6/8 - I feel better again today -- part of it is the view from last night at the fort. You’re across the bay from the city looking down on it, the moon and stars twinkling, the breeze sliding over you, the lights glistening off the water... Ah. Que bueno. It was beautiful and romantic and I took care of your absence by taking advantage of a lightpole. It was a bit colder and stiffer than usual, but most of that is probably due to me not having sex in nigh on eternity. (As Ross says on Friends, I’m beginning to fear for my health!) :)
This morning's big adventure was a trip to a local hospital with my pal Bernardo to see the real state of state health. We walk for close to 45 min because he can't take a cab with us (another brilliant rule) and half the time we have to walk behind him like we're tailing a suspect in some bad cop movie or he'll get arrested again. (The fun secret agent side to this part of the routine has worn off and now it's just ridiculous that we have to go to these lengths to talk with a native.) The stupid hospital is halfway to Japan, it feels like, the path leading there completely baked in the beating sun, so by the time we get there I’m a sweaty, drippy mess. Once we arrive, though, the view makes these contemplations irrelevant with things looking about as bad as I’d feared. The main building is this rundown old two story structure -- it looks like a converted old factory from the outside -- the first floor is the ICU and the second is intermediate care, and you walk into the building past this outdoor waiting room that was dark, its walls covered with dingy old mosaics and crumbling yellow plaster. There are no lights in the main building, there's broken glass in the windows on the far wall, and everything inside looks rather grim. It’s hot (there's no air), dark, and has not a whiff of the nauseating antiseptic cleansers from health care facilities back home. Slightly frightening.
We walk through a connected walkway to another building in the complex, passing decayed old courtyards with broken benches and grass growing through the cracks in the ruined concrete. (As you pass, you can see how these would be nice outdoor waiting areas -- put a fountain here, some plants and flowers there -- if they had ANY money at all. Instead it's nothing but more wasted space and festering eyesores.) We continue past maize colored walls whose plaster is falling off in chunks and whose wires are exposed like broken guitar strings, flying haphazardly in a range of directions, until we reach the burn unit, which bears a disconcerting resemblance to sad tenement homes of old inner cities in America -- no lights, coffin-sized rooms, crumbling exteriors, etc. with all the patients sitting outside on the front porch to escape the cramped confines of the interior. It's nowhere near the antiseptic, restricted land of pressurized oxygen tents and isolation like back home.
We pass the building for the cook and food staff, the laundry, the supply storage, the old folk's home, even one, interestingly enough, for sick prison inmates. (Surprisingly, they transfer sick patients from the jails and bring them here -- Bernardo says this is the worst part of the hospital as all the inmates are in there together and very loosely guarded. He said to be assigned to work there for the day is to be forced to confront tenuously controlled chaos for the entire shift.) This stands in stark contrast to our system back home where we move prisoners only as a last resort. And sure enough, as we walk around the grounds there is a sputtering stream of green military wagons that pass by, which are the medivac trucks used to transport the patients to and fro.
As we wander we pass buildings that are literally falling down before our eyes -- you'd hear a crumble and boom and turn back to see a plume of plaster and concrete dust billowing up from where a section of roof had just collapsed on one of the abandoned buildings -- and stone-faced doctors wandering across the grounds to one of the myriad buildings. It’s all rather disheartening and makes you clutch onto your health like a stray rope as you teeter on the edge of an abyss. Elderly patients in wheelchairs or on crutches and canes stagger to other buildings, hobbling over broken pavement and shattered sidewalks in the baking sun. There’s no air-conditioning anywhere, no covered walkways, no easily discernible conveniences of any sort -- there simply is no money.
The only building that looks like it's in decent shape is the operation facility -- it's got fresh paint and nicely plastered walls, and you can hear the hum of electrical generators and AC units so you know it has power and air, but this is the ONLY one. Twenty or twenty five-odd buildings may be crumbling to the ground around your ears, but at least there's one where you can find something of save haven. (Talk about a strange Russian roulette.) So you seem to be ok if you need to go under the knife, but if you need to recuperate you're just as well off going home, it looks like -- that or sleeping under a park bench or setting up a cot in a stairwell of an abandoned factory.
We walk around a bit more, past the Salvador Allende statue (interesting that he’s here...), the baseball stadium, the volleyball facility, and a bowling alley (wow! I want to go, but figure V will kill me if I do this, too, without her, right on the heels of the horseback incident) and Bernardo hits us up with some payback for buying him and his cousin drinks the past few nights. We get a killer spiced pork sandwich (spices here are like Aboriginal crock pot salesmen back home -- perilously scarce) and a couple of cold sugarcane sodas before having to go back.
The afternoon featured an abortive trip to Hemingway’s museum and a quick trip to the University of Havana for some pics (it's a nice, small campus – it even has a tank!) before I go to the flea market for some more prezzies and return to the hotel for a group meeting. Since I walked halfway around the island today, I’m bushed by 9:30, so I grab a guarapo con ron and head upstairs to snooze.
6/9 - First up this morning is another interview with the assistant secretary of state and it goes pretty well. The guy's really interesting and different than the normal cog in the communist propaganda machine -- his time in the US changed him a lot, it appears. After this we buzz off to the Hemingway museum and house and Try II is far more successful than Try I was. He’s a terribly interesting and contradictory character -- perfectly apropos for a country that is exactly the same. He originally came to the house in the 30s and didn't like how far it was from his haunts in Habana Vieja -- it sits high atop a hill about 25 minutes outside of town -- but his wife came back without his knowing it and rented it, fixing it up. Once the rights to For Whom the Bell Tolls sold to Hollywood, he ended up buying it despite his previous reservations.
The house has over 9000 books, tons of records and hunting trophies, etc. He was a rather odd fellow, some of the more interesting items include his having 57 cats (Hemingway! totally at odds with appearances and expectations, here.) that had their own room and then their own tower at the house; he had books in the bathroom (a half bookcase full) and a pickled lizard one of his cats killed; he had a stamp that said, "I never write letters," to use in response to mail; and he used to write standing up in the morning, typing away atop a kudu skin, an animal from Africa he thought was lucky. Like I said, interesting. He won the Nobel in '54 for Old Man and the Sea and killed himself in Idaho in '61. (What in the world was he doing in Idaho?!? I didn’t know people actually WENT to Idaho, let alone went there to KILL themselves.) All this definitely makes me want to reread his stuff again. The Sun Also Rises first, perhaps.
Anyhoo, next up it's off to our dance lesson, which is carefully qualified disaster. It starts with us waiting 45 minutes for our instructor, me running frantically across town to use the bathroom at the hotel (because no one in this country has toilet paper in their bathroom, even state facilities. Excellent place to have uncontrollable, body-clenching shits for two weeks), and us finally getting our lesson in a hot, stuffy studio across town. It’s fun, I am TERRIBLE for some reason, and my partner is hot to the point of confusion. Afterwards we leave, go cool down in the pool, I take a Cuban friend to dinner, he gets arrested after dessert -- just your typical evening in Cuba. RRRrrrrr... This place is wearing on me. One and a half weeks till I can come home, get a hug, and stop getting people incarcerated. Sigh…