Wednesday, February 18, 2004. Can’t get a cab this morning, every cab is occupied. The smart people are wearing quilted jackets with hoods. Some seem fairly comfortable in light jackets. People in T-shirts only have their arms crossed and are shivering as they walk. Another cool morning in Havana. Some would call it cold. The ones without jackets, for instance. It’s somewhere between twenty-seven and twenty-six degrees Celsius. From my window I see that everyone who has a jacket is wearing one and everyone who doesn’t have one is envious. And cold. I am very privileged. I have three jackets with me and three others at home. Disgusting! How the bourgeoisie gets a bad name. But all six are rather scruffy and from the early 1970s. Nobody will mistake me for Bret Easton Ellis.
My green fountain pen is even older, but not scruffy at all, like an old car from the 1950s that has been lovingly maintained, and it seems to love Cuba. Upon arrival, the pen immediately started producing a richer flow of ink and with a longer time between fill-ups. Even on a coolish day like today it’s working more smoothly than when I bought it for two dollars at age seventeen.
All morning someone in a large block of flats across the street has been playing the drums, perhaps to keep warm. The drumming is good-natured, intricate, impossible to dislike.
Melba adores my T-shirt. It shows a pair of belugas, mother and baby, swimming together in a pristine sea with blissful smiles on their faces. She doesn’t ask me to translate the caption – Wildlife at Risk – but she asks if I have any children, which makes sense, because it’s the kind of T-shirt a daddy would wear. Melba has very thick hair, well brushed, with only a few streaks of grey, and close-cropped at the sides and back. She is small and with a mode of dress that is carefully chosen for a mature woman with flair. The jacket she is wearing this cool morning would seem a bit loud on a man, even a young man, with its multicoloured checks, but it looks perfectly fine on Melba.
Yesterday in Havana Vieja I came across numerous old Afro-Cuban grannies dressed up in floral hats and brilliant Aunt Jemima dresses, sitting here and there on concrete steps or little wooden boxes and puffing away on extra-long, extra-large Cuban cigars. Actually they’re not really puffing, they’re just holding those cigars cold for atmospheric effect, and as visual aids to amateur photographers with no time to spare. They probably have to give them back to the boss at the end of their shift.
One of these grannies had a medium-size brown dog, with short hair, and it was very well behaved, almost too well. The poor pup had also been decked out in a little Aunt Jemima junior dress, and with a floral cap on its head – and a pair of overlarge sunglasses with thick white plastic frames. When I spoke to this mutt, and tickled him behind the ears, he looked over his glasses at me very sadly with deep soulful eyes and not enough energy to move his neck or wag his tail.
Could these dogs have been sedated for the benefit of the tourists, to facilitate easier snapshots? Or perhaps because Cuban dogs have an instinctive dislike for tourists, and tend to be snappy with them? Now and then a Cuban will make a sudden unexpected move, but tourists do this constantly. Makes a dog kind of nervous and in need of a good doggy Demerol. Not a knockout drop, just a little something that will stop the average hound from giving a hoot about anything.
The numerous other elderly Aunt Jemimas, similarly attired, included skinny women with skin like leather, and others corpulent and shining, smiling like the tropical sun, and they may be sweeping the streets with brooms, or tending to the trees and flowers in the various parks that were apparently such an eyesore ten years ago but now are just so pretty and so dreamlike, as beautiful as they had been in all their ancient colonial splendour.
My dedo doloroso is killing me. At the Hotel Havana Libre I painfully wait in a long lineup at the front desk. When I finally get up to the cashier, she tells me they don’t do cash advances any more, though they used to, when A. was here. I have to go outside, turn left, and go down the road a bit. So I hobble to the little bank, trying to keep my mind off my agony, and there are two long lineups in there, one for the cash machine and one for the counter. I get into the one for the counter as it seems slightly shorter, but after a minute or so a big serious-looking cop, in his fifties, shoulders me out of the one lineup and into another. I think he’s trying to even up the lines, but he’s doing a poor job of it. When I ask why he’s taken me out of the short lineup and put me in the long one, he puts me back into the short one (except it’s now longer than it has been but still not longer than the other lineup).
So now I just wait motionlessly while an exceedingly lengthy transaction is taking place. Then the cop brings in a pregnant woman and escorts her to the front of the queue. Then two women from a store with lots of cash to deposit come in the back door and are ushered likewise to the front of the queue. Then one of the cash machines breaks down, so that line is placed at the end of my line. But when the people complain about being put at the end, they are given a lineup of their own, parallel to my lineup, even though there is just one teller, so the teller has to make sure he takes one person from one line followed by one from the other.
When I finally get my cash I go out looking for a polyclinico. And now I’m sitting in a cool shady waiting room waiting for the doctors to see my dedo doloroso, which sounds more dignified and serious than “sore toe.” I’m close to tears thinking of others somewhere in the world whose toe may be even sorer than mine.
There are two elderly ladies in the waiting room and they have lost something. They had been having a quiet chat and now they have the sofa upside down and are shaking it. It’s the white woman’s gold hoop earring that has been lost, but her black friend is looking for it every bit as hard. I have one shoe off for the pain, but am hopping around, lifting up the other sofas, then I get down on my hands and knees searching for the earring, which must have rolled somewhere. The black woman points to the white woman’s ear, the one with the hoop in it, and says the one we’re looking for is just like that one. Now they are giggling, so we give up, straighten the sofas out, and sit down. The white woman is trying to remember where she last noticed she had both hoops. Next thing I know they’ve decided my toe is more important than the lost earring. They get down on their knees and examine the damage. They ooh and aah and commiserate tenderly. They make me feel I’ve come to the right place already, and I haven’t even seen the doctor yet. You can really tell you’re not in Canada.
Dr. Melba and Dr. Monica, when I earlier showed them the state of my toe, were not at all impressed. They seemed to think it was nothing. So when I got in to see the polyclinico doctors on duty (two, both female and youngish), even they managed to give me the impression I was overreacting to a very minor wound. Lazily, between much chit-chat of a personal nature, both on the phone and off, they disinfected and bandaged the toe. Then they gave me a spool of medical tape to take with me. And a half-litre bottle of cloruro de sodio .9%, enough to last a lifetime of sore toes. And of course it was all on the state. They didn’t even require my signature, or to fill out any forms. They didn’t even want to see my passport. The only thing they forgot was the extra cotton batten to go with the extra tape and I was too shy to ask for it.
But it all seemed right somehow. I kept thinking this is truly ideal, there is no valid reason why it shouldn’t be like this in Canada, and everywhere else. The only time I had more impressive medical treatment was in a tiny Fijian hospital in a remote village up in the hills where I went with dangerously infected sunburn sores on the tops of both feet. The very large and kind female Fijian doctors had to fight with the skinny little snobbish male Indian pharmacist who insisted they were treating me wrongly, I should be given drug A rather than drug B. “They want to put antibiotic eyedrops on your feet?” he said. But the doctors won out. “Don’t worry,” they merrily told me, “he doesn’t know what he’s talking about, we’re doctors, he’s just a pharmacist who thinks he’s smart.” And I was right as rain the next day. Cuba isn’t the only country where the doctors seem more serious and well informed, and with a kind of boundless dedication to the sick and injured, rather than to their bank balance.
Meanwhile, back in Havana, I put my sock and shoe back on and feel a lot better. They give me the address of a larger polyclinico in Miramar that stocks walking sticks. I hobble up to the street and hail a cab. It’s an old beat-up pale yellow Lada. You have to lift the door a few inches before it will open. It is a terrible wreck, but the driver is very proud of it, in a melancholy hangdog sort of way. We understand and instinctively like each other. His name is Carlo, but he likes it when the tourists call him Charlie. He is sixty-three, and he can’t figure out how to get the car going faster than twenty miles per hour, which gives me the opportunity to observe certain aspects of Cuban traffic. Even the bicyclists are passing him. He keeps as far right as possible, to cut down on the horn-honking from the rear. Our route is lined with old Spanish palaces, which were empty and falling apart ten years ago but are now beautifully restored, sparkling in the sun, and housing embassies, cultural centres, government offices, medical labs, concert halls, lecture halls, art galleries, various non-government organizations, and so on.
When we get to the larger polyclinico, Charlie kindly comes in with me. There are three canes hanging from hooks on the wall behind the main counter. I choose the black one. It is twelve pesos. So I give the attendant the smallest I have, a twenty-peso bill. She looks very confused. Why doesn’t she just give me eight pesos in return? Then I realize my twenty-peso bill was really the tourist pesos, fixed on the U.S. dollar, so then I am very embarrassed and don’t know what to do. But Charlie, who has been having a little siesta on his feet, suddenly leaps to my rescue. He hands the woman eight pesos (thirty cents) from his own pocket and off we go.
This was definitely a poor person’s cane. This wasn’t the sort of cane you buy at Shoppers Drug Mart for twenty bucks. It wasn’t black, it was dark green with a black rubber handle that was attached by a screw to the cane and was already coming loose. But it felt good in my hand, I felt ready for anything. I wouldn’t be bothered by touts and hustlers any more, because the chicas would see I had a cane, a sign of aged impotence, and the chicos would be worried I might be a homophobe and hit them with it.
Charlie took me back to the Havana Libre, where I blew twenty dollars reading Canadian newspapers in the Cyber Café. Southern Ontario is warming up, it’s now zero degrees Celsius, and Paul Martin’s government seems to be going down the drain with a heavy burden of petty scandals. That twenty dollars was wasted because when I got back to the bar, I met two Torontonians, newlyweds who had decided on Varadero Beach for their honeymoon, but it’s been too cold for swimming or sunning, so they signed up for a day trip to Havana. They were wearing identical Toronto Maple Leafs sweaters and black-and-white Canada ball caps. It turned out we live exactly two subway stations away. They filled me in on what I’d already been filled in on, but I didn’t mind because news from home is always worth hearing twice. They also implored me to visit them at their favourite bar in Toronto when I get back, and described it in wonderful detail, but I forgot to write down the name of it.
Cuban bartenders don’t fanatically measure their drinks, so tipping them liberally pays off very well, as does shaking their hand and introducing yourself, offering them a cigar, etc. I’m now nursing my toe, freshly bandaged and treated, at the main-floor circular bar at the Havana Libre, and I am also nursing my well-deserved gin and tonic with Angostura bitters and about three ounces of gin for the price of one. A waiter is taking three glasses of red wine to a table behind me, and the servings are widely disparate. There will be a bit of a squabble no doubt over who gets which glass. Hard not to love a country like this. Cuba no problemo, as they say, hereabouts, constantly.
The Restaurant El Barracón is also on the first floor. A. says the food here was wretched, so it better be better than it was ten years ago or it’s no tip from me. The ancient limestone coral walls and pillars of the original building are exposed, for a pleasant multicolour effect, with numerous natural trailings of green and orange leeching through the thin whitewash, and with ancient rings for horses also exposed in the old walls, cut into place long before this early postmodern hotel (formerly known as the Havana Hilton) was dreamt of. There’s an unusually good three-man mariachi band, with a singer who does “My Way” better than Frank Sinatra, followed by “Only You” better than the Platters. They even made that dull old chestnut “La Rumba” sound good. I had a bowl of lobster soup and a large serving of white rice and black beans.
They have me sitting behind a stout seventeenth-century pillar, so I can listen to the band without having to watch it. And when they finish “La Rumba,” I get up from my table and step out from behind the pillar in order to applaud and be seen applauding. When I sit down, the singer, who looks about fifty, handsomer than Frank but not as rich, in spite of being a great singer, comes to my table and thanks me for my enthusiastic response, which was definitely deserved, he seems to be saying, but seldom forthcoming, because people are so cheesy, and can’t tell good mariachi music from bad these days. The bad bands give the good ones a bad name. I didn’t have any requests, but I had a dollar for him, a good handshake, and a lot of deep eye contact – three things that are still very much appreciated in Cuba.
Charlie told me today that all the different car-rental agencies are about the same price, the same value, etc. They’re all standardized by the ministry responsible for car rentals. So I think I’ll rent a car tomorrow and just get out of here in search of interesting information and excellent experiences. In the meantime, I’m up to page 232 of Islands in the Stream, where Hemingway says of a certain character: “…He was an excellent car handler with beautiful reflexes in the illogical and neurotic Cuban traffic.”
Illogical and neurotic, eh? Could Hemingway have been projecting his own death-wish demons onto the poor people of Cuba? I shall rent a car, hit the highways and rural routes, and find out for myself. Till then, my first impressions indicate the motorists aren’t homicidal, or even mildly hostile, as is the norm in cities like Toronto, nor do they have that special resentment toward pedestrians Toronto drivers love to display. Give me neurotic and illogical over homicidal any day. But the more neurotic and illogical the driving is, if it is, the sooner I’ll be back in Havana, returning the keys to the rental agent.