Anyway.
We came back to the Hotel Riviera in mid-March and almost immediately fell into a deep malaise. There were a couple of reasons for this but, personally, I think it mostly had to do with our lack of a routine. The Ludwig Foundation had spent so much time and energy figuring out how to get us to Cuba that, when we got there, they didn’t really know what to do with us. As such, our classes were laughably easy. In the three months that I was in Cuba I did no reading outside of class, I only ever had one-page homework assignments for my Spanish class, and no one really cared whether we came to class or not. I had it a bit easier than the Documentary kids, too – I was in a program where I was ostensibly studying Cuban music, but the Fayas stopped showing up soon after we returned from Santiago and remained missing until two days before the end of the trip.
So we had an abundance of free time, but we were a little beyond the stage where we were incredibly excited to be in Cuba – we had been on the island now for two months, and it’s tough to go out and find something new to explore every single day. We got lazy. We hung around. We played a lot of card games. It got hot, and the air conditioning in the hotel broke, and we took to lounging in the pool. We still went places, of course, but the pace slowed down significantly.
And then all of a sudden it was April, and we realized we had only three weeks left in Cuba and everybody freaked out.
The first weekend in April I went west again, this time with Bruno, Sam, and Sara. We rented a car and drove (stopping only briefly for a meal at El Romero in Las Terrazas) to the town of Viñales.
It’s a little strange that I ended up going to the province of Piñar del Rio twice in my time in Cuba – there really isn’t all that much there. But Viñales is home to some of Cuba’s strangest – and most striking – natural formations: mogotes, which are strange, block-like hills, not tall but distinctively shaped. The area has historically been too mountainous to be good farmland, although the best of Cuba’s tobacco is produced here; with the influx of tourists, though, the mogotes have become a veritable attraction.
We left Havana in the midmorning, and the sun was high in the sky. Three hours later, we drove into Viñales – the midst of a torrential downpour.
Viñales is a relatively small town, and the highway is the main drag through town. On either side of the road there are lines of casas particulares, most with small signs out front saying the names and the number of rooms available. It was impossible, though, for us to see those signs, so heavy was the rain. It was a downpour unlike any I have ever seen; the windshield wipers flapped uselessly at the fat droplets. Eventually we managed to find a casa with two rooms available. We parked the car outside and argued about who would have to dash the five yards or so to the front door.
After a spirited game of rock-paper-scissors, I was chosen. I put my hand on the door handle and braced myself for the rain.
There was a bright flash and the air was split by a terrific crack. A bolt of lightning struck a power pole about twenty feet from the car; it gave off a shower of sparks and swayed worryingly for a moment before deciding, on reflection, that it rather liked being upright. A few seconds later there was another peal of thunder, further off but still loud.
We decided to wait until the rain let up.
After about twenty minutes, the rain had slackened somewhat and the lightning had stopped. I ducked out of the car and jogged up to the front porch, where the entire family had gathered, curious. A graceful woman of about forty-five stepped up and shook my hand. She introduced herself as Nery Hernandez Rodriguez, and asked if I was interested in staying in her house. She then introduced me to approximately nine of her children and/or nephews, whose names I forgot as quickly as they said them.
She gave me a tour of the house – and it really was a lovely house. Beautiful tiled floors, tastefully decorated bedrooms, clean. She walked me back out onto the porch, where there were several tables and a swinging bench, and we sat down. She told me the price, and it was reasonable. She mentioned that she was an excellent cook and would provide breakfast and dinner for a similarly reasonable price. I told her that we would love to stay there, and she nodded – not surprised, but pleased.
As I turned to go back to the car she said, almost as an afterthought: “Of course, you all have your passports and visas, yes?”
“Of course,” I said, and at that moment that I realized that my passport was in fact locked safely in the safe in my hotel room, three hours to the east.
If it’s not immediately evident how stupid this was, let me tell you: it was really stupid. It was extremely important to the Cuban government that all the tourists in its borders were properly documented and traveling legally; otherwise, Cuba would have been overrun by hippies in Ché t-shirts sometime around 1982. A passport was necessary to rent any sort of respectable room. And yet somehow I had completely neglected to bring it with me – had, indeed, neglected even to bring a photocopy with me. It was a monumentally boneheaded thing to do.
I jogged back to the car and explained the situation. Needless to say, they were not pleased. We went inside and explained the situation to Nery. Her husband wandered in midway through the conversation, clad only in boxer shorts and a white t-shirt.
“Wait a minute,” he said, pointing at me. “Are you saying you left Havana without your passport?”
I nodded.
“Did you bring any kind of identification at all?”
I shook my head.
“Nothing?”
What could I do? I shook my head again. He stared at me for a moment in bemused disbelief, and then chuckled – a low, deeply amused chuckle that shook his belly.
“Son,” he said. “You left the house without your pants on.”
Coming as it was from a pants-less man himself, this was particularly galling, but I held my tongue and in the moment even managed, I think, to laugh with him a bit. We asked Nery if there was any way that we could still stay in the house, promising that the three Americans who were obviously smart and responsible would keep an eye on the other. But she shook her head. She went out to the porch and pointed to the house next door.
We went and looked – and saw why it was she couldn’t let me stay.
The house next door had a small sign above the door that read, “Comité de Defensa de la Revolucion” – and then, in smaller letters, “Viva el socialismo.” I’d seen these signs before, all over the island. There was a C.D.R. in every neighborhood, and though they had all sorts of secondary activities – they often organized classes, or distributed medicine – they were primarily concerned with monitoring the people in their neighborhood. They were the Communist party’s local ground force; they kept files on every person in the neighborhood, and if someone was judged to be a bad communist – if, say, they were neither working nor in school, or if someone is spreading anti-communist information – the C.D.R. alerted the local police.
In my time in Cuba I learned many things about the Communist government. In some ways it worked better than I had been led to believe; in other ways, worse. But nothing was quite so alien to me as the idea of a C.D.R.
(Speaking of things that work reasonably well – there has been a lot of talk about the Cuban health care system since Michael Moore’s film Sicko came out a few years ago. Here’s the thing about the Cuban health care system: it’s very good at keeping its population reasonably healthy. Much more emphasis is put on treating serious conditions or illnesses, and so Cubans only go to the doctor when they’re really sick; when they do go, though, the quality of the care they get is very good. The situation is creates is strangely opposite from that in the United States: in Cuba, it costs nothing to get, say, a kidney transplant, but to buy aspirin on the black market is quite expensive.
Here’s the catch: the Cuban government’s magnanimity only extends to its citizens. Since the end of the Special Period, Cuba’s entire health care system has been funded by tourist dollars. There is an entirely different set of hospitals set up in tourists areas; these hospitals are nicer, cleaner, better-stocked, and expensive. In addition, a Cuban doctor has developed a rather unique surgery for night-blindness that brings many people to the island specifically for the treatment. So if you travel in Cuba, don’t expect that your medical treatment will be free – the best thing that you can possibly do, from the Cuban government’s point of view, is to visit the island and then fall deathly ill.)
So this, then, was why I could not stay at Nery’s house: the C.D.R. was not just close, it was next door, and if they found out that she had let me stay she could lose the license on her palidar. But she held up a finger and said: let me make a few calls.
A few minutes later a man walked up and introduced himself to Bruno and I, and we followed to him to another, altogether poorer neighborhood. He led us to one house in particular; I noticed, as we entered, that there was no palidar certificate in the window. We were led to a back room with two thin cots in it. The paint was faded; the single window was small and set far up in the wall; cockroaches skittered at the corners of the room. But they would let us stay without asking to see our passports.
What else could we do? We took it.
We waked back to the first house and spent the evening drinking wine and playing Spades on the front porch. We went to bed early, and the next day got up and drove to la Cueva de Santo Tomas.
The hills of Viñales are riddled with caves, and throughout Cuba’s history they’ve been militarily important: the Native Americans first hid in them to launch attacks on the invading Spaniards; hundreds of years later, Ché Guevara set up his headquarters in them during the Cuban Missile Crisis. La Cueva de Santo Tomas is actually a huge cave system, extending some forty-two kilometers into the mountains. When I learned this I was filled with admittedly unrealistic expectations – would we stumble, I wondered, over the skeleton of a long-dead Taino warrior? Or a handful of miraculously-preserved pages from the diary of Ché himself?
Of course, although the cave system extends back forty kilometers, they only take you through a well-traveled kilometer of it, so my hopes were dashed. But we donned spelunking helmets and set off into the caves anyway, with only our guide and two giggling Swedish girls (with whom communication was, sadly, rather difficult) for company.
It was a fun way to spend a morning. There’s something inherently unsettling about caves, and it was fun to poke around in one without any real chance of hurting ourselves. We startled a gaggle of bats; we giggled childishly at a remarkably phallic stalagmite; and we clambered around on rocks. (We did not, unfortunately, find any of the blind, albino creatures that Animal Planet had led me to believe lurked in all caves.) A few hours later we emerged, blinking, into the daylight, and set off for Cayo Jutiás, twenty miles to the north.
You would think that after nearly three months in Cuba, I would have grown tired of beautiful beaches. You’d be wrong. Cayo Jutiás was a nearly perfect beach: warm, beautiful, almost empty. I fell asleep on the beach with A Farewell to Arms over my face and woke a few hours later covered in small, colorful crabs, which was less unsettling than it sounds. We drank a bottle of wine, scrawled a note on a bit of scratch paper, and threw the bottle back out to sea.
When the sun had dropped below the horizon we made our way back to the car and drove back to Viñales. The next day we woke up, got in the car, and drove home – stopping only briefly for a lunch at El Romero.
It was a calm, uneventful couple of days – and so I offer it in stark contrast to the weekend that followed.