Life with Lolita from her Havana Guesthouse
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Life with Lolita from her Havana Guesthouse
By Lynette Chang
Special to The Tico Times
A Personal Report on Cuba
Lolita's house is a tiny, crumbling time capsule wedged in a crevice of
colonial Cuba.
Each morning I wake and open the two little shutters in the front doors to
let in the mournful cries of "tomates. cebollas. ajo"
(tomatoes...onions...garlic) and the clack-clacking of the peddler's
wheel-barrow trundling through the narrow cobbled streets.
Lolita goes to work every morning at 7:30 sharp, to clean all day in a
hospital. The job pays $5 a month. With this pitiful salary she can buy food
or cleaning products, or maybe an item of clothing. On the table she's left
me a small plate of scrambled eggs, two bread rolls toasted with a scrape of
cooking oil, and a jug of freshly squeezed orange juice. I am aware she's
given me her daily ration of one bread roll plus that of her estranged
husband.
On the faded walls are photos of her wedding day, in which her ex is blocked
out by happier photos of herself, ones of her when she was pregnant. He'd
left her while working in another part of the country, and she blames the
loss of her baby on her heartbreak.
Such things are accepted with a sigh in Cuba, the paradox being the intense
closeness of family, married with the accepted waywardness of the Cuban
male. There is even a name for this type of hombre: "pica flor," hummingbird
or "he who bites at flowers".
In the tiny nook of a kitchen, I light her rusty petroleum camping stove to
heat water for a wash, and wait for the oily black smoke to disappear.
Outside, water comes trickling from a pipe every five days.
It is collected in three large drums, the reserve for the coming dry week. I
stand in the waterless concrete shower, ladling cupfuls of hot water over my
head, and let the spillage fall back into a bucket, so as not to waste a
drop. I am careful not to use her small bar of soap, though she offers it
freely, for it must last her a month.
By government decree, toilet paper is found only in the dollar shops, so
there is a neat stack of newspaper squares sitting in the dry basin. "Leer
el culo" (for your butt to read), chuckles Lolita, of the favorite Cuban
joke.
I met Lolita by pure chance: during a 12-hour train from Havana to the
island nation's eastern province of Oriente. I sat opposite a man who ran a
licensed guesthouse in Santiago de Cuba, my destination. When I mentioned my
meager daily budget he offered to introduce me to his ex-wife, who lived
alone on the same cobbled street. "She earns very little," he said. "Your
money will help her buy a new bed."
Lolita has left for work, so I poke my head through the curtains to her
bedroom. I am humbled to see a narrow, squeaky stretcher on a sunken floor
where the once-elegant colonial tiles have cracked and lifted to reveal the
gaping hole below. In my room the dressing table is adorned with empty
shampoo and lotion containers, left behind by passing guests.
"Decorations," says Lolita simply, when I ask her why she bothers to keep
them. On the wall is a collage of perfume and cigarette advertisements,
carefully cut out and pasted onto a square of cardboard.
These products are nowhere to be found in the austere, often empty shops,
where lines of Cubans press their noses against the windows with U.S. dollar
bills clutched in their palms, waiting patiently to be let into Dollarland.
At 5 p.m. Lolita returns, flustered from standing in the hot sun during a
televised rally for Elián González, the Cuban boy whose mother fled with him
to Miami on a makeshift boat. She tells me she and her co-workers were
instructed to partake in the rally or lose a month's pay. And in a land
where a simple T-shirt can cost a month's salary, only the front row of
rally-goers were lucky enough to receive the ubiquitous "Salvemos Elián"
T-shirts.
At 7 p.m. I am eating the most delicious vegetarian food I've tasted for a
long time. The fare itself is simple - pumpkin puree, rice, beans, braised
cabbage, fried green banana, and maybe a little milk curd for dessert. But
the flavors are wonderful, full of love and the thyme growing in the tin can
hanging on the fence.
A small black and white TV fills the house with drama and hope between 9:30
and 10:30 p.m., when all of Cuba stops, dries its hands on a tea towel and
sits down to view la novela. There are always three or four soap operas
running on the one channel, between pro-government speeches, two Chilean,
and two Mexican, and the Cubans breathlessly follow all.
Lolita makes many apologies for the impoverished state of her house, but
somehow, this tiny cracked and faded little space is filled with love and
light. Most of all, the house is filled with Lolita, a rotund, warm and
smiling woman who soldiers on in the face of adversity and practices her
near-fluent German every night, a skill learned years ago, when Fidel sent
his people to Russia, Bulgaria and Germany to assist Cuba's communist
brothers.
As she practices, she dreams of work in Cuba's exploding tourist industry,
work which some day might give her the freedom to buy food and one of those
large bottles of shampoo - in the same month.
Lynette Chiang is a 37-year-old Australian cyclist who quit the secure life
three years ago to travel the world with a tent and her folding Bike Friday.
A lousy sense of direction, zero martial arts skills and the thighs of an
office athlete did not stop her pedaling through the British Isles,
Nicaragua, Costa Rica, and most recently, Cuba, where she saw the millennium
dawn on a unique and resilient people who have nothing -yet everything - to
give.
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Leo Sanger
unmarried mothers or deserted children, no power blackouts and medical
treatment is free at the point of use for all who need it.
And none of Cuba's financial problems are the result of America's 40 year long
economic blockade.
leo :o)