Missive #18: Generalizations (or more reasons I feel so normal living in Cuba)

Generally speaking, Cubans love to make generalizations in general--and most specifically about Cubans in general. (That might sound redundant, but it is only another typically Cuban form of expression.)

Cuban babies sleeping (seemingly on some kind of schedule).

For example, at least once a day, I hear somebody say, “Así somos los cubanos.” (“This is how we Cubans are.”) Or, “A los cubanos nos encanta…/no nos gusta…” (“[We] Cubans love…/don’t like…)” A more specific example, which I have heard repeated by several people, parents and nonparents alike, is: “Los ninos cubanos no tienen ningunas rutinas…se acuestan a la hora que les parezca.” (“Cuban children don’t follow any schedules…they go to bed whenever they feel like it.”) Even more appalling is how true these generalizations seem to be.

Cubans love to tell everyone when it is their birthday. Just today, I had one of my favorite laundry/cleaning ladies named Jenny come right up to me and say, “It was my birthday yesterday!” And when Aitana, one of the residential students, came striding in through the front seminary gates back from Christmas break, her greeting was, “It’s my birthday today!” (And I used to think I was the only one who went around telling everyone it was my birthday because it was also Valentine’s Day!)


When Cubans get drunk, they love to sing! Sing-alongs are the best, and then everyone really sings along…These are not tawdry drinking songs, nor pop music; they are lovely traditional love songs from the golden days of yore, and everyone knows every single verse.

Feeling "normal."

When Cubans watch any kind of sporting competition on television, they scream and yell, and make strange animal sounds, and jump up and down, and dance, and punch holes in the wall, just like they do at the real live games at huge, crowded outdoor stadiums. This cultural-genetic phenomenon closely resembles the way Cubans behave in front of a movie screen; they act like they are part of the actual film and have every right to make comments or talk back to the actors.

This past Sunday afternoon, for example, I was at the only movie theater in Matanzas, a huge old theater with a huge screen. The film was an American movie from 2011 titled, "The Son of Nobody."


There were about a dozen of us in the audience. A few minutes into the movie, a phone rang, and I did a double-take to check and see if it was part of the movie; it wasn’t, and a regular cell phone conversation took place about half the empty theater away from us, but still audible.

Toward the climax of the plot, someone in the audience clearly yelled out at the screen: “He’s the only other one who knew about the murders! It has to be him!” It reminded me of my father yelling, “Imbécil!” at the television screen when a Phillies umpire made a bad call, or an Eagles halfback fumbled the ball.

A few more Y-Generation names: Yolandri, Yoelixis, Yandri, Yulexis, Yoel.

Most of these are names belong to baseball players for the Matanzas Cocodrilos and for the Villa Clara Naranjas. I copied them from the television screen while watching the third of a three-game series in a kitchen filled with a dozen Cubans hysterically yelling, screaming, punching, lighting candles, dancing, and hitting. The kitchen table had to be taken outside to make room for all the chairs, which were constantly being shifted between one person or another, depending on whose team had made the last good play…oy veh.

With love from Cuba,
Elisa

Missive #17: Christmas in Cuba

Today, January 6, is the real Cuban Christmas. December 24 is the family celebration, with the huge pork roast. December 25 was reinstated as a “Día de Fiesta” after the Pope’s visit, but other than saying “Feliz Navidad” and “Igualmente,” there wasn’t much else that took place on that day.

The fake little Christmas trees, nativity scenes, lights, wreaths, and sundry ornaments had already been brought out and heavily, overly decorated as of the first of the month. (When I asked one of the seminarians why they were decorating the chapel so early, she said, “Because Christmas is over so quickly, it only lasts a week; so this way we can enjoy it longer.”)

But today is the day when the children receive gifts, because it commemorates the Day of the Three Kings, also known as the Magi, and the Epiphany of the Christ Child. I just came back from the Calle del Medio, Matanzas Main Street, with all the stores, where I noticed a much larger line than usual crowd of shoppers, surrounding a single-woman vendor behind a small table, just outside the entrance to one of the larger department stores.

I asked the store attendant standing closest to the crowd, “Why are there so many people there? What are they selling?” And she gave me that same half-puzzled, half-bored look I get a lot, like wondering what my problem is and not really caring, and replied “Toys.” Like, ‘Duh, lady, don’t you know what day it is today?’

Then she pointed to another, even larger table and longer line inside the store, indicating that this crowd outside was just the preview. These large stores, which deal only in convertible pesos, all have a guarda bolsas, where shoppers have to leave all of their bags before entering the store.

Upon leaving the store, waiting in yet another line to give the key to the guarda bolsas man so he would return my purse, several women exchanged greetings and felicidades and kisses, and then took out all the little toys they had just managed to purchase for the niece or granddaughter who is about to come over after school this afternoon.

The date had to have been January 6, 1960, a few weeks before my fifth birthday. We were sitting in the room just off the enclosed balcony of our third-floor apartment, facing the street two blocks from the Malecón. A blue parakeet flew in through one of the windows! And I was delighted when my mother said it was a gift from the Three Kings.

Many years later, when I related this memory to my mother, she admitted that the little bird had probably escaped from a large cage that my grandmother kept somewhere between her patio and our apartment building. Nevertheless, I continue to treasure that magical memory as a symbol of love’s mysteries captured in flight.

With love from Cuba,

Elisa

Missive #16: Forgetfulness, serendipity, and surprises

FORGETFULNESS

For our circuitous road trip through Central Cuba, I threw my two pillows in the trunk of the car, just in case one of the casas particulares where we planned to sleep only provided only one pillow per bed, for my nightly reading.

It turned out that they weren’t needed, but we were warned by everyone to take everything out of the car, even out of the trunk, before locking up the car, or that it would disappear by morning. I had also packed the only towel I’d brought from the United States, a huge old beach towel, threadbare and stained, which I’d been using to dry Semi after his baths and as a doormat between the laundry patio and the kitchen.

Our first night on the road was spent at a Cuban B&B in Playa Larga, on the Zapata Peninsula. I left the beach towel hanging out to dry on the concrete wall/fence separating the two adjacent properties, and it was gone the next morning. After leaving and promptly losing a cell phone (on the beach in Varadero), my first flash drive (in the ETECSA computer at Varadero), and my second flash drive and apartment key (in the seminary library), the loss of the raggedy old beach towel was no surprise. No, I never learn.

In Cienfuegos, I knew better than to leave the two nice seminary pillows in white pillow cases in the car overnight. Alice and I dutifully carried them into our room at the Hostal Colonial, only to find that they looked exactly like the other four pillows already on the beds. Every day, I would say to Alice, “Alice, remind me that I must...” and every day, Alice would reply, “Mom, you know I won’t remember to remind you...” To which I would reply, “Ok, well, maybe just asking you to remind me will help me to remember...”

You guessed it: we left the Seminary pillows behind. (Alice will not be happy with the "we.") I think that the real reason that Hemingway loved Cuba is that he could get away with writing drunk every day.

Losing the two white pillows with their two white pillowcases made Alice mad, but it made me happy. I only enjoy going shopping if I have something very specific that I need to buy. In Cuba, where scarcity with most items is the rule rather than the exception, shopping becomes even more of an exciting challenge.

Alice spent the rest of our time in Cuba together saying: “Mom, I refuse to waste my time in Cuba shopping for your stupid pillows!” But that is exactly what we did over the next several days, in every single town or small city we hit, until we finally hit pay dirt in Miramar, Havana. (Actually, I immediately found and bought 2 pillows and 2 white pillow cases in Placetas, our stop after Trinidad, for about a dollar each, bright orange and green coverings over what felt like small cubes of foam, but decided to leave those pillows to my student Jesús, who was having a sciatica attack and whose wife, Marielys, could tuck them into Jesús' sides at their home, since they had left their only other pillows back at the seminary, unlike myself). The new set of pillows I bought off the street vendors in Miramar cost 10 times as much, as they were hypo-allergenic and more like what Americans consider real pillows.

Leaving the pillows behind wasn’t as bad as what I did next: I left with the key to the room at the Hostal Vista al Mar in Playa La Boca, just outside the gem colonial city of Trinidad. Of course, Alice yelled at me again. Replacing a lost key could be as big an inconvenience as replacing a lost pillow. I mailed the key back with an apologetic note inside of a beautiful card made by the seminary photographer.

The chocolates! Alice brought a few bags of chocolates, which we meant to give to my mother’s best childhood friend in Cienfuegos and to our hosts along the way. We put them in the refrigerator at the first B&B in Playa Larga and of course left them there. The childhood friend had died two years earlier, but we would have given them to her only surviving older sister...see Serendipity. It’s just as well that the biologist homeowner and her teenage son ended up with the chocolates.

The rental-car keys are another example of my forgetfulness. I forgot to remove them from the ignition before locking all four doors--not once, but twice. The first time was in the empty parking lot outside the National Aquarium in Havana. Of course, I’d left the rental contract with the emergency contact numbers inside the glove compartment.

Within minutes, I grabbed the next hapless would-be aquarium visitor, who dropped me off at a Cuba-Car two blocks away, and the Cuba-Car people called a guy who came in a flatbed truck. He used the tricks of the trade: a bent wire, a large screwdriver, and a small rock. I watched carefully, because I just knew it would happen again...which it did, right in front of my grandparents’ second home, just outside Cienfuegos.

Alice was having fits again, almost as bad as those of her sister Livia, who takes after my father, and nobody can throw a fit like an irate Cuban. But the present tenant of my grandparents’ old house calmly found a hanger and a large screwdriver, and I found a nice wooden wedge doorstop, and then a young man on a motorcycle stopped and helped us to unlock the door behind the driver’s seat.

We had gathered quite an audience by then, and I was babbling something about being so emocionada, having finally found the house I most remembered, from when my older sister and I had been sick from getting the smallpox vaccine in order to get our passports and visa to join our parents and baby brother in the United States in early 1958. We spent several weeks in that house, recuperating, and I especially remember feeding hens and chicks for the first time...so, of course I was going to forget to remove the key from the ignition, but who cares? It’s Christmas, and I’ve found my grandparents' house in Cienfuegos!

SERENDIPITY AND SURPRISES

Our tour guide on the second day, upon hearing my name, said, “I can take you to the ruins of the ancestral colonial mansion in the town of Australia, not far from here.” Even the ruins of this home clearly showed the majestic showcase it had once been. Alice took lots of photos.
My mother-in-law quite appropriately decided to join her angelic cohorts on Christmas Day, at dawn. I hope to eventually find the right words to describe the blessed impact she had on my life and on those of my four daughters.

Also on Christmas day, Alice and I attended a Cienfuegos vs. Habana Industriales baseball game with a lovely tall, handsome man named Urs from Bern, Switzerland. There were easily 20,000 people in attendance at the stadium, spread out mostly from third to first base, with a reserved and netted portion behind home plate guarded by military police with sticks.

As far as I could see, looking at all the people around us, we three were the only "foreigners." Alice and Urs were wearing Santa hats that read Feliz Navidad and had Cuban flags as pompoms, and I was sure that the television cameras would pick them up, but we later asked the next-door-neighbor who had watched the game on TV, and he hadn’t noticed us.

Not far into the game, a middle-aged husband-and-wife pair came to sit next to us. I said to Urs and Alice, “they have to be Americans, but they don’t look like they have family here, so they have to be illegal, and they don’t look illegal, so they must be Canadians instead.” I waited until I could hear them speaking to one another (having gotten quite good at distinguishing American accents from Canadian accents), and they sounded definitely American. So I just decided to ask them.

Turns out, they sailed their own 42-foot yacht right into Cienfuegos harbor and just hopped into a taxi and headed to the baseball game. Sailors from Oregon! No passport or visa required! And of all the places in that entire stadium, they decided to sit next to probably the only other Americans in attendance.

My mother’s best friend, when I found the home where she had last lived in Cienfuegos, had died in 2009 at the age of 84. But those who had taken care of this single woman until her death told me that her only surviving relative, an older sister named Alicia, lives around the corner from the B&B. The owner walks me over to her house to introduce us.

“Rosa Esperanza!” she exclaimed when I showed her a recent photo of my mother holding her great-granddaughter Jade at the baby naming. I had not mentioned my mother’s real name to her or to anyone, assuming they all only remembered her as Totty, which is what everyone, including my father and my grandbabies, has ever only called her. Interesting that this sky-blue-eyed 90-year-old older sister of my mother’s closest childhood friend would just blurt out that birthname, which my mother has never liked.

The very same B&B owner, who used to live in the same Buena Vista neighborhood where my grandparents’ last house was, began the phone call chains that helped us locate the house.
Toward the end of our delightful (minus the fits over forgetfulness) two weeks together in Cuba, I asked Alice what had been her favorite parts of our trip.

She replied, “Lots of things! But I can mention a few highlights: the frog in the shower! And the owl popping out of the top of the palm tree stump like a cuckoo out of a clock! The turtle swimming with us in the cenote! And the people from the hotel who cheered me dancing salsa in Trinidad.”

Alice took lots of photographs during her two weeks here with me, which I am hoping that her older sister Zoë, editor of this blog, will post to accompany the written text. [Editors' note: They are coming.] There are several photos of the frog that popped out of the hole in the wall, which was a showerhead at the first house where we stayed. Alice and I had spent the day with a father-and-son team of expert tour guides, ending with a snorkeling swim in the Bay of Pigs. (Yes, we even saw a family of wild piglets in the savannah, though I'm not sure if Alice was able to get that shot.)

We had already checked out of our B&B, as there was a large family of Russian guests arriving, but we needed to shower before continuing on to our next adventure. Since we had already checked out of our room and the adjoining bathroom, our hostess offered us the choice of her own cold-water "very simple" bathroom upstairs or the shower in the enclosed patio off the outdoor kitchen. Of course, I chose the latter, as I love outdoor showers.

The shower head was gone, and there was a simple hole in the masonry, out of which the water flowed. Our hostess told us that it was fine to use soap and shampoo, since the water went into a drain. A few minutes into my lovely shower al fresco, the water began to squirt out at a 120-degree angle to the right. I stuck my finger into the spout and felt something squishy. The hostess stuck a sharp knife into the spout, trying to clear the obstacle.

Alice squealed delightedly really loud. I was blind without my glasses, which I’d taken off to shower. ”It’s a frog! Mom, there’s an adorable little frog popping out of the shower spout!”

My first thought was that the poor thing had been struck by the knife, but it hadn’t. It sprang out of the shower, and Alice held it in her palm to marvel at its minuscule beauty, and the wondrous surprise of nature and humans colliding.

Other wondrous intersections of humanity and nature:

- The crocodile-breeding farm: Oh my!
- The tocororo: large and brilliant red, white, and blue national bird of Cuba, hence the colors of the national flag. We were able to spot and photograph three or four perching in branches just above our heads. Rhey were amazingly big and very colorful!
- The zunzún: the smallest hummingbird in the world
- The small nocturnal owl who builds a nest and seeks out a life-long mate.
- Small, medium, and enormous Cuban bats, but no luck (thank goodness!) sighting its Boa predators hanging out near the mouth of the caves.
With love and peace and happiness for a brand new year,

Elisa

Missive #15: The French-Cuban Connection

I hadn’t done the following things since living in France as a teenager (and I am thoroughly enjoying every minute of every one of them again!):

1: Doing laundry entirely by hand. Even the washing machine needs to be fed clothes into one tub for washing and then into another tub for spinning (which they call drying) before being hung on the clothesline.

I hated doing laundry in France, because it entailed taking the wet clothes up to the attic to hang out to dry, and then my French mother insisted on ironing my blue jeans. Here in Cuba, I don’t own a pair of jeans, and I am so happy to have my own brick-paved outdoor patio with a double-basin.

I found some old plastic-coated wires and hung them diagonally through the top slats of the louvered aluminum windows. The best part of doing laundry by hand is that I can be as sloppy and as slow and as stupid as I want, and nobody knows or cares, and all my laundry comes out just fine.

So here I am, imitating my French mother, making la soupe pour les chiens -- her homemade dog food, which was constantly simmering on the stove inside a huge pot, into which she would throw anything and everything she didn’t serve to the family or feed to the ducks (such as carrot and potato peels), only in my case, it’s la soupe pour le chat siamois-cubain). And I cannot stop thinking about my own Cuban mother, who actually used to love eating the fish’s eyes. Now it is my darling Semi who gently devours the eyeballs, leaving only the smallest piece of inedible white pit behind.

A few days ago, Alice and I and Marielys bought a large amount of seafood, including three huge red snappers, directly from the fisherman who caught them, in the northern coastal town nearest Remedios. Back at the parent’s house in Placetas, her parents cleaned and cut the fish up into ruedas, round pieces instead of filets, and then put the heads, tails, fins, etc., into a large pot for la comida del gato.

The fish parts are covered with water and brought to boil, then rice is added and simmered until the whole thing thickens, and voilà! La soupe aux chats par excellence. It was then shoveled into a couple of plastic bags, frozen, and brought home to feed my Semi for about another week.

3. Stopping the car to find a place to pee behind a tree in the countryside.

4. Following the truck drivers on the road out in the middle of nowhere to wherever they stop to eat. These places generally have the best food at the best prices.

Cienfuegos is the city where my mother was born. Her father, like many of the Cuban Pearl of the South’s residents, is a French descendant. Alice fell in love with Cienfuegos at first sight and, having already decided that she wanted to take a year off from teaching to learn Spanish, felt that she would love to spend part of that year in her grandmother’s lovely hometown.

I had already been remembering the chicken croquettes from the Havana Yacht Club, and the ones my mother continues to make, and the ones I buy at the nearest kiosco, and, of course, now it occurs to me that croquette is yet another French cuisine word and exquisite cultural item that has been made nearly universal, like the ballet and the bouquet.

I feel like I have come full-circle, finally fusing my memories of Havana and Paris, and my former lives in Cuba and in France.