mile away, in an entirely different section of town, a policeman walked out into the street, flagged me down, and wrote me a ticket for the transgression. There’s a space provided for this on the rental-car papers, and the fine comes out of the deposit. The traffic-cop omniscience was creepy enough, but I happened to be on my way to visit a dissident couple. Well, “dissident couple” is a little dramatic. They hadn’t actually dissented about anything. They just wanted to leave Cuba. They went to Sweden and applied for asylum. But the generous Swedish refugee policy does not extend to refugees from progressive, socialist countries to which Sweden gives millions of dollars in foreign aid. They were sent back. And now they were in permanent hot water. They lived in a shabby tower block with a ravaged elevator, piss stink in the stairwells, bulbs filched from the lobby light fixtures, and even the glass stolen from the hallway windows. And in Havana, this was a good place to live. The apartment had been inherited from a parent, a parent who had been an official in the revolutionary government. “Come on Friday,” the couple had said. “We don’t have power outages then.” There were five rooms—small rooms (you couldn’t flip a pancake in the kitchen without standing in the hall), but five rooms nonetheless—and a bathroom (when the water was running). And not too many of the louvers in the jalousie windows were broken. Carlos and Donna—not their real names of course—come from families that had been prosperous (families that now, incidentally, won’t speak to them). The low, narrow-walled living room was filled with too much big, dark furniture from a more expansive age, like a Thanksgiving dinner for twelve put in the microwave. I felt claustrophobic although I was five stories in the air and could see the ocean shining in the distance. Carlos and Donna are not allowed to hold jobs, but they each speak four languages and so are able to get work as guides and translators with the various groups of academics, philanthropists, conference delegates, and film-festival attendees who are forever traipsing through Cuba looking for international understanding and a tan. “You have to earn dollars anyway here,” said Carlos. “‘Dollars or Death’ is what everyone says.” He showed me their ration books, which have categories for everything from tobacco to clothing. So far in 1996, only one liter of cooking oil per family had been available. Eggs were plentiful at the moment—fourteen a
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