My Kind of Place: Travel Stories from a Woman Who's Been Everywhere (18 page)

On Thursday, I had gone to the fashion show for the World Football League, which aspires to become the NFL’s European counterpart, because I expected the models to be real football players; after all, it would look pretty weird to have a waif drift down the runway in a helmet and pads. The event did not pack them in, and that meant that I was among the few who saw the uniforms for the Barcelona Dragons, the London Monarchs, and the Düsseldorf!Fire. When a model named Tim came out wearing the Amsterdam Admirals’ uniform (“Tim’s wearing an away jersey. . . . There’s the insert in the pants for an aggressive-type look”), I remarked to a reporter sitting near me that I thought Tim was pretty cute and perhaps a little slight for a football player. The reporter snorted and turned to me. “That’s no player,” he said, shaking his head. “That’s just some surfer.”

The real players—the 49ers and the Chargers, that is—were scarce, except on Friday, when 49ers Ricky Watters, William Floyd, Todd Kelly, and Toi Cook, along with Tim Irwin of the Dolphins, showed up at a press conference announcing a joint venture between Tommy Boy Music and Gridiron Records that will give football stars the opportunity to become recording stars. Then Watters, Floyd, and Kelly performed a rap song, and Irwin sang a few bars of a wistful country paean to his GMC truck. The female rappers Salt-N-Pepa had come to give the singers moral support. When someone in the audience asked them what an athlete needed to succeed as a rapper, Salt—or maybe it was Pepa—chuckled and said, “A nice butt.”

At last, it was time for what had been described at one press briefing as “the on-the-field part of the product”—the ultra-big event that 49er Bart Oates had said early in the week he considered “better than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick.” On game day, the parking lots were filled with tailgate parties and with people still trying to buy tickets. Dozens of white tents had been set up beside the stadium: This was the Corporate Hospitality Village, where companies like Ford and Budweiser and Reebok were holding lavish private parties for their guests. The tents made the place look like a refugee camp, except that the VIP parking lot beside the Corporate Hospitality Village was packed with long white stretch limos—almost a hundred of them, idling in endless rows. Overhead, planes hauling banners buzzed back and forth:
FLORIDA PEST CONTROL WORKS FOR YOU
, followed by
PRES. CLINTON: PUNISH CASTRO NOT OUR KIDS AT GITMO AND PANAMA
, then
LET US CUBANS SACK CASTRO,
and then
THE REAL WINNER IS JESUS
.

The real winners, of course, were the 49ers. It happened in a flash: Steve Young passed to Jerry Rice for a touchdown one minute and twenty-four seconds into the first quarter, and half the people around me threw up their hands and said, “Well, that’s the game.” It was, and three and a half unsuspenseful hours later, the final score was 49–26. In their locker room after the game, the San Francisco players looked sweaty and happy but not the least bit surprised. I talked for a while with Chris Dalman, an offensive lineman with pink cheeks and upper arms the size of turkeys. I had never seen upper arms like that in my life. He was telling me that it really hurts to play football and that after a game you feel lousy for a couple of days. I finally interrupted him and asked him if he had any idea of the circumference of his arms, and he said he didn’t. “I don’t even know exactly how tall I am,” he said. “The one size I need to know is my ring size, and that’s a Super Bowl size fourteen.”

THERE

Part Two

The Homesick Restaurant

In Havana, the restaurant called Centro Vasco is on a street that Fidel Castro likes to drive down on his way home from the office. In Little Havana, in Miami, there is another Centro Vasco, on Southwest Eighth—a street that starts east of the Blue Lagoon and runs straight to the bay. The exterior of Miami’s Centro Vasco is a hodgepodge of wind-scoured limestone chunks and flat tablets of Perma-Stone set in arches and at angles, all topped with a scalloped red shingle roof. Out front are a gigantic round fountain, a fence made from a ship’s anchor chain, and a snarl of hibiscus bushes and lacy palm trees. The building has had a few past lives. It was a speakeasy in the twenties, and for years afterward it was an Austrian restaurant called the Garden. The owners of the Garden were nostalgic Austrians, who in 1965 finally got so nostalgic that they sold the place to a Cuban refugee named Juan Saizarbitoria and went back to Austria. Saizarbitoria had grown up in the Basque region of Spain, and he had made his way to Cuba in the late thirties by sneaking onto a boat and stowing away inside a barrel of sardines. When he first arrived in Havana, he pretended to be a world-famous jai alai player, and then he became a cook at the jai alai club. In 1940, he opened Centro Vasco, and he made it into one of the most popular restaurants in Havana. Having lost the restaurant to Castro, in 1962, Juan Saizarbitoria moved to Miami and set up Centro Vasco in exile. Along with a couple of funeral homes, it was one of the few big Cuban businesses to come to the United States virtually unchanged. The first Centro Vasco in America was in a small building on the edge of Miami. After a year or so, Saizarbitoria bought the Garden from the departing Austrians. He didn’t have enough money to redecorate, so he just hung a few paintings of his Basque homeland and of the Centro Vasco he’d left behind in Havana; otherwise, the walls remained covered with murals of the Black Forest and rustic alpine scenes. The restaurant prospered: It became a home away from home for Miami’s Cubans in exile. Soon there was money to spend, so a room was added, the parking lot was expanded, awnings were replaced. Inside, the walls were redone in a dappled buttery yellow, and the memories of Austria were lost forever under a thick coat of paint. Until then, there might have been no other place in the world so layered with different people’s pinings—no other place where you could have had a Basque dinner in a restaurant from Havana in a Cuban neighborhood of a city in Florida in a dining room decorated with yodeling hikers and little deer.

These days, Centro Vasco is an eventful place. During a week I spent there recently, I would sometimes leaf back and forth through the reservation book, which was kept on a desk in the restaurant’s foyer. The pages were rumpled and blobbed with ink. Los Hombres Empresa, luncheon for twelve. Beatriz Barron, bridal shower. The Velgaras, the Torreses, and the Delgados, baby showers. A birthday party for Carmen Bravo and an anniversary party for Mr. and Mrs. Gerardo Capo. A paella party for an association of Cuban dentists. A fund-raiser for Manny Crespo, a candidate for judge. Southern Bell, a luncheon for twenty-eight people; someone had written next to the reservation, in giant letters and underlined, “
NO SANGRIA
.
” The Little Havana Kiwanis Club cooking contest had been held in the Granada Room; the finals for Miss Cuba en Exilio had taken place on the patio. There were dinner reservations for people who wanted a bowl of
caldo Gallego,
the white-bean soup they used to eat at Centro Vasco in Havana; lunches for executives of Bacardi rum and for an adventurous group of Pizza Hut executives from Wisconsin; hundreds of reservations for people coming on Friday and Saturday nights to hear the popular Cuban singer Albita; a twice-annual reservation for the Centauros, 1941 alumni of a medical school in Havana; a daily reservation for a group of ladies who used to play canasta together in Cuba and relocated their game to Miami thirty years ago.

Juan Saizarbitoria goes through the book with me. This is not the Juan of the sardine barrel; he died four years ago, at the age of eighty-two. This is one of his sons—Juan Jr., who now runs the restaurant with his brother, Iñaki. The Saizarbitorias are a great-looking family. Juan Jr., who is near sixty, is pewter haired and big nosed and pink cheeked; his forehead is as wide as a billboard, and he holds his eyebrows high, so he always looks a little amazed. Iñaki, fifteen years younger, is rounder and darker, with an arching smile and small, bright eyes. Juan Jr.’s son, Juan III, is now an international fashion model and is nicknamed Sal. He is said to be the spitting image of sardine-barrel Juan, whom everyone called Juanito. Before Sal became a model, he used to work in the restaurant now and then. Old ladies who had had crushes on Juanito in Havana would swoon at the sight of Sal, because he looked so much like Juanito in his youth. Everyone in the family talks a million miles a minute—the blood relatives, the spouses, the kids. Juan Jr.’s wife, Totty, who helps to manage the place, once left a message on my answering machine that sounded a lot like someone running a Mixmaster. She knows everybody, talks to everybody, and seems to have things to say about the things she has to say. Once, she told me she was so tired that she could hardly speak, but I didn’t believe her. Juanito was not known as a talker; in fact, he spoke only Basque, could barely get along in Spanish, and never knew English at all. In Miami, he occasionally played golf with Jackie Gleason, to whom he had nothing to say. Some people remember Juanito as tough and grave but also surprisingly sentimental. He put a drawing of the Havana Centro Vasco on his Miami restaurant’s business card, and he built a twenty-foot-wide scale model of it, furnished with miniature tables and chairs. It hangs over the bar in the Miami restaurant to this day.

On a Friday, I come to the restaurant early. The morning is hot and bright, but inside the restaurant it’s dark and still. The rooms are a little old-fashioned: There are iron chandeliers and big, high-backed chairs; amber table lamps and white linen; black cables snaking from amplifiers across a small stage. Pictures of the many presidential candidates who have come here trolling for the Cuban vote are clustered on a wall by the door.

Now the heavy door of the restaurant opens, releasing a flat slab of light. Two, three, then a dozen men stroll into the foyer—elegant old lions, with slick gray hair and movie mogul glasses and shirtsleeves shooting out of navy blue blazer sleeves. Juan comes over to greet them, and then they saunter into the far room and prop their elbows on the end of the bar that is across from Juanito’s model of the old Centro Vasco.

These are members of the Vedado Tennis Club, which had been one of five exclusive clubs in Havana. Immediately after the revolution, the government took over the clubs and declared that from now on all Cuban citizens could use them, and just as immediately the club members left the country. Now the Vedado members meet for lunch on the first Friday of every month at Centro Vasco. Meanwhile, back in Havana, the old Vedado clubhouse is out of business—a stately wreck on a palm-shaded street.

The Vedado members order Scotch and martinis and highballs. The bartender serving them left Cuba just three months ago. They themselves left the Vedado behind in 1959, and they are as embittered as if they’d left it yesterday. A television over the bar is tuned to CNN, and news about the easing of the Cuban embargo makes a blue flash on the screen.

A buoy-shaped man with a droopy face is standing at the other end of the bar. He is Santiago Reyes, who had been a minister in the Batista regime, the bartender tells me. Santiago Reyes winks as I approach him, then kisses my hand and says, “My sincere pleasure, my dear.” He bobs onto a bar stool. Four men quickly surround him, their faces turned and opened, like sunflowers. Santiago Reyes’s words pour forth. It’s Spanish, which I don’t understand, but I hear a familiar word here and there: “embargo,” “United States,” “Miami,” “Castro,” “yesterday,” “government,” “Cuba,” “Cuba,” “Cuba.” Across the room, the Vedado members chat in marbled voices. There are perhaps thirty-five of them here now, out of a total of a few hundred, and there will never be more. There has never been anything in my life that I couldn’t go back to if I really wanted to. I ask if Little Havana is anything like the real Havana.

One gray head swivels. “Absolutely not at all,” he says. “Miami was a shock when we got here. It was like a big farm. Plants. Bushes. It was quite something to see.”

I say that I want to go to Havana.

“While you’re there, shoot Fidel for me,” the man says, smoothing the lapels of his blazer.

I say that I think I would be too busy.

He tips his head back and peers over the top of his glasses, measuring me. Then he says, “Find the time.”

The tennis club sits down to
filete de mero Centro Vasco.
The food here is mostly Basque, not Cuban:
porrusalda
(Basque chicken-potato-and-leek soup), and
rabo encendido
(simmered oxtail), and
callos a la Vasca
(Basque tripe). Juanito made up the menu in Havana and brought it with him to Miami. It has hardly changed; the main exception is the addition of a vegetarian paella that the cook concocted for Madonna one night when she came here for a late dinner after performing in Miami.

I wander into the other dining room. At one table, Dr. Salvador Lew, of radio station WRHC, is having lunch with a couple who have recently recorded a collection of Latin American children’s music. They are talking and eating on the air—as Dr. Lew does with one or more different political or cultural guests every weekday. The live microphone is passed around the table, followed by the garlic bread. From one to two every day, at 1550 AM on the radio dial, you can experience hunger pangs.

Iñaki and Totty sit at a round table near Dr. Lew, having a lunch meeting with two Colombians. The four are discussing a plan to market the restaurant to Colombians, who are moving into the neighborhood in droves. More and more, the Cubans who left Havana after Castro’s arrival are now leaving Little Havana, with its pink dollhouses guarded by plaster lions and its old shoebox-shaped apartment buildings hemmed in by sagging cyclone fences—Little Havana, which is nothing like big Havana. The prosperous Cubans are moving to the pretty streets off Ponce de Leon Boulevard in Coral Gables, which looks like the elegant Miramar section of Havana; or to Kendall, near the newest, biggest Miami malls; or to breezy golf course houses on Key Biscayne. Centro Vasco, which had been an amble from their front doors and a home away from home, is now a fifteen-minute drive on a six-lane freeway—a home away from home away from home.