Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
in a building made of glass. It looked underwater. Manuel stopped the bicycle-taxi and gazed
on it with obvious pride.
“There's always an armed guard in front of it,” he said, nodding his head toward a young
man in a green uniform, who was standing with a machine gun over his shoulder.
“They're worried that someone will try to blow it up or something?” I said.
“They're worried that someone will steal it and go to Miami,” he said.
There was a time Mariana took me to Cuba, and we went to a town called Remedios, in the
central part of the island. It is one of the most ancient Cuban cities. The church on the main
squaredatesfromtheRenaissance.Whenitwasrestoredinthe1950s,theworkersdiscovered
that under the white paint on the high ceiling was a layer of pure gold. The townspeople had
safeguardeditfromthepiratesinthatmanner.WestayedinthehomeofamannamedPiloto.
A friendly bicycle-taxi driver, who introduced himself as Max, told us that Piloto worked
for the government and rented out his spare room only in order to spy on tourists, and that
we should be careful what we said there. But all we ever got from Piloto and his wife was
a nearly silent politeness and one night a superb lobster dinner. My most vivid memory of
Remedios is of being taken to the house of an artist who lived there, a woodcarver. The
bicycle-taxidrivertoldusthatanyonewhohad“agreatinterestinculture”neededtovisitthe
homeofthisparticular artist. Thenextdayhetookusthere,intheafternoon.Werodebehind
a row of houses that had strange paintings and animal figures hanging in their breezeways.
After what seemed a long time for a bicycle-taxi ride, we arrived at the woman's place. Tak-
ingoutacigarette,Maxtoldustowalkahead,hewouldwait.Atthedoorofasmall,salmon-
colored house, an old woman met us. Not the artist, it emerged. This was the artist's mother.
We sat with her in a kind of narrow front parlor, where she made sweetly formal small talk
for maybe 20 minutes, telling us every so often that the artist would be out soon.
At a certain moment, a woman appeared in the passageway that led from the front room
into the main part of the house, a woman with rolls of fat on her limbs, like a baby, and skin
covered in moles. She walked on crutches with braces on her knees. She had a beautiful nat-
ural Afro with a scarf tied around it. She was simply a visually magnificent human being.
She told us the prices of her works, and we bought a little chicken carving. She said almost
nothing otherwise—she had difficulty speaking—but when we stood up to leave, she lifted
a hand and spoke, or rather delivered, this sentence. It was evidently the message among all
others that she deemed most essential forU.S. visitors. “I knowthat at present there are great
differences between our peoples,” she said, “but in the future all will be well, because we are
all the sons and daughters of Abraham Lincoln.”
