Yankee Come Home Page 5

  The Interior Ministry’s passport cops gave most of our group no trouble at all. The chorus passed slowly through night-shift customs, dutifully opening aid-stuffed suitcases that had made it onto the plane. As the lone “missionary” carrying a Cuban journalist’s visa, I got some extra attention: inevitable questions—Evangelist or reporter, which is it? What are you going to write about?—calmed by my pledge to visit the Centro de Prensa Internacional, the international press center in Havana, for press credentialing a.s.a.p.

  Of course, they hassled Maricel. The daughter of a national hero, and she grew up in New Jersey? By daring to return to Cuba, Maricel reminded the state that her mom, Blanca—the widow of a revolutionary hero, herself a freedom fighter—turned out to be just another gusano, a “worm” who turned against her homeland and fled north to fatten on capitalism’s stubbornly animated corpse. Cuba has a very long memory, and when it comes to the Revolution, Cubans at home and in exile treat grudges like the family jewels.

  So, yeah, Maricel’s always going to get hassled. When the rest of us got through, Interior Ministry officers were still asking her questions to which they already knew all the answers. It’s not that they cared what she had to say; it’s just a part of their job to subject any returning traitor—or traitor’s daughter—to at least a minimum dose of intimidation, of stone faces, nasty innuendos, and loathing sneers.

  Watching them give her the business, a few of us who’d come out the other end of the line tensed up, though we tried not to show it. She’d been turned away before, and those of us who were on the 2001 trip remembered the three-hour grilling she endured in this same terminal. Here we were again, more than four years later: martyr’s daughter, chorus fully laden with husbands, partners, and kids, all arrived on Santiago’s front step with more than half a ton of donated stuff that couldn’t be shipped back. And this time we were traveling as missionaries, which suddenly seemed a preposterously flimsy pretext. The Cubans knew we were really here for the choral festival, but if they decided to make an issue of our identity, we didn’t even have a preacher along for a fig leaf.

  Inconsistency is the essence of arbitrary power. After less than ten minutes’ more desultory nitpicking, the passport cops let Maricel take a giant step across Cuba’s invisible threshold. They let her off so easily, so quickly that we were out of the terminal, meeting this trip’s bus driver and rolling toward the city before we quite realized how tense we’d been, how relieved we were.

  That’s one of totalitarianism’s great strengths: capricious power trains us to be grateful when it stays its hand.

  I sat up front, talking to the driver and guide in my capacity as the Reverend Esau’s designated bagman. The primary driver was Faribundo, big-boned and saturnine; with him was the obligatory second driver, Luis, a short, bald sparkplug. Cubatur, the government agency for travel and tourism, also provided Marina, our translator-guide. She was a little anxious: Where is your leader? The trio was friendly but stiff in the official Cubatur manner, and we were not quite connecting. That was too bad, because I didn’t really understand how the system of official fares and under-the-table tips was supposed to work, and I would need their help stretching Esau’s—that is, the chorus’s—money as far as it would go. Maybe we could talk it over in the morning. We were all tired, and I was distracted by the road’s spooky magic-lantern show.

  It was weird business, tunneling through darkness in strange country, chasing the headlights’ bore; what wasn’t worth noticing by day—roadside scrub, tossed litter—was almost all there was to see. I should have closed my eyes, but I kept watching the night-emptied road to Santiago, trying to learn something from nothing. Cracks in the asphalt skittered ahead of us, splitting and fraying like nerves and veins. Faribundo sometimes slowed to pick his way around potholes that looked like old craters. A tropic day’s dust matted the roadside foliage, making each leaf a specter of itself. The only trees framed entire in the narrow headlights were low, ghostly palms wound in bark like a mummy’s bandages. A man appeared, a skinny creature carrying a plastic sack, one bony forearm shielding his eyes as light swept over him, dissolving him in glare, abandoning him.

  Oriente es la tierra de las muertéras, the people say; “Oriente is the land of the dead ones.” They don’t mean that the old province—which once comprised the eastern third of the island, now divided into the five provinces of Las Tunas, Holguín, Granma, Guantánamo, and Santiago de Cuba—is a vast ghost town; few places on the planet are so charged with creative energy, with the courage of persistence. The people of Oriente live intensely, even joyously, in the face of perennial hardship. They’ve endured centuries of oppression and struggle, in part by holding on to religious traditions brought over from Africa.

  In the cosmology of West African people enslaved in colonial Cuba, “the dead ones” are spirits, “people no longer living in a physical body,” as Jualynne E. Dodson wrote in Sacred Spaces and Religious Traditions in Oriente Cuba. Five centuries of martyrs, heroes, and ordinary unknowns, the few who were wicked and the few who were good and the many, many who lived in between: Oriente’s departed are powerfully present because their spirits are respected and invoked, their remembrance kept ever alive.

  West African belief isn’t the only ideology sustaining the dead. Just as Afro-Cuban folk religion honors departed spirits to make sense of life, suffering, and death, so the Catholic Church reveres Jesus and a panoply of saints, and the Cuban government polishes the memory of the revolutionary elect. The world-famous musica tipica of eastern Cuba is a living folk tradition, a constant revival of songs first sung by grandfathers and great-great grandfathers. In Oriente, everyone works, in one way or another, at connecting life to the afterlife, at living with the dead.

  In all these ways, Cuba reminds me of Ireland, another island nation lying too close to a covetous colonial power. Like cubanos, the Irish—my great-grandfathers’ people—spent centuries cherishing what empire couldn’t take from them: saints, heroes, songs and resentments. Oriente has the “terrible beauty” Yeats recognized in a nation touched by the genius of suffering, a people crazy with hurt and love.

  The dusty road in our headlights was as spectral as an old sepia photograph. Would it be all that surprising if una muertéra were to step out out from behind one of those ceremental palms, doffing a conquistador’s helmet or rattling a slaver’s chains?

  Maybe everyone on the bus felt that strangeness; maybe that, as much as exhaustion, explained the chorus’s subdued chatter. Even as we rolled out of the bush into Santiago’s southern neighborhoods, the sense of past-present kept pace. There was so little to chase it away. This late in the evening, our bus moved almost alone down boulevards generously proportioned to accommodate several lanes of horse-drawn carriages. Some of these avenidas follow the camino militar, the military road that defined the ancient city’s southern limits. The road was a trench line in the War of 1898; as the city expanded in the early automobile age, failed defenses became roadbeds for paseos linking old neighborhoods to new.

  At this hour, most santiagueros were at home in neighborhoods out of sight down dark and narrow side streets. Even on the boulevards, streetlamps were few, their light pink and weak. They shined on eerily static scenes: an empty intersection, houses on all four corners the ghosts of mansions, walls scabbed and vitiliginous, balconies sagging like escapees afraid to jump. Vacant lots, collapsed buildings. A block of well-kept houses but no one on the sidewalk, no cars at the curb. In many of these snapshots there was little or nothing—beyond asphalt paving and sagging electrical lines—to place the scene in the twentieth century, let alone the twenty-first.

  Of course, there were signs, literally, of a more modern history: a few commercial signs in shop windows, advertising sodas or cookies, had a picture-and-label simplicity that all but disappeared from U.S. advertising sometime in the ’80s. They were deficient in hyperbolic excelsior, in advertising’s essential deceit; they didn’t promise that drinking this soda gets the g
uy the girl, that eating these cookies transports children to a land of unicorns and rainbows. What’s more, they were absolutely lacking in irony: no sardonic geckos or Neanderthal antimascots.

  Propaganda was more plentiful, but still stuck in time. All the examples we could discern in the dark streets—mottoes stenciled on flaky walls, the heroic names of bakeries and bookstores, here and there an exhortatory billboard or mural—might have been designed in 1964. Block letters, earnest hues, the figures drawn in a loose, warmhearted adaptation of Socialist Realism. In Cuba, au courant is an underlit billboard showing a barbudo—a “bearded one,” a scruffy guerrilla in old-school GI fatigues, the generic archetype of the men who fought under Fidel from 1956 to 1959—waving a World War II–surplus rifle and congratulating Santiago on its revolutionary spirit.

  Santiago did more than any other city in Cuba to support los barbudos’ struggle, and the guerrilla flatters the ancient town with the truth: Santiago: rebelde ayer, hospitalaria hoy, heroica siempre. “Rebellious yesterday, welcoming today, heroic always.” Problem is, yesterday, today, and the abstraction of “always” were over already, over and done. What about tomorrow? It was hard to believe, but even a drive-by, night-light inspection showed that Santiago was still poorer in 2005 than it was in 2001. Almost all the buildings we passed, all the houses, and almost all the government stores and offices were hurting for paint and plaster. There was a still higher percentage of collapsed buildings, shaky-looking construction, here-and-there hovels and shacks. Cuba’s second city appeared to be crumbling into the past.

  Because Faribundo avoided the old, narrow streets at the city’s heart, where the nightlife would be pushing Saturday into Sunday’s small hours, we saw few people on the sidewalks until we’d rolled a long ways down Avenida Victoriano Garzón, one of scores of Santiago streets named for heroes of Cuba’s several wars of independence.

  Garzón was a courageous colonel who fought in all three phases of Cuba’s late-nineteenth-century War of Independence, first enlisting as a twenty-one-year-old lieutenant in the Ten Years’ War. He was one of the diehards—along with Calixto Garcia, Guillermon Moncada, and Antonio Maceo, nearly all men from Oriente—who rejected the Treaty of Zanjón and fought la guerra chiquita, the hopeless “Little War” of 1879–80. At age forty-eight, Garzón joined his old comrades and Cuba’s young apostle of revolution José Martí in the trilogy’s last act, the War of 1895.

  Martí had been raising money and propagandizing in support of renewed rebellion for more than a decade, trying to enlist all Cubans at home and working abroad, of all social classes and colors, for the coming fight he simply called la guerra necesaria, the Necessary War. Martí’s War Diaries offer this portrait of Garzón at a camp in la manigua, the bush, on April 26, 1895:

  From his hammock, Victoriano Garzón, a sensible black man with a mustache and goatee and fiery eyes, tells me, humble and fervent, about his triumphant attack on Ramón de las Yaguas [a fort in the hills between Santiago and Guantánamo]: his words are restless and intense, his soul is generous, and he has a natural authority; he pampers his white aides, Mariano Sánchez and Rafael Portuondo, and if they err on a point of discipline, he lets them off. Stringy, sweetly smiling, in a blue shirt and black pants, he watches over each and every one of his soldiers.

  Martí was a gushing romantic, but his affectionate, poetical portrait of a warrior is nothing unusual in Cuban culture. Heroes cubanos aren’t revered for being as hard-ass as George Patton, as stolid as Stonewall Jackson, as nobly impassive as George Washington. Cubans like their generals sentimental. The archetypal Cuban war story may be “The Murdered Puppy,” from Reminiscences of the Cuban Revolutionary War by the Argentina-born Cuban soldier Che Guevara. The puppy, a mascot of the barbudos fighting in the mountains east of Santiago, insists on following a column that is marching on an urgent mission to attack government troops. And it won’t stop howling. As they approach the danger zone, Che has no choice but to order the puppy silenced.

  Félix regarded me with eyes that said nothing … Very slowly he took out a rope, placed it around the animal’s neck, and began to pull. The affectionate movements of the dog’s tail suddenly became convulsive, before gradually dying out, accompanied by a steady moan that escaped from its throat, despite the firm grip. I don’t know how long it took for the end to come, but to all of us it seemed like forever.

  The column hurried on, but los barbudos arrived too late to catch the government troops. Exhausted, they retreated to an abandoned village and cooked their evening meal. Félix dropped a bone on the ground.

  One of the house dogs came up meekly and took it. Félix put his hand on its head, and the dog looked at him. Félix looked back at the dog, and then he and I exchanged a guilty look … An imperceptible stirring came over us. There, in our presence, with its mild, mischievous and slightly reproachful gaze, observing us through the eyes of another dog, was the murdered puppy.

  The avenida named for “humble and fervent … sweetly smiling” Victoriano Garzón runs downhill from the ancient city center toward its meeting with Avenida de Las Americas. They intersect at Parque Ferreiro, a park named for a prominent nineteenth-century businessman, which is an ever-busy hub for roads leading out of town in all directions. Late-shift workers were lined up for buses, camiones (open-bed trucks), and hitchhiked rides back to their homes in outlying villages such as Sevilla and Palma Soriano. They waited under sulfurous streetlamps, while dim figures gathered in clumps under that park’s broad trees, passing bottles, playing dominoes by candlelight.

  A nightbird rising from those trees would barely have to flap to see San Juan Hill in the moonlight, and beyond it the heights above El Caney where Garzón died just a couple of weeks after his meeting with Martí. Death was very busy in those first months of the War of 1895, claiming several rebel leaders, including Flor Crombet, Guillermon Moncada, and, on May 19, Martí. They’re all remembered in Santiago’s street names and statuary.

  The Hotel Las Americas overlooks one corner of the intersection. It has all the charm of a neo-Stalinist EconoLodge, but I remembered it fondly from 2001, when Kathy and I shared our first meals there. The Las Americas is one of the cheapest hotels in town, and it’s sometimes a little rowdy; international tourists are likely to be sharing the poolside scene with Cuban schoolteachers, mechanics, or youth groups blowing off steam on state-subsidized vacations. We felt right at home, and I wished this expedition were headed there, but one result of the Reverend Onyegoro’s hapless renegotiations with Cubatur was a like-it-or-not upgrade to the most expensive hotel in town.

  Faribundo hung a left, traveling a hundred yards up the Avenida Las Americas to turn into a grand drive lit in bright, white floodlight—and we were suddenly returned to 2005, rolling up to the snazzy porte cochere of the city’s one and only glass and steel tower, the Hotel Meliá Santiago de Cuba.

  In all of Santiago de Cuba, nothing blares a teenth so bright as the Hotel Meliá. The hotel is a partnership of sorts between the Cuban government and the great Spanish hotel chain Sol Meliá. The Meliá Santiago was built as a showpiece for the Fourth Congress of the Communist Party of Cuba in 1991. The Russians were shutting off economic aid, and Castro had already imposed the program of shocking austerities euphemized as the “Special Period in Time of Peace.” As ever, hard times were still harder on the eastern end of the island; the Meliá Santiago was created to help Oriente attract international business types and top-tier tourists. Glassed-in elevators climb the fifteen-story façade. The lobby is an elegant, high-ceilinged cavern. Attentive, uniformed staffers took our bags, organized our arrival. While chorus members checked in, I acquainted myself with the signboards and brochures, reading about the four restaurants, the multiple pools, the spa, the nightclub, indoor gardens, meeting rooms, shops, the art gallery …

  This was standardized global glitz, and it must be the only reality way up north on the Hicacos Peninsula, where Cuba has ghettoized luxury tourism in the dozens of hotels lining mi
leslong Varadero Beach. But Santiago de Cuba is one of the world’s truly original places, a source from which other cities, other cultures draw an inimitable spirit. To ride through it after years away, only to step from the air-conditioned bus into a tricked-out box of a building that could be anywhere in the built-up world—Capetown, Osaka, Cleveland—is a little depressing.

  Still, it was somewhere to sleep. Chorus members were kissing and hugging and heading off to the elevators. Some thanked me for untangling the Kingston mess, which was sweet, but some asked me what was up for tomorrow, when we were going to start our mission work, when Esau was going to arrive and pay us all back. Maricel was this expedition’s leader, and she had trusted lieutenants, but I had somehow become some kind of service liaison, a tour guide with nothing to show. “Esau will be here soon,” I said. “I think.”

  Faribundo and Marina wanted to talk to me about the week to come, and tomorrow’s schedule in particular. Tomorrow, Sunday, would be the chorus’s best chance at a sightseeing tour. The rest of the week was supposed to be busy with missionary work in the mornings and International Choral Festival events most afternoons and evenings. Esau hadn’t told me what our project was going to consist of, but his website showed church-group missions painting chapels, cleaning school buildings, or lending a hand with light construction. Marina knew no more about all that than I did, so I guessed our longer-term planning would have to wait for Esau’s promised arrival.

  Then it was my turn at the reception desk. I got my room key and checked off a few other to-do list items. In the morning, I’d be able to spend about twelve dollars in pesos convertibles—a currency created to keep hard tourist cash in Cuba—for an hour’s Internet access in the hotel’s business center, where I could check for Esau’s e-mail. I’d call him, but of course the embargo meant my cell phone wouldn’t work here; the desk clerks said that long-distance calls from my room could run as high as twenty-five dollars a minute. If my laptop didn’t fit into the room’s wall safe, could I store it in the hotel safe when I’m out? Probably. I purchased a city map and, what the heck, since the young desk clerks were being so nice and I was so punchy, I asked for the schedules of games at the nearby baseball stadium, Masses at the nearest Catholic church, and meetings of Alcoholics Anonymous. The game times they could give me, with pleasure. Spiritually, I was on my own.