Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
partly what he meant. He also meant that if you're going to fly to Cuba from Miami and rub
it in my face that our money is worth one twenty-fifth of yours, I'm gonna feed you some
hilarious communist math and see how you like it. Cubans call it
la doble moral
. Meaning,
different situations call forth different ethical codes. He wasn't being deceptive. He was say-
ing what my wife forced him to say. She had been a bit breezy, it seemed, in mentioning the
unevenness between the currencies, which is the kind of absurdity her family would laugh at
affectionately in the kitchen. But they don't have to suffer it anymore. And he was partly re-
mindingherofthat,fencingherofffromaconversationinwhichCubanswouldjoketogether
about the notion that the CUP and the CUC had even the slightest connection to each other.
That was for them, that laughter. So, a very complex statement, that not-quite-lie. After it, he
was totally friendly and dropped us at one of the Cuban-owned tourist hotels on the edge of
Havana.
Peoplewalkingbyonthestreetdidn'tseemasskinny.Thatwasthemostinstantlypercept-
ibledifference,ifyouwereseeingRaul'sCubaforthefirsttime.Theyweren'tsicklylooking
before, but under Fidel you noticed more the way men's shirts flapped about them and the
knobbinessofwomen'sknees.Nowpeoplewerefillingouttheirclothes.Theisland'soverall
dietary level had apparently gone up a tick. (One possible factor involved was an increase in
theamountoffoodcomingoverfromtheUnitedStates.Unknowntomostpeople,wedosell
a lot of agricultural products to Cuba, second only in value to Brazil. Under a law that Bill
Clinton squeaked through on his way out, Cuba purchases food and medicine from us on a
cash basis, meaning, bizarrely, that a lot of the chicken in the
arroz con pollo
consumed on
the island by Canadian tourists is raised in the Midwest—the embargo/blockade has always
been messy when you lean in close.)
The idea was to spend some days traveling around, before going to see family. Once you see
them, it gets emotional, and after that, sightseeing feels wrong somehow.
TheladieswantedtovisittheHavanaaquariumbeforeitclosedfortheday—mywifewent
there when she was younger—so they took off. The hostility of the hotel workers was to be
experienced. I started making up reasons to approach them, just to provoke it and make sure
I hadn't imagined it. My reflex during an odd social interaction is to assume fault, and this
can create its own distortion, making it hard to see what the other person is doing, but no,
these people were being fantastically unfriendly. It was one of the big, newly built Gaviota
hotels—Gaviota is the quasi-official Cuban tourist organization (financed in part by transna-
tional investment but controlled by a prominent Cuban general). Loosely speaking, these
men and women worked for the government. It's not that they were incompetent or mean;
they just had zero motivation to be nice to tourists or in a hurry to do anything for them,
and for me, after years immersed in a may-I-pour-you-more-sweet-tea culture, the contrast
held a fascination. In a way it was refreshing to see people so emphatically not kowtowing
