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Thursday, Nov 26, 2009
What is it about these poor countries? What savor do they offer us? Is it just the perfume of misery that makes us appreciate our own lives?
Feb 7, 2002 | What was that doing here?
He was scarcely even a puppy, a tiny black bit of fur the size of my own small hand, just able to walk across the beach. I scooped him up and turned around, looking for his owner. There was no one behind me, just the beach restaurant where my lunch had been cooked. It had been simple grilled fish with rice and a few tomato slices. The restaurant offered salt but no pepper or hot sauce -- expensive luxuries here.
Twenty feet in front of me, close to the turquoise sea, a group of Italian men with Cuban girls laughed and bantered. The men were 40-ish but fending off gravity better than most American males, and they didn't look bad in their bathing trunks. The women were spectacular in their tangas, not an ounce of fat on their 20-year-old bodies. They were ebony. There was an adage around that you heard once you'd been in Cuba a few times, that the Italian men always went for the really black Cubanas. What interested me about this was that in Italy, bourgeois Northern Italians will sneer at Sicily or even Naples as "Africa."
The puppy was completely black and would have been beautiful, but for the way every inch of his skin was covered with fleas or flea bites. Using the big bottle of water I'd brought to the beach, I began to clean him and scrape away the fleas. He squeaked in discomfort as I cleaned him, but he was so little that his resistance was no impediment.
By this time other beachgoers were coming round to watch the drama. The Cuban girls ignored the puppy, but the foreign men were concerned. An Italian man thought he'd seen a black bitch with milk-full teats nearby. But when he found her -- X-ray thin, mangy, unhappy -- and led her over, she turned her back on the puppy. The puppy followed her. He grabbed helplessly for her teats as she backed away.
A Spanish man volunteered that the perrito -- the puppy -- was probably under a week old and needed milk. At the restaurant they regretted they had none. I had forgotten that in Cuba milk is rationed, and only government-sanctioned restaurants and families with children may obtain it at local peso prices. Everyone else has to pay in dollars, at prices approximating American supermarket prices. This puts it out of the reach of most Cubans, whose official state salary is about $10 a month.
The Spaniard left to go buy milk from the dollar store a hundred yards away, refusing my offer of payment. He returned with one of those European brick containers. When we opened it and poured some milk into a bottle cap, it was ochre. Probably old, no expiration date. Luckily I was feeding a dog, not a baby. The perrito gladly drank four bottle caps' worth. I'd have to give him a bath in the sink back at the hotel in Havana, I decided. And then I'd have to try to find a family to adopt him.
On my fourth visit to Cuba, I knew enough to realize that this would not be an easy task. Most families could hardly afford to feed their kids, much less a pet. This was why the lovely girls on the beach were sleeping with the foreign men old enough to be their daddies. And while well-off Cubans did have dogs, as often as not they were an element of conspicuous consumption and had to be recognizable breeds. This puppy was a mutt -- he wouldn't increase anyone's status.
That evening, with the perrito asleep in my hotel room, I found myself at El Rio, or Johnny's, a Havana nightclub that exists for one reason. Very short brown girls were trying to attract the attention of substantially built white men, mainly, judging from the looks of them, Northern Europeans. Perhaps twice as many women as men were in the bar, and some of the girls danced with each other. They were animated but self-conscious. There was no joy here; it was a place of business, though the decor was delirious and the flashing strobe lights made the cushiony metallic walls even odder.
My friends Beth and Lucy and I were here because two German men we had met over dinner invited us, but it wasn't clear why they would want us around to watch the scene unfold.
The girls, I knew from previous visits to Cuba, were not only college age, but actual college students. They were not quite part-time prostitutes, but something like prostitution was going on. "They're happy if you buy them a good dinner and a pair of shoes," one Italian man had told me.
The girls were so short -- at 5-foot-6 I was a head taller -- because of malnutrition during the so-called Special Period in the early '90s when they were growing up. When the Soviet Union stopped supporting Cuba and then suddenly collapsed, food had become scarce in this one-time agricultural nation. Even middle-class urban Cubans found themselves short of food. Judging by their skin tone, these girls were not middle-class.
Even five decades after the Revolution, color lines largely equal economic lines in Cuba. Though the gross inequities of pre-Revolutionary days had been eliminated, blacks clearly occupied a lower economic rung. I'd never seen a casa particular, or pension, run by a black family, or a paladar, an informal restaurant, with black owners. I'd never seen a black driver of an official cab. These were three of the best legal ways to acquire foreign currency in Cuba and blacks didn't seem to have access to them. (The houses people had at the time of the Revolution were largely the houses they had now, which is why white people were the owners of the big places that made good pensions.)
Blacks could play music, of course, just as they could in the Jim Crow South, and some of Cuba's economic elite are successful salseras who make money overseas. But the most obviously black occupation is not singing and dancing. The hardcore whores, the jinateras, are almost all very dark-skinned.
