The Trip to Cuba

They have been swimming in the startling blue sea at Varadero. The bus driver told them that Varadero was once the playground of Fulgencio Batista, a humble mulatto who became a colonel in the Cuban army and then, like colonels all over the world often do, seized power in a military coup. He governed his country as a popular strongman with Washington’s backing, until Fidel Castro arrived from Mexico on the yacht Granma and toppled him. The bus driver is sober and middle-aged and tells his tale with studied impartiality.

Varadero now is a bit of Bondi and a bit of Bali. A few hotels of five or six storeys look out to sea, and a marina has been built, but it is mostly villas, regarding each other from sandy hillocks. On the beach, families dominate, with hordes of schoolchildren. The tourists are mostly Spanish, French and German. Young, saucy girls, mostly black, stroll and prowl. They have become used to Cuban prostitutes. Three blonde girls about sixteen, smoking, with short skirts and much jewellery, handbags slung over their shoulders, tried to enter their hotel in Havana. They kissed the security guards and generally carried on as if they knew everyone at the hotel, but the guards stood firm, escorting them off the premises.

The United States has won the Cold War and the Soviet Union, Cuba’s protector and provider, is in ruins. They are here for a couple of days, out of curiosity. They made a pact before leaving not to read books about Cuba, to ignore the media and neither to meet officials nor collect data. They will be tourists, taking Cuba as it comes. They will admire old Spanish terraces, stroll down promenades in the shade of established trees, visit churches and monuments to the revolution with equal courtesy, swim in the warm water, sample local food and music, talk to anyone they happen to meet and let the spirit of the Cuba, whatever it is, wash over them.

In Varadero, the memory of clear, warm water and white sand is marred by the discovery of oil spots on their legs and bathing suits, which must have come from the powerboats scooting about. The previous evening they had been to Cuba’s famous open-air nightclub, Tropicana, staged in a botanical setting of huge trees, including king palms, the national emblem. The sets and lighting were glitzy, the costumes would have suited Ziegfeld or the Folies Bergère, the chorus girls had long legs and bouncing bosoms—and the show was so boring that he began looking at his watch halfway through it. The setting had to be spectacular, the lighting had to be dazzling, the costumes had to be sensational, the show had to be non-stop and whizz-bang, because there was not much else to notice. The choreography was no more than three or four steps, incorrigibly connected with shimmering shoulders and wiggling hips. The music had three beats, always so fast and loud that, despite the airy setting, it was like being assailed by amplifiers in a café.

They longed for romance or sentiment or irony or humour. A couple of minor acts (tumbling twins on the trapeze) were diverting, but were quickly overtaken by another fast and furious round of spectacular floorshows. He glanced at his companion’s face, which showed the strain of striving for empathy. He longed for Mozart.

The show was a hit with tourists, all the thousand-plus seats occupied (and it had been playing since 1939). The couple sitting opposite, however, were having a row, the woman having enjoyed the show much less than the man. The smell of rum was strong at their table. Important people in dark suits (and red ties) were ushered to their seats. The atmosphere was vaguely sleazy. They had agreed that they needed the swim.

It is March. Like a clenched fist, a huge rainstorm rises from the sea. The bus driver tells them that Havana is “blacked out” and it is too dangerous to take the tunnel, so they make a circuitous return, entering the city near the railway station rather than the way they had left, which was by the old presidential palace and then immediately out along the coast. Back in Havana, at the Inglaterra Hotel, with its coloured glass windows, tiled walls and floors, high, decorated ceilings, they talk in the foyer to an American engineer who has spent twenty years in Cuba and is married to a Cuban. He tells them that his wife cried when she entered a supermarket in Colorado, where they are now living. She had never seen so many things to buy.

In the evening, they stroll hand-in-hand on cobbled streets. An old man is sitting on a step of the Museum of Natural Science, next to the Grand Theatre of Havana, which houses the National Ballet of Cuba.

“Come over here so I can speak to you.” His English is rounded, balanced, almost formal. He is delighted when Roman clicks heels obediently and salutes.

His name is Albert. He has been a sailor and has lived in London and Hamburg. He tries out a few words of German. He is beached in Cuba waiting to get to Tunis. He will probably have to go by air through Mexico, but he can’t afford the fare. He has been stranded for four months and hasn’t had a good meal for three days. Things are bad.

Why and how? They try to make their questions seem solicitous. “Let’s call it bad management,” he says slyly.

He asks about Australia. Plenty to eat? Housing? “Sounds alright,” he says. Roman’s companion, who is Indonesian, offers observations on the universal nature of poverty. He screws up his eyes as he follows her, not sure where she is taking him.

“Look,” he says, “I’ve never begged and I’m not begging now but could you do anything to help?”

Like what? “Well, how about a buck?”

They give him a buck. They are using American money. As they leave, some men who have gathered during the conversation give the clenched-fist communist salute, whether to record pleasure or irony is uncertain.

La Bodeguita del Medio is crowded, so they go to the Paris Café. Excellent German draft beer at eighty cents a pot. A kind of club sandwich—cheese and pressed ham in a roll—for $2. A chicken dish, skimpy, for $3.50. A sausage and potato bowl, oily, for $2.50. It is popular with tourists, but also with Cubans, who hand over their dollars (where do they get them?). A tall man, with a handsome, ravaged face, and a woman, petite, smothered in gypsy-style jewellery, hair bangers, very high heels, are having a night out. He is animated, she is intent on demolishing food and drink. Her birthday? An anniversary? His hand is on her knee, even between her legs. He is restless, up and down from his stool (they are sitting at the bar). He goes suddenly outside to chat to the queue of customers and the security guard, grins at Roman when he returns. She sits hunched up, drinking German beer and eating Cuban chicken (every last scrap, down to the bone), rarely speaking, occasionally going to a table to get condiments.

Next day, they see the man selling paintings in the street, including his own watercolours. They buy one for $8.

They watch a wedding procession of half a dozen cars, each sprouting streamers and loud music, the bride and groom at the front in an open, sports model. The evolution of the motorcar was frozen by edict in Cuba in the 1950s. Now, the streets are cluttered with large, well-preserved American vehicles with shiny bumpers and prominent tailfins. Progress of the wedding procession is slow and bystanders break away to walk or jog alongside, one hand touching the car, like secret service agents protect the president of the United States. By the time the wedding leaves them, it has attracted perhaps twenty public supporters. They ask themselves what happens when the procession reaches its destination. Presumably the wedding ceremony is over. Are the joggers now guests at the reception?

At the old presidential palace, which is now the Museum of the Revolution, they are prevented from seeing part of the exhibition, on the other side of a road, because a ceremony is being arranged on the road to give medals to workers for long and meritorious service. The museum guides are unable to help and an officious security official will not allow anyone through. They cajole and argue, but he will not budge—and becomes more officious by the minute. Eventually they give in. Alright, says Roman, but we want our $3 entrance fee back.

Consternation! The staff run around in circles, until a senior person appears from somewhere inside the building. He speaks a little English. Roman performs his ritual of indignation. The senior person takes them through the building until they encounter another security guard.

They wait while a long and agitated conversation takes place. Eventually, the museum official motions them through, while the security guard glowers. The official then guides them around the ceremonial gathering on the roadway, past the other security guard who had previously prevented them from seeing the exhibit, and then through the entire exhibition on a guided tour. The centrepiece is the famous yacht Granma, surrounded by iconic objects—the jeep in which Castro had conducted his military campaign, an aircraft that had defected to him, Russian missiles and other military hardware.

On their way to the Plaza of the Revolution, they encounter a boy, sitting on a heap of stones with his arm around a dog.

Boy: He can do tricks.

Surati: Like what?

Boy: Chase sticks.

She is not impressed. All dogs chase sticks and balls.

Surati: Can he catch rats?

They have left the elegance of old Havana and are in a cramped street with rundown terrace houses that look like slums. Four or five families are living in one house. On many of the small balconies, a small shack looks like storage, until you hear chickens clucking and pigs snorting.

Boy: I feed him.

Roman: You have money?

Boy: Cuba has plenty food.

They had been told at the hotel that on Thursdays, trucks came into old Havana with lettuce. Another day it may be tomatoes, or bananas or mandarins. There was not enough petrol to distribute all produce from the farms. In the tropical heat, vegetables were left to rot. There was one small market on the fringes of Havana, and it only took dollars. It was not clear why this market existed. If it were for tourists, it was hard to find.

Boy: Also education. Doctors and hospitals very good.

He recites the litany of Cuba’s social capital with an air of weariness, as if he is required to do so, while being at the same time proud of the achievement and determined that the outside world shall take note of it.

Surati: Why aren’t you at school?

Boy: No school today.

There are many festivals in Cuba. They leave the boy and his dog with expressions of goodwill for himself and his country. As a farewell gesture, he stands and shakes their hands.

He looks about fourteen, but he has a grave, proficient manner.

The Plaza of the Revolution is a grand space, green and clean, incongruous in the midst of slums and remnants of industry. Large Soviet-style edifices and a tall tower dominate, with a statue of Jose Marti. Their impression is that Marti, a nineteenth-century writer who became Cuba’s national hero in the independence struggle against Spain, is more iconic than Fidel Castro. Cubans seem to have avoided leadership fantasies. They have seen no huge public pictures of Castro, no monuments or statues to him, no streets renamed for him.

But he is highly protected. It is said that he lives as well as works in the long grey building behind the monument, which used to be the ministry of justice and is now the headquarters of the central committee of the communist party. All traffic entrances to the monument are blocked off, guard boxes are placed at either end of the sloped lawn on which the monument stands. Roman is not permitted to take photographs from the footpath. He is directed across the other side of the massive road, which is virtually a square. Presumably all this security, although it isolates the revolution from the people, is designed to prevent snipers or dissidents from getting close to Castro. Roman has no alternative official to pit against the security guard, as he had at the museum, so he dutifully crosses the huge square to take his photographs at a respectful distance.

An alert man in a little car drives up and offers to take them back to the Inglaterra for $3. His name is Frank and although he speaks only Spanish they make themselves understood. He can take them to Hemingway’s house, there and back, for $10. The tourist taxis are charging $30. They say they haven’t yet decided to visit the house. What about room 511 at the Ambos Mundos Hotel, which claims to be where Hemingway wrote For Whom the Bell Tolls? “It’s just a room,” says Frank. He will check regularly at the Inglaterra Hotel for their decision. Mobile phones do not seem to be common.

They are standing in a queue at the Paris Café when the manager arrives, remembers them from the previous day and inquires whether they like Chinese food. He has just opened a Chinese restaurant around the corner, called La Torre de Marfil. Today is its first day. They would be its first customers. He shows them the menu, which is reasonably priced. He explains that he runs five restaurants for the government in the area and more are opening up. He specialises in good food at low prices. “Not all tourists are rich.”

He takes them to a spacious, elegantly renovated establishment, with the usual heart-stopping Spanish courtyards and some beautiful old Chinese wood chests and cupboards, red mandarin upholstery, classic Chinese paintings and screens. A Chinese waiter appears and, they are told, a Chinese chef awaits their orders. Their friend the manager orders for them and it arrives quickly: two bottles of Cuban beer, two spring rolls, two plates of fried rice, a chicken dish and a salad of lettuce and tomato. It is delicious, the tastiest meal they have had in Cuba, the spring rolls done in the traditional fashion with hand-made pastry lining, the chicken crisp on the outside and soft and succulent on the inside, the salad three times the size of any salad they had been given before and the rice moist but not oily and plentifully laced with prawns and pieces of ham. It came to under $20 for the two of them, which was more than they would have paid if they had stayed in line at Café Paris, but better in quality. At the end, the Chinese chef came out, with his chef’s hat on, looking sheepish. They heaped congratulations on him, Surati advising him to spice up the sweet and sour sauce. How in Cuba could they discover a real Chinese who was such a good cook? He says his family has been in Cuba since his grandfather arrived from California to work in the fields of sugarcane.

At Santa Clara convent, now the National Centre for Conservation, Restoration and Museology, they are shown around by Francisco, who prefers to be known as Paco.

He provides the following information. The convent was for girls from the best families in Havana. They brought all their worldly possessions (including their slaves) with them, and when they died their wealth went to the church. The convent is now being restored by UNESCO—and has for the time being run out of money. All of old Havana is designated by UNESCO for preservation. Formerly, the wealthy families of Cuba lived in old Havana. They moved out to the suburbs, following the fashion in Europe and the United States. They rented their properties in old Havana—until Castro expropriated them. Now people who live in old Havana are mostly the families of the tenants who were there before the revolution took place. Some people are moving back in joint ventures with the government, turning their houses into cultural centres, with places for scholars and artists, but no major resettlement is taking place because there is no wealthy or even middle class in Cuba to undertake the renovation. They are all now living in Europe or Miami.

The guide book says the convent contains a public water fountain, a cemetery, a house built by a sea captain for his daughter, and a slaughterhouse. Paco has never heard of the slaughterhouse: the rest are all here. The sea captain’s house is partly reconstructed: it will become a restaurant with a rooftop dance floor. The cloister near it (there are three) will become a small hotel. The main cloister is in good order and is used for administration. The third cloister, which is badly decayed, will be restored eventually. They leave Paco in a melancholy state. The government does not have any money—and UNESCO’s funds are not enough.

They have left Chez Hemingway until last.

Frank takes them to the house, Finca La Vigia, now a museum. He delivers them to the gate, which is closed. They are told that the house is not open to the public this day. But the hotel said it was open today. No. Non. Two British tourists arrive, holding a guide book that confirms the museum is open on weekdays, except Monday. Today is not Monday. However, this fact makes no difference. Nicht. Nyet. A little group gather as the four foreigners plead to be allowed in for a few minutes. No. Non. Nicht. Nyet.

A tractor arrives, expecting to be let out with a load of leaves, branches and brush. The gate is opened. Roman steps inside and is immediately repelled. In retaliation, he stands in front of the tractor. It moves forward and he remains steadfast. Hullaballoo! Frank, thinking Roman is in danger, tries to pull him aside, an agitated female guard runs to get the police, onlookers triple in number. Surati declares that the man at the gate is unworthy of the great Cuban people, and holds up five fingers, repeating a refrain, “Just five minutes”. No. Non. Nicht. Nyet. The tractor driver throws his arms about, several new officials arrive from the compound, which is a small farm, the house hidden behind trees.

For ten minutes, Roman and Surati are stalwart at the barricades. The British couple leave. Eventually, Roman agrees to let the tractor through if the gate is left open. The tractor roars past, the driver angrily throwing his arms about, and the argument starts all over again. Just for five minutes. No. Not one minute, or even one second. Just to take photographs? Non. You can take photographs from the gate. Just to walk up the drive and around the house? Nicht. The museum is not open to the public today. It will be open tomorrow. Today it is closed. Nyet.

Surati counter-attacks. If this is how Cuba thinks it can get tourist dollars, it has another think coming. It has taken thirty hours for them to fly from Australia to Cuba. The figure 30 is written on notepaper and held up in front of the guard’s face. This was their last day. They were only asking for five minutes, illustrated by one outstretched hand after the other. Their plane leaves at 2 p.m. The figure 2 p.m. is written on notepaper and brandished.

A man arrives who is able to speak English. They explain their predicament. He explains it to the security guards, who understand it already and continue to say No, Non, Nicht and Nyet. Their spirits are beginning to flag, but Surati is determined, scolding the guards for their inhumanity, repeating the magical numbers, thirty hours, five minutes and 2 p.m. The gate remains open. Roman keeps saying that he wants to speak to the police, who have not arrived. He demands the name of the security guard. Surati demands the name of the house manager.

Then a relaxed couple, a young man and a young woman, saunter down the long driveway from the hidden house to the gateway. She apologises for her English, which is good, and sets about discovering the cause of the turmoil. Thirty hours! Five minutes! 2 p.m.! They are writers from Australia, wishing to pay homage to the man who made Cuba his home. “Writers!” She grasps at a new straw. She devises a solution. She will take them up to the house where the manager will explain why they cannot see it. While they ponder this illusion of a solution, it is apparently acceptable to everyone else. The English-speaker who had earlier translated for them smiles. Frank raises his hands in agreement. The head security guard mounts a bicycle and leaves. The gate is locked behind them.

On the way to the house, the woman, whose name is Mary (the man does not come with them; he has a hole in his shirt which must be repaired) explains that the director is absent, the manager is a bureaucrat who does not “understand” literature and tourists, the roof of the house is full of leaks and it is not possible to see inside, no matter which day of the week you come, and her mother, who is in Sweden, does not want to return to Cuba and would rather live in Australia. Behind a closed door, she has what sounds like a frank exchange of views with the manager, and emerges downcast. The head security guard was already in the manager’s office, giving his version of what had happened at the gate. They cannot go inside. Today the museum is closed. Roman says he will write a letter to the absent director, saying how disappointed they were that they had been unable to see inside the house, if Mary agreed, which she did. But while he is writing the letter, the manager, in an orange skirt, appears and announces that Mary will conduct them on a tour of the grounds and provide them with a commentary on how the property, including the house, was given to the nation of Cuba by the widow of “esteemed Hemingway”.

Punch-drunk with capricious success, they stumble happily in Mary’s wake. She shows them Hemingway’s fishing boat Pilar (“The Old Man and the Sea”, she annotates) and where he bred his colony of cats. But what is in the forefront of her mind, apart from the plight of her mother in Sweden, is that although Ernesto’s (she uses the name Hemingway himself preferred) third wife Martha came with him when they first bought the house in 1940, which they named “Lookout Farm”, his fourth wife lived there longer, following Ernesto’s divorce from Martha in 1945. They lived at Finca La Vigia until 1960. She pauses in her running commentary, turns to face them, her eyes modestly lowered. “The fourth wife’s name was also Mary.”

Suddenly, she is ducking and weaving amid trees and piles of rubbish, motioning behind her back for them to follow. At a foundation of stone supporting a weatherboard wall, she offers a knee and cupped hands, which together hoist Roman high enough to see through a small, dirty window. He sees a long, narrow, habitable, even comfortable, room, with trophies and prints on the walls and shelves of books. Surati, being slighter, is lifted even higher and for longer. She sees strewn carpets and a desk with an old typewriter. Infected by Mary’s excitement, they shower her with praise for giving them a glimpse of the inner sanctum.

She escorts them back to the gate, where she asks for their address in Australia. “For my mother”.

Frank scrambles out of his seat, opens the taxi door for them, clenches his fist and cries “Champion!” at Roman, holds up one hand, fingers extended, directed at Surati. “Only five minutes!” They have become part of Cuban lore.

On the flight to Jamaica (which left precisely at 2 p.m.) they collect their thoughts. They discover that, while they have known each other in the biblical sense, they have neglected their literary preferences.

Hemingway is not her favourite author. “He’s such a child,” she says. “Always eating and drinking and playing games.” Yes, he says, but he worked hard at getting the words right. Also the calibre of guns, the hooks of fish bait and the mix of drinks. And, as a definition of courage or, as he would have said, guts, “grace under pressure” is hard to beat. She persists in being politically correct. She doesn’t like masculinity. She wants authors to tell her the right way to live. Her favourite authors are the Egyptian Naguib Mahfouz and her countryman Pramoedya Ananta Toer.

“What are yours?”

He stumbles through the knowledge that they have changed as he has changed. Once they were Charles Dickens and Anton Chekhov. Then they were Joseph Conrad and D.H. Lawrence. Then Leo Tolstoy and Marcel Proust. He says airily that he is rereading E.M. Forster and Albert Camus.

She sniffs. “No women.”

They wonder why Hemingway made Havana his almost permanent home. It was an outpost of Spain, the country he loved, but it had abolished bullfighting, his favourite pastime, as a gesture of independence from Spanish rule long before Castro came to power. Well, there was cockfighting and fishing for marlin and jai-alai (a Spanish court game somewhere between lacrosse and squash). It was also cheap and he liked the people.

“I felt safe in Cuba,” she says, suddenly. “I don’t usually feel safe.”

True, she is a nervous traveller. “I don’t mean physically.” She is groping for an idea. “Or not just physically.”

He has learned to wait for her thoughts to take shape. While she is looking out the window, thinking, he summons up the facts.

Castro thumbed his nose at the United States. When he took over in 1959 he was treated like a hero in New York, but he declared he had always been a secret communist (was this true and if it was, why declare it?). He provoked the Cuban missile crisis (although Khrushchev collaborated), put troops into Angola in a display of international solidarity with the Russians, which gave the impression that Cuba had lost all sense of perspective. Provocation on the American side was just as persistent. The attempted invasion at the Bay of Pigs in 1961 proved to Castro that his suspicion of the USA was justified. US support for anti-communist regimes in Central and South America during the Cold War period confirmed his view that the USA would do anything to stop programs of nationalisation and social reform that struck at the heart of US hegemony in the region. Now there was an additional problem—the Cuban exiles in Florida. They were wealthy and politically influential. Any US presidential candidate would need to take them into account. And there was the bizarre anomaly of the US base at Guantanamo Bay, extracted from the Cubans as the price of supporting them in their war of independence against Spain and used as an off-shore American prison for Cubans and Haitians.

What were Cuba’s chances in the capitalist, democratic global order that was transforming the world now the Cold War was over?

What are the benefits for the USA in removing the embargo on economic activity with Cuba? It would remove the threat (or perhaps it is no more than an embarrassment) of waves of immigrants. It would provide some US businesses with opportunities. It would give a US president an opportunity to behave like a statesman. But this may not be enough to attract the USA. The place is so run down, the infrastructure is so poor that few US businesses would want to bother to invest in Cuba when, with a globalising economy, they are being offered good prospects elsewhere.

He announces, by way of conclusion: “Cuba has been elevated by history and circumstance—and the collision of its own bravado and the paranoia of the United States—into an alien force in the American hemisphere.”

“Yes,” she says, “they’re heroic.” Her English is fluent, but erratic, and he has learned to avoid pedantry. “An orderly, community-minded, old-fashioned, patriotic people. And good-humoured.” The idea is taking shape. “Down at heel but dignified, not screaming for revenge, not killing themselves with drugs or AIDS or gambling or guns, not messianic, believers in progress, but a bit cynical about government, fed up with rationing and hostile to the United States because of the embargo, sad about the collapse of the Soviet Union, but still part of that stream of human purpose that believes there is more to life than the bottom line.”

And that, for her, is enough. She looks dreamily through the cabin window. She can put up with decrepit housing, bureaucratic inertia, buses more crowded than in Shanghai, as dirty as the worst in India.

She suddenly laughs, remembering the behaviour of waiters in Cuban hotels, who seem trained to spend their spare moments polishing the glassware. They are trained in Russia! They have exactly the same technique of raising a glass to eye-level to see that it is clean.

They joke together. Now the Soviet Union is kaput, Cuba will have to follow the China model. Keep political control under the communist party but open up the economy.

“Without handing over the economy to the Chinese,” he says. He knows she is sensitive about the dominant economic role of the Chinese in South-East Asia, especially in Malaysia, Singapore and Indonesia.

“China is far away,” she says sweetly.

She is adamant. She felt physically safe in Cuba. Something about the spirit of the place was reassuring. You were pestered and irritated, but not harassed.

“No politics and history.” She glances at him, dreams out the window, glances back. “The utter finality of objects.”

For some time, she has been saying she wanted a family. She was tired of running after every twist and turn in the new world order. She wanted to “settle down”. But where?

She reveals her authority. “Dora Maar”. She hasn’t enlisted Picasso before. “You can’t live everywhere,” she says. “You only have one body.”

True. It was easier for Hemingway and Picasso to be exiles. And Joyce. Now the global world was everywhere, except backwaters like Cuba.

He ponders hidden meanings in some muddled sayings they picked up on their visit, like “Bear and grin it” and “Things grow up on you”.