Dreams of Blackberries and Music: Cuba Pt. 2

It’s important to have blackberries with you when you go over a waterfall. When I think of all the waterfalls I have gone over in my life, for most of them, I have not had so much as a canoe.

In Cuba, it is illegal to surf; it is the kind of thing you would learn if you wanted to move to another country. Despite the hurling waves, they do not surf. In the town of Matanzas, vultures circle the city.

I see a driver who has locked his keys in his cab. Seven Cuban men try to help open the door with wrenches and screwdrivers.

“Excuse me,” I say in Spanish. “Before we updated cars, American thieves used hangars.”

Someone runs for a hangar and jimmies the car through the window. I find it odd that this knowledge has never crossed the water.

We have a few more days. The Saturn Caves. Swimming. Writing.

In Varadero, an Afro-Cuban woman in a red dress spoke to me in the street, her face full of light. She was on crutches and had one leg. She asked how I was doing. I thought, there is a story about you, and in that story, you are the hero of your family.

I read Samatha Harvey’s Orbital. Italian writer Italo Calvino saw Cuba as the moon, swinging away from the earth, and the people of Cuba could not climb back for the moon cheese. That’s the Cuba I find. There is not an endless supply of moon cheese. Many go without necessities.

We are greedy monsters, we humans. Where I sit here in my room, I hear Cuban music. I can buy expensive water. I can take a taxi to the ocean.

The man at the hotel who gave me free Wi-Fi says he has been to Florida.

“Dios,” he says. “What a country.”

“The US?”

“Miami.”

People say that Cuban culture and civilization is frozen in time. That would imply that it is rocking in the cradle of the revolution. No one is rocking this cradle. I think of Cubans setting out to the sea for the ninety miles to Miami.

We visit the Saturn Cave, and I go for a swim; the cave is huge, the water fresh. It is like swimming in an underwater cathedral. I am the only one swimming, and there are only a few people in the cave. We visit the Cuevas de Bellamar and go all the way to the back alone. They insist on a guide following us down, but we are left to explore, and we adventure to the tiny crawl space at the back of the caves where ancient people journeyed.

We climb tiny stairs to the top of a church. From up there, we can see the large scoop that is the bay of Matanzas, the deepest bay in Cuba, and the massive ships in its harbor.

When we return, it is lunch, then back to writing. We have enough money for a single meal a day. Mark has a small, thin pizza, and I eat a small bowl of rice with sliced cucumbers. For dinner, we will each have a cup of coffee. For breakfast, I have coffee and guava slices.

What you envision of a country you have never visited is your imagination. I thought I would find authentic Cuban food, like fried plantains, everywhere we went. But every bit of food is controlled within the black market, and all most people can afford is pizza, a cheap brand of chocolate ice cream, and steamed rice.

When I left the Farm, I imagined myself picking fruit and training horses. That’s all I had ever done. Why would I change? For a while, I kept doing those two things. I kept horseback riding and picking fruit. Even when I got to California, I took my children to pick apples and made sure they had horseback lessons. It seemed important.

This year, I want to go and pick peaches at David Mas Masumoto’s farm. I want to make jam with my kids like I did in the past.

On the Farm, we never had peaches. It was too cold for peaches. We had apples and pears. When we went to Vancouver Island, there were cherries. We had never seen cherries; it was amazing to see them falling into our laps. When we got home, we picked blackberries and made blackberry jam and blackberry juice. I dreamed of blackberries. In my dreams, I was carried by large people to the edge of the world where there was a waterfall, and they threw me over, but I had blackberries.

It’s important to have blackberries with you when you go over a waterfall. When I think of all the waterfalls I have gone over in my life, for most of them, I have not had so much as a canoe.

The Cubans don’t have so much as a surfboard, but music is the lifeblood of the island. Almost anyone can participate in the making of music by playing an instrument, dancing, or singing. When you don’t have much, as Cuban poet Nicholas Guillen said in “Guitar,”

They went out hunting for guitars

underneath the full moon.