CHAPTER THREE
2000
Driving around Cuba

   This chapter is being written right now - slowly. With patience, you can watch me write it.

       In fact, yowling cats kept me awake or helped keep me awake most of my first night back in Havana. It was not a miraculous resurrection of cats. It was just a coincidence, and it didn't tell me a lot about Cuba; it only underscored what I already thought of the San Diego Union and of the "exiles."
        Besides the cats keeping me awake, though, there was the tropical heat even in April and the excitement of being back in Cuba and, for the last night of Semana Santa, there was a near all-night concert (which probably provoked the cats) at the Union de Escritores y Artistas across the street - and also my bed was a bit lumpy.
    The heat, the noise, and the bed, at least, were Latin American commonplaces, a touch of realism to spice my travel advice to readers that the private home I'd chosen over a hotel was everything Francisco had assured me it would be. Francisco, known to his family and friends in Tijuana as Pancho, who'd had his way paid to Cuba several times by TJ cigar merchants, had called ahead of me to make my reservations.
    "Glen," he'd urged me, "you don't want to stay in a hotel," though in fact, while I meant to shun giant tombstones like the Capri, I had wanted ever since 1989 to stay at the beautiful old Caribbean on the Prado. But, "Trust me," Francisco said, "Cuban houses are OK. They have modern bathrooms and everything, and they cost a lot less." Francisco had gone with me to Nicaragua once and had boarded in a shack there and his point was that plunging into Cuban reality isn't like that. He meant I wouldn't be roughing it.
    So when the phone rang almost the minute I stepped into Esperanza's living and dining room in Vedado and it was Francisco, making sure I'd arrived safely, though I hadn't seen the bathroom and didn't know about the lumpy bed yet, I looked around at the heavy old dining table and couch, a small aquarium tank that smacked of California and the thoroughly Cuban song-bird cages by the wall-to-wall front windows and assured him he'd been right, that it looked fine.
    It did. The state usually only issues licenses to rent rooms to homes with adequate space and facilities to do that, so though certainly not luxurious, the spacious condominium apartment was somewhat beyond what I'd expected. With its miniature but separate kitchen, combination laundry and TV room, and oversized airy bedrooms, it was about like some really nice old place a student or working person might luck into in Oakland and afford by splitting the costs with a room-mate. The bathroom, though overly shared, was OK; and since then I've often slept peacefully at Esperanza's place, so the noisiness of the first night wasn't important, except for the cats declaring their existence. There were lots of trees outside and a nearby park where groups of old ladies have exercise classes and I've seen fancy-dog lovers comparing their dogs.
    I know there are readers literally sputtering to tell me what they think they know - what the reporters parroting each other always say - that Vedado is an enclave for privileged Cubans who've escaped Old Havana. Their grandparents would have been right, but they're wrong. Esperanza, who spoke a high-speed, non-stop gossipy blur that set my Spanish back 10 years, had probably been born at least somewhat privileged. But, though it never seems to penetrate U.S. reporters' skulls, way back in her youth a revolution moved into her life and neighborhood, and I found her, 41 years later, living on terms of equality with a mulata housekeeper who fit into the neighborhood as well as she did. Since then I've met some of her neighbors who were teleported by the revolution straight from Bautista-era shanties into the solid old homes of tree-shaded Vedado and, though you have to see Holguin, Santa Clara, Camaguay, Sancti Spiritus and other places to know it, Vedado is much more typically Cuban today than Old Havana.
    Normal Cuban people live in Vedado, all kinds and colors of them, and it's not an enclave. It's huge, stretching under an urban forest of street trees for 30 long blocks along the malecon from the foot of La Rampa to the Rio Almendares and 15 blocks inland. Dotted with parks, crosscut by two spectacular boulevards with center-strip parks, and bordered by a huge and beautiful river park, a town-sized cemetery (oddly shadeless), another forest preserve, and the University of Havana, it boasts numerous public institutions, museums, office buildings, and hotels, and all along La Rampa, a near Los Angeles-like boulevard, it has its own downtown, arguably the real main street of Havana.
    For the next few days, I was going to waste considerable film taking bad pictures of cats, but my first order of business next morning was to visit Coppelia, the park-sized Vedado ice-cream mecca about four blocks seaward from Esperanza's that I hadn't noticed in '89 but which was world famous by 2000 because of the movie, "Fresa y Chocolate," which begins there. Another American who'd also just arrived at the same house, whose name I'll forget as long as the Washington fascists keep disappearing people into secret dungeons, had the same idea. I'm going to call her Travelling Matilda.
    Even in the morning, getting into Coppelia looked out of the question, though it's a point of national hospitality that tourists go first and people in the long lines leading in from three sides of the block (the most popular lines in Cuba) urged us to take advantage of the rule as happily as if they'd thought it up.
    It looked as though the lines themselves were an eternal social event, since there were clearly little stands selling cones along the park perimeters on L and 21st Streets with no lines at all. We asked a typically slender unarmed cop, the only cop in sight, why there was such a crowd, and he assured us they all just wanted to be in the movie.
    Though the city's top tourist hotel, the Havana Libre, towers over the intersection of La Rampa and L, most of the people lined up at Coppelia, or reading movie bills at the theater on the corner across L, or waiting for the walk light at the foot of the hotel, or browsing in the music store on the fourth corner were Cubans. Maybe they weren't buying much besides icecream, since promenading just to be promenading is as big in Havana as it is in Madrid. But, just as in '89, they were all well dressed and nobody looked like they were starving or suffering. Maybe we didn't notice they weren't "free," because their universally well-tended white smiles fooled us.
        We decided to save the icecream for later and floated further seaward with the crowd down La Rampa's busiest three blocks to O where we joined an eddy of tourists and Cubans packing SofÌa's open veranda cafe on the island's most cosmopolitan corner. Seeing that, just as in Spain, the source of many Cuban table customs, they were serving tiny cups of expresso, I utilized the line of patter I'd developed in Spain in '98 to convince a sceptical waitress that I actually didn't want one of the bitter semi-liquid pills and, though the largest cup they had was a small medium, negotiated at least one of those (and then another) almost full of plain black (and still bad) coffee with a drab breakfast that contrasted dramatically with Sofia's exciting ambience. Then, barely fortified, we took the same long walk up the Malecon and back through time that I'd taken in '89.
        There were more cars on La Rampa and on the Malecon than I'd seen before, but the curving coastal avenue was still too wide and shadeless, big waves still crashed angrily on the rocks piled outside its wide and sun-glaring seawalk and seawall, and it still looked way too hot and too far to where it finally curved into La Bahia De La Habana behind the old city's eastern towers.
        Havana's bright white Malecon, though spectacular, is more a sweaty hike than a pleasant walk, but halfway to the 16th century this time, we had to detour into the cooler alleys of Centro to stop dodging the scaffoldings, workmen, and dust of a restoration project that was bringing the ancient face of the Malecon back to life. The entire rampart of what I'd imagined in '89 to be the yellowed ruins of Atlantis rising from the sea was being hammered, broken, re-splinted, restored, resurfaced and sanded for painting - no good for contact lens wearers. Apparently, tourism, which had replaced sugar as Cuba's cash cow, was paying for more than food, shelter, and clothing.
        I found Centro, though, even just a single block from the fast modernizing waterfront, as dark and shabby as when I'd seen it last. Matilda, who was seeing Cuba for the first time, thought aloud that the worn old alleys we then followed through Centro to Habana Vieja were like some supposedly romantic Paris streets she knew, except obviously cleaner and safer, and she couldn't see why, untwisted by American delusions about communism, they couldn't be considered - well - like some supposedly romantic Paris streets she knew.
        Matilda was in the the process of being as startled as I had been in '89 by the dramatic contrast between greater Havana and the smaller historic enclave always used by propagandists to illustrate their anti-Cuba slander. Since I'd stayed in a hotel before, we'd both been surprised to find our lodgings to be acceptably modern and comfortable. And we were both destined to learn, driving around the island in a tiny rent-a-car we'd secure next day, that even greater Havana is a slanderous misrepresentation of the rest of Cuba.
        And just then, as we hiked east up the dark floor of the San Lazaro Street crevice, we found ourselves shadowed by our first jinetero. In post-depression Cuba, jineteros (literally >horsemen< but really hustlers) have replaced the black-market money changers who hustled me in '89. Scorned by most Cubans as good-for-nothings who don't want to work but innocently accepted by a lot of tourists as friendly natives, they are a by-product of tourism.
        They always start by asking where you are from in English ("Hey, mon, whayr you frome?") and then whether, by chance, you might need some help finding this or that - a hotel, a restaurant, a famous landmark, passing themselves off as only coincidental guides or potential friends - very subtly open to rewards.
        But legal guides work for the state and supposedly pay taxes on tips. Because they aren't licensed, jineteros evade taxation and often sell illegal goods, so they are technically crooks, breaking the law or trying to, subject to arrest, except that Cuban cops are realistic about the difficulty of telling friendliness from hustling, and they only keep track of the jineteros by checking their ID's until they've established a provable pattern. Anyway, that was the strategy in 2000. The jineteros of those days then wildly misinterpreted that fairly civilized though foolishly clumsy police procedure to milk sympathy and contributions from easily confused tourists.
        Pedroso was a sweet young man, dressed to the teeth and polite as pie who spoke perfect English. We guessed it was his first day trying out the career of jineterismo and he hadn't expected us to speak Spanish, carry a map we understood, and be so overtly independent. But my Spanish had evolved since '89 and though she was a little shy with it Matilda's was better, and, partly to discourage him, we were freely asking other Cubans for directions just as if he weren't there guiding us. Of course, we'd already read about Pedroso in >Lonely Planet< , and maybe we should have chased him away, not to be rude but to discourage him from a traitorous lifestyle.
        He showed us no sign of dissidence. But of course he saw we were clearly comfortable with Cuba, and jineteros tell tourists what they want to hear. If we'd needed an English crutch and had spoken uneasily about being in a communist land, he might have tried to earn some supposed escape money by regaling us with tales of woe that we could pass on to our receptive fellow countrymen. Too many tourists have been conned that way not to have suspected him.
        But we weren't yet as fed up with jineteros as we would be, and he was putting up a patriotic Cuban front for us, and also it did occur to us that we were tacitly using the strategy suggested by the guide book of adopting a bearable jinetero to fend off the others. Pedroso was clingy but not pushy, so we were noncommittal but friendly. We pretended to believe he just wanted to practice his English, and, as he continued to walk with us as if he were our best friend in Cuba, we used him or ignored him as we needed. He didn't seem to know how to get to the money part, and we gave him no help with that.
        So he stuck with us to the grand Hotel Ingleterra on the Prado, which we looked into just to look and where I excused him to the doorman, who was trying to cut him away from us, then to La Floridita, where we verified so quickly how stiff and phony the place is that he almost collided with us as we stepped in and immediately back out. My memory took us around the corner to Obispo Street, where there were so many people to talk to that Pedroso's inability to either guide us or practice his English should have been getting him down, but he kept up with us and kept up a gay front.
        Actually, we could have used a real expert on the 90's just then, because Obispo Street was startling. In '89, I'd seen just enough sanded and painted buildings there to prove how beautiful the old city could be. Now it was as slick and bouteeky as any touristy alley in San Francisco, lined with bookstores, artist's stalls, cafes and whatnot, and full of parading Cubans showing off their duds.
        "Are you in the youth movement?" I asked an old man selling newspapers.
        "No. I'm 74."
        "What is the rebellion about?"
        "There is no rebellion."
        "Why is the paper called Juventud Rebelde?"
        "It's the newspaper of the Juventud." The revolutionary (not rebellious) Juventud are the young communists, an auxiliary of the Communist Party much larger than the party. The old man was selling their paper to supplement his pension.
        "Who pays to put it out?" Flipping the pages, I found no ads.
        "El estado." I bought one of his papers and then two more skimpy tabloid sized papers from two other old men we met along the street. Each old man was sure that the several papers on sale were all different and free to be different.
        The old men were. The one selling the Rebelde had a brother in the U.S. But he, himself, he informed us in abrupt verbal bursts, did not want to go there or anywhere else. He said different people want different things. No, he wasn't political. It wasn't a political matter. He wanted to stay in his home town because his friends were there and he was used to it.
        The old man selling >b>Granma, the official voice of the state named after the yacht that carried Fidel and Che and their guerrilla band from Mexico to immediate death on the Cuban coast for most of them, told us he'd been to the U.S. Very politely, he told us he didn't like it, well, not very much, well, not at all, well, the part he'd seen. That wasn't a political matter, either. He was apolitical. He just didn't like the U.S., neither the climate which was too cold, nor the people who couldn't speak Spanish, nor the way everyone went around closed inside of cars. And it was too expensive.
        A third old man, who was selling >b>Trabajadores, the labor union paper, was not apolitical. He seemed a little contemptuous of our ignorance and made a joke of our unfamiliarity with the Intur coins we were using, which he refused to take because he didn't have the right change. He gave us the newspaper free. But he told us, looking in another direction as if staring into the past, or as if some people around (like us) might not get it, that once upon a time the former tyrant's police had tried to kill him for going on strike and he had been a militant revolutionary ever since.
        There were a lot of artist's stalls all along Obispo Street in 2000, looking downright capitalistic. And in fact they were. If the island were self sufficient, it wouldn't need money at all, except to democratize, limit, and regulate consumption fairly. In fact, that's exactly what the small salaries of most Cubans are for. Everything people really need, after all, is produced through participation, not capital, and is virtually free. But to accommodate the tourists who were now Cuba's main source of revenue for foreign exchange, the artists were providing ambience and things to buy. And with a lot of luck, they could make a little more pocket money than ordinary Cubans, but strict regulations and record keeping requirements, and closely figured taxes and overhead kept them from really cashing in on their talents.
        Some of them subtly complained, and I easily guessed that some of them cheated, and you might sympathize, them being artists and all, but I didn't. I know that some foolish Yankee liberals who've made friends with Havana artists sympathize, because the mystique of the somehow holy value of paintings is old in the capitalist world they come from. But I've painted some myself and been offered money for my paintings, which I wouldn't take, though, once tired of them, I'd have given them to anyone who really wanted them. I know absolutely that it takes more training, study, skill, brains, and work to write philosophically profound, truly coherent and honest essays than it takes to paint pictures, and I've distributed my writing free and freely all my life.
        Anyway, exercising artistic talent doesn't make you sweat minute by minute any more than exercising your muscles, and if a single painting earns the same livelihood as all the goods produced by a laborer in the same week or month it took to do the painting PLUS whatever measure of praise and renown the painting rates, that's adequate acknowledgement of the value of art. So if you think carpenters and mail carriers and bus drivers and teachers in a communist state should live at a normal economic level and picture painters at another, I disagree and suggest you re-read these two graphs, think more realistically about it, and wake up.
        Anyway, some of the paintings we saw that day were really original, remarkable, and unlikely to sell. A lot were cliches showing innumerable 50-year-old Chevis parked by usually the same nearly-500-year-old buildings. They'd be special in America, and you can buy them or what looks like them on the internet in spite of Washington's pseudo-legal and contemptible restrictions. The size of our backpacks precluded our buying anything. But we spent a lot of time looking and asking about the locations of landscapes, quickly learning that the strange hillocks near Vinales were another cliche, and the colonial streets of Trinidad another.
        We talked to an old lady just hanging out in an open-air art and book stall who was bitterly dissident because she said she'd composed a famous song and then been robbed of personal fame and royalties by the system. We also talked to quite possibly the most beautiful, charming, and cheerful girl in all of Cuba, whose stage was a high corner Infotur booth from which she artistically dispensed important but absolutely free information in a manner that would certainly have won her a movie contract if we'd been scouts discovering her in an LA soda fountain. She explained that a poster behind her showed Punta Gorda in Cienfuegos which she urged us to visit, and directed us to a map store half a block up a side street.
        In the Plaza de Armas, we explored the cluster of shady used-book stalls there, finding, just as in Nicaragua in the 80's, more revolutionary pamphlets than seemed likely among books culled, one merchant told us, from the estates of people who died. But there was also a wide selection of world literature, including any number of Don Quixotes, numerous paperback Spanish translations of European and American writers, especially Hemingway, and even some Franklin editions in English. Most interesting to me were books about specific revolutionary fronts in the 50's that you wouldn't find outside Cuba.
        When I decided I needed a beer and Matilda wanted to try a mojita, Pedroso finally became useful. We wanted away from the Obispo Street crowd, and Pedroso said he knew the short way to Dos Hermanos, the quieter hang-out of Federico GarcÏa Lorca I'd missed in '89 but had read about in our guide. We could have found it without him, but he took us by the non-tourist route, which took us a long way south along an unrestored old alley and home stretched eastward down the narrow >sombra< of Sol Street, where we met an Italian looking seaman with a daypack striding up from the docks loudly singing an operatic aria, a perfect introduction to the working end of the malecon well inside the harbor.
        To tell the truth, I can't remember ever reading anything by GarcÏa Lorca. Maybe I have. Maybe I haven't. But I immediately decided his taste in bars beat Hemingway's. Dos Hermanos looked as perfect as a shade tree. Facing the docks, wide open at one end and on one side along the malecon, it's deep enough to be a tavern and not just a deck but not too deep to be part of the hot and sunny waterfront - a shady alcove ambientally salty and full of the harbor breeze with room for only one casually zigzag row of tables, some half on the sidewalk, and a big long very historic looking wooden bar not far from the sidewalk, either.
        Ever since that day my favorite corner of Havana, it's one of three places the daiquiri might have been invented, so I decided to have one. Matilda stuck to her mojita idea, and Pedroso, looking a bit uncomfortable under the somewhat scornful glare of a bartender he may not have learned yet how to tap for a commission, permitted me to buy him a beer.
        I leaned over the massive old bar to watch as they crushed the ice the same way I used to do it long long ago when I lived in a Lombard Street flat on Telegraph Hill. They put it in a bag on the floor and beat it with a hammer. I discovered daiquiris in the 50's as a teenage sailor curing hangovers in Tijuana and gave them up with all other mixed drinks when I discovered wine in San Francisco in the early 60's. When my nose turned so cold and numb it hurt in Dos Hermanos in Havana in 2000, I gave them up again and discovered a Bucanero beer.
        Like its more famous rum, Cuba's beers, though now all produced by the state, are still made in the same old breweries that invented them, they're each unique and, except for Crystal - the Budweiser of Cuba - which is all fizz and no flavor, they're all good, including Hatuey, though Hatuey's a bit sweet. Like the Floridita, its fame is largely a Hemingway invention.
        I never knock Hemingway's writing, by the way, only his tastes in drinks, bars, hotels, and lifestyle. As a writer, I rank him right up there with Hammet and Chandler and I'm a fairly knowledgeable bullfight fan, but my own adventures are seldom intentionally dangerous. I call them "gentle adventures," and when they're not, unlike Hemingway, who thought talking about one's "grace under fire" (i.e. bravery) cheapened it, I enjoy talking and writing about my scary experiences later a lot more than I enjoy having them, maybe because I'm not all that brave or graceful, anyway.
        Our next two adventures, one gentle, one not so gentle for Pedroso, were (1) watching the noisy anchor-lifting party of an Italian cruise ship whose passengers on the afterdeck and their well wishers on the street still composed a giddy arc of international goodwill when we left them behind, and (2), a third of our way and then two thirds of our way to Chinatown, watching the cops gently crack down on our erstwhile guide.
        Don't be too quick to gasp, now. This does happen in America. In fact, once at a Fourth of July parade in Coronado, deliciously ironically, I watched a cop writing up a street vendor for selling American flags without a permit. He didn't confiscate the flags, but he made it clear that that and worse could follow if the guy didn't cool it forthwith. And the Coronado cop was fat and wore a big gun and had the swaggering manner of a movie tough guy.
        Each of the Che bereted cops who briefly detained Pedroso separately and at separate points several blocks apart along our trek was slender and unarmed except for a baton and a cell-phone and did nothing but examine his carnet, call his data into someplace, lecture him in a private tone I couldn't hear, and send him on. I could imagine HQ telling the second cop that the kid's record was a few minutes old and went way back to the last cop we'd passed, maybe three blocks behind us.
        I just naturally don't like cops intruding gratuitously into people's lives, so it made me mad, and I audibly told Matilda so, which the cop calmly ignored. But a citizen who, if he'd been 11 years older and wore a city slicker's hat, could have been the same citizen who explained the counterfeiter's arrest to me in '89, stopped to assure me again that it all made sense and was for the good of all concerned.
        But why had the cops zeroed in on Pedroso at all? I remembered that all the illegal money changers in '89 had been black and told the citizen, hoping the cop was listening, that I thought it was racial profiling. Even as I said that, though, it came to me that maybe a third of the people we'd been freely talking to (and of those standing there listening) were black, and, while the citizen patiently assured me it wasn't true, I thought that what made Pedroso different was that he was walking with us though he clearly wasn't with us. He was too well dressed, trying too hard to look respectable when all the other young Cubans around him were trying to look fashionable, and we, of course, were Euro-California casual.
        Later, though, after too many more jinetero experiences, it would be Matilda who figured out the unhappy logic of the cops' certain racial profiling. Almost all jineteros are black, because black Cubans don't have Miami relatives sending them money. So a self conscious black Cuban not just chatting amiably with tourists but clearly pursuing them probably is a hustler. And hustling is police business in Cuba, whether it should be or not.
        Pedroso, as we continued on our way, assured us he hadn't been bothered, but entering the San Rafael Street mall on the other side of the Prado and seeing another cop a block ahead, he asked me to step into a small shop and buy him some cigarettes. Curious about the cigarettes and thinking he'd probably decided to get something for his trouble and bail out, I agreed. But back outside, glancing at the cop ahead, he told us that zigging a block over and zagging down would take us directly to the best Chinese restaurant.
        And, for all we knew, it did. Anyway, a dark alley-sized street took us to an inscrutable knock-knock door, and a cramped inside staircase took us up one floor to another mysterious door which opened into a dark (but cool) second-floor, half-veranda food den without a single Chinese looking waiter or waitress.
        But it was a Chinese restaurant. And after (tactfully, I hope, though the cigarettes had diminished my concern) explaining to Pedroso that we didn't need his company for lunch, we enjoyed resting there. The food, which was probably a good example of what Lonely Planet calls feaux Chinese, was odd but OK. We hoped it wasn't the best and that the waiter who escorted Pedroso out to the stairs didn't give him more than an appropriate "commission." We gave him nothing.
        I understand the empathy Mark Cramer feels for jineteros and expresses so well in his excellent 2000 guidebook, "Havana At Your Door," but I don't agree with him on that point. I agree with most Cubans, who almost universally see male hustlers as embarrassing beggars who don't want to work and who misrepresent Cuba to tourists.
       And, whether it's fair or not, I also agree with most Cubans about hustlerettes, referred to by guidebooks promoting your Spanish as jineteras but actually called just chicas (and rarely putas) by most Cubans. The "chicas," barely differerentiated from all other chicas, chiquitas and chiquititas by context and maybe a slightly different intonation of the word and an eye-crinkling smirk, are almost always cheerful and charming and are almost universally adored.
        In any case, though they seem to take up a lot of the tourist's narrow view, there aren't really many jinoteros or chicas, and ordinary Cubans aren't as aware of them as you are, because most Cubans are busy with their co-workers and their work every day, just like Americans.
        Why? Why, if Cubans are so poor they have to hustle tourists to survive, aren't they all doing it? If you stop and think about it, considering that an average salary of 300-400 pesos, which AP reporters always sneer isn't worth $20 isn't much more than pocket money, it has to be because every Cuban understands what apparently no AP reporter has the brains to grasp, that what his participation in the system earns is both his pocket pesos and the subsidized parts of all his benefits.
        Every AP reporter counts his own rent or house payment, for instance, as part of his salary, doesn't he, even though he gives it right back to the system without ever seeing it? So why doesn't he count a Cuban's only equally invisible house payment on, say, an 850 square foot modern home (normal for new homes virtually given to Cubans these days), as part of the Cuban's salary? That much alone, added to the supposed $8 to $30 the AP reporter makes such a show of sneering at, has to run a typical salary up to at least $758-$780 (or that's what my calculator says - what about yours?); and if the AP reporter admits what he certainly knows and conceals from his readers, that he couldn't honestly (if he was honest) call a 300-peso salary $12 when it will buy more movie tickets, ice cream cones, bus fares, green beans, milk, etc. than $300 will buy in his hometown, he also has to admit (you can do this in your head, right?) that a Cuban's salary and just his home add up to over $1000 a month.
        But, besides their homes, almost everything Cubans need is mostly subsidized, and the simple reason you almost never see a hungry or shabby Cuban is that, for his participation in a system that (when things are going well) produces all the goods and services everyone really needs, besides pocket money, he's given back his share of the goods and services produced, which is all he really needs - which is how maybe nobody else ever told you communism works. Now I've told you.
        The next morning we spent some time watching a sweating car rental agent at work, who, I assume (since he didn't throw up his hands and become a jinetero while we were there), had to consider his deal with the state good enough to pay him for the frustration of endlessly explaining terms and requirements and availability of cars to the nearly hopelessly confused tourists ahead of us who didn't speak Spanish while juggling us, them, and an arrogantly pushy group of Spaniards (from Barcelona of course) who marched in and out and butted in when they felt like it.
       We didn't necessarily take the right approach, either. Our polite sympathy with the guy earned his sympathy for us and we got what we wanted, the smallest cheapest car possible, a Japanese midget make I never heard of, to be brought there from somewhere else on the morning we needed it, but we overlooked some small print that would unpleasantly surprise us later.
        But that would be later. That morning we hiked west toward Miramar in search of a laundromat we mistakenly thought we needed because we each traveled with only one small backpack, and in Cuba you do sweat. The last surprise at the Capri in '89 had been the outrageous price the hotel gouged me for washing a tiny bundle of T-shirts, and though I'd seen a laundry on Reina, I hadn't known it was Reina then and I didn't think I could find it 11 years later. After we'd found the Miramar place and decided it was too much further away than it looked on the map, we'd learn to depend on the houses we stayed in. Esperanza, who met us each morning with a friendly copita of sweet coffee and a glass of juice, surprised us by throwing our clothes in with hers as a courtesy, and I've learned since that the price for doing laundry in a casa is usually: "Tu me digas" (you tell me), a good psychological trick on Americans, though probably not on Spaniards and Italians.

TO BE CONTINUED AS YOU WATCH...

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