Talking Location With… author John Thorndike – Cuba

1st September 2018

TalkingLocation With…. John Thorndike, author of A Hundred Fires in Cuba, set in Cuba.

A few years ago I went to Havana to do some research on my current book, A Hundred Fires in Cuba. It’s a good thing I made that trip, for while I’d read plenty about Cuba and the Revolution, Havana didn’t always look the way I’d imagined it. To get a true feel for the place, I had to be there.

In the book, a young American woman falls in love with Camilo Cienfuegos. Few people in the U.S. know Camilo’s name, but in Cuba, everyone. He was one of Fidel Castro’s early comandantes, and to this day he’s as revered as Che Guevara. Their images, often paired, can be seen throughout the city. Camilo, always famous for his bravery, is still known as El Señor de la Vanguardia.

I hoped during the trip to talk to Camilo’s brother, Osmany. He’s an architect who worked for Castro’s Revolution, and he founded an ecological center, Las Terrazas, an hour and a half west of Havana. It’s now a tourist destination with a hotel, restaurants and museum-like displays, and Osmany, I’d heard, still lived there.

It isn’t easy for a random yuma to get through to a Cuban government official, even if he’s retired. (Yuma is what Cubans call the U.S., and yumas are either Americans or other foreigners. The term comes from the cowboy film 3:10 to Yuma, which was a hit in Cuba in the late Fifties.) Still, I had to try. I couldn’t find a bus, so I talked to the Havanatur driver who’d been shepherding my group around, and he set me up with a friend who’d recently received his taxi license and could legally carry foreigners wherever they wished to go.

Engels (his brother’s name was Estalin) showed up at the hotel in his ‘52 Chevy, and I climbed in. About a fifth of the cars on the island are old Fords, DeSotos, Dodges, Studebakers and Chevys, and most of them are in pretty rough shape. Engels’ was something of a hybrid: its 6-cylinder block was original, but the transmission was a four-on-the-floor out of a 1994 Lada. These Russian cars are much maligned in Cuba, but they’re everywhere. Engels’ Chevy also had some clever extras. The horn had been switched to the high-pitched whistle which almost all cars use in the capital to keep pedestrians at bay. It also had a reverse-signal beep, and—quite the surprise—power windows!

We explored a few places in Havana where I’d set scenes in the book, then headed for the autopista. The day was warm, the windows down and the muffler noisy, and conversation with Engels wasn’t easy for me. It was his Cuban Spanish. When I listen to one of Castro’s slow and emphatic speeches, I understand every word, but on the streets of Havana there were plenty of people I could barely understand at all. Often I had more trouble understanding black people—though there were plenty of whites who baffled me as well. (Cubans speak like this about race, quite directly. People are black or white or mulatto, with endless gradations. Racially-mixed couples and their offspring are everywhere, which soon makes it feel like no big deal: a vision of where the world is surely headed). Engels was white, sort of. Darker than some, as I am darker than some. But in the noisy car I struggled with his Spanish, and we didn’t make much of a connection.

At Las Terrazas I spoke with the Director. But after stepping out of his office for a few minutes—he might have just gone out to have a cigarette, or perhaps he called Osmany and the guy had no interest in meeting an American writer working on a book about his brother—he came back and said, “No está. Se fue.” Osmany wasn’t there. He had left.

Engels and I drove through the village, around the lake and into the forest, and wound up at a peasant house and restaurant called La Casa del Campesino. An actual peasant house would have had a dirt floor and split, palm tree walls. This lovely house had polished concrete floors, sawn walls and a ten-inch-thick roof of palm thatch. The walls only went up six feet, so it was essentially open to the weather. Walking into the main room, with Engels trailing behind me, I met an older guy wearing cotton trousers, a long-sleeved shirt and traditional straw hat. He introduced himself as the manager of the place, and led me deeper into the main room. Close to the kitchen, where a wood fire burned in an open oven, two young men were sitting at a wooden table, picking apart a shank of pork, preparing for lunch. And there on the wall was a painting of Camilo. The manager saw me studying it and said, “El famoso Camilo Cienfuegos, El Señor de la Vanguardia.”

From the start, his Spanish was slow and clear. He pointed out a black and white photo of himself, his wife, and “el jefe”—Fidel—seated in this very house. He was clearly a believer. He’d grown up with Fidel and the Revolution, and had somehow landed in this house that seemed to me a rustic paradise, surrounded by orange and grapefruit trees, a horse in a pasture, and two-day-old chicks wandering around outside the front gate.

I asked him how it was that in Cuba there were no mosquitos, no spiders, almost no flies, and he explained that the state controlled such problems before they got to be a plague, by spraying. It was the same with their health care system, he said. It was better, and more economical, for the government to keep people healthy. Prevention was easier than treating people after they got sick, and Cuba’s system, he was sure, worked much better than the U.S. system.

He was quite up to date on U.S. policies and politics. He talked about Obama, about Nancy Pelosi, about the Republicans who were now on the rise. There was a TV in the corner, as there is in almost all Cuban households. He believed in work, he was happy with his lot, he seemed a poster child for the Revolution. His was the most beautiful place I’d seen in Cuba, and I told him so. We talked and talked, as Engels meandered about, paying little attention. Engels was the antithesis of this older campesino. He was a city dweller, a guy on the move, someone with little interest in such an elemental country life.

After a slow and tasty lunch, Engels and I drove back into the village so he could do some shopping. Las Terrazas was the home of Polo Montañez, the Cuban singer who died in a car crash in 2002, and Engels bought a pair of his CDs for fifty pesos nacionales, about two dollars.

On our way back to Havana, so we could talk in peace, I suggested we stop at a roadside restaurant for a late second lunch, and there I asked him directly what he thought of the Revolution. In what sounded like a standard line, he announced that he cared nothing about it—but then launched into a fifteen-minute diatribe about how impossible it was for Cubans to earn a living. The facts, I’d say, are with him. His sister was a nurse, he explained, and her salary was 200 pesos nacionales a month. This meant that Engels paid, for his two CDs, a quarter of her monthly salary. Housing for Cubans is cheap or free. Electricity, water, gasoline: all cheap. Some food comes with their ration cards, and fruits and vegetables are relatively cheap—but a beer is at least a dollar, perhaps two in a restaurant or bar. How do they do it?

They hustle. They put together an old Chevy, get a license and drive tourists around. They give dance lessons in their apartment. They open a small private restaurant. It felt to me that hustling was Cuba’s future, and I sympathized with both Engels and his sister. I like the music of Polo Moñtanez, I like to travel and I like having a laptop. I understand how Engels wants to live, because I live that way myself. Yet the one who has stayed with me, ever since that trip to Las Terrazas, is the older campesino, the self-educated and clear-spoken peasant who was so content with Fidel and the Revolution. His peaceful enthusiasm lifted me up. He seemed the embodiment of the people Castro was bent on helping—even as Fidel put thousands of homosexuals and dissidents in work camps and prisons.

It’s a complex country. There’s no one in my novel quite like either of the men I spoke with that day, but the tensions they embody are ingrained in the book. My real topics are love and family, but these can scarcely be divided from either the hustle of Cuba, or the peace.

Thank you so much to John for a really interesting insight into Cuba. Connect via his website and Facebook

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