Cuba and the Night (21 page)

“What the hell are you doing here?”

“Oh, the usual. Baseball.
El equipo del sueño
. Pan Am warmup, Olympic preview.”

“Shit, no kidding? I’m here for the
Geographic
. Three months. With Miguel over here.” He pointed to a guy standing beside him in the lobby. “Miguel makes sure I see light from dark.”

“So how are you spending your time?”

“How do you think? Checking out my roots. Shooting dawn to dusk. Trying out a few friendship offensives. Hey, you want a drink?”

“What about Miguel?”

“Ah, Miguel’s happy as long as I’m not talking to Cubans. He loves everyone in the world except his fellow Cubans.”

“A true Communist.”

“Right.” We went to the wicker-chair bar they have over there that’s always empty except for a few Ecuadoran trade fair delegates getting blitzed to “Guantanamera.”

“So what’s the matter?” he said, after we’d toasted the Yellow Book. “You look upset. Not getting any?”

“Kind of the opposite.”

“Too many crooks spoil the broth?”

“Just one. And she’s no crook. That’s the problem, Mike. I’m in, in really deep. I met this girl, like three years ago, took her with me to Varadero, now she’s trying to decide whether to wear white or cream at the wedding.”

“What about Diane?”

“What indeed?”

“The import duty on this one figures to be really heavy.”

“Don’t I know it!”

“Just bag it, man! Say sayonara, hasta la vista, stay out of the city
for a while. She can survive. There are plenty more where you came from.”

“You don’t need to tell me that. I know she’ll survive. It’s me I’m worried about.”

“You’re really gone on her?”

“Really gone. Far gone. Not like before. You’ve never seen me like this, have you?”

“Well, there was that one time, in the Camino Real …” But it was true, and we both knew it.

“So how about you?”

“I’m great. Come prepared, don’t you know?” He pulled out a do-it-yourself AIDS test he must have bought in Bangkok or somewhere. “Doesn’t do any good, of course, but it scares away the wild ones. Also, this.” He pulled out one of those over-the-counter pregnancy tests. Mike was like a pharmacy on two legs. “Only thing to do here is stay away from the politics. Far away. I remember this one time I was in La Rampa—that bar down near the Sofia restaurant—and I was shooting with a flash, a big one, and these guys suddenly came over from a booth and said, ‘You’re a North American,’ and hustled me out of there. I was shitting bricks, man, seeing my visa getting revoked, watching the boys in Washington freak out. I flashed them a ‘dazzler’—you know, one of those official-looking letters with embossed seals the
Geographic
gives out—but they weren’t buying it. ’Let’s just go to the hotel and talk it over,’ this guy says, so we come back here, and they order some drinks, and I kind of tell them how I’ve set up the thing with the Foreign Ministry guys, and they order some more, and ask me if I’ll give them twenty bucks apiece. I do, and then they just stand up, shake my hand, and head off. ‘You’re safe now,’ one of them calls back to me. ‘Your friend’s back.’ And I turn around and see this guy darting behind a pillar. Crazy: like something out of Groucho Marx. That’s the kind of Marxism they have here. And they also tell me that everything we’d said had been recorded, which was great since we’d been mostly talking about Robert Redford, and this deal he’s got going with García Márquez.” He looked around him. “Man, I just love this place;
la situación
comedy.”

“Yeah. But how long is it going to stay like this? Things are getting really bad really fast.”

“Forget it. It’s always been like this: been cockeyed from the beginning. These guys don’t know their asses from their brains. Their big celebration is of this coup attempt where ninety of their hundred and fifty guys got wasted in the street, and everyone knew about the surprise attack in advance, and thirty of them had to go to jail. Why do you think they have these statues of Quixote all over the place?

“It’s like the Keystone Kops meets Yogi Bear, man. You never know what’s going to happen next. You know the night they attacked—twelve men on a boat against the world—they arrived two days late, on the wrong beach, to be met by a welcoming committee who took out seventy of their eighty-two guys? Purgatory Point, the place is called. They’re always talking about how they fought against the odds—but who was it who made the odds so crazy in the first place? These guys were shooting themselves in the foot from the moment they got guns. They were making problems for themselves so big they would have to be heroes just to conquer them. Heroes chasing their own tails. At least I’m chasing someone else’s.”

“But that was their heyday. Fidel giving exclusives to the
New York Times
. Getting carried by cheering students around the Princeton campus. Handing out checks for three hundred thousand bucks. Appearing on “The Tonight Show” with tears streaming down Jack Paar’s face. Fidel was the American Dream in action, riding into town with a few
compañeros
and cleaning up the whole place. Rugged individualism with a vengeance.”

“Sure. Only thing that saved their asses was that their enemy was even more screwed up than they are. So Washington mass-produces
Fidelistas
as fast as Fidel produces good capitalists. It’s great. And”—he swerved around as a couple of
señoritas
displayed their wares—“capitalism with curves.

“I’ll tell you one thing, Rick: this is the only place in the world where the hookers pay you. I was driving along the sea a couple of weeks ago—in this rental car, which works on them like catnip—and
a girl flags me over and gives me two twenty-dollar bills. For shopping, she says. So we go across town to the Hyper-diplostore—over in Miramar—and then go to her ‘aunt’s house’ to recuperate. Cute girl—nice complexion, lots of sparkle. So we do the deed in the house—this empty mansion by the sea—and then I’m on my way again. But later I realize I’ve got two bucks in change we never used. So she ended up paying me two bucks! For humping her! And you wonder why the whole country’s bankrupt.”

I felt happy just listening to him talk: it was like being on solid ground again. The world I knew.

“So how much longer you here, Ricky baby?”

“Leave tomorrow.”

“Okay. See you round somewhere. Long live
la lucha!”

I left him to his sport, Miguel cracking his knuckles in a chair nearby.

T
he last thing I had to do that day was check in on José: self-interest, I guess—I needed a reading from him. On the private side of the Revolution.

When I went into his apartment, the place was transformed. In the front room, where the stereo and books had been, there was an enormous
santeria
altar, each shelf given over to a different deity, with framed pictures and food at the bottom, and a coconut with a face.

“Let me get a picture of this,” I said.

“No, no,” said José. “You cannot.”

“Why not?”

“For one year after I make saint, I cannot have a photograph. My father tells me—my
santeria
father: I cannot give food to anyone; I must only wear white; I cannot have a woman.” I looked again at the roses in bottles, and the old pieces of meat, and some handmade swords, and axes all around.

“What’s going on here, José?”

“This is my new religion.” He looked at me with his broad smile. “Many, many people are doing it. For me, is like a bank. If I need something, if I need anything, I can go to a tree—a ceiba tree—and
I hit the tree two times, and I can talk to the gods. Like a prayer.”

“Or a telephone?”

“Sure. And if I need something real bad, I can go to my father: I give him some money, and he talks to the gods for me. He can do anything; I introduce you to him later.”

“Fine, but right now, I need you.”

“Sure. What can I get for you? When you need it?”

“Your advice only.”

He looked a little disappointed.

“About Lula. What do you think of her?”

“She’s a pretty girl.”

“I mean, beyond that. What would you think if I married her?”

“Okay. If you want. Give her a ticket out.” I caught the change in his voice, and knew that some kind of wall had come down.

“The thing is, my divorce hasn’t come through yet. To get it through is going to take a lot of paperwork, a lot of time.” I’d put it in terms he’d understand. “A lot of money too. Lawyers, trips to Singapore, payoffs, all that. And I’m not going to go through all that if she turns out to be a washout. Or maybe, in the year it takes to do this, things get even worse, and she can’t wait, and she’s got some other iron in the fire, who can give her a confirmed seat.”

“Maybe. So if you want to move fast, you find a guy to marry her.”

“What do you mean?”

“You find a friend, a foreigner.
Soltero
, maybe
siempre soltero
. Give him some money if he wants. Then she marries him, he takes care of the papers, and when she’s out, you go and get her.”

“Sounds crazy. Why make everything so complicated?”

“Is better. Not so difficult. Everyone does it all the time. I have a friend, he can help you.”

“You mean we fix up the marriage here, then she gets a visa, then both of us are safe?”

“Sure. It happens all the time. Is easy, no problem. There is a way of doing these things.”

“In Havana?”

“Sure. But is better outside. In the country.”

“Like Cayo Largo.”

“Right.” He gave me a broad, and approving, smile. “Not so many police there. Very free. Maybe you go there with Lula, and her new husband, and my friend, he can plan everything. Then they come back to Havana, go to the
yanquis’
Interests Section, show them the papers, and she is free.”

“As easy as that.”

“Sure. Why not? It is not against the law to make love. Not yet. So I tell my friend tonight?”

“No, wait a little.” I thought about what he said when I got back to the hotel; and again, when I went to say goodbye to her; and then again, on the plane home. After a while, I figured that anything was better than nothing; sitting around would get us about as far as it had got the Revolution. It was the crazy ideas that were usually the best ones. So I got out a postcard of the Cameron Highlands—to remind him of his king and country—and wrote.

Ten days later, I got a reply, in his church-mousy little black-pen scrawl.

IV
 

W
e planned the meeting for just before the Pan Americans: that way I could get some pictures in my spare time. I knew it was the kind of event I could shoot in my sleep. New stadiums. Fat Fleet Street journalists being bused to distant hotels, where the taps never worked. Razzle-dazzle new billboards and slogans and TV crews, with teenagers outside the arenas begging for bread. Everywhere in the world it was the same: suddenly, everyone is told to stop eating dogs, and to be polite to foreigners, and to refrain from spitting in public, for two weeks. Walls are spruced up, shops repaired, camera angles worked out in advance. Bright colors; Potemkin houses. Even in Beijing, the whole city had been turned into one murmurous haze of hospitality girls, speaking good English in the hotels, filling up your glass every time you took a sip, smiling you in and out of security checks, and every single flight into the city, during the Asian Games, had been met by whole welcoming groups of kindergarten cuties waving fans and singing folk songs. Cuba didn’t have it together for all that, but they’d repainted all the houses along the Malecón, dressed up the city in its tropical best.

I took the Iberia flight over that time, from Madrid, the cabin attendants putting on black gloves before they handed out the copies of
Granma
, as if they were scared of contamination. When I went to the immigration booth, they waved me over to the Hotel Reservation desk, as usual, where a sweet young thing with dark lashes asked me where I’d like to stay, and when I said, “Victoria,” she said no, and when I said, “Habana Libre,” she said no, and when I said, “Sevilla,” she said no, and then, smiling deliciously, with that look that all the Cubans have—“Sorry,
compañero
, but we’re all in this together”—she told me that I could stay only in the Colina.