Seven Days in Cuba

Story and Photos by Emily J. Minor,
Palm Beach Post Staff Writer

- Downtown Havana is a mess. Just a block from the Capitol, families build on roofs and live in slums. You'll find your nostrils black from diesel and kerosene fumes. The city's once-famous architecture is deteriorating to the point of crumbling.

In February, Palm Beach Post columnist Emily J. Minor spent a week with a family who lives about an hour outside Havana. She stayed in their apartment, watched how they pieced together enough food and stamina and humor to make it through each day.

Minor got a glimpse of Cuba that few reporters see. To avoid repercussions, we have changed names and identifying details. But the family members, and the lives they shared with Emily, are real.

Read her account and see her exclusive photos of Cuba and its people.

- Pipo Martinelli's family is saving up for a new refrigerator, though their old one is often bare.

The apartment is small, tiny really. Four rocking chairs. A table. A television and VCR. It smells of stale smoke and kerosene and tomatoes that should have been thrown out yesterday. There are bars on the windows and a Christmas cloth on the kitchen table. The place mats are red.

We've arrived under a full moon after a long day of travel. The boy's mother and father have met us downstairs. There is kissing. And hugging. There's a growing crowd of curious neighbors, so we start up the dark stairwell, slowly, carefully, one invisible step at a time.

We walk into the apartment and on the wall, straight ahead, is a calendar. The kind you tear off with each passing day.

June 9, it reads. Eight months ago.

Which makes sense. Perfect sense.

It was the day Pipo and Isabel hired a driver to take them to the big new airport in Havana.

It was the day their boy left.

They show us our room. His room. We talk some more, hug some more, deliver the latest news from America. Someone yawns. Then again. The lights go out.

We shuffle to the room where the boy grew up.

I take his sister's old bed. His wife takes his. She has already passed out a few of the gifts to his parents. The Vicks VapoRub and the cappuccino maker she got from the thrift store back home. We are jabbering, laughing, crying. Two strangers becoming fast friends.

"I miss him," she says.

"I know you do," I say.

"He should be here," she says.

"Some day," I tell her.

We're grown women with husbands, not high school steadies. We have professions, not after-school jobs at some mall. Yet, like summer camp, we whisper our secrets well into the night. The opened slats in the wooden shutters let in the cool air, but they also let in the sounds. The teenagers walking home from town. The occasional old Chevy rattling down the street. The man with the hacking cough crunching leaves as he walks along, whistling.

I hear it all from my small cot in this strange place.

This place where time has stopped.

- The owner of a bridal shop in Cardenas, the city where Elian Gonzalez is from, decorates his display window with an out-of-date dress and a poster of the boy.

I am here because of a child named Elian, a boy who needs no last name, a child who's practically as wholesale as Cher.

There are Elian jokes and Elian T-shirts and Elian hearings in Congress. There are Elian posters and Elian news conferences. Each week in Cuba, thousands march for his return.

Elian Gonzalez.

It was Thanksgiving weekend when the two fishermen found the child, just 5 years old at the time. He was hanging onto a piece of inner tube in the ocean off Fort Lauderdale. And with a fever and a pitch unmatched since Cuban MiGs shot down two exile Brothers to the Rescue planes in 1996, the furor erupted. Fidel Castro, 73, Cuba's leader for 41 years, is said to be obsessed with the child.

Of course, Cuba is filled with young Elians. There are 11 million people in Cuba, but no one really knows how many have left the island. No one can keep count of the rickety rafts that float off the coast. No one knows how many have died at sea like Elian's mother and 10 of her companions Elian is all the Cubans hear about on their government television stations. Each afternoon, there are reruns of Elian news instead of the cartoons that kids, and mothers, have come to count on. Elian has preempted the soap operas. He even disrupts the already difficult workdays. The government buses people by the thousands to its sanctioned demonstrations.

One small boy, with a mother desperate enough to risk her own life as well as his, has become the centerpiece of an ideological struggle stretching from Havana to Miami to Washington.

And torn me from the comforts of my narrow world.

- At the largest market in Havana, meat lies on counters in the heat for hours. By day's end, it's smelly and warm and covered with black flies. There are puddles of blood on the floor. Still, beef is such a rarity that if Cubans have the money, they'll buy it -- regardless of the health risk.

Her name is Angela Martinelli. Except that's not really her name.

We stayed for seven days in the small town of Romero, except that isn't really where we stayed.

Her husband's name is Orlando, except it's not.

Her in-laws are Pipo and Isabel. Her sister-in-law is Rosalita. Orlando's best friend is Julio. Except those are all protective names.

Cubans can't even go into a hotel and spend the night. It's against the law to carry beef without a receipt. It's illegal to own a copy of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. So they certainly can't go traipsing off with a reporter for a week, discussing feelings and frustrations and food-rationing cards.

So, we've changed it all.

Except we haven't changed a thing.

- A young girl just home from school nibbles at her piece of bread, allocated daily on each Cuban's ration card. The bread is always stale.

Dear Ms. Minor:

I visited Cuba for the first time in 1998. Born and raised in Puerto Rico, I believed I was prepared for the experience, Cuba being so similar to my island in so many ways. I was wrong. My feelings of frustration and impotence are so strong in regards to Cuba it is difficult to explain them. Ever since my first visit to that incredibly beautiful island, I have come to the conclusion that I am Puertorican by birth, a U.S. citizen by law, and a Cuban from the heart.

I married a Cuban software engineer who at the time we met was making 300 Cuban pesos a month (the equivalent to 15 U.S. dollars). His family had not eaten beef in over 6 years, they could count with the fingers of their hands the times they had eaten chicken or eggs that year, their basic diet consisted in white rice, black beans, yuca, if they were lucky, sugared water and the daily piece of bread per family member they were allowed in their food rationing card. Their underwear was made from scraps of cotton cloth hand sewn, and for elastic they used thin strips of rubber cut from old bike tubes. Newspapers were relished, for toilet paper was nonexistent. Living on a second floor, with a malfunctioning plumbing system, hauling buckets of water from the neighborhood water pump was a daily chore. Minimal proper hygiene is impossible to achieve, food poisoning is a common ailment, flies are a constant nuisance, and you can't get used to the stench of rotten garbage.

I have visited Cuba 6 more times, taking in every trip as many suitcases and boxes and bags as I can of everything you can imagine, from frozen steaks to toys and bars of soap, to toilet paper and sneakers and shampoo, to pencils and notebooks and pillows. But no matter how much I spend or take them . . . it will never be enough. I can't give them back the 40 years of suffering they have been forced to endure.

I have a son who plays in Cuba with friends 2 and 3 years older than him. None of them reach his height nor weight by far. I have met women, brave intelligent women, professionals and academics who in the outside world would be magazine cover material, who have had to, at one time or another in their lives, resort to prostitution in order to feed their children.

Why? I can't come up with an answer. I could spend hours telling you about the bizarre and crazy things I see in Cuba, but would my words reach deaf ears? Your article in Saturday's paper has given me such hope. I also wish Cuba were different, but it isn't. I can only say one thing:

I would have risked my life and my son's life in order to escape that prison and have the chance of a better life for him.

And that his how I met Angela Martinelli.

I wrote her back that day, Jan. 29, saying her letter was both "heartwarming and heartbreaking." I thanked her for taking the time to write.

Then I moved on -- to politics and PTA meetings and short, expensive trips to the grocery.

But I couldn't forget about this stranger and her strange images.

Four days later, I called her on the telephone, gingerly suggesting she take me there. Three weeks later, she and I were holding hands as an old Taino airplane took off from Nassau to Havana.

She took four suitcases, filled with jeans and medicines and toys for the children. She took baseball bats and books and videos of her new house back in Florida. A real home! With a yard and a deck and pots of flowers. Each time someone would come to the apartment, Angela would emerge from the bedroom with a stack of special things just for that person.

Crayons for the boy who loves to draw. Barrettes for the young female tennis player. Linen pants, size 8, for the mother downstairs. A left-handed baseball glove for the kid across the hall. On and on, day after day, until everything she had lugged down was gone.

For herself, she took one pair of jeans and one shirt.

My mother is worried.

She can't figure out why I'd want to go.

So I try to explain it to her.

And to myself.

Every day, someone or something from Cuba touches my life.

I eat their food and eavesdrop on their language. I read about their politics. I watch the documentaries.

The man who lives across the street from me came from Cuba when he was 9. My dentist's wife. The cashier in the cafeteria at work. The janitor at my son's school. The couple that cleans my husband's office complex. A woman I pass every day in the newspaper office corridor. All from Cuba. They are my neighbors and my colleagues and my friends. That's why I'm going.

- A boy rides a pretend horse in the neighborhood where Elian Gonzalez lived in Cardenas. The town's main street is presentable, but around the corner, you'll find peeling paint and puddles of sewage. The day we visited, there were dead rats in the streets.

When he was about 12, Angela's husband was sent to a school out in the country, and it was there he began to notice that some people were treated differently. There was this girl. She was better dressed. And she seemed brighter, happier. Sometimes she'd even arrive back at school from weekend leave a day late. That was unheard of!

She also didn't seem as hungry.

The next time Orlando was home, he asked his father about the girl.

Why did she have all these special privileges?

Pipo was ready. He'd been waiting. He'd raised his son to ask these very questions.

Pipo is a kind man, an artist, a reader, a scholar. He's a man who survives by pretending. On the outside. But Pipo never pretends in his heart. He has spent countless hours of countless days riding his old bicycle around town looking for food for his family, pretending he wasn't worried or angry. Or starving.

"Why is she different?" Orlando asked him.

And that's when Pipo went to his bookshelf, the one in the hallway, the one stuffed with hard-to-find books like dictionaries and the classics and dissertations about democracy. And he gave Orlando a copy of George Orwell's Animal Farm.

"Read this," Pipo said.

And the boy retired to the corner bedroom he shared with sister. He lay on his hard cot, the windows open. And he read. About the animals who took over the farm. About the pigs who took over the house. About the social system that was supposed to be so equal and fair, but really wasn't.

And that was the year Orlando Martinelli began to understand communism.

- Their bathroom cabinet lacks most of the basics, such as aspirin, antacids, shaving cream -- even a door.

We are sitting at the table with the Christmas cloth, and they're telling jokes. We've just eaten a feast. Rice and beans and fried yuca and pork. Cubans can't buy these things with the pesos they're paid at work. Cubans buy these things, and just about everything else, with dollars they get from family in the U.S.

Orlando's friend, Julio, is in rare form. He is our traveling partner for the week, our bodyguard, my new friend. He is darling, about 30 years old, smart and handsome and funny. So funny. Pipo is smiling, laughing, really, a cigarette propped between his teeth. Isabel is so happy to have guests -- and a gringa at that! -- that she doesn't sit down for hours on end. The first thing I learn how to say in Spanish is sit.

"Isabel," I shout. "Sientate."

She ignores me with a pretty smile.

Julio starts to talk. His long arms are flailing, his white teeth flashing. This one's about Elian.

Imagine that!

It's the year 2020, and there's a man with a sign protesting in front of the capitol building in Havana.

He's shouting: "Free Elian! Free Elian!"

A woman walks by.

"Free Elian?" she says. "But they returned him to our country 20 years ago."

"I know," replies the man.

"I am Elian!"

Pipo laughs, big, hard gales of emotion. His rationed cigarette wobbles in his mouth.

"Another!" he says. "Another!"

Julio starts up. This one's about Castro.

"Wait," Pipo says.

He turns and pushes the nub of his cigarette out a crack in the louvered shutters. Then he turns the knob that closes the window.

Better that the neighbors not hear.

Because you never know.

You just never know who believes in the triumph of the revolution, and who doesn't.

"Go ahead," he says. And Julio starts over.

Fidel's giving a speech.

"I have bad news, and good news," Fidel says.

"The good news is, that starting today we will be giving out rocks for food at all the ration markets.

"The bad news is, there's not enough for everybody."

Pipo laughs as he lights another cigarette.

"Another," he says. "Another!" He turns to shut the window even tighter.

- Children in Cuba are incredibly resilient, playing ball with a stick and a piece of fruit and getting a huge thrill out of a simple thing like mugging for the camera. They know nothing of Legos, summer camps and steaming hot showers.

The boy.

I can't take my eyes off the boy.

People all around me are exchanging pleasantries. The grandmother, her husband, the teenager who smells of hair tonic from the peso store.

Hello. How are you? How nice of you to come! someone's saying.

But my eyes are on him.

It's late in the afternoon, around 5, and the sun is throwing soft light on the walls inside the small, scrubbed house at the edge of the village. The boy is standing beside the wooden dining room table. He's 9, maybe 10. It's hard to say because he's so thin. There are dark circles under his eyes, his skin is almost gray and his skinny arms hang lifeless at his sides, like two useless sticks.

Come look at the garden in the back, someone says.

The boy and I just stand there.

I put my hand in my bag and dig around for something, anything, a toy, a pen, a root beer barrel candy from the Publix back home. And then Angela remembers. She pulls a mashed Twix candy bar from the front pocket of her blue jeans. It's a miniature, about the size of a baby carrot, the kind we might give out by the handful at Halloween.

The boy takes it. For one beautiful moment, his face is full of color. He gives the first bite to his grandmother and the second to his older brother. About half now remains.

And then, unaware of anything but the unexpected treasure he holds, he brings the candy to his mouth and he starts to lick the chocolate.

Slowly. Delicately. Pathetically. Over and over, again and again, until every bit of chocolate is gone, until all the boy is licking is a memory.

That vine blooms in spring, someone's saying.

The boy just stands there, still licking, licking. He seems to me as thin as the shadows that have begun to fill the room. I follow the voices to the outside garden.

And as we are leaving, after we have oohed and ahhed about the cool evening air, after we have snapped a family photograph, someone thrusts a small bouquet of flowers in my arms.

Amaryllis. Hardy and healthy, with pink and white petals.

Beautiful flowers.

I take them. I hold them. I touch them. I smell them.

I even remember to say thanks.

But it isn't the flowers I want.

It's the boy.

We leave in our old truck. We bounce along the dirt road that leads into town. We pull up to the apartment, walk up the stairs, stroll into the place that a short time ago was odd and foreign, funny-smelling and unappealing. A place that now feels very much like home.

Angela does some things in the kitchen. Isabel putters about, too. Pipo roots around in his bedroom, looking for Orlando's old baseball scrapbooks that he wants to show me. Julio, dog-tired from all his protecting, takes a nap on Pipo's bed.

I walk into our bedroom, Orlando's bedroom, and sit on my cot by the window. I'm tired. My head hurts. My stomach is queasy from all the smells, the diesel fumes, the garbage and the sewage on the streets.

I listen to the sounds floating up from the first floor.

I think about the boy licking the Twix.

I think about Elian drifting in the ocean.

I think about his dead mother.

I dream about going home -- to my narrow world of overdue library books and feather pillows and birthday cakes made from scratch. To a place where nothing, yet everything, makes sense. Perfect sense.

- On this day, a woman at the peso market has tomatoes, garlic and yuca. On another day, the only thing available was cabbage. Just a few vegetables can cost a Cuban a few days' work.

We just sat in the living room in the four rockers and I read my Elian column -- the one that drew Angela and me together. She translated it for Pipo and Isabel and Rosalita. And the women all cried. Even Pipo got a little somber. They know. They know that the world out there is so much better, so much more fair. Afterwards, Pipo showed me his favorite Hemingway quote: `Worries kill the capacity to create.' I've thought about that all day.
-- Emily Minor's Cuba diary

About five months before the Christmas of 1998, something happened at Pipo's job. Something good.

They told him they would sell him a pig.

It was a baby pig, really, a piglet. And he'd have to pay, of course. But Pipo was a good man, a good worker, and this was his boss' way of telling him just that. Good job.

The Cuban government calls these gestures "incentives." Sometimes, the incentive is nothing more than an old pair of shoes in a bag. That happened once to Pipo's wife, Isabel. Other times, it might be fruit or fried chicken for lunch.

So this piglet was no small thing, even though it was a very small pig.

Pipo was elated.

He took the piglet to a farm near work, and he left it there. There was no place for a pig at home! Pipo had a tiny apartment, for heaven's sake. And as the days and weeks and months went by, Pipo would go to check on his pig, and he always paid the farmer for his work.

About this time, another bit of excitement was racing through the lives of Pipo and Isabel Martinelli. Their son, Orlando, was in love. They were sure of it. He had met a woman -- Angela -- a beautiful woman, and she had already visited from Puerto Rico three times. She was funny and kind and generous. She was like family from the minute they met her. They could argue and laugh and poke fun and cry. She was like a breath of air in their stagnant, sorry lives.

Her fourth visit would be at Christmas. And this time she was bringing her son.

They would feast on Pipo's Christmas pig.

For the Martinellis, Angela's visit meant one thing and one thing alone. A real Christmas. They had never had such a thing. Church had been discouraged since the revolution. It wasn't until after the Pope came and went in January 1998 that Cubans began to relax and enjoy a little religious freedom. So they might not have a washing machine or the proper eyeglasses or a toilet or a sink, but they were lucky people. Pipo was sure of it.

The Martinellis, like most everyone else, had just made it through the most difficult years of their lives: The Special Period. These were the mid-1990s, when Fidel Castro ordered the country to cut back. They were hard times, brought by the collapse of the Soviet Union and the withdrawal of Soviet goods from Cuba. So while food and clothing and household items had never been plentiful in Cuba, those years -- that special period -- had been especially brutal.

The four of them, Pipo and Isabel and Orlando and Rosalita, their daughter, would dissolve some cane sugar in a glass of water, and that's what they'd have for dinner. They drank it fast, so they'd feel really full, then they'd scramble off to bed before their stomachs could complain. A few times, Pipo thought they might starve. And Isabel thought Orlando was going to have to drop out of the university because they couldn't find him shoes. But by 1998, things had improved, mostly because of the influx of tourism dollars.

Angela and her funny son, Robbie, arrived 10 days before Christmas. And what treasures they brought! Presents and garlands and lights and lace and wrapping paper and pretty bowls. She was always doing so much for them that it worried Pipo, made him feel so damn helpless. Maybe that's why he was so obsessed with that piglet, which really had grown quite nicely. It was the first time the Martinellis would be able to do something for her.

Christmas Eve. Orlando and Angela are in Havana for his work. Isabel is busy in the kitchen. And Pipo leaves to get the pig. The minute Pipo gets to the farm, he can tell something is wrong. The minute he gets back, Isabel can tell something is wrong. The minute Orlando calls from the road, he can tell something is wrong.

The farmer had brought out the pig, but it wasn't Pipo's pig. It wasn't a pig at all! It was a piglet, small and squealing and certainly not suitable for slaughter.

"What happened?" Pipo cried. "That's not my pig!"

"You're right," said the farmer.

Then the farmer explained that Pipo's pig was gone. There was nothing he could do! It was beyond his control! It had been needed, the farmer said, for "the greater interest." And Pipo knew right then what had happened.

A good soldier of the revolution had triumphantly walked off with his Christmas pig.

- Pipo Martinelli removed the motor from the Old Russian washing machine's wringer to make a fan.

I had an orange for breakfast this morning and it was so nice to have something fresh. I ate it completely, down to the skin. We walked into town, and Isabel bought pork from someone she knew on the street. We'll have a feast for dinner tonight. Then we walked to the peso market. Angela bought two candied guavas and two bunches of onions. It cost 36 pesos. I took a picture of Julio holding up the food because these are things he usually wouldn't buy. 36 pesos is more than three days' work for him.

Onions and guava! Three days' work! Imagine!
-- Emily Minor's Cuba diary

She kept her old schoolbook all these years. Who knows why. But there it is, tattered, eaten by bugs, smelling faintly of the five bare rooms she has somehow managed to turn into a home. Marta brings it from the bedroom where she sleeps with her new husband.

She's telling me about her school and how she was sent away and how she dreads those days for her sons.

She's 37, beautiful in both face and spirit. Small, tired, strong. Every morning she gets up and lights the kerosene stove. The smell of the cooking fuel in her apartment is so strong it's making my head pound, but it's nothing to her. She's used to it.

She's used to a lot of things.

There's rarely food for breakfast and certainly no food to pack a nice sack lunch for her kids. Her boys go to bed on two ratty mattresses on the floor. There are no toys. No baseball cards. No bicycles. Nothing. Sometimes, she gives them their dinner in the middle of the day, and she knows they're still hungry.

But what can she do?

She makes just seven pesos a day. Thirty-five cents.

She says she's lucky. I ask her, "How so?"

"Ay," she says. She has an apartment, a job, three beautiful sons, a new husband. She has friends who visit with an occasional dollar.

But there are no real pleasures in her life. She doesn't read books or go to movies. How absurd! She doesn't eat ice cream or have conditioner for her hair. She doesn't have a seat on her toilet. She doesn't have sanitary napkins or cooking oil or toilet paper or perfume. They don't sell these things at the bodega, the ration market. At the bodega, she sometimes finds cabbage, she sometimes finds tomatoes, she sometimes finds onions. On a good day, there might be all three. But there are no peso stores that sell batteries and soap and new shoes for the boys.

If you rely on the peso market, you might go three months without soap.

If you rely on the peso market, you might practically starve.

She knows. She's done both.

Marta walks to work in the morning right after she drops off her two youngest boys at the neighborhood school. She makes knickknacks for the government to sell to tourists. Little dolls and colorful donkeys and boxes covered with bright blues and greens and reds. Later, she takes classes at school because: What if?

What if one day she can get out?

Marta Rodriguez used to just shuffle through the days with no crazy thoughts of leaving. She was never one to rock the boat. This is home. But now, with the boys getting older and older -- with her getting older -- she actually allows herself to dream about a life. Out there.

There's a saying in Cuba. You walk down the dusty streets of any town, any village, and you see a house that's different. Maybe there are a few flowers in the yard. Or a shiny new security fence. And you just know.

You know: "They have family." Family outside Cuba.

And that means one very simple thing. Dollars.

Dollars mean soap. They mean shoes and hot dogs and -- God forgive her -- maybe a tube of pink lipstick for herself. Dollars mean you might have more to eat that day than the one stale piece of bread dispensed on the government ration card.

She and I are talking in the living room of her house. The kids are outside, so the rooms are quiet and dark and sad.

I ask her if she is happy.

"Many times, no," she tells me.

I ask her what she does to treat herself. What's a luxury?

She says she does not know what that means.

- Cuba has no 911 service, so ambulances -- like this one that made a call to an old farm out in the country -- sometimes don't arrive in time to help. Many people rely on neighborhood professionals to get them through a medical crisis. College educations are free, so there are plenty of doctors. And although health care is free in Cuba, transportation to clinics and hospitals is difficult and appointments are all but impossible to get.

We went to a neighborhood in Havana today to deliver some letters and medicine from home. And it was so weird. The whole house was filled with doctors! There was this young woman, a new mother, and she's an eye doctor. Her husband is a medical doctor. His dad is a doctor. Everyone I've met, practically everyone, is well educated even though the most a Cuban professional can make is 350 pesos a month. That's less than $20. A month! In America, we judge people so much by appearance. When I'm standing at Starbucks, I can mentally sort the homeless man from the downtown lawyer. But not here. No way.
-- Emily Minor's Cuba diary

Julio's father might be dying. I have to say it like that, I have to beat around the bush, like two kids chasing each other around a mango tree. Otherwise, I'll never be able to face him again.

How do you just stand there and accept death in a place like this? A place where you struggle every day for a chicken or a ride to work or a bit of cooking oil, and you win that fight, barely, that fight for life and dignity, and then along comes cancer.

His father has Hodgkin's. Stage Three. Or maybe Stage Four. But the bottom line is he's been in and out of the hospital in Havana, had his first round of chemotherapy, and he just doesn't seem to get any better. There are times Julio is convinced he's getting worse, like after our visit.

"Not good," he said, shaking his head, after we'd taken a crowd of 10 for a surprise lunch at his house. "He looks very weak."

One recent weekend, Julio had to work on Saturday, some crazy "volunteer" thing. But after that, he took his little stash of dollars and made his slow way along the northern coast to see if he could find this cancer medicine everyone's talking about. Venom from a scorpion. He found it, all right. And, please God, make it work.

Because this is a young man who dreams about getting out of this country constantly. He fantasizes about it every single day. It will be hard enough to go if everyone is well. It might be impossible if someone is dying.

The government loves to brag that Cuba is a great place to be sick. Actually, they love to brag that it's a great place to get better. College educations are free, and there are plenty of doctors. But the system is all out of whack.

We walked through a maternity hospital in Havana one day, and it looked more like a 1940s insane asylum than a place where you'd want to have a baby. It was dark and dreary, and the medicines were lined up in antique glass bottles.

And a woman we met in town, herself a doctor, had to move her little boy to a private home in Havana right after he had ear surgery. Doctor's orders. He said the chance of infection at the hospital was too great.

When Julio's dad was in the hospital, Julio had to take him his food every day. And since his father's been out, he's had to beg rides for the 40-plus miles to Havana for his chemotherapy. Can you imagine? Sick and weak, but having to wait along the road until a kind driver comes along to haul you safely home.

Then, there's the logistical problem of trying to make an appointment. Very few people in Cuba have a phone. This is a country where people don't even have a bathroom rug. So you might leave in the morning with high hopes of getting medical help, only to return six, eight hours later having never seen the doctor simply because he wasn't there. It's very hit or miss.

The Castro government also likes to brag about its educational system. Cuba's literacy rate is very high and, again, college is free. But there are obvious problems, the biggest of which is how they treat their middle school children. If you thought middle school in America was bad, listen to this:

When kids in Cuba are about 12 years old, they're sent away to schools in the country. There are some exceptions -- if your father is in the government or your uncle was a good soldier in the revolution. If your son is a good athlete or if your daughter's a promising musician, those children might attend schools closer to home. But, by and large, girls and boys are pulled from their families in those delicate middle school years and sent away. Their days are divided between classes and working in the field.

Kids see their families on the weekends only, unless something happens during the week -- like maybe you sneak into the kitchen for a piece of bread, or you question a communist theory -- and then they take even the visits away. At school, seeing family on the weekends is a reward, not a right.

"It is what is wrong with Cuba," said one woman I met, a writer who lives in Havana and whose daughter, now grown, was sent away at 12.

One night we sat outside a church in Romero, and I talked with Julio and two of his friends, a man and a young woman, about those middle years.

It was like prison. You had to be strong to survive. Fighting was constant. The weaker kids were always getting picked on. Supervision was a joke. Food was scarce. We'd get up early in the morning, before the sun, to steal milk from delivery trucks.

On and on they went. Three Cubans sharing memories of their middle school years.

And it struck me later as I thought about those three young people: They're handsome, polite, well-educated. They're kind, funny, well-read.

They're good children.

The strength of Cuban children -- no matter what their age -- struck me wherever I went.

Children in Cuba, even the 9-year-olds I met, know their parents' sacrifice. They know they often get the last piece of bread. They know mothers and fathers go without shoes and underwear and sleep just so their sons and daughters can survive.

And they appreciate it.

Which is why the handsome young man with the gorgeous smile and the big dream traipsed around half the country not too long ago in search of something, anything, that might keep his father alive. Sacrifice. That's what Cubans do.

Last night, we stayed in Havana. Just Angela and I. The hotel was OK. $120 a night, and the first thing we saw when we walked in the room was a roach! The moon was almost full, and we had a little balcony that looked out over the square near the Capitol . It was beautiful. But when I was trying to fall asleep, it struck me: That's a view no regular Cuban has ever seen. When we checked in, Angela and I came up and took a shower. But Julio couldn't even come up to wash his face or use the bathroom. He had to stay outside. Like a dog.
-- Emily Minor's Cuba diary

Orlando's sister wants to tell me a story.

She's flailing her arms and talking fast and smiling.

Laughing, really.

"Tell Emily I have something to tell her she won't believe," Rosalita says.

Angela translates.

One time, not too long ago, the government scheduled one of their big Elian demonstrations in town. These are big deals, not just because the government makes people go, although that's exactly what they do. It's not a free-choice kind of thing. The buses show up. The workday ends. You go.

But it also means they come into town a little in advance to do some work. Tidy up. Make sure things will look spiffy on TV.

Rosalita knows this because she saw them come in one day.

They brought some paint. Paint, for heaven's sake! There's no paint in Cuba! Indeed, the whole country looks like Martha Stewart has been down here for a month with a sander and a hammer, distressing every building, every bench, every piece of furniture.

But they brought the paint, and they started on these two buildings right behind where the podium was going to go.

Or at least that's what Rosalita figured.

And she was right. The workers came back into town a few days later, and they set the microphone right in front of those two repainted buildings. They handed out hundreds and hundreds of those Cuban flags, the ones the people are always waving at the rallies.

No T-shirts this time. Rosalita suggests the money had finally run out.

But she noticed the craziest thing the day of the demonstration.

She noticed that the workers who had come to town, the ones with the paint, had done only the fronts of the buildings.

And then she starts laughing. "Isn't that funny?" she says.

But I tell her it doesn't surprise me, not for one second. After five days in this place, I tell her, I've witnessed a social contradiction on every street corner.

You can't find a gallon of milk to save your soul, but there are cigarettes for sale every two steps. The literacy rate is one of the highest in the world, but you can go to jail for reading the wrong book. It's illegal to use the Internet. Farmers raise cows, but they can't eat them. You live in a house all your life, pay the mortgage, fix it up as best you can. But when you die, there it goes, back to the government. Not your kids. End of discussion.

There's no money to fix up crumbling schools, but there's money for Elian rallies.

The bathrooms at the baseball stadium are gross -- overflowing toilets, no toilet paper, no toilet seats, the sinks don't work. But a little old bathroom attendant sits at the door. She wants money. And not a lousy peso -- she wants dollars!

And how about that park in Havana, I tell Rosalita. The one they ruined.

But that's the kind of thing they don't broadcast on the state-run news. Rosalita doesn't know what I'm talking about.

"Tell her," I say to Angela. So Angela tells her about the pretty little park in Havana.

It wasn't very big, about a fourth the size of a football field. But it was green space right there along the water. It was a good place to sit. And think.

A good place for kids to run. Fly a kite. If they had one.

"Orlando and I used to go there," Angela says.

Then, one day, the government cement trucks rumbled in.

They ripped up the grass, put down pavement.

They built some sort of weird platform.

It was a political arena, a place for the government to gather up the people and have them meet and march and demand the return of young Elian Gonzalez.

"Ohmigod," everyone hollered.

But it was too late.

The pretty little park along the water was no longer a pretty little park along the water.

We've been stopped by the police every time we've left town. They just pull us over and check the driver's papers. I guess the government doesn't want too much time to pass without reminding people who's in charge. Today we went to Cardenas, the town along the coast where Elian is from. We rode in the back of this old truck, 10 of us, singing and telling jokes and eating fruit. The town's a little nicer than the others I've seen because it's along the tourist strip. But when we walked to Elian's neighborhood, it looked like everything else. There were huge dead rats in the streets where the kids were playing stickball. Lovely.
-- Emily Minor's Cuba diary

Just about everyone in Cuba loves absurdity, which is good considering they live it every day. So it didn't take long for this tidbit to start making the rounds.

If Elian Gonzalez were returned to Cuba today, he'd lose his milk ration the very next year. Cuba cuts off milk to its children when they turn 7.

The town of Cardenas, where Elian lived with his mother, and where his father still lives, the town where the speedboat from Miami probably picked them up, is called the city of carts. It's about 10 miles east of Varadero, one of the country's most popular tourist spots. Even before the revolution -- or the "triumph of the revolution" as it's still called every day on the state-run news -- foreigners came to Varadero for its restaurants, hotels and beaches. All the travel books call it "Cuba's mecca."

Of course, most Cubans wouldn't know. They are not allowed to go there.

Elian's father, Juan Miguel Gonzalez, works in that mecca, which means he has dollars, which means he has more of life's necessities than the average Cuban surviving on pesos. Nonetheless, he's just a regular guy who probably has to buy black-market pork and scrounge around for new shoes like everybody else.

Tourism is a huge business for Cuba. But what happens is this: A taxi from the hotel whisks you from the airport, down the one nice street between there and here, straight to the protected enclave where you will stay. Most tourists don't see Cuba's neighborhoods.

But if the taxi driver is adventurous, or if you're curious about the real state of affairs, the reality is always just around the corner. Cuba is crumbling -- in Havana, beautiful old buildings are literally falling down -- and there's not enough money to make real repairs.

So superficial face lifts on the route from there to here have to suffice.

We got to Cardenas late in the day, about 5, because we'd made some other stops. The woman at the dollar store where we bought bottled water -- with dollars, not pesos -- knew just where the famous boy lived. Three blocks down, two blocks over. You could tell she'd given the directions before.

The main street of Cardenas is presentable, even pretty. But there were no trinkets to buy, no place to stop and eat. There were more Elian posters and T-shirts here than any other place I'd been in six days. Enterprising Cubans have been known to sell their T-shirts -- the ones given out by the government for the marches -- to foreigners as souvenirs. Quick dollars.

Cardenas has little more than quaintness. The old church at the square. The wedding shop with the frilly dress that was pretty 20 years ago. Couples walking, holding hands, gawking.

But a few streets over, in Elian's old neighborhood, there it is.

The reality. The stuff you don't read about in the travel books.

The skinny, shirtless kids jumping over dead rats as they play stickball in the street. The little girl in the school uniform that's too tight standing on the corner eating a piece of dry bread. The peeling paint, the puddles of sewage, the tired people shuffling home from work.

Cuba might be one country, but it's two places. The place that tourists see. And the place where Cubans live. More absurdity.

I went to the grocery today, my first day back home. I just needed bleach and applesauce, so I ran to the crummy little store down the street. I usually won't even buy my meat or produce there. But today, everything looked so gorgeous. The beef seemed as red as Christmas! Everywhere I went, I tried to pretend I'd just arrived. Can you imagine? Can you imagine coming here and seeing all our things after having lived all your life with nothing?
-- Emily Minor's Cuba diary

I want to send a package. New place mats. Magazines. Canvas, so Pipo can start painting again. Some CDs.

I want to send the neighbor lady all my really cute dresses that don't fit me anymore.

I want to send the kids every single unused toy that is stuffed, forgotten, in my son's closet or scattered across his bedroom floor.

But I can't. I can't even send a lousy thank-you note.

The phone rings, and it doesn't seem to want to stop. The neighbors are all calling. My friends from work. My boss, my best friend, my mother, my sister. They all want to know.

What did I see? Am I glad I went?

Did I eat good food and listen to great music? Was it beautiful? Aren't those old cars cool?

But I can hardly talk. The smells. The sights. The tears. The funny, funny jokes. The hellos. The goodbyes.

It's all trapped inside me -- just like they're trapped down there.

So I tell everyone a very simple story. I repeat it again and again. For days, it's the best I can do:

I brought all my trash home with me. The plastic containers from my Mott's applesauce, my tuna cans, the paper trash from my medical supplies. I carried it all back in a plastic Publix bag because there is no place in Cuba to put any trash because there is no trash because there is no packaging because there are no things.

Thanks for calling, I say.

And then I hurry back to my little game.

The one where they're all here with me.

Pipo and Isabel and Julio and Rosalita. They are in my van, seat belts securely fastened for the first time in their lives, and I'm showing them what the world's really like.

The cars and the ice cream stores. The construction on Dixie Highway. "Our tax dollars at work," I tell them.

We go pick up Angela, we go to a baseball game, we go to the dry cleaners, we go to Wal-Mart. Isabel not only gets to buy towels, she gets to choose the colors! They get to walk inside any restaurant they want, any hotel. They can even go up to a policeman and complain about the litter. That night, we watch the news, just to make the point that things here are not really all that perfect. And being that this is America, there's the story about a 6-year-old who has shot a classmate, so the point is very well made. I feed them a nice dinner, something easy for their stomachs. And then I tuck them into their marshmallow beds with feather pillows.

I play this game so often in those first days back that it starts to scare me.

People keep calling, stopping me at the store, in the halls at work. And eventually it all comes around to him, because, of course, I knew it would. The boy. The point.

Should Elian Gonzalez go back?

And then I say the most awful thing.

I don't care.

It turns out, he's not really the point.

I know that's wrong. I'm a mother. A journalist. I've been there. I've seen. I should have some big intellectual speech all ready to go.

It's just that, even if he goes back, Elian Gonzalez will never be a regular Cuban child with an anonymous Cuban life. His mother died changing all that.

So I tell everyone: It's hard for me to cry for one child when I've seen so many others.

And then I have another good cry.

A month ago, Cuba was a story in the newspaper, dateline Havana. It was a documentary I'd seen on TV. It was my fine-and-dandy neighbor across the street.

A month ago, Cuba didn't have a face.

But that was a month ago.

Now it's Pipo, proud as can be, going to pick up the Christmas pig, only to discover it had been given away to a good soldier. It's Julio, sitting beside me in the back of some old Chevy, telling me he's never cried.

"Only inside," he says.

It's Angela, white-faced and stoic, holding it together with the strength of three women as we say goodbye to everyone at the airport. It's me, sitting in the claustrophobic clutter of my home, sobbing, chain-smoking, still sick from pork.

It's a little boy, thin and sad, licking a piece of chocolate in a room full of shadows.