The Rum Chronicles

We had been bouncing and lurching our way from Holguín to Boniato for about an hour when Carlitos stopped his cavernous covered flatbed truck at a crossroads. No other vehicles were in sight around what appeared to be three divergent highways. An almost full moon and clusters of stars lit the January night. Once the chugging of the motor died, it was utterly quiet except for the phantom noise of the cold wind that had been slamming full into my ear as I sat at the cab's broken-out passenger window.

A half-dozen men riding in back clambered out, shivering, and headed toward a solitary brick building. They were searching for rum. Our greeting party from Santiago had quickly emptied the homemade rum from the two half-liter plastic bottles they'd brought for the 180-mile ride to the Holguín airport.

That's where we'd landed a few hours earlier; it was my husband's first visit to Cuba since immigrating alone to la yuma, Yankeeland, five years earlier. We had flown in from the north, and the hilly farmland surrounding Holguín looked brown and patchy compared to the emerald fields I remembered from the last time I was here, two and a half years ago. People had told me then there was a drought in eastern Cuba; it must have been the beginning of the same one now ravaging the region.

But more than water has dried up in Cuba, I would observe on this visit. I was struck by a scarcity of spirit. Everything was dwindling, including what I had always believed to be Cubans' infinite resourcefulness and resilience. (Maybe I would have a different perspective if we'd stayed only in Havana, where there are undeniable pockets of vitality, prosperity, and renaissance -- but even in that great city, I didn't escape feeling an unaccustomed psychic fatigue.)

More and more members of our family are filling their malnourished souls with Christian fundamentalism, adhering to an absolute morality that promises the life and hope undelivered by the revolution. But by far the more prevalent and trusted opiate is rum, Cuba's great national product, which I found to be in more reliable supply than food and water, certainly more so than gas, electricity, or cash. My husband, whom I'll call Julián (all names and occasional details have been changed to protect identities), attributes the island's rum-saturated marketplace to an astute socialist government producing revenue while taking the edge off social discontent. "Of course it's for the tourists; they love Cuban rum," Julián says. "But also to keep the people from thinking about the way things are -- to keep them from getting upset and making trouble, going on strike or protesting or speaking out."

The bottle proved a constant companion as we revisited a past not always missed. Naturally Julián's people drank more than usual to celebrate his return, and even more because he was buying. At first I assumed those were the simple reasons everyone was inebriated all the time. As the days passed, though, I could see a more complicated picture. The return of the prodigal son wasn't easy for anyone. Drinking became less a means of rejoicing than of dulling the difficult, ambivalent emotions that arose in both visitor and visited. Julián's family has always been dirt-poor, generations of farmers and laborers (his father's grandparents came to the island from Africa, either as slaves or indentured farmers). Julián alone escaped his legacy at an early age, fighting his way to a one-in-a-million spot on the Cuban national boxing team. That accomplishment afforded him seven years of privilege, celebrity, and world travel. It's been about twenty years since an injury forced him out of boxing and into a long aimless period, capped by five years in the Combinado del Este prison for plotting to leave Cuba. After he was released in 1999, his life had changed too much for him to go back to his beginnings, but he had no future on the island either.

Julián has missed Cuba terribly since relocating to the U.S. under the auspices of the Red Cross refugee program; nevertheless he was steeling himself for his first trip back, hoping against his deeper reason that he might be able to ease the hardness of his loved ones' lives. I was all but oblivious to his inner turmoil, at least at the beginning.

While Julián and the others went for rum, I waited in the front seat beside Rita, the youngest of Julián's three sisters, who was cradling her gorgeous three-year-old grandnephew, wrapped in a ratty orange towel for a blanket. Ten minutes later the men straggled back with pockets full of unfiltered Popular cigarettes and the two bottles now brimming with off-white rum. This was the mass-produced stuff the state stockpiles in tanks and pipes into its bare, pesos-only stores commonly called roneros. The socialist rum (also sold in mass quantities at marches, rallies, festivals, and religious peregrinations) costs only about twenty pesos, less than a U.S. dollar per liter, and isn't half bad -- certainly better than chispe tren (train spark), homemade from kerosene and other foul ingredients.

Rita produced a chewed-up plastic glass, which she filled and pressed into my hand as the truck started up again. Ahead of us was another hour of navigating the countryside, drinking in diesel fumes along with the burning rum, swerving and slamming into potholes unseeable in the obscurity, the huddled men in back tossed like bags of rice.

We stopped again at a gas station in San Luis, just downhill from our destination, the stone-and-log cabin of the matriarch Luisa, Julián's mother. No one expected the gas station to be selling gas; we were there to stock up on necessities Luisa couldn't afford and wouldn't have on hand -- things such as cooking oil, dishwashing soap, toilet paper, bottled water, bottled rum. These and many other goods, including imported foods and candies, are almost always available only for divisa, foreign currency. U.S. dollars were the coins of choice until several months ago, when President Fidel Castro, reacting to President George W. Bush's crackdown on the flow of both U.S. residents and money to the island, outlawed dollars. Now dollars must be converted (at an eighteen percent discount) to chavitos, named in honor of Fidel's new best friend, Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez.

I was intrigued by the name of a rum I'd never seen before -- Planchao -- displayed alongside the usual lineup of Havana Club, Varadero, and our family favorite, Mulata. Planchar means "to iron," and planchao is Cuban for planchado, "ironed"; various slang meanings include "fired," "kicked out," "done away with," "the end of the matter." As far as I'm concerned, all the meanings are perfect for Cuban rum.

We bought a case of water and a case of Cubay, another previously unheard-of rum brand recommended for its price ($2.25 to $3 per bottle) and taste. It was indeed good, though not more or less than any other of Cuba's many minor-league rums.

Carlitos started the truck again and we passed San Luis's dark town square and shuttered homes. We came onto a paved highway, a smooth black river in the moonlight, but after a short cruise, Carlitos turned off onto a dirt road that was actually the floor of a ravine. We began a gradual climb up the foothills and mountains overlooking distant Santiago and its rocky bay. The winding route was bordered by cashew trees, thick bamboo, or craggy cliffs where the rock had been blasted away to carve out the road. We went through towns no more substantial than a few buildings set into the mountainside or perched amid brush on a bluff.

Finally we passed through Boniato, still ascending and catching a bird's-eye view of the notorious Boniato prison. The prison enclosure was well lighted and we could see the wormlike rows of barracks. That was where Julián's father had spent the greater part of his son's childhood, and where several of Julián's friends served time for various petty crimes. We climbed around a lime quarry and a dairy farm. Sometimes I could see little white stones arranged on the side of the road in revolutionary reminders, such as Viva Fidel, and Volverán -- "they'll return," a reference to the five Cubans now imprisoned in the U.S. for espionage.

Then there was the wood gate and long stone walkway leading to Luisa's open front door, and people rushing out and down the path to embrace us and exclaim over Julián. Luisa, small and darting, with eagle eyes and a tight-lipped smile (from worry and arthritis pain), disappeared quickly again back into the house to cook and keep order. All five of Julián's siblings were there: Besides Rita and Francisco, who live in the neighborhood, Cristina had journeyed from Havana, and Elena had left the bedside of her infirm husband in Santiago. Their father, Benjamin, and eldest brother, Vicente, had come from their finca way up in the Sierra Maestra, 100 miles or so to the southwest. (Benjamin and Luisa have been separated for more than twenty years but remain good friends.)