Tom Robbins - Tibetan Peach Pie - A True Account of an Imaginative Life

I traveled to Cuba in 1978, partly because it was forbidden (no American had legally set foot there in about twenty years), partly because I wished to see for myself how much of the official picture the U.S. painted of our small island neighbor was just Cold War propaganda. (A fair amount, as it turned out.) I could not honestly say that the Great Mystery was in any way involved, although I did, after an evening of dancing at the fabled Tropicana nightclub, make love with a vacationing French Canadian schoolteacher during a ferocious Caribbean storm, and there was definitely a transcendent presence in the room. Forget Barry White, Percy Sledge, Mantovani, and Sinatra; forget romantic mood music of any genre: nothing surpasses crackling lightning, apocalyptic thunder, thrashing palm fronds (Aphrodite fanning the ozone), and hard-driving torrents of rain as inspirational background audio for a night of tropical love.

Upon learning that there were regular flights from Canada to Cuba, I’d phoned my friend James Lee Stanley and convinced him to join in the escapade. He canceled a few gigs (James Lee is a singer/songwriter), we booked a fifteen-day excursion, and a month later flew from Montreal to Havana on a Russian airliner. On the hour-long bus ride from José Martí Airport to the small, funky seaside resort which was to be our headquarters during our visit, our hosts passed around bottles of rum, and it wasn’t long before James Lee had his guitar out and we all — Cubans, Canadians, and us two Americans — were singing “Guantanamera.” We were already having fun, and I hadn’t met the schoolteacher yet.

James Lee and I, in fact, had rambunctious fun the entire time we spent in Cuba, which set us apart from the many Russians there and endeared us to the natives. In those years, Cuba was the Soviet Union’s Hawaii. If, for example, Ivan’s section of a Russian tractor factory met or exceeded its production quota, Ivan and his family might be awarded a holiday in a tropical paradise. Just how paradisiacal Ivan found Cuba, however, was open to question. The Russians would not even attempt Latin dances, they eschewed local rum in favor of their own vodka, and when besotted would sit around teary-eyed, singing old mournful nationalistic songs. You’d see a busload of them on their way to the beach and from their expressions you’d think they were being shipped to a gulag. In private, Cubans — a warm, ebullient people who love love love to dance — mocked the Russians, referring to them as “square heads.”

What became apparent during our visit is that ordinary Cubans were deeply grateful to the Soviet government for its assistance in a time of need, but were somewhat contemptuous of the Russian people. Conversely, they despised the American government but maintained a genuine fondness for individual Americans. That dichotomy is easy to understand if you know anything about Cuban history and America’s long record of oppressive behavior toward the island, but I shan’t get into that here. I will say that while I came away with sympathy, even admiration for Cuba, my favorable impression did not extend to its socialist economy, whose austerity and uniformity was itself oppressive. The conspicuous consumption in capitalist countries such as ours is deadening to the soul, but an absence of variety and choice can be psychically impoverishing, as well.

The lone pizza parlor in Havana did not sell beer, although it would have been entirely legal to do so. In no beer garden could you buy a snack. When you hailed a taxi, the driver would pick you up only if he happened to be going in the direction you wished to go. The cabbie earned the same amount each day regardless of how many fares he picked up, the merchant’s profits increased not a peso when he moved more product than expected. Was the average citizen happy with this rigid and prescribed arrangement? Despite his or her fierce (and understandable) pride in the 1959 revolution that overthrew the brutal dictator Fulgencio Batista and evicted the U.S. businessmen and Mafia dons who supported him, I suspected not. Secretly, when they felt they could trust James Lee and me, the Cubans we’d befriended would plead with us to somehow get them cassette players, radios, rock albums, or blue jeans.

There are things in this world — even material things — that supersede politics, exhilarating things that support a personal liberation of the spirit; and on a crude, unevolved level may even represent a longing to connect to the Mystery.

Suzette from Quebec notwithstanding, my most cherished memory of Cuba stems from an occasion of mechanical and linguistic miscarriage. A party from the gringo resort was off on a day trip to the Bay of Pigs when our vintage bus stalled near the center of a small town. It was midday, hotter than the fiddles of hell, and having no luck in restarting the engine, our driver urged us to get off the bus and find a place, if we could, in the shade. We huddled beneath a lone tree in the square, preparing for a long wait as he tinkered with the engine. We should have known there would be bad juju associated with the Bay of Pigs.

James Lee retrieved his guitar and commenced to strum, even to quietly sing a little. Up to that point, the town had seemed unoccupied. There wasn’t a soul or a sole in the square, the surrounding houses showed no sign of current human habitation. Someone suggested that Castro had drafted the entire population to go cut sugarcane, someone else dismissed that as U.S. propaganda. James Lee continued to play. And slowly, very slowly, one by one — kids first, then adults — people came out of their homes and drifted into the square. It was as if James Lee was an immobile Pied Piper.

James played louder. People drew closer. And before long there was an impromptu fiesta in progress: literally dozens of people singing along, mostly to interminable renditions of “Guantanamera,” the one song to which all present knew the words. Obviously, we weren’t Russian, but it took a while before James and I were identified as Americans, for many, if not most of them, had never encountered an American. They knew some rock and roll, however, having listened clandestinely and at considerable risk to Miami radio stations. And they knew Chiclets. Man, did they know Chiclets. Somewhere — if only in their mythology — they’d come into contact with the tiny pellets of candy-coated chewing gum and automatically associated them with America. The land of the free and the home of the Chiclets. Chiclets and stripes forever!

Hesitant to interrupt James Lee — in Cuba you don’t mess with the music — kids surrounded me, just pleading for Chiclets. Now I knew practically no Spanish, and much of what I did know was from a Tex-Mex idiom not widely understood in Cuba — but I’d seen handmade signs in California shop windows that read SE HABLA ESPANOL, a statement I always took to mean “We have Spanish,” as in “We have command of the Spanish language.” For years, I’d been confusing habla with the verb haber, “to have,” when in actuality, hablar is the verb “to speak.” So when I kept protesting to the young Cubans, enunciating clearly so they wouldn’t misinterpret, “No habla Chiclets,” what I was really saying was “I don’t speak Chiclets.”

Well, it was an honest statement: I did not speak Chiclets. Later, however, when I came to realize why the Cubans had been regarding me as if I were some kind of Yankee nut job, I had to ask myself, “Why not?” Trying to imagine what Chiclets might sound like, I began to teach myself a basic Chiclet lexicon. You know, the essential phrases. I still recall a few (they sound like passages from Beowulf being recited by cartoon mice), but can only pronounce them after I’ve consumed four or more Cuba libres.