month for the two of them. Carlos and Donna also got two bars of soap a month, some months. There was virtually no meat, and it was inedible, besides. “All red meat has been nationalized,” said Carlos by way of explanation. Cuban nationalization does to goods and services what divorce does to male parents— suddenly they’re absent most of the time and useless the rest. Cubans can’t even get real coffee from the ration stores. They get coffee beans mixed with the kind of beans you get in tortillas. This tastes the way it sounds like it would and gives everyone stomach cramps. The few legitimate delights of Cuba—coffee, rum, cigars—require not just dollars but lots of dollars. And even this doesn’t always work. The Monte Cristo coronas I bought in a government shop had the flavor and draw of smoldering felt-tip pens. Carlos and Donna had had one other brush with the law. Besides committing the heinous crime of trying to move, they were also caught with dollars. Until mid-1993 it was illegal for Cubans to own dollars. Given what the peso was worth, that meant it was illegal for Cubans to have money. Carlos and Donna found sixty dollars tucked in a book they’d inherited. They dressed in their best clothes and, being fluent in French, tried to pass themselves off as foreigners at a beachfront hotel. “To get a decent cup of coffee,” said Donna. But the hotel waiter wasn’t fooled. Perhaps the two bars of soap a month was the giveaway, this being more than most French tourists use. As Carlos and Donna walked home, they were arrested. They escaped any serious jail time, maybe because of their foreign-diplomat connections. But they were threatened with six- or seven-years imprisonment. And a year later the block captain—the government snitch who resides on every Cuban street—called them in and threatened them with imprisonment again. “When dollars became legal,” said Carlos, “everyone was happy. I wasn’t so happy thinking about all those people who were locked up for years sometimes, just for having one or two dollars. “Still, I don’t have any hatred against the system,” he said. “But this is just for myself, for my own sake—I don’t want hatred to destroy me.” “When we couldn’t leave,” said Donna, “we were in despair for a while. Then we became involved in the charity work of the church, in their hospitals. This created new meaning.” “We’re happy now,” said Carlos. But they don’t have children. They felt too cut off from Cuban society for
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