The Best American Travel Writing 2014 (7 page)

I saw Sandra one last time on that trip to Cuba, a quick visit on the
malecón
again. She'd come up with a plan: when I went back to Mexico, I should get my company to write her a
carta de invitación,
an invitation letter that she'd use to get an exit visa. “You work at a newspaper or something, right?” she asked. “They wouldn't have to offer me a real job, just do the
carta oficial.
I can take care of myself once I get there.”

I explained that I didn't really work for anyone, at least not like that, and some of the magazines I wrote for were actually based in Europe. She looked at me coyly. “Whatever,” she said. “Wherever.” I paused, uncomfortable, and then smiled a little and said that I could hardly get them to do favors for me, much less for an
amiga
in Cuba. Sandra shrugged. She began to gossip about a neighbor of hers who'd come over the day I'd visited her house. There was no change in her demeanor, as if the desire to go to Mexico or anywhere else had dissipated as soon as her shoulders had moved.

 

The big turquoise Habana Riviera hotel was originally commissioned by Meyer Lansky's men to be his mob's Havana gambling hub, an extravagant high-rise with sophistication unrivaled in the Caribbean—Manhattan on the Florida Strait. Architect Philip Johnson did initial designs until he realized he'd be working for the Mafia and passed the job along. The building opened in December 1957 with Ginger Rogers and her musical revue in the hotel's Copa Cabaret. In the end, Lansky's henchmen and Hollywood hangers-on enjoyed only three years of ocean views before Castro nationalized the hotel and casino in 1960.

Today, the wallpaper in many of the Riviera's rooms buckles from the humidity. Only half of them have seen renovations after 50 years of use; most floors are partly habitable and some are closed altogether. Viewed from the huge saltwater pool below, to which $10 buys anyone a day pass, the broken curtain rods dangling diagonally across the windows give the hotel the look of a cross-eyed old man. What beds there are have been made up with linens in sizes that don't fit the mattresses, and cockroaches skitter around the hallways or lie belly-up in corners. But in the lobby, the imagination sketches outlines of the three-piece suits and stiff silk skirts of the past, ghostlike, conjured by the decor. Low-slung, coral velvet couches and surfboard-shaped coffee tables with opalescent mosaic and gold inlay, all well preserved, invite time-travel fantasies.

Lobbies were where one could forget the hotels and houses that were crumbling for lack of maintenance, ignore the damp bubbles at the corners of walls. Lobbies were also where hotel security could most easily identify the women in spandex and pleather halter tops. The Riviera was Sandra's beat. Some nights she'd stay out on the
malecón
and other nights she'd slip one of the hotel workers 5 or 10 CUC to stay from around nine at night until she found a client. The $50 she charged gave her a good profit margin. She'd order a TuKola at the bar and proposition any man whose eyes lingered on her. At the club, now called the Copa Room, she'd shimmy up against a man and make him feel like he was the best dancer in the room. She complained later about how embarrassingly badly they danced, and sometimes even demonstrated for me in the middle of empty streets, but someone usually took her up to his room or whisked her off in a taxi to another hotel.

A tenuous confidence built between Sandra and me. That winter, we sat on her patio and watched the Brazilian
telenovela
on her neighbor's TV, which he dragged outside each night. He was supposed to be leaving for Panama soon, where he'd work as a physical therapist, always any day now. I watched Sandra untangle her 10-year-old neighbor's jump rope and tally scores from the
lotería,
the numbers racket that all of San Miguel played, on scraps of paper. Other days, we drank cheap coffees or beers in the cafés in San Miguel and ate the Toblerones I bought at Mexican airports and talked about not much and then hitchhiked downtown together. I got out of cars near my room in Centro Habana, and she continued on to the Riviera. I wore Birkenstocks to Sandra's heels and demurred when she asked me to buy her a cell phone or told me how great her half-brother was in bed. I rarely took cabs anymore.

One afternoon, we went for pizza at one of Habana Vieja's tourist-trap restaurants. Oil-stained white tablecloths hung limply atop red ones and pink-faced men sat with young women at the other two occupied tables. While I went to the bathroom, she flagged down the waiter and ordered a plate of olives.

“Ay, Julia,”
she sighed when I returned, stretching out the round vowels of my name in her hoarse voice,
“estoy en estado.”
She shoveled the canned olives into her mouth, filling her cheeks. She'd been eating like a horse, she said, peeing four times an hour, had what looked like a spare tire though she could rarely buy the food she craved—she thought it was Mumúa's baby. He'd gotten out of jail recently and was the only man she didn't use a condom with. If she had any more abortions, she might not be able to have kids in the future, so she'd have a baby in seven months.

Mumúa wanted to make a family of them, but Sandra had a plan, she said as she dipped French fries in the olive brine. She'd tell Bong, the Italian who visited Havana every four months with a millionaire invalid boss, that he was the father. As Sandra told it, theirs was a torrid, Jane Austen–in–the–tropics tale, the hunt for an advantageous match. Bong, who had a wife and kid back in Italy, wanted to move to Cuba to be with her, but his boss, who had promised to leave his fortune to Bong, wouldn't hear of it, so they snuck around. Since he was crazy about Sandra, and he looked something like Mumúa, she'd tell him the baby was his. Then he'd support her until the old man died and Bong could divorce the wife, marry Sandra, and take her and “their” baby away from Cuba, or at least to a better house on the island. “If he asks for a genetic test, I'll just say no,” she summed up, bobbing her head between bites of food.

She had never actually seen the invalid boss, though. One day Bong hailed from a town in Italy where everyone looked like they were Asian—Sandra wasn't sure which town, didn't care—and another day he was actually Filipino Italian. When I asked what she'd do for money if she did leave, how she'd pay rent or buy medicine, she was dismissive: “Aiouuuuuulia, I'll do anything, anything,” she said with a wave of her hand.

Sandra's plans for the future were like clouds she thought she'd walk into; they'd envelop her and then everything would be different. She'd find a boyfriend who'd marry her and get her the hell out of Cuba, where the life she'd lived for 21 years bored her: the same ration food, the same lack of privacy, the same eternal wait for buses to get downtown, the gloom that rolled in when her days were occupied by sleeping and boredom. The languid sense of time—which I soaked up in Havana—suffocated Sandra. Foreigners opened up wormholes of opportunity: Sandra could have money, sleep in hotels, buy $1 H. Upmann cigarettes, eat her favorite dessert, Jell-O, every day. The dreams Sandra imagined were the size of all the rooms she'd ever been in.

A few weeks after we'd had dinner, Sandra stopped talking to Mumúa. She'd seen him zipping toward home on his motorcycle with a pretty little thing clinging to his back. He'd also slapped her once or twice, she told me flippantly. I was relieved that Mumúa was out of Sandra's life and hoped it stayed that way.

So she'd listed Gallego as the baby's father on her
carnet de embarazada,
the ID card with which a pregnant woman can claim state benefits. With her
carnet,
she was entitled to medical care throughout her pregnancy, including house calls if she couldn't make it to the clinic and enough sonogram pictures to show off to neighbors, plus, she said: “a cradle that never shows up, a roll of gauze to use as diapers, little bottles of perfume and cream, two baby outfits, and four cloth diapers.” She had already bought an extra roll of gauze off a woman who would use disposables. In stores, disposables retailed for around $12 for a pack of 20, or, on the black market, $14 for 40. Sandra hoped that if Bong pulled through and decided to support “his” child, she'd use disposables once the baby came. It wasn't an exit visa, but it was progress.

 

I moved to Havana at the end of summer 2009, just a few months after I'd met Sandra. The more time I spent there, the more I understood that, in direct contradiction to the grand and lofty ideas that dominated the city's public discourse, the very small details of life were all that mattered in Havana. Since no one had any say in what happened anywhere else, or in the government, or in any larger way, the individual dramas of what one saw, heard, did, felt, or needed held weight. I would never understand how these details stitched together if I left after three or four weeks. And there was something of relief in the surrender that the country forced on its visitors: You couldn't eat what you wanted to eat,
porque no hay,
or visit a neighborhood with new buildings, because it didn't exist. Every car, townhouse, staircase, and avenue kept the patina of a city that had given itself to the passage of time and to which you were of no consequence.

By then, and since she was visibly pregnant that summer, Sandra had moved on to her second moneymaking plan. She and her neighbor Yessica had bought 200 cups of yogurt of the sort that retailed in the CUC supermarkets for 75 cents each. They paid a middleman 15 cents per cup and then walked the neighborhood to sell the yogurts at three for a dollar. I found them one afternoon near the main avenue, struggling to free a yogurt-filled stroller from one of the potholes that winked across the asphalt. Yessica and I took the stroller, while Sandra waddled along the sidewalk, whispering to people who sat on chairs outside their homes and sticking her head into open doorways and windows to advertise product. Someone emerged from every few doors, handed over cash, lifted the lacy blanket that covered the carriage, and pawed through its contents for the desired flavors.

Sandra was imminently due. Her pink-and-gray-striped T-shirt snuck up her belly, which protruded nearly a foot from her slight frame, to reveal thick purplish marks.

We snaked through the area. “Baby's still cooking,
china
?” whistled the man who leaned against the counter of the near-bare corner bodega, where rations were dispensed. Sandra rolled her slightly slanty eyes.

“Child's coming out walking if she stays in much longer,” muttered one woman as she sauntered by.

“When are you due?” asked a girl as she pressed Lilliputian hands against Sandra's swollen belly. “Today? Tomorrow?”

“If it were up to me,” she said, “I'd go straight to the hospital right now and get this baby the hell out of me.” The temperature stretched toward around a hundred degrees of mostly humidity.

When we reached the main avenue, Yessica and I stayed on the sidewalk with the stroller as Sandra advertised in shops—laundromat, cafeteria, Banco Nacional de Cuba. At the bank, the girls stopped to rest in the air-conditioned ATM cabin and sort out who wanted what inside. They ferried upwards of 40 cups of pineapple and strawberry while I stayed with the stroller. If a policeman came, Yessica said sternly, I was to invent an excuse or pretend not to speak Spanish and run. Sandra giggled: “The
yuma
comes to Cuba to sell yogurt. That's how bad the economy up north is.” When one yogurt spilled open and the bitter smell of synthetic strawberry began to stink, Sandra whisked a towel embroidered with a yellow duckie out of her purse, which had at one point been my purse, a black faux-patent tote I'd given her on the last day of my last trip—she'd noted at our Habana Vieja pizza dinner what a good diaper bag it would make and I'd left it with her. She wiped up the yogurt and stuffed the damp towel in an interior zip compartment.

Once the stroller was empty, Yessica pointed it toward home and Sandra walked me toward the bus stop. The amber afternoon was dusty. As we paused at a corner to let a truck turn, she pivoted toward me. “I'd like to ask you something,” she said. “Will you be the baby's godmother?”

I felt her at my side, gauging my response as she studied the ends of her long, layered hair for split ends. The truck passed, and we crossed the street. I needed to redraw the lines between us, I knew then, and if that meant she'd toss me aside, foreign and writer and all, I'd do it anyway. I wished that there was a part of me that wanted to say yes, or believe she'd asked me out of genuine sentiment, but there wasn't.

“The problem,” I explained, “is that I'm still hoping to write something about you someday.” If I was the godmother of her child, I could be seen as being too involved, I said, and my “bosses,” hazy as they were, would find even our formal interviews suspect.

She nodded. We were on the main street among sweaty men in dago Ts, old ladies with shopping bags, and girls with hair in netted ballerina buns. We passed under shaded colonnades that had been painted, vandalized, and repainted darker shades, a mottled patchwork of scratched-out signatures, expletives encased in bubbles, and declarations of love,
PR+SN
and
Yoser y Lulu
.

Sandra shook her head and pursed her lips. “No,” she said. She laughed and, after a beat, nodded. “Of course I'd rather maybe be famous. You just keep doing your job. Yessica wanted to be godmother anyway.”

 

The day after Mia Jaqueline was born, yogurts were still stacked three-deep in Sandra's tepid freezer. All nonessential furniture had moved outside to the shared patio. A crib had been assembled in the windowless bedroom, and the two twin mattresses on which Aboo, Gallego, and Sandra slept were piled one atop another. Fourteen plastic bottles on which Winnie-the-Pooh licked honey from a jar sat atop the old washing machine that was the kitchen counter between cleaning days. Sandra's father had sent her a suitcase of baby goods from Florida, and she would sell the overstock.