March 27 - April 5 2008 / Cuba: A Brief Visit in 2008
A Church Group Sees Havana, Cienfuegos, and Matanzas
Part 2 - To Cienfuegos and Matanzas
On the way to Cienfuegos, a pretty big town to the southwest of Cuba on the other shore, we stopped to snorkel in the Bay of Pigs. The irony of it! The joy of it! Thank you Lord for letting me do this one more time! Some good fish, some good coral, a tiny walk on a marl trail, two kinds of lizard, and the three colors—red, orange, black--of big land crabs, scuttling among the ragged rock, audible clacking, clicking, rustling. They cross over the road, here, in their mating migrations, and the road is covered about two inches thick and stinking with destroyed crabs.
After the snorkeling we had a fine visit, after a pouring rain soaking the fields and the blue mountains beyond, to the national botanical garden. Cubans should be proud of this, a beautiful place. I love walking among the plants, flowering trees, palms. At the little shelter where we took refuge from the rain, a car pulls up, a bunch of people get out and the driver opens its trunk to display an entire roast pig on a slab. Picnic time!
Driving through the countryside to the botanic garden, we saw small groups of people here and there alongside the road, usually at intersections with the highway. Enrique explains that these are people hoping for a ride. You hold up a certain number of fingers and that tells drivers how far you want to go. You pay a little for this ride, depending on the distance.
Upon leaving the botanic garden, in the rain, we drove a young girl from her job at the garden to her intersection, where we had to let her off, and where she hoped to hitch another ride to get farther along her way home.
So you never know when you will get home.
Cienfuegos looks far more prosperous than Havana, although Enrique describes it as a city with a lot of makeup. There are fewer of the crumbling falling-down buildings, and more paint (the makeup). It turns out paint is made in a joint-venture place with the Spaniards, and thus there IS paint (“joint-venture” enterprises are good things in Cuba). Anything that is just done by Cuba alone is pretty much lacking.
The height of the economic times here corresponded to the height of Soviet times, and when they fell, so did Cuba. So there's no market for sugar cane, and when before it was a huge industry, now it and all the jobs it spawned, as well as the fields of cane (now gone to a horrid invasive)--all that is gone.
Enrique told us about the days in which he went to a boarding school, along with all the other kids, China style, “working in the fields" half the day and studying the other half. He told us that he enjoyed it, but somebody else told me that the last time they were here he said he hated it. He said it was supposed to get the kids off the streets of Havana into something wholesome, but that of course the kids in the dorms got up to all kinds of mischief.
He talked, in the bus, about--oh, so many things--the difficulty of cars, for instance, how if it's a car from before 1959, you can sell it, but if it's after, the machinations are so totally arcane that it is beyond belief. How do they keep the cars running--they invent stuff, create stuff. Again, Soviet-style.
[An addenum from 2010: I met and talked briefly with a young man from Cuba, now in the US, and he told me that if you don’t know anything about the rest of the world, you think this is the way things are everywhere.]
Anyhow, there is a fantastic undertone of politics, American politics too, and world politics, desperation, and above all a terrific edginess (nobody else in the group understands what I mean by this word, but it’s the word all right). It’s summed up in the Under The Table gesture that Enrique makes frequently, meaning, Yeah, this or that is done under the table. Things are not calm here; there is a racing pulse just under the surface.
Later today, well, we have painted the church we were supposed to paint. A bunch of people from the local parish helped, thank goodness, and our minister, and a couple of our men, and a couple of theirs, particularly worked very hard.
In our luggage each of us had brought material to help with this painting project—my assigned objects were the paint rollers and pans, and another person had a big bag of plaster in her suitcase. This caused a certain stir at security when she came through. But it was indeed found to be plaster and not an illegal substance of some kind. Others carried paint brushes from home, and shielding tape to keep paint lines controlled. We brought drop cloths, too. All of these are things which are hard to find here, or cost more than the church could afford. The church provided the paint, but it was expensive and had to be diluted many times to last long enough for our whole job.
I was astonished to see both Enrique and Jose, our driver, working hard at the painting along with everyone else—a strange and nice thing since it is certainly not part of their responsibility. For my part, I taped all around the base of the walls to protect the stone baseboard, such as it was, and I scraped vast amounts of walls. I painted a fair amount, over and over since the paint was sol diluted.
But most especially, and strangely, I was handed a crucifix to clean by one of the parish women. Right in my lap it was placed, heavy, along with a stray damp sock to use to clean it. I was stunned, and very very pleased. I can do this, I thought. Immediately our minister and one of the other women, both of whom know my profession of aetheism, began teasing me. Oh, a conversion, said the woman, joking.
But I felt the weight of my task, there in my lap. At first I laughed with them, but then I felt mocked, or not taken seriously. It was a serious task. I cleaned first the cross, then the hands and arms, then the feet, the legs, the garment, the torso, and finally the hair. And then the face. But their teasing seemed shameful to me. It was not a thing to joke about. I did not find it a joking matter. And I began to cry a bit. Our minister protested, well you were laughing before. Idiot. They left me alone after that, and I sat in the sun in the tiny back courtyard of a tiny Cuban Episcopal church and washed the body of Jesus on the cross for them.
I don't understand how this could be a joking matter.
I guess the thing of it is that they can't possibly know that even if you know there is no God, that does not stop you from revering and respecting, venerating even, the symbols of your native religion or more importantly, the fact of this venerated death.
This morning at our "prayer meeting" (we have one every morning) one of the men in our group read a passage from C. S. Lewis that had moved him since he was a teenager. It was about how God or whatever is incarnate in EVERYTHING and how no person is not glory. Well of course. I commented to the group about my book, Never Say It’s Just A Dandelion, and how I believe that nothing, not a pebble nor a person, is any more nor less than any other thing. It was a good discussion. One of our women said that she didn't believe that people have souls. There was a shocked silence. I loved her for that!
This town has tourists in it, but it has a fine small scale that I like very much. One of our men, a nice young person, asked if I would come back. I said no. Too edgy for me. But this seems a little different.
Enrique takes us to a pleasant square where I see two young girls showing off their dance lessons to a benchful of family. One girl demonstrates the five positions, with incomparable elegance in one so young, and the other, in white knee socks and low black heels, does a few flamenco steps. Beyond them some young men play an informal soccer game.
All of the problems of the communist system, or socialism or whatever it’s called now, are here. People having to learn from birth to work the system, to work around, over, under, past, to Play The Game, as Enrique calls it.
He just learned yesterday that Cubans are now allowed to rent rooms in hotels. Well golly gee. Before, if he wanted to take his family on a small trip, they would have to stay with relatives, if they had some near where they wanted to go.
Many things are rationed. He showed us his ration book. Toothpaste, soap, meat, rice, flour, cigarettes--
Why is it that these rulers can't let their people go, to create and to prosper.
Enrique says he can Google things, and gets all the hits, but cannot open them. I say, so it says to you, “Sorry, you are in Cuba.” He says, right, but it doesn’t say “Sorry.”
In the midst of a big rainstorm, that flooded the streets and drains, we were taken to the home of a photographer and I bought two images, one of crumbling streets, in a small place to which we will not go, but it is evocative, and the other of a surreal grouping of two little kids, an old man, a string of fish and a bicycle, and two white cats, one having been tossed into the picture. I love it.
The artist’s tiny apartment is also his studio. While others looked through the photographs, I sat in the little living room with several others. While the rain storm raged outside, his little boy trotted into the room with a video game, which he inserted into the tv and began playing, watching us out of the corner of his eye to see if we noticed. After a while it began to rain so hard that water started creeping over the sill from the courtyard in back, and splattering into the room where the pictures were being shown.
When we got back to our hotel, after a bit of a scary ride through the flooded streets (water over the wheels), we all found little floods in our rooms. Some people’s beds were soaked. Water came in through the ceilings, or in my room, through the closed windows. The marble stairways in the halls were puddled.
Following today’s second morning of painting the church, when we have finished it and the tiny open courtyard (walls black with mold or mildew) and three little rooms behind, in the evening we are invited back for a celebratory service with the congregation. Lots of little kids and “young people.” Hector, the priest, embracing in his simplicity in a way our minister will never be. I’m in the front row with one of our women, following along in the Communion service in the Spanish prayer book.
Then there was a social gathering in the newly-painted courtyard, in the dim light. There are modest refreshments of orange drink and stale bread with mayonnaise on it. There is a moving performance by an old lady in purple who sang like the best Broadway star (she used to be on the stage, we are told). A tiny girl who danced like a great ballerina. An older couple, she stout and unsmiling, he thin and very dark, dancing together like one body, barely moving and so very sensual.
That night, some of us gathered on the roof of the hotel, in the dark under the stars, drinking rum neat, some smoking Cuban cigars. Enrique went on, somewhat in his cups, about how if he could find a church with a priest like Hector (of the painted church), he would go to it, but the churches near him are “too political.” Finally, feeling such pity for him in his yearnings for what he cannot have at least at the moment, I leaned across and said, “Enrique, if you like, I will be your partner.” Enrique was happy and so was I; we embraced and I promised him the next morning that I meant it and that I would think strong thoughts of him every day. And I have (and have emailed him every single week since that night).
(Actually I am at home now, dates and order of things fading, and I am writing a little from notes--)
At some point, we were taken in the heat to a famous cemetery on the outskirts of Havana. A harsh-voiced woman, the guide (who lights up her cigarette right in the cemetery) takes us around. In a loud and piercing voice she gives us the tour—and only a few yards away a burial is going on. Some of the mourners glare at us, and I am terribly embarrassed. Enrique apparently told her to lower her voice, but to no avail. The cemetery is I believe about the same vintage as Mount Auburn Cemetery, and there are some glorious marble monuments. All of them are pristine, because of the beneficent weather here, unlike the ones at Mount Auburn, eroded over all those harsh winters.
In Havana: scaffolding around four sides of a roofless, gutted building, untended for so long that thick vines cover it all, and grow within the empty space where there was once a building.
The hollow cry of roosters in the night time.
In the southern part of Havana, street after street of low plastered buildings with wrought iron balconies hung with clothes, all falling apart, streets rutted and broken, all clearly formerly quite lovely and upscale.
A big amusement park right by the side of the road as we drove from Havana to Cienfeugos, rides supplied by China.
24 pesos, for ordinary Cubans = 1 CUC for tourists. But I still don't know how much anybody earns, nor how much things cost. No taxes, but salaries so low you can't live on them without some other sources of income. Enrique says that everybody is involved in some nominally illegal form of income generation.
And finally, my Palm having shut down and I don’t seem to be able to recharge it, nor myself, I stop even taking notes and mostly stop taking pictures. We drive to Matanzas, our last place, where we stay in a seminary on the top of a hill. I’d gotten pretty high on company and was talking too much. So on the way here I stopped talking, and after arrival skipped dinner and all, and shut myself in my pleasant darkened room for 15 hours.
A concatenation of roosters at 6 am. Large black bees in the early light amid some pink hibiscus.
Mild doings. A long talk given by a person about AIDS, and another by the director I guess of the seminary, for us and a bunch of Presbyterians from Minnesota.
Whatever. I just go gently with the flow, here in Cuba. A strange, confusing place. At the little house church in Havana, we were entertained by a quartet of men (Seventh Day Adventists, we are told) who sing a capella and wonderfully. When explaining that they were going to sing some spirituals, the English-speaking man, very dark, says, “I’m not black, I’m Cuban.”
Would I come back? Well, I might or might not. The social aspects, being part of a group after the day’s activities, was very fun except when I got into trouble with some of the others. But I can only take just so much of this and then I get funny. And Cuba itself did not seem terribly compelling to me.
I feel fervently for them in their communist dregs. Even since we have been back, things have changed there, what with the Castro brother Raul. People can own cell phones and computers legally, now. How about that-- (if they can afford them of course.)
Am I glad I went? Oh yes, I am glad to go anywhere. And it was good to be a small part for short times of real people’s lives. But to be trapped on an island from which you cannot depart? To be trapped in a way of life which you cannot influence?