Free Cuba and the Night by Pico Iyer Page A

don’t get nothing. I have many Cuban pesos—I am a millionaire in Cuban pesos—but with pesos I can only buy things I do not need; anything I need is only in the dollar stores. So maybe I’m a millionaire here, but still I’m living like a beggar.”
    “Sounds like friends are a kind of currency.”
    “Sometimes. Sometimes, no. With you, Richard, is no need. I like you.” He clapped me on the shoulder and smiled.
“Compañeros, no?
I don’t need your money.”
    Just then there came another knock on the door. José motioned me with his eyes to the bedroom, just in case, and I went in and checked the place out for light. At first, I couldn’t hear anything. Then José’s broadest chuckle, and two softer voices, and he was speaking English. I came out and saw two girls, one pale and freckled, in a red T-shirt and baggy pants, the other cool, blond, in some kind of Nepali harem trousers.
    “Richard, this is Anna, right? And Ilse? From Germany.”
    “Hi,” they said, all smiles. I knew a lot about them already, I figured: vegetarians, disciples of Petra Kelly, semi-Buddhists, studying despair in the Third World.
    “You want some coffee?”
    “Ja
. This is great.”
    We sat down, the three of us, around a little table on the rooftop.
    “You’re tourists here?”
    “Ja
. You can say this. We are here to see the Revolution. We were trying to go to Nicaragua. But maybe this is better.”
    “I think it is. I live in Managua now and then. Most of the people you’ll meet there are from Berkeley or Düsseldorf.”
    The girls laughed. They would have looked pretty if they hadn’t been so serious.
    “Here.” José put three cups down before us.
    The girls looked around them in the sun-baked morning. No noise in the air, no factories, no planes. No sense of purpose, no hurry, no direction. Every day a day off here, a day for daydreams and reminiscences.
    “This place is like heaven,” said the freckled one. “I would like to stay here. I know, you do not have everything here. But you do not need to have everything. You have history. You have spirit. Human warmth. This place is real. No plastic, no videos. You know, in Buddhism they say that life is suffering. You taste life only when you taste suffering.”
    “Sure,” said Jose dryly. “This is Paradise.”
    “If we were truly free, we could come here, and live and help you.”
    “And if we were truly free, we could go to Germany to help you.”
    Then there was another knock on the door—this place was like Grand Central Station—and there was no point in all three of us running for cover, so we sat there, while José opened up, and a kid in a clean white shirt came in, looking like he was on his way to meet his future father-in-law: the latest model in Communist Yuppie.
    “Ignacio. This is Richard. Anna. Ilse.”
    “Swell,” the kid said in fluent English. “How’s it going?”
    “Great. We are here to see your history.”
    “Then you must know about our friend?”
    We looked at José. “Sure. I am a piece of history. Richard, I told you before, no? I am a grandson of Martí.”
    “Grandson! Martí died in 1895.”
    “Sure,” he replied smoothly. “Son of the grandson.”
    “José Marti’s children are known.”
    “You think he never slept with another woman? He was a true Cuban—the father of the nation right down to his
pinga!”
José and Ignacio laughed, and I thought that José was a true Cuban too, right down to his chutzpah: a self-styled great-grandson of the Revolution, who played his cards both ways.
    “If Martí were here now …”
    “Ja,”
said Ilse. “He was a man who did everything, no? Like Ho Chi Minh. And he was in prison, no? All the great ones are in prison: Gandhi, Mandela, Fidel too.”
    “Me too,” said José. “I was in Combinado four years. Sometimes there was no light. Sometimes I was alone. Three times I tried to kill myself.”
    There was a difficult silence.
    “And you know what Martí said about