The Domino Diaries Read online

  “I felt like a fairy-tale girl lost in a dark forest.” She laughed. “But with cigars I had my magical little fetish tune to whistle, to forget my troubles.”

  Ría pointed to the blue government-owned plates. She explained how the letters and numbers on the plates were indications of whether the car could be used for personal travel and where it could go. The first letter indicated which of the fourteen provinces the car came from. A “K” signified a privately owned car. Caramel plates for those higher up in government-run firms. Maybe they could only transport visiting officials during business hours or perhaps had more leeway for private use. Mint green plates were for military personnel, placed only on the rear of their vehicles. Olive green for Ministry of the Interior–issued plates, including Fidel’s motorcade of armored 1980s-made Mercedes. Black plates were for foreign diplomats who mostly lived in old abandoned mansions on Havana’s jarringly opulent Fifth Avenue. They were free to ignore traffic laws. Cars with white plates were for Cuban ministers or heads of state organizations. Maroon plates for rental cars. Bright orange plates for Cubans working overseas, religious leaders, or foreign journalists.

  “Yellow plates for all the old American cars held up by bubble gum and Popsicle sticks,” Ría went on. “Those are the only cars Cubans can legally trade and buy and sell. Only cars before 1959, when our revolution began. And for those the government has not yet decided which plates to give you, ‘provisional’ red plates are given. Isn’t it all so egalitarian?”

  “How does anybody purchase a new car?” I asked.

  “With permission.”

  “Permission?”

  “This is our version of a catch-22. To gain permission you must explain how on earth you could ever afford a new car, living on the government wages that over 90 percent of us do. Let’s change the subject. I believe in the principles of this crumbling revolution, but I find it inconceivable that on your first visit you never slept with one of our women.”

  We’d come from the apartment she’d found me in Calle Neptuno to sit on the Malecón where the U.S. battleship Maine had mysteriously exploded and promptly sank, setting off the Spanish-American War just before the turn of the twentieth century. This was the “war” in which William Randolph Hearst invented yellow journalism for the American public. “There will be no war,” one of Hearst’s employees telegrammed back from Cuba. “Please remain,” Hearst telegrammed back. “You furnish the pictures and I’ll furnish the war.” In 1898, for twenty million dollars, Spain handed over Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines to the United States and in all but name took over Cuba, signing into Cuba’s new constitution the right to intervene and “supervise” the treasury and foreign relations. Gitmo was handed over indefinitely with the signing of the Platt Amendment soon after, with an annual fee of four thousand dollars to be paid by the U.S. Treasury, which no Cuban was involved in negotiating, and which was never to increase. But all this had come after the Spanish troops had crushed José Martí and the Cuban rebel army and wiped out between two hundred and four hundred thousand Cuban civilians in an eerie foreshadow of the concentration camps that would haunt the new century across Europe.

  I’d tried to track down Alfonso and coordinate meeting him in Havana again, but his phone had been disconnected and he never answered any of my e-mails. I didn’t know he had already been granted his wish of never having to leave Havana again since he’d been buried in the Colón cemetery for over a month at that point. Montalvo didn’t have a phone or a computer, so Ría had offered to meet me at the airport. We’d shared a gypsy cab back to my original block near the Plaza de la Revolución and discovered nearly everyone I’d met during my first trip had abandoned Cuba altogether. Two houses had been sold on the black market to finance escapes out of the country. The old man who had worked as a doorman at the Nacional had died in his sleep. Ernesto had reunited with his wife in Barcelona. The family of Jesús had gotten lucky in the annual lottery of twenty thousand visas and relocated to Miami. Only Doogie Howser remained on the block, and he’d taken a mistress to Varadero and wouldn’t be back for a week.

  Ría had helped me work out an alternative plan, through a friend of a friend of a friend, with unregistered accommodation in Centro Habana, a little dingy neighborhood called Cayo Hueso (Bone Key). She found me a room on the roof of a four-story walk-up across the street from a building that had recently fallen down. After Ría rejected the traditional 15 percent referral fee from the married couple illegally renting me the room, they were entirely convinced she was a spy. Their mutual shock made it clear no other plausible explanation existed in their minds.

  “We’re happy to pay you for bringing him to us,” they reiterated nervously. “This is a reasonable custom.”

  “I’m not opposed to the custom.” Ría smiled. “But it doesn’t apply here. I won’t accept money for helping a friend find accommodation. If I did this in service of a stranger, I would. Claro?”

  “We know times are very hard,” the husband renting me the apartment reasoned. “I respect what you’re saying. Don’t be stubborn here.”

  “Then this extra money will help your family and I’m happy for that. Thank you for looking after my friend.”

  The husband and wife, Arnaldo and Ariana were their names, still looked petrified accepting Ría’s explanation. But they had no choice. Ría had nothing left to say about it.

  Back on the Malecón some kids were diving into the ocean while a trumpeter serenaded them. A fisherman clubbed his first catch with the heel of a ratty Nike sneaker as a policeman stopped a young black local girl walking hand-in-hand with an old sunburned tourist. She didn’t have her papers and was taken away in a squad car to the station. The tourist hailed a taxi and gave pursuit. The nearby, supremely well-guarded U.S. Interests section was almost entirely obscured by fifty flapping Cuban flags beneath a vertical phalanx of poles pointed at the heavens. If anyone inside could see past the flags, a sign had been freshly painted, proclaiming WE DON’T WANT SLAVE OWNERS HERE. A family huddling beside us stared off at another cruise ship slugging its way across the horizon into the harbor. We got up and walked for a while under the curled streetlamps before sitting back down on Havana’s collective sofa and windowsill to the world.

  Eventually we walked the length of the Malecón as kids glazed the cement in sticky embraces, the waves just over the edge of the seawall. Sometimes just below their feet other people would be fooling around against the rocks, but all you could see were shadows folding like origami against the dim light of the horizon. We turned onto the Prado promenade toward some fights being held at Kid Chocolate that I’d invited Ría to watch. A pack of boys chased after a soccer ball under the trellis of trees overhead while jineteras smoked cigarettes on stone benches waiting for business. Stray cats sat and stared predatorily at the birds perched on the branches overhead. Artists were taking down their afternoon displays and packing up their canvases.

  “Hundreds of years ago,” Ría said, smiling, “the most beautiful women in my city could only be seen stepping in or out of carriages along Prado. Some of the first foreigners who wrote about their visits never got past just how stunningly beautiful the women’s feet were.”

  “My boxing coach Héctor sent me to Prado to observe the women after our first lesson together,” I confessed to Ría. “When we were finished for the day, I asked what made the Cuban style of fighting so much more effective than anywhere else in the world. He told me to come here and sit on a bench in Prado and to study how the women walk. ‘It’s all right there, Brinicito. That’s our secret. We try to box the way our women move. Have you ever seen women who can do more with each step than ours?’”

  “He is probably a puerco.” Ría laughed. “But it’s an intelligent observation.”

  The natural light was almost entirely gone when the streetlamps flickered on and hummed beside us. Distant smokestacks rose into the last embers of glow hovering over old Havana’s skyline. I’d forgotten about the mood that always seem
ed to haunt the Prado and so much of Havana with nearly each step. Something like catching the gaze of a beautiful teenage girl with every fuse on her body lit by sexuality while smiling at you with rotten teeth. Both for Havana’s beauty and its decay, it’s nearly impossible to restrain yourself from staring at everything you see. I was told before my first trip that no city in the world offered the dreams you could have sleeping in Havana. However, nobody warned about how it also feels like an exhausting nightmare that never quite fulfills the promise of that with which it’s threatening you.

  A pack of jineteras, all uniformed in spandex, walking arm in arm with a group of much older, drunken, overweight, sweaty European tourists, strolled past us. Ría watched them from the corner of her eye until they were by us. She turned to me.

  “I wondered when you first contacted me if that was the arrangement you were looking for.”

  “It worried you?” I asked.

  “It amused me.” She winked, reaching over to squeeze my wrist.

  We walked in silence for a while. Along the Prado they used to sell slaves on the auction block. Before Fidel, when segregation was in full swing, the Cuban apartheid meant many clubs and parks still refused black Cubans entry. Famously even President Batista couldn’t gain membership to a country club because he wasn’t white enough.

  “How many boyfriends do you have now?”

  “¡Qué va! I’m innocent. So dime. Before you drag me to this boxing match I would like to know what movies do they like where you’re from, Brinicito.”

  “Superheroes and comic book stuff are the most popular. Hollywood makes a lot of movies about America being attacked or blowing itself up that people seem to enjoy watching. Distraction. Escape.”

  “They’re sad?”

  “Not even sad. Depressed.”

  “Movies to me are as close as we have to dreams. What do they wish to dream about where you’re from? Por ejemplo, what is the most popular movie of all time in Gringolandia?”

  “Titanic made the most money.”

  “I saw it. We get pirated DVDs of American movies from the black market.”

  “What did you think of it?”

  “Titanic doesn’t sound like escape or distraction to me. Fidel loved the film Jaws. He said it was capitalism attacking every citizen with nowhere to hide. I’m sure Fidel would say Titanic describes a lot about America.”

  “The doomed, supposedly unsinkable ship?”

  “Bah!” Ría slapped my arm. “Forget politics. Emotionally. Existentially. There’s poetry in what that ship’s failed journey meant. Have you read Neruda?”

  “Listen,” I said. “Forget Pablo Neruda and start talking about Leonardo Di-fucking-Caprio.”

  “Titanic has different significance here. We don’t go on cruise ships anywhere. We can’t go anywhere. We know why we’re miserable—we’re stuck here. Why do your people care so much about an unfortunate accident with Titanic during a pointless transatlantic crossing?”

  “Where I come from more people believe in angels than climate change. The unsinkable ship is how we see our own lives.”

  “I must tell you, the only part I liked about Titanic was when the orchestra played after they found out they will all die. That Cubans would like.”

  “Do you think it was true?”

  “Everyone has the same death sentence as those doomed people on that big boat making all their plans for what they will do when they arrive in New York. It’s uninteresting. The men who played their instruments were beautiful.”

  “Do you play an instrument?”

  “Several.”

  “So what would you play?”

  “Under those circumstances?”

  “We’re all living those circumstances, with an iceberg on the way sooner or later, aren’t we?” I asked.

  “I don’t know. Just a melody of some kind. I like little melodies. When Orpheus went into hell to retrieve his bride he had to play a melody for the devil to get her back. I like to think it was a little melody he played. We’re all just melodies in the lives of every person we know.”

  “So what’s your melody, Ría?”

  “How can I know that answer? I don’t think you get to choose. It’s played with everyone else’s orchestra. I’m sure I’m just elevator music for most people, but maybe a symphony for the people who love me.”

  “You don’t think you get to choose?” I asked.

  “Maybe you can. I believe you can. But that very idea that I believe you can choose just becomes part of mine! Maybe that’s my fantasy.”

  “For you is my melody sad or happy?”

  “Oh Brinicito.” Ría looked over and through me. “I think your melody is that very question.”

  “I always read how primitive things are here relative to everywhere else. You might get around to adopting this glorious invention called ‘small talk’ one of these days. You sure know how to go for the kill, don’t you?”

  “Military service is mandatory here. I’m a good shot with a rifle. My point is just, even with us, it is strange. Do I have the same melody in person as in writing when you read me before? Are both melodies playing for you and you’re guessing which is the real me? Do they play nicely together or give you something you didn’t expect? Less or more? Maybe you were curious and attracted to me but you aren’t now. Maybe it’s the other way around. This is a little more complicated than maybe you expected with your question. I don’t even know if my melody or my country’s deserves to be a happy one to someone like you. Maybe we seem very sad and this gives your own sad feelings some comfort.”

  “How would that possibly give me comfort?” I asked.

  “Because unlike the Titanic our voyage isn’t a luxury cruise. And even if it failed there’s beauty in some failed journeys. We’re sad for reasons many of us remain proud of. And from what I see of many who come from where you do, you can’t even put your finger on what makes you sad. That is a sadness none of us understand. It’s incomprehensible to not know why you’re sad here. That’s a strange gift, isn’t it?”

  We were nearly at the lion statues at the end of the promenade. Cabs were parked on the corner of Calle Neptuno overlooking all the hotels Ría was forbidden to enter. Hotel-approved bands were playing Buena Vista Social Club standards on several of the patios while doormen and security stared off. We crossed the street over to Parque Central and Ría snickered at the mob of Esquina Caliente raging at one another over the merits of this or that Cuban pitcher’s dominance if they had a chance to pitch outside the confines of the island. “¡Yo discrepo!” one ancient man cried out. “There are not two opinions unless you are a fool, old man!” “¡Yo discrepo!” “¡Usted está senil!”

  “We should stay here and listen.” Ría laughed. “Listen to the formality of these people. This will be much more interesting and informative than the boxing at Kid Chocolate. This is better than the Brazilian telenovelas that shut down Havana. Who knew?”

  I pried Ría free and we walked down the block to Chocolate’s entrance, yet while I paid two Cuban pesos for tickets, all I could hear from inside was a barely intelligible speech over a broken-down loudspeaker. As we entered the gymnasium the voice made one final pronouncement overrun with churning feedback that echoed off the walls and suddenly everything fell silent. Inside they had problems with most of the lights and the scene was lit like van Gogh’s The Potato Eaters, the shadows smeared and lathered all over the room. The packed audience was quietly standing at attention before a lineup of Cuba’s pantheon of great revolutionary boxing champions, a murderer’s row of legendary fighters. Their heroes were all a little grayer and paunchier than in their primes, all wearing a mishmash of various Cuban jerseys or tracksuits, but the silence had no stuffy formality. The boxers’ faces had scars from their battles, though the audience had many scars of their own from daily battles, too. The capitalism grenade the fighters had smothered was the same grenade everyone else received the same shrapnel from. Boxing is the only sport where the sc
ore is hidden from the competitors while competition rages on. Life didn’t seem all that different a lot of the time, considering the circumstances. But not knowing the score imbues the moment with a horrible tension that’s only relieved when one arm is raised in victory and the other is left hanging.

  In the silence we all saw the Cuban Olympic team’s famously grumpy head coach for the last forty years, Dr. Alcides Sagarra, look down the line of champions and not be able to contain a smile. He clearly couldn’t contain the smile while his countrymen in the stands admired his life’s work. Sagarra was soon to step down and retire as Cuba’s coach, and no small portion of the silence was offered in homage to his contribution and for his fighters’ contributions to the revolution’s struggle: thirty-two Olympic gold medals and sixty-three World Amateur Championships. No country on earth could touch Cuba’s achievements in that realm. And in Castro’s symbolic war against the United States, these soldiers to the cause had trounced a country with infinitely more wealth and thirty times the population. Even more, they’d all done it while turning down every offer of riches to leave. My sense witnessing this ceremony was that the silence wasn’t just in gratitude for that sacrifice, it was equally an attempt to impart that what they had done on behalf of Cuba wasn’t in vain. La Lucha—the struggle—in the ring was irrevocably intertwined with the struggle of all Cubans. There was no way to illuminate anything about the struggle of Cuba’s boxers without exploring all Cubans’ courage and humanity. I’m still not sure if that silence I witnessed lasted a few seconds, or an hour.

  Teófilo Stevenson was the centerpiece of the group, still handsome and effortlessly composed, grinning almost bashfully as he magnetized the auditorium’s collective wonder yet again. Nobody could look away. Stevenson’s grin made him seem like a Cuban Cool Hand Luke, but this version hadn’t just rebelled against every temptation America had offered him and been crushed by way of reprisal, he’d gained some measure of satisfaction. It was as if he knew that it was all the people watching who had given him the strength to stand up to the forces and temptations that had conspired against him throughout his life. He’d spent his life climbing pedestals to accept medals and trophies and accolades, but after all his battles were over, he was on no pedestal. Little separated Stevenson from anyone there and that was by Castro’s design, after all. Distilling the interplay between Stevenson and the crowd that night was easiest to understand as an inside joke, which was as impenetrable as Mona Lisa’s smile to an outsider. Stevenson looked out and giggled at the smiling faces in the crowd with as much admiration for them as they had for him.