It Is Still an Island of Despair

HAVANA —  Today, I am going to tell you a story. No, two stories. I won’t name any names, because paranoia strikes deep, and into each heart it will creep. If my superiors ask me to identify, confidentially, the people in question, then I will. Otherwise, I’m not looking to cause anybody any pain.

There is an unmarried man from the United States who came here for the Pan American Games. He has never been to Cuba before. He does not speak Spanish. He is not particularly young and he is not known to be particularly naive. He has heard and read what life in Cuba can be like, but he has never experienced it first-hand.

He met a woman here. She has never lived anyplace else. They locked eyes a couple of times, exchanged a couple of buenas nocheses, conversed the best they could. He was attracted, maybe even smitten. More than that, he plain liked her.

The man began to take her places. To a restaurant. To a sporting event. They were not demonstrative in public, and what they did in private I have no way, or need, of knowing. What I do know is that Cuban citizens have little or no access to certain places where tourists are welcome, and can get into trouble associating with Americans or carrying U.S. currency.

The woman never asked the man for anything specific, but made it known more than once how much she longed to get off the island. A visa can be had by those with money or connections, but in the United States there is less red tape for someone who spontaneously defects than there is for someone with proper temporary papers who wishes to stay.

It wasn’t long before the couple realized that they were being followed. The characters tailing them weren’t difficult to spot. They were grim-faced, green-shirted guys who drank Coca-Colas like thirsty camels at an oasis. They never smiled, never spoke. They watched. Wherever the man and woman went, whenever they touched or passed anything back and forth, their shadows took note.

One night, the American lost his patience. He bought an extra beer in a bar. When he got outside, he walked straight up to the guy spying on him, banged the beer down in front of him and left it there. The veins swelled in the guy’s neck.

Soon thereafter, the man took the elevator to his hotel room, leaving his companion in the lobby. Cubans are not permitted inside the hallways of one of Cuba’s finer hotels. When the man came back down, he found out that the woman had been arrested.

Next time he saw her, she told him what happened. She was questioned, she said, and worse. There was a strip-search. It included an even more intimate search for U.S. money that she might have been hiding. The woman said it was as humiliating as humanly possible. The man felt like crying, and did.

You don’t file official protests in Cuba. They get you nowhere. What was the guy going to do, hire a lawyer? Call his congressman? He did, however, get angrier and angrier, until ultimately he said: “To hell with this. I’m a bachelor. I’ll marry her if that’s what it takes to get her out of this place.”

He introduced her to another acquaintance visiting here, a Floridian of Cuban heritage. The friend spoke to the woman in Spanish, found out where she was from, listened to her tale of woe. The girl grew up in a mountain town, in the province of Sancti Spiritus, he found, not here in the city. She came to Havana specifically for the Games. It seemed a good time to visit, lots of activity.

The friend got an uneasy feeling. His instincts were going off like alarms. They told him, although he did not want to hear it, that this woman was someone who, uh, met men professionally. That the first time she set foot legally in America would be the last time the American man would ever see her.

But what if he was wrong? How do you insinuate any such thing? How do you prove it, short of accepting the word of the very people the woman herself feels persecuted by? All he could do was tell the man to be careful.

The situation is unresolved. The man is returning home in a day or two, by himself, I believe. It is a troubling story, and I wish that were all it was, a story.

There is another American here, a woman. She is Cuban-born, and had to obtain a temporary Cuban passport before being permitted to visit. It expires at the end of this month.

The woman has relatives here, several she had never seen. One day I encountered her in the hotel lobby, waiting for an aunt she would recognize only from a grainy photograph. The past few days, she said, she had been escorting impoverished loved ones into markets and shops, buying them food, provisions, toiletries, auto parts, items they couldn’t find or afford. She bought the women fingernail polish, cotton balls. She helped the men push rusted automobiles, rummaged garages with them for a battery that was nowhere to be found.

A party of Americans went to the famous Tropicana cabaret. The woman invited her teen-age cousin to tag along. The girl had never been there. She put on her best dress, entered the club, sat, ate, drank soft drinks, taught the tourists a native dance.

The woman was enchanted to see her cousin so happy. That was until a couple of uniformed men came over to ask the girl where she was from, what she was doing in the company of these Americans, why she had come back here because they remembered seeing her before. Her American cousin spoke up, taking full responsibility for the girl’s being here, vouching for her that it was the first time she had been to the club.

The rest of the night, whenever the Cuban girl glanced at them, the men were staring at her, pointing, whispering. The Americans told her to ignore them. They couldn’t help notice, particularly her cousin, that from the time the men came to their table, the girl never again danced or smiled.

I will tell you one more story, quickly. A man from Philadelphia told me of this beach he visited, Varadero. The sand is white, he said, and soft as talcum powder. The water is blue, he said, in varying shades from turquoise to indigo. The women are topless, he said, and dark and supple. The hotel is five-star, he said, with meals that melt in your mouth.

I listened. I nodded. And I decided what I would say to anyone who asks me where they should come for a Caribbean vacation. Come, I will say. Come to a wonderful, worry-free place.

Come to Jamaica.