Read Online Cuba Diaries by Isadora Tattlin - Free Book Online

moderately spicy tomato sauce), and flambéed. The lights are dimmed when the flambéed shrimp comes out, glowing with a blue flame. We have two
mojitos
each and move on to beer.Our host wants to give us each another
mojito
, but we say we’d better not. He keeps yelling. Nick eggs him on. They are all laughing, so I start laughing, too. “
Qué simpático es este señor
,” our host says, about Nick. Ladisel, our guide on the trip, and Flora, his wife, smile timidly. We are also served yucca
con mojo
(a root vegetable similar to a potato, with a garlic sauce), a salad of avocado, cucumber, and tomato, and a dessert of
cáscara de toronja
(pressed grapefruit rind in syrup) with cream cheese, followed by coffee and
ron añejo
(rum aged over seven years). The rum is like hot silk. Nick is offered Cohibas, which are the finest Cuban cigars and sell for four hundred dollars a box.
    We roll back to the Hotel Rancho Faro Luna, feeling like we need wheelbarrows under our stomachs. Nick puts a hand on the small of my back to push me up the stairs.
    We stand on the balcony of our hotel room. A nearly full moon is rising out of the sea. First it is orange, and then it becomes white. It shines on the sea and on our very full stomachs, which protrude over the aluminum railing and over the sea below like the prows of pirate ships. The children snore in the next room. We burp. We have done nothing we approve of, but still, we are happy.
I. 26
    Standing inside the unfinished nuclear reactor outside of Cienfuegos (which has sat three-quarters complete since the Russians pulled out) is like standing inside a dark, nearly dried-out navel orange, cracked open.
    The reactor is explained very rapidly to Nick in Spanish. We walk on catwalks over rods that stick up, and I remember what I can of Chernobyl and make a note to ask Nick later: were those
the
rods? Water drips and I make a note: was that
the
water?
Flojos
(literally, “loose guys”—thin guys with bad posture who pretend to work but just lounge around) hover in the shadows. Everything is covered with grease to keep it from rusting, but it’s still like a dried-out navel orange.
    Nick’s firm has told him not to
touch
the nuclear issue, but we have to be polite.
    â€œIt will make a wonderful discotheque,” Nick says to Ladisel, Flora, and the head of the suspended works. “Put a Plexiglas floor over this whole level.” Nick indicates the level we are standing on. “Light the rods up from below.”
    Ladisel, Flora, and the head of the suspended works laugh uneasily.
I. 27
    Driving from Cienfuegos to Varadero (this is our reward for having visited the reactor) on the second leg of our trip, we pass through a citrus-growing region. It is neither cold nor hot, and the smell of the orange blossoms blows in through the open windows of the van. The children put their noses at the edge of the window and start breathing and breathing with little moans of delight, like they do when they eat guava ice cream. Jimmie says, “There’s perfume all around, Mommy,” and I feel like swooning and jumping out of my skin, all at once; it’s the same pleasantly panicky feeling I get sometimes at dusk on our back patio.
    Flora is telling me that the hardest thing to find right now is clothes.
    Flora and I have gotten to the point of talking about how things are—materially—for her family. It takes longer, usually, to get to this point with a Cuban official, or a Cuban official’s wife, but we’ve had nearly two solid days together. Some will never say that they lack for anything, or if you mention material hardship, they will launch right into education and health care, as if no other country in the world offered free education and health care.
    â€œFood, we have,” Flora says. “It’s a bit boring because it’s always the same thing—rice, beans, rice, beans, sometimes chicken or