Falling Off the Map by Pico Iyer Page A

needed dollars—is the string of coral keys that sparkle like teardrops off the coast. One day I took the flight to Cayo Largo, an absurdly beautiful stretch of fifteen miles of open beach, graced with every enticement this side of Lauren Bacall. As soon as I got off the plane, at 8:45 a.m., I was greeted with a frenzied Cuban dance band and—what else?—aWelcome Cocktail; for the rest of the day, I simply lay on the beach and gazed at the cloudless line of primary colors—aqua and emerald and milky green, flawless as a Bacardi ad. There is nothing much to see in Cayo Largo, save for some basins full of turtles and an island featuring 250 iguanas; but, as with all the most delectable resorts in Cuba, the place is utterly empty, even of Bulgarians in string vests. (This is, in part, because locals are not permitted on the beach—this is, alas, no legal fiction: I, too, while walking along the beach one drowsy Sunday morning, was hauled over, by a policeman hiding in the bushes, on suspicion of being a Cuban.)
    In recent years, in a bid to rescue its shattered economy, Cuba has begun refurbishing its old hotels with tiled patios and stained-glass windows, and trying to entice visitors with “Afro Shows” and “Smashed Potatoes”; but even now, thank Marx, the island remains roughly 90 percent tourist-proof: one still needs two chits and a passport to buy a Coca-Cola, and as in some loony lottery, Visa cards are accepted only if they contain certain numbers. This, though, is part of the delight of the place: whenever one goes out at night, one never knows how the evening will end, or when. Days are seldom clearer. One sleepy Sunday not so long ago, I waited for a taxi to take me back to Havana from the beach; and waited, and waited, and waited, for three and a quarter hours in all, under a tree, on a hot afternoon. Finally, just as I was about to lose all hope, up lurched a coughing red-and-white 1952 Plymouth, with “The Vampire Road” written across its back window. Seven exhausted souls piled into the wreck, and the next thing I knew, the quartet in back was pounding out an ad hoc beat on the seat and breaking into an a cappella melody of their own invention—“Ba ba ba, we’re going to Havana … ba ba ba, in a really sick old car …” For the next two hours, the increasingly out-of-tune singers unsteadily passed a huge bottle of rum back andforth and shouted out songs of an indeterminate obscenity, while the mustachioed driver poked me in the ribs and cackled with delight.
    In Santiago de Cuba, the second city of the island and the only officially designated “Hero City” of the Revolution, I spent a few days in the gutted home of a former captain of Fidel’s. From the hills above, where Castro and his guerrillas once gathered, the city looked as it might on some ancient, yellowing Spanish map; down below, in a peeling room that I shared with a snuffling wild pig who was due to be my dinner, things were somewhat less exalted. Every night, in the half-lit gloom of his bare, high-ceilinged room, decorated only with a few black-and-white snapshots of his youth, my host took me aside (“Let me tell you, Pico Eagle …”) and told me stories of the Revolution, then delivered heartbroken obituaries for his country. Next door, in an even darker room, one of his sons prepared dolls for a
santería
ceremony, the local equivalent of voodoo. And when it came time for me to leave, the old man asked for some baseball magazines from the States. Any special kind? I asked. “No,” he said softly. “But I like the ones with Jackie Robinson in them.”
    That sense of wistfulness, of a life arrested in midbreath, is everywhere in Cuba: in the brochures of the once-elegant Hotel Riviera, which now, disconcertingly, offers a “diaphanous dining-room”; in the boarded-up stores whose names conjure up a vanished era of cosmopolitanism—the Sublime, the Finde-Siècle, Roseland, Indochina; in the Esperanto Association