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  His face brightened when he talked about his four-year-old son, Luis Jr., or Luisito, who had moved to Guatemala with his mom, Arasay, just before I visited Cuba the first go-round.

  Arasay became pregnant with their child when they were no longer officially a couple. Their four-year relationship already had ended but things happen, as they sometimes do with exes. Though they weren’t together anymore, Luis was exceptionally good to Arasay during her pregnancy. She moved back in with her parents in Santa Clara, which sits in the middle of Cuba, about four hours outside of Havana. For those nine months, Luis visited her every few weeks and brought her cold pickles and chocolate that she craved. They cared greatly for each other, but weren’t romantically compatible and never would be, so they chose platonic affection.

  In Cuba, where many men openly father multiple children with multiple mothers, oftentimes while married, I knew Luis was different. He had always been different, growing up with his mom and twin sister, who dragged him to parties all throughout high school. Allergic to crowds, Luis roosted on outdoor steps, waiting until Anabel was ready to go home. He was always protecting, filling a paternal hole.

  His father had left while he and his sister were still in the womb, not even six-month-old fetuses. Luis Sr. had been with their mom for two years before he up and left one day without notice. He had been suffering from an almost fatal head injury that happened while he was at work.

  He was lucky to be alive, but he was never the same after that. He started drinking, became despondent, and wasn’t interested in working anymore. Pair that with demons from an abusive past, at the hands of his father, Macho Simón (his real name, no joke), and perhaps Luis Sr. was never headed for fatherhood.

  History or not to blame, he left Ana, who cared for two small children in a five-hundred-square-foot space in roughed-up Central Havana.

  Consequently, Luis knew from a young age that he would one day become the father he didn’t have. So while his new infant’s mother, a musician, traveled the world for the first three and a half years of their son’s life, Luis cared for Luisito alone. He was up at all hours of the night, warming milk, changing and hand-scrubbing cloth diapers, which were boiled and hung out to dry on a clothesline. While Luis worked, his little one—bottle in mouth—rode shotgun through the potholed streets of Havana, ushering passengers to and from in their taxi.

  On return, Arasay requested to take their baby to Guatemala to live with her and her new husband. Luis conceded. Increasingly, in Cuba, whenever Luisito had caught sight of a woman who remotely looked like his mom, with ashy blond hair and reading glasses, he would reach out to her and call her mama. But just after his baby boy left, Luis’s hair started to fall out and knots in his stomach kept him awake at night.

  The day that I had met him in the Cocotaxi, he was as lost and out of sorts as I was. He was, in fact, hiding when Cyn and I found him, eschewing tourists by parking in a non-eventful spot that time of day.

  As we sat for hours, cars swerved around the last stretch of the Malecón, lovers combed and played with one another in humid, evening strolls, and fishermen threw lines around us; we had become the only two people in the world under the faded streetlamps.

  Luis leaned in and his peaked cupid’s bow briefly shared a narrow space with my slightly parted lips before he cupped my face with his hands, looking directly into my eyes and running his fingers back into my hair. When he kissed me, it became my first kiss. The only kiss. The one that devoured culture and language and challenged everything I knew about life. My heart opened and my soul unlocked, folded into Luis on the crux of that long wall in the middle of Havana.

  I felt calm in a way that I never had before. The crushing twists and turns and mess of nerves that had owned me for two years let go, with virtually no effort. For all of my yoga and crying and screaming, tossing and turning, and steeps in scalding water, none of it had managed what time with Luis did, on Castro’s isle of all places.

  In a brief pause, we cut our conversation and returned to the apartment to change clothes, eat, and make our way to the nearby Jazz Café. Delirium ensued, as we carried on in our escalating and hyper interest, barely noting another soul, though the music hotspot was brimming with people.

  We shut the bar down around two or so and walked to the Hotel Nacional to carry the night as long as we could. As a national, Luis wasn’t allowed in the touristy spot, but friends who worked at the hotel let him slip in without notice. In the back garden, we rambled on until the wee hours. Crutched under his arm, I fell asleep briefly, as did he, curled into one other. I opened my eyes into the bright of the lights that glared against the still dark night just steps from us. Chattering of the birds signaled that morning was on the rise, but I had no idea what time it was. I certainly didn’t care. I was buried in the smell of his chest and rooted myself further, wrapping my arms around his torso. He stirred, returning the gesture. I was so happy that I could have burst.

  Together, we gathered ourselves and opted for a cab for the short ride to his house. I all but crawled the six flights of stairs and just before I crashed hard, Luis whispered, “Te amo.”

  I love you.

  Chapter 21

  Thirty-Six Hours and Counting

  Luis managed to get up for work the next day. It was near noon when the muted sounds of footsteps climbing the stairs woke me up. The bedroom door opened slowly and Luis peeked in. I smiled at him as he came to sit on the bed. He ran his hands through my hair. I touched his arm, which was warm from the sun.

  “Buenos días,” he said.

  “Good morning,” I returned.

  He asked me if I slept well. I did.

  Did I want to take a shower? Yes, very much so.

  He said he would heat the water. Luis went to the bathroom and grabbed a metal bucket, which he took downstairs and filled with water from a large white sink sitting just off of the kitchen area. He lit the stovetop and I waited ten minutes or so for the water to warm.

  As he came around the top of the stairs, his arm muscle flexed, balancing the weight of the bucket. He held the searing handle with a potholder and carefully poured half of the steaming water into a pink plastic container inside of the tub.

  Now standing in the doorway of the bathroom, I watched Luis run cold water from the spout, which coughed and choked, but eventually produced a light stream. If the water was too hot, then I could add more cold; if I wanted more hot then make sure to grab the pot holder. There was a plastic cup on the side of the tub for rinsing. The pink towel hanging was for me.

  “OK, thank you,” I said, smiling.

  He kissed me on the forehead while giving my hand a light squeeze and said he’d be waiting downstairs.

  As I poured the warm water over my head, I began to feel guilty for my showers at home, which frequently ran a good twenty minutes at a time or longer if I was hungover. In that case I would lie on my back on the tub’s floor and let scalding water run over me. As the water became lukewarm, I used my foot to crank up the heat until there wasn’t any left. Utterly shameful.

  When I was in Spain, the hostess with whom I lived asked me to please limit showering time to ten minutes max. I didn’t get it. It also annoyed me slightly that the water pressure was weak and the water didn’t heat well, but there in Cuba, I suddenly understood. The way I lived at home wasn’t the norm; it was the exception. I had never thought of waste of any sort until standing in that drafty bathroom bathing my twenty-six-year-old self with a bucket and cup.

  With water an issue in their house, the toilet wouldn’t flush most of the time. I was horribly embarrassed later that morning as Ana gently asked me to place used toilet paper in the pink weaved basket on the floor. She had requested this of me the day before, but my habits got the best of me. I felt annoyingly American, but had learned my lesson.

  I descended the stairs in a blue halter dress and flip-flops with my hair pulled back in a ponytail and saw Luis and Ana talking at the dinner table.

  Luis
stood up and pulled a chair out for me to sit next to him. Ana asked me if I’d like coffee. I let out an emphatic yes and she laughed her great laugh while making a round-trip to the kitchen and back. She handed me a doll-sized saucer and cup with her coffee in it, and I took my time sipping.

  A plate full of various sorts of crackers, bread, cheese, and fruit sat on the table and I picked at the mango first. It was by far the sweetest I had ever tasted. I then tried a thick slice of Gouda, an expensive and somewhat rare buy in their marketplace. I knew that they were spoiling me. Gnawing on the Dutch cheese, I was reminded of my mother, who used to say, “Gouda is Good-ah” and then laugh at her ridiculousness. Inwardly I smiled at the absurd memory and missed her at the same time. But still, I felt calm and happy next to Luis.

  As he had to go back to work, he asked me what I’d like to do.

  I wanted to go to Café Paris in Havana Vieja to write and listen to music. Maybe I’d walk around a bit. He warned me that it might not be a good idea to go alone, but my independence (and hard head) still firmly in place, I politely insisted on going.

  We hopped in the Coco, which was parked in the driveway of the underground garage. As Luis drove off, I sat directly behind him and he reached back around his bucket seat and rested his hand on my ankle. My thoughts returned to my first trip to Cuba when his touch sent chills up my spine and it was no different this time, only now I embraced the sentiment.

  When we arrived I got out, anxious to know when I would see him again. He said he would stop back by in a couple of hours.

  I passed my time in the crowded, popular café, set in motion by a two-piece band and female singer. I was seated against a wall with peep holes to the street and my body moved to the music as I studied the other people in the room, all of whom were tourists. I watched, I wrote, I sipped my drink. Looking out to the street, I could no longer turn an eye to the distinct pattern of too many young, beautiful Cuban women, hand-in-hand with decades-older European and Canadian men. The prostitution I tried so hard to ignore flowed freely in and out of hotels, restaurants, cafés, clubs, and the beautiful beaches nearby. There was nowhere to hide from it.

  Another massive fallout during the Special Period, prostitution had become a new sort of international tourism following the Cold War. Prior to that, Cuba was handed four to five billion dollars in yearly Soviet subsidies, allowing Castro to provide quality health care, education, and basic consumer needs to citizens. But when the aid dissolved in 1989, times became desperate, as Castro hadn’t diversified the economy. The US embargo didn’t help matters either, and food was suddenly and severely rationed, so much so that Luis later told me that even if you had money to buy items, there was nothing—not even a cold drink or ham sandwich—on the streets or in the markets.

  To this day any Cuban I’ve ever met tells vivid stories from that time. One of the more eye-opening ones is a tale of cardboard and condoms, which were pounded, shaped, and topped with cheese and any other remotely consumable item and sold as ‘pizzas.’

  Absorbed in my surroundings, I jerked at the touch of a hand in my hair and swiftly turned to see a man peering at me as his skinny fingers stroked the back of my head through the latticework.

  “Hola, rubia,” he said.

  Ugh! I gathered my things quickly and moved to the opposite side of the room where there was a solid wall. Sitting next to me was a baby-faced redhead, freckled from head to toe.

  Within moments, a tall, thin mulatta (the ultimate Cuban beauty with her roots split between mainland Europe and Africa, as slaves were once common trade on the island), moved in for the kill. This was territory that she clearly manned.

  Little clothing covered her parts that stuck out in all the right places and she slid into a chair next to him, amplifying her assets. The guy bound upright, perfectly aligning his back with the wall behind us. Without saying a word, she pushed her fingertips into his “Guide to Cuba,” flipping the pages one behind the other, while she twirled her hair in her front two fingers of her other hand.

  His eyes darted around the room, once at me as if in a plea for help, and avoided eye contact completely with her. Yet she persisted, pressing her body onto him. She whispered something in his ear. His jaw clenched. Finally, he turned completely so that his back was to her.

  If the situation hadn’t been so sad, it would have been interesting in a Discovery Channel sort of way. She seemed unaffected by the cold shoulder, stood up, and moved her advances elsewhere.

  I scribbled a journal entry and eventually wandered outside, where I sat on a bench to draw passersby. I am not an artist, but I have on occasion enjoyed drawing light sketches of my surroundings, as much as a creative outlet as a reminder of where I have been.

  My pen never lifted from the page as I inked an outline of policemen who stalked the cobblestone rows.

  By the time Luis arrived, I was giddy like an idiot. He came to see me several times throughout the day, each visit outweighing the previous one. I thought I might explode having to wait until that night when we could be together, uninterrupted.

  After eating one of Ana’s divine creations that night, we went to the Hotel Nacional. We sat on a white wicker sofa and watched peacocks strut out from behind the bushes lining the granite floor. Tiny birds flew from one rafter to the next and a trio of musicians played only feet from us. The music, however, faded to background as Luis and I submerged into a world of our own, void of any and all things around us, with the exception of a waiter who stopped to take drink orders.

  Our energy was electric and it was within those thirty-six hours back in Cuba that I was able to answer that glaring question—Why was I here to see a man that I barely knew?

  Luis was the man I would marry.

  The thought wasn’t really a thought, but more like an extraordinary sense: precise, swift, and sure. Luis was it. I had hopped on a plane, alone, to go to an island that both scared and exhilarated me. Somewhere deep within me, I knew exactly what I was doing. Or I couldn’t stop thinking, maybe it was my mom who did.

  From there nights rolled into days with no coherent sense of when I had arrived, nor when I would leave. Luis and I were so ensconced in each other that the thought of the latter was incomprehensible.

  Luis worked one day on, one day off, while I counted the minutes until I would see him again. He stole moments throughout his workdays and raced the stairs to see me; I leaped into the hallway before he touched the door. We were teenagers again, unapologetic in our delirium.

  In his off hours, Luis shared Havana with me from the front seat of his red VW Bug that we released from its padlocked cage in the garage below. We visited Bosque de la Habana, a dense urban forest with sweeping vines that look they might carry you away in the nook of their limbs, and the front steps of Universidad de La Habana, the oldest university in Cuba. Luis pointed out the faded blood stains of Julio Antonio Mella, a university student and Castro revolutionary, which remain like a lost Rauchenberg, abstract in its tell-all brushes of the 1959 uprising.

  Driving past the Palacio Presidential, Luis pointed out bullet holes that lace the building like Braille nods to former President Batista’s final stand. Skimming the various neighborhoods this second time around, I noted the beauty and curves of the city’s trees, which define it greatly, much like Savannah’s do.

  For lunch we parked at the end of a broken, concrete walkway and stepped into the foyer of Los Amigos, one of the few legal paladares (privately owned restaurants run out of Cubans’ homes) in Havana at that time. It was comprised of a handful of tables that were draped in red and white checkered paper cloths.

  “Sientense,” a large, friendly woman told us as she pointed around the room to suggest that we could sit anywhere we’d like. We were there at an unusual hour, maybe three or so, and didn’t have to compete for space at one of the more popular places in town.

  Luis pulled my chair out for me and touched my back lightly as I sat. I quickly ordered fresh orange juice, fish, black beans,
and rice. Luis added to that tostones, which are plantains that are boiled, smashed, fried, and then sprinkled with salt, as well as plátanos fritos, their more mature, sweeter sisters, smashed into divinity.

  Moments later the same woman brought out our drinks and a basket of sliced and toasted Cuban bread, butter generously applied. A salad of chopped lettuce and tomatoes with oil and vinegar on the side followed, but Luis suggested that I stay away from any food that was cleaned with tap water. That time, I took his advice with heed. Nibbling bread and eventually plates of food that arrived shortly thereafter, which we cleared almost in full, Luis and I dabbled into the future.

  “Maybe we could meet in Italy,” he suggested.

  “I can check into work visas for me, but can you get there?”

  There had already been three denials for an Italian visa for no reason. I was skeptical.

  “I’ll talk to a lawyer friend. He might be able to help.”

  He rested his hands on mine over the table. “You could always come here. Stay with me.”

  The air in my chest cut short. “What would I do? How can I be here legally? I need to be here legally or my family will freak.”

  “I know,” he said with a nod. “Maybe as a journalist … or as a student at the University of Havana.”

  My breath clipped. It was scary to think about being in Cuba indefinitely and falling harder for someone who may or may not be able to get out of the country.

  And unbeknownst to us, Cuba and the United States were gearing up for an all-out war as Castro and President Bush were on their way to becoming bitter archenemies.

  Chapter 22

  War

  End of February 2002

  Two weeks after saying good-bye to Luis, I landed again in José Martí Airport. The day following my return to Savannah, I booked a ticket back to Cuba for fourteen days. I then changed my ticket to Budapest from March to April, explaining to my family that the brief illness I had following my trip to Cuba was the reason for the change.