dogs. All the dogs were old and small, the kind kept by rich women for purposes of baby talk. Maybe the dogs had been left behind when the rich women fled the revolution—thirty-seven-year-old miniature schnauzers forced to pawn their costume-jewelry collars and have their fur clipped at barber colleges. The dogs didn’t look happy. The kind of meat that goes into dog food would be eaten by people in Cuba if there were any of it to be had. The people didn’t look happy, either. There was an edge and an attitude among the idling mobs in Havana. They gave out lots of hard looks, grabbed their testicles, and made those Latin sounds—hisses and sucky lip noises—especially at foreign women. But when I actually met the Cubans—and I met a lot of them at a gas station after I drove the Toyota into a big hole, causing a front wheel to fold like a paper plate with too much potato salad on it—they were swell. They were pleasant, helpful, cheery, polite. They all had relatives in Union City, New Jersey. And an American woman told me that when she went out alone, the noises ceased. Or nearly ceased. The men grabbed their testicles in a formal and courtly manner. The gas station was one of the few visible instances of anybody doing anything for a living. The Cuban government has not only eliminated the concept of unemployment, it’s eliminated the concept of jobs, if you don’t count begging or pestering strangers to buy “genuine Cohiba cigars” that “a good friend of mine sneaks out of the factory.” Either the fellow who sneaks Cohibas out of the factory has an unusual number of good friends, or Cohiba-sneaking is Cuba’s largest industry. There was even less honest economic activity on the streets of Havana than on the streets of Stockholm—no roving food vendors or knickknack merchants, and only occasional kiosks selling cigarettes and newspapers, which they were mostly out of. At a few prescribed spots in the city, there were arts-and-crafts markets. The arts and the crafts looked like they were made by accountants, lawyers, university professors, and other famously unhandy types who’d been out on the patio with dull tools trying to turn pieces of scrap wood into Che Guevara wall plaques and cigarette boxes with CUBA IS BEAUTIFUL carved on the lids in a desperate attempt to get U.S. dollars. The dollars were provided by a few tourists watched over by more than a few tourist police. Membership in this august branch of the constabulary being proclaimed, in English, on the breast pockets of their uniforms. The tourist police did not, however, enforce fashion law. The tourists wore NBA balloon
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