busto, ” I explained, opening the hood in that purposeful way men have when we don’t know what we’re doing. “ Mi amigo es mecanico, ” said a fellow in the crowd. He and two of his friends grabbed the fenders and pushed the car down the block and around a corner. A big guy about my age came out of a house, shook my hand, and removed the car’s air filter. While the big guy probed the carburetor, the crowd went to work. One kid brought tools. Another kid sat in the driver’s seat and worked the ignition on the big guy’s instructions. Two young men rolled a barrel of gasoline up the street and tipped some into the tank. An old man came out of another house with a pitcher of water. He checked the level in the battery cells and filled the windshield-washer reservoir while he was at it. A second man removed the distributor cap and inspected the points. He pulled the spark-plug wires and looked into their sockets. A third man detached the fuel line and began sucking on it, spitting the gasoline into the street. The big guy took the fuel pump apart. The distributor cap man disappeared for a while and returned with some scavenged spark-plug sockets, which he spliced onto the old spark-plug wires. Other people checked the radiator and the oil. “I have an aunt in Union City, New Jersey,” said someone. That was the extent of anybody’s English. After an hour the big guy shook his head. It couldn’t be fixed. Which was fine with me. The car smelled like dead crabs, and I’d get another one from FlubaTour at the hotel. But now I had a problem in diplomacy. My crowd of mechanics didn’t want to take any money. I could, I gathered with some translating help from a cabdriver, pay for the gasoline. Gasoline was hard to get. But as for working on the car, well, they hadn’t fixed it. But they should get some money for their time, I said. They shrugged. They looked at the ground. They were embarrassed, time being the only thing everyone’s got lots of in Cuba. It was with negotiating effort worthy of Jimmy Carter fishing for a Nobel Peace Prize that I managed to get their price up to fifty dollars. Che Guevara believed that socialism would create a “New Man,” someone who worked not for personal gain but for the good of humanity in general. All the murders, imprisonings, harassments, and deprivations of Cuba have supposedly been aimed at creating this New Man— somebody who would act like the big guy. Except the big guy wasn’t one of them. He had a handmade sign hanging over his door: PARKING 24 HOURS I CARE FOR YOUR CAR I DO SOME REPAIRS ON BICYCLES MOTORCYCLES AND CARS , written, with obvious hope of future capitalist imperialism, in English.
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