The Best American Travel Writing 2013 Page 4

  I woke up the next day to the sounds of morning pool activity. Water splashing on concrete. Insistent, unfamiliar bird song. Sleepy murmurs of people rubbing lotion on themselves. Hotel carts rattled by outside the double glass doors. It was about 8 A.M. in Varadero on a warm spring day, which I’m pretty sure is literally Utopia, in some vague historico-linguistic way: the northern shore of Cuba, which supposedly moved Columbus to call this the most beautiful place human eyes had ever seen. My wife has a thing about going to Varadero when she goes to Cuba. I don’t know if she even likes it. She does it for her family. To them it would seem insane to skip it—it was the place they most wanted to go when they lived there—not to go, on returning, would be like taking a trip to Keystone, South Dakota, and not going to see Mount Rushmore.

  Sitting up in my twin bed, I looked over at the queen bed—they were already gone. The massive cafeteria operation swung into motion for only a couple of hours each morning. You had to be there for the stampede. We were moving through different micro-Cubas so quickly; too quickly, really. The day before we rode horses through the jungle to see the ruins of ancient coffee plantations and the stone huts where the slaves were kept. We passed cooperative villages of campesinos in the forest and heard political speeches coming from loudspeakers, something about the new agriculture laws. The previous night, coming in on the suddenly pitch-black Cuban highways, zooming up to unlighted ROAD CLOSED signs at 60 miles an hour, swerving to miss car-killing potholes and horse-drawn wagons . . . that was already dreamlike. And now we were navigating the omelet and cereal stations, in lines of mainly European tourists: Germans, Italians, Central Europeans, and also Brazilians, Argentines, and Canadians. (You know when you’re meeting a Canadian, because they always ask, in the same shocked tone, “How did you get into the country?” It’s an opportunity to remind you that you can’t go legally, and they can. And by extension, that they come from a more enlightened land. “You need to grow up about that stuff,” one guy that I met at a nature preserve said, to which I wanted to tell him to get a large and powerful population of Cuban exiles and move them into an election-determining province of Canada and call me in the morning.)

  The cook at the omelet station, when he asked where I was from and I told him, put up his fists like a boxer, as if we were about to have it out, then started laughing. He told me that he had family in the United States, in Florida. That’s what everyone says. You can’t understand the transnationally dysfunctional, mutually implicated relationship between Cuba and Miami, which defies all embargoes and policies of “definitive abandonment,” until you realize that the line often cuts through families, almost always, in fact. People make all sorts of inner adjustments. I told the man I hated the embargo (the blockade, as they call it) and thought it was stupid, which was both true and what he wanted to hear. He gave me a manly clap-grasp. I didn’t go on and say, of course, that I disliked the embargo most because it, more than anything, has kept the Castros in power for half a century, given them a ready-made Goliath for their David. Thanks to the embargo, when the Castros rail against us as an imperialist enemy, they aren’t really lying. We have in effect declared ourselves the enemy of the Cuban people and done it under the banner of their freedom, hitting Cuba in a way that, after all, makes only the people suffer and, far from punishing those in power, rewards them and buttresses their story. As for the argument that to deal with tyrants would render our foreign policy incoherent, we deal with worse every day—we’ve armed worse—and in countries that don’t have a deeply intimate history with ours, going back centuries. All this because a relatively small but highly mobilized exile community holds sway in a state that has the power to elect presidents. There was no way to gauge how much of this the man would agree with. We left it at mutually thinking the embargo sucked.

  Out by the pool, where my wife and daughter were swimming, I lay on a chaise in the shade, feeling paler and softer than I ever had in my life and unlocatably depressed in the way that resorts do so well. I read Doctor Zhivago, a new translation by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (the husband-and-wife team who have been retranslating the Russian classics for more than 20 years). Zhivago isn’t on the Tolstoy/Chekhov level, but there are wonderful passages, including one that I thought spoke to the gruffness you often encounter in Cubans, the excessive suspicion of introductory small talk they sometimes demonstrate. “The fear known as spymania,” Pasternak wrote about Russia after the revolution, “had reduced all speech to a single formal, predictable pattern. The display of good intentions in discourse was not conducive to conversation.”

  Every time I looked up from the book, there were more people in and by the pool, as if they were surfacing out of the water, out of the ripples. I had black sunglasses on, so after a while I propped myself at an angle at which I could seem to read the book but really be moving my eyeballs, staring at everybody. God, the human body! It was Speedos and bikinis, no matter the age or body type. You would never see a poolside scene in the United States with people showing this much skin, except at a pool where people were there precisely to show off the perfection of their bodies. The body not consciously sculptured through working out has become a secret shame and grotesquery in America, but this upper-class Euro-Latin crowd had not received that news, to my distraction. I took in veins and cellulite, paunches and man-paps, the weird shinglelike sagging that starts to occur on the back of the thighs, cleavage that showed a spoiled-grape-like wrinkling, the ash-mottled skin of permanently sun-torched shoulders, all of it beautiful. All of it beautiful and tormenting. You watched an 18-year-old Argentine girl in her reproductive springtime walk past an ancient Soviet-looking woman, her body a sculpture of blocks atop blocks, and both of them wearing black bikinis, the furtive looks they gave each other, full of emotions straight from the Pliocene, from the savanna. The old men scowled from behind mirrored shades. The young men tensed every muscle in order to seem not obsessed with how the girls saw them, a level of self-consciousness I found I could no longer really reenter, as if it had been a drunken state. Everybody was stealing looks at one another, envying or disdaining or gazing, like me. We were all inside a matrix of lust and erotic sadness, all turning into versions of one another, or seeing our past selves.

  My wife’s people come from a small town with a strange name, a rare Spanish word that almost doesn’t look Spanish when you see it. When they lived there, the place was not considered all that far from things, from the cities, but the decay of infrastructure, the collapse of the trains, has left it stranded. There’s simply no reason to have heard of it.

  The first time I went, before we were married, they made a big thing of me. Yankees almost never appear in this town, unless they are lost. I walked into a stuccoed, leafy house on a quiet street, a house full of loud talking, hands grabbing my arms. Everyone kissed and cried over my wife, whom they hadn’t seen since she was a teenager. They nicknamed me “Wao,” because everything they would tell me, I would say, “Wow.” It seemed the appropriate response. Wei-Wei, the abuelita, had come with us, or rather we had gone with her—it ended up being probably the last time she would ever go back—and she sent money ahead of our visit, for them to buy food with. She’s always sending money, but this time she sent more, and they laid in pork and all the spices they needed. There was a long table. All of the men were named some version of Rafael, Rafaelito, Rafaelín. The matriarch, a shy and tiny woman named Haydee (eye-day), presided with birdlike hands, making little apologies. You didn’t even have to chew the pork; you could just sort of let it melt. They made chicharrones de viento, “wind-crackers,” the Cubans’ witty name for a kind of poverty-inspired something, frisked up out of salt and flour and a little lard. There was a bottle of Havana Club on the table—the first time I ever saw or tasted it. Knowing only a little classroom Spanish, I struggled to follow their phrases, the swift and expressive but mud-mouthed Spanish spoken on the island.

  After dinner, I made the mistake of saying something about a cigar. It
wasn’t as if I asked for one. I probably said something like, “I hear that your country is famous for its cigars.” But they took this as an overpolite way of asking for one, so the hunt began. The shops were closed, but the Rafaels started working on the car. You’ve heard, no doubt, how in Cuba they still drive working American cars from the 1950s, but this was something else, a Frankenstein made from the parts of about four different cars from the ’50s and one Russian car apparently from the ’70s. They got this creature going, and we started moving through the streets. No headlights—one of them held an electric lantern out the window. It was wired to the cigarette lighter. We needed it badly. Within a mile of leaving the town, we were in the face-close darkness of unlighted rural roads. They took me to a kind of kiosk, an open bar in the middle of a field. I don’t know what it was, really. A kind of club. All of the men, about seven of them, were workers in the tobacco fields. They would smuggle out a cigar or two each week, maybe defective ones, for personal use or the chance to trade it away. Rafaelito told me, “This is the puro puro.”

  Back at the house, half the neighborhood gathered to watch me huff on this thing, many, I slowly realized, hoping to see me vomit. I stood outside on a back patio, amid chicken coops. The cigar went to my head like thunder. My knees became untrustworthy. But no throwing up. Rafaelito had too much to drink and danced like a crazy person. As a boy, he lost his only brother, drowned in the river. His father, Rafael, approached me with a wagging finger, asking me if I liked the country. Of course, I said, bonita, linda y la gente.

  “Si.” He looked a little bit like a Cuban Groucho Marx. “Si, te gusta el país,” he said. “Pero, te gusta el sistema?” He pulled the syllables of el sistema out of his mouth like draws of taffy.

  Now they were all gone, all the Rafaels. The two older ones were dead from disease, and the youngest one had gone to Miami, I don’t even know how. There is a kind of lottery, apparently. Perhaps he won it. He’s working as a mechanic. The house was completely different. The ground floor was empty and quiet.

  Haydee, the old woman of the house, was still there, even more ancient but seemingly unchanged. I saw her do the same thing now to the six-year-old that she did to my wife those years ago, wrap her arms around the girl and sort of refuse to leave, the way a child would. “I’m keeping her here,” she said. “You, go back.”

  Her husband and son were gone, her grandson gone to Miami. Her other grandson, Erik, half brother of the boy who left, was still around. In fact, he was thriving. He had started a little furniture business. He was living in the house with his wife and daughter, and all had been going well. But just months before, they lost a son, an infant, to a respiratory disease. So within a short span of years, he lost his father, grandfather, and his brother (to emigration), and now his son. He was the only male in the house.

  Erik’s daughter, a young girl with glasses and reddish-brown hair, was as shy as her grandmother. She stayed on the edges of whatever room we were in. My daughter was at my feet, peeking through my legs at her. I could feel their intense awareness of each other, but neither would approach.

  After lunch, while Erik was explaining different aspects of the furniture operation to me, my six-year-old came up and started tugging on my shirt. She was mouthing something at me. I kept saying, “Please don’t interrupt, sweetheart.” She said, “Give me your phone!” I excused myself from Erik for a second to give her a little lecture. I knew she was bored, I said, but this was an important day, and she needed to use her manners, not play with the phone. “Give me the phone!” she said, and ran off in a huff when I refused.

  Barely 20 minutes later we went back upstairs and passed by the little girl’s room. She and the six-year-old were sitting on the bed, playing on a phone. It was my wife’s. The six-year-old had taught her cousin to play Angry Birds. They were smiling and leaning on each other. For the next two days they were completely inseparable and wanted to sleep in the same room. They communicated through my wife when they really needed to work something out. They will probably know each other for the rest of their lives now, because of that game.

  We went out walking the streets, making the rounds to see other family members—to the old church, with its brightly painted statue of Saint Julian, where Wei-Wei was married and where they remembered her, “la maestra,” past the school where she taught and the corner store her father owned, where first she and then her children, my mother-in-law and her brother, grew up playing, before it was taken away—and as we strolled, I had a diminished, doubtless much-flawed version of the old woman’s cake-box map in my head. I was hearing her voice-over, all the stories she told me over almost 20 years now, some of them repetitive, but with details emerging and receding.

  Her memories of the revolution begin with the shortwave radio, kept in the backroom by her husband. Wei-Wei and her husband would gather with friends to listen to the transmissions that the Castro brothers and Che and Camilo Cienfuegos (the best loved of the young comandantes, at least by my wife’s family, worshiped as a pop star by my mother-in-law, then 11) were broadcasting from the mountains, giving assurance that they were about to ride down and liberate the island. For years I assumed that the family had been listening to these speeches in fear—as a couple, they were about as solidly middle-class as could be, a teacher and a tobacco salesman, and their later experience of the revolution involved only pain and regret—but the abuelita surprised me one night, at the table, by saying that, on the contrary, they heard those speeches with great excitement. No one liked Batista, no one who wasn’t directly benefiting from his thuggery and favoritism. The powerful charisma of the freedom fighters had percolated down into even quiet, apolitical homes.

  There was a night back home, after a long meal, when for the first time after knowing her for so long, I got a bit pushy with her—asked her follow-up questions instead of just mm-hmming—and she gave me a description of what it had actually been like to watch this optimism turn to fear, and something worse, what that had actually looked like. When the milicianos first came from the mountains, she said, “they come to say hello with this necklace made of pieces of wood and a gold cross.” They mugged for the cameras with these crosses in their teeth. I asked why. “For you to look at. To pretend that they are Christian. That they believe in God.

  “Everybody cooperate with Fidel,” she said. “Everybody was happy that we had the opportunity to have all the freedom that he promise.” She taught adult literacy classes at night.

  Change came with the arrival of the comites, one house per block, appointed as the government representative for its households. The rapidity with which that degenerated into spying and becoming complicit in spying had been breathtaking to watch play out in stark anthropological terms. Within months, they were taking children aside at school and asking them about their parents. The parents started pulling the children out. The first nonpolitical families started to flee. People betrayed their neighbors to the comites. A woman who lived in the neighborhood, a woman named Solita, “somebody accuse her of having fried pork in her house. And they make—she was a teacher—they make a public, ¿come se llama?, juicio?” Trial. “Exactly. Accusing her of having pork.”

  My wife’s grandfather had let it be known that he was against the Castros—not because he had preferred Batista; in fact, the family had some obscure connection, that I’ve never been able to get anyone to be forthcoming about, to one of the other revolutionaries in the mountains, a rival who was executed not long after the uprising—in any case it was known that the family’s sympathies did not lie with the communists. “I remember one time we going to the farm,” she said, “and when we was coming back, we stop in Mario’s grandmother’s house, and we saw my brother passing on the road very fast. We get scared. We say, ‘What happened?’ He says, ‘The police is going to ask for, getting into your house.’ And at this time we was already saving some American money to come here. And you believe or not? The first thing that I do in the house was burning the dollars. To be
sure that they don’t find it out.”

  The party came and took away the family business. They took the store. They took the car, covered in tobacco advertisements. They took “a house of birds.” Not yours anymore. They took a little dog, named Mocha. They took pictures off the wall. They came in and counted the number of pictures, and took a certain percentage of them. Absurd things. They took away the family’s tiny beach house in Playa del Rosario, “gave it to some fishman.” But this succession of losses came to seem indistinct against what was happening outside. The picture had darkened. “So bad, so cruel all the things that they do it,” she said. “The television was on all day long.” She meant both that they were watching all day long and that the revolutionaries were transmitting constantly. There was “a man that the name Blanco,” she said. And his trial concerned “if he abuse the farmers, if he do all these things that accuse him to do it.” They found him guilty. “Then the people go to the street, singing, ‘Paredon paredon paredon!’ Paredon means ‘kill in front of the wall.’ And then they put this in television. And you see the brain of this man jumping out. It was getting gross and gross and gross.” She resigned her job, and they essentially went into hiding.

  She got her two children out first, my mother-in-law and her brother, on waivers made possible by the CIA-initiated, Catholic-sponsored airlift known as Pedro Pan. The story goes that the CIA started spreading rumors on the island that the government was about to take away the children, raise them in camps. People panicked, and the planes were waiting to fly them away. The children wound up living with Catholic families all over the United States or, in this case, with an aunt in North Carolina. Eventually Wei-Wei and her husband got out, through Mexico, and joined the children. But Pedro Pan tore apart many families.