gone straight to the Nacional’s bar and started drinking mojitos. This was Cuba- fan Ernest Hemingway’s second favorite drink, after the wake-up slug out of a hidden gin bottle. A mojito is made by mixing too much sugar with too much rum in not enough soda water and adding crushed mint leaves and lime juice. It sounds disgusting, and believe me, the next morning it is. The walls of the bar were decorated with black-and-white photographs of celebrities visiting the Nacional, all of them, except a couple second-string European intellectuals, before the Castro era. Bad rumba music boomed from the girlie show in the hotel nightclub. After five or eight mojitos I went to the john. If you were designing a socialist system—a nation in which everyone had the same social status—wouldn’t eliminating rest-room attendants be the first thing you’d do? And if I were designing a socialist system (what a hobby), I’d at least let the masses visit the hotel that they all supposedly own in common. But ordinary Cubans can’t enter the Nacional or its several acres of seaside gardens unless they are, for instance, rest-room attendants. A few Cubans manage to sneak in. When I went upstairs at 3 A . M ., there was a North American–type fellow in the elevator with a young woman, a girl, really, maybe sixteen years old. She was clean and clean-cut, soberly dressed, without jewelry or makeup, wholesome of manner and apparently a prostitute. At least the elevator operator thought so. He ordered her out. She was not a hard-looking girl, but a hard look crossed her face as she left. I rented a car for an exorbitant amount of money. The car-rental company’s manager spoke at length about Cuban-American friendship and how the citizens of both countries desired peace and mutual cooperation, “except for a few fascists such as Barry Goldwater and that Oklahoma bomber.” The manager seemed to have done pretty well in the revolution. “According to my Rolex . . . ,” he said, noting the time on my rental contract. And I got to hear about how he liked women with large bottoms. He gave me the keys to a dirty and dented Japanese sedan. It had a Toyota nameplate, but, looking at the fit and finish, I’d say it was manufactured by that Studebaker corporation our government is going to buy stock in if we reform the investment industry. I drove through Habana Centro. In 1991, Fidel Castro told Mexican journalist
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