Dionisio was Rocky’s fiancé, her reason for staying in Cuba, and the real source of my parents’ concern. We’d seen him in photos: a winsome young man in his late-twenties, just about her height when she wore flats, pale and soft featured. She’d fallen for him on that first trip three years ago and she’d never looked back. But for an annual trip to Honolulu to see us, she’d stayed in Cuba, translating and teaching English to foreigners and Cubans with dollar connections.
Technically, I was in Havana to visit Rocky — a trip organized during her brief sojourn in Honolulu weeks before — but, frankly, more than anything I was to serve as a kind of scouting party for my parents: They needed time to acclimate to the idea of returning to Cuba, and even more so to the idea of their eldest daughter’s wedding (though no date had been set, we all understood it would happen). Because Dionisio was a doctor, his chances of leaving Cuba were virtually nil. Marrying Rocky meant little to the Cuban authorities, who expected him to stick around and perform medical duties until he’d given back enough to justify his free education.
“That’s our guy,” Rocky said, pointing with her chin in a way Hawaiian locals think particular and which the Cubans, as Rocky explained later, claim as uniquely theirs.
I turned my head to see, then snapped back to Rocky. “Are you kidding me?” There, striding toward us in all his smug glory, was the jerk. He was alternately waving hello to us and goodbye to a guy who was carting away the boxes. “He’s...”
“He’s a friend of the family,” Rocky said before I had a chance to finish. “A really good friend.” Her look was cautionary.
“La Hawayana! Raquelin,” he oozed, taking my sister in his arms. As his chin rested for a second on her shoulder, he winked at me from behind her back. She hugged him too, but quickly, not letting it go beyond courtesy. “And this is the baby sister?” he said, laughing as he pointed at me.
“I’m nineteen, I’m not a baby,” I protested, realizing immediately how childish I sounded. “And we’ve met,” I said, my embarrassed words aimed at Rocky.
“Oh yes, we’ve met,” he said, extending his hand to me but pulling it just as I approached, bringing me in to him for an unexpected — and unwanted — embrace. I decided to play like Rocky, feigning courtesy. “I’m Tom Mahler,” he continued, “practically Dionisio’s brother. Which means I’m practically your brother-in-law — that’s what we’d be, no? In any case, family!”
Dionisio’s family lived in an early — twentieth century house on San Nicolás Street, perched on a busy and narrow corner in Havana’s Chinatown, where I immediately noticed that the vast majority of the workers — vendors, shop clerks, incredibly aggressive maître d’s and hostesses in front of the restaurants — were not Chinese, in fact not Asian at all. They wore Mandarin blouses or jackets, and rayon pants imitating Heung Wun silk, but with a looseness that made them seem like careless costumes.
Very few people in this Chinatown, Rocky explained, actually spoke Chinese, even the few Chinese who were left.
“This is largest two-column Chinese gate outside of China,” Mahler piped in as we passed under the Dragon gate into the neighborhood, “measuring almost sixty-three feet by forty-three feet.” I made a face behind his back but Rocky didn’t see me.
Mercifully, the family’s home wasn’t buried in the neighborhood labyrinth but just off the main streets of Zanja and Dragones, where pedestrian and bicitaxi traffic clogged the arteries. I noticed right away that noise was constant: in the predawn hours, the local agro-market opened (the only one in the city with eggplant and bean sprouts), restaurants began pounding meat, and, later, kids trotted off to school yelling and fighting. At night, crowds lingered, with laughter and music everywhere. It never let up. (Curiously, once off the little official Chinese food mall, most of the eateries — and there were dozens of them, usually just carry-out through somebody’s living room or kitchen window — served up regular Cuban menu items like ham-and-cheese sandwiches, roasted pork, and black bean and rice concoctions — nothing Chinese at all.) Just when a lull was conceivable, a group of tourists would stampede through, fascinated by Cuba’s Chinese-less Chinatown, seeing Chinese eyes on mulattos and blacks and, after a few days into my visit, even me.
“We grow Chinese after a while,” Dionisio said, pointing to his own eyes, which he swore had an Asian slant neither Rocky nor I could discern. He spoke to me in a mix of Spanish and elementary English. “Didn’t you become a little Hawaiian after a while in Hawai’i?”
“Yeah, but there are real Hawaiians in Hawai’i,” I said, trying first in Spanish, then surrendering to English. “And, you know, we wouldn’t presume to be Hawaiian.”
“But you were born in Hawai’i!” he replied incredulously.
“C’mon, Dionisio, I’ve explained this to you,” Rocky said, tugging at his arm.
“We don’t have too many Chinese left, see, so sometimes we have to step in for them.”
I had noticed, though, that the occasional high-level Chinese diplomatic tour groups were frequently led by an elegant elderly man who looked really Chinese, even as he moved with the ease and flair of the Cubans.
“That’s Moisés Sio Wong,” Tom Mahler said when I asked the family about him. “He’s one of the original revolutionaries; he’s been with Fidel from the very, very start. One of three Chinese Cuban generals in the Revolution. Now, that is a hero!”
To my surprise, the family appeared expressionless — certainly only silence followed Mahler’s declaration — but then I thought I saw Dionisio roll his eyes. And Rocky smiled conspiratorially, apparently unaware I had noticed.
According to Dionisio’s family, they had all been very happy when he unexpectedly fell in love with Rocky, La Hawayana, as they affectionately referred to her. They could never have imagined my own amusement at my sister cast in any way associated with Hawai’i. But in Cuba, where she’d always wanted to be, Rocky reflected her Hawaiian upbringing more than ever. Around Chinatown, she wore flowers in her hair in a typical Polynesian style (which seemed to me should not have been so exotic to the Cubans). She’d found a connection through a Japanese diplomat for fresh fish for sashimi and had us shipping wasabi and seaweed regularly. In her room, I found Eddie Kamae CDs, and both Dionisio and his mother confided that Rocky frequently cried when she heard a particular Hawaiian song. I was flabbergasted — not at her emotions, because my sister has a tender heart, but at the source of such displays.
“What song?” I asked them.
The two hummed a few bars of something completely unrecognizable, frequently interrupting to correct one another.
“Do you know what the song’s about?” I asked.
“Oh, it’s about Hawai’i,” said Dionisio’s mom.
“Yes, about missing Hawai’i,” added Dionisio, quite seriously.
“Rocky misses Hawai’i?” I asked.
“Oh yes, she misses Hawai’i very much,” he responded, “sometimes I think so much that she’ll leave.”
I could tell he meant it — his voice actually cracked a bit, then withered. And his mother quietly stroked his back, already comforting him for his future loss — something she was familiar with, I was told, since her husband had died only a few years before.
“It was an embolia,” she explained to me in Spanish.
“What’s that?” I asked. The noise from the street was filtering in and I wasn’t sure I’d heard her right.
“An attack,” she said.
“What kind of attack?” I asked.
“A special attack,” she said, shaking her head with just enough annoyance that I was sure she thought I was an idiot.