The Domino Diaries Read online

  “How far are we from Old Havana?”

  “An hour walk. But your friend will explain and show you how taxis work here in Havana. Much easier. The Ladas are for tourists and expensive. Ex-lawyers and doctors drive them and pimp jineteras—prostitutes—for tourists. The Cuban taxis are cheap, but you need Cuban pesos and some more Spanish. If policía stop a Cuban taxi with a tourist, they can lose their car. Be careful. Any Cuban on the street who walks with you can be stopped by the police and taken in for questioning. If he does not carry an ID card to show the policía he can be taken to the police station for the night.”

  “Are you serious?” I asked Jesús.

  “Claro,” Jesús said gravely, but cracked a smile almost as quickly. “But we Cubans say that life itself is a joke to be taken very seriously. You’ll see how the game is played. Eat and we meet my family and the rest of the block.”

  “Everybody is already awake?”

  “Of course. This neighborhood is your home now while you stay with us.”

  My mother has lived in the same house for the last thirty-two years (we moved there when I was three) and we hardly ever knew our neighbors, let alone anyone on our block. When FOR SALE signs went up and new people moved in around the neighborhood, nobody ever welcomed them. I have a close friend that I’ve known since I was five. He lived two blocks from me during our childhood and I visited his family home hundreds of times and was never invited for dinner. A lot of homes I visited as a child sounded a kind of silent alarm when you stepped through the door that seemed to say, “Welcome! When exactly are you leaving again?” And here was my first taste of Havana, where you were supposed to be trespassing safely into the tragedy of Cuban lives caught beneath the wreckage of a broken system. Maybe Cuba was frozen in time, but this first glimpse into the human cost I was warned about instead mirrored the breakdown of families and neighbors and support systems where I came from.

  As dawn broke, Jesús, holding his son’s hand, their small family sausage dog in pursuit, escorted me to each front door on the quiet, leafy street. From every home I could hear radios or televisions talking about Elián González and returning the boy home to his country and family. More marches were planned. More speeches. From what I could gather, Castro had found yet another winning angle, by making his adversaries in Florida look like fanatics defending a kidnapping. The best argument made against sending the boy back to his father and country was that doing so amounted to child abuse. How could any child wish to live in such a society inflicting so much harm? And this protest against child cruelty offered from the wealthiest nation on earth that also permits one child in five to grow up below the poverty line.

  We knocked on the front door of the home across the street belonging to Cucho, a Ricardo Montalbán lookalike eighty-one-year-old who had received his house from a state-run lottery many decades before. Cucho was the patriarch of the twelve family members residing in his home. We were invited in for coffee served in shot glasses as I was introduced to his family, each female leaning over to give and receive a kiss on the cheek. Cucho had worked at the Hotel Nacional in the 1940s, when it was run by gangsters like Lucky Luciano, and moved over to the Havana Hilton at the end of the ’50s, right up until Fidel Castro rolled in and set up his government headquarters in the top two floors at the newly named Habana Libre. Cucho was also the neighborhood CDR (Committee for the Defense of the Revolution), a neighborhood watch program that escalated in darker times into spy operations that reported to the government on fellow citizens.

  Cucho’s neighbor was a frail young doctor with a failing heart named Jorge, married to a Penelope Cruz–sumptuous wife named Nancy. Ernesto lived in the next home, 250 pounds of seething bitterness as he stared down a government-required year’s wait to join his wife, Blanquita, who had just left to join some of her family in Spain. Cuba’s answer to Doogie Howser, Manolo, a surgeon in his forties who looked like a teenager, lived by himself after a divorce. As we had another cafecito with Manolo, there were three separate deliveries of produce, freshly butchered chickens, and cement brought over in a little dragged wagon. “Have you heard the word palanca before?” he asked in perfect English.

  I shook my head.

  “Palanca is slang for offering a helping hand. Since you literally cannot survive in this country without breaking the law, corruption is institutional. The black market economy is larger than the traditional economy. We all offer something to someone in exchange for something. So don’t be surprised to see deliveries at all hours of the day of things that may seem very strange to you.”

  There was a knock at Manolo’s door and Jesús got up to answer it. He returned to the dining room with a linebacker-sized dark-skinned Cuban, not much older than me, dressed in matching canary-yellow dress shirt and pants. He stared at me with such warm anticipation I felt like I was meeting a pen pal I’d been corresponding with for years.

  “Hello, my friend! I’m Lesvanne.” I was quickly discovering that every Cuban deserved his own eponymous sitcom. “You must be the writer boxer I have heard so much about. Obviously Hemingway helped bring you here, I take it? Of course he did. Montalvo and Alfonso asked me to show you around and help you with finding your way in our city. Today I take you to Rafael Trejo gym to find a trainer, too, no?”

  “I would love that,” I said.

  “Also transportation.” Jesús grabbed my shoulder. “Walk around until he has more of a tan and then show him our taxis and get him some Cuban pesos.”

  “Of course.” Lesvanne smiled.

  “Where did you get these clothes?” Manolo teased him, pinching a sleeve. “These are not from Calle Obispo.”

  “What’s Obispo?” I asked.

  “Obispo is a street for tourists,” Lesvanne explained casually. “I was just in Miami and brought back some clothes. Only three weeks in Miami visiting some family.”

  For both Jesús and Manolo this was a bombshell they endured in silent shock. I was fairly confused by how matter-of-fact Lesvanne was about a journey such a high percentage of his countrymen had died trying to make. His tone suggested that of a man taking a whirl on the Staten Island ferry. Who exactly was this person that Alfonso had lined up as my guide? Who exactly was Alfonso?

  Suddenly Lesvanne’s face twisted in agony. “¡MariCÓN! I gave my ass a paper cut this morning. Cubaneo. The first luxury I miss from Miami and Gringolandia is the availability of toilet paper. A page from José Martí’s poetry slit me open this morning and I am still bleeding.”

  Lesvanne put his hand on my shoulder and turned his wide, conspiratorial smile toward me. “Obispo is the Hemingway tourist street. The El Floridita bar where Hemingway would have drank himself to death, if not for the suicide. La Bodeguita del Medio for the mojitos is five minutes, but every Cuban knows he never drank mojitos there and the owners just made it up. There are no better capitalists than communists. And the Ambos Mundos hotel where he wrote For Whom the Bell Tolls is near the bottom of Obispo. Fidel carried that book with him in the mountains to help learn guerrilla warfare. At Obispo there is much shopping, too, if you have tourist dollars to spend. The high-end jineteras work Obispo for the lonely tourists who wish to pretend they can seduce all the pretty Cuban girls.”

  Jesús laughed. “Should we arrange a girl for him tonight?”

  “He doesn’t need a pimp.” Manolo smiled. “I’m sure you can find the right girl on your own. You come back and tell us everything or we’ll report you to Cucho.”

  As soon as we left our block, Lesvanne informed me he needed a couple glasses of guarapo for energy and led us zigzagging down a few streets to find some. “A girlfriend from Texas leaves tomorrow so I must have energy for her so she is faithful back home. I’m so madly in love with this woman. If you heard her accent calling my name! And she’s big as a Texas woman should be. I love that. She’s forty. So beautiful.”

  He pointed out the direction of some peso fruit markets and another supermarket for American dollars that had a security guar
d out front. “The tourist apartheid is everywhere. I can’t walk with you into a hotel or a nice bar. It used to be illegal for us to carry even one American dollar.” Lesvanne shook his head. “During the awful Special Period, one market existed that had actual supplies and good food while everything else had nothing. People were starving. We called this market with everything ‘God’s Market’ at that time. Things are better now since that period, but still very difficult.” Finally we arrived at an open garage that was surrounded by sweaty construction workers huddled in the shade wiping the foam from their lips and patiently holding out glass cups waiting for refills.

  “This is a guarapotería. Guarapo was what the African slaves who first came to Cuba drank. Good for energy to work or to fuck really good if you meet the right girl. We love it. It’s very good and fresh. You can find them all over Havana and have a glass for only a Cuban peso. There are twenty Cuban pesos to each converted peso for tourists. These two currencies are very important to be aware of because you will be cheated if you are not careful. So be careful to get your change and to keep it when you first use the converted peso. Until you write a bestseller or win the heavyweight championship, Cuban pesos are good to have to use for transportation or food that tourists are not allowed to use. I’ll show you how our taxis work soon.”

  I watched as a dwarf woman jammed huge stalks of sugar cane into a massive metal grinder that she worked over with a crank when the stalks were inserted deeply enough. She had the sneer of a male porn star as she worked. The dwarf’s coworker was a woman who looked like she was born a hundred years before when the Platt Amendment was signed. She collected the juice from a pail and dumped it into carafes full of ice. Once the carafe was full with the milky-yellow juice she refilled the cups of the eager construction workers on their break. We waited our turn for a glass and I watched Lesvanne wipe the chilled foam off his lips before my glass arrived.

  “You just came back from Miami?” I asked.

  “Yes.” He grinned shyly. “My first time.”

  “Your first time?”

  “The first time I have traveled anywhere in my life outside of this … place. Miami is paradise. For a nonbeliever, it is the closest thing I have ever seen to heaven on earth.”

  “We’re going to have a strange day together, aren’t we?” I asked.

  “What is a normal day in a place like this, which no one will ever believe existed two weeks after it’s gone? Pick up a newspaper this morning in Miami, and things have never been worse here. Pick up our newspaper and things have never been better. That is the reality we live with every day of our lives. This is normal to us.”

  He was right: the only place where normal seemed halfway as slippery as here was in America. Guidebooks spoke of Havana as frozen in time like wreckage, but that was only true if you looked everywhere but at the people. When Napoleon first encountered the Sphinx he measured every inch of it. I didn’t know how to do that here. I didn’t have the right equipment. For the Cubans I saw, time had slowed in an entirely different way than I’d been told it would, along the edge of a blade. Life at the extremes is always slowed down, magnified, surreal. It was as if, all around me, forty-one years’ worth of Cuban society was in the backseat of a car Fidel had used to run through one of the world’s most profound red lights, and instead of finding oblivion as its consequence, it created a different kind of tragedy by just keeping going and going. It wasn’t long before that Fidel was nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize and was having charges brought against him in Spain as a war criminal at the same time. Communism had petered out everywhere else and given way to the real revolutionary force with legs that swept the planet: capitalism. But here everyone was popping a tire on communism’s last bend of memory lane.

  Still, I wasn’t sure how to approach the obvious question: Why hadn’t Lesvanne stayed in Miami? How had he gotten out? Why wasn’t Cuba’s answer to Sophie’s Choice something that devastated Lesvanne the way it seemed to everyone else?

  Just then Lesvanne’s name was hollered from down the block. We looked over and saw a large woman smiling as she held the hands of four little girls wearing red scarves and school uniforms at her sides. As I finished another glass of guarapo, Lesvanne patted my shoulder and headed in their direction to say hello. “I come right back. This is a close friend of my mother. I love this woman.” The construction workers and I watched him kiss the cheek of each member of the group and offer a bear hug to the woman that lifted her off the ground until she squealed and playfully flailed her arms to be put down. The girls all reached over to take Lesvanne’s hands as they walked back up the street toward me. Lesvanne introduced the group and each child stared up until I bent down to say hello and offered a cheek for them to kiss. I kissed the cheek of Lesvanne’s mother’s friend and she apologized before insisting the children were late for school and they had to leave. The construction workers around us waved at the children and the children smiled and waved back.

  “Is everyone here so comfortable with strangers?” I asked.

  “But you’re not a stranger, you’re a visitor to our home.”

  “One of the first things I was taught as a kid was not to talk to strangers. Stranger equals danger.”

  “But this is not protection. This is just instilling fear. This is just propaganda. Of course there is a risk to trusting your environment. There are bad people and accidents in life, some are avoidable and some are not. But if you don’t trust there is a guarantee you will lose all things available to you only through trust. To sacrifice that for a false sense of security is protecting children?”

  I shrugged.

  “Well.” Lesvanne shrugged back. “If you have something to lose, that is very logical. In Miami I saw many walls protecting houses. Here all the walls are falling down. The nice cars in Miami all had alarms. Here almost nobody can afford a car. There the division is very important in their society and the fear of the poor trespassing on the rich is on everyone’s mind. Look at all the guns there people feel they need to defend themselves from their own neighbors. Miami has both extremes. Of course here we are nearly all poor. What is there to steal? Even the most moral believers in the values of the revolution must steal from the government with corruption to support their families, but there is little to steal from each other.”

  “If there was something to steal, would people steal here?” I asked.

  “With this much difficulty and how much we rely on others to survive—I don’t think so. Even if you could escape responsibility, you could not escape seeing the damage. There are no strangers for us in Havana.”

  “And in Miami?”

  “In Miami everyone is your stranger. You would not know who lives next door. Look at the mansions protected from everyone. But I miss many things I saw in Miami tremendously. It is impossible to have anything I saw there here. That is why, when I’m ready, I will make Miami my home. When I am ready. And I could never leave without my wife. Let’s go to Centro Habana and I can show you my photos from Gringolandia.”

  I offered to pay for a taxi, but Lesvanne insisted we hitchhike. We walked over to a busy street and he flagged down a motorcycle with a sidecar in minutes. He sat behind the driver and pointed for me to take the adjoining seat. Our engine snarled at stray cats darting across the traffic as we headed back to the Plaza and Che’s monument.

  We took a smoother road into the city with the Havana Libre’s penthouse peeking over the palmy skyline as buzzards swerved above us in the early morning cool before the real heat of day arrived. Elián González’s face was on signs and T-shirts all throughout the city. Lesvanne pointed toward lone musicians serenading the jungle with trumpets. We drove past a bus station overwhelmed with lines snaking around the block. Hitchhikers were everywhere waiting for rides into work, students to the university, families trying to get home. After a bumpy climb skirting the border of a columned monument worthy of a Roman emperor, Lesvanne mentioned the university was around the corner. The Napoleon museum was jus
t behind it, he shouted. He leaned close to the driver’s ear and mentioned Coppelia as our destination. The driver nodded and accelerated toward a red light at an intersection like a kamikaze and picked up speed as we swung past the grandeur of the front steps of the university until we screeched to a stop under the towering shadow of the Habana Libre, just across the street from a ballerina’s crossed slippers on Coppelia ice cream stand’s famous sign. Under the sign hoards were already lined up to grab a bowl.

  “It’s a short walk from here to Calle Neptuno, where we can catch a ride into Habana Vieja. You can hail your first Cuban taxi. Hold out two fingers to the first old American car and if the driver has room and stops, you tell him ‘Capitolio.’ Say nothing else. I need some more guarapo for tonight. After the photos.”

  “What’s tonight?” I asked.

  “After we find you a trainer … This woman who stole my heart last year just arrived on the island again from Oklahoma. This girl is amazing. I can’t disappoint this girl. You must see the letter she wrote me.”

  “Aren’t you married?”

  “Of course. To the love of my life. I will show you photos of my wife with the photos of Miami. This area is Vedado, the edge of Vedado and Centro. Centro is very poor. My mother is in a bad part of Centro near the Malecón where many buildings are falling down. Many have no running water and blackouts happen with frequency. But it’s very beautiful there, too.”

  As we walked toward the ocean and his mother’s house, Lesvanne explained how he supported his family. He slept with wealthy American tourists—preferably middle-aged, large, divorced, and with children back home—for gifts provided they weren’t from California. The women of California were to be avoided at all costs no matter how attractive they were. Lesvanne was a man of principle. Californian women never returned his love letters.