The Best American Travel Writing 2013 by Elizabeth Gilbert Read Free Book Online

unless they are lost. I walked into a stuccoed, leafy house on a quiet street, a house full of loud talking, hands grabbing my arms. Everyone kissed and cried over my wife, whom they hadn’t seen since she was a teenager. They nicknamed me “Wao,” because everything they would tell me, I would say, “Wow.” It seemed the appropriate response. Wei-Wei, the
abuelita
, had come with us, or rather we had gone with her—it ended up being probably the last time she would ever go back—and she sent money ahead of our visit, for them to buy food with. She’s always sending money, but this time she sent more, and they laid in pork and all the spices they needed. There was a long table. All of the men were named some version of Rafael, Rafaelito, Rafaelín. The matriarch, a shy and tiny woman named Haydee (
eye-day
), presided with birdlike hands, making little apologies. You didn’t even have to chew the pork; you could just sort of let it melt. They made
chicharrones de viento
, “wind-crackers,” the Cubans’ witty name for a kind of poverty-inspired something, frisked up out of salt and flour and a little lard. There was a bottle of Havana Club on the table—the first time I ever saw or tasted it. Knowing only a little classroom Spanish, I struggled to follow their phrases, the swift and expressive but mud-mouthed Spanish spoken on the island.
    After dinner, I made the mistake of saying something about a cigar. It wasn’t as if I asked for one. I probably said something like, “I hear that your country is famous for its cigars.” But they took this as an overpolite way of asking for one, so the hunt began. The shops were closed, but the Rafaels started working on the car. You’ve heard, no doubt, how in Cuba they still drive working American cars from the 1950s, but this was something else, a Frankenstein made from the parts of about four different cars from the ’50s and one Russian car apparently from the ’70s. They got this creature going, and we started moving through the streets. No headlights—one of them held an electric lantern out the window. It was wired to the cigarette lighter. We needed it badly. Within a mile of leaving the town, we were in the face-close darkness of unlighted rural roads. They took me to a kind of kiosk, an open bar in the middle of a field. I don’t know what it was, really. A kind of club. All of the men, about seven of them, were workers in the tobacco fields. They would smuggle out a cigar or two each week, maybe defective ones, for personal use or the chance to trade it away. Rafaelito told me, “This is the
puro puro
.”
    Back at the house, half the neighborhood gathered to watch me huff on this thing, many, I slowly realized, hoping to see me vomit. I stood outside on a back patio, amid chicken coops. The cigar went to my head like thunder. My knees became untrustworthy. But no throwing up. Rafaelito had too much to drink and danced like a crazy person. As a boy, he lost his only brother, drowned in the river. His father, Rafael, approached me with a wagging finger, asking me if I liked the country. Of course, I said,
bonita, linda y la gente
.
    “Si.”
He looked a little bit like a Cuban Groucho Marx.
“Si, te gusta el país,”
he said.
“Pero, te gusta el sistema?”
He pulled the syllables of
el sistema
out of his mouth like draws of taffy.
    Now they were all gone, all the Rafaels. The two older ones were dead from disease, and the youngest one had gone to Miami, I don’t even know how. There is a kind of lottery, apparently. Perhaps he won it. He’s working as a mechanic. The house was completely different. The ground floor was empty and quiet.
    Haydee, the old woman of the house, was still there, even more ancient but seemingly unchanged. I saw her do the same thing now to the six-year-old that she did to my wife those years ago, wrap her arms around the girl and sort of refuse to leave, the way a child would. “I’m keeping her here,” she said. “You,