Category Archives: Uncategorized

March 29, 2010 · 4:56 pm

Further Adventures with Explosive Diarrhea

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Cuban bichos have nothing on the Haitians. After ten visits to the toilet here in our camp, I can tell you from firsthand experience these creole suckers are fuerte. Beyond the bloody, liquid stools, I´ve been flattened by fever and withstood painful, poignant cramps. I´ve been taking the bitter pills to combat the nasty Haitian bacteria living in my intestines for a couple of days now and I´m still making the mad dash for the toilet. And here lies the real trouble and adventure.

Our bathroom is the picture of nastiness. Shared by 10 to twelve people and without running water, the mud and leaves, dust and random Port-au-Prince shit gets tracked in and spread by each visitor to its four points. But wait, for the poor slob like me suffering from explosive diarrhea, it gets worse: this lovely baño, where I´ve been bathing, crapping, and occasionally washing the odd pair of underwear in an old paint bucket, is kept under lock and key.

Twelve people sharing one (locked) bathroom, with me shooting liquid from my butt ten times a day. You do the math. Oh, just to make it more challenging still, the generator (and the lights, natch) are cut at 10:30 at night. So imagine me (or better yet, don´t) at 3 in the morning, trying to find the communal key in the dark, locating it on the clothesline finally, struggling to wrangle it from the line, having to give up as the explosive diarrhea and cold stress sweat begin oozing from my body, and just yanking the key off its rope and running madly for the bathroom. But once there, I have to find the key hole, insert said key and cross the anteroom to the actual toilet. I almost made it. Once that indignity was done, I had to fetch that old paint bucket and fill it with water from the ground-level cistern. In the dark.

Repeat tent-bathroom-cistern. Tent-bathroom-cistern. Tent-bathroom-cistern ten times a day. Some of my baño compatriots skip the cistern part and leave me nice, friendly floaters or several inches of acrid piss to face as I sit to let things rip. Nice. Twice as nice is when one of the twelve ¨compañeros¨ with whom I´m sharing the bathroom forgets to replace the key on the clothesline…or hides it. I´ve had to go ¨Woodstock¨ (as we say in my family which is full of people suffering from one kind of explosive diarrhea or another) on more than one occasion here in Haiti. Pretty retro, I know, but until now I´ve been able to resolve a bathroom – all are under lock and key here – in my hour of need. Probably more detrimental to my psyche is the diet I have to follow: no coffee or just a little which for me is an oxymoron, nothing spicy (which if you could see our menu, you would understand why this is so trying), no sweets, no juice or soda, and oh, I´m not supposed to smoke my daily cigar. Ach.

Why am I telling you all this? Maybe I´m hoping ya´ll will send me the healing vibe so I can make it to the ceremony I have to attend tomorrow – an hour away over the dusty, crater-pocked roads leading through and out of Port-au-Prince – without incident. My campmates are advising me to bring a plastic bag por si acaso. I pray that ´just in case´ never comes to pass. I´ll keep you posted.

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March 15, 2010 · 9:00 am

Capital Catharsis

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It´s the Itchy & Scratchy Show over here in Haiti. Everyone is itching. Moments ago I was talking to a nurse outside my tent when she bent down to rub her jeans around her shin; earlier, a doctor scratched at his neck while we discussed a prognosis. Tell tale signs. All day long I catch Haitian women slapping their braided heads, trying to alleviate the ubiquitous itch without an actual scratch. I too, am itching. This is par for my traveling course: scabies in San Francisco, an unidentifiable jungle funk that lasted 100 times longer than the five day trek to El Mirador, and a nasty something or other contracted in a chozo on the Mosquito Coast of Honduras. What can I say? The bichos like me.

Scabies is epidemic in most post-quake scenarios and I’m half convinced I’ve got them (again). It sucks, applying the toxic lotion from head to toe and washing all your clothes and bedding – especially when there’s no running water. But I can’t resist hugging all those beautiful, wide eyed kids who are facing scabies and starvation and nowhere to shit. They need hugs, deserve them.

To be honest, the scene here is depressing and some days even all those smiling, jigging kids can’t help me shake it. The stench of shit, piss, and garbage (I hate to beat that drum again, but it surrounds us) is constant. Unavoidable, this olfactory assault, and the visuals aren’t much better: by day, little boys and muscle-bound men lather up buck naked in the street while US soldiers look on through dark shades, desultory machine guns slung by their side; by night, young girls sleep in doorways hunched beneath pink blankets.

It´s fair to say that every last person in Port-au-Prince today is sleep deprived. There is so much to keep us awake at night – the impending rains, the homeless families, the mothers with AIDS, TB, anemia, and scabies – but it is the terrible, horrific tales of rape that terrorize my waking moments. What protection can a single mother in an overcrowded, pestilent refugee camp provide her teenage daughter from the men who enter in the predawn to beat and rape innocent human beings? None, it seems. As I said – depressing.

The Haitian people are an extraordinarily religious bunch and I´m not talking voudou (although there´s that too and I´ve been promised a visit – you´ll be sure to read about it here if/when it happens). These are hard core Christians and ´Jesus saves´ is plastered on every ticky tacky tap tap in the city. ´Our savior shall return´ and ´placing my faith in God’ are also popular slogans painted on everything from barber shops to gas tanks. The other day I saw a wooden plaque that in my rusty French I took to mean ‘Jesus is the chef of this house.’ A Haitian friend pointed out that my high school French was indeed lacking; what the sign actually said was ‘Jesus is the boss of this house.’ Sundays are church days when everything grinds to a halt (much to the dismay of the Cuban doctors: this is their only day off and given their druthers, they would spend sun up to sun down shopping). There are so many things that don’t square in Haiti, the (professed) faithfulness to god and the prevalence of domestic/gender-based violence being just one.

The rubble, of course, remains. There are some motions being made to clear it – in buildings prioritized by the US high command or their private subcontractors (one never can tell) and by men salvaging rebar. De facto as these efforts may be, it’s more than is happening on any formal level. It’s part of the permanent landscape it seems, these piles of pulverized rocks and crumbled facades. We – Haitians, Cubans, internationalistas – just step around and over and through it every day, on every street. This capacity to ignore and move on and around puts me in mind of two anecdotes, one old, one new, from two worlds away.

The first is my mom’s archetypical tale of when my father, (long ago, for they’ve been happily divorced now for over 25 years), broke a glass in the dining room. Rather than go for a broom, he draped a piece of newspaper over the mess. My mom discovered this act of maturity by stepping on the newspaper and slashing open her foot. Divorce? You betcha.

The second is a contemporary story told to me by an Argentine doctor friend of mine trained at Havana’s Latin American Medical School. As happens in Cuba, motors break and systems fail, meaning we sometimes have to go without running water. There’s usually water to be found somewhere, and although it has to be hand carried (up several flights of stairs usually) it is available. One fine day, the motor that brings the water up to the dorm’s tanks and into the pipes burnt out. No water, for how long no one knew. Instead of hauling up the liquid gold to bucket flush the toilet, the students (male ones I hope and assume) began laying one square of newspaper after another over the pile of shit they’d deposited in the dry bowl. Eventually, obviously, the stack drew dangerously close to the rim. This is where I stopped my friend in his telling, but I have to wonder, why do men have such a penchant for covering the ugliness of life with newspapers?

[For the positive things happening in Haiti, visit my posts at http://mediccglobal.wordpress.com]

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March 8, 2010 · 9:24 pm

Visions of Port-au-Prince

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That spontaneous little tent camp that abutted ours? They razed it the other day to make way for the new Ministry of Public Health. So they say. Regardless of what’s constructed in the bulldozed plot, I don´t know what the families who were surviving there will do, or where they´ll go. For now, they´re squeezed into a narrow strip of no-man´s-land where chickens wade in standing water picking at garbage and bulldozers mound detritus closer and closer to their makeshift kitchen.

It has been raining all night. “How did you sleep?” I ask my neighbor, a doctor from Guantánamo who has been serving in Haiti a year already and treats her patients in capable Creole. “OK, but I wake up tired.” This is common: sleep is elusive, especially when it’s raining. With each drop you think of a different person – the malnourished four month-old; the young girl caring for her three smaller siblings; and the 12-year old boy who is now the head of his household, made fast a man by the earthquake. No matter how much good the world is doing Haiti, regardless of the size and sincerity of the tender outpouring, no one can control today and tomorrow and the next day’s most pressing problem: the rain. Perhaps more than any other place on earth, in Haiti March 2010, you don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.

Outside the gate of the Cuban camp, that wind is laced with an acrid smoke from all the burning garbage. Mixed with the dust, it makes a toxic cocktail. There are people living in cars of course and tents pitched in the middle of rubble-edged streets. Even folks whose homes are intact prefer to sleep in tents in the driveway or family courtyard. The earthquake is too fresh in their minds, the 6.1 aftershock fresher still. Signs on the outside of partially crushed homes read: ´Help us! We need water and food´ in three (or more) languages.

You´ve seen the destruction already, repeatedly, on one of your 150 channels. But living among it, with the dust and dirt filling your eyes and nose and mouth is something else entirely. Flies swarm over garbage, shit, and people. Four-story buildings are flattened like millefeuille pastries with chunks of concrete-encrusted rebar dangling from skewed balconies like Christmas lights or strings of rock candy. Thinking about what lies beneath isn’t advised. People are starving literally to death, yet there are mounds of food for sale everywhere: fried chicken, grilled hotdogs and corn on the cob, fresh fruits, vegetables, bread, and rice.

Inside the camps, conditions are not fit for cattle, truly. But the children. Smiling and laughing and dancing in spite of it all. They’re adorable and wide eyed and play alongside garbage heaps shouting ‘ blan! blan!’ (whitey! whitey!) with affection when I walk by. I joke with them, flashing the peace and thumbs up sign and dancing to music only I (and maybe they) can hear. It’s my only way to communicate beyond my high school French. More often than not, they’re barefoot and bare bottomed. It’s heartbreaking. I make them smile, just for now, but Patch Adams I am not.

Back within the walls of our encampment, vendors set up shop, peddling boots, golden-colored watches and fine shirts encased in plastic. They´ve got the Cubans´ number. The sneakers are name brand and spotless, though many are used – or to be precise, no longer of use to their owners who are dead. Some lovely pharmacists who arrived with me just over a week ago are already approaching their 30 kilo baggage allowance, having shopped within our walls to the limit permitted under their contract as part of the Cuban emergency medical team. Meanwhile, Wilfred, a Haitian who worked at the Military Hospital before the quake, runs a commissary where we buy sort of cold Cokes and Colt 45. Prestige, the Haitian beer, is in high demand and runs out fast. One friend, who has been in Haiti for more than two years, takes a long pull on his beer and tells me: “best to stay anaesthetized.” If only.

And I thought Cuba was surreal.

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February 16, 2010 · 12:34 pm

5 Bodegas & 8 Cafeterias Later…I’m Worried

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I recently shared with readers my top five reasons for the frayed Cuban psyche circa February 1, 2010. To recap, this psychic static is being caused by (in no particular order):

– the embargo
– bureaucracy
– economic hardship
– housing
– exhaustion

The domestic economy and crushing bureaucracy is a double whammy that’s hitting home, every Cuban home, including mine, and I’m worried.

The problem? Apparently, distribution of cigars for domestic consumption is in some kind of trouble. What kind of trouble, I can’t be sure, but that’s what the last bodeguero I talked to posited. How deep that trouble is, I can only guess and gossip (the technique used 24/7/365 by 11 million Cubans trying to figure out everything from when/if the ration book will be cut to the whereabouts of a beloved film star). But whatever the reason, it doesn’t look good for your cigar smoking Havana correspondent: after hoofing between five bodegas and eight cafeterias (see note 1) to procure the five cent cheroots I’ve been smoking for the past eight years – nada.

I’m getting a little desperate.

One of my last hopes is the funeral parlor. Every Cuban funeral parlor has a cafeteria attached where, heretofore without fail, I’ve been able to buy cigars from the upbeat (surprisingly) and underpaid (not surprisingly) staff. Getting my fix from the folks babysitting stiffs and their loved ones is only a little morbid when measured against my cigar-less disposition. Death is one thing, murder quite another.

If the funeral parlor doesn’t bear fruit, I’m afraid I’ll have to resort to my back channels (see note 2). Thankfully, since arriving those many years ago, I’ve opened several such channels. But these things take time – it’s not like picking up the phone and ordering a pizza/burrito/pad thai like where you are – and my stores are running dangerously low. True, my family and friends are always looking out for me, flipping me quite good cigars de vez en cuando, but I can’t count on ‘every once in a while’ when my stores are running dangerously low. Have I mentioned my stores, those that currently run dangerously low?

Of course, I could, in theory, resolve my stogie problems in hard currency – the dreaded CUC which circulates alongside the weak-like-an-ugly-man’s-chin Cuban peso. Unfortunately, our family economy won’t support another hard currency habit, I’m afraid (see note 3). Besides, I find the five cent cigars just as smokeable as their brand name counterparts, plus I appreciate the low level commitment of these ‘dirt sticks’ – 25 minutes and out. To be honest, I don’t like Cohibas much (see note 4). I mean, when they come my way, I’m grateful and enjoy their long, spicy smoke, but it’s not my famous cigar of choice (see note 5). In short, the time and money commitment required by really good Cuban cigars – what most people think of when someone says ‘Cuban cigars’ – isn’t practical for the modern Habanera like myself.

My bodeguero tells me he doesn’t know what’s up with February’s cigar delivery. Like so much here in Havana, it’s making me sweat.

Notes

1. The bodega is where all Cuban families (at the time of writing!) receive their monthly food and staples rations. It is also where you (yes you!) can buy 100% black tobacco Cuban cigarettes and tasty, smokeable Cuban cigars for $1 per 20, plus rot gut rum sold by the liter (bring your own empty for this service). Whatever gets you through the night and all that!

2. If I or you ever think, ‘she’s not THAT cubanizada,’ dig the subtext here (which is pretty much the Cuban economy in a nutshell): ‘state drops the ball on X good/service forcing otherwise upstanding citizen to resort to the black market’ (or as we sometimes say here: the ‘informal economy’ which is a wonderful euphemism).

3. My husband has a $2.50 cigarette habit. There’s no way I could tack on another $5 or so dollars a day.

4. The Robusto hoarded away in my drawer-cum-humidor that my father-in-law recently gifted me notwithstanding.

5. For those wondering how to make my day, do it with a Romeo y Julieta Churchill (or Monte Cristo #2).

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December 8, 2009 · 4:10 pm

DIY US-Cuba Collaboration

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UPDATE FOUR! (post Haiti)
Finally! One of my postcards sent up north arrived (and with comically large pope stamp which contrasted nicely with the B&W image of the rebel army in the Sierra Maestra).
Sent from: Habana Cuba on February 14 or so, 2010
Arrived in Queens, NY: March 23, 2010

UPDATE THREE!
Well folks, I’m hours away from taking off for Haiti but I wanted to let you know I had a nice little (record-breaking!) surprise in my PO box today. In the interest of brevity (haiti prep continues apace!):

Card with lovely family photo from A Lee
Sent from: Albany, NY on December 10, 2009
Arrived Havana: February 19, 2010 (slowest to date!)
Highlight:Stamped with a never before seen message in bright red ink: “Missent to Bermuda.” This is one well traveled card!

A Lee – you’ll have to wait for me to return from Haiti for your missive from here. So far, none of the people below have received theirs as far as I know

!UPDATE DOS!

Hi folks! New development on the DIY project front…

Postcard from LP colleague Zora O’neill
Sent from: Bali, Indonesia on January 20, 2010
Arrived Havana: February 13, 2010 (note: this is the date stamped on the postcard as being received at my post office, not the day I went around to collect it)
Highlight: The stamps are beautiful, four color floral affairs and the 1657 temple on the postcard is a wonder. Also, this is the first item I’ve received from someone I’ve never met.
Upshot: Nora, fellow LP writer/blogger and New Yorker is a fast rising star – thanks for taking out the time from Forkin Fantastic to participate in our little project! Also, her postal travel time is neck and neck with the goodies from LA – and came WAY farther.

UPDATE! UPDATE! UPDATE!

I’ve got mail!

Well, a big hola to all my readers (and writers) from across the Straits. I’ve at last been able to visit the old P.O. Box and what a haul! Our little DIY US-Cuba postal collaboration is bearing its first fruit. Interestingly, only items from the two coasts have arrived (once again, proving that middle America is a wasteland. Kidding!). Interestingly de nuevo, only items from people I already know happened to get here. Random, but at least it was speedy.

So here are the preliminary results:

Package from my dear friend AD
Sent from: Los Angeles on December 14, 2009
Arrived Havana: December 28, 2009
Highlight: A package! What more do you need to know? OK, it contained a collection of essays by David Foster Wallace that I can’t wait to read (can I BE him? please?) and a super cool envirosax reusable shopping bag unit with 10% of the sale going to the surfrider foundation (www.surfrider.org). I had to pay 1.5 pesos (that’s about 6 cents USD) to get the package from the nice lady behind the glass. Like all packages entering Cuba, this one was opened by customs, inspected and resealed with the aforementioned official form inside detailing what is/was in the package and the state in which it was found. Interestingly, for the first time, there was a problem with the form. Namely, it wasn’t mine! Instead, the form corresponded to Zeida Paez Garcia in Matanzas. Her package contained bags and jars, books, magazines, catalogs, and postcards. I like the contents of my package much better, sorry Zeida.
Upshot: Nothing cheers up like a package from a friend! AND it seems LA PO wins for speedy delivery – just two weeks (or maybe that it was a package had something to do with it)

Long, fun letter from my creative friend AL
Sent from: NY, NY on December 16, 2009
Arrived Havana: January 12, 2010
Highlight: So many! This letter was written in stages during AL’s performance piece enacted during 24 hours riding the F train – I especially enjoyed reading about her pulling into Coney Island at 3:37 am and awaiting the next train, wondering if it will be on time, observing all the other New Yorkers wondering the same thing. (It pulled in promptly at 3:41. Rudy Giuliani – he did get the trains running on time). Bonus: the original Keith Herring Free South Africa postcard, circa 1985. Thanks A!
Upshot: Anything arriving in under a month is pretty good in my opinion.

Postcard from my old friend C
Sent from: Westchester, New York on December 23, 2009
Arrived Havana: January 28, 2010
Highlight: Hubby out in a blizzard at the Jet’s game – some folks never give up hope!
Upshot: Took a month, but hey, it’s the holidays.

So far so good. To post offices and their employees on both sides of the straits, I say: keep up the good work! (If anyone is reading this in Miami or elsewhere in southern Florida, I invite you to participate in our little project: it would be fun to see how long it takes for a card or letter to travel that interminable 90 miles) And to my correpsondents: your postcard is on its way!

—–

So have you heard Obama and Company espousing ‘change’ towards Cuba? Newsflash! It’s a whole bunch of hooey, (despite pundits’ claims to the contrary). OK, maybe not a whole bunch, but mostly. For instance, absolutely nothing floated so far by the United States is bringing my dear friends Karna and Joseph any closer to my doorstep or my husband any closer to my Mom’s (see note 1). Nor has anything changed that would help bring life-saving medicines to Cuban kids with cancer or allow me to access my bank account. My knickers do tend to get in a twist, therefore, when I read about the supposed strides being made. From where I’m sitting, it’s the same old story, save for a new protagonist of color instead of the rich, old white dudes who have been ruling the free world for what seems like forever (see note 2).

But I can tell you from years of firsthand experience that things have improved markedly in one area: mail service. Sounds terribly unsexy and 19th Century, I know, but if you’ve ever had a smile sneak across your lips or a flutter erupt in your gut when a letter from a friend or lover graces your mailbox, you know receiving mail can be one of life’s small but great pleasures. Letter writing is also one of our few remaining acts of pure reciprocity – usually you have to write a letter to get a letter.

And living where I do, without YouTube or podcasts, Skype and webcam capabilities (see note 3), it’s a downright thrill to receive something “from the other side.” Imagine my delight peering into my post office box (a gilded iron affair with the Cuban coat of arms on the door) recently to behold a little pink envelope sent by my youngest niece from summer camp. No matter that she was already assembling her Halloween costume by the time it reached Box 6464 at Havana’s main post office. Or the record-breaking postcard sent by my good friend Claudia from the heights of Denver that took a full three months to reach me.

But arrive it did, which brings me to the pollo of the arroz con pollo of this post: I contracted my post office box in 2002. In those early years, I received magazines, recipes, letters, photos – even boxes packed with paperback books and CDs friends had culled from their collections. A sheet of paper tucked inside each of those incoming packages informed me that the box had been opened and inspected by Cuban postal authorities. It was all very official, with the standardized, column-filled form itemizing the contents and their condition upon arrival, plus whether any prohibited items had been removed. None ever had and nothing was ever stolen or damaged.

Then, after 3 or 4 similar packages and a couple of years of postal elation or deflation depending on what, if anything, my P.O. box contained, my mail lifeline was choked off. I’d get the occasional postcard from China or South Africa from globetrotting friends and family, but nothing from my compadres up north. Letters were getting lost somewhere in transit. Postcards sent from California, Colorado, New York, and New Hampshire never graced Box 6464. Mom resorted to sending newspaper clippings about the Knicks’ new coach and New Yorker cartoons just to see if they’d get here. Few did. I was dismayed – these handwritten, stamped gestures are like Red Bull for the expat soul (without the nasty taste) and I wanted to know what was up with my dose.

I went to talk to the postmistress. I explained the sudden death of my correspondence.

“But if you’re sending money through the mail…” she commented with a raised eyebrow and ‘what do you expect?’ shrug.

This is the type of foreigner-as-village-idiot comment Cubans sometimes make that gets my Irish up. My first inclination is to look the woman straight in the eye and ask: “¿¡tengo cara de boba?! (do I look like an idiot?!) But since this will likely be my postmistress for life, I must be careful not piss her off.

“No, no. Nothing like that. Just postcards and letters and such.”

I inquire as to whether there have been any staffing or procedural changes at the post office that may account for the lapse.

Negativo.

After months of missives gone missing, people stopped writing. Oh, I’d get a postcard from Kenya or Cambodia now and then, but these were few and far between. More often than not, I’d walk the long marble hallway to the bank of boxes, lean in and see nothing but a dark, empty slot. And so it went until one day, in some obscure way, the information reached me that George W had decreed postal services to Cuba would cease, indefinitely. I imagine there’s some P.O. purgatory somewhere up north piled high with pink envelopes addressed to Cuba by beloved campers and secret banana bread recipes that never found their new home.

Fast forward to 2009. My magazine subscriptions started arriving again and Mom’s clipping about the ongoing Kilauea eruption (see note 4) came at last. Then I got a letter from an old friend.

Finally!! I was experiencing direct, positive results from regime change in the USA.

So I’d like to get some evidence as to how well the US-Cuba mail service accords are working, make it scientific, if you will. Drop me a line and we’ll see how long it takes for a simple letter or postcard to cross the 86 miles of water separating us (see note 5). Some will surely never arrive, but those that do will receive a response from yours truly here in Havana. I’ll be sure to keep readers posted on the results.

Send all letter love (and please! nothing inflammatory or flammable, edible or fragile, dangerous or dissenting) to:

Conner Gorry
Apdo 6464
Habana 6
10600
Habana CUBA

Notes

1. Something that typically gets lost in all the venom and rhetoric is that the US routinely denies tourist visas to Cubans unless they’re over 70, an artist, or musician. My husband and several of my friends – although they traveled to the US on occasion prior to 2002 – can now only dream of visiting because of this unstated, exclusionary policy.

2. In no way do I mean to minimize Obama’s achievement. His election was triumphant and exultant and not wholly expected in that underdog, tear-jerking Hoosiers kind of way. But when it comes to Cuba, he’s singing the same tune – perhaps with more rhythm and style – but in the end, it’s the same regime change, capitalism-is-better-just-admit-it-and-surrender song and dance we’ve been subjected to for 50 years.

3. People (Cubans and foreigners alike) who can afford to use the WiFi at hotels (cost: $7/hr, 2-hr minimum) or access the Internet through a private provider (cost: $36 for 30 hours/month minimum) do have wider access than me to some of these services.

4. Kilauea on Hawaii’s Big Island has been erupting since 1983 – the longest recorded eruption in history. If you have never been to the Big Island, go there, now. And take my guide with you!

5. But wait! Please join in even if you live in Canada or Argentina, France or Hong Kong. After all, the blogosphere has no borders, why should our experiment?

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October 1, 2009 · 9:29 am

Cuba is Bugging Me – Part II

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If you’re keeping up, you’ll recall my lament over the termites eating through our mattress (see note 1). But as nauseating as microscopic, gluttonous bugs munching on our love nest may be, nothing truly disrupts life in here in Havana like mosquitoes. The upside is that Cuban skeeters are slow, clumsy flyers – easy to kill and not much bother. The downside is that in most tropical climes – including this one – mosquitoes mean dengue.

Evil, evil dengue.

It doesn’t kill you, ‘breakbone fever.’ At least not the first bout. But the second go with dengue has a good chance of developing into the hemorrhagic variety (see note 2) and then it’s curtains. There’s no treatment, vaccine, or cure. Cubans are serious about health in general and as serious as a heart attack when it comes to dengue. This isn’t run of the mill hubris since health is something Cubans do quite well – even better, one could argue, than their big, bad neighbor to the north. Maintaining these health standards is a point of national pride and dengue is public enemy #1. Controlling it is imperative.

This means that once a week, an inspector from ‘Team Aedes Aegypti’ comes to the door to check around my house for standing water, inquire about any ‘spiritual waters’ (see note 3), and make sure I’m draining the water from the fridge on a regular basis (see note 4). Sometimes he’ll test for larvae and sprinkle some poisonous powder into the offending water. Then he (they’re always men for some reason and rarely the same one twice), notes his findings on a chart pinned to a clipboard.

“Your little piece of paper?” he then asks, looking for the mosquito monitoring slip every Cuban home keeps somewhere near the front door, if not tacked right to it. He notes the date and his initials, even the time of day he inspected.

Being from NY, you can imagine my reticence to let a big strapping man into my house one week and a somnolent or shifty looking youth the next. But you get used to it, despite occasional tales of ne’er-do-wells sporting the Team Aedes Aegypti uniform entering homes on the pretext of inspection only to knock old ladies senseless and steal their TVs.

So it goes, regular inspections week after week, until dengue rears its ugly head. If memory serves, this has happened each of the eight years I’ve lived here. And when dengue comes down, it’s war. Cubans bring all arms to bear against the disease-carrying skeeters and the big gun in their arsenal is the ‘bazooka’ – a handheld mini-canon that spews toxic smoke of what cancer causing components I’ve never been able to ascertain.

When there’s an outbreak, they no longer simply come to check for standing water where mosquitoes breed, it means total fumigation of your house. So now when Team AA (dengue Twelve Step, anyone?) comes to the door, they’ve got the deafening bazooka fired up and walk slowly through each room waving it to and fro, noxious smoke pouring forth. Then they back out of the apartment, giving the living room a good strafing and shut the door. As I wait the requisite 30 to 45 minutes before re-entering, I can see the heavy, chemical smoke streaming from under doors and windows the length of our block. The neighbors are sprinkled along the street, gossiping while they wait it out, their dogs on leashes and pet turtles in little tubs by their side.

Back home, the poisonous smoke hovers and I have to hold my breath while running around the apartment throwing open windows. It’s acrid and toxic and unpleasant all around. It’s also mandatory by law I just discovered. It seems some folks in Playa aren’t being as cooperative as they might – especially once they learned Team AA was going to fumigate every day for the next 30. My friend tracked down the legal statute about obligatory cooperation in health because she’d come to loggerheads with a recalcitrant neighbor who refused to fumigate. I was surprised to see in black and white the penalties I could face should I too refuse (see note 5). When Gaby went on to tell me about last week’s scene, replete with cops rolling up to the neighbors’ door to compel them to fumigate, I realized it was no joke. Indeed, excuses don’t fly with the health authorities and their enforcers. If everyone who lives in the house works, you’re expected to leave the key with a neighbor so fumigation can proceed. If there’s a child with asthma or a house-bound elderly person in your family, you have to procure written medical permission to forgo fumigation.

In outbreak areas like where we live, big, rumbling trucks also troll the streets, blanketing the entire block with the thick, cloying smoke. You never know when the truck will roll through, but you’ll smell the smoke before it comes seeping in. Then it’s a mad dash to shut all the windows and secrete the fruit bowl. I remember one time….

Oh! They’re knocking. Time to fumigate (or not).

Notes

1. In case your compassion for my bug plight is waning, I’d like you to know that aside from spraying the Cuban insecticide I Killed It! straight into the holes in the bottom of the mattress, there’s not much we can do to resolve this problemita (buying a new mattress, alas, is not in the financial cards). So, right now, in the instant when you come to this upcoming comma, I could be sleeping atop a seething nest of termites. Think Princess and the Pea but with bugs crawling around down there to disrupt my beauty sleep, instead of a small, round legume.

2. The Merck Manual says this about it: “Some people develop bleeding from the nose, mouth, and digestive tract.” Nice, huh?

3. The first time Team AA came to my door and asked me if I had any “spiritual waters” I couldn’t fathom what they were talking about, though I was quite sure I didn’t have any. I subsequently discovered that Cubans traditionally leave a glass of water in front of portraits of their dearly departed so they shouldn’t be thirsty in the hereafter. Turns out, if you don’t change the water daily, these glasses of spiritual waters become mosquito breeding grounds.

4. Every January, Cuba’s revolutionary government appoints a theme for the upcoming 12 months. So, 1969 was Year of the Decisive Struggle’, 1977 was ‘Year of Institutionalization’ (yowza), and 2006 was ‘Year of the Energy Revolution.’ Indeed, it was revolutionary. Teams of social workers went house to house nationwide surveying how many incandescent light bulbs you had, then showed up some weeks later with the same amount of those squiggly energy efficient bulbs. They spirited away your incandescents in return for the energy efficient models.

They also replaced energy inefficient pressure cookers, rice cookers (both are Cuban kitchen staples), electric tea kettles, hot plates, and refrigerators with energy efficient models. If you didn’t have these items, they provided them. And yes, I know Cubans who live without refrigerators. On the whole, the program worked, but there were problems of course. One is just coming to light with the Chinese fridges they distributed, called “lloronas” because they cry on the inside, dripping water down the interior walls which collects in a tray in the back. Let the water sit for a few days and it becomes a mosquito breeding fest. They’re great units otherwise (we were very thankful to be rid of our Russian clunker with its Cyrillic defrosting instructions and cardboard freezer door), and while I can’t tell you how many they distributed – a million? half that? – it was on a massive scale. Unfortunately, now they’re presenting this massive problem.

5. I always cooperate with Cuban health authorities. This runs the gamut from providing HIV results in order to secure residency to taking a blood test for certain infectious diseases when arriving from endemic areas abroad (also mandatory by law and punishable by a $500 fine, up to two years in prison, or both. Did I mention Cubans are serious about health?!). But my husband and I also like to live as chemically-free as possible. And when a medical student recently commented to me: ‘I always get as far away from those fumigators as possible. I still want children!’ I started thinking twice about opening our home to the noxious treatments.

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September 16, 2009 · 12:58 pm

Survival Skills for Cuban Cooks – Finale

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Thriving in the Cuban kitchen is akin to being a basketball coach: you have to master the art of substitutions. When a recipe calls for pancetta, you understand bacon. If (and when) that’s not happening, a bacon-flavored bouillon cube is a workable alternative. Bouillons of all stripes – pork ribs, chicken and tomato, sausage – are kitchen staples here and though no substitute for the inimitable Better than Bouillon, I’ve made a killer pasta all’Amatriciana with the little square suckers. Alas, the B in BLT does not stand for bouillon. If a recipe says ‘fresh tomatoes,’ that’s understood as canned for a good part of the year, which in turn becomes tomato puree when all else fails (see note 1). And it will: I recently resorted to the ubiquitous ‘puray‘ for a chicken Masala recipe that my husband is still going on about.

Recipes calling for cream aren’t cause for panic as in other underdeveloped, sweltering climes since Cuba is almost entirely a powdered milk kind of place. I remember powdered milk from my childhood as thin and watery, a vehicle for wetting our puffed rice into something approaching edible. Powdered milk also had to be ‘made’ which rendered it labor intensive in my mind. In short, the powdered variety was nothing like the whole and creamy milk my friends poured straight from the carton onto their Cap’n Crunch and Froot Loops (see note 2). But since living in Cuba, I’ve discovered that powdered milk is a versatile and powerful tool in the tropical kitchen. By adjusting the powder to water ratio you can approximate heavy cream (or at least half-and-half) and while I won’t be serving up chocolate mousse with a dollop of whipped cream anytime soon, I make a mean Fettuccine Alfredo and fabulous flan thanks to powdered milk.

Things get trickier when a recipe calls for any cut of cow. It feels like India over here beef is so scarce and the thought of steaks fuels, in part, dreams of escape (see note 3). The only reliable source of red meat – aside from the trio of tony supermarkets selling a handful of cuts to the foreigner crowd, plus the best off Cubans – is frozen ground beef sold in tubes. Not an ideal stand in for the cubed sirloin holding together my favorite chili recipe but it works and ‘Conner’s chili’ has become a dinner party favorite.

Another key to my kitchen survival is importing staples that are simply not available ever. Most people come home from vacation with a suitcase full of souvenirs – some handwoven cloth or a carved totem, a pair of hand-tooled sandals and a couple t-shirts. But when I head home, I’m limit up – close to 50 pounds – with foodstuffs. That seems like a lot, I know, but do you realize how much a jar of Better than Bouillon weighs? Not to mention canned hearts of palm (my guilty pleasure) maple syrup and tahini, dried mushrooms, apricots, and sun dried tomatoes, tortillas, bulgur and couscous, popcorn, basmati rice, and nuts of all types. I always come packing a big block of Parmesan cheese and at least once a year with some olive oil (which has been known to explode en route. Not at all pretty). Cereal figures big in my importation scheme and a few nooks and crannies of luggage space are always packed with spicy stuff: Rooster or habanero sauce, cayenne or red pepper flakes. If you’ve ever been here, you know how alarmingly bland Cuban cuisine is. Now if I could only figure out how to smuggle in some tofu…

Choosing the right recipe is nearly as important as being able to punt. I have a dear friend who sends all kinds of goodies to my PO box here in Havana, including recipes. Exciting stuff, except when it’s clippings from Saveur or Gourmet. That is to say, utterly useless with all their esoteric ingredients and fancy equipment. My go-to source is Cook’s Illustrated, a no-nonsense monthly with real recipes for real people using an evidence-based, kitchen science approach. Not surprisingly, it’s published by frugal and hearty New Englanders who preserve and can and maintain root cellars. I’ve wow-ed Cuban crowds with eggplant Parmesan, tilapia Meunière, apple brown Betty, and blondies culled from Cook’s Illustrated which by the way, is one of the few advertising-free publications I know.

Online recipe databases are another indispensable tool. Got several heads of bok choy or an abundance of carrots? Hit the search button and you’re good to go. One serendipitous day not too long ago, cream cheese suddenly and quite magically appeared on store shelves. With the closest bagel over 90 miles away, I typically have little use for queso crema, but it had been a long time since I’d seen it on these shores and it would likely be as long before I saw it again. I bought four packages. The general state of things here induces this type of ‘wartime buying’: it doesn’t matter if you need it, when you see it, buy five. So I stashed my little bricks of creamy goodness for safe keeping and logged onto my favorite recipe database. Moments later I had recipe in hand combining the cream cheese and another treasure buried in the back of my fridge: a tub of top-of-the-line dulce de leche brought in by my Argentinean brother-in-law. People are still talking about my individual dulce de leche cheesecakes. Too bad the stars will probably never again align for a repeat performance.

When my psychological hunger conspires to get the best of me, I remind myself (or my husband assumes the responsibility in that special way of his) that we’re lucky. Far luckier than most here in Havana – ni habla of those in the provinces. We travel so can import parmesan and pine nuts, sesame oil and ginger root (see note 4). We have internet so can scour for recipes when the corn is ripe or there’s a bumper crop of cabbage. What’s more, about 18 months ago we moved from our shitty cinderblock box facing a cigarette factory to a little apartment on a shady block. In the old place, even my cacti died, fatally intoxicated by the nicotine and other pollutants. Now, we’ve got year ’round basil and cilantro in the cooler months growing on our sun-flooded balcony. My herbal success encouraged me to try my hand at bell peppers and tomatoes. It’s touch and go…

Still, in weaker moments, when my “psychological hunger” takes on a New York state of mind, I miss bagels and sushi horribly, and regular slices and puri (see note 5) only a bit less. If you’re headed down our way, feel free to pack a care package – especially if it’s edible!

Notes

1. If Cubans are dependent on any one single ingredient, it’s tomato puree (the one item that never goes missing from stores). Known simply as ‘puray’ it’s in everything from eggs and soups to casseroles and cocktails – the Cubanito is a tropical Bloody Mary, technically tomato juice and rum, but can just as easily by watered down puree and rum. On any menu, anywhere in the world, if its shrimp/lobster/octopus ‘a la Cubana’ it means swimming in tomato puree.

2. What up with major cereal brands and bastardized spelling? Seems like kids these days need all the English-language help they can get, starting with breakfast.

3. But it’s not only the emigrants for which the out-of-reach meat holds allure: putting knife and fork to ‘carne roja’ is a mania for traveling Cubans and their beef-based stories are legion. I have more than one friend who returned from Argentina with gout and still get dewy eyed re-living their Southern Cone food moments. I watched as another friend of mine, an artist of note, devoured a 24-ounce steak in a swanky New York bistro, only to vomit it up soon thereafter. My own body has grown unaccustomed to the richness of red meat, so that these days I can only handle a few ounces at a time. And oh the ensuing flatulence! I’m my own biological weapon.

4. If customs confiscates any of my food upon my next arrival, I will be coming for you readers!

5. I’m fairly certain Cuba is the only in the country in the world without a single Indian restaurant. Can anyone name another?

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September 10, 2009 · 5:45 pm

Survival Skills for Cuban Cooks – Part II

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The best preparation for living in Cuba is having known hard times. To paraphrase that paragon of faith and insight Frei Betto: “The rich can handle Cuba for a week, the middle class for two, but the poor can live there forever” (see note 1). Poor folks know what it means to have no lights or water or phone and just how costly a bounced check can become (see note 2). And most poor folk have known, if temporarily, what it means to go hungry.

Cubans know many things – salsa, art, history, sports, poetry, rum, rumors. Cubans also know hunger. In the ‘Special Period in Time of Peace’ adult Cubans lost 15 pounds on average. During these lean times, kids would be fed and sent to bed while their parents laid awake, stomachs empty, fighting off painful pangs of hunger. These were those notorious times when flour “meatballs” were what was for dinner and ‘pasta de oca’ was a staple (see note 3). Thankfully, tales of banana peel hamburgers and shredded condoms standing in for pizza cheese seem to be apocryphal. Except for the condom cheese, I can attest to the veracity of these stories – I first came here in 1993 during the worst of the Special Period and witnessed the privation first hand.

Though some things have improved some, the Periodo Especial endures in ways. My brilliant friend Fernando summed it up like this: we don’t suffer from physical hunger so much anymore. What we suffer from is psychological hunger. That is, it’s the lingering scepter of hunger that haunts us. This explains a lot, from obesity rates in Miami to the savagery that possesses Cubans at buffets and Coppelia (see note 4). Bells started ringing with Fernando’s “psychological hunger” dictum – this is precisely the condition from which I suffer. Sown during the oatmeal years and now in full bloom, I get like a nervous flyer on a haul to Honolulu without my Xanax when food stores are low. Hunger may make the best sauce as the old saying goes, but take cover when it overtakes me.

Coppelia notwithstanding, Cuba’s not the best place for the psychologically hungry. It’s not Sub-Saharan style granted, but it has its moments. Mondays for instance, when all fruit, vegetable, and meat markets are closed. Run out of fresh stuff on a Monday? Tough luck. Need an egg? Go to Plan B (see note 5). I don’t need Bob Geldof to tell me why I don’t like Mondays. Though open daily, regular stores selling pasta, butter, cheese, and other staples close at 6pm and even if you catch them open, there’s zero guarantee they’ll have what you want or need.

Then there are the seasons. Cuba imports 80% of its food supply – none of it fresh fruit or vegetables. That means if it ain’t the season, you ain’t eating it. No chips and salsa in July or mango chutney in October. Guacamole? You’ve got a three month window. And so it goes with everything from lettuce and parsley to scallions and spinach. Some produce (pears, plums, berries of any sort, broccoli, asparagus, mushrooms) is just a dream on that 90-mile-away horizon. This probably sounds like a nightmare to most, but is mostly bearable until one breezy evening when the mouth-watering image of a BLT pops into my head. Agony ensues. It’s too late for tomatoes and nowhere near lettuce time. Ironically, I’ve got the bacon but by the time I can lay my hands on the L and the T, the B will be long gone (see note 6). Needless to say, in almost eight years living here, I’ve never had a BLT.

The seasons, the supply chain, and the complete unavailability of some items (not to mention the occasional hurricane and blight) force a cook to get and stay creative here in Havana. Such creativity sometimes results in radishes in your pasta primavera or squash in your stir fry. When I first got here I was unsettled by the frequency with which cooked cucumbers appeared in casseroles, chop sueys, and other concoctions. But now I’m unfazed by hot cucumbers and other inventions like Tandoori spaghetti.

To be continued…

Notes

1. For those of you unfamiliar with Frei Betto, the man is an inspiration to which this wiki doesn’t do justice. He was imprisoned for four years helping people flee dictatorial Brazil and has written 50 (FIFTY) books. His most famous is Fidel & Religion based on umpteen hours of interviews with you-know-who. This book holds some kind of weird record for selling out faster in Cuba than any other title in the nation’s history. I could explain why but that would entail a long and not terribly interesting (for the general reading public) explanation of religious history in revolutionary Cuba. Unfortunately, few of Betto’s books are available in English.

2. Living here for so long, I am woefully out of touch. Do people in the real world even use checks anymore?

3. Literally ‘goose paste,’ this is about as close to pâté as Alpo is to ground chuck. Since the 90s and the worst of the Special Period, the government ration system has relied fairly heavily on “enriched” products to inject protein into the national diet. The most infamous of these is “picadillo de soya enriquecido” or enriched soy pellets. Pasta de oca was along these lines – a gooey, flour-based paste to which microscopic amounts of ground up goose was added. Sounds appetizing right? The point is, pasta de oca wasn’t something to savor, but something to keep 11.2 million from death’s door. Amazingly, it did.

4. Coppelia is Cuba’s world famous ice cream parlor and one of my favorite spots here in Havana. Sure, the lines are beyond what most people reading this blog would ever endure, but put in your 45 minutes and you’ll be sitting down to 5 cent scoops of delicious ice cream surrounded by (real! live!) Cubans. Sure, there’s usually only one flavor available – two in the summer – but the ice cream is wicked and the atmosphere charged. Did I mention the nice price?

What you’ll notice after the monumental mod architecture (inspired by the cathedral in Brasilia) is the ferocious appetite Cubans have for ice cream. Chicks so gorgeous they’d be modeling elsewhere order 4 “ensaladas” without a second thought and tack on a piece of cake while they wait. When the 20 (TWENTY) scoops of ice cream arrive, they set to work. These Cubanas lindas aren’t alone: people all around the place are digging into their own score of scoops and if you’ve ever sat elbow to elbow digging in with them, you know I’m not exaggerating in the slightest.

And if you’re ever find yourself stuck between a Cuban and a buffet, run the other way, fast!

5. In the up north world, an egg is something easily resolved – just head over to the neighbors and see if they’ve got one to spot. Not so here, where eggs are nicknamed “salvavidas” (lifesavers) since they’re a major source of protein. While neighbors reliably loan sugar, salt, rice and other ration book staples, it’s seriously bad form to ask for a protein float.

6. Ironic because Cuba is awash in pigs and pork products – lard, feet, ribs, ears, sausage, and more are all easy to come by – but bacon? No, my brother. I’m not sure why. Any butchers out there who can educate me on this finer point of pork?

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July 24, 2009 · 3:27 pm

La Yuma Jamaliche

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La what? Huh?

If your Cuban isn’t up to snuff, Yuma means gringa (see note 1) and jamaliche is someone who eats mucho, mucho, mucho.

Or as my Mom so unceremoniously puts it: “You’re feeding that pie hole again?!

The Yuma Jamaliche my Cuban friends christened me some seven or so years ago and the nickname stuck. Cubans use nicknames like other people use salt – daily, liberally, in an effort to perk up the bland.

José, who’s hair-challenged is Baldy. Cristina, who could stand to lose a few pounds is Little Fatty, but Carla, who could use a few according to the Cuban standard of beauty is called Skinny. The guy from the sticks is El Guajiro (“The Hick”) and his girlfriend, of course, is La Guajira.

What you look like, where you’re from, what you do: it’s all nickname fodder. I have a dear neighbor I’ve known since I landed on these shores named Chino, which sounds downright racist when it’s translated (see note 2), so I won’t, but the point is in all these years I’ve never learned his “real” name; I don’t have to. It can get a little confusing though, because we have more than one Chino in our circle of friends (“who’s calling?” Chino. “Chino Pons or Chino Chino?”) which says a lot about the prevalence of nicknames, not to mention chinos here.

Then there are those with confounding nicknames that certainly come from somewhere, but who the hell knows where? There’s our friend “El Platano” who doesn’t look like a banana, nor is he particularly fond of the fruit; our other friend “Curry” who isn’t Indian and whose real name is not evocative of that or any other spice; and the talented drummer known as El Negro, though he’s as white as me.

But enough about los dos Chinos, the banana and curry, though they’re making me hungry…

I’ll eat (almost) anything, anywhere. I’m even starting to eat beets, but I draw the line at Cuban party food, the highlights of which are nauseating lard cake and mac salad drenched in cheap mayo and studded with chunks of pineapple and ham (caterers, as well as purveyors of sex toys, lubes and the like, stand to make a fortune here in Havana).

For those of you wondering what this all is leading to, it is this: I’ve been invited to write a guest post for Ever the Nomad, the swinging blog of fellow Lonely Planet author Anja Mutic. Wondering what La Yuma Jamaliche is cooking up this time? Check out Eating in Cuba: Go Local or Go Hungry.

Notes
1. There are several theories about how ‘Yuma’ came to totally supplant ‘gringo/a’ as the denomination for someone from the US. The most popular holds that it took hold when Cubans – every last one of whom is a movie addict – first saw the 1950’s western 3.10 to Yuma (interestingly, adapted from an Elmore Leonard short story). And really, what’s more all American than the wild, wild western? Since I’ve been here, the use of Yuma has expanded to include all whiteys from everywhere, but when I arrived it meant whiteys specifically from up there.

2. Cuban nicknames might smack of racism to many English-speaking ears and sensibilities seeing as so many are based on skin color or other stereotypical characteristics. In addition to Chino, we know ‘El Indio’ who is short and dark like Cuba’s ancestral (and extinct) indigenous group and the national women’s volleyball team is referred to as ‘Las Chicas Morenas’ – roughly translated as ‘The Brown Girls.’ In conversation, meanwhile, it’s normal to describe someone according to racial criteria: este negrón (this big black guy) or el javao ese (that lighter skinned black guy with blondish hair). And back to El Chino for a second: no matter what part of the world you’re from – Japan, Korea, Vietnam, Southern California, or France – if you have epicanthic folds (that’s slanted eyes to the rest of us) you’re El Chino or La China in Cuba. I’ve talked to Vietnamese, Asian American and other visitors who have been tagged with this moniker and the consensus seems to be that it rankled (sometimes mightily) at first, but only until it became evident that it was being used as a term of endearment.

These descriptions are based on race, but aren’t inherently racist. Of course, in the wrong hands and coming from the wrong mouths, they certainly can be. But I find it interesting that Cuba, where it’s normal to describe someone as the ‘dark skinned mulatto’ or ‘the blue-black woman,’ is less racist on the whole than other places I know. There are a whole host of reasons for this, but I suppose it starts and ends with the old Cuban saying: ‘quien no tiene de Congo, tiene de Carabali’ (the person without Congo in their blood has Carabali in their blood – that is, we all have African in us; Carabali were slaves brought from Southern Nigeria).

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July 15, 2009 · 6:51 pm

Back on Track (and the Toilet)

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Hola Readers,

Maybe you’ve noticed my absence…I’ve been cooling off on a little vacay in the US o’ A. It rained every day, but any weather’s better than sweating when you blink or breathe like here in Havana.

Fresh off the mainland, I’m inspired to put together a new list. This time it’s Things I Don’t Miss About the USA. When I started to put it together, MJ was the farthest thing from my mind, but now the King of Pop is right up there with scented toilet paper; not that it’s all bad or overblown; see my inverse musings, Things I Miss About the USA. This will be followed by Cuban Things That Take Some Getting Used To (& Some That You Never Do). Topping that list is the giardia I recently re-contracted. Nothing like a little explosive diarrhea while you’re sleeping to put things in perspective.

While I gather my thoughts on this and other topics of import, I’m off to the toilet for the tenth time today…

But first!

There’s a new gadget, widget, watchamacallit on the menu there called ‘About Today’s Photo.’ Pretty self-explanatory for photos that aren’t (like this first one in the series)

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