Yankee Come Home Page 6

  Room 1117 was a long rectangle with a door at one end, a bed in the middle, and a curtained wall of glass at the other. I threw my stuff in the closet, on the dresser, on the floor. I turned out the lights and started pulling off my sweaty, grimy clothes. I quit; I was done, my body ached for the bed … but I couldn’t resist going to the window, pulling the curtain, checking the view.

  It was like that moment when the lovers finally close the door behind them, the Tommy James and the Shondells moment, the bass drum’s heartbeat thump, I think we’re alone now. I’d been part of a group for a day that seemed like days, worrying and negotiating and more or less forgetting where I was going and why. Now I was alone in the dark with a view of Santiago de Cuba, thrilled by everything I saw.

  One hundred-something feet down and a block or two south, Garzón was still feeding the Parque Ferreiro a steady trickle of trucks and buses. The nightclubs here at the Meliá and over at the Las Americas probably explained the game being played at the parque’s edges: girls and women waiting at the mouths of side streets and alleys, leaning in to talk to men in the backseats of taxis. Between the smoked glass and the color-stealing streetlights, the world down there looked like a moving tintype, an old silent movie that just kept on rolling, reel after reel, through little scenes of arrival and departure, laughter and trouble. There must be a radio, or maybe a guitar; here and there beneath the trees, people were dancing: not fast, not for show, but just moving in place, hips nudging the night toward dawn.

  Beyond the park I could see some of the landmarks I knew in this end of town. There isn’t a square block of this nearly five-hundred-year-old city that doesn’t have a story to tell. Poor and crumbling, vibrant and rebellious, Santiago de Cuba is always fascinating, always beautiful to me.

  The Avenida de Céspedes, for example, is the main drag running through the neighborhood, or reparto, behind the Meliá. It’s one of the neighborhoods created in the city’s rapid expansion following the War of 1895 and the American intervention that climaxed in the siege of Santiago. In the decade after 1898, the city that had been the war’s ultimate battlefield outgrew boundaries that had defined it for centuries; a 1908 map celebrates the urbanización of two new neighborhoods to the east, Reparto Vista Alegre and Reparto Fomento.

  After centuries of naming neighborhoods for saints, heroes, and places in Spain or its empire, a newly Americanized Santiago apparently chose these names for their promotional value. The upscale Vista Alegre, “Happy View,” climbs the hills on the other side of the hotel, and does indeed boast terrific perspectives on the city, bay, and surrounding mountains. Fomento means “advancement” or “encouragement.”

  But fomento is a tricky word, touched by the negativity that Americans attach to “foment,” as in “incitement.” Fomenters are determinedly disruptive folks like Sam Adams, John Brown, and José Martí.

  There was once a Spanish blockhouse farther up the hill called Fuerte Sueño. Sueño means either “sleep” or “dream.” To tener sueño, or “have sueño,” is to be sleepy, but to tener sueños is to have dreams, to aspire. I’ve seen propaganda signs urging cubanos to lucha por sus sueños, to “struggle for your dreams.” Over time, the working- and middle-class neighborhood dropped Fomento and became known as Reparto Sueño, a less aggressive synonym for moving on up.

  The 1898 defense of San Juan Hill—behind me, on the other side of the hotel—was directed from forts in Reparto Sueño, which climbs the lower hill that used to form Santiago’s innermost rampart. The rise is dominated by a bulky old maternity hospital, Gineco-Obstétrico Mariana Grajales, named for a mother whose nine children included four sons who fought for Cuba’s independence from Spain, most notably General Antonio Maceo, the “Bronze Titan.”

  There’s always a huge mural on the great blank wall of the hospital’s downhill side, and the hero painted up there just then was Camilo Cienfuegos, one of Cuba’s holy trinity of Revolutionary captains, alongside Che and Fidel. We caught a glimpse of the image as we turned onto Garzón, and I thought it was he: tall-crowned cowboy hat, longer beard.

  Camilo was one of the few survivors of the Granma, the motor yacht that sailed from Mexico in 1956, dangerously overloaded with guns, supplies, Fidel Castro, and eighty-one amateur soldiers bound for Oriente, Cuba. Within days of their landing, most were wiped out by Batista’s troops and planes; the survivors, approximately and, Cuba being Cuba, inevitably a Last Supper baker’s dozen, formed the nucleus of the barbudo army that fought a two-year jungle war. Camilo distinguished himself as a lead-from-the-front commander in the Sierra Maestra and in the climactic cross-country push to Havana. He seemed both marvelously rugged and just plain lucky.

  While never a public speaker or policymaker to compete with Fidel and Che, Camilo is popular as a symbol of the barbudos’ folksy integrity and soldierly pluck. He endeared himself to the nation in the ecstatic days immediately following Fulgencio Batista’s New Year’s Eve 1958 flight to the Dominican Republic. The Cuban journalist Carlos Franqui recalled finding Cienfuegos in possession of Havana’s infamous Camp Columbia army barracks, a center of torture under Batista’s regime:

  It was enough to make you burst out laughing. In the commandant’s office was Camilo with his romantic beard, looking like Christ on a spree, his boots thrown on the floor and his feet up on the table, as he received his excellency the ambassador of the United States.

  On January 8, 1959, when Castro told a huge Havana crowd that Camp Columbia would become a school, he turned to Cienfuegos and asked, “How’m I doing, Camilo?”

  “Vas bien, Fidel,” Camilo replied. “You’re doing fine.”

  The Revolution’s early, hard left turn shook off many former comrades. But in June 1959, when the young and playful state put on an exhibition ball game—the barbudos versus the cops (the PNR, or Policía Nacional Revolucionaria)—former wannabe major leaguer Fidel was supposed to pitch for the rebels and Camilo, now a state security officer, for the police. Yet Camilo walked onto the field in a barbudos uniform, declaring, Yo no estoy contra Fidel ni en un juego de pelota. “I am not against Fidel, not even in a baseball game.”

  Camilo died mysteriously on October 28, 1959, when his plane crashed somewhere off Cuba’s southern coast, presumably in the shallow, coral-thicketed waters Christopher Columbus had named los Jardines de la Reina, the Gardens of the Queen.

  The nation mobilized for an all-out search, but not even a trace of the plane was ever found. Inevitably there were rumors. The alliance of Christian, Communist, peasant, bourgeois, and countless unclassifiable Cubans supporting Fidel Castro’s victorious revolution was falling apart. Some dissenters were fleeing to Miami; others were staying to fight. Camilo had been flying back from a mission to arrest the counterrevolutionary Huber Matos; maybe Matos sympathizers sabotaged his plane. Maybe he was accidentally shot down by a Cuban pilot nervous about recent CIA-funded air raids by Miami exiles. Some even suggested that “that one”—a euphemism for Fidel, sometimes emphasized with a pantomime stroke of a phantom beard—might have grown malignantly jealous of his lieutenant’s popularity.

  Whatever the reason for his death, Camilo joined Maricel’s father, Oscar, in the Revolution’s firmament of martyrs, where his light shone brightest until Che’s death in 1967. Every October 28, children in Cuba throw flowers into the sea to honor Comandante Camilo Cienfuegos. They are taught that he fomented a righteous and compassionate revolution, that he struggled for their dreams.

  I was as jazzed as I was exhausted, my mind barking at my body like an overexcited puppy, but I had to get to bed. Thank God my room didn’t face east, toward San Juan Hill; I might never have stopped staring, waiting to see the sunrise over the battlefield. I stripped and dove onto the oversized mattress, into weakening ripples of concern. I was hungry, but breakfast was coming all too soon, and the chorus would have questions, and Faribundo and Marina would want money and God knows whether Esau would show up with our cash. Sleep finally arrived to a fanfare of car horns from
the edge of the Neighborhood of Dreams.

  Chapter 3

  THE REVOLUTIONARY VIRGIN

  Breakfast was a sin.

  I elevatored down from 1117 to one of the Meliá Santiago de Cuba’s several restaurants, a huge room lined on two sides with booths and buffet bars offering eggs—as omelettes, over easy, sunny side up, and scrambled—pancakes, cereals hot and cold, sliced meats, fish, fresh vegetables. Islands and tables around the room were heaped with ice and fruits: melons, guavas, papayas, oranges, and their juices and nectars. Everything was arrayed in flagrant profligacy, spread and stacked and pyramided in the go-on-and-stuff-yourself style of love boats and Vegas buffets and Disneyland resort hotels.

  I’d been to Cuba before, and I knew the difference between what we were being served and what our servers saw in their kitchens every morning. Everyone outside this gleaming tower was dependent on ration books that promised too little and delivered even less.

  Still, the cook who took my egg order, a big man who had no trouble wearing the name Raymundo—king of the world—smiled with genuine welcome, as if I were joining him in his family’s kitchen. We swapped a few good words about chickens; I keep egg birds, but he was more interested in fighting cocks. The young lady who brought me a cup of “American-style”—i.e., weak—coffee, was just trying to take care of me, assuming I wanted what most guests wanted. Her name was Yudith, and one of her knees was badly scarred; she was getting around fine, but I waited until later to ask about getting some kick-ass café cubano.

  They were very nice people, and their jobs were pretty cushy by Cuban standards: a clean and fancy workplace, the chance of hard-currency tips, the chance to eat fairly well during their shifts, and opportunities to save some of the food that rich foreigners were wasting. They appeared anything but resentful; they were people of dignity who didn’t have to fake graciousness as they indulged the overprivileged.

  I was glad to see Maricel come to breakfast all rested and aglow with excitement. While we were talking about all the unknowns—Esau’s whereabouts, how to fulfill our missionary obligation without him, how far our bus money would take us—we were greeted and lobbied by chorus members who wanted everything from the day’s plans to their money back.

  Feminine Tone accompanist Walter Gomez, an accordion wizard, joined us at our table and listened in, smiling behind his brushy mustache. During a lull he muttered, Muchos caciques y poco de indios. “Lots of chiefs and few Indians.” It was the first I’d heard from him, besides our exchange of nice-to-meet-yous at JFK, and I was delighted to discover his dry humor. At week’s end the chorus would be returning to New England, and I’d be traveling to Havana with Maricel, who’d introduce me to another branch of her family. Walter had old friends in the capital, and he’d be with us on our seventeen-hour cross-country bus trip.

  Annie the percussionist, whose Spanish helped smooth our Kingston negotiations, offered to help me talk to Faribundo and Marina. Raised in Puerto Rico by parents who left Castro’s Cuba, she was sharp and sweet in two languages and had already started up friendships with Raymundo and the rest of the dining room crew. I teamed up with Annie to negotiate our day.

  Faribundo, Luis, and Marina were waiting in the lobby, looking as worried as I felt. Marina was our official translator, but it was a good thing Annie was along, as there were ambiguities to both the on- and off-the-book aspects of this deal.

  I was honest about the chorus’s situation: our leader missing, our cash limited. The drivers looked disappointed but determined to make the best of this semisorry opportunity. Marina—whose job may have included some element of “minding” us for the state—got really nervous. She said something about concern for “security,” but neither Annie nor I could figure out what that meant. It was clear she feared being held accountable by Cubatur, should our tour group use up fuel and other resources and then go broke. I didn’t know how to reassure her, though I tried to sound certain of Esau’s imminent arrival. Meanwhile, we agreed that the money I had to offer them would cover their official and unofficial expectations for the chorus’s first few days in Santiago, but not the full cost of a sightseeing tour today.

  After breakfast, the chorus assembled in a glassed-around foyer. Once again I found myself explaining that we needed to take up a collection, a few extra bucks from each, to bridge the gap between itinerary and actuality. Annie seemed to be a close personal friend of every member of the chorus; her enthusiasm sealed the deal. We were off to the Basilica of Our Lady of Charity and Remedies of El Cobre and then to the Castillo de San Pedro de la Roca, the fortress known as “El Morro.”

  * * *

  The Basilica of Our Lady of El Cobre stands on a hill several miles west of Santiago, ringed by sharp, high ridges of the Sierra Maestra. The pale yellow basilica is beautiful and its green backdrop both lush and dramatic, but the longer I looked, the more hard-rock trouble I saw.

  El cobre means “the copper.” The Sierra Maestra is rich in minerals, and Taino Indians scratched the open vein of copper-flecked pyrite ore running through these hills to find shiny, beautiful stones. The Spanish started the New World’s first Euro-style mining operation here within sixteen years of Santiago’s founding, in 1515; its initial yields produced cannon to defend Spain’s colonies. Some of the ridges beyond the church and its village are scarred by centuries of mining, ore processing, and erosion. Far below the basilica, open pits have been filled in by underground springs, creating a lake of poisonous green. Give or take some lean years and a war or two, the mine was worked until 2001, but there’s no longer enough profit in this ore to cover the cost of chasing it under the hills. The Cuban government closed the mine, and the village of El Cobre is a place without a purpose.

  Except, of course, for the service of Nuestra Señora de la Caridad y Remedios del Cobre, Our Lady of Charity and Remedies of El Cobre, the full title of the attribute of the Virgin Mary housed in the great yellow basilica. She is the patron saint of Cuba, and this is her shrine.

  Pilgrims sometimes approach the basilica’s great front arches on their knees, shuffling a quarter mile or more along a fairly shallow promenade but finishing with a steep climb up several flights of stone steps. Crawling or walking, most Cubans hope to visit the shrine at least once in their lives. Scores come every day, and the church is big enough to welcome the hundreds who celebrate Our Lady’s feast day on September 8.

  The bus let us out in the parking lot behind the church, and to get around to the front doors we walked a gauntlet of locals selling all kinds of worship paraphernalia and souvenirs, including candles and rosaries, tiny votive statues, and chunks of glittery ore. Chorus and friends have gone on ahead, but I’ve stopped to look around and, what the heck, to buy a classic piece of El Cobre kitsch: a whittled image of the Virgin, much smaller than my thumb, looming over even smaller figures of three men in a boat. Little wooden waves seem to menace the craft, and scraps of shiny ore stand glued to the whittled base like sparkling reefs. The scene is preserved in a glass cylinder under a little wooden dome with a tiny cross glued to its apex; I wrapped the gewgaw in a kerchief and tucked it into my traveling bag. If it got home with the cross still on top, that’d be some kind of miracle.

  The bag was an old friend, a lightweight leather camera bag I’d owned and abused for more than two decades. It’s been tossed onto airport tarmac, run over, stained with motor and suntan oil, sewn with kite twine, and patched with duct tape. There’s room in its three compartments for notebooks, pens, a Spanish-English dictionary, a phrasebook, maps, sunblock, sunglasses, Band-Aids, a needle for popping blisters, and a vial of mercurochrome, ibuprofen, a water bottle, cookies, a yard of clothesline, a spoon, a bar of soap in one plastic Baggie, a few sheets of toilet paper in another (you can’t count on finding either in any Cuban facility), the kerchief, a spare shirt, my handsized Canon digital camera, a telescoping tripod, a wallet (not the crucial one; passport and serious funds are stowed in two kinds of money belt) containing some cash, an AA anni
versary medallion, some cowrie shells, and a miniature crucifix. I can travel a long way on the contents of this bag, but its looks say, “Nothing worth stealing in here.” Indeed, as accessories go, it’s so disgraceful that panhandlers and thieves wrinkle their noses as they move on to more promising tourists. That may be why the young man who sold me the little glassed-in statue would hardly stay long enough to peddle me a couple of candles before he hurried off after the chorus.

  We were here just ahead of the ten A.M. Sunday Mass, and as I entered the basilica I saw, far ahead, a wedding-cake altar rising toward the ceiling in layers of pillars and plinths. The ultimate arch protects a glass case, lit from within so we could see the Virgin gleaming in her golden robe. The statue is only about sixteen inches tall, the baby she holds no bigger than my index finger. From down in the distant pews, she is an abstraction, a golden pyramid. But when she isn’t watching over Mass, her revolving case turns her around to face a small chapel tucked high into the back of the basilica. Pilgrims who need to get closer to the saint they call “Cachita”—a common nickname for women named Caridad (Charity)—can climb the stairs to this sanctuary and tell her their troubles, face-to-face.