Cuba Diaries (40 page)

“Maybe both,” Nick says.

PRIESTS AT A MASS
use the word
derechos
(rights) for the first time.

A Spanish priest is expelled from Cuba for what is described in Cuban news media as “counterrevolutionary” activities. It is not explained what the activities were, nor can anyone tell us.

NICK SAYS HE SAW
the pope on television, celebrating mass. He was so weak he could not lift the chalice.

All reports still say the pope is really coming.

FIDEL HAS NOT BEEN
seen in public for many weeks.

I ASK NICK HOW
often, when people are in a historical moment, do they
feel
they are in a historical moment.

Nick says he thinks not very often.

FIDEL APPEARS IN PUBLIC
for the first time in months, accepting his nomination as a representative of Santiago in Cuba's parliament. The speech lasts three hours. Those who watch it tell us later that Fidel looked blank a few times and that sometimes his mouth moved, but no words came out.

All shoes of the Cuban
nomenklatura
are curious. And Raúl Castro's shoes, visible below the pant legs of a snug-fitting olive green military uniform at a dinner party we attend, are no exception. They look custom-made. The heels of the shoes are slightly higher than normal men's heels and there is probably a lift inside them as well. This is to be expected, for Raúl is a good five to eight inches (depending on who is telling you) shorter than his brothers, Fidel and Ramón. It's the
last
on the shoes (I think that's what you call it—the slope of the shoe, from heel to toe) that makes them curious. The lasts of Raúl's shoes are more
swooping
than the lasts of modern men's shoes, even of shoes with lifts. They are more like the shoes of burghers in late Dutch Renaissance
paintings, swooping down to square toes, or a more stolid version of the shoes men wore in France during the reign of the Sun King. They are shoes of
The Nightwatch
or
The Anatomy Lesson
. They are laced but would take buckles well.

It is curious how Raúl does look entirely different from his brothers, Ramón and Fidel, who greatly resemble each other. But the rumor that Raúl's father was the Castro family's Chinese cook and that he is gay—hence the nickname La China—seems to me a little extreme. Ramón and Fidel are both around six foot one. Raúl's height, according to different assessments, ranges from five foot five to five foot eight. Raúl's face is round, flat, and beardless, with slanted eyes and high cheekbones. His fine hair, which is light brown and still has very little gray in it, is straight. His voice is high and nasal.

Raúl says people say he doesn't talk as much as his brother Fidel, but that it's not true: he talks just as much. The guests laugh politely. Then what follows is a play-by-play of the campaign in the Sierra Maestre, without anyone's asking for it, without any conversational lead-in, lasting throughout the entire dinner. He gestures, he bobs, he smiles, he grimaces, and you can tell from the degree of his absorption that he is not with us in the dining room at all, but back in the Sierra Maestre with his men.

The high-ranking members of the
nomenklatura
at the dinner table remain absolutely silent while Raúl talks, even more silent than they are when Fidel holds forth. The expressions on their faces are neither rapt nor adoring nor in love, but this is Raúl, and these are ministers, not vice-ministers nor the dormouselike lower-ranking members of the
nomenklatura
with whom Fidel prefers to surround himself these days. The ministers drink sip after sip of wine as Raúl talks. Some ministers slide forward on their chairs, their tail-bones giving way until their underarms are nearly level with the table. They play, straight-armed, with the stems of their wineglasses, draw with the tines of their forks on the tablecloth, steal glances around the room.

Then, just as abruptly as he started, Raúl stops talking. The ministers who have sunk push themselves back up in their chairs. There is a collective inhalation. Raúl rises. Chairs grind back. We move into the living room. People break up into smaller groups. Conversations start. Standing in one group, Raúl says that he hopes that Cuba can normalize relations someday soon with the United States. It is a fact of geography that the United States is Cuba's closest neighbor, and you can't go on forever, having difficulties with your closest neighbor.

A Cuban tells us Fidel told him he invited the pope knowing that he was an anticommunist. Fidel then said, chuckling, that maybe he—Fidel—was an anticommunist, too.

The intercom rings. It is Manuel. “You should come and have a look at Bloqueo. He doesn't look well.”

I sigh. Things have just gotten going at my desk.

Bloqueo's face is blown up to twice its normal size. One eye is shut and oozing. “He hasn't been seen for two days, and he just showed up like this. He's been fighting.”

There's a new official veterinary clinic on Quinta. We have heard that, being so new, they haven't had a chance to go downhill yet. We bundle Bloqueo into the laundry basket, and off we go.

Claw marks, teeth marks on his face and legs, filled with pus. On one leg the skin has been ripped off, exposing bone. Miguel and I hold Bloqueo down as the doctor drains the wounds and paints then with purple disinfectant. The doctor gives him an injection of antibiotics.

We make an appointment for castration for Bloqueo and a complete ovariectomy for Embargo.

We move to the living room between the main course and dessert to hear the archbishop of Havana, Cardinal Jaime Ortega, speak on television about the visit of the pope. It is the first time since
el triunfo
that any religious person has been allowed to speak on television in Cuba.

The cardinal's speech is well constructed. First he speaks about poverty in the world and the scourge of neoliberalism, and he takes a potshot at abortion; then he gives a brief biography of the pope. He speaks of the pope as a young man, of his struggles against the Nazis, and of his struggles against the domination of his homeland by a large neighboring power, which imposed its system on his country. He concludes by speaking of the need to achieve the widest truth possible.

I think he has done a good job, but others in the room say he is tense and that he uses too many complicated ideas and words for the average Cuban.

I have rented rooms for Mark and other journalists in Cubans' homes, as they asked me to, but it's getting more and more illegal all the time to stay in people's houses, so I faxed them that I reserved rooms for them at the Hotel Lincoln. The Hotel Lincoln looks, from the outside, even more poorly managed than other hotels; the management probably has little idea who is going to be staying there, so (I reason) that if any one of the ministries that intercept my faxes should choose to check if Mark and his friends—among the three thousand other journalists who are coming to Havana to cover the pope's visit—are really in it, even it might have a hard time verifying this.

This morning, a decree goes out that all those renting to foreigners during the pope's visit will not have to pay taxes on the rooms they rent out, so now I can go ahead and fax, “You're in a private house,” and give the address and telephone number. We rent a car for them today, too, even though they won't be coming for another week. There won't be any cars available by then. It sits waiting in Roberto's garage, costing one hundred dollars a day.

Within hours of the decree, the airport arrivals area is jammed with people holding up signs advertising rooms for rent.

INAUGURAL DINNER AT A
newly refurbished tourist hotel, Arenal, in Santa María del Mar starts earlier than scheduled, in order to allow the guests to return home to listen to Fidel's speech on television about the pope's upcoming visit.

I ask the vice-minister of tourism, a brisk, open-seeming thirty-year-old, if his ministry is doing anything to discourage single-male tourism.

“We are raising prices,” the vice-minister says. “We are developing more cultural activities.”

“Because the girls, you know, they go to Europe thinking to improve their lives. They are generally disappointed.”

“You don't appreciate what you have until you lose it,” the vice-minister says.

I ask him if hotel workers are given any more stimulus.

“It depends what you mean by
stimulus
.”

“I know many people on vacation don't care how much the people who are serving them are paid, but when I hear someone at a hotel where I am staying, or at a restaurant where I am eating, is making two hundred pesos a month, it cuts my appetite. I can't enjoy myself.”

“But in your country, you have to pay for your education, your hospitals, your housing—”

“But there is free education in X——, and medical care. There is free education and medical care in Italy, France, Sweden, Holland, and many other European countries.”

“There
is?
”

WE BEGIN LISTENING TO
the speech in the bar of the hotel, move into the hotel director's suite, have another drink, listen to the speech on and off for an hour, drive back to Havana, turn on the television: Fidel is still speaking. I put Thea (who has been waiting up for us) to bed. We floss. I undo my face, pour water, put on hand lotion. Fidel is still speaking. At one o'clock we turn off the television, sleep, wake up at two-fifteen, say to each other, “Let's see if he's still speaking.” We turn on the TV and there he still is.

We are invited by Eusebio Leal to the dedication of a park to the memory of Diana, Princess of Wales.

I thought, at first, when I read the word
Diana
in the invitation that they were speaking of a statue of Diana the huntress, rescued from some ruin and now used to adorn a park. But no, they mean the princess.

There is near universal shock on the faces of Cuban friends when I tell them what we are invited to. “Now they are truly mad,” they say.

Nick can't go.

The monument to Diana is a ten-foot, entirely phallic column with, to the side of it and much smaller, a vaginal sun.

A Latin American journalist whispers breathily in my ear that the column must be the monument to Dodi Fayed.

A Cuban writer favored by the government comes up to me. The writer says it is good the pope is coming because it validates the Cuban process.

What process
, I want to ask him, but don't.

He moves to the next group of foreigners.

Nick and an American journalist, Herb, who both speak Spanish a thousand times better than I, agree that Fidel's speech the other night on TV was brilliant. The speech, they agree, was Fidel's way of controlling the disgruntled
nomenklatura;
it was Fidel's way of showing that he was in control of the pope's visit, that it was he, Fidel, who was asking everyone to go to the Plaza de la Revolución, so that it would not appear that anyone's going to the Plaza de la Revolución was an independent act or an expression of anything other than support for the revolution.

I look at Nick. I didn't realize that Nick had actually
listened
to the speech, listened enough between the driving and the flossing and the dozing to be able to put it all together, but he had, and I realize, for the millionth time, how much more serious, thorough, and attentive Nick is than I am.

ON THE PATRIA O MUERTE
sign next to the airport, they have taken down
O MUERTE
and left just
PATRIA
.

There is no slogan on the PabExpo traffic circle billboard, only the words
THE CUBAN PEOPLE WELCOME HIS HOLINESS JOHN PAUL II
.

AT LAST FIDEL SEEMS
younger than someone.

The pope's speech is slurred. Fidel looks at him with surprise and concern. One wonders if the pope's dentures are slipping, or if he has had a stroke right there on the plane, and if this trip is some kind of abuse of the elderly, imposed by the pope on himself. His chin is on his chest, his hands and head are trembling, and his entire torso stays permanently bent over to one side. He manages to stay standing up, though, and when he says, with his trembling voice rising, that he hopes the world can open up to Cuba and that Cuba, “with all its magnificent potential,” can open up to the world, his frailty is transformed into a giant, gleaming bulldozer pushing vanity off a high cliff into crashing violet waves.

THE POPE'S FIRST MASS
, in Santa Clara. We watch it on TV. His theme is the family. I call the help to come in and listen to it with me. When the pope speaks about separation of families, Concha starts crying and runs out of the room.

ROBERTO STANDS IN THE
doorway looking crestfallen. Mark comes up behind him. “We have to go back to Washington,” Mark says. “Clinton's been banging one of the White House interns and it's all over the news. Brokaw is leaving; Rather is leaving. I want to stay here, this is much, much more important, but we have to go.”

Mark was supposed to stay for six whole days, but now he will be leaving
after three. That means $60 less for Roberto (or more, if you figure in the proportional tip that it is Mark's style to give) and $150 less for Roberto's aunt on his father's side, in whose house they are staying. Two hundred ten dollars is more than any Cuban makes in a year.

I want Roberto and his family to make money. I want everyone in our house to make money. I want all the
jineteras
except the underage ones to make money. I want all the
paladar
owners and the black-market cigar, lobster, fish, flour, sugar, potato, and cheese vendors to make money. I want all the people who work in the
agropecuario
to make money. I want all the artists to make money. I want all the people who rent rooms and houses to make money. I want all the people who rent out or show pirated videotapes to make money. I want the antique dealers to make money, as well as all the people who sell something precious out of their homes just every once in a while. I want the independent taxi drivers to make money. I want all the rent-a-clowns, magicians, and puppeteers for children's parties to make money, and the
piñata
makers and the independent tire repairmen. I want the man who powers his glass engraver by pedaling his bike and carves your name on your windshield—so that the windshield cannot be stolen right off the car—to make a lot of money. I want all the manicurists at their card tables on the street and the people who restitch tennis shoes and refill lighters with insecticide to make money. I want all the handmade greeting-card and party-favor people to make money. I want Alfonse the innovative vegetable farmer to make money. I want all the freelance masseurs and all the freelance Spanish, English, French, Italian, German, Russian, Portuguese, piano, swimming, dance, karate, tae kwon do, and yoga teachers to make money. I want the people who sell souvenirs in the Plaza de la Catedral and on the weekends in the parking lot on the Malecón to make money. I want the booksellers to make money, and the people redoing the houses of all the people who have made money to make money.