuegos; the second, from March 1st to the 9th, to Santiago and Baracoa. Since this blog is organized newest to oldest, Part I is further down on the page than Part II.
Enjoy! I'll get some pictures up in a couple days.
It’s been far, far too long since my last update, and I’m sorry if I’ve been keeping any of you in suspense. Looking back, I see that the last thing I wrote about was the Las Terrazas trip, now over a month distant, and though what I’m about to give you is only a summary of my activities since then, it’s still going to be a monster.
In the interest of organization, I have decided to split this post into two parts, each based around a trip – the first, in late February, to Cienfuegos; the second, from March 1st to the 9th, to Santiago and Baracoa. Since this blog is organized newest to oldest, Part I is further down on the page than Part II.
Enjoy! I'll get some pictures up in a couple days.
Part II.
The night before we left for Santiago, I met for the first time with Douglas Deas, the first (albeit distant) family member of mine I’d met in Cuba. We had talked on the phone several times, and I knew a few things about him: he’s an electrical engineer, he lives in Santiago, and he’s the grandson of my great-grandfather’s brother. (This isn’t quite as complicated as it sounds.)
We met in the lobby of the Riviera, and the moment I stepped out of the elevator I recognized him. There isn’t any one physical attribute of his that I could pick out as being similar to anyone in my family, but somehow the sum of the parts made him immediately identifiable.
We talked for almost two hours, and found that we enjoyed each other’s company. He’s thirty-nine, in the same generation as my father and uncles, and he and his wife are expecting their first child in June. (She’s hoping it’s a girl, but he would prefer a boy, to carry on the family name.) He was interested in my family and was happy to find out that I had pictures, and he listened attentively as I pointed out each person. Unfortunately, he soon had to leave, as he was leaving early the next morning for a month-long job in Nicaragua, but we made plans to have ice cream at Coppelia when he returned. He also gave me the number of his parents in Santiago and said he would let them know to expect my call.
The next morning, we also rose early. Our Spring Break trip was made considerably more difficult because NYU was just a little too thrifty to pay for our hotel rooms during the week we’d be gone, and so we needed to check completely out of the Riviera before we could leave. At a little after seven, though, the thirty of us boarded the bus, bleary-eyed but excited.
The flight to Santiago caused considerable anxiety for some of us – the plane was barely large enough, and rickety to boot – but except for the sickening leftward lurch during landing it was uneventful. The day we flew in was actually our most packed day, schedule-wise: after landing at noon, we went to the El Moro Castle, on the mouth of the Bay, until two; ate lunch; went to a dance performance at four; and finally, at seven in thee evening, arrived and checked into the Casa Granda Hotel in Santiago just in time to eat dinner and pass out. As I was falling asleep, I resolved to call Abel (Douglas’s father) first thing the next morning.
The next morning I was startled awake by the telephone. I rolled over, looked at my telephone. It was six forty-five am. I couldn’t imagine who could possibly be calling at this hour. I picked up the phone.
“Hello?” I said.
“¿Hola? ¿Keel?” said a woman’s voice.
I scrambled. “Hola, aqui es Keel,” I said.
“Hola, Keel. Aqui es Ilia, hija de Ricardo, el hermano de tu bisabuelo Mario, el papa de Híran, tu abuelo.”
“Hola,” I said again, stupidly.
“I was wondering if there was a time today that we could meet in the lobby of the Casa Granda, you and I and some of the family,” Ilia said in Spanish.
I did a quick calculation of how many more hours I felt like sleeping at that moment.
“One?” I asked.
Having settled on a time, she wished me goodbye, and I hung up the phone.
“Who the hell was that,” my roommate said from under a pile of pillows and blankets.
“That was-” I stopped. “That was my great-grandfather’s brother’s daughter.”
Adam grunted and went back to sleep. I lay there for a few more moments and wondered how Ilia had known what hotel I was at, or that I was even in Santiago at all. Then I too fell back asleep.
Later that day, having showered and feeling much more awake, I waited in the Casa Granda lobby. Eventually, a short, bespectacled woman of perhaps sixty walked into the lobby, followed closely by a man of the same age who looked exactly like my great-grandfather. I stood up and walked over to them.
The introductions went well: there was a lot of hugging and shaking of hands. The woman was, in fact, Ilia, while the man was her cousin – the son of another brother of my great-grandfathers. (Note: But for a select few people, I have shamefully forgotten the name of nearly everyone I met in Santiago. When Douglas returns to Havana I am going to show him the picture I took with everyone and ask him to identify them, when I have pen and paper close at hand.) They took a seat and we fell into conversation, talking about the family. After a few minutes, another man of about the same age walked up and was introduced to me as Abel – Douglas’s father. He sat down and joined in the conversation. A few minutes later two young men, about my age, wandered into the lobby. They turned out to be grandchildren of someone, and they shook my hand, too. Their father was quick on their heels and was soon sitting next to them. By this point, there were multiple conversations happening at once, and it was taxing my Spanish skills – I usually have no problem understanding people, but with so much happening I was having trouble keeping up. Ilia’s brother walked in, apologized for being late, sat down, and then called over the concierge of the hotel, who turned out to be a personal friend of his. By this time there were nearly a dozen of us and we had pretty much filled the Casa Granda’s small lobby; hotel guests were having to make their way through the throng to get to the front desk, and were thus doubly frustrated to find it unmanned. I had pretty much stopped talking, and was concentrating all my energy on simply understanding what everyone was saying.
Then, all of a sudden, Ilia turned to me and said, “It was very nice to meet you, I think you are a credit to the family and I think it’s very good that you have met some of your family here in Santiago.” Still reeling a bit, I nodded, and said that I thought it was a very good thing too. She gave me a hug, and all the men shook my hands, and then they departed en masse.
I stood in the hotel lobby, a little confused at what had just happened. I was planning on spending most of the day with the family, I had hoped to visit their houses and meet everyone I could. Then I remembered that I had wanted to meet Bebé Caballero, the only living sibling of my great-grandmother’s, but that I had accidentally packed the paper with his address on it in my suitcase back in Havana, and that I had forgotten to ask Ilia where he lived. With no way to get in contact with her, it looked like I was going to have to search him out myself, but my only starting point was that he worked at a church somewhere in Santiago. I resolved to do that the next day, and spent the rest of Sunday wandering around Santiago with a couple of my schoolmates.
Santiago is one of the oldest cities in Cuba, and for a long time it was poised to become the premier harbor in the country; it was only well into the seventeenth century that Havana was finally established as the clear capital. Like San Francisco, Santiago is built on hills, and everything slopes down to the harbor. In general, Santiago is a poorer, hotter, and more vibrant city than Havana; almost every important Cuban cultural movement has come out of Santiago. In Santiago are the best dancers, the best art, and especially the best music. (Casas de la Trova are the name for the music-halls that dot all of Cuba, and for many people they’re the only place to play or hear live music. The first, and best, casa is in Santiago.) In short, it’s a fantastic city, and I wish I’d stayed for longer than the two-and-a-half days we were there.
The next morning was Monday, the last day we were in Santiago. Early in the morning, the phone rang. I rolled over and picked it up. It was Ilia. She asked how I was, and then apologized for their abrupt exit the day before. Things, she said, had progressed rather quickly.
All at once I understood what had happened the day before. Ilia had mentioned to a few of her siblings and cousins that I was going to be in town, and the word had spread to the rest of the family. She hadn’t been expecting that many people to show up at the Casa Granda, and once they were there, she was in the awkward position of having to play host to all of them – nearly a dozen people.
Anyway, she said, she would love to have me for dinner that evening, and if I wanted she could also take me to see Bebé – who she just called El Caballero. I gratefully accepted, and at three that afternoon we met again in the lobby of the Casa Granda.
We walked first to her house, which was only six or seven blocks away from the hotel. She ran some kind of boarding house for foreigners, but when I referred to it as a casa particular she corrected me, and said that it wasn’t, but didn't elaborate. So I’m not really quite sure what it was, but it operated exactly like a particular and was a very nice house. I met her husband, admired the pictures of her grandson (her daughter and grandson live in Montreal) and then we left for El Caballero’s house.
We caught him just as he was coming back from the church, a short, wizened figure with large ears and a walking cane. He’d been expecting me, in a vague sort of way, for several months, and was delighted that I’d come to see him. We accompanied him (slowly) back to his house, a modest, crumbling building nearby that was nevertheless homey. He showed me around, pointing out his bedroom, the back porch (where my aunt Linda and Dennis, he said, had sat with him for many hours when they visited in 2003), and the ancient Russian icebox that took up most of the kitchen. We went out into his living room, he took out his photo album and we all took a seat in a set of elderly wooden chairs. (At this point Bebé leaned over, gestured toward me with a crooked finger, and told me, in a low, conspiratorial voice, how when Dennis had sat in one of these same chairs four years earlier, it had collapsed under him and sent him tumbling to the dusty floor. Then, he leaned back in his chair and chuckled a quiet and raspy chuckle, his whole body shaking silently.)
He opened the photo album and I found, somewhat to my surprise, that it was full of photos of my family, in California. Bebé went through each photograph with me, pointing out the people in each one, and when he identified them correctly – which he did with surprising frequency – he would smile contentedly, and when he came across someone he didn’t know (my mother, for example, or some of my cousins) I would fill in the name, and he would repeat it until he had it memorized. I hadn’t any pictures to show him, my computer being back in Havana, but I promised to send him some more as soon as I could.
A few minutes later, Ilia and I, seeing that he was tiring, excused ourselves and made to leave. Bebé pulled me into a hug, told me how nice it was to meet me, and made me promise to write him letters and send him more photographs. As dusk settled Ilia and I waved goodbye to El Caballero and walked back toward her house.
Walking through Santiago with Ilia was a pretty incredible experience, not because of the number of people who filled the streets – children playing sports, women walking with husbands, old men sitting out on porches and in parks – but more because of the sheer number of them that she knew. She would call out to people almost constantly as she walked, congratulating this one on the new baby, chiding that one for not coming to visit her recently. At one point she turned to me. “El pueblo de Santiago,” she said, “es muy fuerte.” The meaning of pueblo that she’s using refers to the community, the people as a whole, and can be found all over Cuba, although I’d never heard it before I came.
When we got to her house, and she parked me in the living room with her husband while she bustled off to make dinner. Her husband, while quite polite, was quiet; I think he didn’t quite know how to interact with me. So instead of talking we watched a dubbed episode of Knight Ridder on TV, which was a singularly odd experience.
Eventually dinner was ready, and Ilia had managed to include nearly every Cuban food I love: fried plantains, shrimp, rice and beans, coffee, flatbread, fruit. I ate until I was stuffed, and there was still more food that I had to beg off. All of the hotels that I have eaten at in Cuba have had the same fundamental flaw in their dietary options: they only serve American-style food. This fails both because they aren’t terribly good at imitating American food (the pancakes are particularly insipid, and all Cubans seem to have the uniform delusion that chocolate sauce is our preferred pancake topper) and also because nobody comes to Cuba to eat American food. The best and most authentic food that I’ve had here has either been at casas palidares or at the houses of my kindly relatives, and there hasn’t been nearly enough of it for my liking. So it felt incredible to just stuff myself.
An hour or so later and several pounds heavier, I left the house, bidding Ilia goodbye with a peck on the cheek. I made my way back to the hotel, digested for awhile, went to the casa de la trova, and fell asleep late that evening fairly sure that my phone would not be ringing the next morning.
The next morning we left for Baracoa, where we would spend the next six days. (This whole trip was planned by Fernando, our primary liaison at the Ludwig Foundation, and he traveled with us. It’s ostensibly an educational trip – our visa requires that we not do any traveling as tourists - but all of our educational and cultural activities were dispensed with in Santiago, and our considerable time in Baracoa was completely free and unscheduled. Incidentally, Fernando is an avid sport fisherman, and the best fishing in Cuba is in Baracoa.)
Baracoa is nestled in the Sierra Maestra mountain range, which runs up the eastern side of the island. It is a place of stunning natural beauty: the rain forest here is denser than anywhere else in Cuba, and in many places it doesn’t clear until it’s almost hit the ocean. Ten rivers cut deep crevices through the mountains before pooling out into deltas where they hit the ocean. Many of Cuba’s indigenous animals make their home here, including two of the most unique animals on Earth: the world’s second tiniest frog, which is only about the size of a sunflower seed; and the polimitas snail, whose shell comes in all manner of brilliant colors. (Necklaces made from the shells of the polimitas snail are breathtaking, and are popular souvenirs for the tourists to the area; because of this, the snails are now endangered.)
For most of its existence, Baracoa was almost completely cut off from the outside world, accessible only by a hundred miles of dirt road. (It was the setting of the short film Por Primera Vez, which I believe I discussed in an earlier post.) The villagers here lived in almost complete isolation, interacting little even with the rest of Cuba. Then, in the mid-nineties, a paved road was finally laid through the mountains and Cuba discovered, somewhat to its surprise, that it had a veritable Garden of Eden on its Eastern coast.
Today, Baracoa is well-known for its beauty, but due to its location and relative inaccessibility (even the new road is harrowing in parts, and is impassible during the rainy season or at night) it hasn’t become much of a tourist destination yet. We stayed at the Hotel Porto Santo, which is right on the beach and claims to be the exact spot in which Christopher Columbus first landed in the New World. It even has a replica of the cross he’s supposed to have planted in the soil, in the exact place he’s supposed to have planted it, although how they know this is anyone’s guess. (The actual cross, which, it is claimed, is the only one of the thirteen crosses Columbus planted that still exists, is housed at a nearby museum.) In any case, it was a reasonably nice hotel, which bungalow-style housing and surprisingly good drip coffee, the only American-style coffee I’ve had in Cuba.
My time in Baracoa was spent mostly lounging on the shores or in the waters of various beaches and rivers, and so I’m not going to go into too much detail about any of it. I’m just going to say that if you’re ever in Baracoa, make sure to go to the mouth of the Rio Yumurí, and find a man named Mirloy. He’ll take you upriver in his boat, show you the remains of a giant winch abandoned by an American banana company in 1959, take you back into the ancient Indian cave behind a waterfall, and point out interesting flora and fauna. (In a moment that exemplified Cuba’s strange, conflicted relationship with ecotourism, Mirloy pointed out a tocororo bird in the branches above – Cuba’s national bird, whose colors are those on the Cuban flag – and then, when it sat too still for us to see, chucked a stick at it.)
(Actually, one other interesting thing happened in Baracoa: I got the most horrifically bad sunburn of my entire life. Our first day in town I went to the beach and spent almost twelve hours either snorkeling face-down in the water or lying on the shore asleep, and despite having applied sunscreen I found that night that my back had turned an alarming shade of maroon that throbbed painfully and did not fade for several days. Almost a week later my skin began to slough off in these grotesque patches; this kept up for so long that I began to get seriously worried about whether there would be any more new skin underneath to replace that which was falling off. It was a disturbing experience, and not one I’ve ever had before.)
Five days later, sunburned and sandy and not in any mood to resume our studies, we climbed aboard another rickety plane and flew back to Havana.
That just about brings us up to date. In the last week or so since I returned I’ve just settled back into the flow of things. I went to Spanish class and finally – finally! – got a handle on the subjunctive. I went to the Museo de Chocolate with Bruno and Sam and had a chocolate fria drinking contest, which Sam won handily but which left all three of us feeling sick the rest of the day. (Imagine the best chocolate milk you’ve ever had. That’s a chocolate fria. And they’re eighty cents a glass.) I went to the Charlie Chaplin Theater and watched Alfred Hitchcock’s Rebecca with a bunch of old Cuban men. And I wrote this ludicrously long blog post, which I hope held your interest. To all of you who made it this far, thanks for reading, and I promise not to run on so long in the future! (Right.)
We met in the lobby of the Riviera, and the moment I stepped out of the elevator I recognized him. There isn’t any one physical attribute of his that I could pick out as being similar to anyone in my family, but somehow the sum of the parts made him immediately identifiable.
We talked for almost two hours, and found that we enjoyed each other’s company. He’s thirty-nine, in the same generation as my father and uncles, and he and his wife are expecting their first child in June. (She’s hoping it’s a girl, but he would prefer a boy, to carry on the family name.) He was interested in my family and was happy to find out that I had pictures, and he listened attentively as I pointed out each person. Unfortunately, he soon had to leave, as he was leaving early the next morning for a month-long job in Nicaragua, but we made plans to have ice cream at Coppelia when he returned. He also gave me the number of his parents in Santiago and said he would let them know to expect my call.
The next morning, we also rose early. Our Spring Break trip was made considerably more difficult because NYU was just a little too thrifty to pay for our hotel rooms during the week we’d be gone, and so we needed to check completely out of the Riviera before we could leave. At a little after seven, though, the thirty of us boarded the bus, bleary-eyed but excited.
The flight to Santiago caused considerable anxiety for some of us – the plane was barely large enough, and rickety to boot – but except for the sickening leftward lurch during landing it was uneventful. The day we flew in was actually our most packed day, schedule-wise: after landing at noon, we went to the El Moro Castle, on the mouth of the Bay, until two; ate lunch; went to a dance performance at four; and finally, at seven in thee evening, arrived and checked into the Casa Granda Hotel in Santiago just in time to eat dinner and pass out. As I was falling asleep, I resolved to call Abel (Douglas’s father) first thing the next morning.
The next morning I was startled awake by the telephone. I rolled over, looked at my telephone. It was six forty-five am. I couldn’t imagine who could possibly be calling at this hour. I picked up the phone.
“Hello?” I said.
“¿Hola? ¿Keel?” said a woman’s voice.
I scrambled. “Hola, aqui es Keel,” I said.
“Hola, Keel. Aqui es Ilia, hija de Ricardo, el hermano de tu bisabuelo Mario, el papa de Híran, tu abuelo.”
“Hola,” I said again, stupidly.
“I was wondering if there was a time today that we could meet in the lobby of the Casa Granda, you and I and some of the family,” Ilia said in Spanish.
I did a quick calculation of how many more hours I felt like sleeping at that moment.
“One?” I asked.
Having settled on a time, she wished me goodbye, and I hung up the phone.
“Who the hell was that,” my roommate said from under a pile of pillows and blankets.
“That was-” I stopped. “That was my great-grandfather’s brother’s daughter.”
Adam grunted and went back to sleep. I lay there for a few more moments and wondered how Ilia had known what hotel I was at, or that I was even in Santiago at all. Then I too fell back asleep.
Later that day, having showered and feeling much more awake, I waited in the Casa Granda lobby. Eventually, a short, bespectacled woman of perhaps sixty walked into the lobby, followed closely by a man of the same age who looked exactly like my great-grandfather. I stood up and walked over to them.
The introductions went well: there was a lot of hugging and shaking of hands. The woman was, in fact, Ilia, while the man was her cousin – the son of another brother of my great-grandfathers. (Note: But for a select few people, I have shamefully forgotten the name of nearly everyone I met in Santiago. When Douglas returns to Havana I am going to show him the picture I took with everyone and ask him to identify them, when I have pen and paper close at hand.) They took a seat and we fell into conversation, talking about the family. After a few minutes, another man of about the same age walked up and was introduced to me as Abel – Douglas’s father. He sat down and joined in the conversation. A few minutes later two young men, about my age, wandered into the lobby. They turned out to be grandchildren of someone, and they shook my hand, too. Their father was quick on their heels and was soon sitting next to them. By this point, there were multiple conversations happening at once, and it was taxing my Spanish skills – I usually have no problem understanding people, but with so much happening I was having trouble keeping up. Ilia’s brother walked in, apologized for being late, sat down, and then called over the concierge of the hotel, who turned out to be a personal friend of his. By this time there were nearly a dozen of us and we had pretty much filled the Casa Granda’s small lobby; hotel guests were having to make their way through the throng to get to the front desk, and were thus doubly frustrated to find it unmanned. I had pretty much stopped talking, and was concentrating all my energy on simply understanding what everyone was saying.
Then, all of a sudden, Ilia turned to me and said, “It was very nice to meet you, I think you are a credit to the family and I think it’s very good that you have met some of your family here in Santiago.” Still reeling a bit, I nodded, and said that I thought it was a very good thing too. She gave me a hug, and all the men shook my hands, and then they departed en masse.
I stood in the hotel lobby, a little confused at what had just happened. I was planning on spending most of the day with the family, I had hoped to visit their houses and meet everyone I could. Then I remembered that I had wanted to meet Bebé Caballero, the only living sibling of my great-grandmother’s, but that I had accidentally packed the paper with his address on it in my suitcase back in Havana, and that I had forgotten to ask Ilia where he lived. With no way to get in contact with her, it looked like I was going to have to search him out myself, but my only starting point was that he worked at a church somewhere in Santiago. I resolved to do that the next day, and spent the rest of Sunday wandering around Santiago with a couple of my schoolmates.
Santiago is one of the oldest cities in Cuba, and for a long time it was poised to become the premier harbor in the country; it was only well into the seventeenth century that Havana was finally established as the clear capital. Like San Francisco, Santiago is built on hills, and everything slopes down to the harbor. In general, Santiago is a poorer, hotter, and more vibrant city than Havana; almost every important Cuban cultural movement has come out of Santiago. In Santiago are the best dancers, the best art, and especially the best music. (Casas de la Trova are the name for the music-halls that dot all of Cuba, and for many people they’re the only place to play or hear live music. The first, and best, casa is in Santiago.) In short, it’s a fantastic city, and I wish I’d stayed for longer than the two-and-a-half days we were there.
The next morning was Monday, the last day we were in Santiago. Early in the morning, the phone rang. I rolled over and picked it up. It was Ilia. She asked how I was, and then apologized for their abrupt exit the day before. Things, she said, had progressed rather quickly.
All at once I understood what had happened the day before. Ilia had mentioned to a few of her siblings and cousins that I was going to be in town, and the word had spread to the rest of the family. She hadn’t been expecting that many people to show up at the Casa Granda, and once they were there, she was in the awkward position of having to play host to all of them – nearly a dozen people.
Anyway, she said, she would love to have me for dinner that evening, and if I wanted she could also take me to see Bebé – who she just called El Caballero. I gratefully accepted, and at three that afternoon we met again in the lobby of the Casa Granda.
We walked first to her house, which was only six or seven blocks away from the hotel. She ran some kind of boarding house for foreigners, but when I referred to it as a casa particular she corrected me, and said that it wasn’t, but didn't elaborate. So I’m not really quite sure what it was, but it operated exactly like a particular and was a very nice house. I met her husband, admired the pictures of her grandson (her daughter and grandson live in Montreal) and then we left for El Caballero’s house.
We caught him just as he was coming back from the church, a short, wizened figure with large ears and a walking cane. He’d been expecting me, in a vague sort of way, for several months, and was delighted that I’d come to see him. We accompanied him (slowly) back to his house, a modest, crumbling building nearby that was nevertheless homey. He showed me around, pointing out his bedroom, the back porch (where my aunt Linda and Dennis, he said, had sat with him for many hours when they visited in 2003), and the ancient Russian icebox that took up most of the kitchen. We went out into his living room, he took out his photo album and we all took a seat in a set of elderly wooden chairs. (At this point Bebé leaned over, gestured toward me with a crooked finger, and told me, in a low, conspiratorial voice, how when Dennis had sat in one of these same chairs four years earlier, it had collapsed under him and sent him tumbling to the dusty floor. Then, he leaned back in his chair and chuckled a quiet and raspy chuckle, his whole body shaking silently.)
He opened the photo album and I found, somewhat to my surprise, that it was full of photos of my family, in California. Bebé went through each photograph with me, pointing out the people in each one, and when he identified them correctly – which he did with surprising frequency – he would smile contentedly, and when he came across someone he didn’t know (my mother, for example, or some of my cousins) I would fill in the name, and he would repeat it until he had it memorized. I hadn’t any pictures to show him, my computer being back in Havana, but I promised to send him some more as soon as I could.
A few minutes later, Ilia and I, seeing that he was tiring, excused ourselves and made to leave. Bebé pulled me into a hug, told me how nice it was to meet me, and made me promise to write him letters and send him more photographs. As dusk settled Ilia and I waved goodbye to El Caballero and walked back toward her house.
Walking through Santiago with Ilia was a pretty incredible experience, not because of the number of people who filled the streets – children playing sports, women walking with husbands, old men sitting out on porches and in parks – but more because of the sheer number of them that she knew. She would call out to people almost constantly as she walked, congratulating this one on the new baby, chiding that one for not coming to visit her recently. At one point she turned to me. “El pueblo de Santiago,” she said, “es muy fuerte.” The meaning of pueblo that she’s using refers to the community, the people as a whole, and can be found all over Cuba, although I’d never heard it before I came.
When we got to her house, and she parked me in the living room with her husband while she bustled off to make dinner. Her husband, while quite polite, was quiet; I think he didn’t quite know how to interact with me. So instead of talking we watched a dubbed episode of Knight Ridder on TV, which was a singularly odd experience.
Eventually dinner was ready, and Ilia had managed to include nearly every Cuban food I love: fried plantains, shrimp, rice and beans, coffee, flatbread, fruit. I ate until I was stuffed, and there was still more food that I had to beg off. All of the hotels that I have eaten at in Cuba have had the same fundamental flaw in their dietary options: they only serve American-style food. This fails both because they aren’t terribly good at imitating American food (the pancakes are particularly insipid, and all Cubans seem to have the uniform delusion that chocolate sauce is our preferred pancake topper) and also because nobody comes to Cuba to eat American food. The best and most authentic food that I’ve had here has either been at casas palidares or at the houses of my kindly relatives, and there hasn’t been nearly enough of it for my liking. So it felt incredible to just stuff myself.
An hour or so later and several pounds heavier, I left the house, bidding Ilia goodbye with a peck on the cheek. I made my way back to the hotel, digested for awhile, went to the casa de la trova, and fell asleep late that evening fairly sure that my phone would not be ringing the next morning.
The next morning we left for Baracoa, where we would spend the next six days. (This whole trip was planned by Fernando, our primary liaison at the Ludwig Foundation, and he traveled with us. It’s ostensibly an educational trip – our visa requires that we not do any traveling as tourists - but all of our educational and cultural activities were dispensed with in Santiago, and our considerable time in Baracoa was completely free and unscheduled. Incidentally, Fernando is an avid sport fisherman, and the best fishing in Cuba is in Baracoa.)
Baracoa is nestled in the Sierra Maestra mountain range, which runs up the eastern side of the island. It is a place of stunning natural beauty: the rain forest here is denser than anywhere else in Cuba, and in many places it doesn’t clear until it’s almost hit the ocean. Ten rivers cut deep crevices through the mountains before pooling out into deltas where they hit the ocean. Many of Cuba’s indigenous animals make their home here, including two of the most unique animals on Earth: the world’s second tiniest frog, which is only about the size of a sunflower seed; and the polimitas snail, whose shell comes in all manner of brilliant colors. (Necklaces made from the shells of the polimitas snail are breathtaking, and are popular souvenirs for the tourists to the area; because of this, the snails are now endangered.)
For most of its existence, Baracoa was almost completely cut off from the outside world, accessible only by a hundred miles of dirt road. (It was the setting of the short film Por Primera Vez, which I believe I discussed in an earlier post.) The villagers here lived in almost complete isolation, interacting little even with the rest of Cuba. Then, in the mid-nineties, a paved road was finally laid through the mountains and Cuba discovered, somewhat to its surprise, that it had a veritable Garden of Eden on its Eastern coast.
Today, Baracoa is well-known for its beauty, but due to its location and relative inaccessibility (even the new road is harrowing in parts, and is impassible during the rainy season or at night) it hasn’t become much of a tourist destination yet. We stayed at the Hotel Porto Santo, which is right on the beach and claims to be the exact spot in which Christopher Columbus first landed in the New World. It even has a replica of the cross he’s supposed to have planted in the soil, in the exact place he’s supposed to have planted it, although how they know this is anyone’s guess. (The actual cross, which, it is claimed, is the only one of the thirteen crosses Columbus planted that still exists, is housed at a nearby museum.) In any case, it was a reasonably nice hotel, which bungalow-style housing and surprisingly good drip coffee, the only American-style coffee I’ve had in Cuba.
My time in Baracoa was spent mostly lounging on the shores or in the waters of various beaches and rivers, and so I’m not going to go into too much detail about any of it. I’m just going to say that if you’re ever in Baracoa, make sure to go to the mouth of the Rio Yumurí, and find a man named Mirloy. He’ll take you upriver in his boat, show you the remains of a giant winch abandoned by an American banana company in 1959, take you back into the ancient Indian cave behind a waterfall, and point out interesting flora and fauna. (In a moment that exemplified Cuba’s strange, conflicted relationship with ecotourism, Mirloy pointed out a tocororo bird in the branches above – Cuba’s national bird, whose colors are those on the Cuban flag – and then, when it sat too still for us to see, chucked a stick at it.)
(Actually, one other interesting thing happened in Baracoa: I got the most horrifically bad sunburn of my entire life. Our first day in town I went to the beach and spent almost twelve hours either snorkeling face-down in the water or lying on the shore asleep, and despite having applied sunscreen I found that night that my back had turned an alarming shade of maroon that throbbed painfully and did not fade for several days. Almost a week later my skin began to slough off in these grotesque patches; this kept up for so long that I began to get seriously worried about whether there would be any more new skin underneath to replace that which was falling off. It was a disturbing experience, and not one I’ve ever had before.)
Five days later, sunburned and sandy and not in any mood to resume our studies, we climbed aboard another rickety plane and flew back to Havana.
That just about brings us up to date. In the last week or so since I returned I’ve just settled back into the flow of things. I went to Spanish class and finally – finally! – got a handle on the subjunctive. I went to the Museo de Chocolate with Bruno and Sam and had a chocolate fria drinking contest, which Sam won handily but which left all three of us feeling sick the rest of the day. (Imagine the best chocolate milk you’ve ever had. That’s a chocolate fria. And they’re eighty cents a glass.) I went to the Charlie Chaplin Theater and watched Alfred Hitchcock’s Rebecca with a bunch of old Cuban men. And I wrote this ludicrously long blog post, which I hope held your interest. To all of you who made it this far, thanks for reading, and I promise not to run on so long in the future! (Right.)
Part I.
A couple of days after returning from Las Terrazas, my friend Sara asked if I wanted to go to Cienfuegos with her and a few others. I almost said no – I had only just returned to Havana, and the weekend she was planning to go was the one directly before our Spring Break trip. But, on impulse, I accepted, and promptly forgot about it for the next week and a half. It was only the day before we left that I remembered, and this lent the trip an impromptu air that, as it turns out, was unearned; Sara had planned everything, and the trip went off without a hitch.
Four of us went: Sara, Adam (my roommate here at the Riviera), Alexandra, and I. We rented a car (which I, not being twenty-one, was unable to drive), set off, and promptly got lost.
This is understandable, because driving in Cuba is a haphazard and often frustrating experience. To begin with, there is an almost ludicrous lack of signs. It’s often impossible to tell what road you’re on, where it’s going, or how to get to any other road. Cars share the freeways with bicycles, horse-drawn buggies, herds of cows, and hitchhikers. And once you get off of the main autopista, the roads decrease sharply in size and quality; what looks in the atlas like a major artery turns out to be a winding one-lane spit of pavement.
Often, the only way to find where you’re going is to ask the people around you, but this presents a new host of problems. For one, if you ask any four people how to get somewhere, their instructions will conflict in some way. And because most people in Cuba don’t drive, their directions usually use routes and landmarks more conducive to walking than to driving.
All in all, driving in Cuba is difficult, and it took us two hours – maybe a little more – to even make it to the Autopista #1. Luckily, it was a straight shot from there to Cienfuegos, and we drove into town in the mid-afternoon.
Cienfuegos is a reasonably large town, the capital of the province of the same name. The city sits on the Bay of Cienfuegos, on the southern coast of Cuba, in almost the exact middle of the island. While picturesque, it’s not a big tourist draw yet, and we found the city to be refreshingly laid back. It’s also a new city, built up mostly in the 40s and 50s, and this meant that large parts of the city felt distinctly like American suburbia; at times, I could have believed we were in the Florida Keys.
Coming into town, we passed by what was to be Cuba’s first nuclear power plant. It was only half-completed when the Soviet Union fell, and so now it stands, inoperative, its one huge tower looking oddly incomplete on its own.
We stayed in two casas particulares on the western side of town, the girls in one and the guys in the other. Casas particulares are one of the more interesting side-effects of the Special Period, and they represent Cuba’s most official step into capitalism. They are similar to a bed-and-breakfast: Cubans with appropriate houses are allowed to let out one room, usually for twenty or thirty convertible pesos (the tourist currency) per night. Although there are stiff restrictions and taxes – the casas are usually only allowed to convert one room to let, and they pay as many as three hundred convertible pesos per month to the government – the owners are almost always able to make a comfortable living off of it, especially since for an extra ten or fifteen pesos per day they will make you breakfast and dinner. They are a nearly perfect way to travel, and I would not recommend that anyone coming to Cuba stay in a hotel; the particulares are cheaper, have better food, and offer much more chance of interaction with Cubans.
Both of our casas were very nice: one with a beautifully tiled interior and the other with a porch garden. The room Adam and I stayed in, though, was obviously meant for couples: it had red silk sheets, a heart-shaped pillow, and the bedside lamp had been modified with a red bulb. Each casa also had some sort of infestation: the girls’ was crawling with geckos, while Adam and I had several impressively large cockroach buddies to keep us company. (Personally, I would have preferred their infestation.)
That night, we walked into the center of town, which is organized around a square called – wait for it – Parque Jose Marti. This is the tourist center of town, such as it is, and we gawked for a bit at the cathedral, the 18th-century theater, and the impressive statue of the park’s namesake. The area around the Parque was well-kept and new, but this stopped as soon as we ventured away from it: the streets became cracked and crowded, the houses fell into disrepair. Eager to see the sunset over the ocean, we walked toward the bay, but we found instead an abandoned train yard with people living in and around the old train cars and the decrepit depot. I had started to think that everyone in Cuba lived at relatively the same level of poverty, but visiting a place like this drove home that even here there are drastic differences in people’s living situations. Some residents of Cienfuegos lived in homes little different from ours back in the United States while others, for no reason that I could discern, were relegated to living in shantytowns built upon deserted railroad tracks.
In the fading light, we made our way back to our section of town, and then we walked down the peninsula until we came to the very tip, a place called La Punta, where there was a sort of outdoor bar. We parked ourselves in a gazebo on the waterfront, watched the waves, played cards, and sipped the best (and cheapest) mojito I’ve yet found in Cuba.
The next day we rose early and drove a few hours to Trinidad, which is in the nearby province of Sancti Spiritu. Trinidad, a remarkably well-preserved colonial city, is almost certainly the most-visited spot in Central Cuba, and indeed it was crawling with tourists – and with people trying to take their money. In fact, while Trinidad itself was beautiful, our afternoon there was a depressing one, mostly spent weaving between beggars and trinket-filled stands. Everyone, it seemed, was trying to sell us the same guayabera, the same Che t-shirt, the same racist fat-black-woman doll.
Just as it seemed that our afternoon in Trinidad was going to be nothing but unpleasant, we drove to the outskirts of the city, to a small waterfront community called La Boca. Here, there were no tourists (except us) and we found a small, beautiful beach and put down our towels. We swam for a bit, watched the sun go down and the fishermen throw out their nets. At one point a young boy, shirtless and unshod, galloped past us on a horse and rode straight into the water, and then the horse reared back and the whole scene was really quite stunning – the two figures, silhouetted against the scarlet sunset, droplets of water cascading from the horse’s mane. Unfortunately, I had left my camera in the car, and when I returned with it the boy was guiding the horse out of the water.
We ate that night at a casa palidar, which is similar to a particular except that it only serves meals. While we were there, we met a French-Canadian man, who I mention only because he lived the strangest sort of migratory lifestyle. From April to October, he lived in Montreal, working as a landscaper; as the weather cooled, he flew south and lived in La Boca through the winter. All told, the man hadn’t experienced weather cooler than sixty-five degrees since 1985. He was quite happy with it, but I don’t think that I could live like that – nor, for that matter, do I think I could live in Cuba permanently. I like the cold too much, rain and snow and jackets and fireplaces.
(Talking to Cubans about snow is a strange experience, because they only know about it in the abstract. Rollo, my Spanish teacher, once asked us what snow felt like, and an artist that we met painted polar bears into Cuban landscapes because he felt the juxtaposition was so absurd – he compared them to unicorns.)
The next day we rose early, checked out of our particulares (bidding our hosts farewell with a peck on the cheek), and drove to Santa Clara.
Santa Clara is in almost the geographical center of the island, and this as much as anything explains why the city exists: not only is it in the middle of important trading routes, but it has been the site of many battles, since the revolutions in Cuba tend to start in the East and work their way westward. Indeed, it was at this site in 1958 that Che Guevara and the rebels had their most decisive victory against the Batista Administration, derailing a train loaded with soldiers and wewapons. It was one of the turning points of the war, and it was in Santa Clara that, after his death, an enormous memorial to Che was erected.
The memorial was the first thing we visited. It’s pretty tough to miss – the statue of Che, fully a hundred feet tall, looms over the autopista. The memorial, though, was oddly deserted, and a little underwhelming. The statue doesn’t even look like Che, really – the figure depicted looks much older than Che was when he died at 49. We soon headed toward Santa Clara proper.
It was a Sunday, and it was hot, so most of the population of Santa Clara was indoors. We wandered through town, visiting the main square and the diorama-style reenactment of Che’s battle. At about two in the afternoon, we passed by an open doorway, and inside I glimpsed a television. On it was a large, parliamentary-style room full of men in business suits.
We walked a couple more feet until it hit me, and I turned around. “I’ll bet those are the elections,” I said, for it was Sunday, the 24th, the day that Fidel’s successor was to be elected by the Cuban Senate. We walked back and huddled around the doorway just in time to hear the chairman say, “…nuestro nuevo Presidente, Raul Castro!”
There were six old ladies in the room watching the television, none of whom were a day under eighty, but when the news was announced they all came to their feet, whooping and clapping. They must have been the most revolutionary old ladies in all of Cuba. I believe one of them actually started to dance. They turned around and saw us standing in the doorway and invited us in, and we watched Raul speak for a couple more minutes before excusing ourselves. It was a pretty perfect way to witness the election of Cuba’s first new President in fifty years, and we departed Santa Clara for Havana feeling that our trip had been a success.
Four of us went: Sara, Adam (my roommate here at the Riviera), Alexandra, and I. We rented a car (which I, not being twenty-one, was unable to drive), set off, and promptly got lost.
This is understandable, because driving in Cuba is a haphazard and often frustrating experience. To begin with, there is an almost ludicrous lack of signs. It’s often impossible to tell what road you’re on, where it’s going, or how to get to any other road. Cars share the freeways with bicycles, horse-drawn buggies, herds of cows, and hitchhikers. And once you get off of the main autopista, the roads decrease sharply in size and quality; what looks in the atlas like a major artery turns out to be a winding one-lane spit of pavement.
Often, the only way to find where you’re going is to ask the people around you, but this presents a new host of problems. For one, if you ask any four people how to get somewhere, their instructions will conflict in some way. And because most people in Cuba don’t drive, their directions usually use routes and landmarks more conducive to walking than to driving.
All in all, driving in Cuba is difficult, and it took us two hours – maybe a little more – to even make it to the Autopista #1. Luckily, it was a straight shot from there to Cienfuegos, and we drove into town in the mid-afternoon.
Cienfuegos is a reasonably large town, the capital of the province of the same name. The city sits on the Bay of Cienfuegos, on the southern coast of Cuba, in almost the exact middle of the island. While picturesque, it’s not a big tourist draw yet, and we found the city to be refreshingly laid back. It’s also a new city, built up mostly in the 40s and 50s, and this meant that large parts of the city felt distinctly like American suburbia; at times, I could have believed we were in the Florida Keys.
Coming into town, we passed by what was to be Cuba’s first nuclear power plant. It was only half-completed when the Soviet Union fell, and so now it stands, inoperative, its one huge tower looking oddly incomplete on its own.
We stayed in two casas particulares on the western side of town, the girls in one and the guys in the other. Casas particulares are one of the more interesting side-effects of the Special Period, and they represent Cuba’s most official step into capitalism. They are similar to a bed-and-breakfast: Cubans with appropriate houses are allowed to let out one room, usually for twenty or thirty convertible pesos (the tourist currency) per night. Although there are stiff restrictions and taxes – the casas are usually only allowed to convert one room to let, and they pay as many as three hundred convertible pesos per month to the government – the owners are almost always able to make a comfortable living off of it, especially since for an extra ten or fifteen pesos per day they will make you breakfast and dinner. They are a nearly perfect way to travel, and I would not recommend that anyone coming to Cuba stay in a hotel; the particulares are cheaper, have better food, and offer much more chance of interaction with Cubans.
Both of our casas were very nice: one with a beautifully tiled interior and the other with a porch garden. The room Adam and I stayed in, though, was obviously meant for couples: it had red silk sheets, a heart-shaped pillow, and the bedside lamp had been modified with a red bulb. Each casa also had some sort of infestation: the girls’ was crawling with geckos, while Adam and I had several impressively large cockroach buddies to keep us company. (Personally, I would have preferred their infestation.)
That night, we walked into the center of town, which is organized around a square called – wait for it – Parque Jose Marti. This is the tourist center of town, such as it is, and we gawked for a bit at the cathedral, the 18th-century theater, and the impressive statue of the park’s namesake. The area around the Parque was well-kept and new, but this stopped as soon as we ventured away from it: the streets became cracked and crowded, the houses fell into disrepair. Eager to see the sunset over the ocean, we walked toward the bay, but we found instead an abandoned train yard with people living in and around the old train cars and the decrepit depot. I had started to think that everyone in Cuba lived at relatively the same level of poverty, but visiting a place like this drove home that even here there are drastic differences in people’s living situations. Some residents of Cienfuegos lived in homes little different from ours back in the United States while others, for no reason that I could discern, were relegated to living in shantytowns built upon deserted railroad tracks.
In the fading light, we made our way back to our section of town, and then we walked down the peninsula until we came to the very tip, a place called La Punta, where there was a sort of outdoor bar. We parked ourselves in a gazebo on the waterfront, watched the waves, played cards, and sipped the best (and cheapest) mojito I’ve yet found in Cuba.
The next day we rose early and drove a few hours to Trinidad, which is in the nearby province of Sancti Spiritu. Trinidad, a remarkably well-preserved colonial city, is almost certainly the most-visited spot in Central Cuba, and indeed it was crawling with tourists – and with people trying to take their money. In fact, while Trinidad itself was beautiful, our afternoon there was a depressing one, mostly spent weaving between beggars and trinket-filled stands. Everyone, it seemed, was trying to sell us the same guayabera, the same Che t-shirt, the same racist fat-black-woman doll.
Just as it seemed that our afternoon in Trinidad was going to be nothing but unpleasant, we drove to the outskirts of the city, to a small waterfront community called La Boca. Here, there were no tourists (except us) and we found a small, beautiful beach and put down our towels. We swam for a bit, watched the sun go down and the fishermen throw out their nets. At one point a young boy, shirtless and unshod, galloped past us on a horse and rode straight into the water, and then the horse reared back and the whole scene was really quite stunning – the two figures, silhouetted against the scarlet sunset, droplets of water cascading from the horse’s mane. Unfortunately, I had left my camera in the car, and when I returned with it the boy was guiding the horse out of the water.
We ate that night at a casa palidar, which is similar to a particular except that it only serves meals. While we were there, we met a French-Canadian man, who I mention only because he lived the strangest sort of migratory lifestyle. From April to October, he lived in Montreal, working as a landscaper; as the weather cooled, he flew south and lived in La Boca through the winter. All told, the man hadn’t experienced weather cooler than sixty-five degrees since 1985. He was quite happy with it, but I don’t think that I could live like that – nor, for that matter, do I think I could live in Cuba permanently. I like the cold too much, rain and snow and jackets and fireplaces.
(Talking to Cubans about snow is a strange experience, because they only know about it in the abstract. Rollo, my Spanish teacher, once asked us what snow felt like, and an artist that we met painted polar bears into Cuban landscapes because he felt the juxtaposition was so absurd – he compared them to unicorns.)
The next day we rose early, checked out of our particulares (bidding our hosts farewell with a peck on the cheek), and drove to Santa Clara.
Santa Clara is in almost the geographical center of the island, and this as much as anything explains why the city exists: not only is it in the middle of important trading routes, but it has been the site of many battles, since the revolutions in Cuba tend to start in the East and work their way westward. Indeed, it was at this site in 1958 that Che Guevara and the rebels had their most decisive victory against the Batista Administration, derailing a train loaded with soldiers and wewapons. It was one of the turning points of the war, and it was in Santa Clara that, after his death, an enormous memorial to Che was erected.
The memorial was the first thing we visited. It’s pretty tough to miss – the statue of Che, fully a hundred feet tall, looms over the autopista. The memorial, though, was oddly deserted, and a little underwhelming. The statue doesn’t even look like Che, really – the figure depicted looks much older than Che was when he died at 49. We soon headed toward Santa Clara proper.
It was a Sunday, and it was hot, so most of the population of Santa Clara was indoors. We wandered through town, visiting the main square and the diorama-style reenactment of Che’s battle. At about two in the afternoon, we passed by an open doorway, and inside I glimpsed a television. On it was a large, parliamentary-style room full of men in business suits.
We walked a couple more feet until it hit me, and I turned around. “I’ll bet those are the elections,” I said, for it was Sunday, the 24th, the day that Fidel’s successor was to be elected by the Cuban Senate. We walked back and huddled around the doorway just in time to hear the chairman say, “…nuestro nuevo Presidente, Raul Castro!”
There were six old ladies in the room watching the television, none of whom were a day under eighty, but when the news was announced they all came to their feet, whooping and clapping. They must have been the most revolutionary old ladies in all of Cuba. I believe one of them actually started to dance. They turned around and saw us standing in the doorway and invited us in, and we watched Raul speak for a couple more minutes before excusing ourselves. It was a pretty perfect way to witness the election of Cuba’s first new President in fifty years, and we departed Santa Clara for Havana feeling that our trip had been a success.
Thursday, February 21, 2008
Castro's Resignation
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As you probably know, two days ago Fidel Castro announced - via the above letter in the state newspaper, the Granma - that he would neither seek nor would he accept the position of President of Cuba; in effect, he resigned. Fidel has been President since 1976, and before that he served as Prime Minister since 1959, so this will be the first time he hasn't been directly involved with the government in nearly fifty years.
Monumental as this was, it was not entirely unexpected. Castro is old and sick, and since he appointed Raul Castro as acting President two years ago, he has been expected to retire. This does, though, underscore the serious condition that he's in: many have said that he would not willingly give up power unless he was at death's door. (There are even muttered rumors that a Cardinal has come in from Rome in case he dies, but these are as yet unsubstantiated.)
The news did not make much of an impact on day-to-day life here. There were no marches, no public celebrations or gatherings; people went about the day like it was any other. But there were a few more radios on, a few more newspapers sold, a few more little groups of people stopping in the streets. The retirement was not discussed in forums; it was discussed on porches, over coffees, between friends and neighbors. It was most certainly not discussed with the nosy American student with the questionable Spanish, so I've had a bit of a tough time telling how people are really feeling about this, but the consensus seems to be that the resignation, in and of itself, doesn't change much.
Things will get really interesting on Sunday, when the Cuban Parliament meets to elect a new President. It is widely expected to be Raul but, at 76, he's also no spring chicken, so some are saying it will be someone younger. I'm going to be in Cienfuegos this weekend, and with CNN and the internet you all will probably know the outcome of the election before I do, but as soon as I know more I'll let everyone know.
Saturday, February 16, 2008
So, this is my first attempt at adding pictures, so I'm not sure how well it's going to work. But we'll give it a shot.
This is the view out of my window, with the other side of the Hotel Riviera in the foreground and the sea in the background.
The Malecon, with some random Cubans on the right-hand side.
This is the entrance to the University of Havana. The inscription on the front of the statue - alma mater - dates back to before the term had its present usage; in Latin, it means 'nourishing mother'. The owl statue on the top of the building is a symbol of wisdom.
Random Cuban guy in front of a mural.
The black flags in front of the US Special Interests Office.
Perhaps the greatest statue ever: Jose Marti, holding a baby, pointing defiantly toward Florida.
I think this is my favorite picture I've taken so far in Cuba.
This is not at all an uncommon sight.
These are the cabins that we stayed in at the San Juan River.
The community as Las Terrazas.
The lake.
And lastly, me, in Las Terrazas.
So, did this work for everyone? Are the pictures big enough? Anything you want to see more of?
This is the view out of my window, with the other side of the Hotel Riviera in the foreground and the sea in the background.
The Malecon, with some random Cubans on the right-hand side.
This is the entrance to the University of Havana. The inscription on the front of the statue - alma mater - dates back to before the term had its present usage; in Latin, it means 'nourishing mother'. The owl statue on the top of the building is a symbol of wisdom.
Random Cuban guy in front of a mural.
The black flags in front of the US Special Interests Office.
Perhaps the greatest statue ever: Jose Marti, holding a baby, pointing defiantly toward Florida.
I think this is my favorite picture I've taken so far in Cuba.
This is not at all an uncommon sight.
These are the cabins that we stayed in at the San Juan River.
The community as Las Terrazas.
The lake.
And lastly, me, in Las Terrazas.So, did this work for everyone? Are the pictures big enough? Anything you want to see more of?
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