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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March 3, 2010 · 6:49 pm

First Daybreak in Haiti

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It´s dark still but I can´t sleep. The low drone of heavy earthmoving equipment, the lingering smell of burning garbage, the symphony of cell phones chirping with incoming messages all conspire me from sleep. But above all, guilt is due the old ¨gringo alarm clock¨ – cocks crowing incessantly. It´s amazing, the number of roosters, hens, and chicks running around our camp at the defunct military hospital in Port-au-Prince (see note 1). I never understood how owners of free-running (see note 2) chickens keep track of them. Here in post-quake Haiti I´m even more baffled by chicken behavior – how can they run around willy nilly with so many hungry people about?

When I emerge from my blue igloo, the sun hasn´t yet come out. No matter: I´m sweating like a pig. The type of muggy here is like none I´ve known save for on a pre-Giuliani subway in August. Though there´s still no sun, an ominous light I don´t like hovers above the clearing where clothes lines are strung. I walk over to the dangling bras, jeans, and t-shirts to check if the metallic, cold light is the effect of fluorescents – the generators have already started up and the tubes have been flicked on around the camp. But no, it´s just an ugly filtered light hanging there over the piles of dried almond leaves covering the ground.

There´s a spontaneous refugee camp just adjacent to the Cuban installation, a few families is all, and the women and children fill their water buckets at the spigot at the far end of our camp. Since (some) Cubans share genetic similarities with Haitians (note 3), it´s hard to know who is who. I cover all bases with the smiling fellow sweeping up the almond leaves this morning, starting with bonjour followed quickly by buenos días.

Good day? Let´s hope so. Welcome to Haiti, March 2010.

Next up: Visions of Port-au-Prince…

Notes
1. Their brethren ended up on my plate twice yesterday, so I guess getting roused at 5:45 in the morning is a small price to pay.

2. I´m talking about chickens that have free reign, not free ranging like in the US. These birds rule the streets, parks, and patios of the developing world. How do their owners identify them? How come they aren´t stolen? How come they don´t make a run for it, the dumb birds? Interesting side note: I have decades of Latin American experience, but still am baffled by simple Latino chicken behavior.

3. And some – like the guy from Villa Clara did, moments before typing this – deny it.

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February 26, 2010 · 5:44 pm

Here is….HAITI

Hi readers,

Well, if all goes as planned, at this time tomorrow I will be in a (dry, please be dry!) tent watching the Cuban doctors do what they do so well. Hopefully I’ll be spared the foot amputation I witnessed in post-quake Pakistan (this was both my first post disaster assignment AND my first time in an operating room without me on the table. The blood wasn’t bad, but the stink of cauterizing flesh is not easily forgotten)…

Anyway, I will be blogging for my organization, MEDICC and perhaps here too. Posts will be a bit different – more mental effluent and emotional reaction than the (usually) carefully crafted prose I like to post on Here is Havana.

In the meantime, I’ve got a new article up on the fabulous Matador travel Network entitled Life as an Expat in Havana, Cuba (their title, not mine). Check it out!!

And as one of my favorite DJs likes to say: “fly low and avoid the radar.”

See you on the rebound!

Abrazos,
Conner

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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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February 1, 2010 · 10:00 pm

Cuban Psyche 2010

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“You must be a very patient person,” my friend said in reference to living in Cuba.

He doesn’t know the half of it. Standing in line for bread, the bus, ice cream, hard currency, hats or whatever other random thing appears on the shelves. Or losing my youth waiting for my 50k dial-up to giddy up and connect me (see note 1). These things don’t require patience. They demand resignation. Quite simply, we have no choice (see note 2).

Most days I can live with that. Most of the time I’ve got the trade offs in perspective.

In my previous life, I had to step around mother and son sleeping on the sidewalk and was awoken by gunshots. I watched and worried as friends got hooked on heroin or tried to recover from sexual assault or a nasty crack habit (now that’s redundant!). Waiting for a bus? A small price to pay for peace of mind and the freedom to wander the streets without all that armor urban America requires.

I’m not patient. I’m resigned. And relieved. But tucked into that chasm between relief and resignation lies frustration. I believe frustration is one of the truly equitable things in Cuba and while it may manifest itself differently for different people, anyone who tells you otherwise is apathetic, inattentive, or both. (Incidentally, denial is another wholly human trait that finds firm foothold on the island and is also in this mix).

So what’s so frustrating? There are innumerable little things like lack of red meat and tedious Friends re-runs, but some people can afford steaks and others adore the antics of Phoebe and Ross. So instead of ranting about the picayune or personal, I’d like to cast the net wide and look at the top 5 frustrations I see contributing to the Cuban Psyche 2010. In no particular order:

1. Bureaucracy, capital B. Exit permits, house papers, customs processes, and entrepreneurial permission slips: it’s getting people down. Not just the paperwork and hoop jumping – after all, every society has them. No, it’s not simply the bureaucratic bloat, but rather the informational black hole that is so frustrating. Not knowing where to go to get the right form or who to approach to hold the right hoop is time consuming and irritating as hell. There are no 800 numbers or customer service representatives in Cuba. Many times there isn’t even a low level pencil pusher willing to answer the phone (see note 3). No websites walking you through all the bureaucratic bullshit or a handy ‘contact us’ button as last resort.

Finding out how to get something done in Cuba is often more laborious and time consuming than actually doing it. To give you an idea of just how wildly out of control Cuban bureaucratic bloat is, consider the fact that China, population 1.3 billion, has nine governmental ministries while Cuba, population 11.2 million, has some two dozen (see note 4). Bottom line: you’ll go gray and flabby trying to navigate Cuba’s too big bureaucracy populated by people exercising the little power they have.

2. Economic hardship. Owners of $250/night casas particulares notwithstanding, almost all Cubans experience this in one way or another. We’re not talking about the distended bellies and death-by-diarrhea misery that plagues other developing nations, but rather lentils and rice six days running and no new shoes for baby. There are so many different and complex reasons (from without and within) the Cuban economy is on the skids but regardless, no mother wants to deny her daughter a new bra if she needs it and psychological hunger runs a close second to the physical variety. Bottom line: low salaries are eroding goodwill and commitment. People want to earn what they’re worth and live a little.

3. Inadequate/insufficient/inappropriate housing. Chronic and fairly widespread, the housing problem in Cuba is like the health care problem in the US: intractable and inequitably harsh (see note 5). Again, there are many complex reasons for this, from the weather (hurricanes knock down hundreds of homes a year) to shortages of supplies (blame the embargo, the Cuban government, or the guys “helping” cement fall off the truck, the end result is the same: building materials in Cuba are in absurdly short and expensive supply). This housing crunch translates into five generations living in a two-bedroom apartment, 10 people crammed into a one-room solar, generations being raised in albergues (what are supposed to be temporary, post-hurricane shelters), and lovers who can’t find any privacy to get jiggy (see note 6). Bottom line: Major housing problem needs major fixing.

4. The embargo. It costs my sister more than a dollar a minute to call me in Havana, yet she can shoot the shit with Esteban in Brazil for three cents that same minute. But it’s not only the price. In this case, financial frustration is compounded by technical frustration since calls from the USA to Cuba get routed through third countries (the base at Guantánamo Bay excepted of course). This means that sometimes we’re sharing the line with a Korean housewife or an Argentinean carpenter. But at least we have that – it can take a dozen attempts over half an hour or more to place a call to Cuba from the United States. Bottom line: politics preventing families from communicating is frustrating (and cruel).

5. Good old-fashioned exhaustion. Cubans have fought, worked, and withstood. They have suffered and struggled. They have also triumphed, but they are, quite frankly, pooped. Ironically, one of the most divisive decisions in recent years didn’t get much press – the raising of the retirement age (funny how foreign correspondents jumped on Cuba’s liberalization of cell phones like a Beagle does a bitch in heat, but gave short shrift to this big story affecting millions of Cubans countrywide). In early 2009, the government held spirited debates across the country regarding the idea and despite some dissent, raised the retirement age by 5 years for men and women (to 65 for men and 60 for women). These would-be retirees are the same folks that built the Revolution from Day 1 and they are, in large part, pissed. Retirement in Cuba isn’t only a time to kick back a bit and hang with the grandkids. It’s a time to finally make some money. Those aforementioned perpetually low salaries are rivaled only by perpetually low pensions and folks of retirement age often work in parallel markets to augment their meager earnings. Bottom line: it’s great there are pensions, but people want them like, yesterday, not five years from now.

I don’t have any answers, but I know 2010 is going to require a lot of patience, on everyone’s part.

Notes

1. Anyone who doubts there’s a digital divide in today’s iPad/YouTube/Twittering world should come to Cuba where the scintillating beeps and squeaks of dial-up are just enough to keep us connected (sort of – it’s so slow even streaming audio is impossible). More than once in the past 8 years, I’ve had young ‘uns up north give me a blank stare when I tell them my connection is measured in kbps. ‘What’s that?’ they ask me.

2. Like anywhere and everywhere, moneyed people in Cuba can create choice. Pay double the price for a loaf and there’s no waiting in line for bread. Shell out ten times the bus fare and you can ride downtown swiftly and comfortably in a 1956 Chevy. And yes, $7 an hour will get you a (slightly faster) WiFi connection in the fanciest hotels. Alas, while that choice is available to some Cuban bloggers, I’m not one of them.

3. In all my travels, I have never seen a people more able to ignore a ringing phone than Cubans.

4. Ongoing consolidation of ministries should help, but it’s causing other types of frustration not limited to job losses.

5. Housing in Cuba and healthcare in the US share another parallel in that neither problem is black and white but rather an awkward shade of gray. True, there is no one sleeping on the streets in Cuba. Likewise, no one in the US will be turned away from an ER for lack of insurance. This does not mean, however that this type of housing and that type of care is good or desirable.

6. This last is particularly hard on gay folks. While parents typically allow their grown (or nearly) breeder children to bring home their honeys for some loving, queer kids/adults usually don’t have that luxury. Since it’s extraordinarily difficult for Cubans of any age to get their own apartment, if Mama don’t like homos, you ain’t getting any in your own bed. I personally believe overcrowded housing and lack of privacy have tangible knock-on effects elsewhere in the Cuban reality from HIV prevalence (it’s hard to negotiate condom use during a back alley quickie) to divorce rates. Over 50% of marriages on the island fail (60% in Havana), giving Cuba one of the world’s highest divorce rates. Not surprising: what would you do if you had to live with your in-laws?!

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January 20, 2010 · 2:15 pm

Coño, It’s Cold

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Like many writers, I keep a running list of things about which I want to write – ideas that are especially interesting (at least to me) because they’re especially Cuban, capturing the inimitable specificity of this place.

One thing on that list, a writing idea I had about six months ago, was about The Heat. That suffocating, certain noose of weather that induces apathy, discomfort, and an ineluctable urge in all Cubans to complain about just how hot it is. Whereas six months ago, I was going to write about threads of sweat weaving between breasts, now I’m compelled to write about erect nipples thanks to our recent spell of witch’s tit kind of cold.

First and foremost, bathing is a bitch. Most people I know (myself included, dear reader) don’t have running hot water at home. Everything is accomplished with cold water or with water heated on the stove. (Talk about Old Skool. I swear, Cuba [too] often feels like that Pioneer House reality show). This includes bathing. Pull back the shower curtain in any Cuban home and you’re bound to see a plastic bucket. When it’s ‘bath time,’ water heated on the stove is mixed together with its cold counterpart to the bather’s preferred temperature in the bucket. This brew is then poured over the body using another, much smaller, plastic bucket, or more commonly, an oversized tin cup known universally as the ‘jarrito.’

To all those people who have ever said to me, ‘why do you need hot water in Cuba anyway?!’: I invite you to my house today, where the thermometer struggles to reach 50°F, to try bathing with the little/big bucket system.

I’m particularly fond of hot water, I’ll admit. Esalen, Fuentes Georginas, Puna’s hot pond – I’ve lounged and lingered in them all and I’ve yet to meet a (clean) hot tub I didn’t like. Bathing with the bucket method cold day in, cold day out? This is my hell.

You would think that 8 years on I’d be used to it, or at least have a viable strategy. But I’m still trying to dope out the best method: Do I pour many little jarritos of hot water over my entire body head to toe in quick succession and then proceed to suds and rinse all at once? Or do I go about it piecemeal, wetting my legs, soaping them up, and rinsing them off before working north to my hips, waist, and beyond? Even on still days, the air is colder than the water and neither strategy keeps me from freezing my ass off. (Hair washing is clearly out of the question.) It’s like entering a chilly pool, I suppose. Creep deeper inch by inch or dive right in head first? Tough call.
_____
So how cold is it, really? Well for starters, the weather folks on Cuban television (see note 1) are using phrases I’ve never heard here before like ‘exceptionally cold’ and ‘be sure to bundle up.’ For once, this isn’t Cuban hyperbole. Record lows have been recorded throughout the country this January: last week it was 33°F in Gran Piedra and a couple of days ago it was just a few degrees warmer in Colón. Average lows here in Havana hover around 48° (or colder in the microclimates). I could make a fortune selling fuzzy socks and cozy pants on a random Habana Vieja corner. According to our venerated weather people, it’s going to be close to, or record breaking, for the number of cold fronts passing through Cuba in a single January. Already it has been 30 years since the last time it was this cold – some nine cold fronts in the month.

It’s affecting everything. Outdoor concerts are being cancelled and patio dining is at an all-time low. Even baseball is feeling the effects, with hard to hold bats flying towards the infield and sportscasters breaking in after the count to exclaim, ‘I am FREEZING and for what?’ Then there’s the Cuban cold weather wardrobe: Dogs are combing the streets in jury-rigged hand towels, while musty, long-abandoned coats are hauled out of closets from Guanahacabibes to Punto Maisí. If you’ve been to Cuba recently, you’ll have noticed there’s an unhealthy predilection for denim jackets. Unfortunately, these are often paired with jeans, meaning Cubans of all types and stripes are violating the 11th Commandment: ‘Thou shalt not wear jeans with jeans jacket.’ (see note 2)

Friends here assume I’m not bothered by this relative cold since I hail from ‘up there.’ But they’re wrong: I hate this state of weather in between. This not hot, but not really cold either. I hated it for 7 or so years in San Francisco and I’m hating it still. It’s just too wishy washy for me. It’s like the suburbs. Give me urban like New York or rural like Pinar del Río, but I’ll skip Scarsdale in all its über suburban-ness, thank you very much. Likewise, give me hot like Havana (normally is) or cold like Montreal. Northern California’s pseudo-heat? I’ll pass.

For now, I’ll just have to suck it up dirty hair and all and brew some more tea. Giselle just announced another cold front is on its way.

Notes

1. I must take this opportunity to say something about Cuban weather forecasters, since they are so different from those pretty little thangs that dominate TV weather up north. Living in the hurricane belt confers upon Cuban weatherpeople a notoriety, visibility, and responsibility beyond detailing five days worth of sunshine and rain. We depend on them to keep us informed about any heavy weather heading our way, lest we have to tape windows and put up water, lay in candles or evacuate to a shelter. These folks are experts and have the higher degrees to prove it – everyone reporting weather on Cuban TV has a master’s degree or higher – and are accorded the reverence we usually reserve for professors or doctors in the USA. Another difference between here and there is the weather wardrobe: the night weather woman Giselle appeared wearing a black lace teddy type number during prime time, I was reminded of my dearly departed brother who watched the Weather Channel like it was porn. And when her colleague Odalys reported the weather right through her eighth month of pregnancy, I realized this was a whole different ballgame. I mean, when was the last time you saw a very pregnant woman delivering the weather forecast where you live?

2. The 11th Commandment was coined by my dear old friend Neil S. Since he clued me in to just how cheesy and profane the pairing is a couple of decades ago, I’ve ceased to be a sinner (at least in this regard).

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January 5, 2010 · 4:25 pm

Slippery Okra & Sleeping Shrimp: Classic Cubanisms

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One thing I’ve learned my nearly eight years in Havana is that Cubans have a way with words. Many a lass for example (present company included) has been seduced by a poetry-reciting buck borrowing from the likes of Silvio Rodriguez and Cintio Vitier. And who isn’t hip to the oratory artfulness of Fidel, that hypnotist of crowds from New York to Durban?

In fact, Cuba is a country full of semantic artisans willing and able to sprout ‘flowers from their tongues’ as we say here. This oral aptitude is nothing new or novel. Since Martí and the Mambises, Cubans have honed their mesmerizing way with words. This extends to dichos, popular sayings that use metaphor, irony, and double entendre to encapsulate life’s promise, problems, and perversities. Learning a dicho or three in your armchair or actual travels is a simple way to peel away a layer of the Cuban psyche.

An all time classic that has particular relevance during the dog days of summer and other ‘special periods’ is “entre col y col, una lechuga.” Between all that cabbage, a little lettuce is akin to our ‘variety is the spice of life.’ It’s not surprising one of the most popular sayings uses a metaphor based on leafy greens and cruciferous veggies – Cuban psychological hunger runs deep.

Another food-related dicho that anyone who has been to Cuba has likely experienced is: “donde come uno, come dos (o tres),” which means to say: where there’s food for one, there’s food for two (or three). What can be likened to our ‘the more the merrier’ is in fact, the cornerstone of Cuban hospitality (see note 1).

But hands down, my favorite food-related saying here is “pasando gato por liebre.” While ‘passing off cat as rabbit’ may sound like a Chinatown food nightmare, this saying is applied to all sorts of Cuban chicanery, from serving $3 mojitos made with rock gut rum instead of Habana Club to selling Selectos as Cohibas (see note 2). Being agile to this kind of trickery is part and parcel of being Cuban, embodied in another of my preferred sayings: “camarón que se duerme, se la lleva la corriente.” Or ‘you snooze, you lose.’

But enough of all this food and fauna. Let’s talk about sex, another cornerstone of Cubanilla. While there are many dichos referencing carnal undertakings, (and I could dedicate an entire post to piropos, the ingenious and often hilarious come-ons Cubans invent for catching the ear and eye of the opposite sex), my favorite is “quimbombó que rebala, pa’la yuca seca.” Literally this translates as ‘for dry manioc, use slippery okra.’ Hardly the sensuous flowering phrase you’d expect from hot-blooded Cubanos y Cubanas itching to get their groove on. But anyone who’s familiar with okra knows how slippery, slimy it gets if prepared incorrectly. And yucca, from Havana to Asunción, is dry and unappetizing unless gussied up with mojito (see note 3). So while okra is slippery by nature and yucca is dry, get the two together (or more accurately, the body parts for which they serve metaphorically) for erotic results.

Gracias a dios I’ve got no problem where yucca and okra are concerned, but there is one dicho bien Cubano that I’ve yet to internalize. Maybe it’s because I’m a New Yorker or has something to do with being a Scorpio or perhaps it’s just the state of being Conner (god help us!), but I just haven’t been able to master ‘a mal tiempo, buena cara.’ Putting on a good face during bad times just doesn’t seem to be in my make up.

Seems I’ve still got a lot to learn.

Notes

1. According to the expert in everything (that would be my husband), this saying has roots in the Cuban countryside, where hospitality knows no bounds. But it can also be traced to the island’s Haitian community, which arrived on Cuban shores in the early 19th century. Seems Haitians of the time had the custom of setting an extra place at the table, Caribbean Elijah-style.

2. Selectos are the/my five cent cigar of choice, sold in bodegas (where Cubans procure their rations). Many a tourist has been duped into buying what are touted as Cohibas when really they’re just Selecto dirt sticks wearing the signature yellow and black bands of Cuba’s most famous cigar.

3. Visitors sometimes confuse mojito, the minty potent potable, with mojito the garlicky bitter orange-spiked sauce used to dress root vegetables that is as delicious as it is addictive. While plain old manioc yucca is pasty and not-so-tasty, yuca con mojo is irresistible.

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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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