The Domino Diaries Part 6

"It must be a record." Montalvo shook his head.

"Even now when I can't f.u.c.k the pretty girls I always visit, they're still sweet to me. We still have a good time. Life has always been sweet to me. The only cruelty is saying good-bye. Which reminds me-" Alfonso handed his cigar to Montalvo, who whisked away the smoke from his face and held the cigar at arm's length out his window. "Brinicito, I want to give you my card before I forget for after you leave so you can always reach me if you need anything here or there."

I took the card and put it in my wallet. But of course the next time I tried his number several months later to see if Alfonso wanted to meet in Havana again, he couldn't answer because he was already there, buried in the Coln cemetery after his liver finally gave out. He'd gotten his wish and never had to say good-bye to Havana ever again.

"After we visit the old man in Cojimar I will show you all the books I am bringing back. It is a crime to part with them, but for the price I'll get I will. eBay has made the life of a bookseller so easy. If I collected baseball cards down here, I'd make a fortune. And, by the way, I have figured out a way to pay for your trip and every trip you make down here. Montalvo can get you several Cuban Olympic tracksuits on the mercado negro and you can sell them on eBay to Cuban Americans in Miami. For three hundred dollars apiece, you could sell a handful for fifteen hundred. You get these tracksuits and a couple boxes of Cohibas from the cigar factory, and you've paid off all your airfare and rent. Let me show you just a few books I have with me from this morning. First editions! London's White Fang!"

The international book fair in Havana was nearly over and moving on to spread out over the rest of Cuba. Alfonso had cleaned up at the old eighteenth-century Fortaleza de San Carlos de la Cabaa, where the fair attracted tens of thousands of book lovers and collectors. Even an international book fair in Cuba is a touchy thing (beyond the fact that it is permitted to sell only state-sponsored books). After La Cabaa was built by the Spanish in 1774, it was used as a military base and prison for the next two centuries. When the rebels seized the fortress in 1959, after Batista's troops surrendered without offering any resistance, Che was installed there for five months to oversee a military prison and revolutionary tribunals, which resulted in extensive executions of informants, Batista's secret police, war criminals, political prisoners, and traitors. These events turned a lot of supporters against the revolutionary agenda. Later on La Cabaa was converted into a historical park with a few museums and a famous cannon, which explodes across the Havana night at 9 p.m. each evening. Then again, a lot of the prettiest plazas in Madrid where tourists sip coffee were once public execution grounds or impromptu bullfighting rings.

After we reached Cojimar we got temporarily lost. The town was too quiet, almost somber, and both Lesvanne and Montalvo immediately sensed something was wrong. The few people we saw in town refused to make eye contact with our vehicle except for strange men inventorying all movement from street corners. "Joder," Montalvo moaned, "secret police. Something went down here last night. Can we visit this man another day, Alfonso?"

"It's not a crime to visit Fuentes. We're not doing it in secret. What happened here?"

The streets were almost completely empty. Lesvanne spotted a face he recognized walking with some waiters in uniform to La Terraza, the most famous tourist bar in town. When Lesvanne hollered to them out the window none of them stopped walking. We pulled over and Lesvanne got out to ask some questions and to double-check our directions to Fuente's home. When Lesvanne returned to the car he reported that a delegation of three hundred people from across the United States had been visiting and doing volunteer labor in Cuba. Most of the delegation stayed in the dorm facilities athletes had used during the Pan American games near Cojimar. A couple of days before, a young woman with her friends from California had visited a beach outside of town with a video camera. Three men approached her and demanded the bag with the camera inside. She refused. One of the men struck her in the face while another s.n.a.t.c.hed the bag. The police were called. Within two hours Cojimar and two other areas the boys were suspected of living in were under complete lockdown. Scores of police and special police invaded the towns and searched each home, door to door, until they found the perpetrators and the girl's property. The boys were quickly arrested and the government notified the girl's family back in the States that the camera, along with the girl, were promptly being sent home.

"Those boys who took the camera are f.u.c.ked." Lesvanne shook his head. "Even a thief could get the drawers. But to attack someone before robbing them?"

"What the h.e.l.l are the drawers?" I asked.

"It's like a morgue, only they put living people into the s.p.a.ce of a coffin and push you into the wall. You're left there for one day, or two days, or three. You s.h.i.t all over yourself. You lose your mind. Striking a woman is terrible. There is very little violence here and they should know how that will be treated. They must have been truly, truly desperate for some reason. You can be arrested in my country for not carrying your ID card. You can imagine how b.l.o.o.d.ying a tourist is handled. The tourist dollar is the breathing hole in our little cage."

We found Gregorio Fuentes's small apartment on the corner of a narrow, hilly street, and the 103-year-old man answered his own door. He was puffing away on a cigar and refused to wear gla.s.ses, but his grandson held his elbow for support just in case. After he sat down, Gregorio looked healthy and alert, his chair surrounded by photographs and paintings of himself and Hemingway. The gift shop feel of the living room didn't seem to be his idea, but he wasn't embarra.s.sed by it, either. He was giving you his time for the fifteen dollars and a bottle of rum you were expected to bring. The money went toward the revolution, the rum stayed on the premises.

I knew that Gregorio Fuentes, who could fish before he could walk, had stopped fishing for the remainder of his life the day he found out Hemingway had committed suicide in 1961. I knew it, but I can't say it really prepared me for feeling the intensity of that bond in Gregorio's living room, with him sitting there.

I told him the day before I'd seen his old boat the Pilar for the first time, and he nodded. "Isn't she beautiful? I don't think she's very happy away from the sea."

Which was true. I didn't think Pilar had much interest parading herself around as a centerfold beside the swimming pool in Hemingway's backyard. You could tell she missed the action. She'd helped Hemingway catch some of the biggest fish ever caught, was rigged to spot U-boats during World War II, had hidden explosives for the rebels during the revolution, but now she continued to work for Fidel winning him all those cover charges from tourists eager to pose in front of history.

"I don't know anyone in the world as identified with their profession as you," I clumsily began. "But after Hemingway died you never wanted to fish?"

"After we got news of his death..." Gregorio stared at me, adjusting his ball cap. "I had no desire to fish anymore. I was captain of the Pilar for twenty years. I had fished all my life. I have loved the sea. I have loved all that lives in the sea. But this man was my friend. I had no desire to fish after I knew he was gone. I miss him. He was such ... fun." His crinkly lips curled into a smile as he relit his cigar and took some more drags from it.

For the next ten minutes his grandson cut into the conversation and elaborated on Hemingway's love of Cuba, Gregorio's allegiance to the ideals of the revolution, how the embargo was harming the island, and a few other perfectly interesting things I wasn't really paying attention to. Gregorio's face, while he was quietly smoking and thinking, was too captivating to take much else in.

The last thing I ever asked of Gregorio was why he thought Hemingway had such an effect on people. Especially Cubans.

His blue eyes looked like cracked, half-frozen puddles. He stared at me and puffed on his cigar for a while. Then he put down the cigar and cleared his throat before saying, and smiling with that century-old face, "He knew who he was."

It was late when I got back to my neighborhood. At night conversation and arguments and music were everywhere, with the percussive slap of dominoes. .h.i.tting the table from the porches of myriad Cuban homes. One of my favorite sounds at night.

11.

ELEVATOR MUSIC.

The heaviest of burdens is therefore simultaneously an image of life's most intense fulfillment. The heavier the burden, the closer our lives come to the earth, the more real and truthful they become.

-Milan Kundera "I WANT TO TELL YOU my favorite story about Che," Videliah, Jess's seventy-four-year-old mother, told me over coffee on one of my last nights in Havana. "Before his death three years ago, I was married to the love of my life for fifty years, G.o.d bless his soul. My husband played the piano, was close friends with Ernesto Lecuona, one of my country's most beautiful composers. I fell in love with my husband at first listen. I could hear we were soul mates even before I could see his lovely face. Wherever he is, I hope he cannot hear this confession. The only man I would have cheated on him with owned the most beautiful eyes I have ever seen in my life. I saw them when I shared an elevator with Che when I was still young and beautiful. He was with two soldiers, but he couldn't pay attention to their conversation as the elevator climbed in that office building. He leaned over to confess my beauty was too distracting. It wasn't a dirty compliment-it was warm. Che never cheated on his wife. He was very respectful of women. He pa.s.sed very unpopular laws where powerful men were forbidden from sleeping with their secretaries. No other Cuban would ever think to pa.s.s such a law. Fidel had many lovers and many children from different women. Che wasn't that way. But calling me distracting was all he had time to say before it was time for me to leave the elevator. I worked as a secretary in the building and my stop was before Che's. You have no idea how many times I've returned to that brief little climb in the elevator with him. Even as an old woman the wound is fresh. But the story I wish to tell you is when Che left Cuba for the last time. He changed his ident.i.ty and radically altered his appearance in order to sneak out to Bolivia. It was a suicide mission from the very beginning. He had no illusions. Che was never going to live to be anyone's grandfather. And the irony of Che's downfall is that a peasant betrayed him to the police. The police pa.s.sed on the information to an American-trained and funded army. Che could have been drinking mojitos at the Nacional, but instead spent his last days nearly starving to death trying to help these oppressed people, only to be betrayed by a peasant and executed on the CIA's orders. The wrist.w.a.tch Che was wearing when they murdered him is now worn on the wrist of a man in Miami as a trophy. But before Che left he had dinner with his wife and family one last time. His wife introduced him to his children as Ramn, his new ident.i.ty's name, and they didn't recognize him. The disguise was so well done even Che's children were all fooled. When dinner was served, out of habit, Che sat at his usual place at the head of the table. Instantly one of his small children confronted him and grabbed the chair. 'You cannot sit here! My father sits here.'"

Videliah smiled and reached a hand across the table to place over mine. "You don't have the hands of a boxer, do you?"

I had to look away at her quinceaera portrait placed over a bookshelf. Along with free birthday cakes for all children delivered to their door by bicycle and a free wedding day, the state offered a party for all girls on their fifteenth birthday celebrating their transition into womanhood. A banquet hall is rented along with a feast and they receive a dress and fancy dress clothes for their family. All the boys in attendance wear rented tuxedos. Fourteen couples dance a waltz around the quinceaera, who is allowed to select a boy of her choosing to dance with. A photographer is hired to commemorate the day. Every Cuban lady lives with an arrestingly beautiful portrait of herself posing dreamily somewhere on the premises of her home. Videliah's portrait was the most lovely I've seen.

My time left of that first trip in Havana was nearing its end. I've always been terrible with good-byes. I've tried to sneak out of everything before it ends all my life-family, relationships, friendships, even life itself. Cuba as these people knew it had been coming to an end for fifty years, yet it just never actually happened. Castro's obituary has been on file at the Miami Herald for decades, yet at this point he might end up living longer than that newspaper.

After my last training session with Hector on a rooftop in Old Havana (he got tired of having to give a cut to the Macbeth witches at the front), I paid a visit to Montalvo's house a few blocks away from the gym. At Alfonso's suggestion, I'd bought some cigars and tracksuits through Montalvo's contacts on the black market to help cover some costs of the trip and maybe make it a little easier to come back. His street, like a lot of streets in the baked Old Havana maze, has a vise-like squeeze. The streets are potholed and dusty. The sidewalks are filled with dog s.h.i.t and trash. Many windows on the homes are barred, with old men and women a.s.suming poses gripping the bars and staring out with docile eyes at the neighborhood. There's never a bustling morning commute here, everything is clotted and fading or giving out. From the rooftops you feel a lot of eyes watch your movements. There's no homelessness anywhere, but what roofs people have over their heads leak, the plumbing doesn't work, food is terrible, electricity is finicky-everything everywhere is continually breaking down.

I banged on Montalvo's rotting front door just as I heard a needle drop on a Barry White record inside. Lesvanne was delivering the tracksuits and cigars soon. Typical of Lesvanne and Montalvo, the only cut Lesvanne wanted was a tracksuit for Montalvo to enjoy, and Montalvo wouldn't take more than a bottle of rum for his father-in-law. They were both insulted at the idea of anything more.

"Oye!" Montalvo hollered. "Te gusta, Barry Blanco?"

Montalvo's wife answered the door with their grandchild in her arms. I received and gave a kiss to both while spying Montalvo from the corner of my eye, wearing his pristine Cuban Olympic tracksuit, responding to Barry Blanco with the relish of Bill Cosby cleaning off a spoon of Jell-O.

"He cheats on me every afternoon with Blanco." His wife shook her head. "Look at this? I'm not h.o.m.ophobic but to have to watch your husband of thirty years have an o.r.g.a.s.m in your living room to Blanco every day? This man has no shame."

"You cheat on me with Jorge Miguel," Montalvo volleyed, under his breath, as he swayed. "'Careless Whisper'? Que va! Don't tell me about Blanco. In our open marriage I have my Barry Blanco and you have Miguel."

"Lesvanne already delivered everything?"

"Yes. He just stepped out. Thank you for this tracksuit. Aren't I a flashy papi chulo in it! Ay! Ay!" Three Cuban wrist snaps accentuated this point. "Brinicito, I have something for you while I cheat on my wife for the next four minutes with Blanco."

He reached over and grabbed a ma.s.sive photo alb.u.m. Montalvo dropped it like an anvil in my lap but quickly reclaimed it to inspect the pages. For a reason I had significant difficulty determining, he began to show me pictures of people he had known in school or in track who had died. After pointing out four recent deaths, Montalvo gestured at another and shrugged, then almost sang, "Heeeeee's dead, too." I looked to his wife for some explanation and she held up her hands and paced off to the kitchen to make some coffee on the stove for us. After he'd introduced me to twenty more dead people, he didn't bother to lift his finger anymore, simply slid it across the images. "el tambien. Dead." Turned the page. "el ... hmmm ... momento." Montalvo turned toward the kitchen and leaned back in the sofa until I could feel the backrest about to snap off. "Mi amor! Marco Antonio Reyes? Four-hundred-meter runner."

His wife sang back, "Muerto, mi amor! Dos aos atrs."

"Graaaaacia!" Montalvo turned back to me and paused. "He's dead, too. Vamos a ver quien ms." He flipped over some more pages and inspected the faces with the tip of his finger against his cheek.

"Montalvo," I asked, grinning in the perverse delight of his weirdness. "Why are you showing this to me?"

"Because Alfonso has just left and I miss my friend. And now you are leaving. I hate good-byes. Good-bye is death. So my revenge against that is to listen to music I love and find all the people of my generation who are dead so I gradually get cheered up realizing how happy I am with everyone still alive in my life. Have you had anyone close to you die?"

"There were three suicides in school. But I wasn't close to them."

"No, no," he corrected. "They count. When a good-bye makes you sad, open up your school photos and find them. Keep score. This is better than pretending about heaven. That is the most beautiful thing I can ever offer you to understand about Cuba. If there is a heaven, even as bad as things are here, everyone would know who all the Cubans are."

"Why?"

"They would be the only people asking to go back home."

And as we stared at each other in silence, for the first time, I was aware of Montalvo's ancient father-in-law in a rocking chair across the room from us. I had never seen him in the living room before. His daughter had been nursing him in his room for all of my visits. He stared intently into my eyes while he fanned himself with an exquisite peac.o.c.k feather. After we made eye contact he nudged his head toward the cabinet.

"Hijo, quien es el?"

"Don't worry about him," Montalvo said, without looking up. "My father-in-law is crazy."

"What does he want?"

"Who cares? He wants to drink. Photos! Muy importante."

"Right."

I had trouble calibrating myself to that room. I leaned back in the couch for a second and grandpa was ominously pointing his peac.o.c.k feather at me. It might as well have been a rocket launcher. He slowly dragged the tip of his feather in the direction of the cabinet. Keeping the feather pointed, he turned his head toward me, with his straw fedora at a maniacal angle all his own.

"Montalvo," I pleaded. "What is he trying to show me?"

"Nothing. He wants the rum we got him. He's crazy. Even at ninety, all he wants to do is f.u.c.k and drink. He was tortured by Batista. After his torturers got the firing squad, he celebrated with his first drink and has been a drunk ever since. He's crazy. You and your peac.o.c.k feather are crazy, I tell you," he said to his father-in-law.

We spent the following hour going over all Montalvo's track medals, ribbons, trophies, and press clippings from his glory days. His favorite possession was a photo of Fidel beaming proudly with his Pan American silver medal from the early sixties.

Lesvanne entered the apartment wearing the searing bright outfit he laundered every day. As he stood in the open doorway with his sideburns as perfect as Cadillac fins, the sun blazed off his fake Versace belt buckle and glazed his freshly polished shoes. He found the cheek of every female in the house to kiss before joining us in the living room.

"Please tell me why I'm being shown everyone who has died in his alb.u.m," I pleaded to Lesvanne.

"Ah! el tambien! Dead. Mira, mira! Chico, mira! Look!"

Montalvo yanked Lesvanne down beside us on the couch to behold yet another victim.

"Why is he showing us friends of his who are dead?"

"It's his favorite game."

"Why does he seem so ... festive about it?"

"He used to do this somberly. But Barry Blanco puts him in a good mood."

Montalvo closed the book suddenly and hollered for his wife to get his track medals from his room to show us all again.

A cab dropped me off on the Malecn near the Hotel Nacional. An old woman and a little boy were arguing about which direction they wanted to go. It was that strange hour between the time when the sun sinks out of view and the streetlights turn on, while it's still muggy out as the colors drain and begin to smear against the rooftops and balconies throughout Centro Habana. From a distance, all the apartments along the Malecn unfold like a Christmas calendar of hurricane-bruised colors. As usual, it felt like a drive-in movie experience to watch the day bleed out.

The Malecn was crammed with families greeting friends and I watched the handshakes far too closely because I had been told that if you shake hands with someone's wife and clandestinely run your thumb against her palm during the gesture it meant that you're asking if she'd like to have an affair. I knew this because I had done it by accident after meeting a boxer's wife to whom Hector introduced me. It was roughly the same look I got when at a fruit stand I asked an eighty-year-old woman if she had papaya available, not knowing I was requesting p.u.s.s.y by its slang term. On my second day in the country, I got lost near the Malecn near the Habana Libre hotel-a popular cruising area for gays-and asked if anyone knew where the maricn ("f.a.ggot") was by mistake. Even a stone-faced policeman broke down laughing.

Bike taxis hustled rides while the fishermen worked barefoot and shirtless, smoking unfiltered cigarettes next to a bucket of the day's catch. Some worked alone with rum, others in groups with conversation. Jineteros kept their eyes peeled for an easy wallet while their female counterparts arched their backs and hissed, "Warr joo frawm?" Thousands of teenage silhouettes sat flirting on the Malecn like it was one collective sofa. Some people paced, turning over decisions made a little easier by their proximity to the sea as itchy stray dogs roamed in search of handouts. Old women with sacks of candy held out fistfuls of lollipops and bags of popcorn to families sitting against the wall near solitary musicians honing soliloquies on trumpets or guitars, while cruise ships approached the harbor. Somewhere beyond the perfect line where the sky and sea kiss, the shark-infested pa.s.sage spanned, a three-day float-if you make it-to pay dirt.

Somebody once said that at the end of the world there's always a tourist and a wh.o.r.e f.u.c.king in a hotel. If that's here, that wh.o.r.e's mother probably made the bed and had coffee ready for them. The girls with price tags always ask me why I look so sad and offer me company, but I'm always too shy to accept their advances. Femininity here in any permutation-wife, mistress, mother, grandmother, daughter, friend, stranger-overwhelms and intimidates me. Where I come from, any woman worth her salt knows how to break your b.a.l.l.s, but they're so worn down by a culture perfected to make them feel like s.h.i.t that hardly any know how to truly break your heart.

One more day until flying home....

12.

IF SPANISH LACKED A FUTURE TENSE.

It's a soccer ball covered with ants, to which an unknown player has given a tremendous kick, sending it spinning through s.p.a.ce without the ants having the slightest idea where they came from or where they're going or why. That doesn't stop the little animals from clinging to the surface or from killing each other so as to keep holding on to the ball and their dreams.

-Carlos Loveira, Juan Criollo MAYBE EVERYTHING HAS BEEN SAID, but how much of it has been heard?

Of the eighty-two revolutionaries crammed onto the leaky boat that shipwrecked onto Cuban sh.o.r.es on December 2, 1956-twenty-nine years after Loveira's novel-no more than twenty survived the initial encounter with Batista's army and succeeded in escaping to the Sierra Maestra mountains. Only twelve men from this group survived to see victory when, on January 1, 1959, Batista fled Cuba for Spain with an estimated three hundred million dollar fortune stolen from the Cuban people. Since that time, some estimates say that there have been 638 attempts on Castro's life organized on American soil. In 1979, on a historic trip to address the UN General a.s.sembly in New York, Castro was asked about the constant need for protection in light of the a.s.sa.s.sination attempts.

"Everybody says you always have a bulletproof vest," the reporter Jon Alpert remarked on the plane ride.

"No." Castro smiled.

"No?"

Castro leaned back and struggled to unb.u.t.ton his shirt and reveal his soft, spa.r.s.ely haired fifty-three-year-old chest.

"I will land in New York like this." Fidel beamed. "I have a moral one. A moral vest. It's strong." He held up a fist. "That one has protected me always. It's too hot in Cuba to have a bulletproof vest."

On the afternoon of my last day in Havana, I saw a little girl get bit by a dog in Parque Central in between the tournament fight cards at Kid Chocolate. I watched her from a stone bench beside the Esquina Caliente crowd of men arguing baseball just down the street from the Capitolio. She tried to pet one of these Goya-nightmare stray dogs and it snapped at her hand. She went off like a car alarm, but it was the way she screamed that made the old men give up their arguments and rush over to console her. I had been hypnotized by these men's bickering my entire visit. I'm convinced that that girl's ability to distract them from their shouting is the only bona fide miracle I've ever witnessed in my lifetime. You'll have to take my word for it, but if the Hot Corner heard Slim Pickens himself was falling from the sky straddling an atomic bomb, slapping his cowboy hat against his hip and yee-hawing his way down onto their heads ... there wouldn't have been a flinch. "We're talking beisbol here, coo."

The Esquina Caliente finally cheered her up enough that she smiled and jammed her head against her mom's shoulder. The men went back to baseball and the mom carried her baby home.

I closed up my notebook and followed the little girl and her mother to Calle Neptuno, where they caught a cab and disappeared.

The last thing I had planned before flying home was to catch an Industriales game at Estadio Latinoamericano with Jess. It was nearing the end of the Cuban National Baseball League's ninety-game season. Television in Cuba only has three channels and when baseball or Brazilian soap operas are on, the city shuts down to watch. As much as these people loved boxing, if Tefilo Stevenson came out of retirement to fight the heavyweight champion while a little league game was telecast from any corner of the island, people would riot if anyone dared replace it with boxing. I've never loved Americans more than when I see them up close watching a baseball game. It distills one side of their culture and national character in a way nothing else does. It's like they're watching their daughter at their first dance recital. And the only people on earth who loved America's game as much as Americans were these people.

And this was Jess's going away present to me. We were going to stop at his dad's house on the way to say h.e.l.lo. He looked so proud on his way to work, pulling his Industriales cap over his little shaved head after he kissed his wife and boy. That's when his wife came over to me and told me his dad had terminal cancer and n.o.body had the heart to tell Jess yet. It was in his pancreas and there wasn't much time left. The dread of keeping this information from someone who had been as kind to me as Jess had been during my stay hung over the rest of my last day. But it's impossible to hold on to any one feeling for long given the speed that this town dishes them out.

I'd had a laughing fit at the gym that afternoon because I'd mentioned I wanted to meet Felix Savn, the three-time Olympic heavyweight gold medalist, before I left, if it was possible. Most of the coaches at Trejo were either Olympic or Pan American gold medalists themselves or had coached Olympic gold medalists on the national or Olympic team. They knew and enjoyed Savn-everybody knows everybody in Havana anyway-but he was like a sweet little boy, they said. I got the impression that Cuba's answer to "the baddest man on the planet" was more like Lenny from Of Mice and Men.

"Sure you can meet him!" one coach hollered. "We've already talked to him about you. He told us he'd like to meet you in the Presidential Suite at the Nacional this evening. He'll bring his medals to show you but be careful, he probably won't wear them around his neck!"

While I was smiling to myself about this, I got to a street corner and noticed a sweaty, filthy old man crawling on the ground like a crab across the intersection. I wasn't high. I'd been offered plenty of weed by people who, for some unclear reason, insisted on smoking it from their nostrils rather than lips. But I was aware of the years in jail many have spent for so much as a joint and wasn't keen to tempt fate. Yet, this guy, stone sober as I was, wasn't evaporating like any mirage under closer inspection. All he had on was a loincloth. It was a busy intersection. Out of maybe two hundred people walking on the sidewalk-the fifteen taxis, ten Chinese bicycle taxis, forty cars, and two horse-drawn carriages on the road-I seemed to possess the only pair of eyes staring. I appeared to be the only person remotely concerned with this man's role in the universe.

In New York people had arguments with their horns; in Havana they had operas. As the man progressed to the center of the intersection, still in the middle of the street with the cars patiently waiting for him to pa.s.s, I noticed there was a rope attached to his ankle tied to something that remained offstage behind a lamppost. I reached into my breast pocket and took out a cigarette, waiting with my match until I saw what he was dragging: a truck's tire.

Maybe everybody was too busy to notice because, like every other day in Havana, it's Valentine's Day year round. You can't walk anywhere without somebody blowing kisses or whistling or hissing at somebody. If this were the States it would be a s.e.xual hara.s.sment lawyer's wet dream. Yet hardly anybody seems to mind. Cupid was supposed to be a screwed-up kid settling scores with grownups anyway, so it makes sense he'd be mistaken for a local patron saint in this place.

I made my last walk home as I always did, with the sunset glinting off American hubcaps and putting the finishing touches on a stickball game played down an alley, with everyone pleading for just one more out. The sunset got its hooks into the whole overwhelming dripping-wet painting of everything in Havana, and I turned over the same thought I had from the beginning: maybe Cuba is just one dictator's heartbeat away from becoming like everywhere else. But what if it's not? How long could this possibly last? How long should it last? It's a lot easier to theorize about human behavior than it is to look at it.