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Excerpt from:

Havana Ball

        by Mark Plimsoll   


Chapter 40.     FIDEL'S DIGS
              We hail a cab to take us back into Old Havana. This far to the south of the United States, at three o'clock in the middle of the afternoon, the sun barely begins to roll its pointed straight-down stare and soften, to flirt with the earth and elongate shadows. In a couple of hours the light will take on that special golden glow that inflames the ardent photographer, quickens his pulse and infects him with the madness to accomplish some photo gravura before the sun spins away below a red horizon. For now, the blue sky melts down to thick white cream above the green of a tropical winter, with dry slivers of silver accenting grasses and whole trees adding shades of brown that tuck into the shadows around the broadleaf evergreens. The wide spread trees that almost touch each other along the road in this previously upscale community now luxuriously shade these same thoroughfares that once led the owners of casinos and factories to the source their opulence.
              Our young cabby looks like an Italian boxer turned businessman. He wears an attractive long-sleeved shirt and a golden wristwatch. We develop a rapport with him, enjoying his distinctly unpatriotic view of his own country.
              "See these houses here? The houses of the rich. They are still the houses of the rich. People can rent them from the government, and people still live there, but not Cubans."
              "The revolution is incomplete?"
              "Yes, incomplete. Everyone should live in a house like this!" and he laughs, we three understand each other. Any reasonable person knows opulence when they see it. These fancy architectural fantasies resemble little square Spanish Castles nestled amid a private wood lot, even though insulated by a little strips of lawns and trees they still exist side by side. Some sit stately beyond a circular drive, as if to welcome visiting dignitaries and their chofer-driven limousines. Many of these fantasy castles use iron gates instead of a moat.
              "So does Fidel live in one of these houses?"
              Our driver pretends to act surreptitious, shushing us with his finger to his mouth. "Fidel! He has his own block. It is not very far from here, but there are guards. You can not see it from the road."
              "But you know where it is?"
              "Yes, everybody knows where it is. But nobody wants to go there! No really, it's OK. I am not a member of the government, even though I am a communist, and every communist should be a member of the government!"
              "A government for the people, by the people, and of the people."
              "Yes, like your United States Government! Ha ha ha !"
              So we talk him into driving around Fidel's magic kingdom. He cautioned us as we approached not to stare, to keep looking around and talking. There was a large field ahead and to our left.
              "See, in those trees, there are guards. They are watching us right now, so don't stare. Turn your head and look around. I will drive you completely around his house, and you will never see it. All you will see is a field, and some trees. And then I will drive you where you want to go. Away from here!" and then he laughed nervously.
              He was right. We never saw the house, yet a couple of blocks in any direction through tree-covered streets the homes of the previously rich and powerful sprawled in a nostalgic luxury. Fidel's digs lay deep within his own isolated block, at the center of a little guarded forest with men hiding in watchtowers among the trees, guns at ready. The Philosopher King in his peaceable kingdom, imprisoned by his vulnerability and paranoid unwillingness to ever accede power.
              Is Fidel afraid of the United States Government, the Miami Cubans, or his own people? Maybe a rival political ideology, a general in the Cuban Army, or even a relative or a Narco-traficante druglord that might want to accumulate the entire island of Cuba as a personal trophy wait to fill his shows, but for now Fidel remains on the lookout for powder in his shoes that US agents once put there to make his beard fall out.
              Of course there are no Druglords in Cuba, they want everyone to believe. When I look at a map, and theorize drug routes from the Andean region of South America to the Latin and Rich center United States, Miami Florida, I find Cuba right in the middle of the transport lanes whether I go by plane or boat.
              We tipped our young cabby as handsomely as he was handsome in his treatment of us, shook hands as we handed him some, and hoped to meet again someday when we could actually go on a tour of Fidel's house and try to glimpsethe private life of a self-made King.
        41.     RETURN OF THE VAMPIRES
              After a brief visit to the International University of Fine Arts, where Ron and I met a beautiful blond American dancer from Santa Barbara who introduced us to her Salsa dance instructor and his master conga drummer (who immediately offered to sell me his old drum for $150), we take a taxi to Havana Vieja (Old Havana) for the mid-afternoon photo opportunities.
              There we run into a couple of our own Caravanistas, Julie and Viv, pausing to examine the Giant Digital Watch spanning one of the main commercial streets. The giant watch doesn't seem to work, that's obvious even in this surreal darkness. A city with few streetlights. Together we explore the trinkets around the Cathedral Plaza, a mixture of exotic beaded brassieres, carvings of dark Acana wood or Cuban ebony featuring columns of writhing breasts and female faces, Folkloric dolls, paintings of dark repressive landscapes on wood.
              Judy and Viv are in wonderland. They love our first excursion away from our official chaperones, and Viv speaks just enough Spanish to interact with the natives. She is a Cuban-American from California, a large and tall woman with a lion's mane of jet-black hair framing a wide face with beautiful large black eyes. Culturally remote from the concerns of other Cubans, she seems a thoroughly indoctrinated California girl, playfully man-watching with Julie, a short, plain middle aged woman in glasses who sparkles with the wit and witticisms of the sexual frustrated. They are laughing most of the time.
              "Did you see that? Oh ho ho HO!" squeals Julie, grabbing Viv's arm. Ron and I turn around wondering, to see Viv's face locked into a wide-eyed smile. Then she turns and looks back through the people strolling down the street. A big young Cuban man in a gray sweater with a heroic Zorro mustache dividing his intense face, turns around to glimpse Viv from behind.
              Ron doesn't see it. "What was all that about?"
              Judy continues teasing Viv, "Oh, it was like a dream, two souls pass on the street, their eyes meet, and then they are swept away on the currents of this river of humanity!"
              "We better walk behind you girls, so we can get a peek as to how these Cuban boys operate." So we follow the American women down the street, and before we get two blocks down the street, Viv lets out with "Oh my God!" and turns around. Her face shows mock horror, her body stiffens against Julie's, who is laughing and trying to turn her around to meet the man of her dreams, who must have run around the block to get in front of us again.
              They talk, sort of, and we all introduce each other. His name is Lazaro, and he understands my Spanish better than Viv's, but his Havana accent is so heavy, so many slurred words and dropped consonants, that I understand only a quarter of what he says. He might even be illiterate, for he chooses to repeat the same unintelligible phrase over and over instead of rephrasing for the benefit of non-native speakers like myself. He doesn't seem to have a clue as to how he could make himself intelligible to us!
              We continue exploring the city, with Viv occasionally calling for me to interpret something else Lazaro has lustily intoned with his deep, sonorous voice. Unfortunately, it sounds foreign to me without some of the fricative consonants to give me some spelling clues. He usually says something totally obvious and boringly mundane, yet Viv is always thrilled to hear it. They seem genuinely attracted to each other. He promises to take us to the square in front of the Cathedral.
              When we reach the throngs of tourists shopping among the peddlers in the square, I decide to listen to the live music on the patio of a restaurant while Ron takes off to shoot photos. Viv and Julie depart to explore with Lazaro, I tell them that Lazaro will take good care of them, to which Julie excitedly replies "Oh yes! I bet! But how do we get rid of him later?"
              The patio is just the teaser for a luxurious restaurant inside the building which takes up the inner courtyard. A small bar outside coddles customers between potted plants overflowing along the railing. The exotic and lithe waitresses, obviously hired for their beauty, deliver orders for drinks to the bartender, who gets a man to deliver them. The band consists of five Cuban men dressed in light shirts playing stand-up bass and a couple of guitars, and various percussion instruments, congas, calabash, small bongos.
              After the third song, I get the feeling someone is watching me, and to my left, peering over some potted fan palms, is the black woman named Miracles from four nights ago, the one that snuck up beside me like a vampire. She's staring at me, I see her, she stares back stone-faced. I casually look elsewhere, and feel her hot gaze on the side of my neck, hot laser-fangs darting through the potted ferns. She's still standing there when I glance over, but this time she pretends to be looking elsewhere, then she transfixes me again, her baleful caramel eyes staring unblinking unwavering over the Arabian hook of her nose into my jugular vein. She doesn't go away, so I motion to her with my hand to come over and sit at my table.
              We talk, and I ask her what she does for a living, she says she's an accountant. I learn that she has two daughters in Santiago, the city where she grew up, and that she was recently engaged to a Spanish man but now it is over and she feels betrayed. She had prepared to join him in Spain, in fact looked forward to it, but something was not in order. First it seemed her papers on the Cuban side were amiss, then he seemed to be fudging the issue after all those trips to Cuba to prepare his life for his new wife.
              I ask if she remembers me, she looks startled for a minute, says no, and when I describe our meeting in the dark streets of inner Havana Vieja, she seems genuinely embarrassed.
              Her recovery was smooth and flawless, a tribute to her self assurance and intelligence. "Bueno, so we have met before. It was meant to be then. I'm glad to have met you again."
              She really sparked my interest in responding to my questions about the Cuban health services when she rattled off a list of ailments and infirmities she says are directly related to the government's policies. This is the first time I had heard criticism of Cuba's health system fro a Cuban, and she had facts, figures and statistics about infants with infirmities and adults suffering maladies brought on by nutritional deficiencies.
              I whipped the pen out of my pocket and took out my folded sheet of typewriter paper to take some notes, and she quickly pushes my hands down below the table and into my lap. "No no no! No writing, not while you're talking to me. Someone might see us!"
              "OK. No writing, but tell me again, slowly this time."
              "The government doesn't tell us about all the diseases that are going around because of bad nutrition or bad water. Sometimes there are conditions that the babies have, because the mothers haven't had the right foods to eat." She goes on again with the list of maladies unfamiliar to me, at least in Spanish.
              Miracles is from Santiago de Cuba, and I can understand her Spanish. She doesn't mumble like the Habaneros and Miami Cubans, and she intelligently and carrefully chooses her words and grammar for a non-native speaker. She doesn't repeat the same sentence if I don't understand it the first time, she re-phrases it, using simpler words and syntax.
              Many of the women roaming around the Plaza and sitting at tables near us are from Santiago. She invites one or two to join us occasionally. They eventually get bored and leave after noticing Milagros chatting away. Most of these girls have very little to say, even when Milagros talks to them. She seems to know them all, they seem to respect her, as if she's the surrogate mother on the block.
              Ron joins us at the table and we order Mojitos, a delicious drink made of rum, lemon juice, and a sprig of fresh mint leaves.
              One girl at the next table takes a liking to Ron, or at least has no other prospect to divert her attention at the moment. Milagros invites her to join us. Luz, 'Light', is her name. I'd noticed her before because she looked like a Mexican, short, compact, with the muscular and meaty legs of a soccer player. Her hair, although short, formed a black beehive that framed her face as she chewed her gum behind deep cherry lips. Milagros introduces them, and Ron smiles at me with his tight dry lips, implying a shrug. "I really don't speak enough Spanish to do any good," He says.
              "So who's interested in doing good? Maybe she'll teach you something."
              "Undoubtedly. I don't doubt that for a moment!" He leans back in his chair and reaches for his drink to hoist the glass, mint leaves swirling around the ice cubes suspended in his Mojito. "There's so much to learn, so little time."
              We start to join his toast, and Luz reaches for a drink she does not have. We start laughing, Ron looks around to hail a barmaid and remedy the situation. Luz pulls an d tugs her tight miniskirt across her thick muscular thighs and succeeds in moving it down an eighth of an inch. She moves with quick tight motions that remind me of chickens, or professional athletes, which is what she is. Horizontal.
              Luz, also from Santiago, speaks Spanish that I can understand. We try to talk with Luz a little, but Milagros doesn't seem too interested in including her in our discussion. Soon I begin to see why. She's a hard-line communist. She also doesn't seem very intelligent, and like religious people, uses her ideology to censor others and avoid complex thinking about issues.
              Judy and Viv find us a short time later, and Viv still has the man named Lazaro draped on her arm. It was lust at first sight for the both of them, but there's a problem. Even though he has promised to help us deliver packages from the US to Cubans here in Havana, no one can understand his thick Havana accent, the Miami Mumble, the un-enunciated Spanish of Latin America's under-educated or chic slumming enunciations.
              No one except Miracles.
              We spend the entire afternoon walking with Miracles and Lazaro across Havana Vieja, to visit three Cuban homes and drop off letters or 'care' packages from friends or lovers in the States. One apartment sits high above the city, with a corner room of cantilevered windows with a small bar and a set of stools. This penthouse's current resident, a black woman, is the daughter of a doctor who even had the privilege of traveling abroad. There is art and sculpture from Angola. Most of the apartments enjoyed as a central element a television and they see a lot of dubbed Hollywood movies. Usually I could find a large tape-deck short-wave radio made in Russia, which makes me think they have access to information from abroad.
              Later when I try to listen with my short-wave radio, I find the same strange noise at several places in several bands. It seems to me like jamming. I have never noticed the same noise duplicated on different frequencies anywhere else but Cuba, and although highly unusual, inconclusive. Could be an artifact of their power grid, or some factory.
              The population of Cuba has more than doubled since 1959 and they cope with expanding families by dividing the 14 foot tall colonial rooms with plywood, installing a floating floor and a small spiral staircase to provide access to the new bedroom. There are also signs on some dwellings, like "Permuta 2 X 1" which our translators explain as house trading, two smaller houses for one larger, another way Cubans cope with the changes in family size due to marriages, births, and deaths..
              Cubans think nothing of walking kilometers at a time, even though the public transportation costs pennies. When the average income is less than $10.00 (Ten US dollars) a MONTH, you really count those pennies.
              So we cover 'Kilometros' through the strange cement and stone Colonial city, it's gray facades turning into the tan and black of ancient mushroom skins hiding rectangularly under the penetrating, un-deflected and in disrepair, assault of time and the elemental forces of accumulated dirt, decay, and lack of maintenance.
              Miracles and I walk arm in arm, as do Ron and his new friend, but they can't communicate easily. Miracles is singing to me in a sweet thin voice, more Arabic than black, the songs of Cuba's heritage and genius for music, of it's heart and soul. The names of songs, composers, and artists come easily to her, a vast panorama of music which she clearly enjoys sharing, gracefully singing what she remembers, explaining the lyric and condescendingly patting my arm to acknowledge my ignorance or reinforce the quiet rhythms of her lovely voice.
              Our footsteps crunch through the layers of rubble flaked off the buildings, searching for the obtuse Cuban addresses that use the strange notation of "between this street and that" which allows for different addresses on the same street, in different sections of the city. Both Lazaro and Miracles have their ideas about where the addresses are located, but they both share the strategy of consulting the local denizens.

        42.     PALADAR: BEYOND HAM AND CHEESE SANDWICHES
              A Brazilian soap opera that aired in 1992 on Cuban television captured the nation's imagination. A destitute woman sells sandwiches at the beach and builds a prosperous chain of fast food restaurants. And so the name "Paladar" was given to the surreptitious restaurants that sprang up to cater to the influx of tourists allowed in by Fidel's desperate need for more cash since the fall of the Soviet Union. Today it seems like people are more apt to pronounce it "Paladar" or literally 'palate' as in 'he has a good palate for expensive foods'.
              Throughout Havana Vieja and the more upscale section known as Vedado, Cubans approach the tourist to ask if you need a taxi, cigars, a Paladar for good food, drugs like marijuana or cocaine (after they reach a certainty that you won't turn them) or would you care to buy some of that new Wonder Drug PPG made from sugar, and they always know enough English to say 'Good for sex' while making some interesting hand motions.
              Sometimes a particularly determined Cuban, and most of them have nothing else to do, will just hang around for hours, all day. One silent twelve year old girl hung around one of our male 'Pastors' who was older than seventy. They couldn't communicate, but he didn't mind. She wasn't bothering him, he said.
              Whjile out and about in Old Havana, we would expect that once or twice an evening a middle-age Cuban woman, dressed in conservative Catholic black and white clothing, would furtively approach, politely ask for our time and tell us about her Paladar restaurant in her own private home, listing exactly what will be served tonight. Occasionally they have the address written down, but there is a severe shortage of paper. One woman handed me an address written on a prescription for penicillin. The 'Government' began licensing Paladars last August. They pay a monthly tax of between 350 to 1,500 Cuban pesos, equivalent to about $40 American.
              They don't have menus. Prohibited from serving shrimp, lobster and crab, to prevent competition with the state-run restaurants, they cultivate reliable black market sources of shellfish. They tell you what's available evening by evening, meal by meal, plate by plate, and if it's not too late, they may still have everything promised.
              Once I spent a couple of hours talking with three Cubans and I bought them all a meal. For less than three dollars apiece we ate a mountain of rice mixed with beans (called 'Gray' because of the color mix of white rice plus black beans) and small slabs of fried liver, a salad, and fried yucca. We passed our food from our plates to each other, a symbol of friendship, but I noticed that our slim friend Norge was eating twice as fast as the rest of us. We kept giving him our food, and he kept putting it away. He was also very worried about his engagement to an English woman in her late thirties. He was just twenty-five, and he thought he loved her, but the relationship was mostly sexual. She wanted to come live in Cuba. Maybe he doesn't love her, he says. Then he eats more, the last supper, his friend adds. She's a wonderful person, he says. Shovel in some food. H
              These Paladar family homes are rapidly becoming multi-room restaurants with interiors decorated with wall hangings, luxurious lighting, boom-box sound systems, and trained staff of "family members only", by law. Some Paladars even have lighted signs outside, and a culinary theme such as Mexican or seafood.
              Cuba, in contrast to the tremendous shoreline of the Caribbean's most extensive island nation, doesn't really eat much seafood. One theory claims the colonists destroyed the original peoples and their cultures to supplanted it with a mainland European culture.
              There may be another reason.
              A truck inner tube as fishing boat? Appropriate culture derives from man's interaction with his environment and resources. The Cubans I'd seen fishing were doing it from shore, or from large truck-tire inner-tubes strung with a mesh netting across the center. Imagine a mishap too far from shore with a stray hook. Inner tubes. The same kind of vehicle they try to float to Miami in. That's probably where most Cuban boats eventually ended, or will end, up.
       
43.     PINNED BY THE GOVERNMENT: Official isolation.
              The Government has decided to honor us with a public presentation; we the undeserving little band of Americans that elected to get what we paid for in spite of the quilt trip that our fearless leaders tried to lay on us by depicting us as the "selfish Pastors who came to Cuba anyway, empty handed, with the computers locked in the Federal detention storage of the United States Government, because they were not committed to the struggle".
              Some of us use the opportunity to indulge in the dark, mildewed sense of dread that we all feel from our sunlit days exploring the stained and frozen-in-time nineteen-fifties Havana, sharing streets almost empty except for the ugly little Russian cars and the heavy-metal American gas-guzzler cars from the late fifties with nose cone bumpers and dorsal fins on each rear fender that swim down the streets like chromed sharks. The past few nights of wet warm drizzle and wild-eyed Cubans roaming through a city without electricity also lent us the feeling of explorers landing on a planet where the colony has failed in its experiment to re-create civilization, and the remainder runs on alcohol, boredom, lent bedrooms, and sex.
              This event would present the Pastors or the disappointed Cuban medical community with a good time to line us up and shoot us. The Pastors that called us quitters would be happy, the Cubans would have the world believe we never even arrived, and because we obviously must be spies, they would think the US Government would deny any knowledge of us and privately wax ecstatic with the double victory of eventually proving Cuba dangerously un-American as our respective families marched around some fountain in Washington D.C. holding placards with our photos, demanding the release of information as to the whereabouts of us or our remains, and the details of our imprisonment, crimes, and death.
              Even in death, they might display our desiccated bodies in some catacombs beneath a Cathedral so we would continue to serve the struggle for both Cuban independence because we were Spies, or as reluctant martyrs of the "Free World" and eventually our deaths would help to prove the necessity for the Miami Cubans to march into Cuba with their own Army and retake Cuba, establishing another Democracy and economic miracle in our hemisphere.
              Then island Cubans could devote their lives to producing more dishwashers, birth control pills, and offshore bank accounts.
              Under cloudy, windy skies we were bussed to a the front of a building where a crowd had been gathered, just for our benefit. Probably the employees and their family members from the adjacent areas. It was almost five o'clock, shouldn't we all be on our way home by now? There was a microphone set up, we were ushered in to the front of the building amid much clapping, and the dreamlike quality of it hit me.
              As a former musician, I have ears attuned to the abnormal. They were all clapping in unison, all clapping at the same time, on the same beat. Over and over I longed for the spontaneous intermingling of individual rhythms, but they clapped in unison, smack, smack smack, the fleshy feathered beating of a dying dinosaur.
              After almost five minutes of this communal clap, the man at the microphone led them into a chant of a communist slogan such as "We will never be defeated" (which they never seem to acknowledge also means they allow themselves to fail and die on their own) and the tempo picked up.
              Afterwards, the speech began, and once again the tone was classic stereotypical communist ranting, you could almost imagine a little model of Fidel inside the speakers mind, giving him just the right finger-pointing tone of indignant, insulted anger. On and on he complained and chided, even when he was praising the "personal risks and heroism" of us 'Pastors'.
              Then as the speech stopped, people came up to us from out of the crowd, either kissed us or shook our hands, and each of us received a small pin of the Cuban flag that someone lovingly attached to the lapel of our coats. Over the heads of the crowd I could see the spray as ocean waves slammed against the sea-wall explode upwards in a geyser of energetic and pointless abandon; the salty, patriotic fireworks of resistance whenever the wind blows from the North.

        Part Four: THE 'SEXUAL PARADISE'
       
44.     PALACIO DE LA SALSA
              Through contacts at the Hospital where we stay, arrangements have been made for us to visit the premiere dance club in Havana, the Palacio de la Salsa, (Salsa Palace) free of cover charge. A head count of those who wished to stay up late (things don't really start until after midnight) enabled the organizers to reserve a Van, which delivered us promptly at nine-thirty.
              We were ushered into the huge, multi-tiered and empty concert hall and seated at a table exactly in the middle of everything, front middle of the mid-level tier. We had an unobstructed view of the entire club, and they had the same view of us. We collectively (communally?) ordered a couple of bottles of pricey Cuban Rum.
              After the house seemed full, but was only half-full compared to the standing-room-only fire hazard it would become after midnight, the manager came over and asked us if he could announce our presence as local heroes so we could take a bow. We took a rain check. Thinking now in retrospect, we succumbed to a combination of that good old American tradition of anonymous philanthropy coupled with Cold War paranoia. I wonder if the acknowledgment of our heroic efforts would have made us celebrities for the evening, with the resultant perks of free sex.
              I felt deja vu back to my Miami night clubs, except the well-dressed patrons in Cuba were tourists or foreigners, it seemed. Italians, Spaniards, Europeans and adventurous Americans and possibly even wishy-washy Miami Cubans not too involved in the 'struggle' to visit family and relatives. They danced and danced. For example, the three skinny black girls behind our table had arrived even before we did, and had been dancing in front of their booth seats like the serpents in the Garden of Eden ever since. From my own recollections of my first feelings of stunned offense at the sexuality of Cubans in Miami, I could sympathize with the granite immobility of my companion 'Pastors', but that didn't stop me from dancing, right next to our table, with the sumptuous and multitudinous procession of women, my thigh between their thighs of steel as our torsos correspond parallel in a serpentine pantomime of intimacy.
              The night wore on and wore down my reticent and shocked companions, who felt that they'd landed on a planet of sex. The rhythms of Salsa they'd never really heard in context before, and the extravagance of so many bodies in elegant clothing demonstrating a prowess of sensual and sexually suggestive coupling motions must have short-circuited their WASP mentalities, with its heavy acculturation of social consciousness, Puritanism, anti-sensuality, and moderation in all things. We watched a culture that made our "fast lane" look like plowing rocky fields. It cost me hours of evasive tactics and stalling to keep them there past their bedtimes; appealing to their sense of fairness to those enjoying themselves, explaining what they were seeing, encouraging them to partake, reminding them this was probably a once-in-a-lifetime event. I tried disappearing, dancing, introductions with other Cubans that needed dance partners, betting that such and such would ccur so they'd have to stay and see, brought out my well-worn bar jokes with napkins and matches, gave instant and amusing Spanish lessons, and tried to convince them I had suddenly fallen in love and if we left it would break my heart.
              Oh, the yawns! The cerebral overload and death written on their smile-tired faces!
              Walking back to the Van felt like an expulsion from Paradise for some of us, not because we were drunk, but we had witnessed the ease that these extravagantly beautiful and prodigiously flexible ebony Cubans seemed to find a man to copulate with. At least, that impression unavoidably entered our feeble imaginations to see the intertwined thighs undulating, the sweat-soaked faces beaming wild-eyed with immobile toothy smiles. The music pounded through the walls as we walked away, along an endless sidewalk, where women lined up dressed to kill a man's libido by morning, languishing without a partner to pay the entrance fee. Some of these spectacularly beautiful women, who just couldn't afford the $15 per person cover charge, would probably give up almost anything for a memorable night to brag about to their equally poor neighbors, many of whom had passed through that illustrious and minuscule period of life called youth, way too short for those of us t t follow the tenets of what's appropriate behavior at each stage of life.
              I resolved, way too long ago to count the years, that I would follow the Bible at least in one thing, to "become as little children" and always stay connected to that playfully brave child within, to keep my senses fresh and my mind full of wonder, and to maintain that terminally optimistic and foolish courage that infuses the life of young people that age with few regrets about what they should have done.
              Unfortunately this night, like a child I was too dependent on others.

        45.     UNA VEZ AL AÑO NO HACE DAÑO
              Roland was the lucky one in our group. Some days ago his easy-going manner, salt-and-pepper hair and mustache, and rugged 'largeness' had attracted a very beautiful Cuban woman whom he had invited to come along with us. She had actually gotten him to dance with her next to our table back in the Palace, but she was playfully frustrated with their lack of communication now, inside the Van. We were just minutes away our drop-off at the hotel, and she wanted Roland to visit her very early tomorrow morning. This would be Roland's last day in Cuba.
              "She says that you are welcome to call on her very early tomorrow morning." I translate.
              "That's what I thought she said, But what else is she saying?"
              She pulls me aside and giggles into my ear "Una vez al año no hace daño."
              "She says 'Once a year won't hurt.' It's a song cliché with suggestive lyrics, a poem of invitation to you. Could be an insult, you know, telling you not to be afraid, also. Your move, big guy. You're divorced, she's single. Do you own a fast boat?"