Sunday, July 21, 2002
Book Review
My Dinner with Fidel
CUBA DIARIES: An American Housewife in Havana
By Isadora Tattlin
(Shannon Ravenel / Algonquin Books)
By Ann Louise Bardach
Before arriving in Cuba in the early 1990s, Isadora Tattlin asked a friend to explain in detail what the problem was with that beleaguered country. The friend, a former resident of Havana, summed up its troubles with one sentence: "Fidel is an old man who can't admit that he made a mistake."
Tattlin, the pseudonymous author of "Cuba Diaries: An American Housewife in Havana," is taken aback by her friend's breezy bluntness. "But surely it can't be as simple as all that," she argues. Three and a half years later, however, at the end of her family's stay, she concludes that her friend may have been right. That the raging force behind the four-decade Cuban-U.S. cold war is a prideful, aging comandante who is incapable of backing down.
Tattlin's diary of her extended stay in Cuba offers a sharp and sassy evocation of daily life in that complicated and troubled Caribbean country. Written as a series of impressionistic vignettes, it is a viable alternative to the half-dozen trips to Cuba that seem necessary in order to penetrate the smoke, mirrors, rumors and conspiracies at play on this self-important island.
Tattlin's book is balanced between carefully observed reportage and chisme, or gossip. Also referred to as Radio Bemba (loosely, Radio Big Mouth) or la bola en la calle (the word on the street), chisme in Cuba is a complex and valued medium. It is the central organ of news dissemination and one that is often more reliable than what one reads or hears on the government-controlled news. Most of the book's chisme comes from Tattlin's household staff of seven, a luxury, she admits with some embarrassment, that comes with the perks of her husband's job, her "own small legacy" and the cheap cost of labor in Cuba. As a bonus, there are some exquisite cameos of Fidel Castro, his brother Raul and other movers and shakers in the Cuban firmament.
Tattlin soon learns the requisite Cuban slang, such as the word gusanero, a portmanteau of gusano (worm, and the traditional epithet for those who have emigrated) and compañero("comrade"), which combined mean "a Cuban who makes foreign currency and returns a portion of it to the Cuban government in exchange" for holding onto his citizenship and unrestricted travel. Some of the more interesting exchanges come from Lety, who teaches the Tattlin children gymnastics and who offers a lively treatise on race and "dating," the euphemism for freelance prostitution.
Lety's digression on the nuances of race in Cuba is particularly edifying. " 'There are two basic kinds of Negroes in Cuba,' Lety tells me. 'Negros de pasas' are black or brown people with kinky hair. 'Negros de pelo' are black people or brown people with straight or wavy hair. To be un negro de pelo in Cuba is to get the best of both worlds.... It's as good as having a visa to Canada or Western Europe, guaranteed. And being una negra with blue eyes,' Lety shakes her fingers again like they have been scalded, 'when the girl turns fourteen, people say, 'El norteno [a foreigner] is coming, guapita [pretty one], pack your bags!' "
Tattlin's stay in Cuba coincided with the nadir of the Special Period, a euphemism for the bleak years that followed the demise of its Soviet patron in the early '90s. Habaneros often tell her how things were "not so bad" in the 1970s and '80s before life became primarily the grim pursuit of three meals a day. The underlying assumption throughout "Cuba Diaries" is that most Cubans, natural entrepreneurs bristling under the constraints of a suffocating bureaucracy, are hungry for an exit. This remains the case for a segment of the population, but many more are simply hungry for more and better food, more stuff and more freedom. Indeed, Tattlin's scolding of improvised life in Cuba might strike some readers as Martha Stewart hits the Malecon.
"Call me Isadora," begins "Cuba Diaries" with a wink to Herman Melville, and readers will immediately want to know who Isadora Tattlin is and why she has penned this work under a nom de plume. Their quest to discover her identity will likely end unfulfilled as Tattlin conceals herself and her family superbly, fudging on the dates of her stay and the details of key personalities in the book. To further thwart the curious, she has limited herself to radio appearances, such as National Public Radio, to promote her book. She describes herself only as the mother of two and the "wife of a European business executive," who needs anonymity to protect the Cuban staff who worked for them and other Cuban friends. She reminds the reader that criticism that could be construed as anti-government is often sharply dealt with in Cuba, which is altogether true. Nevertheless, far harsher accounts have been penned about Castro's Cuba. Hence, it would be fair to say--having met "Tattlin" and her family in Havana a few years ago--that the protection of her family, in particular her husband's career, was an equally vital consideration.
Among the best scenes in Tattlin's book is a lunch at her home for Manuel Piñeiro, the aristocrat turned revolutionary known as "Barbaroja" (for his carrot-red beard). The hard-drinking Piñeiro, a Politburo luminary, was the former chief of intelligence who ran Cuba's guerrilla operations in Latin America throughout the 1970s and '80s. "Piñeiro remains the favorite of the international set in Havana because if you have to have an old revolutionary over, Piñeiro is the most schmooze-worthy," observes the tart Tattlin. "He listens well of course--he has spent his life listening .... The true fascination of Piñeiro, of course, lies in the contemplation of the size and scope of the secrets contained in one unkempt head. He knows how [revolutionary icon] Camilo Cienfuegos died, he knows how on purpose it was that Che was not resupplied in the Bolivian jungle." Hence, when Piñeiro crashes to his death while driving under the influence in 1998, Tattlin, who clearly took a dim view of the wily spook, is decidedly unsentimental.
And Piñeiro was hardly the biggest score at Tattlin's dinner table. Among the many members of the nomenklatura--the Cuban ruling class--to honor her home was the country's most famous brother act, Fidel and Raul Castro. One of the ironies of Cuba's socialist powers-that-be is their curiosity for the rich and powerful, and clearly the Tattlins proved irresistible. Tattlin has a wicked eye for the odd detail, such as the fact that Raul Castro, who is about half a foot shorter than his brother, wears hefty lifts on his shoes and how Raul's entourage seemed more solicitous toward Raul than Fidel's entourage was toward Fidel.
On the day of the Fidel dinner, Tattlin receives a flurry of phone calls from Castro's personal security chief. The secretary of her husband, Nick, also fields calls, including one informing her that the beverage of choice for El Jefe is Chivas Regal Scotch. Tattlin quickly learns that no item is too small or quotidian for the attention of Castro's security detail. A team of men arrive at noontime. "The head of security," she writes, "asks me to list the names of the help. He asks me to give him and his men a tour of the house. He asks me what bathroom the president will use. I say we have only one downstairs bathroom. He tells me the president will use that bathroom and that all other guests should use the guest bathroom upstairs. He asks me what kind of toilet paper the president will use.... He asks me if it is Cuban toilet paper. I say it is. He asks me if we don't have any better quality toilet paper. I say we don't. The head of security asks me to take a roll, put it in a plastic bag, tape the bag shut, and leave it beside the toilet for the president."
Tattlin is quizzed on how the meal will be served and by whom, including "what side of the table the president will be served from." She is then instructed "to seat the president with his back facing the wall." Two hours later, more security people arrive to case the house along with "the food taster" who will "spend the rest of the afternoon in the kitchen with Lorena [the cook]. The checkers start combing the house delicately, looking under every piece of furniture with flashlights, tapping the furniture in some places. They get ladders and peek into chandeliers and rub the insides of lampshades with the flats of their hands. They pick up cushions and squeeze every part of them between their hands. They take out the telephone in the despacho [the office] and install a red one. They install a green one in the garden in the bushes near the entrance."
And so it goes until the Castro entourage arrives by caravan. Castro, it turns out, is a man of courtly manners and is as avid a listener as he is a talker, with a sponge-like attention to detail. But when he speaks, there is no telling what arcane digression--Angola, Eritrea--he may indulge in for any length of time. At the Tattlin dinner party, the maximum leader rescues himself with a sense of humor. "Amazing how time flies when you're doing all the talking," he quips at midnight as he prepares to leave.
Not everything in "Cuba Diaries" is new or compelling. The sections on Santeria, the widely practiced Afro-Cuban syncretic religion, may be helpful to the novice Cuba-phile but seems more dutiful than inspired. Tattlin's book is a bit scattershot, sort of like a traveler's photo album. There are some penetrating portraits, some candid and hilarious shots, while some are a bit out of focus. But altogether, these stories, snippets and recollections meld into an alternative travel book, offering the reader a sagacious reading of Cuban life.
Where Tattlin excels is in the plethora of telling, incisive details of the surreal daily life on the largest island in the Caribbean and her keen understanding of power and powerlessness in Cuba. At one Havana dinner party, the non-Cuban guests agree that "what is driving Cuban policy" are the vanities of its politicians. "They cannot have their pride offended," she writes, deftly summing up one of the most most intractable stumbling blocks of the decades-long showdown. "That is the most important thing."