“That’s not ordinary trash — it’s hemp, it’s organic, it’ll decompose,” he explained.
“Not for a long time, Tom, not for a long time,” Rocky said.
She carried that thing all the way to the restaurant, dumped it in the kitchen trash, and, because she was carrying her own bar of soap in her purse, was able to scrub her hands before settling down to eat. The entire family maneuvered to avoid Tom Mahler, so he sat next to me, his left leg across his right knee, the germ-infested bottom of his foot bumping into me and leaving viral traces on my skirt throughout the meal.
“Careful or you’ll have an empacho,” Dionisio said, his chin pointing at the huge chicken and rice dinner before me.
In all honesty, I could hardly eat. Rocky’s jab had had its effect. “I thought you needed a regular diet of Cuban food to be vulnerable to those,” I shot back, trying to be jovial.
“Well, you’re on your way,” Mahler said, grinning malevolently, “don’t you think? Soon you’ll be like your sister, Cuban again, wanting to stay. Then you’ll have a fully rounded Cuban diet all the time.”
Infuriatingly, the family — Dionisio and Rocky included — again just smiled, their lips zipped.
It was just a few days before my scheduled departure (a long, roundabout trip from Havana to Kingston to Miami to Houston to San Francisco to, finally, Honolulu) when Dionisio and Rocky announced a party.
“But not just any party — a luau!” said Rocky.
“A luau?” I asked. Was she kidding?
“Turns out,” she said, all excited, “that Eddie Kamae is in Havana for a world music festival. Dionisio found out and invited him to dinner.”
“So maybe he’d like a typical Cuban fiesta or something instead of another luau, don’t you think?”
Rocky waved me off. “Don’t you see? It’s such a great opportunity to show the family a little bit of Hawaiian culture. Eddie’s probably getting plenty of Cuban everything from his festival hosts.”
When we told Tom Mahler, he immediately filed his protest: He thought it inappropriate that Rocky and I — non Hawaiians — should be leading anyone through a Hawaiian experience. “You yourselves have gone out of your way to tell me you’re not Hawaiian, and now you’re pretending to be our cultural tour guides?”
“Don’t worry, Tom,” Rocky said with a wink, “it won’t be authentic, but diluted and commercialized — as much as we can do that here.”
To my surprise, the family laughed openly and Mahler, stuck somewhere between pride and embarrassment, shrunk a little.
To prepare, we put together the Hawaiian supplies I’d brought and went out searching for a few other necessary items, like flowers and pork. Raúl was negotiating for a lively little piglet raised on a neighbor’s balcony when, unable to keep silent anymore — it’d been almost a month of putting up with Tom Mahler and following everybody else’s passive example — I confronted Dionisio and Rocky.
“What’s the deal with Mahler? I mean, why do you guys even put up with him?”
Dionisio grinned. “Malía, you don’t believe he’s part of the family?”
“No, I don’t think you guys can stand him — which is why I don’t get why you let him think that he is.”
Rocky cleared her throat. “It’s another one of those Cubed things,” she said.
“What did you call him when I first explained it to you?” Dionisio asked her.
“Pet foreigner,” Rocky said in English.
“That’s right, he’s our pet foreigner,” Dionisio repeated.
“Your what?”
“Our pet foreigner,” he repeated, relishing the English through his laughter. “It’s every Cuban family’s aspiration to have one. See, we need someone who can travel back and forth, bring us things, bring us dollars, and remind us that there is another world.”
“One of the pet foreigner’s obligations,” Rocky chimed in, “is also to give hope.”
“And you don’t count?” I asked pointedly.
“Sometimes, yes,” she said.
“But sometimes not,” said Dionisio, now screwing up his face with mock concern. “Because, frankly, these days she doesn’t bring in much more in real dollars than a well-connected Cuban. Yes, we get wasabi and ukulele music, but no hulas — did I tell you? — she won’t grace us with a hula—”
“That’s her job,” Rocky said, her chin aiming at me.
“I’m not dancing hula here,” I said. “But — wait — you’re going off subject.”
“Ah, yes, the pet foreigner. How is my English, eh?”
“Diiiiiiiiiiiiiooooooooonisio!”
“Yeah,” he said as he and Rocky laughed it up, slapping their chests and snapping their hands in the air. “Okay, so what can we do? He attached himself to us and we realized, here’s one lonely little leftist. So we took him in. Don’t get me wrong — there’s real affection there. And he is well-intentioned. You see, he really believes. He believes so much that he just can’t see why we need him.”
“Or that you might be using him.”
“Malía!” Rocky said, aghast.
“Well, that’s it, isn’t it?”
“Don’t you see that it’s mutual?” Rocky argued. “Don’t you see how Dionisio’s family authenticates his experience?”
“Sure, but—”
“Wait a minute, wait a minute!” Dionisio literally put himself between us. He turned to Rocky. “Why pretend? Of course we’re using him.” Then he turned to me. “His services are invaluable, what he does for our hospitals and clinics. Do you realize every clinic in Chinatown has a computer now? And us — well, before Rocky, how else would we get medicine? Who would negotiate for us, even with other Cubans? Here people do for foreigners — for strangers — what they would not do for their own mothers.”
Just then, Raúl stepped up, the squirming pink piglet in his arms, its unsuspecting mouth turned up. “Beautiful, no?” he asked as we left, bopping his head cheerfully.
There is a terrible joke in Cuba which people perversely insisted on telling me over and over while I was visiting: A global conference is being held on the future for young people. The CNN reporter — all foreign TV reporters in Cuba seem to have morphed into CNN — asks a young Belgian, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” The girl says, “A chemist!” The CNN reporter poses the question to a Chinese kid, who says, “An investment banker.” Finally, the CNN reporter asks the Cuban delegate. “Me?” says the boy, inevitably named Pepito. “I want to be a foreigner!”
The joke’s tragedy is not just that it underscores Cuba’s obsequious deference to outsiders in order to survive, but also that it betrays history: Cubans — and my sister’s the proof — have never wanted to be anything but Cuban. Scattered to New York and Madrid, Tampa and Luanda, Miami, Moscow, and Honolulu, they hold onto their Cubanness with audacious caprice.
But bizarrely, in Cuba, I told Rocky, it seemed Cubanness was diminished.
“No, no, no,” she said, annoyed.
“C’mon, it seems like Tom Mahler’s more interested in Cuba, more Cubed than most people here!”
She sighed. “He’s a necessary evil, in spite of his good intentions. And that’s just for now. You’re missing the point. The idea, Malía, is that Cuba not turn into Hawai’i.”
“Hawai’i? Please... there are worse fates.” I was appalled.
And now it was Rocky’s turn to be amused. “Really? Because back in Hawai’i nee, hearing you and Mami and Papi, but especially you — with your Hawaiian language classes and your sovereignty speeches and your Pele — Hawai’i isn’t exactly paradise.”
“By comparison? Are you out of your mind?”
“Aren’t you the one who’s always worried that native Hawaiians will be wiped out by development and ‘immigration’ from the mainland? I mean, isn’t that part of the tragedy, that native Hawaiians are already outnumbered in their own land?”