Cuba Diaries (41 page)

Every
cuenta propista
in Cuba will be making less money now because of Monica Lewinsky.

MASS IN SANTIAGO
. The archbishop of Santiago speaks. He speaks of false messiahs and of those who confuse
patriotismo
with
partido
(the party).

PARTY AT THE HOUSE
of the principal officer of the U.S. Interests Section, Mike Kozak, and his wife, Eileen, for the media. Five hundred
people are expected, but many fewer show up. There are cardinals, also, and congressmen.

Most of the people we talk to acknowledge that the embargo suits Fidel to a T.

MASS IN HAVANA
, at the Plaza de la Revolución.

Red Cross trucks are scattered throughout the square, and people in bibs with red crosses on them. A group tries to unfold a banner that reads
DOWN WITH THE CASTRO BROTHERS
! and are carried off, very quickly, by people in Red Cross bibs, to Red Cross trucks.

Three groups in the crowd appear to be organized. They pack themselves in tightly to keep the Red Cross people from getting at them. “
Libertad
,” they chant, all of them, in low voices, no voice louder than another, so that individuals cannot be picked out. They know that the Red Cross people know that arresting a group of them would cause the news cameras, which are now pointed at the dais on which the pope stands, to be pointed at the protesters.

One friend has bruises on his arms from being packed in so tightly.

Juana and I are alone in her family's Lada. Juana says she and Hernando have had problems and that he has moved out and is living with his mother.

I tell Juana I am so sorry.

Juana starts to cry.

I say to Juana that she is a treasure and if he doesn't realize that, that's his problem.

Juana continues to cry.

I ask her if it is the first time he has moved out.

Juana says there was another time, four years ago, but then he came back.

I ask her if it is definitive.

“For me it isn't.”

Hernando is an engineer. Working as a baby-sitter, Juana makes nearly eighteen times what he makes.

I say that the economic situation here must put a lot of stress on couples.

Juana says that all her female friends, attractive, competent women, are all divorced.

I say that I read in an article that in Russia, women were generally doing
much better than men. Men felt sorry for themselves. They fell apart. Women, on the other hand, were like ducks. They kept floating.

“Courage,” I say to Juana through the open window after I get out of the car, and “He should realize what he has,” which sounds lame as soon as I say it—like the verbal equivalent of using a twig to keep back a landslide, a landslide of broken families tumbling down whole mountain ranges.

The intercom rings.

“Roberto to see you.”

“Tell him to come to the upstairs hall.”

It's becoming a daily event, Roberto coming to see me to get cash—cash for Jimmie's computer lessons, cash for a computer part (I don't ask where he's getting it), cash for the purchase of a computer printer (I don't ask where he's getting it), cash for “caviar” to upgrade the computer (once again, I don't ask), cash to reserve a rental car for an arriving friend of a friend, cash for touring friends, and sometimes friends of friends, around when they run out of cash in Cuba, who then reimburse my account in the States.

Apart from the journalist friends of friends, who came for the pope's visit, there have been fewer visitors this year. As the year goes on, it is becoming obvious that most friends, and friends of friends, who were curious enough to come to Cuba have already come, said,
Oh, it's like that
, and have not felt the need to come back again. I had the feeling, in September, that it would get to be this way. The visitors are now truly fewer and farther between.

Roberto has just returned from taking Jonathan, the last of the journalists, to the airport. Roberto tells me that Mark, who left first, asked Jonathan to give Roberto's aunt some extra money, for the trouble she took in making her house nice for all of them. Jonathan unfortunately ran out of cash and asked Roberto to ask me to give some extra cash to his aunt—$150 extra.

I go to my secret drawer, pull out $150, and give it to Roberto. Roberto thanks me and skips down the back stairs.

I can understand Jonathan not being able to telephone me from anywhere, but I can't understand Jonathan not even writing me a note about it on his way to the airport.

Nick and I slip into the swimming pool.

Nick tells me his replacement has been named. He's a nice guy, Nick says. We will be leaving in July.

It comes all of a sudden like that, as usual—the news. This time it comes even more quietly than usual, as we are slipping into the swimming pool on a weekday afternoon.

“Look at the orchids,” Nick says.

They are blooming now—purple ones and white ones, hung up on little boards on palm trees along the fence.

We walk back to our bedroom, wet feet tracking on the marble floors. We walk through the high-ceilinged downstairs rooms, through which the breezes are constantly blowing, for the doors are never shut and there are no glass windows, only eight-foot-high louvered panels, which bathe the rooms in cool half-light.

It's not our house, we know, but a ghost house.

We will have to go live in a house with glass windows now, which shut.

It's a center, a mandala, a stone in a pond, our house, with ripples spreading from it, describing memories: fish on a reef, our Elegguá,
sopa de platano
, stories every day. Beautiful stories, ugly stories, happy stories, sad stories, hopeful stories, hopeless stories—stories more than I can count, happening every day.

I cannot leave these stories here.

Concha cries; Lorena slaps the cutting board with the flat side of a cleaver.

“You get used to someone, you know their habits, and then they go,” Concha says, wiping a tear from the corner of her eye.

I put my arms around them. “It's not our decision, you know . . .”

“
Y mis niños . .
.” (“And my children . . .”), Lorena says. A tear streaks down her
negra azul
face, causing me to cry now, too.

“I am from La Yuma,” I say. “I'm just over there.”

The help, each one of them so distinct now, also in the ripples of the pond.

I think of them the way Cubans call one another, their physical attributes their handles, signifying affection: La Negra, La Mulata, El Chino, Los Narrow Faces, La Plucked Eyebrows, El Nose Hairs.

We
cannot
take Embargo and Bloqueo back with us to X——, I tell the children. It would not be fair to them. We will be living in an apartment. They would not be able to go outside. There would be no nice Cuban smells for them, nor lizards to catch. The people who will be living in this house after us say they will be happy to take the cats. They also told me they are happy I am going ahead with the surgeries the cats are going to have.

Jimmie and Thea look at me with tears pooling on their lower eyelids.

Friendly Gringo Delivery Service arrives, bringing mail and articles about the visit of the pope, including an edition of the
New Yorker
dedicated entirely to Cuba. It's a thin magazine, though, and the articles just brush the surface. Maybe that's the way it always is when you live in a place that people write about.

The most detailed article is on architecture. Paul Goldberger calls Eusebio Leal's restoration of Old Havana “Old Havanaland” and calls Eusebio Leal a “very efficient capitalist.” Goldberger actually got himself and a photographer inside the Faxas house—the green-roofed one just before the tunnel under the Almendares River—“through the roof of which,” Goldberger writes, “you can drop breadboxes.” It is the one we pass at night in torrential rains, see rain pouring through the breadbox-sized holes in the roof, and see, inexplicably and eerily, electric lights on in what looks like the dining room, on the floor below. It is the house the fierce old lady lives in whom no one can meet and who will never move out or sell. It is the house the interior of which everyone tries to imagine.

The photos show the interior of the Faxas house as we imagined it: grandiose, warped, and surreal to the point of wooziness.

NATALIA BOLIVAR'S FAVORITE CAT
has disappeared. She searches the neighborhood, she goes door-to-door, she goes to her local CDR. Finally it is discovered: some neighbors ate her cat.

Natalia goes to the apartment of the cat eaters. The wife opens the door. Natalia spits in her face. “May your husband die in the same way my cat died!”

FIDEL TALKS FROM
nine-thirty until well past midnight, sitting at a table with two journalists who never speak. One of the journalists is paralyzed from the waist down.

THE VETERINARY SURGEON
calls me. “There was only one ovary when we went in and it was infected. The doctor who operated on her the first time removed only one.”

“But they weren't supposed to remove
any
ovaries, just the womb . . .”

“Well, they removed one ovary while they were at it. It was a good thing we operated and found the infection.”

Miguel brings Embargo home with antibiotics for her infection. We put her in the guest room, where Bloqueo is already confined, recovering from his castration. We have tied up the curtains, put a rubber sheet on the bed, and put down a pan filled with sand, which we collect every week from a spot in front of the former (i.e., before the
triunfo)
Havana Yacht Club.

THE HUSBAND OF THE
couple who ate Natalia Bolivar's cat has a heart attack and is rushed to the hospital.

The wife goes to Natalia, crying. “You must remove the curse you put on my husband! I beg you! For the love of God!”

Natalia remains firm. “I will
not
remove the curse.”

TWO AMERICAN WOMEN
traveling through Cuba come to see us. One is photographing architecture. She was told that in order to see Eusebio Leal she had to make an appointment a month in advance, so she gave up. She met him by chance, though, as she was walking around Old Havana with a Cuban architect. The Cuban architect introduced her to Eusebio Leal, and Eusebio Leal, for some reason, evidently mistook her for some kind of big shot, because he took time with her.

He talked mostly about his clothes. “I'm a simple man!” he said. “My mother still washes my clothes! Look at these old clothes!” He pulled on the front of his
guayabera
. “I wear them because I go every day to the work sites!”

Leal seems more bothered, we agree, by the “efficient capitalist” part of Goldberger's article than by the “Havanaland” part.

We visit Papelería Cubana. It is a paper mill on the Almendares River, not far from Centro Habana. It has been in continuous operation since 1837.

We meet the vice-director, a stocky blue-eyed
blanco
who has spent many years in the Soviet Union. We sit around a conference table made of pale wood-patterned Formica curling at the edges underneath an intermittent fluorescent light.

The director explains that other, more modern factories built in the interior of the country are now standing idle. They used too much electricity and required too many spare parts. Papelería Cubana uses American machines from 1914 and makes the simplest kinds of gray and brown paper—the thick gray paper for making cartons used to package prepared food in the
agropecuarios
, the thinner brown paper used for wrapping surgical instruments after they have been sterilized, and toilet paper.

I ask if the toilet paper is gray with speckles in it and if it is sold now at the Diplomercado. He says that it is.

This is an unexpected boon, for every time I am in that part of my sizable bathroom I find myself trying to imagine the factory that produced such toilet paper. It's because of the speckles, each one a different consistency (some are stiff, like wood chips, some flexible, some crinkly), composing endless constellations for my contemplation: giraffes, cars, a school desk, Independence Hall in Philadelphia, Munch's
The Scream
.

Nick says the word
stimulus
.

“My major concern,” the director says, “is making sure that the workers and their families have enough to eat.”

I look at him. The director of Papelería Cubana is the first official person in any kind of managerial position whom I have met in Cuba (though Nick says he has met some) who has not, upon hearing the words
motivation
or
stimulus
, first lectured me about how in Cuba there is free education, health care, practically free housing, and so on, as if this were news.

The director describes the different ways he has devised to provide the workers with a supplement to their salaries of two hundred pesos per month (a little less than ten dollars). He describes how the workers profit from increased production.

We visit the factory. The paper-pressing machine, made of cast iron by the Beloit Iron Works of Beloit, Wisconsin, is a single machine, twenty-five-feet high by seventy-five-feet long. It's a cross between a pasta roller and a locomotive, and it is studded with
Modern Timesian
cogwheels, valves, gauges, and hissing pistons.

We start with the finished product, dry paper on rolls, and move backward. The machine, though colossal, is still dwarfed by the room in which it sits. Other machines, we are told, making other kinds of paper, were dismantled years ago and moved out. We end at the beginning: at the depository of used paper, and the vats in which the used paper is mashed and stirred with water and chemicals to make pulp. The factory uses only used paper. We see bales of Mexican telephone books. The director points to another bale, which he says is from Cuba. Nick pulls a crumpled volume out of it. It is a Marxism-Leninism textbook.