Free Cuba Diaries by Isadora Tattlin

says tiredly in English. She looks around, then continues in a lowered voice, still in English: “I have been outside the socialist world only once in my life. For one day in Saint John, New Brunswick. I was on a boat that had gone to pick up Venceremos people, just on the other side of the U.S. border. Only one day, can you believe it?”
    â€œHow was it with the Venceremos people?”
    â€œI never heard that ugly word—I can’t say it in English, it is so ugly—so much in my whole life . . .”
    â€œWhat word?”
    â€œI can’t say it . . .”
    â€œOh yes you can.”
    â€œOh, you know, that Anglo-Saxon word . . .” She takes a deep breath, looks around.
    â€œWhat word?”
    â€œ
Fuck
,” she whispers in the quietest voice possible.
I. 30
    We have a swimming teacher for the children, Carlita. Carlita is a teacher at the Escuela de Natación Marcelo Salado on Primera Avenida. The Escuela de Natación is a boarding school. Promising swimmers are sent to the school from all over Cuba from the age of eleven. They have regular classes, but they also swim at least three hours a day.
    Carlita tells me the children won’t be able to use the dressing room at the
escuela
, but she will be able to teach them there. She says it’s also better if José lets us off
not directly in front of
the school, but a block or two to one side or the other of the school, and for us not to talk too much in the lobby. It was better, in fact, for us not to talk in the lobby at all.
    â€œAre foreigners not allowed to take lessons?”
    â€œThis has not yet really been decided.”
    Carlita is waiting for us in the lobby. She ushers us quickly through a side door to an Olympic-sized outdoor pool. The water of the pool is cloudy and greenish.
    â€œIs the water clean?” I whisper to Carlita in Spanish, stopping a few feet back from the pool.
    â€œOh yes, clean,” Carlita says. “The school lacks chemicals right now to keep the water
transparente
, but it is clean.”
    In all lanes but one, the students of the Escuela de Natación are ripping back and forth faster than I have ever seen human beings, let alone not fully grown ones, move in water. At the shallow end of the free lane, there is a gaggle of mothers and small children. We join them. I take off the children’s clothes. They have swimsuits on underneath.
    â€œCan I talk now?” I whisper to Carlita.
    â€œNow it’s OK. They don’t care out here.”
    TU EJEMPLO VIVE, TUS IDEAS PERDURAN SIEMPRE (Your example lives on, your ideas are everlasting), reads a billboard with an image of Che on it.
I. 31
    Nick doesn’t attend our Spanish lesson today.
    â€œI am not a Cuban American, and I never had anything to do with Cuba until I got here, but I will be so happy one day when it all opens up, I think I will cry,” I find myself saying to Olga, my voice breaking slightly.
    â€œBut I don’t think it will be as simple as that . . .” Olga’s eyes fill with tears. “My brother is in Miami. He left a year ago and I don’t know when I will see him again . . .” She reaches into her handbag for a handkerchief. “Sorry.”
    I pat Olga’s hand.
I. 32
    Berti, the wife of the man who used to have Nick’s job, is back for a visit. She misses Cuba, she says. She says I will miss Cuba, too, when I go.
    Berti goes to the Diplo, buys some steaks to give as presents, and takes me to meet her Cuban friends. One is Lola, whom we visit in her new house, which she has
permutaed
with her old house. “If she were in Miami, she would be a millionaire,” Berti whispers to me, ringing the doorbell.
    In Cuba you can’t buy or sell property, but you can
permutar
(exchange) it. You can exchange up (to a bigger, better house or apartment) or down (to a smaller, crummier house or apartment). If you exchange up, you give money, goods, or services to the