Cuba Diaries

Monday

It always astounds me how my prose leaves me on vacation. I cannot find the words to describe the little moments, the vignettes, of the beach in Varadero—

• the little blonde girl, about five years old with curly hair who frolics naked on the beach and builds a sandcastle with her father,


• the bumbling old man, knuckles to the ground, grumping about in his Speedo,


• the small pleasure crafts and amateur windsurfs that dot the water before the horizon,


• the spongey Latino man in hot pants who holds his arms away from his sides like a human peacock, claiming territory…

All of these are before me as I decompress into vacation-mode on the beach. And I know that none of these moments are authentically Cuban. These are all tourists. I know soon my heart and my feet will long to find the authentic Cuban experience. But this phase, this decompression, is necessary to bring me to that meditative Caribbean state of mind. When I am ready, I will find Cuba.

Wednesday

The gardener’s name is J-L. Yesterday he played peek-a-boo with me from behind the shrubs of the front lawn while the girls and I waited for a bus to take us to swim with the dolphins. Today, he gave me flowers.

Thursday

Last night, dressed all in white with the gardener’s flowers in my hair, I went to Mambo Club with the girls and J-L. His arms are solid and his skin is smooth. He smells of Cuba: sea salt and sweet, unlit tobacco.

Saturday

J-L sits on the edge of my bed and stares rapt at the television, almost childlike. I curl myself behind him and just observe how happy he is to watch ESPN – soccer and basketball. He doesn’t like baseball. Perhaps they just tell the tourists that all Cubans love baseball because it’s become part of the romanticism of the island. Every once in a while I let a hand glide gently over his back.

On commercial breaks, he turns back to me and kisses me and I giggle happily. I ask him if he has a television at home. He says yes, but Cuban television is boring – no sports, no movies.

When a commercial for a movie comes on, he turns his attention to the screen. The commercial is in English and it’s for Jodie Foster’s movie from last year, available now on DVD.

J-L makes a face of disgust and kind of half-heartedly throws his arms in the air. “Ugh, DVD,” he says and frowns. He asks me if I have a DVD player. I nod. I don’t have the heart to tell him we have three in the house.

Later in my readings I find that a few years back, VCRs and the like were banned entry at customs by the government. This is a part of the Cuba that the gardener lives in every day.

Sunday

The guide on the bus to the resort seven days ago specifically told us that Varadero was not Cuba, and that if we wanted to see Cuba we should really go to Havana.

But on the bus tour in Havana we are given half an hour at the Capitolio – a grandiose parliament building that really hasn’t been used since the Revolution. We’re given only five minutes in Revolution Square, where we are not even allowed to cross the road and stand at the steps where Castro addresses Cuba. And we are given fifteen minutes at a cemetery that holds no real Cuban life. We don’t even get to stop at the Granma to see the boat Fidel and Ché stormed the beaches in. Later that night at the Tropicana, I look around and know there are no Cubans watching in the audience. And really, since the cabaret opened in 1939, have there ever been?

I still don’t feel like the day trip to Havana let me experience Cuba. I feel like they held my hand and pointed me in the prettiest direction for short periods of time and cut me off before I got a chance to let the important questions even occur to me.

And maybe that realization that I have not been allowed to know everything is my authentic Cuban experience. Here’s what it feels like to me. It feels like Fidel was in love with Ché Guevara (consciously, subconsciously, pseudo-consciously, I don’t know…) Together they battled to wrest Cuba from the hands of the dictator Batista. Hand in hand they ousted Batista, the Americans, and tried to mould the island into a utopian socialist society where everyone was equal and no one climbed the backs of other Cubans to rise above. And when Ché died after he left Cuba to bring socialism to the rest of South America, Fidel was devastated.

It feels like Fidel made a promise to a dead man that he loved to carry out his ideals, no matter what, until the day he died.

So that’s what he continues to do. Despite the trade embargo. Despite the fall of the Soviet Union. Despite the collapse of the Cuban economy. Despite the dual currency the island has had to adopt. Despite the black market, and the information explosion, and the fact that most Cubans seem to want better for themselves and for their families and for their neighbours. Fidel made a promise to Ché, and he will keep it until he dies.

And so my first trip to Cuba is filled with moments of tourist apartheid. But there are things I am grateful for: the moments stolen with the gardener. The fresh flowers, the dancing, the kisses in the quadrant, the jokes we both laughed at despite the tremendous language barrier, the immense generosity of his birthday gifts to me, and the letter he wrote that I’ve read hundreds of times over already. These are what I take home with me of authentic Cuba.

And I will be back.