Around eight o’clock on an August evening in 1984, I was standing on the edge of the Choqueyapu River, gloved and bundled up like a tawatawa in my Castile rabbit-wool sweaters. Even so, my hands were clenched and my bones were frozen by the brutal breeze coming off the snow-capped peaks of the great Illimani.
The only belongings I carried were my passport with its floating visa and the brick-colored elephant-leather suitcase my father had bought at the Plaza Pérez Velasco at the end of the 1970s.
The suitcase was almost unmovable—not so much because of the weight of my personal belongings, but rather because of the weight of fear, the innocence of illusions, and the breadth of hope. The latter occupied more than a third of the suitcase. I had never realized before that the weight of the intangible is far greater than the weight of soap, a hammer, or a penny.
At eight-fifteen, my friend “Flaco” (Skinny) Félix Goitia picked me up in his red Brasilia to take me to the El Alto airport. My final destination was Cuba, but the itinerary included an overnight layover in Lima.
Before boarding the plane, I met a guy who would later become one of my best friends during my stay on the island. His name was Alfredo Jiménez, and unfortunately, I lost contact with him; as I learned later, he stayed in Cuba with his wife, a gorgeous mulata.
A bit nervous at the prospect of embarking on my first continental journey, I paced back and forth through the far corners of the airport, smoking incessantly and chatting about mundane things with Flaco. Suddenly, a mechanized voice—as my mother would say—announced that passengers heading to Lima should board the aircraft. Intuituitively, I crossed myself and gave a big bear hug to my dear friend, whom I would never see again, as news of his tragic death reached me shortly thereafter.
After midnight, an uncle of Alfredo’s picked us up in a van and took us to his apartment somewhere in Lima. The night was frigid; nevertheless, Charco—that was his last name—stopped at a liquor store and bought a couple of cases of Cristal beer to celebrate our arrival and, at the same time, bid us farewell. That night we drank, sang, and danced waltzes to the rhythm of the incomparable voice of Doña Chabuca Granda. Let me tell you, girl from Lima… let me…
Around six in the morning the next day, after sleeping off the hangover, we arrived at the Lima airport to begin the journey to the island of the bearded caiman. Once inside a Tupolev from the Cubana de Aviación fleet, we were able to taste for the first time a glass of Havana Club—that amber-colored aged liquor trapped for years in the oak bellies of the barrels in Santa Cruz del Norte.
Perhaps due to the magical effect of the cuba libre, or the rising uneasiness of knowing oneself far from home, another traveling companion stood up from his seat, opened the overhead compartment, pulled out his guitar, and we all started singing: I am going to Havana, over where the moon and palm trees are, an angelical Cuban woman awaits me…
Six hours later, we arrived. The temperature was around thirty degrees Celsius (86°F) and the humidity hovered near eighty-nine percent. Getting off the plane, I felt a blast of heat that almost cooked my bones. The soporific heat and the smell of the motionless banana leaves were my welcome gift.
Minutes later, a compañero—that’s what everyone is called in Cuba—appeared and gave us the official welcome. We collected our luggage and, in single file, headed to a bus that would take us to a clinic to get shots and vaccinations against diseases common to the Caribbean tropics, but foreign to our high-plateau Andean bodies.
I remember taking two pills, one green and the other white. As dusk was falling, we arrived at a transit lodging facility, the Pepito Tey school. It was there I learned that my final destination would be Santiago de Cuba, far over in the easternmost part of the island.
Golf Balls, Tennis Balls, and a Doctor of the Heart
I wake up drench in sweat and itching like crazy. I notice little whitish bumps on my arms and legs, but I don’t give them any thought because I assume they are mosquito bites.
A few hours later, I inspect my body and discover with horror that the small bumps have grown to look like golf balls inflated with a clear liquid.
I was so frightened that I flew straight to the infirmary. The nurse was a burly jabao—a mix of Black and white—who was snoozing in a chair.
On the treatment table, among cotton balls, IV fluids, and gauze, sat a portable radio without an antenna broadcasting the news of the day. It was 7:25 in the morning; I remember the exact time because Radio Reloj chimes the time every minute, with a ticking background that haunts you for the rest of your life. I woke him up with a terrified yell. He stood up—or rather leaned over—because I had already pulled down my pants so he could inspect these monumental protrusions. He raised a scalpel and sliced a slit into the dome of the balls, from which a colorless liquid dripped out.
He took a few steps back, put on the face of a baffled idiot, and said to me: “Look, kid, it looks like you were bitten by mosquitoes larger than pigeons… but those aren’t bites. It must be something rare, because in my ten years as a nurse I’ve never seen such a thing.” Right then, I nearly shit myself with fear.
By noon, I was admitted to what would be my home, off and on, for three weeks: the Institute of Tropical Medicine, in a beautiful neighborhood called Siboney. It was a specialized clinic where they treated Cuban internationalists.
The internationalists were those men and women who voluntarily enlisted to head off to distant continents and exotic countries—the Congo, Mozambique, Benin, Burkina Faso—to work, teach, or fight. After their heroic deployments, they would return to the island afflicted with malaria, dengue, and other jungle diseases. And there, among them, was I, decorated by a single pill.
They gave me a bed and more pills, surely to counteract the previous ones. The doctor who examined me said: “Don’t worry, it’s just a chemical reaction to what we gave you the day before yesterday.” And so it was. A week later, my wounds had vanished and I was discharged.
A car took me back to Pepito Tey to spend the night, as I was supposed to leave for Santiago the next day. Meanwhile, my other companions had already left for their destinations: Alfredo to Sancti Spíritus and Manuel to Santiago. Since my destination was the same, I had asked Manuel to take my suitcase with him.
At dawn, the nightmare reappeared, and with greater vengeance. This time, the bumps looked like tennis balls. I ran my hand over them, and that clear, nylon-like texture jiggled like gelatin. I almost threw up from disgust; this time I really was scared out of my mind and swore to return to my high-altitude lands as soon as possible.
I headed straight to the institute and practically checked myself in. As if to stoke my horror, the doctor arrived accompanied by about twenty physicians to examine me and take photos of my skin lesions. I thought to myself in a whisper: Damn it, I must be so messed up that I’m even going to shine in anatomy textbooks. They stared at me open-mouthed, as if expecting answers from me.
I told them that my poor body was not accustomed to such an assault—be it chemical, botanical, or animal—and that to prove it, I had at least half a dozen reasons:
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That I came from way up in the high mountains, where children touch the stars with their hands on carnival nights.
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That I was born in a town where heat is scarcer than bread.
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That I had never experienced chemical reactions to multicolored pills.
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That the only time I was ever “stung” (picado / tipsy) was when the booze ran out or when my friends led me astray.
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That people from the highlands only react to sorojchi (altitude sickness), and for that, a cup of coca tea is enough.
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That in my homeland, mosquitoes live only in Santa Cruz or in zoology books, palm trees are drawings on the walls of chicherías and local brothels, and the only things that truly sting you are ulupica peppers or homemade llajwa salsa.
Therefore, I concluded, our Andean anatomies do not develop polymorphic allergies to foreign substances.
Upon hearing such an incongruous rant, they surely thought I was delirious, or that the aforementioned pills were having the opposite effect of what was intended. At any rate, whatever the case was, I got out of bed and told them point-blank: “Look, doctors, please cure me one last time and take me straight to the airport, because I’m going home.”
My decision lasted only a few minutes, because I could not resist the sensuality and beauty of the doctor. She stroked my shoulders, came so close I nearly melted, and with a voice like silk and a dazzling smile, whispered in my ear: “Kid, don’t despair; you’re in good hands and I’m going to take care of you. Besides, how are you going to throw away an opportunity like this?”
It turns out the doctor determined I needed periodic checkups and recommended that I stay in the capital, because according to her, I would die in Santiago. I never knew if that diagnosis was for medical reasons or because she wanted to keep me close. What is certain is that I stayed in Havana, where I spent several memorable years—partly thanks to my chemical reactions and to my Doctor of the Heart, with whom I became tangled in a concupiscent amalgam more sensual than chapter eleven of the Kama Sutra.
The Polytechnic, Kanga, and Julito
Two weeks later, I arrived at the José Martí Higher Polytechnic Institute in Rancho Boyeros. Once settled and fully immunized, I slept well and appreciated for the first time the scent of palm trees and malanga plants. I took a short walk around the area and breathed in deeply, as if to forever capture the flavor and freshness of the sea breezes. I closed my eyes and, just like Eduardo Avaroa, said: Damn it! I wish we Bolivians could breathe this sea air someday—not that of the Caribbean, but that of the Pacific.
The dorm supervisor handed me my books, notebooks, and erasers, a pair of scentless and tasteless deodorant sticks, two bedsheets thinner than a cat’s tongue, a carton of filterless Popular cigarettes, a few pairs of underwear, and a tube of toothpaste that tasted not like mint, but like lead.
I explored my room for a bit and bumped into Kanga, an African from the Congo who spoke Spanish with a French accent and had a shaved head shaped like a flowerpot. Kanga would be my friend and roommate for a couple of years, as was José, another African from Mozambique, who taught me three words in Portuguese: filho da puta.
On Monday morning, the supervisor showed up again, this time with a Cuban named Julio Bazán, and told me: “Comrade Marco, Julito will be your mentor while you get familiar with your surroundings and with the customs of life here at the institute and outside it.”
Julio asked me where I was from. I told him. He looked at me and said: “Ah, you’re from where they killed Che.” Right then and there began our close friendship, which later turned into a unique and unforgettable brotherhood.
As I mentioned before, my belongings were in Santiago and took four weeks to arrive. I opened the leather suitcase and, with astonishment and indignation, discovered that along the way my six tubes of Colgate toothpaste, my Argentine deodorants, my half-dozen bottles of motacú palm shampoo, my two genuine Levi’s jeans, and my only pair of Manaco sneakers had been stolen. With relief, however, I saw that they had left my passport, my Coca-Cola towel, a Parker ballpoint pen, an useless winter ch’ullu hat made of guanaco wool, and a few L&M cigarettes.
A month later, in the company of Julito and other classmates, I was eating lunch and enjoying the malangas, sweet potatoes, frutabomba (which nobody in Cuba calls papaya, for reasons that take a Bolivian a while to understand), moros y cristianos (white rice with black beans), and a jar of milk, when suddenly a mulato approached me and said: “¿Qué bolá, acere? Do you have any fulas?” Acere means friend or pal; fula is the slang term for the US dollar. It was the first time I realized the business potential of having foreign currency. I told him yes, that I had about fifty. He took me outside the dining hall and offered me seven Cuban pesos for every fula. I told him I’d think about it and walked away. The rest is a story I prefer not to tell.
Of Guaguas, Dominoes, and Other Linguistic Surprises
One weekend, Julito and I were standing outside the institute waiting for some form of transportation to take us to downtown Havana. Suddenly a bus appeared, and as I stood there lost in thought, Julito said: “Come on, kid, get on the guagua.” Once inside, I gathered my thoughts, looked my friend dead in the eye, and out of nowhere told him he was a sick, low-life degenerate. Because back in my homeland, a guagua (or wawa) is a nursing baby. Oh, Jesus, Mary, and Joseph!
The thing is, in Cuba, guagua is the common name for buses. That was the beginning of my love affair with the rich and fun Cuban culture, better known as cubaneo—so much so that within a few months, I was talking and acting like a complete guajiro (country bumpkin).
Dominoes deserves its own paragraph, because in Cuba it isn’t played: it’s litigated. The tile isn’t placed down; it is slammed against the table like someone signing a court sentence, and every hand comes with its side dish of shouting, insults, and legal precedent. I came from playing cacho (dice), where five dice in a cup decide for you and chance can be blamed for everything. Dominoes, on the other hand, is equal parts memory, calculation, and nerve. Julito taught me that counting the opponent’s tiles is for gentlemen, guessing them is for masters, and talking while counting them is for Cubans. I never progressed beyond an apprentice, but I learned the essentials: at that table, people debated baseball, women, shortages, and history—and the game was merely the pretext.
Vampires in Havana?
Usually on weekends, around nine at night, when the sun had retired for the day and not before stuffing my belly with some sweet potatoes and malangas, I would turn into a vampire. I’d iron my guayabera shirt and my black cape, comb my hair with pomade, dust my face with white chalk to give myself a Draculean look, and vanish into the sensual haze of the Havana nights.
I transformed into a vampire not to roam the cobbled streets of Old Havana or stalk the surroundings of Miramar to sink my teeth into victims and suck their tropical blood, but rather to enjoy the music, food, drinks, and culture of the Pearl of the Antilles.
Here is a brief review of my vampire escapades and the reason behind the title of this piece.
Right across from the Habana Libre Hotel, in Vedado, sits the Yara Cinema—an important venue for the International Festival of New Latin American Cinema, which I attended a couple of times. A friend recommended that, to refine my pseudo-Cuban ways, I had to watch Vampires in Havana by Juan Padrón.
And so I did. The movie is laugh-out-loud funny. Two international gangs of vampires, one from Chicago and the other from Düsseldorf, engage in gunfights over the formula for Vampisol—an elixir that would allow the fraternity’s tycoons to sunbathe with impunity on sunny beaches. All this happens while a group of revolutionaries fights against the Machado dictatorship in the 1930s. The common link between both stories is the hero: José Amadeus von Drácula. Pepito to his friends. A trumpet-playing vampire who is Dracula’s nephew, doesn’t know it, and walks under the Havana sun without suspecting why.
La Rampa, The Nacional, and The Capri
On 23rd Street at the corner of L sits the Habana Libre, formerly named the Havana Hilton. That’s where the famous La Rampa begins—a place where art and nightlife coexist in a perfect symbiotic symphony, and from where one can walk down all the way to the sea without realizing it’s already dawn.
That hotel brings back incredible, and at times unmentionable, memories. It was at Las Cañitas bar that I learned to savor Matusalem aged rum, smoke Cohiba cigars, and casually hit it off with whichever Cuban woman or tourist happened to be around. On the ground floor is El Polinesio restaurant, darker than a cave and filled with fresh, delicious Asian food—dark because, as they say, the dim light sharpens your sense of smell. On the rooftop is the Turquino club, named after Cuba’s highest mountain.
A couple of blocks east, on O Street at the corner of 21st, stands the Hotel Nacional de Cuba—a grand landmark where Lucky Luciano and Meyer Lansky used to gamble and sleep back in the day. It is also home to the Cabaret Parisién, where I went several times to listen to the fabulous trumpeter Arturo Sandoval.
Founded in 1930, the Nacional boasts superb architecture with medieval flair, precious woods, and breathtaking marble: grand, spacious, majestic, refined, and distinguished. It sits atop a gentle hill a few meters from the sea, facing the Malecón, offering views of Havana Bay and the ancient El Morro Castle. The rear features a sort of circular Moorish garden where, when money was tight, we gathered to drink rum and smoke Partagás until the Havana sunset—out in the open air, nestled in a tropical setting, calmed by the light of the moon’s first cousins. It looked like a second-hand Tropicana, and for us, it was more than enough.
Not far from there, also on 21st Street, is the Hotel Capri, built in the fifties with the modernism of that era and still possessing its majesty and its reputation for free-spiritedness. It has an Italian restaurant and a rooftop pool. In lean times, I would pretend to go eat at the restaurant, but every now and then I’d sneak into that pool with a Cuban mulata who worked as a waitress there.
Heading down La Rampa, you reach the Malecón—the perfect seawall to watch the Havana horizon and the glorious Caribbean sunsets. Or perhaps just to walk with a secret sweetheart, holding hands, letting your cheeks be splashed by the warm waters of the blue sea.
Hemingway, Mojitos, and Daiquiris
El Floridita—an incredible bar on Obispo and Monserrate, where Ernest Hemingway not only made it his mission to drink everything in sight, but also promoted the daiquiri worldwide: Cuban rum, crushed ice, and lime juice.
Near El Floridita is the Hotel Ambos Mundos. In a room on the fifth floor, Hemingway would stay whenever he remained on land, and that room became one of his favorite places to write.
The bustling Bodeguita del Medio is located near the Cathedral. Among its culinary specialties are fried pork chunks, yucca or malanga with mojo sauce, and black beans. It’s said that Hemingway used to claim: “My daiquiri in El Floridita and my mojito in La Bodeguita”—a line he probably never actually said, but which has sold more rum than any advertising campaign in history. The mojito recipe, just in case: rum, sugar, ice, lime juice, sparkling water, and mint.
I don’t recall the exact date, but one radiant day in February, Alfredo and I stopped by La Bodeguita and had the good fortune of seeing Carlos Puebla—the singer of the revolution—singing his famous song for Commander Che Guevara and reciting verses by the great Cuban poets José Martí and Nicolás Guillén.
Cultural Showers
It wasn’t all parties, women, and rum. Every now and then I’d take little “cultural showers” at El Hurón Azul inside the UNEAC (Union of Writers and Artists of Cuba), located on 17th Street at the corner of H, in Vedado.
El Hurón Azul is a bar where bohemians, artists, writers, troubadours, puppeteers, and mimes blend into a cultural amalgam more diverse than the colors of a wiphala flag. Its pre-Columbian leather armchairs invite endless gatherings over glasses of rum and the blue smoke of Partagás cigars. I was a frequent visitor to that center, where I listened in person to stories told by luminaries like Mario Benedetti and Eduardo Galeano.
The Cathedral is just steps from La Bodeguita del Medio, and it was there that I heard a concert by Silvio Rodríguez and Pablo Milanés for the first time. At the end of that amazing recital, I bought a couple of vinyl records: Tríptico by Silvio, and one by Pablo featuring “Yolanda”.
A few weeks later, during a class break, a young man approached me and said he had heard I really liked the Nueva Trova music movement. I told him I did. He mentioned he had a close relationship with the movement and that, as a gift, he would take me one day to meet a member of the trova.
And so, one day we got on a guagua and traveled to San Antonio de los Baños, a picturesque town an hour’s ride from Havana. It turns out that young man, whose last name was Domínguez, was none other than Silvio’s nephew. We entered his bohío (hut) filled with coconuts and parrots. He offered me iced tea and showed me some plaques on the wall while we waited for my surprise.
Suddenly an elderly man with white hair and militia boots appeared; under his arm he carried an album of old photos, and in his hand a pair of cigars. It was the grandfather—a wonderful character who reminded me of Colonel Aureliano Buendía. We spoke about the revolution, the blue unicorn, García Lorca, For Whom the Bell Tolls, and the Latin American literary Boom.
Around midnight, as the last ashes of the Cohiba lay dying in the Baccarat crystal ashtray, I quietly slipped away so as not to wake the grandfather, who by then looked more like “Colonel Goodnight.”
Although I was never able to shake Silvio’s hand, I can say I had the privilege of visiting his ancestral home, enjoying the magnificent friendship of his nephew Domínguez, and learning from the nobility and endless experience of his grandfather.
Casa de las Américas, 3rd & G, Vedado
Founded in 1959 by Haydée Santamaría, Casa de las Américas is the institution that kept the cultural pulse of Latin America and the Caribbean for decades. There, one could buy what was banned or simply unavailable elsewhere on the continent. I used to go there for my books and magazines. On a lazy, rainy day, I arrived at the center only to discover the following lines:
For I am heartened by the formidable pride
of living, neither envious nor envied,
pursuing fantastic visions,
while others drag themselves through the mud
to extract an atom of gold
from the pestilent bottom of a swamp.
— Julián del Casal
Del Casal was a great Cuban modernist poet. They say he died on the night of October 21, 1893, suddenly, while at the dinner table with a friend’s family: during a fit of laughter, he suffered a fatal ruptured aneurysm. I know of no more literary way to die.
Miramar and the Karl Marx Theater
Miramar is a glamorous neighborhood in the Playa municipality, west of the capital. It is a green expanse scattered with mansions and Spanish lime trees. The grand houses with marble staircases and filigree curtains—which before ’59 sheltered Batista’s henchmen—are today home to embassies and fashion houses.
On 1st Avenue and 10th Street in Miramar sits the portentous Karl Marx Theater, with a seating capacity for five thousand people comfortably settled in wide armchairs. In that theater, on the occasion of the thirtieth anniversary of the death of the great German poet and playwright Bertolt Brecht, I attended an incredible recital: the radiant voice of Pablo Milanés, the unmistakable son of Irakere, the courageous guitar strums of Vicente Feliú, and the poetry-turned-song of the great Silvio.
To close the concert, the troubadour performed “Sueño con serpientes” (I Dream of Serpents), whose coda recites the following lines:
There are men who fight for a day and they are good.
There are others who fight for a year and they are better.
There are those who fight for many years, and they are very good.
But there are those who fight their whole lives: those are the indispensable ones.
I left the Karl Marx walking toward the sea, carrying that phrase on me like a second vampire cape. And I thought of the brick-colored elephant-leather suitcase—the one back on the edge of the Choqueyapu that I couldn’t lift because a third of it was filled with hope.
The years on the island took care of emptying it and filling it up again with something else: lighter to carry, and harder to lose. In the end, that is what all escapades are truly about.