XXII
31 July 1990
My dear Alejandra,
Here’s hoping that you are well. We are fine, given the circumstances. I’ll admit everyone’s a little jumpy, a little nervous about what will happen next.
Here in Cuba, we are feeling our isolation and the boundaries of the island. I can tell, from his speeches, from the frustration on his face, that El Comandante is also worried, however much it may feel like a betrayal to say that. I think that the defeat—at American hands, I have no doubt—of the Sandinistas is a big blow to us as well. We are the only ones left standing, it seems.
The rumors that you are hearing—the ones you wrote about—they are true. In the city, everyone is allotted three-quarters of a pound of chicken twice a month and that much beef once a month. At the Jewish butcher, where there are 650 of us assigned by our ration books, we get three-quarters of a pound of kosher beef three times a month. I am sad to report that, suddenly, there is a lot of interest in Judaism, both from Jews who never practiced and from regular people inquiring about conversion. Egg prices jumped from 10 to 15 cents. Bread rationing began this month in some areas.
It is also true, yes, that some young hooligans have doctored some of the signs on the roadways to read “Socialism Is Death.” Recently, some graffiti appeared near the university which said “¿Hasta cuándo Fidel?”—all of which depresses me terribly. Orlando and I joined the volunteers that helped wash away the offending words. They did it again the next night, but we got up at 4 a.m. and managed to have the walls clean before morning, so only a handful of people saw it.
I don’t know anything about the incident you described—about the man who rose from the audience during the World Cup boxing match here and shouted “¡Abajo Fidel!’’ Rafa says he saw something on TV for an instant during the match but he couldn’t tell what it was, or what happened. The TV just went blank.
That has been happening a lot lately. We’re experiencing unexpected blackouts. There is nothing to do then, nothing to say. Ester gets very tired very quickly when that happens. She tends to just go to the bed (then she gets up at the crack of dawn, with the roosters that you can now hear all over the city).
But I can’t sleep no matter what I do. I have taken to walking around the neighborhood. I walk slowly because I’m suddenly very tired, too, but I can’t sleep anyway. In the early evening hours, people just hang out outside, playing dominoes by moonlight, reading the numbers with their fingertips like blind men. Citizens sit on their stoops, staring at nothing. There are also a lot of lovers who, with nowhere to go, must resign themselves to that same stoop. I see them all entangled, rather shamelessly actually, their dark faces melting one into the other. Havana is suddenly a city of shadows.
I’m sure you heard about everything that happened at the Spanish embassy. Poor Angela, she had to stay there through the entire crisis, until Spain recalled its ambassador. It was very hard on the entire family. Nobody knew what was going to happen. Angela said the people seeking asylum were all men, all very desperate it seems, and they wouldn’t talk to her, even though she was in charge of the paperwork for their requests—the asylum-seekers wouldn’t talk to any of the Cubans who work at the embassy, insisting they were all spies for El Comandante—and ended up threatening the Spanish employees there, although I don’t know how, since they weren’t armed. Thank god nobody was taken hostage, as happened at the Czechoslovakian embassy. It is all very delicate.
What I still don’t understand—perhaps you can explain it to me—is why these people want to leave. I know life is hard here—it will get harder before it gets better, I can feel it in my bones—but it is our country, after all. Who will defend it if not us? How can they want to go the U.S. when it is the source of all our problems?
Please don’t read this as a recrimination. I am not judging you in any way. I know you were just a baby when you left and had no input in that decision. I also know some of the machinations of that decision and I do understand—your father was never entirely comfortable in Cuba. He suffered a lot here, he felt very alone (until he met your mother).
Has it been better for him there? I suspect from your letters that he has finally found a place where he is comfortable, although I confess I marvel at your description of your parents’ neighborhood as Jewish. Here your father didn’t want to be around anything or anyone Jewish. When he was young, he had to be, because of Ytzak, but he never chose it of his own volition.
It’s getting dark here so I have to finish this letter. Again today we have no electricity. Please take care of yourself, Alejandra.
Un fuerte abrazo,
Moisés
P.S. Thank you for the vitamins. We are saving them for Paulina, who will need them most. We are also taking solace in the Goodwill Games, where we won over the Americans so spectacularly that the mercy rules had to be put into effect!
25 November 1990
My dear Alejandra,
I think you are too hard on your father. Just like you did not choose to go to the United States and be an American, he did not choose to be a Jew. Yet he’s stuck with it, with all that knowledge, all that anguish in his blood. It’s not unlike your situation as a Cuban in the U.S.: Even if you wanted to assimilate, to become one of them, you would still know in your heart that you are Cuban. You could not deny the experience of your mother’s saints, of this revolution. It has affected your life in a way that no American could possibly know.
So it is with your father and his very reluctant Jewishness. It is not a product of being in the U.S., it’s the way he’s always been, except for a very brief awkward but still golden moment back in the thirties. When he hastened back to his shame, I fought with him all the way, but it was a battle I couldn’t win. His demons are more than 500 years old, his experiences very different from mine: I have known all along who I am; he found out later in life and had to accommodate to that new and harsh reality. Imagine his dismay when he discovered who Saint Esterika really was!
Perhaps it has made it so that he is now always anticipating that what he knows as truth will mutate, maybe he is simply that much more fragile and believes the world can change in the blink of an eye. I always think of him as a man more capable of seeing the flaw on the baby’s cheek than its exuberance at being alive. There was always a sadness about him. Has that changed? I hope so.
Things here are both hectic and slow. On the one hand, change is constant—there are new laws, new regulations for everything every day. But the process of change itself is slow. Nobody really knows what’s going on, and they’re afraid everything will change again soon, so every step is taken very cautiously. Moreover, sometimes—with no electricity and no water or fuel—slow is the only speed available to us.
We are doing better here at home. We recently got bicycles for everyone—Orlando’s car is no longer working, as there is no fuel—and this has been a good thing. Everyone is getting plenty of exercise, even Ester, who initially refused to ride. Deborah, who is in art school now, has gotten very creative and is making drawings from coffee grounds and (I don’t approve but it doesn’t seem to matter), of all things, menstrual blood. Everyone assures me this is a phase, just like the Special Period itself.
Angela continues to work at the Spanish embassy, where things have calmed down considerably. She got Orlando an interview with a Spanish investment firm, Grupo Sol, which is planning some businesses on the island. I don’t know much about any of this, but after all these years and so many achievements, Orlando says he is sick of being an economist. I worry about foreigners in Cuba and about members of my own family working for them, but what can I do?
My problem is that I want Cuba for Cubans, not to the exclusion of others but so that we are not under anyone’s boot. I often wonder how much of this desire comes from being Jewish and my generation’s understanding of the Holocaust. I look at everything going on in Israel, with the intifada and the killings, and I think sometimes those are the consequences of our fears run amok.
Sometimes, I confess, I worry about my own capacity for extremes. Recently, some food concessions were opened in Havana, fast food, just like in the U.S., and people here were delighted, calling the sandwiches “McCastro’s,” and just the reference to the U.S. made it impossible for me to eat them. They were very popular for a while, then everybody found out they were made, at least in part, with soy, and Cubans—you know, carnivores that we are—rejected them fast. I suspect they’ll all be closed by the end of the year.
I’m rambling now. Thank you for the new supply of vitamins. I promise we will all take them this time, not just Paulina.
Un fuerte abrazo,
Moisés
P.S. I know the Vatican announced the pope will be here by the end of next year, but I’ll convert before that happens!
2 January 1991
My dear Alejandra,
We finally met Seth when he brought your letter. What a fine young man indeed! We were happy to see that you have remained friends, that because of you he is concerned about us, too.
Aside from the medicines and the art supplies for Deborah that you sent (she’s still using the coffee grounds, too, but, to my relief, has stopped painting with blood), he brought us jeans for Rafa and the girls, which pleased them tremendously, and small goodies like soap and perfume for the women. Orlando refused his gift of a shirt but accepted Seth’s offer to work for him as a chauffeur while he and his crew were here. Seth had a rented car and it was all very official, although terribly bureaucratic. Orlando earned dollar coupons that we were able to use at the diplo-tienda, which made Ester very happy.
Orlando, however, is not in very good spirits these days. He did not get the job with Grupo Sol after all. They are building a big new hotel in Varadero and will use some Cuban workers. They needed management consultants with a knowledge of finance better acquired in capitalist countries, and construction crews. But Orlando is neither as young nor as strong as other men who applied. I was relieved but he was distraught. He feels responsible for us—he thinks we cannot survive on the ration books because of the scarcities. As you know, there are lines everywhere these days. Sometimes it takes eight hours to buy onions, or a pair of shoes. Just recently Orlando was fined for being a colero—somebody who holds places in line for others, an act that is illegal when you charge for it. Then his frustration simply turned into shame.
I don’t know what to say to him. I know we will be okay, but I don’t know how to convince him that the revolution will take care of us, and so we both suffer. It reminded me of when your great-grandmother died, how your father blamed being Jewish for her death, and all I could do was put my arm around him and pat his shoulder. I was as inexplicably silent then as now.
In your last letter you asked me to tell you about a time when your father was glad to be a Jew. There was a period, I believe, when being a Jew symbolized both community and hope for him. But that same moment turned catastrophic and is what made him turn away most dramatically. To this day, I am not allowed to speak about it. I promised him this many years ago, in 1939, and time does not diminish that commitment.
I must confess, Alejandra, that I find it most extraordinary that he still prays on Friday nights. In Chicago, even surrounded by Jews, there is no obligation for him. I suspect there must be something in those moments of faith that makes him glad to be Jewish. Ask him. Perhaps he will surprise you.
Un fuerte abrazo,
Moisés
P.S. To answer your question, Saint Esterika is a purely marrano invention: They Christianized Purim by making Ester a saint. When your father found out nobody else in the world did that, he reacted the way Christian kids do when they discover the Three Kings are just their parents delivering presents on the Epiphany. He was miserable, defrauded, for weeks.