Havana Noir (27 page)

Dionisio’s family lived in an early—twentieth century house on San Nicolás Street, perched on a busy and narrow corner in Havana’s Chinatown, where I immediately noticed that the vast majority of the workers—vendors, shop clerks, incredibly aggressive maître d’s and hostesses in front of the restaurants—were not Chinese, in fact not Asian at all. They wore Mandarin blouses or jackets, and rayon pants imitating Heung Wun silk, but with a looseness that made them seem like careless costumes.

Very few people in this Chinatown, Rocky explained, actually spoke Chinese, even the few Chinese who were left.

“This is largest two-column Chinese gate outside of China,” Mahler piped in as we passed under the Dragon gate into the neighborhood, “measuring almost sixty-three feet by forty-three feet.” I made a face behind his back but Rocky didn’t see me.

Mercifully, the family’s home wasn’t buried in the neighborhood labyrinth but just off the main streets of Zanja and Dragones, where pedestrian and bicitaxi traffic clogged the arteries. I noticed right away that noise was constant: in the predawn hours, the local agro-market opened (the only one in the city with eggplant and bean sprouts), restaurants began pounding meat, and, later, kids trotted off to school yelling and fighting. At night, crowds lingered, with laughter and music everywhere. It never let up. (Curiously, once off the little official Chinese food mall, most of the eateries—and there were dozens of them, usually just carry-out through somebody’s living room or kitchen window—served up regular Cuban menu items like ham-and-cheese sandwiches, roasted pork, and black bean and rice concoctions—nothing Chinese at all.) Just when a lull was conceivable, a group of tourists would stampede through, fascinated by Cuba’s Chinese-less Chinatown, seeing Chinese eyes on mulattos and blacks and, after a few days into my visit, even me.

“We grow Chinese after a while,” Dionisio said, pointing to his own eyes, which he swore had an Asian slant neither Rocky nor I could discern. He spoke to me in a mix of Spanish and elementary English. “Didn’t you become a little Hawaiian after a while in Hawai’i?”

“Yeah, but there are real Hawaiians in Hawai’i,” I said, trying first in Spanish, then surrendering to English. “And, you know, we wouldn’t presume to be Hawaiian.”

“But you were born in Hawai’i!” he replied incredulously.

“C’mon, Dionisio, I’ve explained this to you,” Rocky said, tugging at his arm.

“We don’t have too many Chinese left, see, so sometimes we have to step in for them.”

I had noticed, though, that the occasional high-level Chinese diplomatic tour groups were frequently led by an elegant elderly man who looked really Chinese, even as he moved with the ease and flair of the Cubans.

“That’s Moisés Sio Wong,” Tom Mahler said when I asked the family about him. “He’s one of the original revolutionaries; he’s been with Fidel from the very, very start. One of three Chinese Cuban generals in the Revolution. Now, that is a hero!”

To my surprise, the family appeared expressionless—certainly only silence followed Mahler’s declaration—but then I thought I saw Dionisio roll his eyes. And Rocky smiled conspiratorially, apparently unaware I had noticed.

According to Dionisio’s family, they had all been very happy when he unexpectedly fell in love with Rocky, La Hawayana, as they affectionately referred to her. They could never have imagined my own amusement at my sister cast in any way associated with Hawai’i. But in Cuba, where she’d always wanted to be, Rocky reflected her Hawaiian upbringing more than ever. Around Chinatown, she wore flowers in her hair in a typical Polynesian style (which seemed to me should not have been so exotic to the Cubans). She’d found a connection through a Japanese diplomat for fresh fish for sashimi and had us shipping wasabi and seaweed regularly. In her room, I found Eddie Kamae CDs, and both Dionisio and his mother confided that Rocky frequently cried when she heard a particular Hawaiian song. I was flabbergasted—not at her emotions, because my sister has a tender heart, but at the source of such displays.

“What song?” I asked them.

The two hummed a few bars of something completely unrecognizable, frequently interrupting to correct one another.

“Do you know what the song’s about?” I asked.

“Oh, it’s about Hawai’i,” said Dionisio’s mom.

“Yes, about missing Hawai’i,” added Dionisio, quite seriously.

“Rocky misses Hawai’i?” I asked.

“Oh yes, she misses Hawai’i very much,” he responded, “sometimes I think so much that she’ll leave.”

I could tell he meant it—his voice actually cracked a bit, then withered. And his mother quietly stroked his back, already comforting him for his future loss—something she was familiar with, I was told, since her husband had died only a few years before.

“It was an embolia,” she explained to me in Spanish.

“What’s that?” I asked. The noise from the street was filtering in and I wasn’t sure I’d heard her right.

“An attack,” she said.

“What kind of attack?” I asked.

“A special attack,” she said, shaking her head with just enough annoyance that I was sure she thought I was an idiot.

Dionisio had met Tom Mahler years back, during one of his medical tours in Haiti. Mahler had swooped in with computers and medical software that dazzled the Cubans and Haitian authorities. All of it was top of the line, and all of it was donated. Mahler wasn’t a doctor or a salesman, just a guy who’d done incredibly well during the boom years of the computer age and had committed himself now to charity work. When Dionisio invited him to Cuba, Mahler immediately set about to modernize the island’s medical networks, a haphazard system that cribbed parts from ancient Soviet, Chinese, and Korean computers with the same spirit that Cuban mechanics rescued classic American cars.

From the beginning, Mahler had stayed with Dionisio’s family rather than at a hotel. He’d come four or five times a year, visits that could last a few days or as long as a month. His presence became so constant that Dionisio’s family had formally surrendered a room to him off the courtyard. During my visit, I was in Rocky and Dionisio’s room, which put Dionisio with his policeman cousin Raúl in another room.

“He is a wonderful person,” Dionisio’s mother told me about Mahler, “and a very good cook.”

During each visit, Mahler would fill the fridge and cabinets with foods normally out of the family’s reach: beef and seafood, dry cereals, fresh milk and cheese, canned veggies, and condiments such as mayonnaise and mustard. Each morning before taking off for work, he’d take over the kitchen and produce the kind of hearty breakfast the Cubans went wild over: steak and eggs or pancakes, skillets brimming with sausage and bacon or, once, biscuits and gravy.

His revolutionary fervor was well-known, yet after unsuccessfully trying to enlist the family in marches and volunteer projects, he had mostly gone about his business, talking things up but not pushing. It was no secret, though, that Mahler had been deeply disappointed when Dionisio took up with Rocky. But because Rocky had chosen to stay in Cuba, his feelings of “betrayal”—if I’m to guess from his words to me at the airport—had been somewhat assuaged.

Mahler didn’t see their relationship as a triumph of love over politics. Instead, he considered Rocky the cause of potential revolutionary slippage. Rocky, according to Tom Mahler, was a temptation—not necessarily erotic (it was actually appalling how he seemed to see my sister as a cut-out figure instead of a real girl) but economic and political. He would joke about how Rocky had almost brainwashed Dionisio into leaving Cuba but not quite.

“Was he falling into temptation, is that it? Are you the reinforcements?” he harangued me one day while we were cleaning rice in the kitchen, his face all smiles but the meanness in his tone evident. “He’s not gonna follow you guys back to your capitalistic island paradise when he has a revolutionary one right here, okay?”

“Tom, por favor, ya,” Dionisio said, irritated. That was probably the first time I’d heard Dionisio actually confront Mahler; usually he was like everybody else, smiling and shuffiing.

But no sooner had Dionisio left the room than Mahler started in again. “Are you here to try to get me to fall in line too?” he said, again screwing up his face so that his eyebrows danced in a clownish manner. “You know, there’s nothing you can show me. I’ve not only lived in the belly of the beast, I was born there…I know it better than anyone here, including you two Hawaiians.”

“We’re not Hawaiians,” I corrected him, exasperated.

“Right—sorry!” He smiled, his face now feigning concern. “I have to get that. Of course you’re not Hawaiian. I guess I want to equate it with, like, New Yorkers or Hoosiers. I don’t know why I keep tripping on that, although it is a mouthful: not Hawaiian, but from Hawai’i. What do you call that? Not Hawaiian, not mainlander? Haole? But you’re no haole, though you certainly look like one!”

* * *

At Dionisio’s family home, the doorbell—a merciless and earsplitting metallic buzzing—rang constantly. There was the man selling illegal crabs (“How many can I buy?” I heard his mother cautiously ask); the man selling a fluorescent tube, maybe several feet in length, frosty and miraculously intact (“No, thank you,” said Dionisio himself, then quickly added, “but Mrs. Wu down the street, Estrellita’s mother—yes, the widow with the balcony full of flowers—I bet she could use this”); the woman selling illegal bags of cement who appeared with backbreaking knapsacks as local kids with features I too had begun to see as increasingly Asian paraded through the family courtyard, stacking the cement under an awning and covering it up with sheets of paint-splattered plastic. The cement was meant for an illegal addition the family was planning on the roof—in fact, a kind of studio apartment for Dionisio and Rocky.

I was told—by both Rocky and Dionisio and later, again, by his mother and Raúl, the policeman cousin who’d come in from Banes, the family’s provincial home, to live with them in the capital—that I was not to let Tom Mahler know about these purchases, that in fact Tom was not to know about the cement at all.

“He wouldn’t approve,” Rocky said.

“But won’t he like seeing that there’s more permanence to your stay?” I asked.

Rocky shook her head.

Still, I thought it peculiar at best to try withholding the information since the plastic sheets were obviously changing shape, growing both taller and fatter by the day as more cement bags were delivered, but Rocky assured me this was the agreed on strategy.

“Don’t you think he’ll be able to tell?” I asked.

She shook her head. “In Cuba—it’s strange—people are remarkably good at not seeing anything they don’t want to see.”

“But he’s not Cuban,” I pointed out.

“He thinks he is,” she said by way of explanation. “He’s zenzizenzic, actually.”

I laughed. “But he’s American!”

“Gringo Z!” Rocky exclaimed. “Mami would be so proud that we’ve discovered a new species!”

Indeed, I already had so much to tell her and my dad.

The first couple of weeks in Cuba, I really struggled to make myself understood (and heard above the barking and horn blowing and general human effusiveness that leaked into every corner of the house). Cubans swallowed letters, syllables, whole words sometimes. And they spoke at rocket speed, punctuating everything with a physicality that was equally quirky and anxious. They slapped their hands, punched their fists in their palms, snapped their fingers in the air (all at once!), thumped their chests, rubbed their tummies, and danced their digits on any and all surfaces. Plus, the heat didn’t seem to bother them at all, while I felt like there was a giant iron on my head all the time.

“But Malía, isn’t Hawai’i tropical too?” Dionisio’s mother asked me as she cut up a large avocado in the family kitchen. She lifted the knife into the air, whirling it around to suggest something akin to a vortex but which I understood to be shorthand for climate.

“Yes,” I explained, “but there are trade winds, and the islands are smaller, and we have mountains.”

“We have mountains too,” said Raúl, leaning against the counter while waiting for water to boil so he could bathe. He raised his right arm, his palm capping off what would be a mountain top, then brought it down and scratched his chest. The pot next to him—caked white on the inside and used exclusively to heat bathwater—hummed on the flame.

“Yes, but…” How to explain the difference between Cuban mountains—thick, green, and sloping—and Hawaiian mountains that go straight up, like sheets of rock, and dominate every landscape? How to explain that a tropical island can have snowcapped peaks?

“And you have volcanoes, right? Rocky is always showing us pictures and videos of the volcanoes,” said Dionisio’s mother. This time, the knife indicated an incline. “She loves the volcanoes; I guess that’s very Hawaiian.”

I nodded, amused. “Yes…” Rocky had warned me not to bother to correct the Cubans: They would insist we were Hawaiian, no matter what we said. And, in fact, it was almost dizzying. Everywhere we went, to whomever I was introduced, we were Las Hawayanas, over and over.

“So it’s actually hotter then, hotter than here, because a volcano would be spitting out fire, right?” the policeman cousin asked, smiling courteously as he puckered then extended his fingers outward. He turned off the fire and lifted the pot to take to the bathroom. He stood there, perspiring, waiting for my response as the steam rose. His face was so kind, it was nearly impossible to imagine him as a cop.

“Yeah, but it doesn’t work that way,” I tried again with my limited Spanish.

They nodded at me politely.

“We are on the same latitude, no?” Dionisio’s mother asked. The knife crisscrossed the air horizontally now.

“Yes, but it’s different,” I said, realizing even as I insisted that I would never convince them.

“Of course it’s different!” exclaimed a buoyant Tom Mahler, bounding into the kitchen for a glass of water for Mrs. Wu, whom he was entertaining in the living room. He’d obviously heard the tail end of our chat. “Hawai’i is an American colony, ripped of all its freedom and tradition. Cuba is a free and sovereign nation!”