Free Cuba Diaries by Isadora Tattlin Page B

crab bodies are the size of Little Leaguers’ baseball mitts. They are moving from one side of the road, where the sea is, to the other side, where there is sandy soil and bushes and trees. They move with their claws raised, as if they are the victims of a holdup, their eyes on stalks, swiveling. We wonder, for a split second, if they can attack, but they scuttle from us as we approach, and we quickly realize that we can herd them. “Gee-ha,” I say, waving my arms, pushing a stream of them ahead of me. “Gee-ha!” the children say tentatively, waving their arms and stepping gingerly on pulverized crab, steering their personal herds. The crabs move ahead of us, but just as soon as we herd some off the road, others move onto the road to take their place. It is some timeless mating or egg-laying ritual, crabs attracted by the heat of the asphalt, and judging from the number of crabs stretching into the darkness on either side of the road, the thick orange carpet of pulverized crab, and the vast scuttling noise, which nearly drowns out our own voices, it doesn’t seem to be something that has just begun or is going to be finished soon.
    We get in the car. Crush, crunch, we hear under the tires. We do not speak.
Yes, life is sacred, but sometimes
. . . I rehearse saying to the children, but they are too tired to grill me.
    We get to Trinidad and stop several times to ask for directions to the Hotel Ancón. Each time we are directed farther away from town. Finally there are no more buildings, and we find ourselves driving on a completely empty, dark road. No one in the tourist office explained to us that the Ancón is so far out of town. We continue to ask lone bicyclists and horsemen if weare truly on the right road, until in the end we have gone fifteen kilometers.
    We arrive at a monstrous building. “There must be some mistake . . .” Nick and I start to say simultaneously, but flickering panels atop the structure spell out AN ÓN.
    The style is part European auto grill on pylons with a cavernous breezeway underneath, part to-be-renovated airport in Uzbekistan, with the smell of a rest stop on the New Jersey Turnpike. Images of armless and legless men, women, and children on fluorescent panels announce an array of services in grim internationalese. A surly desk clerk completes our welcome. In our minuscule room and in the minuscule room of Muna and the children, a sticky, cigarette-burned TV table blocks the way to the door that leads to the balcony overlooking the sea. The bathroom door cannot be opened all the way, either, because it bumps into the bed.
    We realize how much we have been shielded so far. Our thoughts turn to the tourist office and the thousands of tourists who have already been sent by it to the Ancón. We should not be surprised, though: we visited the Soviet Union. Still, it’s impressive that such ugliness—harrowing ugliness in the building design and miserable ugliness in the rooms—has been achieved next to what is supposed to be one of the loveliest towns on earth. It’s impressive, too, that wave after wave of tourists do not come out of the Ancón talking about its ugliness, writing about its ugliness, becoming Anita Hills in their exposure of its ugliness: it’s almost as if there were a conspiracy or as if the Ancón were some kind of afterlife and the tourists who came here before us were dead souls.
    THE COLUMNS DELINEATING the central square in Trinidad are topped by baroque ceramic jars. The treelessness of the square brings to mind early photos of urban American areas just completed, as well as the spareness of Spanish, Greek, and Italian squares.
    We visit the cathedral, where a mass is being held. The congregation is singing hymns accompanied by maracas, guitars, and drums. The people sway back and forth to
son
, salsa, and mambo rhythms. We listen, enraptured. It is light, joyful, and a ton more fun than other masses I have