Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
to rich white tourists, even if that was you, but of course this feeling was not to be trusted:
youlikedtheirunfriendlinessbecausetheyseemedmoreauthenticallyanticapitalistthatway.
Especially wild was a woman about my age at the main reception desk, who evidently had
to handle all the complaints about the
wee-fee
service in the lobby. She looked at you dead
level and half-smiling when you approached as if in her mind she were already pushing in
the blade. At the desk, they sold little scratch cards, with passwords on them, that looked
like lottery tickets and in hindsight had much else in common with lottery tickets. But there
were no cards that day. “They are in the city,” she said—and in my mind I saw them being
unloaded from small boats at night—“but we don't have them here.” I was advised to try
the hotel next door, a few minutes' walk—another, equally massive, equally generically pan-
Latin-style Gaviota hotel. Would a card I bought there work here? “I hope so,” she said, still
doing that smile. “But,” I said, “we made reservations at this hotel specifically because you
advertised the
wee-fee
service.” A total lie. We didn't need it. I wanted to see if she would
crack. She shook her head so slowly with exaggeratedly sincere sorrow, like a long-suffering
teacher forced to tell her most obnoxious pupil he had failed. “I understand,” she murmured,
and went back to work.
Partly what had been clashing were our respective ideas about the role of an individual in
solvingacrisis.IntheUnitedStates,weallgoaroundsoempowered-feelingallthetime,and
when you travel you feel it, a sense of hypertrophy, the thing that makes us look like giant
babies to the Europeans. Bring us our soda refills or we'll get them ourselves! The sheer no-
tion that I thought she herself could
do
anything about the
wee-fee
, about getting the cards
here faster, was probably genuinely amusing to her. Did I not think she wanted the
wee-fee
fixed? Did I think she actually liked standing there answering the exact same question from
a never-ending line of childishly outraged foreigners?
At the neighboring hotel, they did have cards. But their
wee-fee
was down. “It's not work-
ing?” I asked the man. “It's working,” he said, “but not right now.” The whole island's In-
ternet runs through three unpredictable satellites, although I had read that a cable of some
kindwasrecently installed. Ifso,itdidnotgetroutedtothese hotels. Which wasluckyinthe
end—it accelerated the technological molting that had to happen and left you feeling more
present.Inthebasement,nearthebusinesscenter(whereawomantookdelightintellingtrav-
elers from all lands that they could not do various simple-sounding things on the computer
consoles), I noticed a small postcard that showed a picture of Fidel, and the caption read in
Spanish, “In the history of U.S. intelligence, no greater amount of money and resources have
been put toward bringing down a single man than have been spent to get Fidel.” And below
that,
“El mérito es estar vivo.”
Roughly, “The victory lies in staying alive.”
I kept seeing small groups of Asian men get on and off the elevators. That was new. Ten
years ago the only Asian faces you might have seen were in Chinatown—there is one in
Havana, Barrio Chino, several square blocks of ostensibly Chinese restaurants and faded
