Avoiding Prison & Other Noble Vacation Goals (9 page)

BOOK: Avoiding Prison & Other Noble Vacation Goals
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But Cuba didn't have friendly bordering countries such as Jordan. Cuba's nearest neighbor was well, us, and we weren't considered exactly friendly.

The State Department's official policy has been that the embargo we have against Cuba is economic. Therefore, it wasn't illegal to visit the island—it was just illegal to spend money there. This didn't make a great deal of sense to me, but the man who continually supported this paradoxical legislation was the same man who had gotten himself mixed up in a lawsuit, in which he went to great lengths to explain that although a White House intern had provided him with a few oral favors, this, however, did not constitute a sexual relationship—which sort of put the whole Cuba logic into clear perspective.

However, it was common knowledge that Cubans welcomed American tourists to the country. All I had to do was jet down to Mexico and pick one of several flights headed to Havana each day.

There are a few tricks for getting into Cuba that any American visiting the country illegally should know. The first challenge is successfully passing the luggage inspection. Now every country has those questions on their customs forms that everyone giggles about, no one takes seriously, and to which you dutifully check off “no” on the cards they hand out on airplanes. Those are the questions about whether you're bringing in livestock, carrying arms, smuggling narcotics, and so forth. Of course there are the trickier decisions such as deciding whether to declare your liquor when you have exceeded the allowance by say, a dozen or so bottles, but in general the questions are pretty straightforward (except on my recent trip when I'd been handed the card printed in Arabic).

Unfortunately, customs officials in Cuba take their jobs a little more seriously than those of other nations where a sense of humor is still legal. I had placed a neat little row of X's down the “no” line of the customs form (after all, I had come to Cuba to buy contraband merchandise; I wasn't bringing any in), so I was a little surprised when the guard standing watch over the X-ray machine spotted something suspicious looking on the monitor as my bags made their way through the conveyor belt.

“You may enter Cuba,” he said pulling the offending item out of my luggage, “but not with this.”

It was an apple. A nice big red juicy apple. The officers would let a capitalist-bred American illegally into a communist country but not if she wanted to bring in things like produce. So that was my choice: some of the world's best rum, cigars, and salsa music or onefifth of the recommended daily allowance of fiber.

“No problem,” I said to the guard, adding my apple to the trash can overflowing with illicit peaches, grapes, and bananas.

“No agricultural products,” he explained apologetically.

“I thought you were talking about things like sheep.”

Then it was onto immigration, which was a simple enough process. While all the Dutch, German, and French tourists added a Cuba stamp to the back pages of their passports, I had the guard kindly place the stamp on my visa, a little white card stapled to my passport that had been issued to me by my Guadalajaran travel agent.

And that was it. I uttered an enthusiastic “
Gracias
” and officially entered Cuba.

Umberto was a thirty-something businessman from Mexico City, and when I learned that this was his twelfth visit to Havana, I figured it wouldn't be a bad idea to tag along with him. Of course, it actually was a bad idea, a real doosey of a bad idea, but hindsight always comes into focus after the fact.

Meeting him had been a strange coincidence. We had casually struck up a conversation at the Guadalajara airport where we discovered that we were both departing on the same flight to Mexico City. Then we found out we were sharing the same plane to Cuba and that we even had reservations at the same hotel in Havana.

It turned out that we had a lot in common: I was going to Cuba because I had nothing better to do; he was going to Cuba because he was divorcing his wife and had no one better to do. But he wasn't into
gringas,
he informed me on the taxi ride to our hotel. Or smart women, he added, rolling his eyes at what I assumed was my intellect.

Luckily, I had ruled him out as a potential romantic partner already. It had happened sometime after we had met and sometime before he began yelling “Death to all Americans!” out the window of the cab. One minute we were driving along discussing Cuban food and beaches and the next minute, he was shouting with his fist in the air, “
Yanquis
go home!”

Needless to say, his outburst had come as a bit of a surprise. Luckily, he noticed my startled expression and quickly explained himself. “Don't worry, I don't think that way at all. I was just reading that sign over there.” I looked over and caught a glimpse of the writing on the wall: a spray-painted anti-American slogan.

“I'm Mexican,” he continued. “And we like Americans. It's just the Cubans who are against you. It was just a sign. There, you feel better now?”

“Umberto, what country did we just leave?”

“Mexico.”

“And what country are we in now?”

“Cuba.”

“Do you really think I feel better now?”

At that moment, I suspected that hanging out with Umberto was going to be one irritating incident after another. Sure enough, by that evening, this premonition had been confirmed: It was annoying talking to him, it was annoying being with him, and it was annoying having to hang out with so many hookers.

Umberto had insisted on an authentic Italian meal. And my first night in Havana, there definitely was a pizza on the table, but with all the prostitutes in front of me competing for a place on Umberto's lap, it was hard to concentrate on picking off my anchovies.

Umberto grinned over at me, happy as a boy in a Nintendo factory.

“Which one do you think?” he whispered over at me as a peroxide blonde in a tight orange dress ruffled his hair.

“So many to choose from—difficult, isn't it?”

“Yes. I'm so glad you understand. A Latin woman would never understand. Take my wife, for instance. She would never be sitting where you're sitting now.”

“I imagine she wouldn't.”

“Are you having a good time? I want you to be having a good time, you know.”

“Umberto, if it makes you feel better, I'll tell you that I've never had more fun surrounded by prostitutes and anchovies than I'm having right now.”

By the time I had gotten rid of all
my
unwanted toppings, Umberto had whittled the women on his lap down to just one. One was fine. I could deal with one. I just didn't want to have to deal with her alone.

“Be right back. Have to go to the bathroom. You girls sit and chat.”

So there I was: eating pizza in an Italian restaurant trying to find something in common with a fifteen-year-old prostitute from Havana. But it turned out she liked anchovies so she filled the remaining time (and her mouth) by plopping one hairy fish after another in between her well-defined lips.

Prostitution is a sad and inevitable fact of living in Cuba. A woman can make more in a single night using her body than a Cuban doctor can make in a whole year, which means that many women simply can't afford
not
to do it. Or as Umberto pointed out with a roll of his eyes, “I've managed to find the only two women in Havana who won't sleep with me for money. And one of them is an American.”

The other one was Mayra, a lovely, pale twenty-eight-year-old Cuban physician we had befriended while strolling through the streets of Havana on our second day in the country. She represented yet another of Umberto's failed pickups. This was a peculiar habit of my Mexican acquaintance: Instead of discarding women when they refused his advances, Umberto simply accepted the rejection and had them tag along and join us as platonic companions. But that's not to say he was happy about it.

“How come all I ever meet are intelligent women?” he growled that evening over drinks at a posh hotel bar when Mayra and I attempted to include him in our conversation on U.S.-Cuban relations.

Even the previous night had ended without success by Umberto's standards. Every woman in the pizza place had either been too tall or too young or too lacking in passion. So he'd sent them away one by one, cursing his luck and consoling himself by glaring at me and adding, “Don't look so smug. You're not getting any either.”

Perhaps I can forgive my Spanish dictionary for failing to include the words “vagina” and “penis”; however, neglecting to insert a translation for “hangover” seems to me a great omission in a book that boasts over seventy-thousand entries. Nor is there a listing for the phrase “to have sex.” To the dictionary's credit, it does include “to make love to,” which is translated as
“tener afición a,”
but somehow telling a red-blooded Cuban that I want to have an affection (or was it an infection?) for him didn't seem like it was going to get me very far.

Luckily, getting laid in Cuba is easy, a lot easier than making tacos. (On one of my ventures out of my hotel room in Guadalajara, I had walked past a restaurant with a sign in the window that said: “Taco maker wanted. Experience necessary.”) And finding a bed buddy is especially easy if you are either a man with lots of money (I hear it helps if you're not named Umberto) or a woman with two arms, two legs, and a head.

Considering that I possessed all the essential limbs and (in spite of his unfortunate name) Umberto was well endowed in the wallet department, he and I left the hotel bar with Mayra and headed out to explore Cuban nightlife.

In a packed club blaring salsa music, I realized that the moment had finally come—I was actually going to get my hands on some real Cuban rum. However, I had not planned on the political dilemma I would face at the bar. What I wanted was a rum and Coke, called a Cuba Libre in most of Latin America, but as I thought it over, I wondered whether this name (“free Cuba”) was in fact the rest of the world's ironic jab at the communist nation where I currently found myself. I remembered that one Latino acquaintance of mine laughed every time he heard someone order that drink. “Well, in Honduras,” he claimed, “we call it a Cuba Oppressed.”

Not wanting to create any problems for myself, I asked for a “rum and some Coke,” which reminded me of the days of alcoholic ignorance years ago when not knowing what the different cocktails were called, I used to order all of my drinks by their ingredients instead of their names. Instead of a Bay Breeze, I'd ask for vodka and cranberry; in place of a Greyhound, I'd ask for vodka and grapefruit juice; instead of a gin and tonic, I'd order—well, that one hadn't changed any.

Halfway through my first drink, a thin Cuban man suddenly appeared at my side and asked me with a timid smile if I would like to dance. I gave Umberto a rather large, victorious smirk.

“I'm sorry, were you two together?” the man asked, watching Umberto glare at me. “Do you mind?”

“You don't have to ask me,
compañero,
” Umberto answered. “You just might have to ask your government.” Then he added in a loud whisper, “Death to all Americans!
Yanquis
go home!”

I ignored him and walked onto the dance floor, overwhelmed by the bigger problem in front of me, namely my feet. Salsa is very difficult to master, but when done well it is a mesmerizingly sensual dance. When done poorly it looks—okay, so it looks the way I did it.

As we found an open space among the crowd, I struggled to follow my dance partner's lead. For me it was still a challenge to combine the essential hip movement with the simple forward-back step. As if to highlight the contrast between his abilities and my own, in between spins, to my great humiliation, my partner would do back flips across the dance floor as people stood back and applauded. Fortunately, within less than an hour, I became a little too drunk to care.

Alcohol, the friend of inhibited dancers everywhere, had come to my aid just in time. The man I was with (I had learned that his name was Alberto) had snuck a bottle of rum into the club so every few songs, we'd creep off to a dark corner and take several swigs, which was having a beneficial effect. My ability to gyrate my hips was consistently increasing while his ability to do acrobatics was rapidly decreasing so in just a short while, our dancing talents were beginning to even out.

During our dance breaks, I had managed to learn a few details about him. He was twenty-seven, had just graduated from college as a civil engineer, and while he looked for a job (how one went about this in a communist country was a concept I didn't completely grasp), he worked as a supervisor on the bus lines.

He was a few inches taller than me with nice features, a bit on the skinny side but otherwise attractive. He looked like a regular guy—he had short hair and wore a T-shirt and jeans. Like many Cubans, he was light-skinned with green eyes. But it wasn't his appearance that drew me to him; there was something erotic about him—not in that overboard, sleazy, male swagger kind of way— rather, he wasn't aware of his power, which made it all the more effective.

During a slow dance, standing provocatively close to each other, it occurred to me that there was an advantage to travel that I hadn't considered before—the possibility of a vacation fling with no strings attached. Travel would allow me to savor the heart-pounding adrenaline rush of a new romance without having to stick around for the hard part, the predictable part, the “we have to talk” part. Besides, most of the men I had met in my life had proven themselves so good at refusing to commit. I figured that any woman capable of it was just helping to even the score.

Consider this a public service announcement broadcast in the interest of American women everywhere, but there is a Latin lover myth that I think needs to be cleared up before I go any further. In an extensive study I would conduct much too late to do myself any good, I now present my findings in the hopes of benefiting others.

BOOK: Avoiding Prison & Other Noble Vacation Goals
7.55Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
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