Cuba and the Night (16 page)

“How you like our country? It’s great, isn’t it? Greatest country in the world.”

“I think so. But not everyone in Cuba seems to think so.”

“What do they know? They haven’t seen the world. I tell them, ‘You go to Africa, you come back a patriot.’ ”

“Sure. I can see that.” He smelled of aftershave, and gave off the kind of sheen you didn’t usually see around here. “You picked up a lot over there.”

“Sure. I learned English. I got records, stereo system, everything.”

“And the war?”

“It’s nothing. It’s something we’ve got to do, right? Help our friends in need. Like the
yanquis
in Grenada. Like the Russians in
Afghanistan. Before, we had help from the Germans in our Revolution. Now it is our turn to help others.”

“You think you are helping the Angolans? I was down in Kinshasa one time …”

“Sure. We’re helping the world. Teaching them things. Showing them they can make it. A small country does not have to be a weak country. The
yanquis
don’t understand this. They just say, ‘Communist menace,’ ‘Red under the bed,’ all that shit. They have these guys—like Springsteen—say, ‘Born in the U.S.A.’ Just imperialist propaganda.”

“You think Springsteen’s an imperialist?”

“Of course. Why does he sing that song?”

The Dane was studiously reading liner notes, Walter was sitting on his hands against the wall. I knew this was a conversation that was going to get a lot worse before it got better. “Look, I’ve got to cruise now. It’s been great meeting you.”

“Sure,” said the kid. “Great to meet you.” He had no rancor: I half expected him to ask me if I could get Springsteen’s autograph for him.

“I’ll show you the way,” said Walter. We walked along a deserted street that looked like some set from a Capra movie, so quiet and suburban, a leafy calm from another time, and then a guy suddenly came at us from the shadows.

“Your papers?” he said to us in English.

Walter got out his
carnet;
I decided my passport would be better than the press card.

“Italian, huh?” he said. “Maybe I talk to you.” And he turned to Walter. The kid looked up at him politely, and motioned me with his hand to take myself off to the bus.

I left him there, then, paying the price of a dialogue in English.

T
he next afternoon, after I’d mopped up some of the side streets, I went to pay my dues with the Interests Section, listening to some guy who’d been in Moscow, Prague, all the places guaranteed to make you a Revolutionary, tell me how
he’d wept when he’d seen Fidel take the country on TV, how the guerrillas had been his heroes as a kid, but “now, it’s like being betrayed by the only woman you love.” Standard State Department stuff: we hate to do this, and we respect and honor our enemy’s interests, but …

As I walked down Concordia, toward Lourdes, I heard the tinkling of a piano from a broken house; saw a bust of Martí, on the left, through falling buildings; caught flashes of a pure blue sea. As usual, there was everywhere the smell of rotting food, as much a part of Centro as the stink of spilled strawberry ice cream was the perfume of Coppelia.

Her mother was there when I arrived, sitting drably at the table, waiting for something, anything—some gossip, a new saucepan, a letter from her son in New Jersey. Around her there was a whole chattering circle of girls, like tropical birds in the treetops: Caridad, in her tight turquoise top, thick, as usual, with circles of perspiration; Lula’s cousin Marielita, dressed for a party in a sheer, braless halter, her huge brown eyes ringed in black; and Lula, in some sleeveless white thing, her gold cross delicate against olive skin. A few other girls too, whom I didn’t know, called Concepción and Aurelia and América. And there, in the middle of them all, Hugo, looking kind of embarrassed, in one of those green army-issue British sweaters, grinning at everything they said and looking a little nervous, sweating furiously around the temples and tapping his fingers on his legs.

“Hello,” he said. “Didn’t expect to see you here.”

“Nor I you. Are you gathering intelligence?”

“In a manner of speaking,” he said. “Researching the potency of beer.” I tried to size up how they were pairing off.

“So, Richard,” said the mother. “Where do you go?”

“New York.”

“New York.” She looked appreciative. “So you know Ramón Fonseca?”

“Don’t think so.”

She looked surprised. “New York is a big town?”

“Like Havana.”

“Bigger, actually,” said Hugo. “As big as all Cuba, in fact, in terms of population.”

She ignored him. “But here in Havana, I know everyone. You’re sure you’ve never met him?”

“Sure.”

“You go back when?”

“Two days from now.”

Slowly, she got up and trudged off to her room. While she did, another girl sauntered in, and there was kissing all around.
“Me voy,”
said Marielita, and she stayed where she was. The new girl gave her news, and the other girls hissed and chattered, and Hugo gave an embarrassed grin, and Marielita said,
“Vamos,”
and went to the fridge to get some water.

The mother came back, and gave me a folded letter, addressed to someone in St. Pete.

“You can take this for me?”

“No problem.” I knew that that was the deal here: they were your eyes and ears in Cuba, you were their link to the world. A cameraman and a carrier pigeon. When I got back to the hotel, I’d check the letter out. After what had happened before, I figured that Cubans with letters were like Palestinians with bombs—willing to plant them even on their pregnant girlfriends.

Lula and Cari went into their bedroom, and the rest of us sat and talked, but no one had anything to say.
“Me voy,”
said Marielita, and she showed no sign of moving.

“Richard, can you tell me one thing?” someone asked. “Why does my father never write? When he went to Mariel, I was a child. I talked to him for an hour by the boat. He told me that he loved me, that he would never forget me, he told me that he’d send me money and a ticket to join him.” Her eyes were almost watering. “Every month I send him a letter. I am always waiting for him. Why does he never write?”

“My
abuela
the same,” said América.

“Many times, the letters never arrive,” I said, though that sounded hollow even to me. “Many times, the government takes them.”

“What government?”

“Yours, mine; it makes no difference.”

“Me voy al Malecón,”
said Marielita, and she disappeared into the bathroom. We heard her relieving herself—nothing was private here—and when she came out, she’d changed out of her Flintstones T-shirt into a kind of loose white vest, and her tiny denim shorts were a ball in her hand, leaving her with nothing below the waist but some flimsy white underthing and the outline of her pants.
“Me voy,”
she said, and Lourdes’s mother sighed as if another body was being lost to the Revolution.

“Rather a
Delenda est Carthago
scene, don’t you think?” said Hugo, and the girls, following nothing, looked at him in wonder.

“Sure,” I said, and there was silence again. A little later, Lula and Cari came out, ready to party, in happy colors, with skimpy T-shirts down to their brown thighs, and some lipstick they’d cadged from a neighbor who’d married a Mexican.

“Vamos,”
said Lourdes, and I got up, looking to see what Hugo would do.

“Richard,” she said, “before we go, you can show my mamá your American Express?”

The whole group leaned in even closer, around the table, as I pulled out my credit card.

“And how much you can buy with this?”

“Anything. I can buy a TV. A CD player. A plane ticket. But it’s dangerous. You have to pay it all back next month.”

They looked at it in silence, and relayed questions to Lourdes. “And when does it stop? When you die?”

“More or less.”

They handed it around, and pronounced my name on it, and tried not to smudge it with their fingers, and Lourdes explained how it was run through a machine that read the code.

“You have others? Visa, MasterCard?”

“Sure,” I said, trying to show her this wasn’t my favorite line of questioning.

“Then show Mamá. Show them all.” I shook out the whole batch, including my frequent flier cards, and my library card, and a few strangers’ business cards I kept handy for giving out at roadblocks.

There was silence at first, then excited conversation.

“And you have cards you can put in a machine and get money?” “Yes.” “In any place?” “Anyplace in the U.S., sure.” “And you have computer cards for the rooms in hotels?” “Sometimes.” “Here in Cuba we do not even have keys.”

“I think we should be going now, don’t you?” I said to Hugo.

“Actually, I think I’ll stay here for a while,” he said.

“Okay. I’ll catch you later.”

“Goodbye, Richard,” said the mother, coming up to me as I rose. “Take good care of Lula. Be good to her.” She stood still for a moment, her hand resting on my shoulder. “She is a good girl. Take care of her.” I didn’t know whether it was a blessing or a warning.

T
hat night, like most nights, we got no farther than the stoop. The taxis weren’t running, and the bars downtown were shuttered, and the girls didn’t want to walk. So Lula just went into some neighbor’s house, and came back with a bottle of rum, and Cari went off in search of a party somewhere, and then the two of us were sitting against the wooden door, and I was letting her tell me about the glories of America.

“Look,” she said, taking a long swig from the bottle. “In America, you can have everything you want. Everything. You want a car, a video, a washing machine, you can have it.”

I’d heard this conversation before, and more than once. “And you don’t work, you get nothing.”

“Yes. But you have choices. Look at my brother. In Cuba, he got nothing. Intelligent. Handsome. Hardworking. But he can do nothing here. Only the same as a deaf old man. So he goes to America in March, and already he is making business. In New York; New York, New Jersey. You know this place?”

It was easier to say I did.

“And he has color TV. Swimming pool. Lincoln Continental. He is like a Party official there.”

“But I’ll bet he misses Cuba.”

“Of course he says he misses Cuba. But he never comes here. Who misses poverty?”

Some boys ambled down the street and stopped to ask the time, and one of them, noting I had a watch, asked me why Michael Jackson had a white face. Then they borrowed the bottle from Lula, took a swig each, and went on their merry way.

“You see, Richard? You see what the young people in Cuba do? Nothing. They can talk or they can drink. They can sleep or they can make love. That’s it. In your country, you can do anything at night.”

“Like sleep.”

“But you have freedom.”

“Sure. Freedom to suffer, to sit out all night, to do drugs or psychotherapy. I know it’s no party here, Lourdes. I know you can’t live. But it’s not so great in other places too. You saw my pictures.”

“That is your job. You make money out of misery. You need to find suffering. That is your mission too, I think. If you are in New York, you look only for photos of people starving in the streets, dirty people, dying people. Of course the world looks terrible to you.”

“That means it is terrible. I don’t make the news; I just record it.”

“But what I would record is different. What you see is not the truth; it is Richard’s truth.”

“Maybe.”

“And I have different eyes.”

I
could see this was going nowhere, so I walked her across to the seawall, our home away from home. I was getting impatient now—I’d drunk too much—and she was getting antsy too.

“Lourdes,” I said. “We can’t keep doing it like this. Always meeting in the alleyways, always making love in silence, always keeping everything a secret. It isn’t real.”

“Then you have two choices. You can marry me, or you can take me to Varadero.”

“What’s so special about Varadero? How’s it going to make anything different between us?”

“Varadero is not Cuba. I can be there with you. For that time
only, I am not a Cuban. We can kiss, we can talk, we can make love there; we are not from different countries there. Here, if they find you making love to me, they put me in prison, like a
puta
. You understand? When you showed me the pictures, you told me how families and villages in every country are proud of their daughters, whatever they do. But here, where is there room for pride? Only if you escape.”

“And you want the freedom to find out that the places you dream of are not like your dreams?”

“Claro
. I want only this freedom. If I do not have that, I am always thinking of Florida or Bolivia or Barcelona.”

We fell silent then, and I looked out at the sea. Sometimes the place was so beautiful it made you want to cry almost. It was like seeing some young, lovely woman on the arm of a short, sleazy general. The soft breeze off the sea; the intermittent lights of cars, winking along the Malecón; the Nacional above us, like a giant beached galleon: it was like a romantic’s Eden. And here I was with the brightest Eve in Havana, and she was asking me to rescue her from Paradise.

Then she was touching me on the leg, and her eyes were blazing as she talked. “Do you know what it is like, Richard, to live in a shadow? Everywhere I walk, there is the shadow of
El Líder
. He is everywhere I turn. His face is in the next room, and his eyes are watching through the window, and his voice is on the television in the neighbor’s house, and his words are on the radio, and in
Granma
. He is everywhere: there is no room left for me. Except in the shadows.

“You come here, and for you everything is beautiful: the blue skies and the quiet beaches and the colored houses and the pretty girls. But the ocean is closed to us. The beaches are for tourists only. Even the skies are forbidden. I cannot get on a plane and visit you. I cannot do anything unless I am with a foreigner. I cannot buy a sandwich, I cannot help my mother, I cannot give my friend a birthday present, unless I am with a foreigner.”