Free The Best American Travel Writing 2014 by Paul Theroux Page A

barely slanted eyes, like Sandra’s, but
shhh,
she said—it was what made her look like Bong.
    â€œAny news from Bong?” I asked.
    â€œWell, he called the other day,” she said, “first time I’d spoken to him since I told him I was having his baby, months ago, that time when the call dropped. ‘Sandra,’ he says, ‘how’s the baby?’ Identical to you, I say. She’s your carbon copy. ‘Really,’ he says. ‘I can’t wait to meet her.’ Then the call went dead. He said he was coming next month, though.”
    Â 
    State salons aren’t the only ones allowed in Cuba anymore. Among the 178 nonprofessional jobs that Raúl Castro signed into legality last year is haircutting. Sandra could open a small business if she wanted. She wouldn’t, though, because a neighbor with a quicker reaction time already had a monopoly on her block. We sat on the
malecón
again, in nearly the exact spot of our first meeting, a year and some after I’d moved away from Cuba in 2010.
    Sandra dabbed her forehead with an orange washcloth so she looked dewy but never damp and introduced me to her new Cuban boyfriend. It had been tough to find clients lately, she said, and he nodded as she spoke. “I’ve been here last night, the night before, all last weekend, and nothing,” she said. Sandra gestured toward the Riviera and the Meliá Cohiba on the opposite corner: “See how few lights are on?” She was brusque and stiff, as if her insides had puddled down and a shell kept her upright. “Not even worth paying to get in.”
    Gallego was in jail, seven years on charges Sandra wouldn’t detail. Mia was two and back home with Aboo, same as always, doing fine. I could come over tomorrow. She’d call when she woke up. “That’d be great,” I said. Before I left, she asked me for money. Just $5 or maybe $10 or whatever, just so she could get a cab home.
    The second time I’d ever met Sandra, she’d asked to borrow 10 kilos, 10 cents, to buy cigarettes. I, misunderstanding her, had rustled through my pockets for bills. “Ay, no,” she’d laughed, pushing at my forearm and holding out an incomplete palm full of coins. She wanted to buy a pack of cigarettes.
    I understood slang now, sure, but also how Havana forced an acknowledgment of the shades that existed between people.
Jinetera
or
amiga,
self-sufficient or dependent, realistic or delusional. There were armies of young people around Havana whose private dramas unfolded in isolation in the vast stretch between the Castro estates in Siboney and San Miguel del Padrón, who were something like Sandra. Idlers, academics, Santería initiates, and punk rockers harbored poorly constructed skyscraper fantasies about the lives they’d lead beyond their island home. Some of them actually wound up elsewhere, whether with the help of an
amigo
or on their own, turning those dreamscapes into realities. The one binary that Havana tried to enforce was
Cubano
and
turista.
I would always be some unnamed in-between, neither
Cubano
nor
turista,
journalist nor friend. I would always be coming from somewhere else, always leaving, always able to leave.
    I didn’t have much cash on me but I handed Sandra a $5 bill and walked away, feeling like there was a fire at my back and I was gliding toward the air that fed it. I never heard from her again.

JANINE DI GIOVANNI
Life During Wartime
    FROM
Harper’s Magazine
    Â 
    T HERE WAS SPRING RAIN and pale fog in Sarajevo as my plane approached the city last April, veering over the green foothills of Mount Igman. Through the frosted window I could see the outline of the road we used to call Snipers’ Alley, above which Serbian sharpshooters would perch and fire at anyone below. Twenty years had passed since I’d arrived in Sarajevo as a war reporter.
    During the siege of the city, most foreign journalists had lived