The Best American Travel Writing 2013 Page 3

  There were other post-Bush differences in the direct-to-Cuba zone. The lines had grown fewer and shorter. Most noticeable, the Cubans on our flight—a mixture of Cuban Americans and returning Cuban nationals who had been in Florida or D.C. on visas of their own (some people do move back and forth)—weren’t carrying as much stuff. The crowd cast a fairly normal profile. Last time, people had multiple pairs of shoes tied around their necks by the laces. Thick gorgets of reading glasses. Men wearing 10 hats, several pairs of pants, everybody’s pockets bulging. Everybody wearing fanny packs. The rule was, if you could get it onto your body, you could bring it aboard. At least five people carried giant stuffed animals and other large toys. That’s one of the things in the Cuban American community, in which going back is generally frowned upon—but if it’s to meet your nieto for the first time . . .

  None of that, though, is what makes the Miami-to-Havana flights strange. It’s that this most obvious route, more than any of the much longer workarounds by which American citizens can get to the island, lets you feel most fully the truth of Cuba’s sheer proximity. It’s one of those flights in which, almost as soon as you reach your maximum altitude, you begin your descent, and within minutes you’re looking down on a diorama of palm trees growing incongruously in green fields, and within seconds you hit the ground and everyone bursts into applause. The country you land in is too unlike your own to have been reached that quickly, all but instantaneously, and is after all, you recall, on hostile terms with your own. As if you’ve passed through a warp. “Why are they clapping?” the six-year-old asked.

  I explained that it was special, coming here. Some of these people, when they left Cuba, might have thought they would never see it again. Some had been hearing about it all their lives and were seeing it for the first time.

  “Also, they like to clap and yell,” my wife said.

  The six-year-old did her philosopher face, gazing out the window. She gets a little dimple on her forehead when the big thoughts are brewing. “Now I’m here,” she said.

  “Yes, you are.”

  “And I’m Cuban,” she said.

  “You are part Cuban, that’s true.”

  “You’re not any Cuban,” she said, not meanly, just sort of marveling.

  She looks like me, pale with blue eyes and light brown hair and freckles. Yet she has largely been raised day to day by intense, dark-eyed Cuban American women, and their blood is in her, and the history of their family, with all of its drama and all of its issues, has exerted an incalculable influence on who and what she is. At some point in her life, she’ll have to figure out what all of that means to her; the whole story and the way she looks will be part of its strangeness. For me it was all behind glass. I felt the sudden separation between us, between the relative depths of what this trip would mean to us, many years on. One of those moments of generational wooziness that come with having kids, like realizing there’s a part of their lives you won’t see.

  We landed under searingly vivid skies, something like what the blue tablet from a packet of Easter dye lets off. The land right around the airport is farmed; we saw a man plowing with oxen. The fertility of Cuba is the thing you can’t put into words. I’ve never stood on a piece of ground as throbbingly, even pornographically, generative. Throw a used battery into a divot, and it will put out shoots—that’s how it feels. You could smell it, in the smoky, slightly putrid smell of turned fields. More and more, as we drove, that odor mingled with the smell of the sea.

  This was the first time I was in post-Fidel Cuba. It was funny to think that not long ago, there were smart people who doubted that such a thing could exist, i.e., who believed that with the fall of Fidel would come the fall of communism on the island. But Fidel didn’t fall. He did fall, physically—on the tape that gets shown over and over in Miami, of him coming down the ramp after giving that speech in 2004 and tumbling and breaking his knee—but his leadership didn’t. He executed one of the most brilliantly engineered successions in history, a succession that was at the same time a self-entrenchment. First, he faked his own death in a way: serious intestinal operation, he might not make it. Raul is brought in as “acting president.” A year and a half later, Castro mostly recovered. But Raul is officially named president, with Castro’s approval. It was almost as if, “Is Fidel still . . . ?” Amazing. So now they rule together, with Raul out front, but everyone understanding that Fidel retains massive authority. Not to say that Raul doesn’t wield power—he has always had plenty—but it’s a partnership of some kind. What comes after is as much of a mystery as ever.

  Our relationship with them seems just as uncertain. Barack Obama was going to open things up, and he did tinker with the rules regarding travel, but now they say that when you try to follow these rules, you get caught up in all kinds of forms and red tape. He eased the restrictions on remittances, so more money is making it back to the island, and that may have made the biggest difference so far. Boats with medical and other relief supplies have recently left Miami, sailing straight to the island, which hasn’t happened in decades. These humanitarian shipments can, according to the Miami Herald, include pretty much anything a Cuban American family wants to send to its relatives: Barbie dolls, electronics, sugary cereal. In many cases, you have a situation in which the family is first wiring money over, then shipping the goods. The money is used on the other side to pay the various fees associated with getting the stuff. So it’s as if you’re reaching over and rebuying the merchandise for your relatives. The money, needless to say, goes to the government. Still, capitalism is making small inroads. And Raul has taken baby steps toward us: Cubans can own their own cars, operate their own businesses, own property. That’s all new. For obvious reasons it’s not an immediate possibility for a vast majority of the people, and it could be taken away tomorrow morning by decree, but it matters.

  Otherwise, our attitude toward Cuba feels very wait and see, as what we’re waiting to see grows less and less clear. We’ve learned to live with it, like when the doctor says, “What you have could kill you, but not before you die a natural death.” Earlier this year Obama said to a Spanish newspaper: “No authoritarian regime will last forever. The day will come in which the Cuban people will be free.” Not, notice, no dictator can live forever, but no “authoritarian regime.” But how long can one last? Two hundred years?

  Perhaps a second term will be different. All presidents, if they want to mess with our Cuban relations at even the microscopic level, find themselves up against the Florida community, and those are large, powerful, and arguably insane forces.

  My wife’s people got out in the early 1960s, so they’ve been in the States for half a century. Lax regulations, strict regulations. It’s all a oneness. They take, I suppose, a Cuban view, that matters on the island are perpetually and in some way inherently screwed up and have been forever.

  There was a moment in the taxi, a little nothing exchange but so densely underlayered with meaning that if you could pass it through an extracting machine, you would understand a lot about how it is between Cubans and Cuban Americans. The driver, a guy who said he grew up in Havana, told a tiny lie, or a half lie. The fact that you can’t even say whether it was a lie or not is significant. My wife had asked him to explain for me the way it works with Cuba’s two separate currencies, CUPs and CUCs, Cuban pesos and convertible pesos (also called chavitos or simply dollars). When I was last there, we didn’t use either of these, though both existed. We paid for everything in actual, green U.S. dollars. That’s what people wanted. There were stores in which you could pay in only dollars. But in 2004, Castro decided—partly as a gesture of contempt for the U.S. embargo—that he would abolish the use of U.S. dollars on the island and enforce the use of CUCs, pegged to the U.S. dollar but distinct from it. This coexisted alongside the original currency, which would remain pegged to the spirit of the revolution. For obvious reasons, the actual Cuban peso is worth much less than the other, dollar-equivalent Cuban peso, something on the order o
f 25 to 1. But the driver said simply, “No, they are equal.”

  “Really?” my wife said. “No . . . that can’t be.”

  He insisted that there was no difference between the relative values of the currencies. They were the same.

  He knew that this was wrong. He probably could have told you the exchange rates from that morning. But he also knew that it had a rightness in it. For official accounting purposes, the two currencies are considered equivalent. Their respective values might fluctuate on a given day, of course, but it couldn’t be said that the CUP was worth less than the CUC. That’s partly what he meant. He also meant that if you’re going to fly to Cuba from Miami and rub it in my face that our money is worth one twenty-fifth of yours, I’m gonna feed you some hilarious communist math and see how you like it. Cubans call it la doble moral. Meaning, different situations call forth different ethical codes. He wasn’t being deceptive. He was saying what my wife forced him to say. She had been a bit breezy, it seemed, in mentioning the unevenness between the currencies, which is the kind of absurdity her family would laugh at affectionately in the kitchen. But they don’t have to suffer it anymore. And he was partly reminding her of that, fencing her off from a conversation in which Cubans would joke together about the notion that the CUP and the CUC had even the slightest connection to each other. That was for them, that laughter. So, a very complex statement, that not-quite-lie. After it, he was totally friendly and dropped us at one of the Cuban-owned tourist hotels on the edge of Havana.

  People walking by on the street didn’t seem as skinny. That was the most instantly perceptible difference, if you were seeing Raul’s Cuba for the first time. They weren’t sickly looking before, but under Fidel you noticed more the way men’s shirts flapped about them and the knobbiness of women’s knees. Now people were filling out their clothes. The island’s overall dietary level had apparently gone up a tick. (One possible factor involved was an increase in the amount of food coming over from the United States. Unknown to most people, we do sell a lot of agricultural products to Cuba, second only in value to Brazil. Under a law that Bill Clinton squeaked through on his way out, Cuba purchases food and medicine from us on a cash basis, meaning, bizarrely, that a lot of the chicken in the arroz con pollo consumed on the island by Canadian tourists is raised in the Midwest—the embargo/blockade has always been messy when you lean in close.)

  The idea was to spend some days traveling around, before going to see family. Once you see them, it gets emotional, and after that, sightseeing feels wrong somehow.

  The ladies wanted to visit the Havana aquarium before it closed for the day—my wife went there when she was younger—so they took off. The hostility of the hotel workers was to be experienced. I started making up reasons to approach them, just to provoke it and make sure I hadn’t imagined it. My reflex during an odd social interaction is to assume fault, and this can create its own distortion, making it hard to see what the other person is doing, but no, these people were being fantastically unfriendly. It was one of the big, newly built Gaviota hotels—Gaviota is the quasi-official Cuban tourist organization (financed in part by transnational investment but controlled by a prominent Cuban general). Loosely speaking, these men and women worked for the government. It’s not that they were incompetent or mean; they just had zero motivation to be nice to tourists or in a hurry to do anything for them, and for me, after years immersed in a may-I-pour-you-more-sweet-tea culture, the contrast held a fascination. In a way it was refreshing to see people so emphatically not kowtowing to rich white tourists, even if that was you, but of course this feeling was not to be trusted: you liked their unfriendliness because they seemed more authentically anticapitalist that way. Especially wild was a woman about my age at the main reception desk, who evidently had to handle all the complaints about the wee-fee service in the lobby. She looked at you dead level and half-smiling when you approached as if in her mind she were already pushing in the blade. At the desk, they sold little scratch cards, with passwords on them, that looked like lottery tickets and in hindsight had much else in common with lottery tickets. But there were no cards that day. “They are in the city,” she said—and in my mind I saw them being unloaded from small boats at night—“but we don’t have them here.” I was advised to try the hotel next door, a few minutes’ walk—another, equally massive, equally generically pan-Latin-style Gaviota hotel. Would a card I bought there work here? “I hope so,” she said, still doing that smile. “But,” I said, “we made reservations at this hotel specifically because you advertised the wee-fee service.” A total lie. We didn’t need it. I wanted to see if she would crack. She shook her head so slowly with exaggeratedly sincere sorrow, like a long-suffering teacher forced to tell her most obnoxious pupil he had failed. “I understand,” she murmured, and went back to work.

  Partly what had been clashing were our respective ideas about the role of an individual in solving a crisis. In the United States, we all go around so empowered-feeling all the time, and when you travel you feel it, a sense of hypertrophy, the thing that makes us look like giant babies to the Europeans. Bring us our soda refills or we’ll get them ourselves! The sheer notion that I thought she herself could do anything about the wee-fee, about getting the cards here faster, was probably genuinely amusing to her. Did I not think she wanted the wee-fee fixed? Did I think she actually liked standing there answering the exact same question from a never-ending line of childishly outraged foreigners?

  At the neighboring hotel, they did have cards. But their wee-fee was down. “It’s not working?” I asked the man. “It’s working,” he said, “but not right now.” The whole island’s Internet runs through three unpredictable satellites, although I had read that a cable of some kind was recently installed. If so, it did not get routed to these hotels. Which was lucky in the end—it accelerated the technological molting that had to happen and left you feeling more present. In the basement, near the business center (where a woman took delight in telling travelers from all lands that they could not do various simple-sounding things on the computer consoles), I noticed a small postcard that showed a picture of Fidel, and the caption read in Spanish, “In the history of U.S. intelligence, no greater amount of money and resources have been put toward bringing down a single man than have been spent to get Fidel.” And below that, “El mérito es estar vivo.” Roughly, “The victory lies in staying alive.”

  I kept seeing small groups of Asian men get on and off the elevators. That was new. Ten years ago the only Asian faces you might have seen were in Chinatown—there is one in Havana, Barrio Chino, several square blocks of ostensibly Chinese restaurants and faded signs with lanterns and pagodas on them, a neighborhood left behind by thousands of Chinese agricultural workers who arrived in the 19th century, and where very occasionally you might still see Asian features. These guys—all men, I saw no women—seemed dressed as inconspicuously as possible, loose-fitting light blue jeans and generic polo shirts and sunglasses. The bartender told me that they were here to do business. China was doing “bastante de negocios” in Cuba these days, including in oil, he said. At that moment a Chinese-made exploratory rig sat about 30 miles off the northern coast. We would be able to see it, he said, driving along the main highway. Cuba has lately been partnering with foreign petroleum companies to explore prospective undersea oil fields. A major discovery would be a main line to economic independence, that most long-elusive goal of the revolution. So far, though, the wells have come up dry or disappointing.

  Cuba’s involvement with China has been intensifying for more than a decade, as Russian influence has receded. The Chinese have built an amusement park and sold fleets of buses. They have been granted use—if our intelligence can be trusted—of a large signals-intelligence base on the outskirts of Havana near the airport, a giant electronic ear horn right off our shores, the price we pay for renouncing any involvement with a country so close. There is the sheer geopolitical weirdness of Guantánamo’s being there, too: the Chinese and the A
mericans operating on the same island, off the coast of Florida. Guantánamo was supposed to be gone. It’s holding on like the Castros.

  The empty midafternoon lobby was vast and square-tiled and full of the drone of floor waxing, and the six-year-old spilled into it laughing, her mother racewalking behind her, trying to catch her. They saw me at the bar and ran over. “We have to show you this,” the six-year-old said. She was pulling on my wife’s purse. Mariana pulled out her phone and pushed play on a movie, handing it to me. At the aquarium, a little boy had celebrated his birthday, and his parents had gone in for the dolphin special. You put the kid on a raft and pushed it out into the pool. Shortly thereafter, one of the aquarium’s giant 500-pound dolphins started jumping over the kid and raft, in great looping leaps, one after the other. The splash was considerable. The kid looked terrified, he was face forward, clutching the raft at the edges. The repeating image of the dolphin—frozen massive and pendulous directly above him—got better every time. The audience laughed and clapped in the concrete bleachers; you could hear it on the video. My wife was laughing so hard she had tears in her eyes. “You wouldn’t see that in the States,” she said proudly.

  We scanned for the Chinese-built oil platform the next day, and thought we saw something once, though it may have been a ship. To ride along the coastal road with the windows down was sublime. The gaps between houses kept giving you glimpses of the sea behind. There weren’t many other cars, but the few that passed left a heavy, organic smell of exhaust in the air. You could taste dinosaurs in it. It carried that pre-catalytic-converter nostalgia. We were driving down the spine of Cuba, into the vast green interior of the island. Hitchhikers were scattered along the highway, as were people selling various things—garlic, strings of fish. They ran at you as you passed, yelling and seeming to come too close to the car.