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.
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.
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.
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.
“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.
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 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
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