Bootie Town

Question: Can you knit a pair of booties while sitting on a dock in a headwind, listening to War and Peace, and watching your son race sabots?

Answer: Yes, but they won't match.

New question:  What should you do about it?

A) Unravel and re-knit.  Hope the one you unravel and re-knit matches the one you didn't unravel, and not vice versa.
B) Knit a third bootie, give all three as a present, and say, "This way if you lose one, you'll still have a pair!"  Hope that the mother of the baby doesn't think you thought she was giving birth to a creature with three legs.
C) Go to Baby Gap.  Buy present.  Learn lesson.
D) Listen to Hank, who said they were fine just like this because "It's not like the kid is going to know."

Gray yarn with colored specks born, sheared, and spun by Bean Yarn in Massachusetts.  Brown yarn the result of similar efforts on Rancho Borrego Negro in Fallbrook.  Book written over the course of five years by Leo Tolstoy, then hand-copied by his wife for who knows how long, then translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky.

 Obviously, I'm listening to Hank, but Tolstoy (via his wife & Richard & Larissa) gets the last word:

"Their every action, which to them seems willed by themselves, in the historical sense is not willed, but happens in connection with the whole course of history and has been destined from before all ages."

--page 606

Fruition

As part of my attempt to change my life in 2012 and use or sell all of the fruit growing on our Fallbrook California farm, I turned this

into this

on Tuesday.

Kitchen alchemy! you're thinking.  How can I work this magic in my own home?

Or you're thinking, Here in Fomalhaut-b we'd never eat something that looked like that.

It begins with Martha Stewart, as so many delusions do.  Here's part (but not all) of the recipe for candied grapefruit peel printed in the January or February 2012 issue of the magazine (they've stopped printing the date on the pages I tore out, but if you have any citrus growing in your yard, buy the magazine).   

And here's a close-up of the results as shown in the centerfold:

If you scroll back up to the photo of my actual candied grapefruit peel, you may notice a slight discrepancy.  Instead of pastel sugared pommes-frite-y things, I got hard-crack lizard skins.  Naturally, I considered throwing the whole sticky mess away--which, you may have said to yourself already, is what one normally does with grapefruit peel--but then I would have wasted two cups of sugar, thirty minutes of tricky cutting, and 90 minutes of cooking gas, and anyway, to be frank, the entire experience reminded me of nothing so much as writing fiction.  During the writing phase, you imagine it all pale orange and sugar-dusted, something you'd serve with love and pride to strangers and friends, but when you stare at your book two months after publication it looks like burnt lizard skins on a tray.

So I tasted one.  It was sweet on the outside and bitter on the inside.  It was hard and crackly and roasty and dark, and it reminded me of a poem I learned when my mind was still pale orange and sugar-dusted, meaning I was a freshman in college and reading Stephen Crane, William Blake, and Dostoyevsky for the first time.  The lines that came to me were from "In the Desert" by Crane:

In the desert
I saw a creature, naked, bestial,
Who, squatting upon the ground,
Held his heart in his hands,
And ate of it.
I said, "Is it good, friend?"
"It is bitter--bitter," he answered;
"But I like it
Because it is bitter,
And because it is my heart."

I let my ruined candy cool on a wire rack, and then I smashed it to pieces and dropped it into a bowl of powdered sugar, which made it look nicely medicinal, and I made my husband try a shard.    "Like horehound candy," he said.

Even though I'd made something edible out of something I normally throw in the trash, I couldn't help wondering what went wrong.  I found that I still wanted the candied peel as it looked in the picture, as it had been promised to me by that phantasmagoria of kitchen dreams known as Martha Stewart.  Why hadn't the recipe warned me to keep an eye on that pot of peels in case things took, as they certainly did, a Dark Turn?  And isn't this what one would naturally expect when boiling sugar water for 90--yes, NINETY--minutes?  That things might, however low the heat has been turned, round the bend to Hard Crack stage?  I've dallied in my life with fudge and fondant.  I've loved and lost the odd batch of cooked French buttercream.  Most candy recipes suggest a thermometer and demand that you hover as you would hover over a child whose fever has reached 103 degrees, and even then, you never know.  You're in the hands of Fate.

So imagine my surprise when I looked on-line for Martha Stewart's candied citrus peel and found not the recipe I used but this one from the January/February 2010 edition of Everyday Food. Instead of the peel of one grapefruit and two cups of sugar, one is supposed to assemble:

• 2 grapefruits
• 3 oranges
• 4 lemons
• 1 1/2 cups sugar

Instead of cooking the peel for 90 minutes, one is urged to boil it for--is this not a gigantic difference?--ten minutes in water and then 8-10 more minutes in one cup of sugar mixed with one cup of water.   So we have the peel of nine fruits, not one, boiling in roughly half the sugar water for 20 minutes instead of 90.  

What could I do?  I had lots more grapefruit because that's the challenge here--insane quantities of citrus just dangling around like this is the Garden of Eden.  I had these lemons plus thirty more, and I had a basket of oranges, and I had a new bag of sugar.  So I prepared the Everyday Food quick-boil version, and I got soft, limp, sugary strips you can dunk in chocolate sauce and eat even if you have no teeth:

They're nice.  I'm enjoying them.  But I'm not going to lie.  It's the former version, the one that cooks too long and gets too dark (if my experience is any indication, and it might not be), that I recommend and hope to cook up again.  I ate the last shard of Jimmy Crack Grapefruit Peel while I was pecking away on my Untitled Work with the usual mix of hope and despair.  I asked myself, "Is it good, friend?" and I told myself it was bitter but I liked it.  Because it was bitter, and because it was my heart.

Preservation

I made a pint of Moroccan preserved lemons today.  Or rather, I started a process that takes 30 days, and if I did it right, in a month I can cook something in which preserved lemons are an ingredient.  I also prepared, in a frenzy of resolve, a glass of orange-lemonade to drink with my grilled cheese sandwich, a sliced orange salad, and a lime-orange-tangerine frappe for Sam. 

This is all the fault of a seven-year-old boy in New England.

The long, funny version can be read at A Raisin and a Porpoise if you scroll down to the post called "Like Lemmings," but the short version is that he visited California with his family over the holidays, and because his mother preserves, conserves, pickles, jellies, dries, and freezes the fruits and vegetables that grow on their farm, he was appalled at the general state of things in California, by which I mean the way lemon, orange, tangerine, pomegranate, persimmon, and--well, if you live here, just look out the window--trees tend to fill up with fruit, stay loaded with that year's crop, flower in the spring, and then produce another crop, which stays on the tree, and so on.

WHY DOES THIS HAPPEN?

a) We are lazy.
b) California is freakishly fecund.
c) Food is a full-time job if you make it yourself.

I used to think I could fix problem A, and I deluded myself about problem C.  When I married and moved to Fallbrook 18 years ago from Utah, I suddenly had at my disposal more than 200 Valencia orange trees and a swath of property on the east side of Tom's mother's house (together, we share three acres) called a "family grove."  The family grove and the Valencia trees were planted by the man who built Tom's mother's house more than 35 years ago, and it includes the following trees: Mexican limes, macadamias, loquats, kumquats, Asian pears, plums, three kinds of persimmons, pineapple guavas, strawberry guavas, Valencia oranges, lemons, Washington Navel oranges, and avocados.  This is probably not an exhaustive list, though I feel a little exhausted and sort of dazzled just looking at it.  Most of these fruits I couldn't even identify for the first decade that we lived there--I didn't know the strawberry guavas were edible, for example, until one of our boys ate one.  My focus, in the beginning, was on the seemingly endless supply of oranges and lemons.  Someone must want them, right?  

The obvious solution was a packing house.   Two hundred trees produce a lot of oranges.  And they're delicious.  So delicious that to drink a glass of juice squeezed from one of those oranges during the long, long season of ripeness (June to December!) is to feel both immortal and painfully sad that you're not immortal.  If you don't believe me, come over next summer, and I'll squeeze you a glass.

But 200 trees is a small crop in the current (and recent) agricultural world.  Our fruit, though sweet, was small.  Most packing houses said it was too much trouble to send a team of pickers to our measly little grove for a bunch of what are known in the trade as "ponies," and although you can hire pickers yourself, you can't pick the fruit and THEN sell it to a packing house.  So I tried to give it away.  I picked it myself and left boxes of oranges at the senior center, where they were grateful but frankly a little overstocked.  Lots and lots and lots of people in Fallbrook have exactly the same problem: too much fruit, too few mouths, and--let's be honest--too much convenient, cheap juice on the grocery store shelves.

One year, I called the center, and a group of elderly men came over to pick the oranges themselves, but my husband took one look at the ladders and the 80-year-old men and foresaw the crippling cost of litigation.  So I tried other crazy things.  I picked, washed, and transported (with Tom's help) boxes of lemons and oranges to sell to a man named Mahmoud Hassan, the owner of a Lebanese restaurant called Papa Hassan's in Orange, California, situated, of course, in Orange County, not far from where my husband grew up in--where else?--an orange grove.  Mahmoud was nice to the 26-year-old me, and he bought our oranges and lemons for a while, but it was semi-illegal to buy from a non-commercial supplier, and I couldn't help noticing, as I sat in a booth and ate roast chicken and tried black Turkish coffee and fell in love with an almond custard called "Heaven" that still haunts me, that our oranges and lemons didn't look good enough for his restaurant's display case.  Backyard fruit is usually misshapen and homely.  Only a small percentage of lemons grown in any given yard are perfectly lemon-shaped, with a nipple on each side, the way, somehow, the ones in the store always are.  Soon the arrangement simply ceased, and I let the lemon tree grow wild.

Meanwhile, I dreamed of making my own marmalade, of the labels I would paint myself and what I would call my glistening jam, of the farm stand where I would sell my hand-packed jars alongside bright pyramids of fresh fruit.  This was a long time ago, before you could print labels on your own four-color printer or use the word "artisanal" to describe food.  But besides the fact that I couldn't actually produce jam labels, had never cooked any sort of jam, and didn't own a commercial kitchen, there was one problem: I didn't even eat marmalade.  I never had.   Most Americans don't, actually.  They like strawberry jam and raspberry jam and grape jam, but not marmalade.  I proved this to myself the year that I finally taught myself to make it, which, not coincidentally was the year I finished writing a novel about a Scottish girl who emigrates to Kansas in the 1930's and can't find a single jar of lemon marmalade--Silver Shred, it's called--in this country.  I gave orange marmalade and Silver Shred as Christmas gifts, but not even my own family willingly ate it.  It sat in the backs of refrigerators, just another form of waste.

I learned that I could make more money by writing a long non-fiction article about our nearly worthless grove than we could make in four years from selling the entire too-small rapturously sweet orange crop, and although we did sell the crop that year, it was only because I was writing a story about it.  Local packing houses and horticulturalists needed the publicity because tract houses were replacing orange groves at quite a clip 18 years ago in San Diego County.  A few months after I finished the article, in fact, the packing house in neighboring Riverside County where I'd gone to watch the oranges tumble down conveyor belts into the hands of women who packed them in boxes closed down for good.  We became an organic farm for a while because there was a small organic packing house nearby that was willing to work with small acreages, but that didn't last for reasons I can't even recall.  It came down to the old problem: we were still too small to be commercial and too big to deal with the fruit on our own unless we gave up our careers and devoted ourselves exclusively to the farm, which would have caused us, without question, to lose the farm.

Here's how it works now: a very old and frail guy named Salvador comes with an even older, frailer guy.  They arrive episodically, unannounced.  You never know when you'll see them, or when they'll leave the $20 or $40 or $80 in cash.  They pick our oranges and tumble them into ragged cardboard boxes, which they stack into the back of an ancient pick-up truck and take to swap meets in Orange County.  Once, after Salvador had been absent for nearly a whole season and I felt, frankly, a little put out, it turned out that he'd fallen out of an avocado tree and broken his back.  This didn't stop him entirely, just slowed him down for a while.

What Salvador doesn't pick, we try to drink.  We pick two baskets of oranges a week, more or less, and cut the oranges in half and juice them on a stainless steel Breville juicer that inspires envy and devotion and also makes, to be truthful, a pretty big mess.  We pick the lemons, too, if we make the time for it, and we juice them on the same machine, and then I try to make enough cakes and scones and lemonade and avgolemono to use them all up.  On the 4th of July, Sam and Hank walk up and down the parade route with a Bubba Keg full of Fallbrook Lemonade and sell it for a dollar a cup. 

I'm telling you this because even so, if you drove by the house, you'd look at our trees and think, "Why don't they pick all that gorgeous fruit?  Why don't they eat it?  What's wrong with them?"

Mostly, we're lazy and overfed, but the depressing truth is I get worn out by the dazzling fertility of it all.  It's like the sunshine and the grass and the beach and the blue sky and the warm weather.  You move here and you think you'll never take winter sun for granted, never waste a minute of it, never stop feeling in awe, but you will and you do.  Then someone from far away notices, and you have to take stock.  You have to try again.   You make Calamondin Cake with what you thought were calamondins but are in fact kumquats.  (It's delicious, but it takes a loooooong time to squeeze those itty bitty naranjitas.)  You make Candied Kumquats.  Kumquat-Ade.  Strawberry-Guava Jelly.   Grapefruit Sorbet.  Silver Shred.  Unsellable novels.  And, this time, Moroccan Preserved Lemons, a thing I've never tasted but am so far enjoying as a sort of snow globe on my kitchen windowsill, a thing I'm supposed to shake once a day for the whole month.

If we like the taste of salted lemon peel, we could be in business.  I'm already planning the label, of how the colors will be so bright you can hardly look at the jar without feeling hopeful and inspired and maybe a little deluded, which is just how, on a sunny day in January, I like to feel.

Because the World is Hard

El Gran Teatro de la Habana (the building with the angels on top), as seen from the sixth floor of the Hotel Parque Central

Going to the opera in Havana is exactly like going to the opera anywhere.  You hear an absurd story told in a beautiful way by singers you can't understand unless you know the words already.

I don't know the words to "The Magic Flute," so if I'd been anywhere except Havana, I'd have Googled Papageno on the way to the library to find a book that summarized the story.

But for an American, using the Internet in Cuba is like renting a limo from a Russo-Spanish robot.  You have to plan it out in advance, accept that you understand none of the terms, and overspend in a currency that's not friends with your nation.  Plus, I'd decided Cuba was my chance to become the nostalgist I claim to be.  I'd brought a leather-bound notebook in which to write my penciled thoughts.

Since my chances for finding a well-stocked library with an English section on Mozart appeared slim, we had no choice but to decode the story as it was presented to us in very, very fast Spanish translated from the German and sung in the highest possible registers by Cubans.  It tells you a lot about my husband that he was sitting there at all.

First, the opera house.  Opera houses make me feel, in the best possible way, like a character in a 19th-century novel who's about to fall in love and die tragically.  The Gran Teatro, finished in 1837, is ideal since it's in a state of noble disrepair.  The chairs are red and soft, the elaborate wrought iron railings are a little rusty, the curtains are wrinkled and askew, the balconies are perfect for significant looks.  We were sitting in the sixth row, not a box, but still.  Things had a Tolstoyan mystique.

The production begins in Mozart-land--two girls dressed as boys in white wigs, knee socks, and pale satin sing unintelligible loveliness while pretending to look around them--and then, surprise! the stage fills with 20th-century urbanites imported from New York City via a high school for the arts in Spanish-speaking St. Paul.  They sing.  I don't mean they sing like sophomores at your neighborhood theater, where you went because the lead is your friend's daughter.  They sing like nine-year-old Russians do gymnastics, if you know what I mean.  The cute young Cubans dressed like scary stage New Yorkers surround a tenor with a messenger bag who's singing the pants off Spanish Mozart.  I conclude that he's an important character.

"El Yuma!" someone cries, pointing to the messenger-bag tenor.

This is the only moment, for the next three hours, of complete comprehension.  My husband speaks no Spanish and my Spanish is poor but we've read just enough about Cuba to know their slang for America is "La Yuma," a charmingly weird reference to a short story by Elmore Leonard that was first made into a Western in 1957 (two years before the revolution began) but that we know only from the 2007 film.

Three black women dressed in stiletto heels, trench coats, tight dresses, and high-altitude-Milan-Fashion-Week hair make all the other urbanites back away from the American tenor.  They're packing pistols and sexiness, and they want El Yuma for themselves.

But why?  Is he a capitalist they want to kill?  A tourist they want to protect?  Punish?  Are the sexy women Cubans or Americans?

The sexy women sing, and naturally, that wakes up El Yuma.  They sing and sing and sing, and he sings and sings and sings, and they show him what appears to be a sketch of a girl made by a 17-year-old boy daydreaming in geometry class.

Naturally, because this is opera, El Yuma falls in love.  He sings passionately to the pencil sketch.  Clearly, he has to have that girl.  He wants her.  He needs her.  We can't tell who she is, but the sexy women approve.  I comprehend a few words, translate them mentally while the cell phone of the people behind me goes off  (even in Cuba you can't escape this), and experience the thrill of knowing that the only solution, according to Sexy Women, is to visit La Reina de la Noche, which I know--thrilling epiphany!--means the Queen of the Night.

But while the sexy women are off talking to the queen, Papageno appears.  (Papageno sings his name a whole bunch of times is how I know.)  He's dressed like a peasant and is clearly the country mouse in this production.  Innocence in khaki.  He sings a bunch of stuff by way of explaining things to El Yuma, and El-Yuma sings back, none of which we understand, and then . . . 

The curtains part.  The sexy women with guns have brought the American to see the queen of the night, and the queen of the night is . . . the Statue of Liberty?

A soprano on a pedestal wearing a big pointy crown and sashaying about in a giant satin American flag sings a bunch of not encouraging but really authoritative stuff to El Yuma, who cowers.  What could this possibly mean?  The Queen of the Night = America, and America is singing to an endangered American in Cuba who's fallen in love with a Cuban girl?  Who, then, do the Cubans root for?  Did Fidel review the production plans for this first?

Suddenly, going to the opera in Havana is nothing at all like going to the opera in San Diego or an Edith Wharton novel.  We're not watching a 17th-century comedy in a 19th-century tragedy but political art put on by young people in a national company financed by, and we have to assume (don't we?) approved by Castro's people.  So the American, who's clearly the protagonist, would have to be punished, wouldn't he?  Could he possibly win his love and live happily ever after? 

There's nothing to do now but ask John Updike, who wrote a picture book called The Magic Flute that was published by Knopf in 1962 and is now sadly out of print.  We're therefore going to leave the opera house briefly, visit an American library, and whip back into our seats before intermission.

"Long ago to the land of Egypt," Updike explains, "a handsome young prince named Tamino came wandering.  This land was strange to him, and he was alone."

Tamino (El Yuma) meets a dragon (played by the mob of Cubans), runs away, and faints. "Here our story would end," says Updike, "if three veiled maidens had not appeared out of nowhere, waving shiny silver swords."   (Or pistols.)  While Tamino is unconscious, the veiled maidens in trench coats cut the dragon in two.  They moon over him, decide they absolutely must tell the queen, fight over who gets to do that and who gets to stay with the cute guy, and decide to take the news to her in unison, which makes for better musical numbers, anyway.

Enter Papageno, who pretends to Tamino that he, not those gun-toting chicks, killed the dragon and saved Tamino.  The Three Maidens hear Papageno's lie and put a padlock on his mouth.  They inform Tamino that they're the servants of the Queen of the Night (Symbol of American Immigration) and now we're right back where we started, in a Cuban opera theater 53 years into the revolution. 

What does it all mean?

I want to say that it means Cuban opera companies are all about free speech, but I can't.  During intermission, the man next to us, who was not taking calls on his cell phone, overheard our English conversation and spoke in English to us.  He was in his 70's, I think, very thin and soft-spoken, and was one of those people who actually does know all the words to The Magic Flute.

"Have you always lived in Cuba?" I ask.
"Always," he said.  He sounded proud and wistful at the same time.

He comes to the Gran Teatro all the time, and he sees every opera they put on.  He explained that many of the singers are young because they're still in school.  It wasn't normall, he said, for the productions to be in Spanish or in modern dress.  He'd been to Italy and to Mexico, and he once tried to get a visa to visit the United States, but it was denied because the agency feared he would simply overstay his visa and never come back.  "If I wanted to do that," he said, shrugging mildly, "I would have done it when I went to Mexico."  Someday maybe, he hopes.  Meanwhile, he recommended that we see a very famous Italian soprano who would be performing in a few days.

I wanted to ask him about the weird Pamina-prison guard scene.  When Pamina, the girl in the pencil sketch, is first shown on stage, a man in military dress unzips his pants in a clear prelude to raping her.  She faints, and the guard is driven off.  The oafish guard later sings of his loneliness and ignominy, but the story never redeems him in any way.  He's a brute and a rapist and he's driven off stage every time he appears.

I tried to ask the opera goer if this meant something--if it wasn't strange that the character who most represents a military figure is depicted as evil on stage.  But the opera goer didn't understand what I was asking, and we fell quiet.  There were too many symbols on the stage for me to ask him about, anyway--Sarastro, a tall, elegant black man dressed in red pajamas like a Chinese emperor, his surroundings and his priests decorated with the symbol of the sun and communism.  (The opposite, obviously, of the Queen of the Night, but does that make him Castro?)  The three girls dressed like Cuban schoolboys--los pioneros, school children are called--who save Pamina from a suicide attempt.

Real pioneros at a primary school in Havana

If only I spoke perfect Spanish and perfect opera.  If only I knew all the words.

The opera resumed, and then it ended after another hour, or, if you ask Tom, after three days, 13 hours and 46 years.  We walked out into the Cuban night, which smells of the fumes of old American cars.  The opera-goer asked if we liked the show.  "Yes!" we said.  The opera goer disappeared into Parque Central.  Havana lay under the stars like the ruined sister of Paris, a once grand and decadent city that looks as if it's been submerged in the ocean for hundreds of years, brought to the surface again, left to dry, and re-inhabited without repairs.  It's a necropolis in which no one is dead, where time stops and yet keeps going.

Only John Updike could explain to me whether America, Queen of the Night, or El Yuma, the lovelorn American tourist, was the hero in a beautiful incomprehensible Cuban opera.

You know the answer, don't you?  

Sarastro, symbol of day and light, lives in the Temple of Wisdom.  "Sarastro!" says Papageno, shuddering.  "He is great, but he is hard."

Fidel meeting Chavez on the wall of the library in a primary school in Havana.  "An Embrace Between the Cities of Bolivar and Marti" it says at the bottom.

Papagena, a character I haven't mentioned because she's not politically important, replies, "Sarastro is hard because the world is hard."

Picture of Fidel and Raul at a smaller primary school in Havana

Sarastro's prisoner is Pamina, the daughter of the Queen of the Night, an "unhappy woman," as Tamino/El Yuma puts it to Sarastro.  To free Pamina from Sarastro, El Yuma must pass three tests:  faith, patience, and courage.  He passes the tests, and Pamina is saved from her own despair by Cuban school children.  He and Pamina "walk through death's enduring night/ with gladness, free of fright."

They don't walk through death's enduring night in America.  The Queen of the Night, who loses her daughter forever, becomes "insane with fury."  She and her Sexy Veiled Maidens try to destroy the Temple of Wisdom, which is Cuba.  Her army melts "before the might of Sarastro as evening dew melts with the coming of the golden sun."

"For there is nothing in the world stronger than goodness and truth," Updike says, not talking about countries, of course,  just symbols of day and symbols of night and Mozart's silly, profound story.

I hope Knopf will allow me to print here the final words of the tale as Updike tells it:

"The Queen of the Night was not a wicked woman but she was a woman whose will had not yet been subdued to the will of a man.  Therefore she was like a proud ship sailing through a tempest without a captain, at the mercy of every wave and wind, all her sails fluttering.  Some say, indeed, that in time Sarastro tamed her fierce spirit with patient advice and harmonious music.  Perhaps in time they were married.  Perhaps Tamino played the magic flute at the wedding.  There are more fantastic things than this that are true."

Because I was there, because I saw it happen, I can't help inserting the words "United States" for "Queen of the Night" and "Cuba" for "Sarastro."  I think Castro would have like the opera.  But so did I.  I suspect there are more fantastic things than this that are true, but I can't think of any.

The Art of Socialism

If you know we just took a family trip to Cuba, you're probably wondering

a) if I have finally taken Sam's advice and am trying to write a novel with less description and more car chases, and
b) what socialism looks like 53 years into the revolution.

Some day, Sam, some day.  

Meanwhile, socialismo. 

My father fought in the Cold War (if fighting is the word for flying missions to check on Soviet maneuvers near Iceland), and then he fought in the Vietnam War, which you definitely would call fighting, so I was not one of those American children growing up in the 60's and 70's with liberal parents.  We drank Tang.  We went to church.  We hated communism and socialism even though I didn't and don't know the difference between those two things (although, to be frank, neither do most of the people writing answers on the Internet to that exact question).  The main thing that's in play here is that I viewed the prospect of visiting one of the evil empires both thrilling (we're going to a forbidden place!) and pointlessly depressing. For one thing, no one raves about socialist architecture, socialist cuisine, socialist pastry shops, or socialist art.  I was afraid most of Havana had been torn down and re-built to resemble the Salk Institute (see exhibit A).

Exhibit A

Why do I need to spend two days on a plane to see something I can see right here at home?  And as you know if you've done any traveling to Paris, New York, or Nebraska, it's not just what you think about the country.  It's what the country thinks about you.

Consider this dialogue from Ben Corbett's 2002 book This is Cuba: An Outlaw Culture Survives, where Corbett reports a conversation he had with Cuban men who gathered daily to talk about sports in Havana's Central Park.  Most of the 40 guys walked away when Corbett asked what Cubans think about tourism, which is clearly off-topic, but a few of them stayed.

"El turismo is a good thing," one said.  "Without it, Cuba could not survive."

"But we can't even sleep in our own hotels!  We used to be able to sleep in our own hotels, and now even if we have the money, it's for the tourists only."

At this point, even more of the men walked away, and one observed that the police had edged closer to listen in.  "They won't even let me through the door of that hotel," said the guy with an eye on the police, "but it's supposedly my hotel according to Castro.  Those taxis are mine.  The airplanes are mine, but do you see me using them?  It's a big lie."

Corbett explains that tourism became Cuba's lifeline after the collapse of the Soviet system in 1991.  Cuban imports dropped 80 percent (see pages 24-25), the regime started printing money, the Cuban peso lost value, and Castro told the 4th Party Congress, "The growth in income is considerable, and it's very important that everyone should understand how much Cuba needs tourism, even though it implies our making some sacrifices.  We'd like to go to all of the hotels, but this is a matter of trying to save our homeland, the Revolution, and Socialism, and we need those resources . . . "

Or as made into a pithy rallying cry on a wall in Habana Vieja:

Hank considers the revolution.

 Of course, Castro wasn't really talking about American tourists like us.  The American trade embargo is almost as old as the revolution, imposed in a partial way by Eisenhower in 1960 and strengthened and expanded every year for the next three years until John F. Kennedy not only made all commercial and financial transactions with Cuba illegal but also prohibited travel to the country.  (See J.A. Sierra's timeline of the embargo for details.)  This year, however, the Obama administration eased travel restrictions and expanded a category of legal travel called "people-to-people" visits.  That's what we, the McNeals, were doing in Cuba: we traveled there with a company called Cuba Cultural Travel that has a license to arrange what the law calls "purposeful visits."

The purpose, as defined by law, is "cultural exchange," but what are we exchanging?  Does the American government hope that visitors, such as my children, will return home more committed to capitalism and democracy?  Or is it like the "Big Blue Marble" on a bigger scale?  And what do we secretly or publicly hope the Cubans will take away from the exchange, besides money?  If certain arts groups have been told to show tourists what they're doing, and money thus flows from the Castro regime to those groups and generates art of all kinds, is there anything bad about that?  And are we seeing the truth (parts of Cuba as they really are, whether foreigners are watching or not) or a facade?

We were there for seven days, which was only long enough to formulate these questions, not to answer them.  I confess that I watched "Big Blue Marble" often enough as a child to have the song in my head while we were there, and to be truthful and mawkish, that's what I wanted our children to feel.  But if what we saw was merely a story certain Cubans were allowed to tell us, I can tell you that it was a rich, complex, and unexpected story.  I believed the artists, teachers, doctors, and curators were saying something true that they wanted to say to someone, anyone, everyone, just like the artists, teachers, and doctors I know here.  And for a nostalgist like me, there was no end of uncomfortable evidence that socialismo is a better way (I didn't say a painless way) to stop time.

So here I offer just eight things I loved about Cuba, in the form of glimpses that I hope to have time to write about in more detail some day. 

1.  Fusterlandia

Jose Fuster has spent the last 30 years transforming an ordinary house in the Havana suburb of Jaimanitas into an elaborate mosaic fantasy. 

Sewing machine art!  Tile trees!  It's a crazy place, and I mean that in a good way.

Not sure what the story is behind lady-in-blue and Mr. Cowboy but I think it's a romance.

Not your every day pool area.

Viva Cuba, indeed. 

2. Memorializing Hemingway: The Hotel Ambos Mundos and Finca Vigia

Hemingway wrote two minor works in the Ambos Mundos hotel--The Green Hills of Africa and Death in the Afternoon--but the shrine is staffed daily by an articulate Cuban Hemingway scholar in heels and a business suit.  My favorite part of her presentation was "His wifes were American, and his mistresses were international."   

Le Typewriter

In the bookcase beside the holy typewriter, you can view a Finnish copy of A Farewell to Arms, a Norwegian copy of Sneen Pa Kilimanjaro, a German copy of Die grunen Hugel afrikas, and a Ukrainian translation of The Fifth Column, which illustrates the general Cuban effort to make the room more interesting.  As cultural exchanges go, I would say that Cubans have much to teach us about memorializing writers.  When I went looking for the Key West hotel room where Wallace Stevens stayed for 20 winters, hoping for an enshrined typewriter or ink pot, not a single staff member even knew who Wallace Stevens was.

In February of 1939, Martha Gellhorn joined Hemingway in Havana, and she began looking for a house.  She found a newspaper ad for a 15-acre property called La Finca Vigia or The Watch Tower, shown here from the front steps.  

The Watch Tower.  Hemingway's study is on the top floor.

Interior of the study in the tower.

One of the many perfect things about the museum is the fact that you're not actually allowed into the house.  You, the peeping Tom, peer into private rooms through open windows and doors. 

These, however, are the only books for sale at museum store.  I didn't love this part, obviously, but you can buy Hemingway's books at used bookstores in Havana (shown in the next two photos).

Paris Was a Fiesta sounds like a great book, doesn't it?

 3. Tobacco plantation, Valle de Vinales

This is Paco's house.  Paco has been growing tobacco in Vinales for decades.  He and his wife were born and raised on farms that merged when they married, so he's been here all his life.  He still uses oxen to plow, and he still dries tobacco on poles in the barn.  When his family served us lunch on the patio, we ate on tables set inside a picket-fence gazebo near the turkeys, pigs, chickens, cats, and dogs.  On the menu: local coffee, local green papaya canned by Paco's wife and daughters, local (really, really local) smoked chicken, homemade root chips, buttered manioc, and hand-raised, hand-dried, hand-rolled (right at the table) cigars as discussed at the beginning of this post.  In other words, Paco is at the forefront of the farm-to-table movement.

Paco's farm.  The limestone hills are called mogotes.

Many of these excellent photos were taken by our friend and guide, Catalina Sykes.  Note that Hank (green shirt) and Alexa and Mikey are drinking non-American colas.

Paco himself

The tobacco-drying barn.

Paco's family

Inside the barn.  Sam is no doubt thinking about the lessons he heard recently in his science class about the dangers of nicotine.

4. Transportation is a more colorful and difficult affair in Cuba.

If you drive the highway between Vinales and Havana, you'll pass not just one of these buggies but one every three minutes.  Horses are still a common means of transportation there, which depending on your point of view, is either exhilarating
(my view) or just plain sad (according to people who probably understand the effect of oxen and horses on GNP.)

I lost count of how many teams of oxen I saw in the region of Vinales. 

Havana is filled with home-made bicycle carts.  (It's also filled with vintage American cars and old Russian cars, of course.)

Not just two on a bike but three.

5. Restore, recycle, and re-use, as we're fond of saying.

There's no doubt that if we had a contest to see who really cares about recycling, Cuba beats us.  Even the street sweepers do it with style.

6. Cuban laundry lines.

7. The Necropolis de San Cristobal Colon

These pictures show only one of the many elaborate memorials in this cemetery: the grave of Amelia Goyri de Hoz, also known as La Milagrosa or the Miraculous One.  The legend says that Amelia died in childbirth in 1901 and was buried, according to custom, with her stillborn baby at her feet.  When her sarcophagus was later opened (also customary, since skeletons are moved to smaller boxes after two years to make room for the deceased), Amelia was holding the baby in her arms.  Amelia's tomb has since become a place of pilgrimage for childless women.

Those whose prayers have been answered return to the grave with engraved marble thank you notes like these.

This gives you a sense of how many prayers are offered here.

This one says, "Amelia, thank you for curing my grand-daughter."

8. Community Center of Puerta de Golpe

In Puerta de Golpe, a town of 7,000 residents about an hour from Havana, we visited a community center where children can learn to make art.  It was started by an artist, who initially held the free classes in his houses, but as the project has grown, the house has been remodeled to house a gallery downstairs while he and his wife live upstairs.  The classes are taught in structures built of wood and palm fronds.  Behind the various studios is a huge organic garden full of vegetables and flowers.

The artist who founded the school

The sign says that classes offered include music, ceramics, dance, theater, painting (in projects such as those shown here), and knitting.

 
 

The Poetry Corner 

The librarian, his lending library, and samples of children's work.  On the shelf I found a book that I was happy to see in a primary school in Havana, too.  Mujercitas, a translation of Little Women. 

I'll end on the patio of the Puerta de Golpe community center, where Mikey, Alexa, Sam and Hank are sampling fresh guava and papaya, and where the world honestly seemed as simple as the Big Blue Marble song told me it was.  I'll loan you my copy of Mujercitas, we'll do a little papier mache, and then we'll eat some fruit.

That this could happen at all seemed a miracle, almost, something I hope my father, looking down on us from a place that seems as far as Fomalhaut b, would appreciate.