In Cuba a two-tiered economy exists: that of the peso and that of the dollar. There is very little to buy unless the people have dollars. “The local bodega sells rations of beans and rice, but they are never enough, so you have to forage far afield,” Juana says, then thinks for a moment. “The problem is getting there. Sometimes you have to wait from six in the morning to the afternoon for a truck to pass, then you have to find transportation back.”
There is a bitter consensus of opinion in Cayo Carenero about the American embargo. “What they want over there, we don’t want over here,” Juana continues. “Some of us have been to America many times, and we do not accept their way of life.”
As I listen, one question keeps running through my mind. It seems the wrong question, but I ask it anyway of Juana’s mother and father: Do they still laugh? I’m thinking of the rhyme Alberto quoted to me all those years ago.
Alberto says that perhaps his son, Juana’s younger brother Anastasio, should answer my question. Anastasio tells me how he defected to Miami under horrendous circumstances. Although he did well in the United States, he was miserably homesick for 12 years. He could barely wait to come back to his land and his people, so he sailed to Havana in his own boat—he thought he would be treated like a returning hero. But Anastasio’s boat was immediately confiscated and he was jailed for 6 years. When he tasted his first meal of rice and beans, though, he was happy, even in his prison cell. As Anastasio finishes his story, he repeats his father’s rhyme:
“We do not eat very well,
But we can laugh, laugh like hell.”
And he laughs and laughs, and Juana and the others laugh, too—laugh like hell.
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