Last Havana Nights

¿Oigo? ¡¿Qué bolá, asere?!

The countdown is on, and I’ve started freaking out a bit ‘cause my days are numbered in Cuba and the time to say goodbye is approaching. Before I leave there’s all sorts of things pending in my t0-do list, here’s a sample:

-Go to a baseball game (They’re all day games right now while they fix the scoreboard…)
-Rent a motorcycle (Supposedly happening next Sunday with Arien)
-Go to the Aquarium (All because I read that interview with Fidel on The Atlantic before coming and am intent on watching the dolphin show)
-Go to a drag queen show (My friend Talía is working on this)
-Beat my friend Daniel at pool (first we need to find a cheap, working pool table and his mom needs to teach me how to change balls of string so I can finish knitting my scarf)
-Get a tattoo with Arien (Our friend Gabi is designing it)
-Learn book binding with Gabi

THE ROLE OF THE VIEJO – My friend Osvaldo and I are cutting together a short doc on his grandfather as part of a desire to explore the role of old people in Cuba. While we filmed Pepe he said something that’s essential to the understanding of viejos in Cuba, “There’s a portion of small inconveniences that in the long run are beneficial to an old person” he explained, as he listed all the small things that he did as part of his daily routine that made him feel useful, to himself and to his family. These include getting the paper at el estanquillo, the spot were newspapers are dropped off every day, a common old people’s hangout consequence of the lack of newspaper delivery subscriptions in some parts (apparently the lucky ones holding on to those frequently resell them). After that, a visit to the agro-market, El agro, were he checks out the varying prices on produce and makes it a personal mission to find a particular type of plantain to make tostones. These and other mandados occupy his time, as they do so many others. Osvaldo claims old people have been sidelined and I keep insisting that in this country they’re more active and play a more vital role in the family structure that in Puerto Rico or the US for that matter. In Cuba, the elders carry the history and experience of the country, they’re the ones who once lived in capitalism and who insist on remembering the difference. They’re also, for better and worse, the ones still at the helm of the country, a country which could be becoming the oldest in the world, as birth rates decline because of the economic difficulties in raising children, the younger generations flee and the life expectancy holds high. All of this while in our side of the world viejos are so commonly forgotten, visited once a week or once a month, living by themselves or in asylums, worrying, worrying, worrying up a storm– about death, forgetting, crime, loneliness, sickness and a million other what-if’s.

INEXPLICABLY HARD TO FIND: toothbrushes, lighters, a pretty notebook, etc – Part embargo, part deep Caribbean surrealism, it is dumbfounding sometimes to see what’s easy and what’s hard to find in Cuba. I’ve never had a hard time buying cigarettes or rum, but it’s been weeks since both Nancy my host and I have seen eggs in our neighborhood of El Vedado. Three short stories to give you an even better picture:

---I needed a toothbrush because the one I brought was terrible and looked like a brillo pad. I must have asked in a dozen convenience stores and hotels with no luck, and Andrea (from Switzerland, with a car and the best hip shakin’ to ever come out of that country, I’m sure) finally drove me all the way out to a small strip mall were diplomats and wealthy peeps shop to buy one of three toothbrushes left.

---I brought three lighters with me and I already lost one, gave one away and had one run out of gas. To buy a new one would be expensive, plus I haven’t seen them in a while, so my friend Gabi has taken mine to have it refilled. “What do you do in New York when they run out of gas? You throw them out, right? Fucking compulsive consumers…” he says jokingly. “Don’t try to sell me the idea that in Cuba you refill them as a matter of conscience, baby!” I say, knowing that humor can’t disguise need with social responsibility. Meanwhile I’m stretching a box of matches Talía gave me and lighting off of others on the street like the locals.

---Lastly, I’ve filled up the notebook I brought to use as my journal and I haven’t even gotten to December 24th (I’m trying to catch up with notes). The only notebooks I’ve seen around are for school and I’m sorry for the pettiness but I’d like to have a pretty journal to write and save for posterity. Andrea says she brings hers from abroad when she travels, I’ve decided to make mine once Gabi teaches me book binding. I prefer this solution to anything I could have potentially bought, but just thinking of the copious shelves of journals in Borders or Barnes and Nobles that I’ve frequented in the past makes me roll my eyes.

This is what people who have never left this Island sometimes fantasize with and I try to make them dismiss as a silly illusion of the freedom to consume. Yet I know my place, I admit to it all the time: “I don’t live here”, I tell them, and “I have no authority to an opinion. Just understand this and that...” I’ve seen mothers trade milk for yogurt because one’s little girl prefers one and the other has stopped receiving her government allotment. There’s no reason certain things need to be this difficult. Granted, not all of these things are essential (perhaps the toothbrush, perhaps the eggs and milk), but it just amazes me how the simplest things need to be hustled in this Island, found through savvy investigation, repetitive inquiry, invention, import, exchange or por la izquierda, Cuban for under the table.

PIZZAS, BURGUERS AND CAJITAS – Due to lack of a variety of ingredients, and certainly a lack in creativity as well, popular Cuban cuisine and street food offerings are pretty limited. Among the common staples of the easy-to-find, cheap-o (meaning, available in moneda nacional, usually for 10 pesos or less than 50 US cents) food stuffs are pizzas, burgers and cajitas, or boxes of food that usually carry rice and beans, some meat, a bit of salad and a piece of root vegetable. The other cajita variant is usually filled with fried rice, whose vegetable and meat components depend on your luck and the will of the gods. For extra folklore, cajitas are sold without plastic ware, an issue I’ve seen solved in varying ways: I knew a girl who carried a fork in her purse, others rip the lid of the box and use it as a scoop and recently I was sold a box that had a cardboard cut-out spoon on the lid.

Pizzas are a more fascinating phenomenon to me, though. Although they’re ubiquitous to varying degrees of quality, my favorites are the worse of all, 10 pesos pizzas bought in hole in the wall spots all around. The folklore of these pizza spots is never-ending, so much so that a group of friends and I have decided to make a short documentary about them. Hopefully, before I leave we will have chronicled the search for the best, worse and most photogenic pizza spots in the city. Sure, Italians must be revolted by the aberration their cuisine has become in this Island, but to us they essentially fill an emotional need at this point. Just ask our German friends Stephanie and Anja who want to open up a Cuban pizza place in Berlin to combat melancholy when they get back.

Not much to say about the burgers, really, except to say if you come to Havana and you want to try the best in moneda nacional you better trek out to Playa and find Cafeteria Fátima. Andrea drove me the other day and we nearly fainted from pleasure eating two burgers each like true jamalichas (big eaters, glotonas). They’re open from 8:30 am to 9pm and also serve amazing fresh fruit shakes and egg sandwiches, plus the employees will give you such muela (rant, teque) that you’ll be entertained for the duration of the wait, the meal, and then some.

** A correction on a previous post: Gabo (as in slang for house) is actually Gao, it wasn’t a silent ‘b’ issue.

PS – More cosas perdidas, our Cuban lost & found:
Canvases –more lost than limes, which are more lost than beef according to Michel, a painter

PS II – Looking at this post makes me think I could/should get a gig in Cuban travel writing. Any excuse to live here for a while and get paid to do something would be good, forward this link to your friends at Lonely Planet if you have any!