Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
didn't go on and say, of course, that I disliked the embargo most because it, more than any-
thing, has kept the Castros in power for half a century, given them a ready-made Goliath for
theirDavid.Thankstotheembargo,whentheCastrosrailagainstusasanimperialist enemy,
they aren't really lying. We have in effect declared ourselves the enemy of the Cuban people
and done it under the banner of their freedom, hitting Cuba in a way that, after all, makes
only the people suffer and, far from punishing those in power, rewards them and buttresses
their story. As for the argument that to deal with tyrants would render our foreign policy in-
coherent, we deal with worse every day—we've
armed
worse—and in countries that don't
have a deeply intimate history with ours, going back centuries. All this because a relatively
small but highly mobilized exile community holds sway in a state that has the power to elect
presidents. There was no way to gauge how much of this the man would agree with. We left
it at mutually thinking the embargo sucked.
Out by the pool, where my wife and daughter were swimming, I lay on a chaise in the
shade, feeling paler and softer than I ever had in my life and unlocatably depressed in the
way that resorts do so well. I read
Doctor Zhivago
, a new translation by Richard Pevear and
Larissa Volokhonsky (the husband-and-wife team who have been retranslating the Russian
classics for more than 20 years).
Zhivago
isn't on the Tolstoy/Chekhov level, but there are
wonderful passages, including one that I thought spoke to the gruffness you often encounter
in Cubans, the excessive suspicion of introductory small talk they sometimes demonstrate.
“The fear known as spymania,” Pasternak wrote about Russia after the revolution, “had re-
duced all speech to a single formal, predictable pattern. The display of good intentions in
discourse was not conducive to conversation.”
EverytimeIlookedupfromthebook,thereweremorepeopleinandbythepool,asifthey
were surfacing out of the water, out of the ripples. I had black sunglasses on, so after a while
I propped myself at an angle at which I could seem to read the topic but really be moving my
eyeballs, staring at everybody. God, the human body! It was Speedos and bikinis, no matter
the age or body type. You would never see a poolside scene in the United States with people
showing this much skin, except at a pool where people were there precisely to show off the
perfection of their bodies. The body not consciously sculptured through working out has be-
come a secret shame and grotesquery in America, but this upper-class Euro-Latin crowd had
not received that news, to my distraction. I took in veins and cellulite, paunches and man-
paps, the weird shinglelike sagging that starts to occur on the back of the thighs, cleavage
that showed a spoiled-grape-like wrinkling, the ash-mottled skin of permanently sun-torched
shoulders, all of it beautiful. All of it beautiful and tormenting. You watched an 18-year-old
Argentine girl in her reproductive springtime walk past an ancient Soviet-looking woman,
her body a sculpture of blocks atop blocks, and both of them wearing black bikinis, the furt-
ive looks they gave each other,full ofemotions straight from the Pliocene, from the savanna.
The old men scowled from behind mirrored shades. The young men tensed every muscle in
