A Cuban Idyll

In the island's countryside the land is lovely, the people are humble, and life is unforgiving

Comments (0) By Kathy Glasgow Thursday, Feb 8 2001

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As an appetizer for the hungry musicians and the rest of us, Luisa and Zulema piled plates with rice, yuca, ñame, and boiled plantains. "Ñame," Benjamin said affectionately, lifting a fork of the root. "I love ñame." In the back bedroom Angelica, Beti, and two of her daughters had arranged themselves like puzzle pieces on the single bed. After slaving for hours in the kitchen Luisa joined them. Lucinda, Marta, Yulemis, and another of Beti's daughters were sleeping in the other bedroom. I decided to take a nap on this bed. Zulema and Paulo, however, never abandoned the party.

Zulema's home on a rocky hillside in El Caney, next door to the house where her family had lived a few decades before, has floors of hard-packed dirt, electricity but no running water, no phone, and no bathroom. Her oldest child, a handsome 24-year-old man, is in prison for petty theft. So she enjoys her rum when she can get it, and a good pachanga.

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I kept hearing a loud crashing sound during my nap. Finally I rose and peered into the main room. The musicians had stopped for the moment, anticipating the feast. It was past midnight, and Jairo had placed two or three slabs of pig meat on a narrow wooden table at one end of the room. He was bringing his machete down, over and over, chopping the pork into bite-size pieces. It was still hot and had been lightly salted. Women and children appeared at the table, and we picked up the morsels with our fingers, letting the fat slide down our throats. More aguardientemade the rounds. Zulema was laughing, hugging me, and quietly scoffing at a suggestion by Lucinda that she curtail her liquor consumption. "Why can't she stop complaining about everything?" Zulema asked in a conspiratorial stage whisper. "We're here to have fun!"

After a while the meat cooled. Our hands, lips, and faces were coated with shiny grease. It must have been around 2:00 a.m. when the musicians picked up where they'd left off. Benjamin had only been warming up, and now his voice was loose and harsh. He sang crazy songs, like "El Paralitico," in which a man wakes up paralyzed and then debates the mystical reasons for his misfortune. Apparently it wasn't a case of Elegguá striking him down but one of those surprises life doles out. "Bota la muleta y bastón/y podrá bailar el son," he concluded. Throw away that crutch and cane, and then you can dance the son.

I woke up at 6:00 a.m. on the bed where a half-dozen of us had curled up. The bus to La Plata left at 7:00, and we weren't going to miss it. We didn't eat breakfast, and no one offered a wake-up coffee because there wasn't any, even though this is a prime coffee-growing area and the harvest was now in progress. At 7:00 sharp, as the sky was lightening, a bus stopped just past the clearing where the boys had been playing volleyball. The driver would wait there for about fifteen minutes. We straggled out of the house. Zulema and Paulo both looked sick. I felt overwhelmed by the simple exertion of walking to the bus and climbing in. I was wearing the same dress I'd walked in the day before and suffering from oozing blisters on both feet. Luisa was having trouble walking with swollen feet, but she didn't let on. She carried a young chicken in a plastic bag -- a gift from Benjamin, an addition to her menagerie and an excellent future food source.

Benjamin planned to stay at La Magdalena for another day and then return to his harvest in the mountains. He and Jairo walked us to the bus. Jairo stood outside under a lightpost, talking with some of the men from town. They lit one another's cigarettes and gestured toward the cane fields. One, then another of the musicians from the night before joined the conversation. I recognized their shirts, the same ones they had worn at the party.

Benjamin sat with us in the bus until it was time to go. "We stopped when the liquor ran out," he reported happily. "I guess it was about five o'clock." To the east the sky turned pink, orange, and yellow, then a sliver of sun pushed through the tips of the cane stalks. When I told Benjamin what a great singer he was, he beamed for a few seconds and said that once someone had recorded him performing some favorite songs at home. "It didn't come out too well," he admitted. "It wasn't professional."

And he bowed his head, musing. "I'm 75 years old," he said, rubbing the back of his sinewy neck under the faded fedora. The cuff of his pinstripe shirt was unbuttoned; the shirt was rumpled and threadbare at the seams. "Things haven't worked out for me." He didn't make excuses or try to put a spin on his troubles. He didn't say anything about growing up black and in extreme poverty, or about the revolution discouraging individual initiative. He also didn't say anything about hoping his children would succeed where he couldn't. "No," he concluded, shrugging slightly. "I haven't accomplished very much. I did what I could."