Cuba Diaries (47 page)

Aurora gets in the car and directs Nick, who is driving, to the house of Usnavy (a Cuban first name, invented at the time of the Spanish-American War, from
U.S. Navy)
, her friend who can guide us to
her
friend who has the Chinese furniture—“
precioso
”—and to another friend who can take us to the
manteles
and the
maniquí
.

We drive past a building with a guard holding a machine gun in front of it.

“What's in there?”

“
Blumes
” (“Underpants”).

“
Cómo?!
”

“It's an underpants factory. They've had a lot of problems with people breaking in and stealing underpants.”

We are silent for a moment. “Not having underpants can really put you in a bad mood,” I say.

“
Muy mal humor
,” Aurora agrees. Then to Nick, “You see how your
señora
is? She understands us.”

We drive along a ridge under ancient ficus trees to a “suburb” of Guanabacoa: low, flat-roofed houses with carports, looking like Miami. At the door is a living,
mulata
version of the late, great actor Divine, in curlers, pancake makeup, and etched eyebrows. She greets Aurora triumphantly. “I did it!” Usnavy yells.

Aurora yells, hugs her.

Usnavy has managed to get a
certificado médico
so that she can retire a year earlier. “
Fueron los nervios
” (“It was my nerves”). In teaching, women can retire at fifty, and men at fifty-five. She has been teaching for thirty-seven years, she says. She was fed up.

I don't know if I am understanding everything correctly, but I don't dare ask if it means that, if Usnavy is forty-nine, she has been teaching since she was twelve.

Usnavy says it hasn't been possible to abduct the
maniquí
from the factory where it has been sitting unused for years, because King Kong was in Guanabacoa today, inspecting state enterprises.

Lazo, aka King Kong, is the Communist Party head in Santiago. He is one of the few
negros
of any shade in the Communist Party leadership. He is very big, very black, with a low forehead, so everyone—black, white,
mulato
, Communist, non-Communist—calls him King Kong.

We enter Usnavy's living room. Danish modern furniture covered in new-looking spring green Naugahyde. We drink more
cafecitos
and chat with Usnavy about her retirement. Usnavy gets up to guide us to her friend with the Chinese furniture.

As we are walking down the sidewalk to the car, Aurora pats Usnavy, who is ahead of us, on the behind. “Will you look at that
culito
(little ass),” Aurora says, looking back at us, grinning, framing Usnavy's behind with her hands as if it were a work of art.

Usnavy's behind is the width of a Volkswagen, high, and utterly unself-conscious, clad in pink, green, and yellow floral stretch bike pants, which she has either made or miraculously managed to find big enough. “I had problems today on the
guagua
(bus) with this
culito
,” Usnavy says, laughing. “You should have heard the comments! Ooof!”

Usnavy and Aurora laugh, we laugh, and maybe it's the night air coming on, but suddenly I don't feel like a breaded cutlet anymore, but light and fresh, as if I have just taken a shower. And I feel as if we will leave—but leave or not leave (we are laughing harder now), what does it matter? For we are, all of us on this planet, just visiting anyway.

Another weekend gotten through. The heat and boredom of the weekend as we approach it is slightly terrifying, but it goes well enough: a Polar Bar; a visit from a friend of a friend of a friend, a lone man whose evasive answers to our simple questions lead us to conclude that he is a sexual tourist; two children's birthday parties to go to; and a concert by the Camerata Romeu at the convent of San Francisco.

Nick comes to get me during intermission. He wants me to speak to an American who has approached him. The American is an older man with a cane. He is a member of an association of amateur chamber-music groups. He
is against the embargo. He says it fiercely to me, as if I am
for
the embargo. He gives me his card. He is a retired judge from Los Angeles. I ask him what group he has come with. He shrugs, as if that is something unimportant. He says his association has chapters all over the world, but not in Cuba. He says he would like the Camerata Romeu to come to the United States. I agree they would be a big hit in the United States. I tell him who to get in touch with at the Interests Section to arrange for their visit. He says, “Interests Section, bah . . .” I say that's who you have to go through to get Cuban artists to the United States, and that they are really quite helpful these days. I introduce him to the manager of the Camerata Romeu. He asks if her group has ever been to the United States. She says they have been many times and have just come back from a trip to Los Angeles.

The judge steps back as if he has been slapped at the words
Los Angeles
and looks confounded. “I don't understand why I didn't know about it—I just don't understand why I didn't know about it,” he says as he walks off with his cane.

We are introduced by Reny to a black diva in a white dress with a cascade of hair, gold fingernails, and gold shoes. She is a soprano, born and raised in Cuba, who now lives in Europe. She is the first diva I have ever stood close to. She has a tall black girl with her. It is her niece. The niece is a regular Cuban girl, Centro Habana, deer-in-the-headlights style. I ask the diva if she misses Cuba, and the diva says she lives in Munich now, but lived in Paris for fourteen years.

On the way home, with Fritz in the back seat, Nick says he
can't understand
why I didn't invite the diva for dinner, she was so captivating, and I say that I thought she was so compelling that I wanted to walk right into her, my eyes staring, like someone out of
Village of the Damned
, but we are leaving soon, I don't trust my instincts anymore, and every time I spread myself thin, he (Nick) accuses me of being like my mother or like some other ADD-ridden member of my family, spreading myself all over the place.

Fritz, from the backseat, says, “Invite her and invite me.”

That night in bed it comes to me: she is
the
diva, of the French film
Diva
. She is the black goddess-singer the French boy is obsessed with. Our diva lived in Paris for fourteen years.

“MY WIFE FELL DOWN
and broke her leg again yesterday,” Miguel says. “They will have to operate on her.”

She has fallen and broken her leg in the place where the screw of the plate had gone through, where there was a little hole that, they find out now, never healed.

FRITZ HAS LOOKED IT
up on the Internet. Our diva is not the diva of
Diva
, but we don't care.

Juana's letter of invitation and application for an exit permit were passed to the Ministry of Education, which had no objection to her leaving. The papers were then passed on to the Emigration Department. Now Juana tells me she has just received “the white ticket”—a white postcard sent to those who have passed the Ministry of Education and Emigration Department hurdles—informing her that she can now go to pick up her exit permit. Her visas for the United States and for X—— are already ready.

The tickets are the final hurdle. We cannot buy a one-way ticket for Juana to Miami, even though she will not be returning to Cuba through Miami, but through X—— and Madrid. No Cuban can buy a one-way ticket from Havana to Miami without also buying a nonrefundable return ticket from Miami to Havana, no matter how the Cuban plans to get back to Cuba. In addition, there are no direct charter flights available the day we want to leave Havana: we will have to fly through Cancún. We cannot buy the Cancún-Miami portion of our tickets in Havana, nor can we buy Juana's U.S.-X—— ticket in Havana; they have to be bought in the United States and mailed to us via DHL courier service. Only when we have all the tickets that we have to get in the United States, as well as Juana's X——Madrid-Havana ticket, bought in Havana, Juana's nonrefundable return charter flight ticket from Miami to Havana, which she won't use, and a Mexican transit visa for Juana, required of all Cubans traveling through Mexico, are we allowed to buy Juana's ticket to Cancún.

Dinner with the diva, Fritz, Fritz's girlfriend, Belkis, and the Danish cultural attaché, Rolf. It seems to be a good combination, but I don't know how much we can talk about Cuba with the diva there. She is a German citizen, but her family still lives here, and Manuel, who has to make his report, is hovering
near us with a tray. It's also tiresome to always talk about how weird Cuba is, but it's what happens in living rooms in Havana whenever two or three foreigners are gathered together.

Rolf says the Cuban Revolution is good material for an opera.

Pushing myself forward on the sofa, I say that I think of Cuban history, beginning with the war of independence, as a compendium of operatic and dramatic styles.

Rolf and Fritz say yes, they can see that.

I say I can see it beginning as an American musical, incorporating great Cuban music: Don Barreto, Lecuona, Bola de Nieve, Beny Moré, Celia Cruz, the Trio Matamoros, and other earlier and later styles. There would be the explosion of the
Maine;
there would be Cuba's victory snatched by blithe, oblivious, singing, dancing American soldiers (martial American tunes contrasting with Cuban melodies). There would be a Spanish-pride number, a Cuban-pride number. It would continue in the American-musical mode, through a part showing U.S. economic domination of Cuba. Hershey's and United Fruit Company would be represented. More blithe, singing, dancing Americans. There would be a gambling number, a prostitution number. There would be a Batista number and a gangster number . . .

I steal a sideways glance at Nick to see if I am going on too long (he's heard it before from me, but less developed) or being a boor, but Nick looks OK about it, the others are being mildly polite about it, I've been waiting for the right people and time to try my idea out, and now that I am in it, I might as well get to the end. Then there would be the rise of Fidel and the revolution. The work would turn to something akin to classical opera: there would be a small opera buffa number on the Castro family home life in Birán and on Fidel's never winning a student election; there would be Moncada, Fidel's exile and return, and the assault on Batista's palace. Students tortured, dying. There would be Fidel's sweep across Cuba and his early speeches: “History Will Absolve Me” and “I Am Not a Communist, I Am a Humanist.” It would switch back to American-musical mode for the appearance of Herbert Matthews and Fidel's visits to Princeton and Harlem and later contain a reference to
Hair
during a Venceremos Brigades number. The diva laughs. The others chuckle. I feel less embarrassed about going on: it would continue in operatic mode through the disappearance of Camilo Cienfuegos, the executions at the
paredón
the mass exodus of middle-class Cubans, Che's disquiet in the USSR (Russian opera then), his speech in Algeria, the nationalizations, and Che's death (with another eruption of an American-musical number
during the Bay of Pigs). It would move to insertions of Kabuki, No, or Thai dancing (something like the insertion of the
Uncle Tom's Cabin
play in the musical
The King and I)
within the operatic mode with the sclerotization of the revolution, its dependence on the Soviet Union, and its internationalist campaigns, becoming thoroughly Kabuki, No, or Thai following the death of Celia Sánchez, Fidel's last true confidante. The end, beginning with the Ochoa trial, is Greek tragedy, with Fidel and Raúl in platform shoes and a cacophony of musical styles as the revolution sells out and the island is overrun by foreign corporations and mass tourism.

The thesis of the musical would be that Fidel is one of the greatest actors the world has ever known, only Fidel doesn't walk into a play: Fidel transforms history into a play, directed by and starring him. The public would enter with Fidel talking and go out with Fidel talking, and there would be a ten-cassette pack of Fidel talking that you wouldn't have to pay for—it would just be given to you, for you to take home. There would be many, many scene changes, or maybe there could be an
Orlando furioso
type of staging, with the public loose in a big tent and islands of characters on rolling platforms pulled through the crowd. There would be José Martí, de Céspedes, Maceo, Hearst, Spey, Cervera, Teddy Roosevelt, McKinley, Ángel Castro, Lina Ruz, Raúl's alleged father (the Chinese cook), Meyer Lansky, Lana Turner, George Raft, Fidel, Raúl, Herbert Matthews, Che, Camilo Cienfuegos, Huber Matos, Nikita Khrushchev, Kennedy, Piñeiro, Celia Sánchez, the Venceremos Brigades, Black Panther fugitives, a bodega, Lincoln Díaz-Balart, Jorge Mas Canosa, Ochoa, a neurologist in a white coat with a pointer and a chart of the brain, explaining the physiological origins of manic-depressive and obsessive-compulsive disorders, malignant narcissism and logorrhea, or maybe a different neurologist for each disorder, on platforms with slick swiveling casters, singly or in groups, entering, inveighing, exiting, being pulled by vigorous young people on a vast, smooth floor through dodging crowds. It would last seven or eight hours. You could go out and get something to eat—Cuban food served on stands outside—you could go home, even, if you liked, and come back the next day for what you missed. The ticket would be valid for three days.

Juana's transit visa is ready at the Mexican Embassy. All we need now are our tickets to arrive via DHL to get Juana's ticket out of here.

IT'S NOT THAT IT'S
so terrifying to be without a baby-sitter anymore. I can leave the children alone in a hotel room for a few minutes now, if I have to go to a pharmacy or buy a snack for them, with a
DO NOT DISTURB
sign on the door. I can make it from Florida to New York on my own with them (we're supposed to drive, visiting friends along the way). It's that I'm nervous about it working out with Juana's visas and tickets because I really
want
Juana to see the United States with us. I'm nervous because of all the days and weeks I've spent thinking and fantasizing about seeing Juana see the United States: about seeing her see the stuff-a-thon shopping centers and fat people and eight-lane highways and jumbo-sized Styrofoam cups in cup holders coming out from dashboards and her saying “
Mira eso!
” or “
Qué curioso!
” about everything. I am fantasizing about explaining the fat people to her. I am fantasizing about watching Juana bite into a Cape Cod potato chip for the first time, and a tender ear of corn in season, and a pecan, and a blueberry, and hear obscure blues on the radio, and about going off the main highways with her and seeing her see mile after mile of just fields or forests, and seeing her see ranch houses and trailers, but wooden houses, too, with sagging gingerbread porches, dozing at the bottoms of hollows, the picture of nonaggression, or maybe not. I'm nervous that the time I have spent and the time I am still spending fantasizing about her seeing the United States might be for nothing.