Cuba Diaries (9 page)

“When your husband told us you had gone off in the carriage,” the priest says, “I knew this would happen to you on the way back. I was watching you.”

“What should I have done?”

“You can't do anything,” the priest says.

“And do they really think tourists carry bars of soap around in their handbags?”

“This is the question all tourists ask me. They believe tourists have everything.”

By the time we are outside again with Nick, the group of women and children has disappeared. We walk in the shade close to the buildings, looking for a place to have lunch. We finally see a sign for a restaurant and enter a spacious colonial house, with two shaded courtyards, frescoed wainscots, tablecloths, flowers. There is, however, no one in the restaurant, and as we sit down, we see that the flowers are dusty plastic and the tablecloths look as if they haven't been changed for many weeks.

“What do you have for lunch?”

“Chicken, rice, and squash.”

We have eaten chicken, rice, and squash for three days. On the way here,
from the Ancón, we passed through lush scenery and saw pigs, sheep, goats, and cows. “Do you have anything besides chicken?”

“We have ham.”

“Is it fresh ham?”

“Yes.”

We sit at our table, thinking about how wonderful it will be to have fresh ham. Fifteen minutes pass. The children go for a walk with Muna. Twenty minutes pass. We play five games of hangman. It is too hot to try to find someplace else. Maybe the word we should have used was not the Spanish word for “fresh,” for ham is never fresh, but the word for “local,” made from local pigs in the local method, the whole haunch of the pig hung up to cure, in some local protected-by-UNESCO larder. Spain is Ham City, but now that we think about it, we haven't seen a proper ham since we've come to Cuba. Forty-five minutes. The children have dusted all the plastic flowers on all the tables with their napkins.

There is an outdoor oven in the courtyard, with steaming kettles on top of it. Cubans line up in front of it with plates. They are dished up rice, squash, and meat.

“What about us?” we ask the waitress.

“That's for the workers,” she explains.

After fifty-five minutes, we see a can of ham from Denmark going by our table.

“Is that the ham?” we ask.

“Yes.”

“You said it was fresh ham.”

“It's ham fresh out of the can.”

We are too hungry to try to look for another place.

After ten more minutes, the ham finally arrives at our table, with rice on the side.

“Mine has circles on it,” Thea says.

We look. Her slice has rings from the top of the can. I touch the ham. It is cold. The rice is cold, too. We turn our slices over. Someone else must have rings from the bottom of the can. “I win,” Nick says.

We don't ask for any dessert. The bill comes. It is fifty dollars.

EASTER SUNDAY THE NEXT DAY
. We visit the cathedral again. It is crowded to overflowing. There is more percussion in the music this time, and people are swaying more emphatically. Yesterday was a day of mourning,
after all. Once again, people crane forward to catch every word of the bishop's sermon.

We tour the Sierra del Escambray in the afternoon and return in time for an early dinner. I am now reading the guide
Lonely Planet Cuba
, which we have brought to Cuba with us but never read, thinking it was of little use, since it was published before the beginning of the
periodo especial
. It “recommends” a place to eat, or at least says it's not disgusting.

When we get to the restaurant, it is closed. A lone young man on the street explains to us that it closes every night at 6
P.M.

“How can they close a restaurant at 6
P.M.
?”

“It's for the busloads of tourists. They always go back to their hotels before nightfall. If you like, I know a place where you can eat very well.”

“You mean a
paladar?
”

“Yes.”

“Let's go,” I say to Nick.

“I don't know . . . ,” Nick says, but I am already following the young man. It feels OK to follow him; I don't know why. It feels OK to follow him even down the dark side street we have turned onto.

“We're going who knows where, with children . . . ,” Nick mumbles.

“Trust me.”

We knock at an unmarked door. A friendly-looking older man opens it. The young man speaks rapidly to him. He opens the door wider, to allow us in. We stand in an airy, high-ceilinged room that looks onto a courtyard.

He has pork, he says to us, and he has fish.

“Is the fish fresh?” we ask.

“Very fresh,” he says. “
Mira
.” He calls to someone in a room behind him to bring the fish to us. A young woman brings out a large red snapper. Nick inspects its clear eye and red gills.

We order fish, rice, beans, salad. He says it will take about half an hour to prepare. We can sit in his living room, he says, and watch some television while we wait.

We sit in commodious armchairs, watching television and drinking cold Cristal beers. Muna and the girls drink Tropicolas. A little girl is asleep on the floor in front of us, her cheek on the art nouveau tiles. It is the coolest place to be. Men, women, and children cross the room back and forth in front of us, stepping gingerly over the little girl and calling cheery greetings to us as they pass. Some of the women even stop to kiss us on both cheeks, stroke the childrens' chins, and say “
Qué lindos
” about them. The little girl is finally
picked up and moved to a sofa. Our guide sits with us in another armchair, drinking the Cristal we have offered him. He is studying English. Our host comes in and chats with us. He was an engineer, but he is doing this now to make ends meet.

We are relaxed for the first time since we have been in Trinidad.

The meal is ready in half an hour. We sit down at the family dining table. We offer dinner to our guide, but he declines the invitation. He says he will come back after our meal to show us back to our car.

It is one of the best meals we've had in Cuba outside of our own home.

The engineer sits at our table and explains. Before, private restaurants were entirely forbidden. People were arrested for running them. Since the legalization of the dollar,
paladares
are not exactly encouraged, because they compete with the tourist hotels, but they are not forbidden, either. The engineer raises a hand and tilts it one way, then the other. It's a gray area, he says, like a lot of things in Cuba at the moment. Better to be discreet, though.

The engineer presents us with a bill at the end of the meal. It is twenty dollars.

We thank the engineer and his family profusely as we leave. The engineer writes his name, address, and telephone number on a piece of paper. He asks us to please recommend his
paladar
to our friends.

The young man who led us to the
paladar
returns after our meal to lead us to our car. Nick gives him a five-dollar tip.

We drive to the Ancón aglow, feeling, like the children in
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe
, as if we have gone through a door that is sometimes there and sometimes not there, into a whole new place.

NICK HAS AN APPOINTMENT
in Cienfuegos on the way home. I tell Nick not to worry: Muna and the children and I will wander around and look for a place to have lunch.

Muna and the children and I end up on a kind of pedestrian mall. Many shops are closed and empty, or only a quarter full. The street and the shop windows are very dirty. We pass a bar with chairs on the sidewalk. The children are thirsty. We walk into the bar. People are sitting on stools all along the bar. A huge, horizontal Kenmore refrigerator, circa 1953, takes up most of the wall behind the bartender.

“What do you have to drink?” I ask.

“We have nothing to drink,” the bartender says.

I wonder if they are denying us because of the apartheid system under
which Cubans are served in one place and foreigners in another, and they don't know how else to tell us, but then I look at the people sitting all along the bar and realize they are sitting with nothing in front of them. It is true: they are drinking nothing.

“We will be getting something to drink in a few minutes. It hasn't been delivered yet.”

Muna and the children and I continue our walk. “I'm thirsty, Mommy,” the children say. I am beginning to get nervous. There is not a store, either, serving bottled water or any kind of drink. It is very hot. How do people stay on their feet with nothing to eat or drink?

We return to the bar and sit at one of the outdoor tables. There is nothing to drink, but it is shady at least. I leave Muna and the children and cruise the stores. I find some earrings and rings made out of cow horn. The earrings have been in the display case so long they have mold growing on them, which is an attractive burnished green. I will tell the friend I give the earrings to that she has the option of leaving the mold on or washing it off. I return to Muna and the children. There are some Germans at the next table. I assume drinks will never arrive, but to our surprise, four drinks that look like Coca-Cola appear in paper cups. We take sips. Whatever it is, it is disgustingly sweet, sweeter even than Tropicola. Even the children find it too sweet. The Germans have also been served. They make terrible faces as they taste the drinks, then put the cups back down without drinking any more. We all get up at the same time, leaving the full cups, with money beside them. The girl who is serving us acts surprised.

We meet Nick and start to look for a restaurant or a loitering young man to lead us to a
paladar
. It is one o'clock. The restaurants written about in
Lonely Planet Cuba
are all closed. No young men approach us. We find only one restaurant open. We go in. All the tables are full. We ask the waiter how long it will take before we are served. Half an hour, he says. We ask if there is anywhere we can wait. He leads us to an adjoining bar, which is dark and filthy. Earsplitting music is blaring from a radio. We back out of the bar, back into the restaurant. One man gets up from a table, his napkin tucked into his pants.

“Do you speak English?” he says.

“Yes,” we say.

“Just wait, you will be served.”

“But it is so unpleasant here. We will go.”

“Where are you from?” he says, slightly offended.

“X——. Where are you from?”

“Russia. This is the special period, you know . . . ,” he says, following us as we walk out the door.

We try the waterfront, near the tourist hotels. There is bound to be something there. One restaurant, Covadonga, made famous because Fidel ate shrimp there on his march to Havana, a jewel of Santa Monica–type 1950s restaurant architecture, has a door open. A man stands behind a dilapidated bar.

“Do you have any food?” I ask. The man looks at me as if it's the oddest question he's ever heard. He mumbles something about a building a few doors away.

“I'm hungry, Mommy. Hungry and thirsty,” the children are saying.

It is two-thirty. I approach the building a few doors away. There is no sign on the building, but I see tourists lining up outside it. We go in. There is a kind of buffet being served. Cold spaghetti and some meat beside it in a sauce. We line up behind the tourists. There is one plate left by the time we get to the buffet. “More plates should be coming in a few minutes,” a waitress says without conviction. We take the one remaining plate and load it with enough cold spaghetti and meat in sauce for the two children. There is no table to sit at, so we sit on a low wall on the porch outside. There are no knives or forks to be found, so we tell the children to eat the spaghetti and meat with their hands.

“I want to be in Miami,” Thea says.

JUST AS NICK, MUNA
, and I resign ourselves to driving back hungry to Havana, we pass, in a little village a few kilometers outside of Cienfuegos, a woman selling
yucas rellenas
(stuffed yuccas) for a few pesos from a cart at the side of the road. They are not bad at all. They are, in fact, delicious. There are more carts after her, selling
yucas rellenas, empanaditas
(meat- or cheese-filled turnovers),
pasteles de coco
(coconut pastries), fruit juice, and coffee.

It's an elusive door you have to find, to access motivated Cubans, edible food, and charm. Or maybe it's a squeeze through a crack, or a leap of faith, or a stroke of blind luck. It varies, at any rate, the access code, from town to town and from hour to hour.

We have made progress, but it is beautiful, our house, when we get back to it—our house with its polished, echoing halls, its ironed sheets, its Posture-pedic mattresses, its showers with now-robust pressure, its air-conditioned
bedrooms, satellite TV, and larder full of food, painstakingly accumulated. It was big before, our house, pleasant, but now it really is
beautiful
.

The children are so happy to be home that they play nicely together for two whole hours.

I am not the only American here who is not Robert Vesco, or a fugitive Black Panther, or a plane hijacker, or a Weatherman who held up a Brink's truck, or an American working at the Interests Section or the spouse of one. There is a Patsy, an American woman who is married to a Canadian who works for Labatt's beer. There is Carey, the American wife of the Italian ambassador. We are the three Americans who are here because of what our spouses do, and have two passports to smooth our passages.

Then there are other Americans, whose various situations I do not know all the details of. If they are over sixty, their weirdnesses are easier to figure out. There is Lionel, the left-wing journalist who has been here since the revolution. He is married to Mrs. Hunter, who is Canadian and runs the International School, and though he says, mistily, “There was so much fervor then . . . ,” maybe he is here now because of his wife's job. There's Lorna of Connecticut, the ex-wife of Piñeiro, the former head of intelligence during the revolution and for most of the years thereafter. Some say Piñeiro was responsible for the deaths of hundreds of people, some say thousands. Lorna has straight white-blond hair cut in a timeless bob, teaches dance at the International School, and trains a small dance troupe out of her house. Lorna is constantly on the lookout for oatmeal to make oatmeal cookies for her dance troupe, and travels often to Connecticut. She lives for dance, she says. There's Mrs. Retamar, whose mother was American, who is married to the head of the Casa de las Americas. Listening to Mrs. Retamar and her husband speak English is like listening to Victor Posner, the utterly un-foreign-accented Soviet journalist, when he used to be on TV: even though you knew it took all kinds, you still somehow couldn't believe that being an apologist for totalitarianism could go with knowing all those
synonyms
.