The Cat King of Havana Page 6

  The shadow of the plane raced across grass. The runway swept into view.

  We clanged down. Bounced. Dropped. Decelerated violently. Rolled across the runway.

  We were on the ground.

  Somebody in the back of the plane applauded. Like they hadn’t really believed the pilots were up to the task.

  I noticed Ana was gripping my hand, hard.

  I looked down at it. “It’s okay, Ana. I think we’re going to make it.”

  She let go of me as if scalded. “Look who’s talking, hero.”

  The thing was, I wasn’t trembling anymore. A calm had come over me, as abrupt as the terror of before.

  A damp, sweltering heat enveloped us in the jetway, markedly more intense than in New York or Cancún. A few steps and I was covered in sweat. Then we entered an air-conditioned hallway, and my T-shirt hung clammy against my skin.

  We followed a winding route to immigration and joined a line before a booth where an official in a light-blue uniform wielded the power invested in him by his little stamp.

  “Just like home,” I said.

  The immigration agents sat in cubicles much like those at JFK, even if these looked older and uglier. The three uniformed soldiers by the wall with their holstered guns wouldn’t have seemed out of place at an American airport. If anything, the posters on the walls—sandy beaches and colonial city squares, branded Auténtica Cuba—were more welcoming than the TSA’s stern notices.

  “Do you know how many people get detained at the US border for no good reason?” Ana asked.

  We edged slowly toward the booth. Our officer was mustached and portly, and a philosopher. He paused between questions and spent long minutes studying his computer screen and demonstrated an admirable contempt for the frantic pace of modern living. Eventually we made it and buenos días-ed him.

  He looked at our dark blue passports on the counter, back at us. “You speak Spanish?”

  We nodded.

  “You’re Americans.”

  Ana shifted uneasily.

  “Yes,” I said.

  He took the passports. Flipped through mine. Flipped through Ana’s. Took out the tourist visas that we’d purchased in Cancún.

  “What’s the purpose of your visit?”

  “To visit family,” I said.

  “Tourism.” Ana’s Spanish sounded self-conscious all of a sudden, almost as if it were a foreign language for her. “Exploring Cuba.”

  The official squinted at the two of us with the attitude of Sherlock Holmes on the snoop. “Which is it?”

  “My mother was Cuban,” I explained. “I want to meet her family and see her country. And this is my friend.”

  The officer grunted. “Where are you staying? Hotel?”

  “A casa particular.” That was the local term for bed-and-breakfasts run by private citizens. Juanita had instructed me to give this answer until we got to her place and sorted out some paperwork that would let us stay with her legally.

  “You’re under eighteen.”

  We handed him our parental consent forms, translated to Spanish and notarized. He took them. Studied them. Turned to his computer, typed something. Clicked, scrolled. Typed something else.

  Come on. Just stamp our visas already.

  The officer turned back to us. Pursed his lips. Cleared his throat.

  “We support the Revolution,” Ana said.

  I blinked.

  The officer blinked.

  We all blinked.

  “You what?” the officer asked.

  Ana hesitated. “The Revolution? We support it?”

  The officer raised his radio to his lips. “Vasquez, come to ten. Vasquez, to ten.”

  “Officer, what’s the—” I began.

  He cut me off with a wave of his hand. He stared at us like he couldn’t risk taking his eyes off us. Which might have made me feel like Rick Gutiérrez, dashing rogue of international crime—if I hadn’t been in danger of crapping my pants.

  I glanced at Ana. She glanced at me.

  Pictures flashed through my head. They’d deport us. They’d lock us up. They’d find Ana’s video camera and accuse us of spying.

  Behind the officer, a door opened. Another man in uniform stepped in, lean, pale. Vasquez, I guessed.

  “What’s up?” he asked.

  “Girl here says she supports the Revolution.”

  “She what?” Vasquez turned to Ana. “Why would you say such a thing?”

  “Why?” Ana looked confused. “Batista was a dictator. I think Fidel and Che had many good ideas.”

  Vasquez looked at her. Looked at the other officer. Back at her.

  “We’re really just here to see the country,” I said. “And to dance.”

  Vasquez leaned over the officer, whispered something. It sounded like, “I think she’s serious.”

  The officer gave the slightest shake of his head, as if to say, what a thing. What he actually said was, “Welcome to Cuba.”

  We got our visas stamped. We got our photos taken. We got buzzed through the door.

  Moments later, I stood at the baggage carousel, staring at the belt going round and round, amazed that I’d managed to keep my lunch inside myself.

  “I don’t understand,” Ana muttered beside me. “What did I say?”

  “I guess it’s like someone showing up at the US border and announcing they love the Constitution,” I said. “It makes you sound like a nutcase.”

  “Is that so,” Ana said.

  “I mean, you don’t expect someone to go like—oh, man, Obama, he’s so awesome. And how about those drone strikes!”

  “Is that what I was doing,” Ana said.

  That didn’t sound like a question. Which finally made me notice the look in her eyes.

  “Not that you’re a nutcase,” I said.

  “That’s a relief.”

  “You just sounded like one—”

  “Just . . . stop.”

  I grinned. After a moment, Ana did too.

  We’d made it. We were in Cuba.

  chapter seven

  JESUS LOVES THE REVOLUTION

  A mass of people milled about a cavernous, dilapidated arrivals hall. Waiting, chatting, holding signs. Entire families pressed against a metal barrier, here to pick up their loved ones. Elsewhere a group of teenagers sat on a stack of luggage, each bag wrapped in clear plastic. They were eating sandwiches with the patient, indifferent look of people who had nowhere much to be.

  As we pushed our way into this crowd, a gaunt man in ragged Nike shorts tugged at my shoulder. “Cigars? Cigars?” As if I might suddenly get the urge to smoke in the middle of the airport.

  “We don’t need anything. Thank you.”

  The man drifted off without a word, already searching past me.

  “How are we going to find your aunt?” Ana asked.

  I shrugged. So many faces here like Mom’s. So many voices like Aunt Juanita’s . . . she’d emailed me a photo, but—

  “Rick!”

  There she was. A rotund woman with silvery hair and a round face, and skin the same shade of brown as mine. She pushed her way toward me with happy disregard of the people in her way. She wore a faded denim jacket and blue jeans cut off below her knees, leaving her ample calves bare. I wouldn’t have imagined it possible, but she totally pulled the look off.

  I smiled. “Tía! I—”

  She swallowed me in a hug. She smelled of perfume and, faintly, sweat.

  “Rick, mijo,” she said in her rapid-fire Spanish. “You look like your mother.”

  Great. I looked like a girl. “I’m surprised you recognized me.”

  “Of course I recognized you.”

  “On the second try,” said a woman by her side, maybe twenty-five and solidly built, in a plain white dress. She wore a smile that seemed out of place on her face somehow, as if she wasn’t used to the expression. “The first guy she hugged freaked out.”

  “Pssht.” Juanita waved her hand. “Rick, meet my daughte
r Yolanda, your cousin. She’s the brains of the family.”

  “Good to meet you, primo,” Yolanda said. “And this is?”

  I started, realizing I’d neglected Ana. She stood to the side, hands in her pockets, trying on her cool look.

  “Guys, this is Ana Cabrera, my friend and dance partner. Ana, this is my family.”

  “Hi,” Ana said. “Nice to meet you.”

  Juanita went in for a hug, engulfed her as enthusiastically as she’d engulfed me. “Lovely to meet you, cariño.”

  “How was your trip?” Yolanda asked.

  “Good,” I said. “Just a slight hiccup at immigration.”

  “Yes?” Juanita asked.

  Ana shot me a warning look. I pretended not to notice.

  “We expressed our support for the Revolution,” I said. “They didn’t like that.”

  “Is that so?” Yolanda’s smile had faded. “What do you know about the Revolution?”

  “Let’s go get your money changed,” Juanita said, all cheer, as if Yolanda hadn’t spoken.

  Cuba had two sets of currency: the convertible peso or CUC, worth about a dollar, and the national peso, worth twenty-five times less. Juanita instructed us to get some of both and to learn the difference between the two currencies so we wouldn’t get scammed.

  “People will do anything to get their hands on five CUC,” she said.

  “We Cubans get paid in national pesos,” Yolanda added. “Which are worth crap.”

  “Don’t be crude,” Juanita said. “Dale, vámonos.”

  She grabbed Ana’s suitcase and sped toward the door, as if it were suddenly urgent we left. Ana raced after her to reclaim her bag, without success.

  We left the building. It was early evening but you couldn’t tell by the heat that rolled over us. The sidewalk was a free-for-all, tourists wrestling with luggage and fighting off locals offering their services, and trying to flag down a cab.

  Wiping sweat from my face with one hand and dragging my suitcase with the other, I followed Juanita—across the road, down a path between some palms, to an open-air parking lot.

  I’d seen many romanticized photos of old American cars rattling down bustling Havana streets, but I’d figured the photos were just that. Romanticized, exaggerated, a touristy shtick. Now I was confronted with a sea of hulking museum pieces. Massive automobiles with protruding hoods and shiny-chromed door handles and gleaming paint jobs, green and red and deep blue.

  Not that all the cars were like that. There were a few modern ones scattered here and there, Kias and Hyundais and VWs. But the one Juanita led us to was different altogether. Painted a dull tan, it was small and spare and boxy, all right angles, like a thing made of Lego bricks.

  “I’ve seen a car like this,” I said. “In a museum in Germany.”

  “My Lada.” Juanita popped the trunk, heaved in Ana’s bag with one mighty motion. “Good old Soviet beast.”

  I wondered if Soviet cars were as safe as Soviet airplanes. My sense of self-preservation warned me against asking this.

  I loaded my suitcase and took the backseat with Ana. It was painfully hot inside, the seat scalding to the touch.

  Juanita slid behind the wheel. Beside her, Yolanda said, “Roll down the windows and buckle up.”

  I cast about for a seat belt. Couldn’t find one.

  Yolanda laughed. “That one always gets the tourists.”

  “Pay attention, niños.” Juanita started up the Lada—it took three tries. The motor roared like a race car’s. “You’ll never get to see Havana for the first time again.”

  The Lada was sluggish to move but gathered speed. We pulled out of the parking lot and got onto a busy highway. Ana and I sat with our heads halfway out our respective windows, more for the breeze than for the view. I’d have stuck my tongue out like a dog if I’d thought it might help.

  The airport sat on the outskirts of the city. We drove past grassy fields interspersed with the occasional shack or run-down hangar. If not for the stubby palms lining the road and the ancient cars—they rattled like tin cans and spewed black smoke—you could have mistaken this for rust belt America.

  But no, I realized. This couldn’t be America. There were no billboards.

  Except there, I spotted one, plain white letters on blue. Las Ideas Son el Arma Esencial en La Lucha de la Humanidad. Ideas are the essential weapon in humanity’s battle. There was no indication what that battle might be.

  As she drove, Juanita told us about the dinner she was cooking tonight, about Yolanda’s boyfriend who was coming over, about the sights we had to see in Havana. “We’ll take you to all the places your mother loved to go,” she said at one point, and choked up a bit. “If only she could have come home with you.”

  Farther along the highway, warehouses and industrial buildings became more common, and occasionally even a low storefront. Everything had a worn-out air—long rust streaks on metal doors, peeling paint, sagging wooden fences, warped sidewalks, faded lawns.

  Up ahead, a looming tower came into view. An angular spire in the shape of a five-pointed star, stabbing at the sky.

  “That’s the José Martí Memorial,” Juanita said. “You know Martí?”

  “Of course.” Martí was a pre-Castro figure, a nineteenth-century Cuban revolutionary, writer, journalist, philosopher, and all-around national hero. “My mother loved Martí.”

  “I remember. She’d quote him at me when I wanted to pull her outdoors.” Juanita’s voice caught. “Un grano de poesía es suficiente para perfumar un siglo.”

  I recognized the inflection, the cadence of those words. I’d heard Mom speak them once, near the end in her hospital bed, gaunt fingers clutched around a thin black volume of Martí’s works.

  A grain of poetry is enough to perfume a century.

  My eye caught on something else. The Martí Memorial was in the middle of a large square. From the wall of one building beside the square, a monumental mural of Che Guevara looked down. But there was another giant face on a different building—bearded, smiling, with a wide hat.

  “Is that . . .” I struggled to make sense of it. “Jesus?”

  “What?” Juanita asked. “Where?”

  Yolanda looked at me. Looked where I was pointing. Guffawed.

  Ana rolled her eyes at me. “The Revolution doesn’t support religion, don’t you know?”

  “No, no.” Yolanda was still laughing. “I see the resemblance.”

  “That’s Camilo Cienfuegos, hero of the Revolution.” Juanita spoke in a serious tone, but in the end a snort escaped her. “Some people think he was better than Jesus.”

  “He died young,” Yolanda said. “Right after the Revolution. Didn’t have time to get his hands dirty.”

  Juanita started to say something, then bit it back. Yolanda looked at her for a moment, then out the window.

  I let the silence stretch. Mistaking national heroes for religious figures saps your confidence.

  “Coño,” Ana said abruptly. She rummaged in her bag, pulled out her camera, nestled her arm on the door to shoot the passing scenery. “Can’t believe I forgot.”

  We stopped at a red light. A boxy red convertible with the roof down pulled up on Ana’s side. The driver, a gray-haired grandfather type, grinned when he noticed her filming.

  “I think it’s amazing, the way you preserve the past here in Cuba,” Ana said. “Fixing old cars instead of buying a new one every few years.”

  “Like we have a choice,” Yolanda said.

  There came another one of those uncomfortable silences. A bit like when someone lets rip a good one at a fancy dinner party and everyone stares at their plates pretending they didn’t notice.

  “This is Vedado,” Juanita said after a while. “Pretty, no?”

  We rolled down a broad avenue with a wide grassy promenade in the middle, complete with palm trees and voluminous green shrubs sheared into neat round shapes. The buildings that lined the road seemed relatively modern and clean—here a concrete apar
tment building, there a red-roofed house that could almost be called a mansion. Clusters of teenagers and twentysomethings sat on the benches of the promenade and at the tables of a corner café.

  “Yes,” I said. “Very pretty.”

  “The next part is even prettier,” Yolanda said. “Our neighborhood. Centro Habana.”

  chapter eight

  CENTRO HABANA

  My eyes watered, and not from joy.

  Black exhaust hung in the air. On this narrow street, hemmed in by three- and four-story buildings, that air sat hot and heavy, and still. Almost as still as us, barely edging along in the traffic. It was misery, and I barely noticed. The street held all my attention.

  A collapsed balcony, concrete remnants protruding from the wall. A gaping hole in the sidewalk, covered over by a couple of planks. A cloudy, milky-looking puddle on the pavement, seasoned with a rotting banana peel. At one corner only the outer wall of a building remained, the rest a heap of rubble that two boys in bright red shorts scampered across.

  You know how in Fallout you emerge from your underground vault to discover the world a bombed-out ruin? This place wasn’t like that—most buildings were still standing—but looking around gave me that same uneasy feeling.

  Except people lived here. They walked along the sidewalk and in the street, weaving among the cars. Here a muscled man lounged in a doorway, his arms crossed and the flat of his foot against the door, talking to a granny permanently hunched forward at the waist. A freckled teenage girl leaned out of a third-story window, carrying on a yelled conversation with a short black guy dressed all in white—completely comfortable shouting back and forth, and no one even giving them a second glance.

  It was hard to miss the contrast between these people and their surroundings. A woman in fine white slacks and a purple blouse, her leather handbag gleaming new, could have been walking down Fifth Avenue in Manhattan—except that she had to veer around some concrete debris on the street corner. A guy in cutoff jeans and a black tee could have walked off the set of a rap video, complete with sunglasses and a gold chain around his neck.