Cuba Diaries (10 page)

Among the younger ones, whose circumstances are somehow harder to define, there's an affable lady from New Jersey (I don't yet know her name) who is the wife of Miguel Alfonso, an irascible Cuban bureaucrat with a slim gray ponytail who specializes in virulent anti-U.S. cocktail party remarks. They travel to the United States every summer for vacation on the Jersey Shore.
There's a U.S.-born woman with a New York accent whom I met at a cocktail party, who works at Cuba's main bioengineering lab. When I asked her if Cuba was taking any steps to provide more soap for its people, she replied exasperatedly, “The lack of soap in Cuba is because of the U.S. embargo!” There's a teacher at the school, Mrs. Fleites, who looks like Bette Midler and talks like her. Mrs. Fleites told me her parents left Cuba for Brooklyn because of Batista and came back because of Fidel; then she added brightly, “It seemed like a good idea at the time!”

There are others, too, whom you don't notice at first, who dress and act like Cubans. “Son of a bitch!” one mumbles beside me as he stubs his toe on a piece of raised pavement on the Malecón. “
Ooon leebrrrro day zana-orrriaaas
” (“A pound of carrots”), another one says at the
agro
, holding out a tattered plastic bag.

Nick and I know a little more now about Santeria, and we have learned that it is an Elegguá that we need (literally, an “opener of roads”—one who makes the way for you).

We have an Elegguá at Nick's firm in the form of Barbara—a Mexican of X——ian origin. Barbara is tall and fragile, with an essential understanding of both Cuba and the world outside. It is impossible, we have come to feel, for non-Cubans to have the road opened in the right way if they have an Elegguá who knows nothing of life outside Cuba. Well-meaning Cuban Cubans have directed us to exhibitions of cornball landscapes, fake African sculpture, socialist psychedelic realism (happy workers, José Martí, and Che in psychedelic colors: their version of the sixties, but still going strong), and artists' studios with old guys in them in (I swear) berets, their thumbs through palettes.

We follow Barbara through the rubble of the Plaza Vieja to the Centro del Desarrollo de Artes Visuales (Center for the Development of the Visual Arts). We climb stairs inside a naive neoclassical frescoed stairwell to the second floor. Like many
palacios
in Habana Vieja, the building housing the
centro
is an irresistible blend of noble and rustic: naive neoclassical painted wood ceilings, frescoed wainscoting, stained glass fanlights, thick white walls, and worn, undulating brick floors.

Something different is going on at the
centro
. Just a couple of polyester
guayaberas
, the rest unindoctrinated-looking young people in natural-fiber clothes, and on the walls, good art. It is an annual show of young artists.

Everyone is talking about Kcho, a twenty-two-year-old artist who has just won the year's UNESCO prize. The artist is not present, but on one wall is the work that won the prize. It is a crown of thorns in the form of a
balsero
's raft, or inner tube, complete with the carved wood handles
balseros
use to hang on to in case of rough seas. It is elegant and tragic, delicate and monumental, Cuban and universal. We and everyone else in the gallery are stunned by the fact that Kcho is only twenty-two.

We visit a gallery of works for sale on the ground floor. The works for sale are interesting as well, especially some painted bas-relief plaster panels, with the sheen and somber tone of religious works. One shows the Virgen de la Caridad del Cobre, who usually holds the Christ child, holding an alligator (a symbol of Cuba, whose outline on a map resembles the outline of an alligator) instead, floating above three cannons instead of above the usual three men in a boat. One shows the Virgen del Cobre being offered a red baby in exchange for a white one. Another shows a bearded man in a classic Cuban Army uniform, with a rifle on his back, feeding sugarcane into an ox-driven mill, the kind of sugar mill used two hundred years ago. The mood is gentle, resigned. The artist, Esterio Segura, is there by chance. The gallery manager introduces us to him as he is wheeling his bicycle out of the courtyard. He is a combination of white, black, and Chinese, with high cheekbones, a birthmark near one eye like a permanent tear, a long, sparse, mustache and goatee like a Buddhist sage, and a relaxed Afro swelling upward from behind a tortoiseshell headband.

It is May, ninety degrees, and humid. Sweat pouring into the girls' eyes is hampering the girls' performance, the teacher explains, and the dance studio is too crowded now that more girls have signed up for lessons. The lessons will be on the back patio from now until the fall. Girls should no longer wear ballet shoes because the cement floor of the patio is so rough it will tear them up. The girls should wear sneakers. They will not do floor exercises again until they move back into the dance studio in the fall.

The Cuban mothers and children absorb this information without comment.

“You've got to be kidding,” Thea says in English.

The children look at her. “Are you from Japan?” one of the children asks Thea.

The class moves onto the back patio and begins its exercises. Thea does them jerkily, rolling her eyes. I frown at her and she adjusts her expression.

Since the big cocktail party the firm recommends we have every year is going to be in one month, Manuel says that it's a good idea to start
resolviendo
and
consiguiendo
now.

Para resolver y/o conseguir:
500 drinking glasses, paper napkins, ice, limes, mint (for
mojitos
), ice containers, rum (4 cases dark and 4 light), 8 cases beer, 12 cases Tropicola, 4 cases scotch, 4 cases vodka, 6 cases champagne, 1 pig, 2
jamon bikis
(a salami-shaped ham made of different parts of the pig pressed together), 10 pounds white cheese, 40 liters canned tomatoes, 5 pounds grated coconut, 10 dozen eggs, 50 kilos flour, 50 kilos sugar, 20 kilos malangas, 20 kilos potatoes, 20 kilos green bananas, 8 waiters.

The list is broken down into manageable units, with the
resolviendo
and/or
consiguiendo
of each item assigned to the employee most able to do it, to the firm, or to me. Alcohol and mixers are to be ordered through the firm. Readily available fruits and vegetables will be bought at the
agro
. The
jamon biki
is to be
conseguidoed
through a friend of Miguel's. Flour and sugar
resueltoed
by Lorena. Potatoes are to be
conseguidoed
by Manuel. Ice, ice containers, and mint will be
resuelto
ed at the last minute, but the pig remains up in the air.

I tell Manuel that I would like to find some other way to get enough flour and sugar, and others have whispered to me that they would be able to
resolver
flour and sugar, but so far Lorena has been the only one who has been able to successfully
resolver
these two items.

“I'VE GOT A NICE PIG
,” the plumber who is Miguel's friend says, lying under the sink with a wrench in his hand.

Miguel is nearby, nodding. “It's true,” he says. “He has a very nice pig, large, good for the party.”

We arrange to buy the pig for three hundred dollars, which I gather is one dollar a pound. The plumber will kill it, scald it (which, I learn, is what you have to do to get the bristles off), and bring it to the house with the head and feet removed on a day when the children are in school.

SACKS OF FLOUR AND
of sugar are dragged in through the door by Lorena, who is whispering, eyes opened wide and the whites of her eyes showing all the way around her pupils.

CONCHA APPROACHES ME
while I am having lunch. “I have a good boy who can help for the party.”

“Good.” I have asked the help to find extra waiters, people they know, for the party.

“He knows how to serve. He has a white shirt . . .”

“Fine.”

“Do you mind if he's black?”

“What?” I say, thinking that it's just my Spanish, but Concha touches two fingers to her forearm.

“
Negro. El es Negro. Le da fastidio?
”

I give a slight jerk. She
is
asking me if it bothers me that he is black.

“Black, white, yellow, green, it doesn't matter to me.”

“Sorry to ask you,
señora
, but some ladies, they
do
mind.”

THE PIG ARRIVES AND
is laid out on the table on the veranda in back of the kitchen, where the help usually eat lunch, two legs of the table on the slightly raised cement floor of the veranda, two legs on the grass, so that the blood drains off into a basin Manuel has placed in the grass at the lower end. I walk back and forth in front of the door leading to the veranda, half watching, half not wanting to watch, as Manuel, wearing an old
guayabera
and wielding a large knife, skins the pig, then cuts the fat off. He cuts the fat into large cubes, which are rendered into
chicharrones
, or cracklings, by Lorena and put into tubs of lard in the
despensa
, like goose livers in France. The legs are cut off, wrapped, and put in the freezer, then the rest of the meat is cut up into pieces of three to four kilos each, wrapped, and put in the freezer.

I am—
afraid
, I guess, is the word—to ask whether the three hundred dollars includes the head and feet of the pig or not. I have not
seen
the head, but there is a mysterious black plastic bag on the kitchen floor. I don't want them to know that I didn't know, when I paid the plumber, if I was paying for the head and feet or not. I did ask the plumber to cut the head and feet off before the pig came to the house, but I didn't tell him to
keep
them. I don't want the help to know that I didn't know exactly what I was paying for. I think the plumber did say something to me about head and feet and price, but I don't want him or the help to know how little in control I am.

I am also afraid to find out (if the head
is
around), what it is they
do
with the head. I'm sure they do something with it: Cuba is a do-something-with pigs'-heads type of place.

Nick and I go with our Elegguá to the opening of a group show in the gallery-cum
-paladar
of Arquitecto Vasquez.

Once again, people in natural-fiber clothes, and on the wall, a picture of a bearded centaur (his face is covered, but you can see pieces of beard protruding), his body pierced by arrows decorated with the flags of former Communist countries. A cherub seated on the centaur's back holds the cloth covering the centaur's face, but you cannot tell whether the cherub is holding the cloth in order to keep it in place or to remove it. El Caballo (the Horse) is one of the many names for Fidel because in the numerology of the Cuban lottery, the number one is represented by a horse. Another picture shows Lenin in a coffin floating above a contemplative Karl Marx, over whose shoulder the face of Groucho Marx mugs.

Castro is never named in Cuba; he is referred to as Él (Him), El Señor (the Mister, the Sir, or probably more accurately, the Lord), El Caballo (the Horse), or El Niño (the Child), or one simply makes a silent hand gesture down from the chin to indicate a beard. Among the art we have seen so far, we have never seen a painting depicting Him openly, and we have been wondering if it is even allowed to paint direct images of Him. We have asked our Elegguá and others if it is allowed, but no one has been able to tell us so far. At Galería Vasquez, though, there is also a painting depicting Him openly: it is a close-up of Him, presumably in some European museum, contemplating a painting of the head of a woman in Renaissance dress. The painting is in black, white, and gray. It is a copy of an actual well-known news photograph of him, Arquitecto Vasquez tells us. Arquitecto Vasquez tells us that the artist, Toirac, has painted an entire series of paintings of Fidel, copied from well-known photographs of Him.

We ask Arquitecto Vasquez if he thinks it might be possible for us to visit Toirac in his studio. Arquitecto Vasquez gives us the telephone number of Toirac's neighbor's mother. Not everyone in Havana has a phone, and this is the easiest way to get him a message.

ÁNGEL TOIRAC AND HIS WIFE,
Meira, live in a fifth-floor walk-up in Old Havana.

Ángel has large features, and his abundant, curly black hair is, like Esterio Segura's, held back by a lady's tortoiseshell headband. Meira, who is a poet, has creamy skin and a very wholesome air about her.

Ángel's latest series of paintings is called
Tiempos Nuevos
(New Times). The paintings are oil, in black, white, gray, and red, and faithfully reproduce famous photos of Fidel, mostly from the time of the revolution, but within contemporary commercial contexts, in which Fidel appears to be promoting products and businesses. There is a painting of Fidel astride a horse (a well-known photo of the revolution) with the Marlboro symbol beneath him. There is a painting of Fidel and Che trawling off a sportfishing boat, with the words
MARINA HEMINGWAY
(an existing tourist marina) in one corner. There is a painting of Fidel smiling, eating Chinese food with a large bottle of CocaCola beside it and, underneath, the words,
LAS COSAS VAN MEJOR CON COCACOLA
(Things go better with Coke).

Toirac was about to have an exhibition when he was told that he couldn't display images of Fidel in those contexts, so he painted new paintings for the exhibition, substituting his wife in a uniform, smoking a cigar, for every image of Fidel. He shows us one of the paintings in which the image of his wife appears. He is not allowed to export any of the paintings showing Fidel, either.

We ask him about the painting of his we saw at Galeriá Vasquez.