story tower with a den at the top where Hemingway could go and think big thoughts. (“Where is that gin bottle?”) And in the toilet off the main bedroom, there’s a pickled lizard on a shelf. The lizard got into a fight with one of Hemingway’s cats. The cat won, but the reptile fought so bravely that Papa felt the need to immortalize it. The liquid in the container was low. It looked like somebody had taken a few nips out of the lizard jar. And on second thought, I’m not sure I have what it takes to be a major author. Hemingway’s widow donated the house to the Castro government. And Britain donated Hong Kong to China. Roberto was chatty, full of official, government-approved information. On the way to San Francisco de Paula, we passed the dirty, bedraggled worker housing that everywhere mars the Cuban landscape. The buildings are nothing but concrete dovecotes: six-story-high, hundred-yard-long stacks of tiny apartment boxes open on one end. They must have staircases, but I couldn’t see any. Maybe the government comes along at night and plucks up people and puts them in their pigeonholes. “The workers made these!” said Roberto. Though, if you think about it, workers make everything. “The government gives them the construction material,” he said. “Then they rent for twelve years. And then they own them!” In other words, you get a free home in Cuba as long as you build it and pay for it. When we drove into La Habana Vieja, Roberto pointed at a gutted hotel: “These are special worker brigades, doing this construction. They can work sixteen hours a day.” This must have been one of the other eight. Everyone was sitting around smoking cigarettes. “They get extra rations,” said Roberto, “a big bag with soap, cooking oil, rice, beans . . .” Roberto sounded as if he was describing the contents of a big bag from, say, Tiffany’s. “In 1959 there were six-thousand doctors in Cuba,” said Roberto, apropos of nothing. “Three thousand of them left after the revolution. Yet we are training new doctors. By the year 2000 there will be sixty-thousand doctors in Cuba!” But Roberto could only talk government talk so long. He couldn’t stay off the real subject, what was on every Cuban’s mind all the time: the economic mess. “You see these cabdrivers?” he said, pointing to a line of tourist-only taxis. “People need to earn dollars. These drivers may be doctors.” “In Cuba,” said Roberto, “anything you want is available—for dollars.” But people are paid in pesos, even if they work for foreign companies, which Roberto, in fact, does. The national tourist service isn’t owned by the nation
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