Cuba Diaries by Isadora Tattlin Read Free Book Online

government in exchange for being able to keep his Cuban citizenship and travel freely to and from Cuba. Yolanda is in the school because her father can pay for it and because the Cuban government either hasn’t yet developed a policy about children with a
gusañero
parent or simply hasn’t noticed Yolanda is there.
    José drives down a pitted driveway and around a circle and stops in front of a midsize mansion, its garden a jungle with rusting appliance and machine parts poking through the foliage. As usual, we’re not sure we’re at the right place. Few buildings in Havana are used for what they were originally intended, and even fewer have signs in front of them. José goes in ahead of us and comes out with his thumb up.
    An upright Remington typewriter and a battered, unplugged mimeographmachine sit on a desk behind a particleboard partition in the marble-floored foyer. The
directora
, a cheerful
mulata
, kisses both of us and Thea on both cheeks. We thank the
directora
for making it possible for Thea to take classes. She says it’s odd, but few foreign families have ever expressed an interest in their children’s taking dance classes at the
centro
.
    We are shown into the dressing room. Thea has asked Nick and me to stay with her the whole time. We are led through a pantry to what must have been a state-of-the-art kitchen in 1959. There is space in the French provincial wooden cabinets for a wall oven, another space for a stove top once set into a yellow Formica countertop now gouged with cigarette burns, the remains of a garbage-disposal unit, and a space for a built-in refrigerator. Vents near the ceiling show that there must have been central air-conditioning. A coffin-style freezer remains, its lid ripped off, brownish liquid at the bottom. Only a few linoleum tiles are still in place, so the floor is for the most part crumbling cement. The
directora
tells us to leave Thea’s clothes heaped on a counter. We do not have to worry about the clothes, for she . . . she points at her eye. “
Entienden?
” (“Do you understand?”).
    â€œI feel weird,” Thea says to us.
    Other girls arrive soon, lithe-limbed, giggling, with tulle bows in their hair. They change out of their clothes and into leotards, helped by earnest mothers, most of them a good fifteen years younger than I am. Most of the leotards have been mended more than once, the straps taken up or extended, and the legs rehemmed.
    We move into the dance studio, in what must have been the library. Scalloped borders of oak paneling outline alcoves where the bookshelves must have been. A cast-iron chandelier, festooned with cobwebs, is the room’s remaining ornament.
    â€œIt’s like a witch’s house, Mommy.”
    What parquet is left has buckled, but most of it has been removed and replaced with shellacked plywood. It is April, eighty-five degrees, and humid.
    The teacher, an El Greco–faced blond, kisses us on both cheeks. One window is open; the other window is shut. “I try never to use the word
heat
,” she murmurs to us in French. She climbs onto a chair and opens the other window. “There!” she says, smiling, to her students as she steps off the chair. It does not cool off at all.
    Nick and I sit in the garden at the back of the house, dangling our feet in an empty swimming pool, getting up every five minutes to stand on a tree stump and look in through a window at Thea. Parents are not allowed to stayin the room, but we have assured Thea that we will look in on her every ten minutes. “Every five minutes,” Thea said.
    â€œHow much longer?” Thea mouths to us through a forest of lithe, nut-brown, arching limbs every time we look in on her.
    AFTER WE GET HOME , Muna motions to me to follow her into an empty hallway. She tells me Manuel was in jail for nine years. A political prisoner. He keeps his conviction in the
despensa
.
    â€œIn