Notes From A Small Island

The night before we left for Santiago, I met for the first time with Douglas Deas, the first (albeit distant) family member of mine I’d met in Cuba. We had talked on the phone several times, and I knew a few things about him: he’s an electrical engineer, he lives in Santiago, and he’s the grandson of my great-grandfather’s brother. (This isn’t quite as complicated as it sounds.)

We met in the lobby of the Riviera, and the moment I stepped out of the elevator I recognized him. There wasn’t any one physical attribute of his that I could pick out as being similar to anyone in my family, but somehow the sum of the parts made him immediately identifiable.

We talked for almost two hours, and found that we enjoyed each other’s company. He’s thirty-nine, in the same generation as my father and uncles, and he and his wife are expecting their first child in June. (She’s hoping it’s a girl, but he would prefer a boy, to carry on the family name.) He was interested in my family and was happy to find out that I had pictures, and he listened attentively as I pointed out each person. Unfortunately, he soon had to go, as he was leaving early the next morning for a month-long job in Nicaragua, but we made plans to have ice cream at Coppelia when he returned. He also gave me the number of his parents in Santiago and said he would let them know to expect my call.

The next morning, we rose early. Our Spring Break trip was made considerably more difficult because NYU was a little too thrifty to pay for our hotel rooms during the week we’d be gone, and so we needed to check completely out of the Riviera before we could leave. At a little after seven, though, the thirty of us boarded the bus, bleary-eyed but excited.

The flight to Santiago caused considerable anxiety for some of us – the plane was barely large enough, and rickety to boot – but except for a sickening leftward lurch during landing it was uneventful. The day we flew in was actually our most packed day, schedule-wise: after landing at noon, we went to the El Moro Castle, on the mouth of the Bay, until two; ate lunch; went to a dance performance at four; and finally, at seven in thee evening, arrived and checked into the Casa Granda Hotel in Santiago just in time to eat dinner and pass out. As I was falling asleep, I resolved to call Abel (Douglas’s father) first thing the next morning.

The next morning I was startled awake by the telephone. I rolled over, looked at the clock. It was six forty-five am. I couldn’t imagine who could possibly be calling at this hour. I picked up the phone.

“Hello?” I said.

“¿Hola? ¿Keel?” said a woman’s voice.

I scrambled. “Hola, aqui es Keel,” I said.

“Hola, Keel. Aqui es Ilia, hija de Ricardo, el hermano de tu bisabuelo Mario, el papa de Híran, tu abuelo.”

“Hola,” I said again, stupidly.

“I was wondering if there was a time today that we could meet in the lobby of the Casa Granda, you and I and some of the family,” Ilia said in Spanish.

I did a quick calculation of how many more hours I felt like sleeping.

“One?” I asked.

Having settled on a time, she wished me goodbye, and I hung up the phone.

“Who the hell was that,” my roommate said from under a pile of pillows and blankets.

“That was-” I stopped. “That was my great-grandfather’s brother’s daughter.”

Adam grunted and went back to sleep. I lay there for a few more moments and wondered how Ilia had known what hotel I was at, or that I was in Santiago at all. Then I too fell back asleep.

Later that day, showered and feeling much more awake, I waited in the Casa Granda lobby. Eventually, a short, bespectacled woman of perhaps sixty walked into the lobby, followed closely by a man of the same age who looked exactly like my great-grandfather. I stood up and walked over to them.

The introductions went well: there was a lot of hugging and shaking of hands. The woman was, in fact, Ilia, while the man was her cousin – the son of another brother of my great-grandfathers. (Note: But for a select few people, I have shamefully forgotten the name of nearly everyone I met in Santiago. When Douglas returns to Havana I am going to show him the picture I took with everyone and ask him to identify them, when I have pen and paper close at hand.) They took a seat and we fell into conversation, talking about the family. After a few minutes, another man of about the same age walked up and was introduced to me as Abel – Douglas’s father. He sat down and joined in the conversation. A few minutes later two young men, about my age, wandered into the lobby. They turned out to be grandchildren of someone, and they shook my hand, too. Their father was quick on their heels and was soon sitting next to them.

By this point, there were multiple conversations happening at once, and it was taxing my Spanish – I usually have no problem understanding people, but with so much happening I was having trouble keeping up. Ilia’s brother walked in, apologized for being late, sat down, and then called over the concierge of the hotel, who turned out to be a personal friend of his. By this time there were nearly a dozen of us and we had pretty much filled the Casa Granda’s small lobby; hotel guests were having to make their way through the throng to get to the front desk, and were thus doubly frustrated to find it unmanned. I had pretty much stopped talking, and was concentrating on simply understanding what everyone was saying.

Then, all of a sudden, Ilia turned to me and said, “It was very nice to meet you, I think you are a credit to the family and I think it’s very good that you have met some of your family here in Santiago.” Still reeling a bit, I nodded, and said that I thought it was a very good thing too. She gave me a hug, and the men shook my hand, and then they departed en masse.

I stood in the hotel lobby, a little confused at what had just happened. I was planning on spending most of the day with the family, I had hoped to visit their houses and meet everyone I could. Then I remembered that I wanted to meet Bebé Caballero, the only living sibling of my great-grandmother’s, but that I had accidentally packed the paper with his address on it in my suitcase back in Havana, and that I had forgotten to ask Ilia where he lived. With no way to get in contact with her, it looked like I was going to have to search him out myself, but my only starting point was that he worked at a church somewhere in Santiago. I resolved to do that the next day, and spent the rest of Sunday wandering around Santiago with a couple of my schoolmates.

Santiago is one of the oldest cities in Cuba, and for a long time it was poised to become the premier harbor in the country; it was only well into the seventeenth century that Havana was finally established as the clear capital. Like San Francisco, Santiago is built on hills, and everything slopes down to the harbor. Santiago is a poorer, hotter, and more vibrant city than Havana; almost every important Cuban cultural movement has come out of Santiago. In Santiago are the best dancers, the best art, and especially the best music. (Casas de la Trova are the name for the music-halls that dot all of Cuba, and for many people they’re the only place to play or hear live music. The first, and best, casa is in Santiago.) In short, it’s a fantastic city, and I wish I’d stayed for longer than the two-and-a-half days we were there.

The next morning was Monday, the last day we were in Santiago. Early in the morning, the phone rang. I rolled over and picked it up. It was Ilia. She asked how I was, and then apologized for their abrupt exit the day before. Things, she said, had progressed rather quickly.

All at once I understood what had happened the day before. Ilia had mentioned to a few of her siblings and cousins that I was going to be in town, and the word had spread to the rest of the family. She hadn’t been expecting that many people to show up at the Casa Granda, and once they were there, she was in the awkward position of having to play host to all of them – nearly a dozen people.

Anyway, she said, she would love to have me for dinner that evening, and if I wanted she could also take me to see Bebé – who she just called El Caballero. I gratefully accepted, and at three that afternoon we met again in the lobby of the Casa Granda.

We walked first to her house, which was only six or seven blocks away from the hotel. She ran some kind of boarding house for foreigners, but when I referred to it as a casa particular she corrected me, and said that it wasn’t, but didn’t elaborate. So I’m not really quite sure what it was, but it operated exactly like a particular and was a very nice house. I met her husband, admired the pictures of her grandson (her daughter and grandson live in Montreal) and then we left for El Caballero’s house.

We caught him just as he was coming back from the church, a short, wizened figure with large ears and a walking cane. He’d been expecting me, in a vague sort of way, for several months, and was delighted that I’d come to see him. We accompanied him (slowly) back to his house, a modest, crumbling building nearby that was nevertheless homey. He showed me around, pointing out his bedroom, the back porch (where my aunt Linda and uncle Dennis, he said, had sat with him for many hours when they visited in 2003), and the ancient Russian icebox that took up most of the kitchen. We went out into his living room, he took out his photo album and we all took a seat in a set of elderly wooden chairs. (At this point Bebé leaned over, gestured toward me with a crooked finger, and told me, in a low, conspiratorial voice, how when Dennis had sat in one of these same chairs four years earlier, it had collapsed under him and sent him tumbling to the dusty floor. Then, he leaned back in his chair and chuckled a quiet and raspy chuckle, his whole body shaking silently.)

He opened the photo album and I found, somewhat to my surprise, that it was full of photos of my family, in California. Bebé went through each photograph with me, pointing out the people in each one, and when he identified them correctly – which he did with surprising frequency – he would smile contentedly, and when he came across someone he didn’t know (my mother, for example, or some of my cousins) I would fill in the name, and he would repeat it until he had it memorized. I hadn’t any pictures to show him, my computer being back in Havana, but I promised to send him some more as soon as I could.

A few minutes later, Ilia and I, seeing that he was tiring, excused ourselves and made to leave. Bebé pulled me into a hug, told me how nice it was to meet me, and made me promise to write him letters and send him more photographs. As dusk settled Ilia and I waved goodbye to El Caballero and walked back toward her house.

Walking through Santiago with Ilia was a pretty incredible experience, not because of the number of people who filled the streets – children playing sports, women walking with husbands, old men sitting out on porches and in parks – but more because of the sheer number of them that she knew. She would call out to people almost constantly as she walked, congratulating this one on the new baby, chiding that one for not coming to visit her recently. At one point she turned to me. “El pueblo de Santiago,” she said, “es muy fuerte.” The meaning of pueblo that she’s using refers to the community, the people as a whole, and can be found all over Cuba, although I’d never heard it before.

When we got to her house, she parked me in the living room with her husband while she bustled off to make dinner. Her husband, while quite polite, was quiet; I think he didn’t quite know how to interact with me. So instead of talking we watched a dubbed episode of Knight Ridder on TV, which was a singularly odd experience.

Eventually dinner was ready, and Ilia had managed to include nearly every Cuban food I love: fried plantains, shrimp, rice and beans, coffee, flatbread, fruit. I ate until I was stuffed, and there was still more food that I had to beg off. All of the hotels that I have eaten at in Cuba have had the same fundamental flaw in their food options: they only serve American-style food. This fails both because they aren’t terribly good at imitating American food (the pancakes are particularly insipid, and all Cubans seem to have the uniform delusion that chocolate sauce is our preferred pancake topper) and also because nobody comes to Cuba to eat American food. The best and most authentic food that I’ve had here has either been at casas palidares or at the houses of my kindly relatives, and there hasn’t been nearly enough of it for my liking. So it felt incredible to just stuff myself.

An hour or so later and several pounds heavier, I left the house, bidding Ilia goodbye with a peck on the cheek. I made my way back to the hotel, digested for awhile, went to the casa de la trova, and fell asleep late that evening fairly sure that my phone would not be ringing early the next day.

The next morning we left for Baracoa, where we would spend the next six days. (This whole trip was planned by Fernando, our primary liaison at the Ludwig Foundation, and he traveled with us. It was ostensibly an educational trip – our visa requires that we not do any traveling as tourists – but all of our educational and cultural activities were dispensed with in Santiago, and our considerable time in Baracoa was completely free and unscheduled. Incidentally, Fernando is an avid sport fisherman, and the best fishing in Cuba is in Baracoa.)

Baracoa is nestled in the Sierra Maestra mountain range, which runs up the eastern side of the island. It is a place of stunning natural beauty: the rain forest here is denser than anywhere else in Cuba, and in many places it doesn’t clear until it’s almost hit the ocean. Ten rivers cut deep crevices through the mountains before pooling out into deltas where they hit the ocean. Many of Cuba’s rarest animals make their home here, including two of the most unique animals on Earth: the world’s second tiniest frog, which is only about the size of a sunflower seed; and the polimitas snail, whose shell comes in all manner of brilliant colors. (Necklaces made from the shells of the polimitas snail are breathtaking, and are popular souvenirs for the tourists to the area; because of this, the snails are now endangered.)

For most of its existence, Baracoa was almost completely cut off from the outside world, accessible only by a hundred miles of dirt road. (It was the setting of the short film Por Primera Vez, which I believe I discussed in an earlier post.) The villagers here lived in isolation, interacting little even with the rest of Cuba. Then, in the mid-nineties, a paved road was finally laid through the mountains and Cuba discovered, somewhat to its surprise, that it had a veritable Garden of Eden on its Eastern coast.

Today, Baracoa is well-known for its beauty, but due to its location and relative inaccessibility (even the new road is harrowing in parts, and is impassible during the rainy season or at night) it hasn’t become much of a tourist destination yet. We stayed at the Hotel Porto Santo, which is right on the beach and claims to be the exact spot in which Christopher Columbus first landed in the New World. It even has a replica of the cross he’s supposed to have planted in the soil, in the exact place he’s supposed to have planted it, although how they know this is anyone’s guess. (The actual cross, which, it is claimed, is the only one of the thirteen crosses Columbus planted that still exists, is housed at a nearby museum.) In any case, it was a reasonably nice hotel, which bungalow-style housing and surprisingly good drip coffee, the only American-style coffee I’ve had in Cuba.

My time in Baracoa was spent mostly lounging on the shores or in the waters of various beaches and rivers, and so I’m not going to go into too much detail about any of it. I’m just going to say that if you’re ever in Baracoa, make sure to go to the mouth of the Rio Yumurí, and find a man named Mirloy. He’ll take you upriver in his boat, show you the remains of a giant winch abandoned by an American banana company in 1959, take you back into the ancient Indian cave behind a waterfall, and point out interesting flora and fauna. (In a moment that exemplified Cuba’s strange, conflicted relationship with ecotourism, Mirloy pointed out a tocororo bird in the branches above – Cuba’s national bird, whose colors are those on the Cuban flag – and then, when it sat too still for us to see, chucked a stick at it.)

(Actually, one other interesting thing happened in Baracoa: I got the most horrific sunburn of my entire life. Our first day in town I went to the beach and spent almost twelve hours either snorkeling face-down in the water or lying on the shore asleep, and despite having applied sunscreen I found that night that my back had turned an alarming shade of maroon that throbbed painfully and did not fade for several days. Almost a week later my skin began to slough off in grotesque patches; this kept up for so long that I began to get seriously worried about whether there would be any more new skin underneath to replace that which was falling off. It was a disturbing experience.)

Five days later, sunburned and sandy and not in any mood to resume our studies, we climbed aboard another rickety plane and flew back to Havana.

That just about brings us up to date. In the last week or so since I returned I’ve just settled back into the flow of things. I went to Spanish class and finally – finally! – got a handle on the subjunctive. I went to the Museo de Chocolate with Bruno and Sam and had a chocolate fria drinking contest, which Sam won handily but which left all three of us feeling sick the rest of the day. (Imagine the best chocolate milk you’ve ever had. That’s a chocolate fria. And they’re eighty cents a glass.) I went to the Charlie Chaplin Theater and watched Alfred Hitchcock’s Rebecca with a bunch of old Cuban men. And I wrote this ludicrously long blog post, which I hope held your interest. To all of you who made it this far, thanks for reading, and I promise not to run on so long in the future! (Right.)