Thursday, February 26, 2004. The windows in my room on the second floor were shuttered, with nothing between me and the noise from the street, causing me to lie awake for hours listening to a wild cacophony of frenzied yelling back and forth, ambulance sirens, kids kicking cans, and a tourist car that got stuck in a gutter that took three or four men thirty minutes to push back onto the road, with the engine gunning and squealing with a decibel rating far above the recommended level. If this was Ciego de Ávila, what must Baghdad be like?
In Cuba if one sees a toilet with a lid on it he or she must be sure to use it, if possible, because it may be a long time before another shows up. They do tend to get stolen. In fact so many have been stolen they’re practically extinct.
If the United States really wished to impress the Cubans, it would immediately send them totally gratis a small gift of five million unbreakable plastic toilet seat lids. It wouldn’t cost much, but every time a Cuban went to the toilet he’d send a little song of loving gratitude to the United States of America. Bombs create enemies, toilet lids create friends.
And light bulbs too. This is one of the few Cuban hotels I’ve been in where there are reading lamps, one on each side of the bed. But there were no bulbs in them. The bulbs weren’t burnt out, they were AWOL.
I paid six dollars for the all-you-can-eat special last night and when I took my plate to the food table there was nothing that tempted me, not even the salads. So, in spite of the noise, and the bad food, the people were nice, and they were quite aware their service was, in general, lousy. The chef went into the kitchen and whipped up a “chicken supremo” plate just for me, but even that was tough going. The staff wasn’t apologetic, but they kept glancing into my eyes for signs of displeasure. I insisted that everything was fine.
The menu for the free breakfast has all sorts of wonderful things on it, but when you go to place an order in the morning all the interesting items are unavailable – no eggs, no this, no that. But the coffee’s hot. So I managed to have four cafecitos and some bread. Gina handed me a little slip of paper on the way out, all it said on it was orange juice, and she asked me to sign it. Why? I didn’t even have orange juice. But then I woke up and realized it was just so that I couldn’t come back and order another free breakfast. You never know what some scoundrels will try. But not this one.
As I was gobbling up the chicken supremo last night, in came a blind man who had his hand on the shoulder of his friend guiding him. The blind man was a medium-height middle-aged white man, very sloppily dressed and with hair sticking out all over, and his seeing-eye human was a tall and very happy-looking well-groomed black man. Neither carried a white cane. They both took a table next to the piano, and after they got settled and had some coffee, the black man got up and helped the blind man to the piano, sat him down, and placed his hands on the keys.
This happy black man probably worked full-time for the pianist, and they seemed to appreciate each other a lot. As the blind man played numerous romantic songs from the 1940s, mostly of Cuban origin, his friend would bounce in his chair, keep time with his hand, smile, close his eyes with spasms of pleasure, then leap to his feat and lead the applause at the end of each song. About eleven o’clock he took his first break, and his friend lead him to the bathroom. Everybody was hoping he’d come back and play some more, but when they reappeared his friend lead him outside and they disappeared into the darkness.
Ciego de Ávila and Sancti Spíritus are both interesting little ciudads. Peaceful, family-oriented, but Ciego is deafeningly noisy all night long. Sure, I was only there one night. But you could tell this was an every-night sort of thing. And I will probably be returning to prove it.
It did quieten up a bit around one o’clock. I went out. There were people milling around on the street, but pretty well everything was locked up. There was a dance club playing loud disco music, but there were no dancers and the bar was closed. When I got back, most of the hotel staff were sleeping on sofas or soft armchairs, waiting for the morning shift. I spotted Gina snoring away, but very sweetly, of course, almost completely drowned out by the heavy-duty snorers. It was amazing how her skinny yellow arms were covered with fine black hairs, that with all the snoring going on would rustle like little leaves in the wind.
In El Parque Agramonte, in the light of the impressive Catedral Santa Iglesias of Camagüey (est. pop. 348,000), a man sits on a bench playing very quietly on his guitar with his case open, even though tourists are few. In strolling around the park, feasting on the faces of the people and the facades of the surrounding edifices, only one tout, a man with a very silly smile, came up to me. He was dancing and circling me, crouching over while keeping his distance, snapping his fingers, and saying, “Chica chica? Chica chica chica?” repeatedly. And behind him, sitting on the base of a stone wall next to an antique cream-coloured roadster, were two skinny twin girls about sixteen very nicely dressed and as cute as buttons with bright red lips and huge white-toothed smiles on their dark black faces, hoping that I would say yes. I apologetically declined, claiming to be on important business.
There was a barbershop adjacent to the park, with three tall black barbers sitting there in their white smocks waiting for business. I’ve never had a shave from a barber, and I haven’t come across any decent blades or shaving soap in Cuba so far. So here’s my chance. I kept walking all the way around the park, psyching myself up for my first big shave administered by a professional, and in passing I said hello to a guy smiling behind the wheel of a 1928 Model A Ford with the top nicely cut off so that it looked like a hot rod from old Archie comics. When I got back to the barbershop, just a few minutes later, all three barbers had become wide awake and busy with customers, and there were three more customers waiting. There’s a moral here somewhere. Don’t walk around the park till you’ve had a good shave.
So I head back to find the guy with the old Ford, see if he’ll give me a tour of the town, but he’s disappeared. He probably would have loved to give me a tour. He was otherwise occupied, like the three barbers, except that with them I knew where they were and what they were doing, but as for this guy with the Model A, I think he went for a little tour all on his own. I’d forgotten that you have to be able to strike like a rattler if you want to be a good travel writer.
Two Canadian guys were sitting on an Agramonte park bench. I’d walked right past them, unnoticing, in a tropical daze, although I did vaguely notice English being spoken. A pot-bellied red-haired fellow yelled out, “Hey, Eaton’s Centre.” He was referring to the silver logo on my black shoulder bag, which happened to be over my shoulder at the time. So I turned and looked at him with my Team Canada logo on my bright red baseball cap, and they said, “Team Canada! Eaton’s Centre! You must be a Canadian.”
So I sat down with them. The skinny fellow, maybe a bit older, stood up all the time his friend and I were sitting on the bench. He was from Sault Ste. Marie. “See, I’m a steamfitter, eh?” he said. “So I make a lot of money, eh?” But then he lost 150 grand in the Nortel disaster. It was his life savings, and the loss changed his life. So now he works at his trade, and when he’s accumulated enough money he comes down to Cuba for a few months. He usually comes to Camagüey, in fact he married a woman here and they had a child together. But then he became increasingly disaffected with his wife, because she was basically a chica, a street hooker, and he thought he’d saved her from that, and given her a whole new life of respectability and freedom from hunger. But now she was slipping back into it. She missed the old life, working the streets, hustling tourists.
“Heartbreaker,” I said, full of sympathy. It doesn’t take long for a young woman to get bored with an old guy, even if he is a generous Canadian. “There’s a lot of heartbreakers around here, man,” he said.
The red-haired fellow was a chubby real-estate agent, from Hamilton, and he too works part of the year and spends the rest of the time here. Both were about fifty. The real-estate guy knew a cousin of mine. When I told them I love to pick up hitchhikers, then put on the air conditioning full blast to see the looks on their faces, they said, “Cubans hate the cold. When the air conditioning is on they hate it and beg us to turn it off.” But in my experience, they are overjoyed when I switch it on full blast in the car, and when I ask if it’s too cold they say, No, no, we love it!
The guy from Hamilton was an opinionated person in the disparaging redneck style made famous by Don Cherry in sports or the various right-wing columnists in Canadian tabloids. He wanted an update on Canadian news, so I went over all the new scandals I could think of. When I mentioned the Governor General, Adrienne Clarkson, was having her expenses checked, he said, “I hate that broad.” When I mentioned that former cabinet minister Sheila Copps had lost her riding, he said, “I hate that broad too.” And so on. But he was okay. When I told him about the old Model A Ford I’d seen a few minutes ago, he told me he knew that guy and he had a little Suzuki engine under the hood: “You never know what you’re going to find under the hood of a Cuban car, except that you can be pretty sure it won’t be what you would expect there to be. Good old Cuban know-how. Engine-uity.”
It seemed odd that he spoke well of the Cubans in general, but his attitude toward Canadian politics, except for the most right-wing party, was intolerant, and he also hated unions, except for the police union. He hated environmentalists period, and he wasn’t very happy about Canada’s unwillingness to join President Bush in his various invasions of little countries. But he had much sympathy for Cubans, although he insisted that anyone wearing shiny black-leather shoes was a spy. He and the steamfitter had met Christopher P. Baker, the author of Moon Handbooks: Cuba, and had a few drinks with him. They hadn’t seen the book so I showed them my copy and they were very impressed. The chubby chap said Baker knew a lot about Cuba, and he was a very interesting guy to drink with, but there was one thing about Baker that he found disturbing: his ponytail. “I don’t know what to say,” he said, “about a guy who is sixty years old and has a ponytail.” He looked as if he was going to spit. I said I’d love to meet him, he seems to know every square inch of Cuba, he’d be a spellbinder over a beer or two. “For sure, but that ponytail’s gotta go.” Why? “A guy sixty years old with a ponytail? You gotta wonder about a guy like that.” I didn’t care how he wore his hair, my only beef about the book is that he seems to interpret certain things in as negative a way as possible, but he never goes overboard with his positive statements about things he likes, and he emphasizes too much the dangers of being mugged and otherwise cheated and robbed. He stops short of referring to Cuba as a “communist hell-hole,” however.
The chubby fellow said he used to go to Santiago de Cuba every year, but he switched to Camagüey because Santiago was “too poor, you can’t do anything with the people, you just have to be saying no all the time, and that’s no fun, you can’t help everybody, you just can’t.” They’d be waiting at his front door when he woke up in the morning. So he had to get out. Soon he’d be getting out of Camagüey probably, though so far he hasn’t had such problems. When I mentioned Havana, he adopted a contemptuous look and said he had no time for that place. But he wouldn’t say why. I figured it would be because a foreigner can’t spend pesos in Havana as easily as he can in the smaller cities, and maybe the people there are too sophisticated for his tastes.
But he had brains. For instance, he was studying Spanish very diligently, and showed me his textbooks and notebooks to prove it. When they wanted to know what I was doing, I told them I was gathering material for a book of poetic impressions of Cuba. It dawned on them right away that I might be counted on to give them a bit of free publicity in the book, and they didn’t require any free publicity just now. So first the skinny guy said he had to go. He said he’d look up my books for sure, but he didn’t ask my name or the titles. He was supposed to meet his new girlfriend half an hour ago. After he left, the chubby fellow said of him, admiringly, that even though his wife ran out on him he still gives her two hundred dollars a month in child support. He also maintained he has no problem with Cuban summers. You acclimatize quickly, he said, you adapt to it, you know how to find a cool spot and stay there when the sun is blazing. He said the saving grace for most Cubans who are underemployed, or completely unemployed, is to belong to some kind of cultural/political/historical association, where you can get out of the house, which may or may not be comfortable and cool. You’re always welcome at the club hall, and you can just sit there, watch TV, chat with people just like yourself, and play chess or dominoes, and feel somehow important. He said time goes more slowly here winter or summer. When I went to jot something in my notebook, he skittishly scurried away, saying he was late for his Spanish lesson.
Heading east out of Camagüey, I had an interesting group of three people in the car. First stop was to pick up an Afro-Cuban about thirty, a very shy woman with chubby cheeks. She indicated that she spoke no English and couldn’t understand my wretched Spanish. But before we could take off, a happy married couple in their midtwenties tapped on the window, and they got in the back seat. The couple spoke excellent English, and we chatted away about all the little things that were happening in their lives. It turned out the man was an ardent sports fisherman, like Yandys, and worked as a cook in a large glamorous new hotel just outside Camagüey. He told me if I were to get there about two o’clock he’d personally cook me a really good pescado fresh from the sea.
He also said he’d take me fishing if I were interested. It seems the only people who get to go fishing work in the hotels. Boats of any kind seem in short supply. I told him I very much appreciated the offer, but I’m an unlucky fisherman, I never catch anything. Ever since I was a kid, it’s been the same story: everybody in the boat will be catching fish left and right except for me. I glanced at the black woman and she was trying to suppress a laugh.
“Aha!” I said. “You speak English! I caught you in a lie!” She smiled guiltily and confessed. I don’t know if she really needed to get out at that point, or she was just making a stop request out of acute embarrassment. But as I pulled over, and she was getting out, I asked what she did for a living. “I’m a policewoman,” she said in perfect English, blushing through her black skin.
In a large electronics store just off El Parque Céspedes, in the beautiful sixteenth-century city of Bayamo (est. pop. 192,600), I tried to buy a new tape recorder. This simple transaction involved three salespeople and the manager, much running up and down stairs, and at least three phone calls to head office in Santiago de Cuba. When the transaction was finally complete, it turned out they had inadvertently charged me the wrong price, and we had to start all over again, with another three phone calls, and the manager, and numerous Cubans were leaning against the counter and watching with glee the fuss over this cheap tape recorder. When I got back to the car and put on my glasses it turned out it wasn’t a tape recorder, it was just a tape player. I had to take it back again. Turned out they didn’t have any actual tape recorders in stock, so another conglomeration of paperwork was required to give me a refund. I had to present my passport for the third time.
But then I spotted a box of ten blank tapes on the shelf, and the price was almost as much as the tape player, so we just made a simple switch. No paperwork at all, except for that involved in cancelling the transaction.
It was mid-afternoon, and I made a deal with myself. If the ice cream at the crowded Tropicrema is as good as it looks, I’ll spend the night at Bayamo. If not, I’ll move on. So I stood in line, the only gringo among hundreds of Cubans, each of whom was buying two ice-cream cones and putting them together head to head, and licking them as they twirl the pointy ends of the cones. With Cubans, ice-cream cones are like shoes, they only come in pairs.
But when I finally was about to be served it turned out it was pesos only. Like a fool, I flashed a dollar bill and pleaded, but they just shook their heads solemnly. So I zipped around the corner to the bank to buy some pesos, and just as I got there the bank closed.
Since I still didn’t know if the ice cream was any good, I decided to stay overnight in Bayamo if there happened to be a front balcony room available at the gorgeous and attractively restored Hotel Royalton, overlooking the parque. The desk clerk, a friendly fellow who hasn’t had a word from his brother in Toronto for a decade, said there were plenty of vacancies but unfortunately none at the front. I told him about my deal with myself, and he smilingly sympathized, but couldn’t do anything about it.
So I decided to stay if there was an Etesca office where I could check my e-mail and see if everything was fine at home. But there wasn’t one.
On the way out of Bayamo I passed a little hospital for people seeking treatment for the kind of eye diseases often caused by poor nutrition. It was a restful little place, with about six or seven men sitting outside on hard chairs and quietly squinting at passersby.
Everybody in town has ice cream – except for me and these poor fellows.
Farther out on the highway there was a penal institute way back from the road, and two handsome bright young well-dressed fellows in handcuffs were being marched along the highway toward it. These kids didn’t seem like bad guys at all. They seemed full of confidence, giving no hint that they were frightened, depressed, or even slightly worried about their fate. They may have been “dissidents” – overly vociferous anti-abortionists who might have been pleased that they got a light sentence, that they will be able to spend some time praying in their cell, and also spreading the word to the other prisoners about the evils of abortion. Farther on, a green military truck was stalled on the road, and some soldiers were trying to push it to get it started.
Those two Canadian guys in Camagüey told me a schoolteacher makes ten pesos a day. They were dead-on. I picked up a charming, happy, uncomplaining hitchhiker, a schoolteacher, twenty-three, who says she makes the equivalent of ten U.S. dollars a month, which is exactly ten pesos times twenty-seven days. She teaches eight hours a day, five and a half days a week, and has to hitchhike fifteen miles back and forth six days a week. “The bus is so uncomfortable,” she said.
Life is cruel. If she only knew how much cash I had on me – US $637, plus a card with a line of credit which, though modest by Canadian standards, would have dazzled her. And what do I do for it? Yet she lives rent-free, while I’m often on the verge of being unable to pay my rent. Isn’t that odd?
We were passing through sugar-cane country. We passed a billboard saying, The struggle is day by day, but the victory will be eternal. We exchanged quick glances, silent but meaningful. I decided it was impossible to decide who was the more fortunate child, the one born in Cuba or the one in Canada, though Canada’s infant mortality rate is slightly higher.
After the teacher got out, I stopped for a large group of schoolgirls waiting for a bus, accompanied by a couple of teachers. Three happy eight-year-olds hopped in the back seat. I hopped out and ran around to open the back door, helped one of the kids out, and put her in the front seat. Then I thought I better do up their seat belts, an accident would ruin our day. All the other kids, and the teachers, were sitting there watching this with great glee.
These kids had obviously never seen a seat belt in their lives. They tried wrapping them around their necks, but couldn’t get them fastened. So I had to get out again and run around and clip the seat belts for them with even greater laughter from the rapt crowd. The girls in the car were giggling like maniacs, and so were the rest of the gang, watching from the little pickup station. Then I hopped in the car, did my own belt up, and took off.
Their uniforms were white blouses and short maroon skirts. The girls were eight, no more than nine. As I took off I noticed the male teacher had been among the crowd of kids laughing. He seemed pleased about my seat-belt concern, even though he deemed it unnecessary because nobody uses seat belts in Cuba. Only rental cars have seat belts. Adding to the unnecessariness was the fact that the girls were only going about three miles. And had hitched hundreds of miles already in their young lives. They were so pretty – and they knew a bit of English.
At another point I picked up two older schoolgirls, about fourteen at a guess, also pretty. They were in the back seat, and in the front was a gap-toothed unsavoury-looking character who smelled as if he hadn’t changed his clothes since the Papal Visit in 1998. With a big evil smile, this slob looked at me and said loud enough for the kids to hear, “You and I and those two in the back, we could do the f**ky f**ky.” I was embarrassed as all get out, but when I glanced in the rear-view mirror, the girls definitely were not embarrassed: they looked and sounded so cute with their heads close together in mock fear, saying, “No, no, por favor, señors, no!” Giggle giggle!