Cuba Is Near

Irina Popova

CUBA IS NEAR

[Instead of a preface]

Wandering around the hot shabby streets, wagging the finger at the men who try to call me over, stopping by the black youth´s who will serve me a coffee on top of a stool for one peso, then off to the local bar to buy an authentic cigar for two pesos as a gift for my father, and back to measuring the streets and squares with my footsteps, where everything is so palpable and magnetic, gawking at the revolutionaries' portraits and prehistoric autos, alien bike-taxis and crowds of tourists in panama hats, thinking, what incredible chain of events has brought me here? And what do I do with it now?

I don't know when the realization happened: I must go to Cuba. Once, in the eleventh grade or so, still listening to rock and working myself up into the typical teenage-depressive state, I found the airline ticket office in the city, ran up the stairs and, without catching my breath, blurted out, “Hello-excuse-me-please-Iwanted-to-ask... how much is a ticket to Cuba?” The lady in the window looked at me with suspicion, “And what city would that be?” I shrugged.

Every day the ticket office lady faced masses of people who knew exactly what their destination was called and what its average annual temperature and crime rate were, while she herself sat behind the little window, never moving and inch. And, perhaps, her grade in Geography at school was a “C”. She didn't even know what the capital of Cuba was.

She had to call somebody to find out.

“Havana.”

“Havana! That's it!” I remembered instantly.

The ticket office lady looked at me even more suspiciously and typed something into her computer.

“The cheapest round-trip ticket will cost you around thirty five thousand.”

“And do I need a visa?”

She checked something again. − “No, you don't need one.”

So I came out of the ticket office happy, as if I'd just gone to Cuba and back.

Of course, I didn't have the thirty five thousand. I didn't even have enough money in my pocket for a tram ride.

To be honest, I wasn't planning to go to Cuba then. Thoughts about this country appeared in my mind by themselves at the moment when I was losing touch with the world around me. Somewhere out there there's Cuba, where life is completely different. It was almost like a song playing inside me. And this song saved me, that's for sure.

I didn't have any specific knowledge about this country. Far away, “somewhere out there”, where there are palm trees and sand, where Fidel, like an old immortal character from a fairy tale, won't give up on his life and his absolute power. The movie Dirty Dancing and the book The Old Man and the Sea are associations not connected to any specific place in my mind. And that's it.

During the time that had passed since my visit to the ticket office, I managed to grow dreadlocks, shave my head and grow out my hair again, almost finish the

university and suddenly and irreversibly became a documentary photo-journalist, unable to properly apply herself anywhere.

During these years, I somehow formed a clear idea about the place where I'd never been. It often happens in dreams: the storylines are different, but the events take place in the same recognizable spaces that have already become symbolic.

I'd never dreamed of Cuba, but it's as if I'd seen it all already in my subconscious: the coast is on the right, there are black half-naked people walking around, singing their songs, peeling coconuts with a knife, looking like pirates. It seemed dangerous and unthinkable to go there. Another image: very close to the coast – a decrepit neighborhood with a long gallery of arches; on the right, over here, right in the street -- an old barber who's eternally shaving someone; over there, a bit further off -- a youth gang is hanging out, and I even know who is hiding a knife in which pocket.

Sometimes dreams and visions leave a deeper mark than reality itself. Having gone to Cuba and having seen the real country, its commas, nooks and crannies and it's hidden meanings, upon my return, I noticed to my great surprise that the initial spatial image hadn't gone away but continued to stubbornly sparkle in my mind as the real Cuba, with more force than anything real, anything I'd seen there. So to hell with dreams, there won't be another piece here, invented by imagination wandering in the clouds.

Moreover, I'd like to break through these clouds, disperse these lame associations of the collective imagination, recorded in the subconscious of every other person, and tell about Cuba, imprinted on the retinas of my eyes, not having dissolved since then in the corridors of my memory but recorded through thousands of photos and thousands of lines in my worn-out lime-green notebook, which I can now pretentiously call my “Cuban diary”.

[Moscow] I was sitting around in the wintery Moscow, and the blues was coming over me in blackish-gray waves.

I hit my limit when I ran away from the dentist's with the anesthesia having already kicked in because the tooth-crushing doctor didn't seem trustworthy. Up to my knees in snow, I wandered around the bald patches, considered to be “lawns” in the summer, as the security of the 24-hour casinos watched me strangely.

Not having made any decision yet, I started dialing numbers of tour operators, asking them how much a ticket to Cuba would cost. The anesthesia still had my mouth frozen, so the people at the other end of the line had difficulty understanding what it is I wanted from them. The cheapest ticket, ironically, cost the same as back then, five years ago, at the crummy Tverskoi airline ticket office.

As if it had been waiting for me all along, my dear ticket.

I figured that I'd need three weeks to tie all my loose ends. You can stay for up to one month in Cuba without registration. So it followed that I'd fly there on the fourteenth of February. A good date. Simply wonderful. Some get married on

Valentine's day and some - fly to Cuba. Alone. Just me and my favorite country.

Mine alone and nobody's else. I watch Kobzon's video ”Cuba – My love” on youtube but can't sing along.

That night I went to a nightclub called “The Caribbean”, where everybody was shaking it up, tightly clinging to each other's bodies, even if they didn't know how to dance salsa, and drinking mojitos, although they'd normally prefer vodka. Two dark-skinned girls in high heels and tiny skirts told me they were Cuban, working in Russia as dancers and returning home soon. I told them that I had bought a ticket to Cuba earlier that day, but, of course, they didn't believe me. They nodded in response and smiled, but I could tell from the their faces that they didn't believe it. One of them took an iPhone out of her purse so she could write down my number or, maybe, just to show off.

I got drunk on rum at this party and was having trouble convincing the Cuban DJ, called Pink, to finally put on something Cuban from the 60's instead of Russian pop. After the old version of “Bamboleo”, it was time to leave, sharing a taxi with a typical Slavic guy, who was even worse at dancing than me.

So, I had three weeks left for preparations when, to my horror, I read on the internet that most of the Cubans spoke only Spanish. Once upon a time I studied English, successfully and with pleasure. Then I tried to conquer German and French, less effectively. In reality, I didn't have a single chance to practice these languages.

But still, after all of that, Spanish seemed a piece of cake to me. I borrowed from a friend a thick textbook that described through text how Juan and Pedro woke up at 6 o'clock, did exercise, and were off to work at a factory... or how some work committee meeting took place... There was something about love, too: Juan meets Juana's parents and they all go to the theater together.

I read the textbook on the metro, while eating, in the bathroom... Read it without much interest - I couldn't care less about Juan and Juana and their passionate socialist relationship. But the vocabulary and grammar somehow stuck to my brain on their own, creating new pathways there. I liked this process.

On the internet, some people turned up that had already been to the 'not made-up Cuba'. Among them was a girl named Masha who, together with a friend, had covered the whole island by bicycle. I went to visit her to get my share of scary stories about how one night they stopped in a village and some crazy man almost cut them up because he wanted their sneakers so badly. About how every other “photography object” asks for money, about thieves and beggars everywhere you look. She gave me a map of the island and suggested I learned Spanish. I bragged that I'd been studying for a whole week, in response to which Masha just smirked mistrustfully.

And so, already in Spanish, broken but “my own”, I sent letters to dozens of Cubans whom I found in the “Hospitality Club”, a system of addresses and “inscriptions” on the internet. Due to the lack of access to the world wide web, there weren't many Cubans in this “Club”; half of the announcements were commercial, which was completely prohibited by the community´s rules.

But there's only one money maker in Cuba – tourists.

Tourists. Stupid mammals with their noses stuck in their guidebooks. Easily scared and with a heightened herding instinct. The government implemented a law stating: if you want to host foreign visitors in your home, you have to have a license. This type of accommodation is called “casa particular” - a private house.

And even among the “Hospitality Club” members, half of them are owners of such houses and the other half can't even “inscribe” anybody at their house.

One can understand the Cuban members of the club. They are on unequal conditions comparing to the rest: they themselves can barely go to any other country, so all they can do is host people in their homes.

But with my half-empty wallet I only had two options: sleeping somewhere for free or not going at all.

To my surprise, a few people responded to my letters with genuine interest in hosting me. One of the fist letters was an exclamatory one from a Cuban in Moscow.

Mateo and I met on the metro, but I didn't recognize him right away. He was a man with African facial features, but his skin was sickly-pale from the long Russian winter. He, just like everybody else, was dressed in all dark and almost didn't stand out from the depressing Moscow crowd. He looked sad and tired, not at all like the glamorous Cubans I've met in the night clubs of our capital. We went to McDonald's together, where I bought him a hamburger and a coke. In response to which he got up and left. His jacket was still hanging on his chair. In ten minutes, having stood in an enormous line, he brought me a coffee with some pastry.

He replied in broken Russian to my embryonic Spanish. We couldn't manage to choose our communication language and got utterly confused. And his story was very confusing as well. Two years in Moscow. In Cuba – a wife and a two-year-old daughter whom he'd never seen. Mateo misses them very much, he loves Cuba in a way that he could never love Russia. He can't return to his motherland because of his political refugee status and has automatically lost his citizenship – Cuba forfeits it after a year of being away from the country, as if cutting off a dog's diseased tail.

If he ever does come back, he'll get arrested. And his wife can't leave the country anymore because she's considered “politically unreliable” - the wife of a political refugee.

Mateo is from Santa Clara, Che's town. A man selling “Che Burashka” T-shirts on Arbat comes to mind, and for the first time I think that you could really vulgarize a hero's image by talking about him too much. Together, Mateo and I sing a song about the Comandante inside the colorful McDonalds interior, which brings us that much closer. He immediately starts asking me if I'd agree to be his Moscow wife or, at least, sleep with him once. I start explaining that this kind of number doesn't ever work on Russian girls, that we are cold, while they, Cubans, are too hottempered. And in my particular case, well, I am a... lesbian.

This doesn't hurt our solidarity at all. He puts on his glasses and starts reading something from some worn sheets of A4 format. What is that?

The human rights declaration. Mateo leads some mysterious organization which fights for these rights. Simultaneously, he avidly munches the hamburger, looking like some provincial college professor.

“What's your poorest region?” I interrupt him.

He shows me the most southern point on the map, the tail of a long dolphin-

shaped island, what's called Sierra Maestra.

“And what do people do there?”

“Well, they grow coca...”

“Cocaine?”

He waives his hands, “No, no... Drugs are strictly prohibited in Cuba. Coca is, what do you call it...”

He acts out something round with his hands and then smashes it with an imaginary brick with all his might.

My preparations were turning into a nightmare. I couldn't decide what I should take in order not to be weighed down by anything unnecessary and, at the same time, have everything I needed. I took along many unnecessary things for gifts, having heard from Masha that people there didn't have anything, even clothes or soap.

My humble Cuban friend had slept at the the airport, rolled up like a cat. The plane was to take off at 5 a.m.; my plan was to leave by taxi at 3, but Mateo, in order to save money, had occupied the departure hall the night before. He foisted on me a box and some bags full of gifts, among which I could distinguish a Chinese radio, a pack of photos and a couple of shabby blonde Barbies. My backpack ripped right away so these ridiculous belongings came spilling out. He shoved a photo of a dark-skinned girl into my already full hands. “That's my wife. Her name is Yiser.

She will pick you up in Havana.” Then he called her and described in detail what I was wearing. We had a long argument about whether my pantalones were white or beige. That call cost Mateo much more than what he could afford. This allencompassing care was the most touching thing in the world.

[Moscow — Havana] The airplane belonged to Air France, therefore we had a stop-over at the Charles de Gaulle airport. So, Paris. Paris and Cuba – two long-time dreams that were meant to come true at once.

On the plane – a bitter-sweet mix of Frenchmen and Russians, contrast between whom stands out immediately. A dad with three petits enfants who crawl all over him all through the flight. As soon as he sits one down, another one crawls away.

Just like in that Soviet cartoon about a monkey. On the way down - blue clouds like a feather bed, I'd love to jump around in them.

I remembered how two days before a friend was telling me about Paris, “For the view of the white cathedral on Montmartre from the toilet window, I was ready to forgive them everything: the dirtiness and the overly high price of this hotel.” And only then, on the plane, I think I began to understand her a little bit. The only pity is that Paris wouldn't let me in past it's neutral zone.

It was my first time seeing the French so I was looking at them like a boy looking at an antelope for the first time. It seemed that they were all tall, beautiful, welldressed and nice-smelling. Merchandise in elegant packaging. The airport – as if infused with the mix of Coco Chanel and new clothes. Cute neutral black girls

behind the information desk try to understand you in any language. Duty-free: of course I have no business here, except for a pack of Twix and a couple of free magazines. But I can at least touch and smell and, following the travel agency's advice, pick up a few of their brand bags. The bags turn out to be bight pink, something I didn't expect of France. Bright pink, like a pirated pop compilation. Or like a Chinese bathing suit that fades after the first encounter with the sun. But I can use this bag to put rum in it on the way back so that it doesn't get taken away at the airport. Although, anything could happen before the “way back”!

And here is the line for Cuba. The public has changed during the transfer: instead of the 'Moscow – Paris' businessmen, the 'Paris – Havana' vacationers. My plane neighbor is a black woman with a blonde child. She says that Sweden is the most free and democratic country in the world. I don't know, maybe it really is.

I turn away from the woman and watch the film.

And for the first time since the crazy preparation and packing, a thought crosses my mind: what am I doing here? Where am I running to? All these people on the airplane are ready to drag themselves over to the other side of the world just to lie around on the beaches and sit in bars for a week. Is that what I secretly want as well?

All everybody says is that Cuba is a poor and stupid country with a low level of culture and a high level of prostitution; a country where you have to have a huge reserve of patience, where every jinetera is ready to suck your last money out of you. Everybody's seen photos of Cuba: prostitutes and philistines propped against the blue and pink walls. Cuba is love and revolution. I'm going there to see for myself how it all works from the inside, to observe all the sides of freedom and happiness and to understand how these two things are possible, given the people's utter poverty.

But, first of all, I'm going in search of Cuba inside me. To get away from this dull and cloudy city, covered in snow up to the door handles, where you always have to rush somewhere, where everybody expects something from you. And to get to a coast bathed by the sun, like bread by apricot jam, where everybody smiles and doesn't rush anywhere, plays music and sings his songs. It's like taking a plane to your dream. Or like waking up one morning to discover a stranger's reflection in the mirror. To find yourself in a strange place, to speak a new language and witness how things called by new names become new.

I couldn't wait to find out what would happen to me there. What people I'd meet, what stories I'd see, what places I'd end up in. I don't believe in fate and its prophesies. At that moment I saw something very clearly: in this problem called “life”, there's always only one “given”. What you have to find and, most importantly, how - is always up to you.

It feels like this flight will never end. Maybe, we are going to circle around the globe like this forever and will never land there, in the country of dreams, like birds without legs who fly til they fall dead.

But here we go, my ears get congested as we start descending; the seashore can be

seen below, palm trees and roads, on which the bug-like cars crawl slowly. It is exactly what I expected to see but somehow couldn't picture.

At the airport, passing through the immigration services barricade, I decide to show off my Spanish skills. “Buenos días,” I say. “Buenas tardes,” the man behind the counter corrected me politely, indicating that the clock shows three in the afternoon, and sends me off to fill out some paper. The paper is completely in Spanish and I look around helplessly in search of a translator. Good-bye, motherland. Not one Russian-speaking person around. Now I'll have to somehow adapt in order to survive for a whole month. I feel elated.

The Havana airport seethes with black people. They are not allowed behind the rope from where white people roll out their baggage with dignity. Some of them have signs with the guests' names and others yell out, “Casa! Barato!” (“House! Cheap!”), and yet others simply look at the crowd. In my childhood, when black students would appear in my provincial town, boys used to chase them yelling, “Snickers!

Snickers! Give me a Snickers bar!” Now the situation has reversed.

I start to look for the girl whose name I've totally forgotten, of course, but careful Mateo wrote it on the back of the photo. Yiser. A strange name...

At that moment she comes up to me herself. How wonderful it is that I haven't disappeared or gotten lost but managed to break through the clouds to the other side of the world in order for the girl from the photo to find me so easily. For some reason I try to tell her this in English, but she just senselessly repeats each phrase after me, making a wide gesture with her arms. Communication failure.

Happiness. So that´s what a northern deer looks like. Across from the airport, palm trees, lots of palm trees and a sign with some revolution slogan were towering over.

I still couldn't catch my breath, didn't know what to say. All of the French who had been on the flight with me have long been picked up and taken to their hotels by taxi or shuttle. It was just me and Ysir sitting at the bus stop, dangling our feet. At that moment, I realized that the trip would be radically different from everything I'd dreamed about.

Cuba smelled differently. They were probably black people smells, the smells of their sweat and clothes, the smells of a foreign land, foreign food, foreign plants.

The air - so thick and humid, as if smeared with butter.

We boarded a yellow bus. Local reggaeton was playing there and a girl, about six years old, was twirling around the hand rail, mercilessly shaking her butt. And the adults were cheering her on and laughing. “She'll go a long way.”

[Cuba] We drove through hot Havana for a long time. Shabby revolution slogans silently screamed from all the walls and fences. And where “Fidel” had been written in old paint, “Raul” was added next to it in fresh paint, as if to remind us that he, too, was a revolutionary from the start.

Now it seems as if we changed buses three or four times. Every time, Yiser would shove some coin at the driver upon entering. The passengers crowded together, getting stuck to one another, but enduring the ride patiently, without pushing or bickering. I admiringly looked at these brightly and casually dressed people,

observed their faces, their smiles. These were people of all shades of skin color, from very light to very dark; and sometimes you could see strange combinations, for example: a very dark person with fine European features, or a very pale one with a flat nose and puffy lips. And people, it seemed, didn't notice their differences.

Everybody rode the same bus, baking in the same oven, tolerating each other, being friendly and smiling.

Three men were drinking rum from these typical carton packs with a straw, the type they use to package juice where I'm from. One of them had a blurry tattoo of piggylooking Che. They started flirting with me and asked me if I had a boyfriend. I knew this word, “novio”, and decided to play along, saying that I had a new boyfriend in every town I went... But my Yiser almost screamed, covered my mouth and dragged me off the bus. She tried to explain to me that these types were very peligroso, but I couldn't understand what she meant or what it had to do with rum in a carton and a Che tattoo. I explained to Yiser that it was just my way of discovering the world. She didn't understand and after that, for a long time, would tell this story of a weird foreign girl to all of Mateo's family. And I listened and laughed along with everybody, although every time felt like asking, “So what?”.

From that moment on I would hear the word “peligroso” a lot and soon figured out that it meant “dangerous”. It's exactly what they told me before my departure in Russia: put you camera far way, don't talk to strangers. And I tried to do just the opposite, breaking both prohibitions at once.

[Santa Clara] Finally, we made it to the cross road where the Santa Clara highway started. “Are we not going to see Havana at all?” I asked. “It's getting dark already.” Yiser shook her head. That, too, was peligroso for her. I assured her that I had acquaintances from the Hospitality Club and we could spend the night with them. But Yiser wouldn't budge. So, that's how I was married without my consent and on the way to a small provincial town. I had to give in without a fight. But anyway, during these first moments in Cuba, everything seemed interesting to me and it didn't matter which way to go.

My companion raised her hand, trying to catch a passing-by car. I remembered something. “Are you going to do the bottle?” I asked. (There was a phrase in my phrase book for hitchhiking – “hacer botella”, “to do the bottle”).

Ohh, so we were of the same blood then. I even stopped counting the times she said “peligroso” and decided to help her by signaling at the drivers. Maybe my white skin and my yellow backpack would catch their attention or interest or, at least, compassion. But it was all in vain. Then Yiser had me stop and started waving about a red banknote with Che's image on it. Drivers started stopping but, after a short dialogue, it would turn out that they were not going in the same direction.

In reality, hitchhiking in Cuba is strictly official. Literally around the corner from where Yiser and I were trying to catch a ride, there was a geometrically-formed line of Cubans: older ladies with bags, young guys with newborns. They all signed up with a man in a yellow uniform with a whistle. He had a clipboard with a table that contained ordinal numbers, last names and destinations. He would blow his whistle at the cars and match passengers with the appropriate rides. The problem with the system was that there were just way more people than transportation, and even the kindest driver couldn't service all of the ragamuffins; on top of that, obeying the yellow uniformed man is voluntary.

Finally, a very decrepit bus stopped. Everybody formed a line, but when I tried to get on, the driver protested, shouted, flailed his arms. There weren't any free spaces to begin with. So why did he refuse to take me, what's this discrimination about? I tried to stand up for myself in my broken Spanish, all in vain... Yiser dragged me away and calmly said, “We'll wait for another one.�

Only later did I realize that he probably didn't want to take on a foreign passenger because he didn't have a special license for transporting foreigners. In this country everything is divided into what's for tourists and what's for the locals: food, transportation, housing, nightclubs, beaches. There are even two types of currency.

And, God forbid, anybody crosses the alienation line.

The one to be punished will not be the foreigner but the local who provides an unsanctioned service: the cashier, the ticket clerk, the driver.

So we are sitting here in the dark at the empty bus stop, killing time.

At the sight of the next bus I'm determined to keep my mouth shut. We've made an agreement with Yiser and I simply get on the bus and collapse into an empty seat.

To her great joy, she doesn't have to pay for me and I ride the whole way for free.

We dash along the dull desert and somehow the road's texture, the bus's curtains and the landscape outside the window reminded me of Kazakhstan, the highway from Astana to Karaganda. Yiser and I rustle with endless Twix bars from the pack.

Later, I would regret many times having eaten them all so fast, since Cuba has a deficit of sweets. What I would've given later for a couple of these regular Twix or Snickers bars.

And, as usual, at the precise moment when the road starts to seem endless, we suddenly stop and get out into an empty street of a small provincial town. Yellow street lights illuminate small one-story houses, a horse with a lonely coach in a cart strides by.

A horse!

I start to photograph it, as if the last time I have seen a horse was in a text-book picture. I feel like I find myself if not in medieval times, in some Khosta or Kudepsta streets, where Sochi tourists don't dare go.

I found out later that these one-story houses and horse-drawn transportation were a typical feature of any Cuban province. Besides horses, they also ride bicycles or bike-taxis. A motorbike is considered a luxury here, and some prehistoric American car or a Russian Zhiguli could be the object of real pride among the locals. We caught a taxi. This car supposedly was older than my mom and a bit younger than my grandma. Yiser shouted “Stop!” and paid twenty pesos. Then we had to walk for about fifteen more minutes just in order to save twenty more pesos. We entered a one-story house where we were greeted by Mateo's mother, a dignified old lady of terrible resemblance to him, his sisters, nieces and some other relatives, whose titles I couldn't translate. I didn't expect such a reception. They took a very long time looking at Mateo's radio and the dolls, trying on the clothes I'd given them as a gift, then reading his letters, happily leafing through glamorous magazines from the French airport. If I'd only known that these magazine would provoke such delighted interest, I would've picked up not two but five of them so the girls wouldn't have to rip them out of each other's hands. All the young ladies of the family wanted to know what French girls looked like, what they wore and what accessories they used. They looked at, caressed and smelled the pages for a long time, while I sighed looking at them. They weren't some bums but, like all Cubans, followed the rule: the brighter a peacock’s feathers, the more beautiful his song.

At dinner, they fed me to a total and numbing fullness. Rice, salad, tomatoes and beans with gravy. Holding in her hands the next dish, Mateo's mom would add, “Esto – arroz, esto – lechuga” (“This is rice, this is lettuce”). After I would try, the whole family would ask if I liked it. I would reply, “Si, si, me gustó mucho” (“I liked it a lot”). I didn't know how else to express my delight and appreciation.

For some reason they treated lettuce with special admiration and inspiration. I didn't understand it -- a regular green, simply called “salad” in Russia, although nobody eats it, not in salad, not by itself. On the other hand, I got particularly inspired by the oranges, “naranja”. Small, with black spots, their juice penetrated your skin right away. I tried to peel the skin off with my nails, but they took the orange away from me and started to peel it with a knife, like a potato.

And then - freshly squeezed guava juice – the most delicious of treats.

All I could do was nod and say that we didn't have fresh fruit and vegetables in Moscow in the winter, that everything was imported, expensive and full of chemicals.

“So what do you eat then?” they asked me.

I couldn't answer this question. I couldn't tell the Cubans that one eats whatever one wants because our supermarkets were like a fountain of unseen abundance.

That if one wished to have a pineapple, it could be bought but wouldn't be as interesting and pleasant as eating a pineapple in Cuba, especially if being treated to it by some nice people.

I wanted to say that we often ate potatoes and borsch, but I didn't know the the word “potato” in Spanish while they didn't know the word “borsch”.

Of course what they really were interested in was how Mateo was living. But what could I tell them? That he lived, let's be honest, badly, looked like pauper, dressed and probably ate badly, walked in order to save on the metro; that it was scary for him to go outside at night because of skinheads or just Moscow hooligans; that in two years he hadn't managed to start speaking Russian; that he asked me to find him any type of extra work...

I couldn't tell them any of that.

I saw the thrill with which they studied the photos. In them, he stood the same way in the same checkered shirt against the backdrop of the huge and threatening to the whole world Kremlin, on the escalator in the metro -- something they've never seen in Cuba, in an appliance store, hugging huge speakers, against somebody's foreign black car, somewhere in the country amongst the romantic birches, then next to a barbeque... Mateo had chosen all of the symbols of that good, different, life which is inaccessible in Cuba.

Observing their delight as they discussed Mateo's “good” life, I understood that despite socialism and the official call for minimum consumption, all people had the same ideas about prosperity. No matter what Fidel proclaims about revolutionary ideals, all girls want nice clothes, and all boys – an expensive car and a wellgroomed girl.

Yiser says, “He didn't pass me perfume. Did he forget that I had asked him for some last time? Did he say anything to you about perfume?”

Perhaps, Mateo had really just forgotten about it or, maybe, he thought: what does she need perfume for without him there?

[Yiser] The next day, Yiser and I go for a walk around town.

“Tell me, why do you dress like this?” she asks.

“How?” I don't understand.

“Well, not sexy...”

She explains to me that if I dressed sexier, more guys would like me.

I say, “Well, how do I explain this, where I'm from, only prostitutes dress sexy. And all the rest dress normally.”

Russian provincial glamor and Chinese swap-meets are nothing in comparison to Cuban beauty ideals. Here, even fifty-year-old women put on pink tops with shiny

half-faded lettering “DG”, revealing their saggy old bellies. I also explain to Yiser that it's not too important to have a boyfriend. You might have one or you might not, there is nothing wrong with it either way. But she thinks otherwise and immediately starts to pick out a suitor for me.

She would point from far away, “Do you like this muchacho? And that one? Which ones do you like, negritos or blanquitos?” (blackies or whities). And it was pointless to get it through to her that I hadn't come for boyfriends. All guys turned out to be her buddies and we stopped and chatted with each one for a long time. I had to apply all my language skills in order to explain that I'd come the day before from Russia, where it was terribly cold and snowing. When my vocabulary would run out, all I could do was stand around and wait for my friend Yiser to finish her conversation with the next muchachito. I was starting to feel burdened by such guardianship and plotted my escape.

We stopped by a currency exchange point. Yiser got in line. In exchange for my hundred euros, she brought out a really thick pack of bills that wouldn't fit in my wallet – colorful worn-out bills.

“This is peso, moneda nacional,” she explained, “Local money that's used here to pay for transportation and food at the market.

And this,” she pointed at a much thinner pack of a few bills, “CUC, see-u-see.

Dollar. Moneda convertible. You can buy foreign goods with this money.” And I realized that without her help, I'd only have the thin pack in my hands since pesos were only given to the locals. In pesos, life in Cuba is very cheap, almost free. You can buy some necessities with them for government-set prices.

Then we went to the market.

It was the most popular entertainment on a Sunday. A rusty carousel spun around in the center of the market square. A white boy with a sad face was riding a small car that said “HAPPY”. Behind him, in a hand-made trailer tied to the car with a rope, a black boy was riding with a big smile, spinning the steering wheel with all his might. And here, at the market, I heard the sound of live Cuban rhythms for the first time. It was exactly what I so brightly associated in my mind with Cuba... This is exactly the music I'd been listening to in Moscow during those crazy three weeks before my trip, making my way through piles of snow, through the long metro rides, dreaming about this amazing country where the sun shined, where everybody played music and danced in a way that I'd never be able to learn...

I dragged Yiser towards the sounds. She reluctantly gave in. Older musicians were playing on a low platform.

The sound was coming from small speakers. A crowd had gathered around, mostly marginalized-looking old people, the ones that would be called “bums” in Russia.

But to call them that in Cuba would be blasphemous. Two skinny old hags (who could be called grannies, if not for their short skirts) were shaking it up in the center of a circle.

The music was obviously improvised, the speakers hissed and produced feedback but still, I stood there, enchanted.

After a while Yiser tagged at my sleeve. She was embarrassed to be seen there,

what if some of her acquaintances would catch her listening to this.

And suddenly I realized that all this old Cuban trova and salsa, all this Buena Vista stuff is just as obsolete here as our “Katyusha” or “Ochi Chernie”. They used to be popular at one point, they're known abroad, but young people turn away from this music, it being a stupid “folk” stereotype to them, a boring cultural memory (with a shade of ideology to top it off). They make fun of it, use it as a base for something new but can't take it seriously anymore.

Yiser finally managed to drag me away from the square. Then, for a long time, we walked around the market rows that featured portraits of the leader, next to corn and beets. On one of the walls Che was depicted, looking more like Antonio Banderas. In line, among other shoppers, there was a guy with the American flag on his T-shirt. “And how is it that he still hasn't gotten his butt kicked?” I asked Yiser but she shrugged her shoulders: “So what?”

I watch the fast hands of a boy selling tomatoes for a long time. He writes his number for me on a piece of cardboard. Amed. I nod and smile. I know I won't call, but don't say anything. I observe him weigh tomatoes for Yiser and me. He picks the ripest ones but offers no discount. Here everything is too cheap as it is. I rustle with the same small red bills that have Che's image on them.

Then I buy Yiser a beer with CUC and chat with some of her other friends, then we head home with the heavy bags. I realize that Yiser is my total guardian and that she'll chaperone me wherever I go, not worrying about it too much and not trying to do anything special for my sake, taking her time to sip her beer (“Buy me another cerveza!”) and chatting with acquaintances (“Look at this muchacha who came from Russia, a friend of Mateo's”).

She is a real Cuban girl, this Yiser. She aspires to wear the shortest skirts, the most open tops and can't live a day without physically palpable attention from the opposite sex. And the opportunity to cheat presents itself with her every step. But she limits herself to just flirting. Because all of Santa Clara knows Mateo's story. She has slightly bulging eyes (like the mother) and a way of arguing about everything superficially but stubbornly, as if her convictions are shared by the whole world.

No, you couldn't accuse her of carelessness, after all she was born in the most careless country there is, which dances and makes love when it should be on its knees, praying for help. Yiser totally conforms with the code of appearance, behavior and mentality of the Cuban people.

But still, her face bears an imprint of some inexplicable pain and sorrow.

She can stare at one spot for a long while. Such silence bouts are like small deaths, like admission of defeat in the face of time and fate.

As destiny would have it, she became the wife of the not very lucky Mateo, the fighter of wind mills.

She has very slim chances of seeing him. Perhaps, too slim for her to seriously

believe in them. And the curious thing is that neither he nor she really wish for it. It seems that when they are apart, they are more compatible as a couple than when they are together.

If you unite two realities of the two distant parts of the world and put these people next to each other, they will look like... like two creatures from different planets.

“Tell me, does Mateo miss me? Do you think he loves me?” she repeated these questions like a chant, but I couldn't reply. Mateo asked me the same thing when I returned. And I was just as silent, not knowing what to say.

“I miss Mateo so much. I'm so sad without him,” Yiser would say to me, drinking the next cerveza. But it looked to me like she was sad not because of the absence of her beloved husband but because of her uncertain situation in general.

She lives with a small baby that needs far too much attention, money and care for a young careless girl to deal with alone. She is forced to live at her mother-in-law's because it's the greatest shame for a married woman to return to her natal home.

Maybe Mateo escaped not as much from socialism as from an unsuccessful marriage, which he is afraid to admit even to himself. After all, no country grants refugee status to people who are escaping the hurricane and war of family life.

[Mateo's family] I want to do a photo-story about this family but an epic novel comes out instead.

And not Tolstoi-style but more like Gabriel Garcia Marquez with his Hundred Years of Solitude.

I saw it one happy evening when they were taking me around the tangled little streets to their relatives' houses, introducing them and telling their uncomplicated stories.

Yiser's mother is an extremely jolly woman with frog eyes. Her son has a belly, is a bit stupid and crazy about reggaeton music. The dad, revolutionary inclined, works at a hotel, where a perverted Italian has been staying for three months already, having come in search of sexual pleasures.

Mateo's mother's real name is Victoria, but I heard the grandchildren call her 'abuela' and started calling her that as well. Only later did I find out that “abuela” meant “grandmother”.

It seems to me that Cuban language is a total mockery of Spanish. Hardly anybody in the world speaks as illegibly as Cubans – all the sounds blend into one unclear “fu-fu-fu”, which makes it sound like they have some speech impediment a speech therapist failed to correct in their childhood.

Because of the language problem, I'm considered half-witted here. Ellochka-the-

Cannibal. But sometimes, I only fake not understanding anything. The psychologists are right – most of communication is non-verbal. I have no more than three hundred words in my vocabulary and a couple of ready-to-use sentences structures so my thoughts are becoming just as primitive. I've found myself in a safe environment where I am guarded and cared for by a whole family. I find myself in the small Santa Clara instead of the Havana jungle. Everything surprises me: the people, the buildings, the cars. The world has turned upside down. This is a different part of the globe and everybody walks upside down in comparison to my motherland. The world has turned upside down inside me as well. Che Street -where chickens yell in the mornings and old men in cowboy hats loiter around. We ride until Barcelona Street: a tan bike-rickshaw driver pedals while I munch a churra – corn flat bread from the market, and the world is beautiful, amazingly beautiful.

That evening I finally dared to ask abuela what she thought about Fidel's regime.

It was as if Victoria recited some memorized phrases about how the country had been through the toughest times during Fidel's rule but how he, a skilled leader, had managed to steer the country through them. Yes, Cuba was beyond poverty line at the moment, but the ones to blame were the Americans who had put up an economic blockade, not Fidel. I heard the world “bloqueo” from many people later on. It's the main source of all troubles.

“But your own son escaped...”

“Mateo... He left to earn money. First he was a military man, then worked as a taxi driver, but in Russia he earns much more.”

And I remembered Mateo's story about how he was obligated to serve in the army all his life because he already had military education and rank, how he ran away and started working as a taxi driver until they found him and threatened him with arrest. Then he got his papers together in a hurry and left for Russia as a political refugee. Now's he can't wait to leave Russia but... not to return to Cuba, to go somewhere in Europe, Spain, for example. It reminded me of a 16th century picaresque novel. The main character keeps climbing and crawling around, like an ant, looking for a better life for himself and not giving up. Only Mateo, as opposed to the book rogues, is not getting anywhere. I wanted to tell this to abuela, but didn't know enough worlds to express it.

I was put to sleep in a huge bed with an anti-mosquito net stretched around it, although not one mosquito could be heard buzzing in the room. And at dawn, when sun rays made their way through the wooden blinds, as soon as I moved, abuela entered the bedroom with a tray, containing a tiny cup, in her hands. “Cafecito?” she asked me energetically.

“Si, si, cafecito,” I mumbled through my sleep. At first, I didn't know how to respond to such service -- I felt like jumping on top of the old lady to give her a big kiss but later learned to accept the morning drink with dignity, sipping along with it a feel of Cuba, which would excite me throughout the whole day. A toy cup of cafecito, if doesn't kill a horse, makes you jump around all day with your camera around horses, bike-rickshaws and girls in short skirts without the fast heartbeat or the

small tiresome tremor that happens after the coffee from the glamorous Moscow coffee shops.

Seeing that I climbed back under the blanket, grandma came over and asked, “More cafecito?” After the second one, it became hot and stuffy in bed under the net so I started getting ready for a walk to avoid Yiser's total surveillance. Abuela began to worry: so early, “peligroso”, what if something happens... Meanwhile life was in full swing outside the shutters: roosters screamed, dogs barked, horses banged their hoofs and pioneers in red and blue ties hurried to school; old men had already crawled out into verandas and stoops, getting comfortable in their eternal rocking chairs... I wanted to go out there so badly, before the disappearance of this magic light that shone through the leaves of the marvelous trees, illuminating every dust particle in the air.

A big fuss, bordering on hysteria, started at the house, “Where are you going? What are you doing?”

Suddenly Victoria, not knowing how else to prevent me from leaving, asked, “Would you like a coconut?” I naively agreed, “Yes” (give me the coconut quickly and I'll be on my way). And that's when a whole spectacle started.

They took me to the backyard patio where the coconut palm tree grew. “Mateo himself planted this palm tree,” grandma notified me proudly and her voice quivered.

We had to wake up Yiser in the house next door so she would bring a ladder. She, sleepy-eyed, dressed in a nightgown, propped the ladder against the trunk and I climbed up, shaking, still not being able to reach the coconut. Then the neighbor with his machete had to be called upon. His whole family ran out to watch the process. That's how my first real Cuban morning started, with sweet coconut water already streaming down my chin. Breakfast: a big cup of coffee with milk, with foam floating around, a scrambled-eggs-and-tomato sandwich with Tortilla-the-turtle inside. For lunch and dinner – rice with beans, fresh vegetables, and that heavenly guava juice again. But these dishes are repeated day after day in every house all over the country. They are very cheap, and I doubt anything else could be found in Cuba.

It seems that this lost little town has everything you could need for happiness. Here is some grannie selling home-made burnt sugar sweets on a stool. Here is a grandpa on an old Soviet bike. Here is a dreadlocked artist, proud of his new wooden sculpture. Here is my friends' workshop, where they produce moulded vegetable magnets. I walk down the street and see the same houses, the same verandas, where people sit in the same rocking chairs and smile at me in the same way; they smoke the same cigarettes and drink the same rum that's sold in any place for the same price.

Every house's doors are open, and if you step inside, you'll see the same shelves, and on them – photographs made at the same studio, the same cheesy figurines, a TV and a new fridge. On top of the fridge -- those very same clay vegetable are attached, and inside it – the same food: a bottle of water, tomatoes, rice.

Everything is brightly colored in this country, and, despite limited opportunities of activities, transportation and consumption, people act within these limits and find their happiness, having only a vague idea about McDonald's clowns, endless parking lots with shiny cars and self-service stores, stuffed to the ceiling with appliances – those indicators of progress that modern civilization is so proud of.

Although, with time, the pure and bright revolutionary dream about how to make everybody happy is starting to rot at the sides.

As in the Soviet Union at one point, a period of stagnation is starting here. The generation that believed in the idea of liberation from the ties of capitalism is already dying out. Old heroes have been turned into memorials, and these memorials have been long overgrown with moss. New heroes can't come on stage because first you'd have to throw away the stories of all these toy Jose Martí's and Che's. The young generation won´t come out for voluntary Saturday clean-up which was propagated by the revolutionary hero, won´t believe in the slogans, painted on the walls with childish diligence. Parades and festivals, everything ideological, provokes in them not even despise, but total impartial indifference, as if all of it existed in some parallel reality, having nothing to do with them.

Local youth loves reggaeton music and sexy dancing, they are more interested in the number of gigabytes in their MP3 players and brand names of perfume and jeans. Every locally-made video features a hot chick and a shiny car. Each one of them secretly peeks towards over there, across the sea, no matter how much they try to limit their horizon with government propaganda.

Yiser and I meet the next one of her friends on a motor bike.

“Take me with you to Russia,” he says.

“What do you need Russia for? It's cold there, people rarely smile and girls are not as sexual as the ones here.”

“I want to get out of here, make money and then return and live a long life in Cuba, so that I have everything. Maybe find me a wife over there, bring her here, build a second floor on top of my house and live.”

Yiser tells me, “There are plenty of people like him here. We can start a business: I will find the ones who want to go to Russia, and you – issue them invitations. Then we can split the money.”

Will there be enough of the willing? And then I realized, the day the border opens, there will be a huge line waiting with their luggage to go through passport control.

The only thing is, I won't issue any invitations, don't want to be responsible for everything that will happen to them after.

[Che] Yiser and I go to the Che Guevara museum. There are two of them in Santa Clara: the “Tren blindado”, by exploding which, Che took part in the key event of the revolution, and “Plaza del Che” - a square with a mausoleum and a memorial.

The ironclad train, having finally opened after the weekend, is full of French, German and Swedish tourists. Everybody wants to see the hero's weapon, his clothes; they stand around the half empty wagon, next to the chain that fences off the exposition, and talk quietly, afraid to break the holy silence.

Behind the chain, there is and iron-cast bed with a mesh bottom, and next to it – a machine gun. The other wagon contains an experimental exposition dedicated to Che. It consists of his canonical portrait, recreated many times in stones, shells, beans, rice, brass, wood – everything there is in this small but proud country.

And a story comes to mind that I once heard about Albero Korda, the photographer who took this, probably the most copied in the 20th century, photograph.

They say that he could've become a millionnaire by receiving royalties from the use of this image, but he refused this gift of destiny, just once suing a vodka brand and giving the compensation money away to an orphanage.

It was hot midday by the time we made it Che Square. Outskirts of the city, a massive memorial with revolutionary bas-relieves, and Che towering over it all, a doctor-killer, a romantic and an idealist, deliberately moulded in a careless manner, impressionist style. On the red-hot stairs and cement elevations, tourists are walking around, exhausted from the heat. They hold small cameras in their extended arms in order to take memorable shots, but they are blinded by the sun, and nothing can be seen on the LCD screens. They try to match Che´s image with the feeling of his presence here. But it´s apparent that many of them, despite their efforts, don´t succeed – their faces express obvious despair: “When are we finally getting out of here?” Strict female museum guards take away my camera and my voice recorder at the entrance. I am indignant, after all, Che himself was a photographer! I try to explain about the photo project and that I could decipher and translate the information from the voice recorder later. But the guards don't bend and Mateo's sister, who chaperones me, has to write down everything the tour guide says in a notebook. The walls of the mausoleum's cool basement hold placards with the names of the revolutionaries resting here. In the center, on top, its says: “Ernesto Che Guevara”. The tour guide reverently holds a minute of silence.

Perhaps, at that moment, I should've felt the sacred indescribable feeling from the song “Y tu querida presencia, Comandante Che Guevara” (“Your beloved presence, Comandante Che Guevara”) and trembled, as if I'd made a pilgrimage to the grave of the second Jesus. But I just stood there, repeating to myself, Che himself rests here, going through a complete range of possible sensations but not finding anything appropriate. I was still outraged by the ban of my camera and voice recorder, plus my body was feeling the contrast of going from heat to cold, and my eyes had trouble adjusting to the half-darkness.

I didn't feel absolutely anything, no holy delight or reverence, I was just cold and

bored, so I said, “Should we go?” And we moved on to a large hall, filled with endless noise of tourist crowds being guided in different languages, where it wasn't as cold anymore, with lots of exposition cases and large reproductions of Che himself that looked like advertising banners. On a screen, a video of the solemn translation of Che's body was being streamed non-stop. This very square was full of people. Everybody shouted, sang, held up banners and waved flags. And all of this accompanied by the song “Hasta siempre, comandante”, which used to touch me almost to tears with its sincere pathos, love for Che and the belief in the immortality of his spirit. But now it wasn't provoking any emotions in me, and the pathos that seemed sincere in its original context, became unreal after the song had been played millions of times for tourists.

Then, in the center, we run into a small gallery where Che was drawn, as if by a child, looking like a horse. Che, looking like a mushroom. Che that looks like a small monkey. Che in an ear-flapped fur hat. A fountain of hallucination around the hero. Are they kidding? No, the guard explains that the idea is to bring the national hero closer to common people. We stop by a book shop. On the shelves - many cheap state-issued literature about Che and Fidel. The heroes are dissected and presented according to desired images. There's even a brightly colored illustrated book – Che for the little ones. And Soviet books come to mind, where Grandfather Lenin holds a small children in his lap and reads him fairy tales.

Che accompanies me throughout the whole trip. But his image doesn't tell me anything anymore. It's empty here, soaked with state ideology, and in the West – just a trendy symbol. I don't know what he was like, the real person.

Later I read on the Internet that they had burned Che's body in Bolivia and scattered his ashes in the wind. So, everything is a lie?

The cold, empty mausoleum didn't give me the answers.

[Combatientes] Sightseeing in Santa Clara was over and we were sitting with Yiser in the only restaurant in the whole town, where they served you for national currency. My companion talked about how fat the waitresses were there (she only has one

standard commentary for each sex. Muchacho - “how good-looking he is” and chica - “how fat she is”), when I interrupted the discussion by saying, “I'd like to find some of the old revolutionaries.” She was very surprised by this unusual for a tourist request.

“I want to see what happened to those who were once Che's comrades. I want to see if they are rich or poor, sane or insane, want to hear what they have to say about the revolution, what they believed in originally and what has come of it.”

I was probably speaking too loudly, carefully pronouncing the Spanish words I knew, because some of the people in the restaurant turned around and looked at me. Among them, there was a couple that looked exactly like ex-revolutionaries.

They were people whose faces bore the sign of many years spent together. Despite their humbleness, their clothes had something that gave away extreme internal dignity. The old woman had her hair up in an elaborate do and was wearing pendent earrings.

They had already noticed me and nodded, allowing me to come up to their table. I made a few photos and started a conversation, but I was so exhausted by the day that we decided to postpone the meeting. While the man was writing his address in my notebook, the woman picked in her ear with the long nail of her pinky and then contemplated the resulting small ball with satisfaction for a long time.

The next day we went to the given address. We made an excellent delegation: I, as the main interviewer, Yiser, as my fixer – a secretary and a translator all in one, and Rafael, a Spaniard who got bored of regular tourism and wanted to gain a deeper insight into the culture. His help was especially important because he himself was seriously interested in the subject and also spoke Spanish. I had been reading memoirs of the people who had once interviewed Fidel and almost got into the role of a scrupulous journalist-investigator.

The taxi driver who drove us got lost and couldn't find the address for a long time.

It was surprising to me because Santa Clara is so mall, the locals should know its every little corner.

It's just that our driver was too inspired by the question about the age of his car and went off on a tangent of a proud car owner, from which I didn't understand a word.

We drove around the shabby town in this coffin for half the morning, and even the dogs and the trees seemed ancient to me, from the previous century. After this pleasure ride, the driver, who finally managed to find the address, asked for a toolarge-for-Cuba sum.

In any case, we were at the threshold of a very respectable-looking villa on the outskirts of Santa Clara. The lady of the house opened the door and led us to the impeccably clean living room. Then she offered us some pineapple juice with ice, and by the presence of sharp pineapple particles, I guessed that the juice had been

freshly squeezed just before our arrival.

The old revolutionary was full of self-importance due to his role in history and awaited questions.

Not to sound stupid, I started reading one-by-one the questions I had copied from someone's old interview with Fidel.

About the revolution, about his memory of the events and his view of them. About how the idea of the revolution has transformed.

The old man replied thoroughly but very formally, and even without distinguishing what was being said, I could tell by his tone on voice that this person wouldn't say anything important to me. I sucked in the last drop of juice and finally got bored.

The Spaniard joined in on the conversation, and it became obvious that he got along with the old man much better and that now they could chat away all day like old buddies.

But then the old man leaned back in his armchair and with his pose let us know that he was tired of chatting and wanted to rest a little. To top it off, I decided to ask him what he thought about Fidel. He looked at me as if I was crazy and started up his slow boring tirade again, full of ideological pathos, jabbing his index finger in the air, like old Fidel himself.

I was sadly looking at and turning my hands my empty glass, but the act of being a polite hostess had been carried out and it was useless to expect seconds.

Finally, the old man offered to show Rafael a piece of a documentary about his father. At this point he ignored me, as if I was a black sheep in the herd of shameless contra-revolutionary journalists who'd completely sold out to capitalism.

Turned out his father was a field commander, and that's who was a real revolutionary. Our old man put on a VHS tape that depicted an even older man, bedridden, giving a two hour interview to a journalist, waving his bony arms, apparently acting out a machine gun in action and the torrid battles in the name of the revolution and free Cuba.

We rushed to say good-bye so we wouldn't have to watch this for the next two hours. The old man happily shook our hands, but his wife ordered for us to be taken to the “marvelous garden�. The old man was disappointed but submissively agreed.

We trudged along some alleys, where unwashed children ran around and old women washed laundry in shabby basins. At the sight of our old man, absolutely everyone we came across nodded at him with respect, almost obsequiously.

And finally – the arboretum park that the hostess so highly recommended. Birds

were singing, and we happily submerged into the shade of unknown trees after all this terrible heat when the sun burns straight from above and there's nowhere to hide...

The paths in the park were sprinkled with gravel, and if the stories are true, an unbelievable amount of trees and bushes from all over the world were collected there. Workers in green uniforms bustled around and seemed to be an integral part of it all. It seemed to be lunchtime because they carried bowls full of some unappetizing gray mass. Although it's possible that what I mistook for food was just fertilizer or, for example, fish food.

On the sides of the paths, ridiculous bronze statues of boy elves were carefully distributed and, suddenly, next to a tiny fountain – an even more ridiculous statue of Che. He was executed in the same style as the elves, only without wings.

I guess the sculptor got too excited and forgot to give him the typical heroicpathos features.

Che ended up becoming an unfinished overgrown elf who had lost his wings in battle and was barely holding on to his long-suffered machine gun. I liked the image very much, but the sun was blinding, not allowing me to take a good photo.

Nonetheless, the old revolutionary insisted that I take a photo of Che and pose myself with him in the background. By the end of the trip, I could've had a whole folder of photographs that other people insisted I must, for some reason, take.

We came out to a green bus stop through the back part of the park, without elves already, where trees looked more like a jungle entwined by vines. The revolutionary asked me if I'd ever tried caña juice and, upon receiving a negative answer, announced that he would treat me to it. I got happy because juice was exactly what I needed at that moment. The old man absolutely refused to take my money and paid a whole half-peso to the boy at the stop. A glass of murky-gray, very cold and overly sweet liquid turned up in his hand. After taking a sip, I decided that I'd never drink it again.

And later found out that caña is that very sugar cane that got Cuba through the hardest times.

In Santa Clara I met another revolutionary, so different from the first one that it would be hard to imagine them next to each other, fighting together, walking in the same formation, hiding in the same thicket with a machine gun.

We were walking down the central street when I saw some old men sitting right on the sidewalk. They weren't even talking to each other or doing anything at all. I doubt they were even thinking about anything. It seemed as if they'd been sitting there for ever, like something that belonged to the place even more than the statues, because you can take a statue apart or take it away, while nothing could move these old men from their place; and even if one of them would die, the rest of them would keep on sitting there and wouldn't notice it right away.

I asked them how to get somewhere and, to my surprise, one of them, the most ancient one, replied something illegible without taking a very thick cigar out of his mouth, then froze in the same position.

“Turn right after two blocks,” the old man next to him deciphered it for me.

“Excuse me, are you a revolutionary by any chance?” I asked just in case.

The old men sitting next to him replied for him, “Yes, that one is.” A dark-skinned old man with a squished face moved his cigar from one corner of his mouth to the other and mumbled, “Yes, once upon a time...”

I wrote down his address and his name. Even his name had a note of revolutionary pathos – Octavio Vegas Diaz. He was obviously flattered by this honor paid to him in front of his buddies and said that he returned home every day at eight. I promised to come.

My companion Yiser was surprised when at eight o'clock I really got ready to visit the crazy man.

In a totally empty room with white-washed walls, turned gray from humidity, there was a towering bed, and a woman sat in it. Besides that and some uncertain scent of suffering, there was nothing in the room.

How can people live here, I couldn't imagine it. My own life was full of things, even overflowing with them. I can't live without books and notepads, without cameras and all types of technology, without piles of music and video DVDs, without shelves full of clothes and heaps of unnecessary nick knacks and souvenirs. Life without things reminds me of hell, since there's nothing to fidget with, move from place to place, nothing to dust and nothing to show or gift to your friends. And I get the creeps when I see such emptiness, in which people have probably spent all their lives. Perhaps, before Cuba's liberation, these people were slaves, and their fathers and grandfathers were also slaves, doomed to a life of hard and meaningless labor.

Maybe it really made sense for these people to fight since they had nothing to lose.

But what did they get in return? An empty room with a really high bed, old people scents and the opportunity to move a cheap cigar from one corner of their mouth to the other. It must be that this old man is a beggar and spends his whole day on the shady side of the street, waiting for a hand out...

“What do yo do?” I ask him. “Oh, I have a flower business,” he says.

He started telling me about the revolution in a windy and confusing way. It turned out that after acting out one episode of shooting, he'd come back to its beginning (and then they started shooting – ta-ta-ta-ta – the machine gun supposedly still rattling in his saggy arms). I tried to replace the needle on this old vinyl and asked him a couple of guiding questions. But the gramophone was stuck, and the old man kept describing the same episode with more and more spittle shooting out of his mouth each time. Meanwhile, Yiser was looking at me with reproach and impatience. When we said good-bye and left, my flash card contained only one good shot – a woman sitting on a bed in an empty room. A shelter? And old people's home? I could title it any way I wanted.

On the way back, Yiser asked me to buy her a pizza. There was a line of Cubans on the corner, from which people walked away with round flatbread in their hands.

Pinkish-yellow liquid was dripped from the flatbread. The line looked like a centipede. Three or four dogs were running around at the feet of the line. They were playing a game - “guess where a yummy drop will fall and who will get to lick it of the pavement”. Looking not at the people, but at the dogs, I decided to buy this pizza after all. The pinkish-yellow liquid, a parody of cheese with ketchup, dripped all over my hands, burning them with hot fat, and the bread itself was puffy and totally dry so, after two bites, the pizza flew, like a UFO, into the crowd of street dogs that were already jumping up towards it with their mouths agape.

As it turned out, there was a club for combatientes, which means revolutionary fighters. Such clubs exist in each town, somewhat similar to our veterans clubs. And perhaps, during the special holidays, they also go to schools to tell their stories and then come back and spend the rest of the year gloomily waiting for the next holiday, commemoration, medals.

It wasn't hard to find such club in Santa Clara. At the entrance, a concierge was sitting at a table, as in all Cuban establishments. And of course, all foreigners had to receive a special pass from the ministry in order just to go into the building, leave alone taking photos inside. After that was explained to us, we nodded and left.

It was Yiser's fault. She came in and told him right away who I was and what I wanted. And now, almost with glee, she shrugs her shoulders, saying, “He said we're not allowed.” It was obvious that she didn't have any desire to go into some old people club and couldn't wait to be with the muchachos. But I stubbornly stay by the door. Meanwhile, a few people come in, some with beat-up bikes and one with a voluptuous cake on a piece of cardboard. I get up the courage to follow the man with the cake and proudly pass by the concierge, but he doesn't even notice me because he is so immersed in a huge sheet of the Granma newspaper. I make a sign for Yiser to follow me, and she does, reluctantly.

Inside the building there are huge portraits of Fidel and Che hanging along with worn-out photographs of revolutionaries displayed in chess order. I don't know how, but a photo image always gives away that a face that's looking at you in reality has long rotted in the ground. Such pictures always bear a special imprint: the faces are a bit sad and unreal, as if to say that nowadays such expressions don't exist anymore.

Old beat-up Soviet bikes stand propped against the wall in a line. On the veranda, hiding from the sun, six old men sit, playing dominoes. I notice the hands of one of the black men are covered in light spots. I am so drawn in by the spots that I can't look at anything else.

When I become too noticeable, I have to say something. “I'm looking for participants of the revolution,” I say. “I am! I'm a participant!” one of them says, a jolly white man. “Interview me for a Russian newspaper!”

And the other one, with the spotty hands, is silent. “Excuse me, are you a

participant?” I ask him. “No,” he replies, “I was only a child then.” But being a photographer, I'm not interested in the revolutionaries; here they are something boring, formal, ordinary. I'm interested in the spots on the hands, anything that stands out, rarities. That's why to me the spotty one is a bigger hero than the rest of them.

Next to the club there was a cafeteria. The cook in a tall cap offered only two items: a sweet soda and a cake with blue topping. The cake was unbelievably cheap, so I bought a huge piece at once.

The soda was ice-cold and I refused to drink it. The cake turned out to be a regular sponge cake with some blue egg-and-sugar mix smeared on top. It was so sickly sweet that the rest of the day I was dying from thirst and the sweet misunderstanding in my mouth. Why, why did I do it? I asked myself over and over.

Just because everybody eats it here. And, possibly, nobody knows why either.

But at least I had a lovely collection of combatientes' addresses in my notebook, although I had no idea what to do with them.

My “spotty” old man lived somewhere in Mateo's sister's neighborhood, so I was inclined to visit him.

Comparing to the typical Cuban houses of that neighborhood, his dwelling looked like a poor hut. Nobody had even heard of that street, so we passed back and forth by the “secret” spot which was somewhere very close.

On the door of the hut hung a metal horse with a chariot and the number seven. I saw the same one when I stepped into Santa Clara for the first time. I saw them many times after, but that first one was special. We pulled at the handle and a minute later, an old man appeared, naked from the waste up, his face stubbly, exuding a monstrous week-old stink of alcohol. His black chest was decorated by blurry blue-black tattoos. Enrique obviously wasn't expecting anybody and sent us and our cameras to hell. I carried away one shot but didn't have time to record the sound of his marvelous cussing with the voice recorder.

After the door had been shut in our faces, Mateo's sister looked at me with bewilderment, “So that was your revolutionary?”

We slowly made our way back. The narrow local streets, the motorcyclists, the kids with the fighter roosters, the old men on their verandas, the barber with his endless crooked mirrors couldn't excite my imagination anymore.

After a while, in the town center, I saw that same shriveled Octavio with the eternal cigar in his mouth, selling small wilted bouquets made of three field grass blades to old women, asphyxiated by the heat and their own sweat.

That was the end of my meetings with the old revolutionaries.

[Juana] Meanwhile work was going full speed at Mateo´s sister´s house. Juana and her husband Pablo – craftsmen-entrepreneurs, executed the full cycle of production and distribution of the goods themselves. They produced brightly-colored clay

figurines, some to be put on top of the TV and shelves, others – stuck to the fridge with a magnet, and yet others – to be hung on a wall. These figurines screamed about how beautiful they were and this scream hurt your hearing and imagination, if not shattered glasses. White shiny little angels with gold halos, Mickey mice and acid-colored veggies...

This family produced it all with great love. Together, they cut out the rubber moulds which they would fill with clay. Then they oven-dried the resulting figurines and covered them with glaze, so they'd look like porcelain. Rows of figurines of all levels of readiness were lined up on huge workbenches in their garden. Feigning a tourist's delight, I asked them to paint at least one. I could tell from their frowns that Juana and Pablo took their work very seriously and didn't find my idea to be entertaining. But they gave me a spray can and brush anyway. I had to paint the buttons – the least significant part of all, while Juana painted eyebrows and eyes – the most important of all.

As a result, almost two hundred pretty decent copies of Budai, the fat-bellied Chinese god, came out.

And not even one José Martí bust, not one flag or Fidel. Such things exist only in the official establishment, but in regular homes – everything is simple, totally different images and other songs. Juana's little daughter with a name like in a song – Sabina, watched her parents working with a serious face. She had just come back from her dance school and now was showing her mom and dad the latest positions and tricks. A dream to become a ballerina shone in her eyes. But the way to grand ballet was closed for her. The girl was from a poor provincial family, where mom and dad have no connections in the party apparatus, and her uncle is a political refugee who had already lost his citizenship. Ballet is the best fate a woman can dream of, but, as with space travel, only few are chosen for it.

Sabina arched her body and stretched out her legs, and her dad sometimes supported her or hugged her close, or stoked her head.

The father stroked her head, put his hand on her waist, kissed her in a way that, in my eyes, only a lover could be kissed, not a daughter. Maybe it's the legend about Oedipus king and Sigmund Freud that raised a twisted civilization from which you could only seek refuge on a communist island where, maybe due to the hot climate, any expression of physical affection seems as natural as sun rays.

My skin tingled: I'd like to live in a society like this. That's for sure.

But surrounded by Mateo's family, I couldn't handle more than a week.

They fussed around me as if I were a newborn baby, chaperoned me everywhere and often ruined my shoots. I felt that it was time to change the environment, but they, in turn, couldn't comprehend how I would go somewhere alone. Especially right at that moment. It didn't occur to them that I had somehow made it to Cuba, also completely on my own...

[The road to Santiago] I was tired, so I spent half of Sunday in Mateo's mom's kitchen while she packed

some fruit for the road and wailed.

My plan was to go to Santiago de Cuba, the southern capital where life, according to rumors, was not at all like in Havana – more authentic and, at the same time, slowpaced. But most of all I was interested in its fisherman villages and Guantanamo, the American base.

At the bus station I was greeted as a VIP guest and taken to a special hall for whites, which was kept locked. Everything was made of glass in the hall, there were quality seats and a TV. But the announcements didn't reach here, the hall itself had been locked by an attendant who had walked away, so I found myself in a fish tank of comfort from which I couldn't reach the outside world. Finally, the attendant in a blue uniform came back and told me, “Don't worry, your bus doesn't leave for a while.”

At that moment a Cuban family with numerous children walked up to her and asked to be let into the waiting hall. But the woman said, “No, you are not allowed in here.

It's for foreign guests only.” And left again. “What the hell?” I thought, “Some are not allowed in, some – out. What's the point?”

I remembered that my MP3 player was out of battery. Without it, my trip would be a torture. I began to look for an outlet but found only the local ones, with longish holes. The TV was plugged into the only normal outlet, so I unplugged it in order to plug in my player. Immediately, an attendant appeared at the door and wagged her finger at me. In Cuba this means a fairy severe prohibition or threat.

“You can't turn off the TV.” “Yes, but I don't want to watch it, and I'm the only one here. I need to charge my player.”

“It's prohibited here!” she retorted sternly.

Soon, my bus arrived.

The attendant politely called me over and invited me to take my seat inside, and I, full of despise, left this horrible fish tank pretending to be a VIP hall.

To my surprise, the bus was new, shiny, two-storied. The company was called Viazul, which means “Through blue”. Respectable-looking Cubans and a few foreigners got on board this blue liner, ready to cross the vastness of the most wonderful country in the world. The trip cost three times more than the average salary of most of my Cuban acquaintances, that's why some of them haven't been to even the nearest towns.

I asked the driver, “Can I charge my player here?” “No,” he replied, and we took off.

One by one, I finished up the Paris airport Twix bars, imagining how wonderful this trip could be if only I had Cuban salsa music, taken out the Moscow winter, playing in my headphones.

Outside the window, instead of a beautiful country with exotic birds, a rather dull landscape was dashing by. The bus stopped in every tiny town. But station walls

were all decorated by Che's portraits. Stops, announced to be five minute ones, ended up lasting about twenty minutes. I came out at each stop, looking for an outlet for my player. And finally, in a small cafe, I happily noticed that a fridge was plugged into an outlet that carried the long-awaited 220 volts. The neighboring plugs were free.

“Can I use the plug?” I asked the owner.

“Yes, but this is a 220v one,” she replied.

“That's exactly what I need!” I exclaimed.

Her husband and children, who helped in the cafe, joined in on our conversation.

“So can I use your plug?”

“But this is a 220v one, young lady!”

This meaningless conversation would've lasted much longer if I hadn't opened the counter door myself to plug in my poor player. At that moment, with my peripheral vision I saw my bus turning around slowly but irreversibly.

Without saying a word, I yanked out my player and ran with all I got outside, accompanied by child laughter. I ran after the bus, flailing my arms in the air, until it stopped. “I was wondering if you'd run after us until the very Santiago?” said the driver, and the whole burst into arrogant gaggle. I felt humiliated and was ready to kill the stupid cafe owner and the rude driver. In order to calm down, I tried to put some music on, but the player died on me after the first 20 seconds of intro and didn't turn on for the rest of the trip, no matter what outlets I plugged it in. For the rest of the time, I watched TV on the bus. A stupid and unfunny movie about how local boys try to seduce some tourist beauties was on. The boys were servile pretty boys who didn't speak any English, and the girls looked at them with arrogance and accepted their service, only to tell them later to go to hell. This went on and on, and this story could very possible have grown into an eight-day soap opera for a roundthe-world journey on-board the magical ship “Viathul”.

We got to Santiago at night. The air was very stuffy and full of special southern smells: a mix of red-hot dust, as if from an iron, and tropical plant pollen. And after the smells I was bombarded by people, offering their services: taxi, accommodation, sex... I barely managed to get away from there and find a payphone, from which I started calling everybody on my Hospitality Club list. There were significantly fewer numbers that I'd expected. One of them, called Nessi, refused to take me in but offered to ask her neighbor if I could spend the night there for twenty dollars. I didn't call her back because right after that call I found Olga who said right away, “OK, come on over.”

“What's the place called?”

“Pintero.”

And I thought that it was some wonderful painter neighborhood (from the word “pintor”).

But none of the taxi drivers knew where Pintero was.

“Maybe you mean Quintero?”

“May be.”

And I went without knowing where. Instead of a painter quarter it turned out to be a far-away abandoned corner, full of dust, cacti and plain houses. My driver decided that the center of the Quintero neighborhood was a little square across from the university. So that's where he dropped me off. But nobody came. I had to knock on the closest house's door. A friendly black woman in rollers and a nightgown allowed me to use her phone and even gave me advice. Cuba is a remarkable country.

Nobody gets outraged here even when a stranger wakes him up in the middle of the night with some request.

Finally, Olga sleepily picked up the phone and promised to come over to the university.

Three people came, and I couldn't figure out which one was my Olga. At first I thought that the three of them were friends, then – a mother and two daughters.

But finally it turned out that two of them were twins plus the daughter of one of them. Olga was the daughter, a chubby girl with light curly hair and a squished up, a bit absent, face. Her upper lip stuck up and out, which gave her a naïve look. Olga turned out to be the same age as me.

We took the outside stairs to the second floor of the house where an untidy-looking man called Fidel rushed to fry us eggs. When he threw some white chunks into the skillet, I thought it was just another vegetable, unknown to me. And only when I started eating did I noticed the stubble and to my horror realized that they were fried chunks of pig fat and skin. It was too late to refuse to eat this horrible dish with a beautiful name – chicharon. My hosts didn't understand how anybody could NOT like this delicacy and thought I was just being modest. Also, I had to talk, which was hard for me in Spanish, especially after a ten-hour trip.

I found out that Olga was a computer specialist, that's why she had access to the Internet and could participate in the Hospitality Club. Her mother and aunt were women of typical Spanish appearance; one of them – a bank clerk, and the other – a teacher. In Cuba both of these occupations are paid equally badly. Both of them dream of getting Olga married, but the girl, even at the first mention of it, starts to pshaw and argue.

The next morning my new friend was set on taking me to the beach with her cousins. Girls accompanied by boys. I agreed, although beaches are boring to me.

The beach was called Siboney, which reminded me of the fantastic melody that threads through the whole Wong Kar-Wai's movie 2046: “Siboney, yo te quiero, yo me muero por tu amor” (“Siboney, I love you, I'm dying for your love”).

Is it really devoted to this shitty little place? My friends were sure that it was, but later I found just on Cuba's territory at least three or four places called Siboney.

Despite it being Saturday, there were very few people on the beach, mostly glamorous night club youth, partying their lives away, mimicking beautiful American videos.

“In the winter nobody swims here,” Olga notified me. “It's too cold.” I started laughing like crazy and hurried to jump under a palm tree's shadow as the sun was already starting to burn holes in my skin.

The beach is a 20th century invention, a caprice of the bored. What fun is it to fry in the sun, be it winter or summer? (Cold and alien February Moscow will be my answer).

Behind the trees, a hand-made shack was hiding where they sold cola and lunches in cardboard boxes. After everybody had eaten, they threw the boxes and the bottles right into the sea. “Don't throw them away!” I asked. “Oh, sorry, were you going to finish it?” they jeered at me. In Cuba, everybody throws their trash wherever they please, and there aren't any particular ecology discussions. Waste and packaging haven't yet buried the country under only because here there isn't much to package.

Imagining myself as if seen from the outside, on this beach (the waves run into the sand and caress the body), I started pondering dreams and their realization.

There are only three types of correlation of dreams with reality: a) you've never dreamed about it because you don't need it; b) you've always dreamed about it; c) it's so wonderful that you haven't even dared dream about it.

When anything happens in life, it coincides with one of these three models.

And so, the dreams of some collective human consciousness take physical form.

Cuba is a touristic paradise: blue sea and white sand, palm trees lean towards the water, the tide rustles...

Or it's sunset time, the silhouettes of palm trees and of two lovers. Such pictures are often placed as screen savers and printed on Chinese towels.

And here we have the Siboney beach. Let's say even the same one to which the song from 2046 is devoted.

You rake apart with you hands the blue jelly-like water, thinking about the moon fish, a pure figment of your imagination, watching the setting sun reflect in every wave.

Separate parts of some unified mechanism start to fall into place and it seems like, here it is, this is almost it. But dreams, having manifested themselves in time and space, become unbearably vulgar. This silly dance music blasting from the speakers, this trash in the water, which suddenly has become sickeningly salty, and the sweet sun – all of this has nothing to do with what children draw, smiling. No, this is a merciless killer - a monster without a human face. “Stop-stop-stop, this wasn't in my dreams!”

Dreams are made of a few beautiful brush strokes, and the rest is filled in as reality approaches, but not as beautifully.

I get into the warm sea and decide to swim to the pontoon that can be seen far off in the distance, looking very much like the remains of a sunken ship. A fullyequipped snorkeler keeps circling around me the whole time. I'm jealous of him and regret not having brought my diving mask from home because then I could see the blue sea not only from the surface. And maybe I'd even get lucky and see those moon fish or some other incredible thing that could equally be real and imaginary.

The man with the mask flounders around next to me the whole time.

Next time when he shows up on the surface, I ask, making the best of my broken Spanish, “Let me borrow your mask just once.”

“And what exactly is it you want to see?” he asks me slily.

“Well, the fish,” I reply.

He passes on his mask but doesn't leave, and the first thing I see when I dive is his penis, looking like a lonely corral, bulging out of his swimming trunks. I return the mask right away. “Thanks, I've seen enough of fish.”

He followed me around the beach for a while, trying to impose on me his number and a stupid under-water photo where he, in that same mask, is blowing bubbles through the tube. I accepted the photo. To remind me of the moon fish.

The whole time Olga tried to jealously guard me from stranger intrusions and curious eyes. At night, when the guys took me to a night club, she wanted to dance only with me...

Returning home under the moonlight over the hill with its cactus-covered streets (with a view of the whole octopus-shaped sprawl of lights called Santiago), I waited till the cousins were far ahead and hugged her around the waist. We walked on for some time, not uttering a word, but then parted under some excuse.

I didn't feel right because of this hot Cuban night.

From that moment, my life at Olga's stopped being so smooth. When you are inscribed, you have to always crack jokes, tell stories, be delighted, thank... It's a psychological training that sometimes, under certain circumstances, becomes a chore. Having to always explain where and why you are going, knowing when you will return. Listening to a whole bunch of blood-curling warnings. After that day, or night, to be exact, Olga became especially snappy with me. She would act out without a reason or wouldn't let me photograph something in the street, pick on me, or simply go to bed without saying “good night”.

Sometimes this “inscription” almost turns people into enemies, because friendship between the “inscribed” and the host becomes fake with time, even though it hadn't started out as such. But I was willing to deal with anything just to be able to stay in Cuba, to look around, outside the front door of the house where I slept, leaving them alone to eat their eggs fried with lard.

[“Freedom island”] I don't see any freedom here.

Freedom here is only for tourists. Considering that free love is love for money.

While for the locals, freedom has frozen in party slogans, as a stupid word that has lost its meaning.

The possibility of finding out news from other countries is blocked. There's only one central newspaper – the official party printing authority Granma. Chess tournaments, youth celebrations, revolution anniversaries, an abundant harvest. Not one word about problems or socially important events. And the TV is just ridiculous here. One of the channels is educational – it transmits lessons day and night. The other – where a funny lady-announcer reports artificial news. It's almost like Soviet Union, a completely constructed and staged reality.

Freedom of transportation is totally absent. A person can't go not only to another country but not even to another town. Anyway, how would one go when the only mode of transportation is the expensive shiny bus for foreigners.

But the most important freedom for most people is to buy whatever they want in the stores. The government’s position regarding this issue is declared via a huge advertising poster: WE CONSUME ONLY WHAT WE NEED. Fidel still considers a car to be a luxury. And once, I ran into a woman in the streets of Santiago who dismally nagged, “soooap, peeens, soooap, peeeens...” You can't find either one in the shops, not even for pesos.

In Cuba, party slogans are pasted everywhere. On the walls of houses, on the doors of shops. The most common one is “PATRIA O MUERTE” (“Motherland o death”). It's even chiseled in circle on all the small coins. Another slogan I saw in huge letter on a regular residential house: “MOTHERLAND IS LOVE”. There is something religious about this approach, more so since this modified phrase can be seen here on the doors of many churches and many houses in its original form: “GOD IS LOVE”. This is how religion and national patriotism clash together, aiming to occupy the same position in the hearts and minds. It's not a coincidence that Fidel gave a whole interview about the topic of religion, where he claims that “in general, he's not against it”. This is a big achievement, at least in the sense of idealism. How could Fidel allow such strong competition?

Motherland or death.

Motherland is love.

From these two premises, absurd in themselves, one logical conclusion can be drawn: love or death.

The official ideology has twisted these two concepts of utmost importance around motherland. But nobody pays attention to the motherland here, after all, you can't choose it, especially here. This, specifically this motherland, can't be exchanged because there's nothing to exchange it for, and neither can it be sold because this particular motherland is a doubtful object of sale. Even when it throws around such strong words.

Revolution exists as if in a parallel reality. It's in the writing on the wall that fades with time and peels off, but life goes past these wall, laughing, listening to loud RnB and hugging an overly made-up under-aged girlfriend.

But indirectly revolution exists everywhere, in all of this poverty and, as paradoxical as it sounds, in this system of 'unfreedom'. “Bloqueo is to blame for everything,” for the hundredth time say the Cubans. Economic blockade that the States had imposed by prohibiting foreign ships from entering Cuban ports. After the fall of the Soviet Empire, the United States put some more pressure on, and it become impossible to live in Cuba. This period was called “periodo especial”. This meant that everything had become especially shitty and some special measures had to be taken. Street vending was allowed again, private entrepreneurship was viewed with more liberty. Foreign capital flowed into the country. The bourgeois started building their expensive hotels and restaurants here, whereas Cubans continued to eat their weird pizza in cheap eateries, Cuban girls – selling their bodies in order to survive. Essentially, the same thing that was happening before the revolution was repeating, what the Soviet film directors criticized so harshly in their film I am Cuba.

There are fat poor people and fat rich people. The poor are fat because they eat all kinds of crap and provoke a metabolic imbalance. And the rich are fat because in Cuba you can buy pretty much anything, but only if you have money.

Revolution hasn't let go for half a century. Old Fidel has a firm grip on power and even after his retirement scribbles his propaganda articles for the newspaper.

Everybody is tired. After stormy changes stagnation always follows. When old men hold the power. When old ideological dogmas have worn themselves out and coming out with new ones means losing. When nothing happens. Nothing gets imported or exported.

It's unclear how everybody lives without expressing their discontent with a regime that hasn't given anything but has deprived them of everything.

I can't look at Jose Martí busts anymore. It is, perhaps, even more boring and imposing that Lenin memorials. The bust of the hero, a skinny person with a mustache, is installed in every school and kindergarten. Of the same whiteness, produced by the same mould. For some reason looking like Don Quixote.

I don't know who this Jose Martí was. Maybe he really was a hero. He looks like Don Quixote. Just as in my country, despite all that propaganda, it's still unclear who Lenin was. Maybe – a romantic, wishing to improve humanity's life. Or maybe, just a scoundrel. A sly baldy. In my mind, to trust the cult of a leader is not a good idea in general.

[Сантьяго] The southern capital, Santiago, opens wide for me with a different climate, a different temperament. Local air, melted by the heat, is mixed with clouds of dust.

Here, you want to inhale deeply, more deeply, but in vain, and your mouth seeks air with no result, like the mouth of a fish that´s been thrown out of the water.

Santiago is a tourist trap. It´s not burdened by the problems of a capital, like Havana, and not filled with stagnant provincial air, like Santa Clara or any other little one-story town. Santiago is like a painting, like a fairy tale, a festive cake. Its gingerbread houses are painted in pastel colors. You want to look and see, but the sun blinds you too much. The light and shadow contrast here is so great that those who are in the shadow can be detected neither by the eye nor by the camera.

Local air is filled with southern rhythms: reggaeton and salsa blast from every speaker. You can easily run into, for example, Casa de musica – House of music, where you can enter for free and listen to old Cuban musicians play guitars, drums and rattles. And a man in a sombrero will play such a marvelous solo that you will want to love the whole world truly and forever.

Houses here are tightly squeezed together, with no backyards, lawns or any kind of an empty space. The living rooms of these houses come out right into the street through tall doors; men and women sit there on the stoops, not doing anything. Old men slowly sway in rocking chairs.

You get the feeling that they have grown into these identical carved chairs, that they get old and die in them. But this inertia is not the result of internal oppression or depression, on the contrary, the still 'buddhas' fully enjoy life. Sometimes, sounds of Cuban music jump out from a cheap radio next to them. Somebody, without taking the cigar of of his mouth, puffs smoke into the dusty air. Children play ball, sometimes driving it into their own windows, but nobody chastises them – even they are their own bosses here. Women and old ladies sit on concrete steps, dogs sit next to them; everything is motionless, just as it has been for the past few years or, maybe, half a century.

Dogs don't bark here, probably because there's no private estate in Cuba, so they have absolutely nothing to guard. The weather doesn't change either, there are no seasons, only the heat increases or diminishes, but everybody's used to it from birth and nothing can force these people to go into their house or to start moving.

Sometimes tables are carried out into the street and men, and less often, women, play dominoes, chess or checkers – the slowest games in the world.

Their facial expressions are unchangeable, and it seems like nothing can alter their equilibrium and total happiness.

The drivers of these strange contraptions, bici-taxis, ride by. They pedal persistently and their cheap synthetic tank tops absorb their sweat, forming little holes under their armpits. The holes get bigger day after day, and only they can be

of any indicator of time passing, unnoticed and uncounted.

Crazy motorcyclists in colorful helmets also jet by. A motorbike is the most popular mode of transportation here, and each of these guys has an extra passenger helmet hanging off the steering bar. You can simply shout at him, “Ey, niño!” (Hey, baby!), and he will take you anywhere you want for a meager price of 20 pesos. You will hug this stranger's back as tightly as you can, sometimes holding on to your own helmet secured by a string, oozing sweat and adrenaline into the thick air. And then the jiffy driver will speed away, like a bug, his motor humming, expelling silver clouds of exhaust and raising clouds of dust. Sometimes he'll even wave at you. But you won't remember his face anyway.

I don't know what changes will be brought on by the ready-to-break-through capitalism. Maybe, this magical relaxed quality of the people and the 'meltedness' of the air will disappear, time will finally manifest its true nature, will force everybody to rush somewhere, to pedal not only bikes but everything around them.

I think everybody is afraid of that moment, yet really looking forward to it.

[Padrino] That day I was wandering around Santiago streets when suddenly from behind one of the half-opened doors, I heard Buena Vista Social Club – style guitar music. I stopped to listen and was immediately invited to enter. In a room filled with cigar smoke and the smell of old books, just two older men sat around in rocking chairs.

One was playing the guitar and the other one was merrily rocking his rum glass in tune with the song's beat. They were real Cuban songs performed not by professional musician but by regular people, which was very touching. I stayed to listen. The old musician asked me my name and started singing, “Guantanamera, Irina, Guantanamera.” The song was about a poor peasant woman from Guantanamera – a folk song as old as our “Moldavian peasant”.

Gradually, I observed what was happening in the adjacent room. There was a strange altar made of feathers, bones and a pile of strange things. A very thin man in a torn shirt was accepting visitor there, reading spells, waving about a bunch of herbs and splashing water.

This is how I met Lazarus. He the son of the old man (as I found out later, the owner of the house) who was singing, waving his glass around. He invited me in to the 'altar room' which was the passageway between the door and his room. Lazarus is a priest, or padrino (dad, a diminutive from padre), a servant of the schizophrenic Cuban religion – espiritualismo, a mix of voodoo and Catholicism. When African slaves were prohibited to practice their own religion, they masked it with Catholicism, assigning Catholic saints' names to their native spirits. He showed me the altar and explained that there were seven spirits-orishas, each one of which had

its name, its Catholic saint, its color and musical instrument, which could be used to to worship each spirit. “This instrument is for the godess Ochun.” He shook a curious rattle and a small rain rapped inside. I was fascinated, so Lazarus promised to conduct a serious ritual the next day in my presence.

Next time we met, Lazarus was wearing a funny little skullcap, which gave him a very religious look. His shirt still had a huge hole in it. He smiled at me, squeezed my hand with his thin hand and his eyes shone. There was something sublime about this man. Now I could take a close look at the altar. There were knives, axes (big and small), a charred carcass of a little bird on a platter with a chipped edge, various scary bones, a twig bunch with eyes, hand-cuffs, and an old Soviet alarm clock.

This time a girl came in for a “consultation”, as the religious fortunetelling and advice is called here. She had brightly colored nails and a wonderful protruding behind. Her name was Deglis, she was a dancer from the traditional African dance ensemble.

Padrino said that for a real ritual, ovejas and palomas were missing. I wouldn't have been surprises if it meant, for example, elk's eyes and orangutang’s liver. I said, “Alright, I'll go to the market and buy the missing ingredients.” And I took off with with a piece of paper where the two unknown words were written. People looked at me with surprise and pointed in a direction, totally different from where the market was. Finally I reached the corner of a shabby street where old men were sitting on stools and selling bunches of dried herbs. I asked them where I could buy this strange something, which in my mind I imagined as animal organs. And the old men told me, it's right here. It was just two old bunches of herbs.

I also had to find a coconut but, as luck would have it, it was nowhere to be found.

Would be nice to go back to Santa Clara and pick one off a palm tree.

Last stop – the municipal bar on the corner, to pick up some cheap tap rum for the padrino. I took advantage of the chance to buy a huge cake with blue egg-white icing for myself. I picked at the icing with my finger while carrying it on a a piece of cardboard. When I got to the padrino's, tired from walking in the heat, it was so sweet in my mouth as if a sugar bomb had exploded there. Even ice-cold water from the new fridge, from a bottle that said “Havana club”, wasn't able to help.

Padrino said that in order for me to understand something, he would perform the ritual directly on me. Ritual de caracol. I got scared but not too much, since “elk's eyes” turned out to be just some harmless fragrant herbs. … I was to pick up the shells, shake them hard and throw them six times to the

tiled floor. Meanwhile, padrino read illegible rhymes in the African language Yoruba. The shells only meant an address to the spirits and the request to perform the ritual. If most of them fall with the hole up, the ritual is allowed. I was starting to feel disturbed.

Then I had to sit on a stool while padrino sang strangely, mumbled above me, splashed me with rum from the bottle and drew crosses on my forehead and palms.

Then he wanted to give me the dried bird feet, but I shook my head, and he exchanged them for shells. Then he sang more loudly and started to whip me with the dried herbal bunch, repeating “Hallelujah” after each phrase. It was so much like the Russian steam bath that I started laughing hysterically but padrino wagged his finger at me and said, “Hey now, baby, what we are doing now is too serious and dangerous.” And suddenly, when his singing grew into shouting, he raised the knife at me for real, with rage in his eyes. One thing ran through my mind: this is it.

T.H.E. E.N.D. Now I will be slaughtered like a sheep, sacrificed to the unknown gods. I'd already seen something similar in my dream: a shaman kills me in the same exact manner, during a ritual, with a rusty knife, and I voluntarily agree to it. At that moment, when reality and dream linked together, real horror overcome me.

The knife halted a few millimeters away from me. I heard it whiz in the air.

The stabbing attempt repeated a few more times.

The whole ritual is based on fear. When the blade touches you, you feel sacred fear just from realizing its sharpness.

I remembered a girlfriend of mine whose whole body would shake just from thinking of something sharp. The whole time while padrino sang, waled and held the knife above me, I thought of her. I thought that voodoo was the most powerful magic there were -- it gives ritual meaning to the most common household objects or reveals the eternal magic hidden in them.

Padrino poured rum all over me and fumigated me with cigar smoke. As it turned out, even these simple and joyful things can become a part of a sacral, horrific ritual, if it takes place in Cuba – a country where anything is possible.

This whole procedure took place only to get a true reading. Padrino threw the shells and then looked in my eyes for a long time before finally saying, “Be careful.” I nodded and swallowed. I felt disturbed once again.

Then it was Deglis's turn. Padrino put a huge bone and a small ax in her hand and told her to hit the bone with the ax for a long time. The hollow monotonous sound could be heard in total silence, and at some point it became really creepy. He gave her handcuffs and she stood there, looking at them, for a long time while he sang.

Then he twisted and jerked her for a while, it looked like a wild dance, a dance without beauty, only with power and ferocity.

And when the girl completely relaxed and surrendered to this flow, she started to jerk and twitch around by herself, with no further help from padrino – as if thousands of demons were coming out of her. Her face showed it wasn't on purpose. She was shocked by what was going on herself.

And after the ritual, padrino became a regular friendly man, smoking and joking, and I said to Deglis, “It was really frightening, WASN'T IT?” She laughed because I made huge eyes. “As it should be,” said padrino. He explained to me that all Cubans were spiritualists to some extent. “Take a closer look at how many people wear all white and some colorful beads. How many people have a black doll – a a symbol of Africa, at their porch. How many people put pots with espirito santo on their shelves.” Ahh, those Soviet dolls with blinking eyes, painted black! And those ridiculous little rocks with shells instead of eyes. Now it all made sense.

[The Factory] In the old part of town, by total coincidence, I ran into a huge crooked building. It turned out to be a souvenir factory. Here small parts are chiseled from pieces of wood and coconut shells in order to be used for the mosaic that goes on top of the cigar boxes, as unassuming as the building itself. About fifty women labor on various stages of creation of this hand-made miracle. All day – stars and stripes, stripes and stars, just to finally compose, like a puzzle, the national flag, so similar to the U.S. one.

Such box costs twelve dollars at the market while the women are paid eight to ten dollars a month.

Rattle of the primitive machinery, dim lamp light, huge fans from a classical horror movie, intensely-blue walls. Young and older, single and mothers of large families, black and white, fat and skinny – all of them sitting in a long line, producing something they can't afford to buy -- and why would they want to?

During lunch break, one of them lets the others sniff a small bottle with a drop of perfume in it. A gift she could never make to herself. And why even bother finding out the price.

To some of these girls, I would sincerely suggest becoming prostitutes, selling themselves to the abundant foreigners, then sleeping as long as they want, not having to wear glasses or curing the eternal hangnails, buying themselves perfume and clothes. Many of them are extremely beautiful and could become prostitutes out of passion, not out of despair. One of them, with drawn-on eyebrows, is like a movie star.

But none of them realize how hard they have it. They laugh and there's no unhappiness on their faces. Maybe, I am the one who seems unhappy to them. A

lost girl who speaks bad Spanish, doesn't use make-up and doesn't have a 'boyfriend'.

[Cabaret] At night, I manage to get into a cabaret. Here, just like at the factory, the 'girls' earn less a month than what the entrance fee is. The dancers – tired of life forty-yearold black women who could easily be factory workers.

Their dressing room reeks of cheap perfume, sweat and alcohol. Dark-skinned ladies pull on beige tights with holes, put on make-up, looking into shards of mirrors, exchange dirty jokes, cackle in raspy voices. Lewd old chicks with gaudy make-up, smoked through like an ashtray.

At some point, the light goes off in the dressing room and I hear piercing screams of fifteen crazy girls, everybody starts dashing about, screeching, cursing, grabbing each other by whatever. My eardrums are about to burst and I think, the show is off.

But in the next moment the light goes on. The chicks laugh and go back to dressing and painting their faces as if nothing happened. “This is normal here,” one of them explains.

And she's right – the light went off a few more times during the show, and every time there would be incredible screeching – seems like they simply enjoyed screaming in unison.

One of them, before putting a huge turban made of feathers on her head, ties a bandana with the American flag, others put on ripped tights and stockings. They say this crown weighs so much that it abrades your head. Luckily, the viewers don't see any of what hides behind this unearthly beauty.

My God, the public at the tables stands up to applaud after the chicks are done throwing their legs up. And I saw behind the stage how they throw off the colorful rags made of lace and feathers, and out fall their long saggy boobs, lose butts; constant dirty jokes, tiredness showing in the eyes. They are all over thirty or even forty, they've changed dozens of men but haven't found that special one. Many of them have children who have to be fed, clothed and shoed -- which is a subject of worry, lingering in the corners of their eyes. But how can you keep a normal family if you come here every night and your whole life consists of dancing on this wooden stage, then – beer, if somebody treats you, then – sleep til midday.

“Buy me some perfume,” one of them says. “I earn a month less than what is costs.”

I suggest she goes on a diet for month, which would do her right.

“I want to find a Russian boyfriend and move to Russia. Make me a pretty picture and show it to everybody there,” the dancing star tells me.

“Russia is not at all what you think. There are no palms trees or sea, unless, of course, you got to live in Sochi. In our country there's snow for half a year.”

“So what! I don't give a crap!” she replies. “I think I will grow to like the snow.”

I honestly fulfill her request: make a couple of glamor shots and write down her address.

So if anybody wants to marry the star of cabaret “Congreso”, let me know!

[Grupo folklorico] The next day, I decided to visit the folklore ensemble where Deglis danced. But instead of the brightly colored stage with tables, like at the cabaret, I saw an old hangar called “Culture Center”. A tropical storm had just passed and streams were running down the walls, turning plaster into a layered pie. Pintura, not very high quality painting that hung on the walls, was being flooded. A lame man in a faded tank top that said “USSR” asked me what I was doing there. I had accidentally tripped up his walking stick at the entrance and it fell. At that moment he probably hated me. I asked him to forgive me and picked it up, for which he probably hated me even more. His fat breasts, very much like a woman's, stuck out from his shirt.

He was the main choreographer of the collective.

Little by little the group members started showing up.

Two very different percussionists – one a typical 70's hippie and the other – a rapper. Two girls. One – a classical African with a primordially shaped scull, and the other – a mixed girl, very stylish, lean, looking very much like a girlfriend of mine from Voronezh. She halfheartedly wiped up the puddles on the floor. I watched her every movement, each one of them was perfect. Then she took off her shirt to reveal no breast whatsoever, just strong muscle. And I realized that for the first time in my life I was seeing a man so feminine and beautiful.

The dancers acted out all types of activities: hunting, kindling fire, cooking, childbirth, death. I watched only one person in this group. Perhaps, if I were a man, I would've fallen in love with him without much thought.

I read about Cuban gays in the tourist guidebook but was meeting them in person for the first time. They are always interesting to watch: how they hold themselves, what's feminine about them and what's masculine. How they dared to be exactly who they want, and how the others view them. And once again, I was amazed by how tolerant and accepting the others were.

A gay of mixed descent performed traditional African dances under the guidance of the lame fatty in the “USSR” T-shirt. I'm sure ancient Africa had nothing like it. What a strange combination! Another femininely-dressed man showed up a the hangar's door. He also stared only at one dancer. Not hard to guess which one. He looked as if through the dance, somewhere deeper. One of the dancers' little son stared at him without blinking, probably thinking, “And what sex is this creature?” The boy himself had a very beautiful tender face, also primordial-African like the mother's.

And I remembered what a tender kiss he had planted on my cheek when he entered the place.

Then, when during the break the African mom took off her son's hat, there were dreads under and it became immediately clear that it was a girl.

That's when my head started spinning. At first I thought that the gay who had came in last, was looking at his partner, even started painting pictures in my head of their relationship, their sex life. And suddenly it dawned on me: he's not looking anywhere at all! His wild sexual gaze was nothing more than the look of a druggie, high as a kite.

During the dance, the black girl clung to each one of the men. To the lame director.

Then to the gay. The expression of her husband, a typical black intellectual, an Obama look-alike, shone with jealousy through his smile. And I thought how funny it was to be jealous of the dance, the gay and the lame director. Then the drugged gay left, the concert was over, and the bizarre and incredible essence of the story dissipated.

In fact, it wasn't a story, it was just a small episode of some big, invisible to the eye spectacle on the wooden stage of the hangar, where my fantasy began to imagine beautiful but non-existent stories.

Upon the concert's end, the lame choreographer began to demand a bottle of rum that I had supposedly promised him. I got scared of his inadequate behavior (what if he would hit me with his stick) and split in a hurry.

[Children party] I was walking around Santiago at the hour of the creamy twilight, at that magical moment when the street lamp light seems so golden and the sky – so deeply blue, thinking about the freedom of lifestyle which is much more important than political freedom, and about the gradation of sexes, of which there could be many more than two.

Somebody called me over, but I didn't turn around right away. They were some drunk people. I didn't really feel like approaching them, but curiosity took over.

Turned out, they had already seen me with the camera earlier that day and wanted me to photograph their children party. In this shabby neighborhood, in a house with bare walls, some people celebrated their baby's baptism, paid for with their last money. They had invited all of the neighbors' kids, perhaps, even poorer than themselves. They treated them with simple lemonade and that same cake with blue icing. The kids looked at the treats with shy mistrust: was it all really for them?

Then music sounded, relaxed rhythmical reggaeton. It's not at all like the Cuban Kalinka-Malinka or the songs about Che (something that all the tourists seek with such ardor). This was real reggaeton, same as in all of Latin America and even the whole world. And the African dances of the dance group were nothing comparing to how these kids were dancing, clutching a plastic cup of soda in their hand. They shook their butts and rubbed on each other, six-year-old girls getting on all fours, while their seven-year-old partners acted out fornication in detail, mimicking moves they had probably seen in R-n-B videos. The adults sipped on beer and watched the show, yelling out, “C'mmon, c'mmon!”, “That's it, baby!”

Then the adults left and the kiddies started doing things that I'm too ashamed to

describe here.

There was one very fat girl and a very skinny one, imagining herself to be a sex bomb. The thing is, these two girl are best buddies, neighbors; one can't live without the other. And the chubby one takes on all of the skinny one's gestures and mannerisms, her claim to sexiness. The rest of the children act like they don't notice the difference.

Nine-year-old Yidis dreams of becoming a nurse, but it's already obvious that she'll be better at being featured on the Playboy cover in a nurse costume.

[Rastas] I got lost in that same small corner of Santiago that I grew to like and for the hundredth time passed by the same people playing chess.

I just needed to find out if I was going the right way to the factory. They, four young guys, sat almost motionlessly, only moving the chess figures with their index finger once in a while. One of them wore an incredible turban, looking like a tower.

He began to answer me slowly and thoroughly, pleasantly dragging out the words, as if savoring them. All the while showing his perfectly white teeth, spaced far away one from another. I was interested in talking to this dude.

His name was Ismail. He turned out to be a rasta.

So that's what they are like, the real Cuban rastas. It was my first time seeing them.

And I remembered that back in Moscow I had quite a few friends that smoked weed and often chanted “Selassie – Jah Rastafari”. Of course they were regular Russian guys and had nothing to do with what I had in front of me. “The Rastafarian movement in Russia is incredible,” sang one of Russian Bob Marley followers.

I briefly explained this to my new turbaned acquaintance. Dragging out the words, he said, “Ohh, then I'll introduce you to my brothers. Come here on Thursday.”

On Thursday he led me through a labyrinth of streets towards some unknown block that seemed to be the mirrored image of “my” Santiago. Along the way, he answered my questions with that same slow Cheshire cat smile.

The Rastafari movement is more than just religion to him and exists in a totally different dimension. In Cuba, it's very hard to be a rasta. They can't form a church because it can not be accepted as an official religion. “Brothers” can't unite and live in a commune, like they do in Jamaica and many other places of the world. They can't even legally congregate. That's why once a year they go to the mountains in small groups. There, they lead a real Rasta life. Three days out of the year! There, they can smoke ganja and not look out for the cops all the time. I sighed and thought, how familiar! No need to go to Cuba to hear this.

Also, it's very hard for rastas in Cuba to find legal income since everything is ruled

by party discipline... Ismail, for example, studies at a music school and makes extra cash selling hand-made bracelets and necklaces...

When we finally got there, it was already dark. On the other side of Santiago, same type of dudes sat around, playing chess. “Hey, brother,” Ismael hugged a big black guy with dreads while only slightly nodding at the rest of them. We had to stand around and wait for the new “brother” to finish his game. Then he got up and, following ritual, said good-bye to the rest of the chess players one-by-one and joined us in wandering around the Santiago streets. Turned out were were on our way to pick up another “brother”. Finally we peeked behind a humble gate, put together from odd rusty sheets of steel. There was a third rasta sitting there in a rocking chair, not even rocking. It wasn't clear if he was alive or dead from an overdose. In the darkness, the three brothers hid behind a bush and started filling a small pipe with weed from a small envelope. I refused to smoke, thinking that it was easier, cheaper and more legal in Cuba to drink, let's say, rum and coke. They got their heads together and told me, “Well, we plan to buy some more weed. Will you give us 10 bucks for it? We'll smoke some more and tell you everything you want to know about rastas.” But I'd already understood more about rastas than they could've told me. Most importantly, it was a total waste of time for a photographer or any somewhat active person.

I said good-bye and took a very long time to find my way back from their shabby mirror world.

[People] I stay in Santiago and patrol “my” neighborhood from dusk to dawn. I think you can find a place like this in every city – narrow streets, uneven walls, open disposition, obvious poverty, surrealism. And as it often happens, behind each door hides a story, because the world is like a layered cake – there is a lot of yummy stuffing.

Everything I need finds me by itself. It always happens on trips: a few meters away from a person, I already know that I need them, that they can give me necessary information or lead me to a necessary place. And I don't even speak the language.

Precisely when you don't speak the language is when a special intuitive understanding switches on, as if somebody leads you by the hand, not letting you dissolve, disappear in the middle of nowhere. My little notebook gets rapidly filled up with names and places that I will probably never need because it's like scooping up water with a sieve: next time you come, it will be all new water, all new people.

But there were people that, for me, became synonymous with Cuba forever.

Yabo. Doing circles around the same place, I finally stumbled into the heroine I'd always dreamed of meeting.

I was going to the city center by truck, which the locals call a bus. It got stuffed with an incredible amount of people, and the vehicle ran over bumps, raising lots of dust. Even cattle is loaded more loosely. But everybody was content to be finally on the way and didn't pay any attention to the temporary inconvenience. Around me – many hands holding on to the handles. As an additional rail, a broom was attached

to the ceiling.

Right in the middle of this crowd, I realized that I'd forgotten my wallet. “Maybe it's for the best, otherwise it would get stolen anyway.” Paying for such transportation wasn't mandatory. But once in the city, I realized I was very hungry. I wandered around the city in a crappy mood. I really felt like eating something. I already knew this part of town by heart, some people waved at me and yelled, “Hey, photographer!” But it didn't occur to anybody to feed the photographer.

Suddenly a my attention was drawn by a dog that was on the roof of a small house made of concrete panels and plywood. At the door, a young beauty stood with two children.

She somehow reminded me of Lilya, the druggie punk girl that I had photographed a year before in St. Pete. Just as beautiful and a bit downcast, as proud and impudent. The same eyes the shade of moonlight, the same pretty and straight, a bit swollen, nose.

She asked me to photograph her kids and invited me in. Her name was written in color pencils on her door and some flowers and a heart were drawn on it. It was hard to pass by this door. And men didn't.

Yabo is an ex-prostitute – a conclusion that could be made from her casual remarks and the comments of men that still stop by out of old habit. She's twenty two, she has two children from different fathers – wild, even aggressive, always hungry, and left to themselves most of the time.

She tels me how she started having trouble with the police and decided to “give up the business” and start selling refreshments (refrescos) out of her own window.

She would mix some cheap powdered drink like “Yuppi” with water, cool it in her fridge and offer it to people for a peso a glass. She made a small profit, but enough for food. And then the police came again and prohibited this illegal commercial activity. That's how she was left with no money at all. Sometimes fruit and vegetable vendors she knows stop by to bring her good they didn't sell, some lend her money, and the neighbor girl babysits the children while Yabo goes to clubs and hangs out with friends.

Pasta with veggies is being cooked on the stove and the sad beauty doesn't let me go until I finish a full plate. Our dialogue goes smoothly right away, and half an hour later, we become best friends, despite the language barrier.

I look at the kids, thinking that sometimes to be born is not so pleasant. Here, you can only encounter lack of space, poverty, hunger and pain. The kids bump into corners and wail, they accidentally pour boiling water on themselves, stick their fingers into the dog's anus, and the dogs bites them hard, they are constantly hungry and reach their tiny hands for the fridge. When mom brings them pasta with ketchup, they eat not only with their faces, but with their whole bodies, drop it all on the floor, and the little ugly dog immediately runs up and swallows it with a slurping noise.

I like to imagine their future: the kids won't get an education, will become streetwise loose cannons. Yabo herself will slowly age, become a heavy or a dried up woman (most likely heavy), and this terrible pain will stay in her eyes for the rest of

her life; there's no escape from it...

I spent the whole day with my new friend, meanwhile a few men stopped by. The one she introduced to me as her uncle started to harshly molest her and she had to scream and fight him off. The episode stopped being funny and I wanted to help but he calmed down and they both laughed. I shrugged my shoulders, perplexed.

The whole day I photographed a story about her life in the tiny room with the unruly children, about her sad eyes, resigned to her fate.

In the evening, I sat down to write in my notebook and she opened her English textbook, saying she wanted to meet a wonderful English prince, but at the second minute put it away and fell asleep. Suddenly it became apparent that this was the end of the story, such a beautiful English end, so I simply quietly gathered my things and left.

Marcelino. This Russian-speaking Cuban found me himself. When he found out that his colleague (Fidel, Olga´s uncle) was hosting a Russian girl, he simply ran over there so he could practice Russian and tell his story. He was more than happy to drive me around on his motorbike and help me with everything. He reminded me of a character from the Soviet movies – a stocky man with a good sense of humor, the kind you would meet at a dance party or a vacation resort, a gallant gentleman and a perfect family man. He had studied in Ukraine, found himself a wifey, a Siberian woman who gave birth to his daughter, and he had brought them here. Eight years later, she went back to Russia alone, “to take care of a sick aunt”. He immediately lost touch with her.

I told Marcelino, “Yes, all women are like that. Bitches, they only think about how to find the most comfortable spot. You are left on your own with the kids on another continent while they don't give a crap.”

Marcelino, poor Marcelino says, “No, it's just that times were hard back then, the nineties, maybe she just didn't have a way to come back. She came to a small Siberian town and wasn't able to make a living there. I directed her to Odessa, my friends helped her out there, and then, as rumor has it, she moved on somewhere towards Vladivostok.”

I made big eyes. That's some traveler! What does her sick aunt have to do with it?

It's just that the chick couldn't get used to the heat, then the bloqueo started... She found it hopeless to continue navigating the decrepit family boat, so she took off in search of that metaphysical happiness, always flickering on the horizon like a sunbeam, but that really is just a dust particle in your eye. It's a certain type of a woman – a star that's not able to shine just in one place for one person; she must conquer the whole world; she's too preoccupied with her own fate in order to be happy with somebody else; a cuckoo bird dumping her eggs into a stranger's nest; a wanderer who doesn't own anything and only sees one thing – the road. Not one and not two people will think about her all their lives, hoping for a new encounter, sighing, like Marcelino does, “I don't know if she's alive now...”. Don't doubt it, Marcelino, she's safe and sound, alive and flourishing; it's just that for some reason she doesn't find it convenient or necessary to call you; she's like a comet the trail of which will twinkle in front of your eyes for a long time; her appearance will be documented in books; everybody will remember her while she

will remember nobody. She is a player. She plays the big lottery, the lottery called life; she's really well off now or down and out, covered in gold or broke, and if she's six feet under – who cares? You could write an incredible interesting book about such a woman. I'm writing about her so passionately not because I like her way of lie but because simply there's something of me in this character.

And you don't have to worry about my Cuban friend. A Russian man would go on an irreversible drinking binge. But this Cuban Marcelino is not like that – he got himself a new wife, already has three children, including his first one, the most loved Russian daughter, has a big house and motorcycle, huge roosters, is mustached and optimistic. And only if you look closer, you can notice some sorrow in his eyes, as if some alien forces had left their signature there.

Liann. A very smart woman, the chairperson of the Hospitality Club in Santiago.

She's thirty, but still not married, which could be considered, in some cases, a sign of good education and a sharp mind. She calls me nothing but 'that crazy Russian' and laughs in a very contagious way. She is very strict with me when I make mistakes in Spanish while she herself even knows a couple of words in Russian: “tavarisch”, “kak tibya zovut”. Her friend Neki sings the whole “Katyusha” song, not understanding a single word of it.

Despite her intelligence, Liann, for some reason, watches stupid soap operas all day. While visiting her, I saw a piece of the same soap opera I watched in the same devoted way only ten years ago in my childhood.

That's where I picked up my first words in Spanish: “porque” and “por favor” - “why” and “please” are repeated there every other word.

By total coincidence, I have a folder with photos of the Russian winter. I show it as something fascinating and unbelievable. Gray snow, gray sky, black trees. No other shades or colors. And those people on the metro. The unending gloom and horror.

The stream of people in black, the expressionless faces, without a trace of a smile.

People-robots, people-zombies. In Cuba people freeze in eternal happiness and satisfaction, despite everything. And here – people, frozen on the run, with an anxious expression on their faces.

Olga Zvezdina and her family. Olga is Russian but has been living in Cuba for over twenty years. At first, I didn't want to see any Russians at all. I'd already heard from other people and even read some columnist's comments about how unpleasant it was to meet your own kind abroad. It's the same emotion as in a horror film – when you're running away from some horrible monster as fast as you can, open some door, and he's already waiting for you there. Hello. As if you meet the personification of your fake relatives that want something from you and the people who are rude to you on the metro, the teachers, who tried to make an idiot out of you, and the drunks, yelling under your window.

But with Olga it was another story. They told me there were Russians living here and thought it was essential that we met. We set off to visit them. The living room had to be entered straight from the street, no extra corridors, as in all Cuban houses.

During the visit – no tea was offered (nobody drinks tea in Cuba), just a glass of

water upon personal request.

Olga told me how hard she had it in Cuba. Especially during the years of that periodo especial, which coincided with our equally hard perestroika. There was nothing. No food. No water. No electricity. I still have no idea how they managed to survive. But Russian women tend to dramatize everything. I, in turn, told her about the war in Georgia. About Putin and Medvedev. About the strengthened verticals of power.

Olga's husband, Leonardo, joins in on the conversation. He thinks that Russia should stay strong, even if takes crossing the line sometimes. Because Russia and China are the only two countries that can stand against U.S. domination.

Then, suddenly, he checks himself, “You like talking about politics, don't you?” And I feel awkward. It's not customary to talk about politics in Cuba. Even in the kitchen.

Because somebody could hear.

Leonardo is a high class medical equipment specialist. On his computer, he always has some programs open with some extremely complicated micro chips. I know nothing about the subject, yet he apprehensively closes them down every time I appear.

He is one of the few who have Internet access at work. Of course, Cuba is a free country and anybody can connect to the Internet at home or rent and hour of computer access at some hotel. Only the net is so unreasonable expensive here that it's better to do without it. “Why does a qualified specialist earn less than some hotel cleaner here? Fifteen dollars a month! I'd be happy to work for the government if it treated with respect those who serve it with devotion. I'm continuing to work for them only because I love my work. Otherwise I would've told them to go to hell a long time ago.” Leonardo gets worked up and nervously sips water from his glass the whole time he's talking.

Their daughter is finishing her journalism studies at the University of Santiago.

That's nice, but journalism in Cuba totally sucks. I wouldn't want to work as a journalist in such a country. But Katya will. She wants to work for the local Santiago paper. She sighs and says there's nothing to be done. Many things are prohibited in this country but at this point, there is no other.

[And Cuba again] I'm in Cuba... In Cuba... My God, I couldn't have even imagined that Cuba existed somewhere. Leave alone that Cuba was close. It's easy to imagine local temperature.

Hot. It's probably the first word I learned here. It's harder to imagine the color scheme. Khaki-green and brown. Like the local military students' uniforms. Delicate pink and blue – like a colorful marshmallow.

And it's almost impossible to imagine the smells. Such smells definitely don't exist either in Russia or in other places I've been.

I know the smells of the four seasons in Russia. I know what winter smells like: the frost making your nose sting inside; early spring smells of humid soil and streams; I know late spring with its lilac blossoms; know the summer with its freshly mowed grass and dry hay; know the smell of rotting leaves and the first frost of the fall.

It's not the climate or the amount of snow, not the flora or the fauna, not the architectural style or transportation, and not even the political system but precisely the smells of your country that make you miss it and reconstruct it vividly in your memory.

If only I could bring some Cuban air with me in a jar... But sometimes there's simply no air here, it's hard to breathe and the road is full of dust. On such evenings, I feel like grabbing the air with my hands, catching, and eating it.

Right now a sheep is bleating. And I can tell she's beating in a different way, in a different pitch and with a different sound than in my country. “Eh-eh-eh”, so sad, as if calling somebody. And then once more, “Ehh”, completely disappointed, as if she's lost all hope to meet somebody.

[In Chivirico] At one moment, as it had happened with Santa Clara, I clearly realized I had to leave Santiago, immediately. The breeze of far away pilgrimage blew my way again, and my head started pleasantly spinning with wonderful anticipation. I planned to go west of Santiago, to the Granma island, which, according to rumors, was the poorest and the least developed region of the country. I had an image stuck in my mind of a lonely fisherman, Hemingway style, indifferent to politics and economics, to life and death.

First, I wanted to rent a motorbike and spent a while looking for the appropriate office in town, but then, it turned out I didn't have the necessary driver's license for that. So I decided to become a passenger again, even feeling relieved; this way it would be faster and safer.

At the border of the town, people sat on top of boxes and sacks along the highway, and some – directly on the ground, in the tree shade. I stepped onto the highway and stuck my thumb out to catch a ride, which caused general surprise and even laughter. I looked at the map. There were almost no large towns in this direction.

Then I asked the locals how to get to Chivirico – some small village in the direction I'd chosen. I simply liked the name. When you say it, you feel like a bird, “Chivirico –

Chivirico”.

They told me everybody was waiting for the bus for Chivirico and it would come soon enough.

And they were right, soon a large truck came along, the same type that got me around Santiago. Talking loudly and laughing, people stuffed themselves in there more tightly than the air that used to fill it. Shortly, everybody got off at the closest factory and I continued on in the half-empty truck.

The final stop turned out to be in the middle of empty highway, where a horsedrawn buggy passed by once every few hours. One of these carriages took me to the closest village where, next to a liquor store, I met two motorcyclists, who were on the way to some far away beach with their young girlfriends. I invited myself to ride with them, and the guy kindly transferred his girl to his friend's bike. We went up all the way to a hundred, I felt the wind in my ears and life was beautiful. And finally found myself on a wonderful deserted shore, where my head burned even through a bandana, and wild waves clashed with the rocks with enough force to break a human being into thousand pieces.

Another bus took me even further into the middle of nowhere, where nothing happens. On it, I met an old shriveled fisherman (Are you from the Hemingway book by any chance?) who promised to take me with him. When we got off the bus, we were immediately surrounded by his neighbors and fellow villagers who had ridden with us. They wanted to know who I was and what I wanted there. Apparently, under their pressure, my fisherman changed his mind about me and decided to pass me on to some Ramon.

All together, they walked me to his cane hut with a hay roof where Ramon lived with his big family.

Ramon was a sturdy fellow with a serious outlook on life. Around him life bustled: a small girl was putting a baby to sleep, another one was sticking a hay stalk into his nose, yet a third one simply jumped around and shouted that foreigners had arrived... It had nothing to do with that picture I had in my mind of a sun-andwind-dried old man with his beard fluttering around, throwing the net into the sea...

Yet Ramon and his family seemed nice, so I stayed.

He hospitably took me in and allowed me to photograph anything I wanted.

Everybody surrounded me and started asking all kinds of questions. I was especially stunned by the little girl who decided to touch me to see if I was real, and after making sure I was, decided not to let me go for even a second and got into every shot I took.

When I got ready to go into the improvised shower cabin, she asked me, “Are we going to take a shower together?” I explained to her that I don't shower with strangers. In general, spending time with this sharp village girl did a great deal for my Spanish – we spoke the same language.

I felt like I was in Thailand. In a wild jungle. The roof of the house was covered with palm branches, the fisherman himself was barefooted, in a torn shirt. “Yesterday, I went to the city to sell the fish,” he says, “but the government doesn't allow us to fish on a grand scale. So we have to make do with what there is.” He has eight children, some of them had already left for the cities and are doing quite well, as the proud father explains. And the rest are here. His twenty-year-old daughter

looks like she's thirteen, she's missing her front teeth, she's nurturing her own baby. Her beautiful mulatto husband is always close. Also, Ramon's niece lives with them -- a girl with wavy hair, as if from a Gauguin painting. Finally I stopped counting how many of them there were in total, I would get confused anyway – there were just too many of them, looking too alike.

Specially in honor of my arrival, they butchered and plucked a chicken, the little one watching the whole thing with curiosity and laughter. Then I was put to bed. I had two choices of bed – a mattress filled with hay or a hard plastic beach chair, probably nipped from the hotel beach twenty kilometers away.

I chose the mattress. I really regretted it at night because as soon as I fell asleep, huge cockroaches started crawling about me, tickling me with their feet and antennae. At first I thought it was a nervous tic after a hard day. But I squashed at least two, and in the morning, their rust-colored corpses were the best physical proof. But to be a photographer means accepting everything you shoot. With all their roaches.

At night I dreamed that I planted a bomb in the student dorm where I used to live.

And everybody had known about it, but the terrorist act occurred, like in Beslan, simply out of the lack of vigilance. Some journalists I knew happily covered all of this and I was with them, although it gave me goosebumps. The word “vigilance” was the key of this dream, a warning sign for the day to come, but “if I knew where I'd fall...” And better to lay some hay without roaches.

The next day, Ramon woke me up to go fishing. It was so early that I didn't know whether it was day or night. And whether my dream was on this or on the other side of the line.

But the girl had already warmed some milk and there was no going back to the hay.

Ramon carried the paddles over his shoulder, we swiftly came down the hill to the sea, throwing long shadows. Even here, in a desolate mountain village, we would come upon gigantic rocks with revolution slogans painted on them. It was obvious that it wasn't local initiative but government propaganda that had made it all the way out here, where only the same two or three people walk the narrow path every day.

On the seashore, Ramon started looking for appropriate rocks for the fishing weights while I looked at the curious corals and thought about how something once alive could turn into rock and live forever.

I stuffed the most beautiful and well-shaped pieces into my photo bag, remotely remembering that in Cuba there was some law about exporting rare specimens of flora and fauna abroad.

And at that moment, something terrible happened.

[The Police]

They were ridiculous policemen because they rode up on prehistoric Soviet bikes and when they came up on rocks, one of them stayed to guard the bikes while the other had to hop from rock to rock in order to reach us.

Who are you? I.D.? What's the purpose of your visit? When did you arrive? By what transportation? What do you have in your bag?

In my bad there was one big camera and a few small corals. For some reason I took out the camera for them, to prove that I only had something harmless on me, with no intention of stealing the natural resources of the Social-Democratic Republic of Cuba.

At that moment, the second cop left the bikes and walked up to Ramon. The poor fisherman stopped – it was obvious that it was a bad moment to go on picking stones. His face became long and bewildered. They questioned us with passion.

Perhaps, it was some secret zone? But that couldn't be true, the mountain that towered above us was the highest point of Cuba and was pictured in every guidebook.

I explained to them that I came to shoot the incredibly beautiful landscape and had spent the night at the fisherman's, since there were no adequate hotels nearby.

But they went ahead and arrested us. One of them invited me to sit on the passenger seat of his bike, the other looked sideways at plump Ramon and offered him to go home and change into something decent and walk to the police station.

We rode along a deserted dusty road for about 10 kilometers, I hugged onto the policeman and enjoyed the views.

Soviet passenger seats are completely not meant for human transportation and after the journey, its design got deeply imprinted into my behind.

When we stopped, I tried to unnoticeably slip the corals out of the bag and dump them into a ditch. I didn't manage to go unnoticed – the cop's eyes were fixed on me and it all looked very ridiculous. I regretted it. Would've been better not to do it.

And the beautiful corals, a memory of the trip, went to waste; they could be displayed on a shelf right now.

The police station was a ridiculous sight: a small house with an old worn-out portrait of Che and a new one, of Fidel. Next to it – a small yard where ducks, hens and pigs walked around freely. And this whole spectacle fenced off by a high cactus hedge. A sea view opened on one side, on the other – the view of that very unlucky mountain, which isn't even beautiful enough to come out all this way for. But at least I now had more than enough time to contemplate it, as the Japanese do with their Fujiyama.

They took me to a room where they interrogated me once more. I answered pretty innocently but, apparently, it all seemed too strange for them to just let me go.

These two half-witted policemen couldn't come to an agreement about what I was being suspected of. One of them thought that I was spying around with my camera and tried to look at my images. I gave him the camera but didn't explain how to turn it on, so he stared at the buttons with a dumb expression on his face. The other was sure that I hadn't registered with any of the tourist agencies and was staying in a prohibited to tourists place, which could harm my health and my sanity.

That's why, he thought, I should be passed on to the immigration police.

Most likely, Ramon's fellow villagers that had ridden with me on the bus turned me in because I openly asked many questions. Or maybe, these policemen were simply riding around in the morning and decided to approach us.

At the time that I was riding on the passenger seat, holding on to the second policeman, I managed to question him myself. During the ride he told me that he hadn't been working there for a long time and that he had a wife and a daughter in the city, that it was always hard for him to leave them for his shift, and it was far, while they wouldn't give him any other means of transportation but the bike.

It took him an hour-and-a-half or even two hours to get there, and then he had to patrol the neighborhood for some part of the day. After each shift, his wife had to wash the dusty uniform while only two sets had been given to him. And he also complained that he only earned fifteen dollars a month. “And I earn a thousand in Moscow,” I said and immediately thought that now he'd ask for a bribe. But he was an honest cop (all cops in Cuba are honest) and didn't even get the hint.

Now, I thought, I know everything about this policeman and about how police works in Cuba in general. It's not a bad start for the morning, although under guard.

After another stupid and useless interrogation and another I.D. check, just in case, the cops got completely confused and left me to wait in the sun. “But I'm so innocent,” I was thinking to myself, “Why can't they just let me go. I had such a good beginning of a photo story about Ramon.”

But I waited and waited while they still wouldn't come out of their office. When I barged in, one of them was reading a two-day-old newspaper aloud to the other, the first one almost snoozing.

“Well! Why aren't you letting me go?” I asked.

“Because we have to wait for Ramon and question him too.”

“Ramon won't come! You let him go yourself!”

“Ramon will come.”

And I went back to the lawn.

Two hours later, Ramon showed up. In a good T-shirt, clean trousers and even shoes, although already a bit dusty. I don't know where he found it all in his hut.

“Forgive me, Ramon,” I said and lowered my head.

I was ready to repeat it a thousand times.

I'm sorry, Ramon.

I'm still tortured by guilty conscience for bringing something bad onto a person who had treated me with such an open heart.

If any of you run into Ramon, tell him that I'm very sorry and maybe one day, he'll be able to forgive me.

But this time he just waved his hand, as if to say, no worries, and turned away.

After a short interrogation, he was let go and plodded along the dusty road, slightly bent, as if he had just been betrayed by the whole world that he had only recently been so open to. I think that I'll never see this person again. At first I thought about coming back to make peace and finish my shoot, but when? Immediately after being let go? Or after a few days? Or during my next visit to Cuba? But then I realized that it could cost him many worries and cause real danger for both of us. That's why I abandoned the thought.

They kept me on the concrete bench in front of the station, in the open sun. Finally,

I couldn't take it anymore and entered their office again.

“And now, what are we waiting for?”

“Now we are waiting for a car to take you to the regional police office in Chivirico where you'll be registered and giving into the immigration police of Santiago.”

Hm, waiting for a car... I sceptically looked at the rode where just at that moment a buggy was passing by, drawn by a lame horse. The man in a sombrero waved amicably at the policemen. And suddenly I burst, unexpectedly even for myself, in pure Spanish, “How long do you plan on keeping me here?! You have no right to do that! Show me the paper where it says you can hold a person for more than two hours! Where is the order for my arrest?”

The cops were surprised by such an outburst and asked me to calm down and sit down. But I had already changed my tactic and got comfortable in my new role. I couldn't be stopped.

“Give me the Russian embassy's phone number! You must have all the numbers!”

Of course, they had no numbers or written laws bases upon which they could keep me there.

“We have the right,” the policeman replied nonchalantly. And how can you argue with that? Then, for the last time, I said, “No, you don't! I'm leaving!” and made my way across to the cactus hedge.

The devil must've made me go precisely there while there was a totally open entrance through the gate between the cacti. But I chose the biggest opening and proceeded to squeeze myself in there. “Stop!” yelled the “good” cop who had given me a ride on his bike. I thought, “That's it, now they will shoot.” But I continued to make my way, proving my determination.

There was no way back.

And he shouted on top of his lungs, “Stop! You'll get cuts all over!”

I had already managed to get scratches from the long thorns when he ran over and dragged me away. These scratches wouldn't heal the rest of my stay in Cuba but closed up really fast as soon as I returned to Russia.

He dragged me out of the cacti and strictly wagged his finger, “You shouldn't run away. Now they will come for you and we'll let you go soon.”

I heard the cook's voice which had just recently been feeding the chickens in the yard: “Lunch is ready!”

Oh, lunch. And I realized that eating and cheering up wouldn't hurt.

I walked up to the policemen and said, “I'm hungry. Give me some food.”

“It's not allowed,” they replied.

Then I rebelled and screamed, “My doctor strictly prescribed me to eat three times a day at certain hours, and you you break his prescription, you will be responsible and will be brought to justice!” They said, “Well fine,” and ordered the cook to serve one portion more.

For the first time I walked into the main facility of the little house.

Here, there was a clay table where six soldiers were already finishing eating; two more were sitting in wicker armchairs, watching children television, where a sixth grade chemistry lesson was being shown.

The cook fussed around me, apologizing for the overly simple meal.

They gave me standard rice, bean gravy and tomatoes. I ate with gusto, feeling once again like I was on board of Titanic which, perhaps, would drown soon, but

continued to serve its passengers the best food. It's not too bad if you imagine yourself just in a resort next to the sea. Then I moved closer to the TV and started to flirt with the soldiers and leaf through some ancient books from the cupboard.

I was in a wicker rocking chair but for some reason, it wouldn't rock at all, just creak and warp. To be honest, it was old and useless, and I started to pick out the loose twigs from the seat, to spite those policemen.

Finally, a beige Zhiguli came. Two immigration police representatives sat in sunglasses sat inside. These fellows couldn't be fooled for sure. Their interrogation was full of sharp professionalism and one of them tried to “crack me” by pretending to be my buddy. Nothing came of it. No matter how you looked at it, I came to look at the mountain.

“Mountain” was a word I had learned from a Soviet Spanish textbook and pronounced with firm assurance. “You've only been studying Spanish for three weeks? You speak too well,” one of them said.

They were taking me back to Santiago. The road which had taken me one whole day one way, took us two hours. It couldn't be any other way since I was being escorted in a special Zhiguli taxi by real tough guys in sunglasses, like in a Bond movie.

I turned on my player and, for the first time after breaking down, it worked, transmitting first-class Cuban music. What was sounding in my player seemed much more like Cuba than what was really happening at the moment. I used to listen to this music in Russia, believing that this was real Cuba. Maybe it wasn't worth going all this way for...

On the way, another thought occurred to me: I had wanted a Hemingway story and I got it. I came to Chivirico on a hunt for a big fish story. And found a visually unique environment and a plot. My big fish turned out to be the Ramon story. And while everything had started so well, the police sharks ate all of my catch to the last bone – took me away from the site, depriving me of the opportunity to come back one more time. Only the skeleton was left – those photos that I had managed to take that night and that morning, hiding them on another card.

I turned out to be the poor old fisherman who I had wanted the story to be about.

We arrived to Santiago at midnight and sat down at a table for interrogation once again. Finally they took away my passport, ordering me to come back for it the next day, and sent me off to a casa particular, a legal accommodation.

There, I was led to a luxurious apartment with a separate toilet and shower, put to sleep on a wide bed with golden knobs and issued a special receipt with a stamp, based on my passport number, recorded also in a special register. That's it, now I was registered. Now everybody knew about me. The next day, I picked up my passport at the immigration police office, situated in a luxurious villa, undoubtedly taken away from the rich during the revolution. Here, I was also registered and ready for any unpleasant surprises during my return to the motherland: my flash cards being taken away and erased with magnetic radiation, my notes being ripped to small pieces and scattered. I was even ready to throw away most of my luggage, just to avoid searches. And maybe even stuff the flash cards with the information up my anus.

[The bastard] That night I came out to the central square of Santiago. It´s a rather small square containing some benches, planted with trees, with a recognizable cathedral on one side. And I had bad luck once again. I met a real bastard, probably the only one the whole trip. That day I was wearing a top with a low cut, which was a big mistake, forget my excuse that it was the only clean one I had left. I´d heard about the concept of jineterismo but had never encountered it before. Jineteros are people of both sexes who hustle tourists for all kinds of services, including sexual ones.

Some bastard in a little hat, with a guitar in his hand, called me over. I turned around but didn't understand what he wanted, so I moved on to another part of the park. Having already forgotten him, I sat down on a bench and started writing, but in while, he came over to me and started yelling in my ear in bad English, “Who do you think you are? I have a college degree! You don't respect me, I'll shoot you!” I was dead tired, so I simply ignored all of that. I just said, “Of course I don't respect you. There are so many people in this park and I respect every one of them but you, because they are all sitting on their benches and not harassing anybody while you are bothering a person who doesn't want to talk to. And just that is reason enough not to respect you.” Only I didn't have a chance to finish all of that. The first phrase was enough. The bastard got enraged and started choking me with his dirty hands right in the middle of the park. I stopped breathing and couldn't even shout. I had to shove him. Hard. I promised to call the police. Not very seriously, of course. I had just had problems with the police myself and now was ready to cross over to the other side. He left, so I tried to get back to my writing, but in reality couldn't get enough air and tears stood in my eyes. So this is how easy it is to get to me, so helpless, on the other side of the globe.

I was about to leave when I spotted the bastard out of the corner of my eye. He was in the same spot, as if nothing had happened, strumming his guitar and chatting with his buddies. And then, at the end of the park, I saw the police. I knew that the guy would have major problems. Formally, it's prohibited for the locals to come closer than a meter to a foreigner. Specially for that purpose, there are two layers of life that almost never intersect. Cuba has a low crime rate in general because the punishment is too strict.

I wouldn't have complained but that dude was crazy. That day he attacked me and the next he might attack somebody else. I told them he tried to rob me because the word “robar” was the only one related to the subject that I could find in my guidebook. I told them he attacked and tried to choke me, illustrating it with hand

gestures.

This story is not about Cuba at all. This story is about people that you have to recognize from far away and avoid. It's for a reason that padrino had told me, “Be careful.”

[Baracoa] I didn't feel like getting into any more trouble, so I was anxious to leave Santiago the next day to avoid any further unpleasant surprises. I decided to go in a totally different direction, to Baracoa, where in a neighboring small village lived some relatives of my friend Marcelino.

When I arrived to the bus station, I realized that the night at the casa particular had put a real dent in my budget and I had run out of local dollars. To get to Baracoa, I had to take that same “Viazul” bus operated by a state company. I was angry at them for making the tickets so expensive, for being a monopoly, for not having two hundred twenty volt outlets, and for their drivers rushing to drive away without waiting for the passengers to get on.

I had just enough money for one third of the way, so I bought a ticket to Guantanamo, firmly deciding to ride to my final destination.

I handed in my ticket, climbed into my seat, wrapped myself into my sleeping bag and made like a bag of stuff. Soon, I fell asleep, and when the bus got to the final stop of Baracoa, I had to be shaken awake.

The bus terminal's territory was fenced off, and soon it became clear why. Behind the fence roared a crowd, ready to attack the tourists as soon as they appeared. The people grabbed the fence, shook it, some stuck their hands through and reached out to the recently arrived. Some held torn cardboard signs: a comfortable room, private house. I lingered folding the sleeping bag so their last hope came down on me in a way that I felt like I was at war, in the middle of a heated battle. Then the bici-taxis attacked. They are always so persistent and try to take you somewhere where you don't even need to go. I barely made it through them and found myself on a gloomy concrete sea front, looking more like a prison yard. At that moment, I realized I was wrong about my destination and wouldn't find anything here.

Finally, I agreed to use a bici-taxi and asked him to take me to the edge of the city.

The driver couldn't believe that I really wanted to go there and tried to take me to the local bus stop or a hotel. Eventually, I decided to get off and walk. I walked and studied Baracoa. A regular fisherman village. Tourism has ruined it. Tourism with its

demands always ruins everything natural and real that comes across its path. In Baracoa, half-rotten wooden shacks neighbor with neat, painted pastel pink or pale green, cute little houses with a sign with an eye on it. This eye means it's licensed for rent. Casa particular.

The faces around are repugnant and there's a feeling that you can't trust anybody.

Chocolate factory: a gloomy building with a faded portrait of Che and the usual five revolutionaries. The only chocolate producer in Cuba. I've tried the chocolate, it's totally disgusting. Very oily, with sugar crunching between your teeth.

Almost at the city's edge another bici-taxi driver picked me up. His bicicleta looked like something out of space – instead of the usual passenger seat it had two old bus seats put in, an old tape player, attached to the steering wheel, played reggaeton while the driver, a macho with muscles and in sunglasses, sang along to his favorite hits and squeezed the klaxon to the beat.

When the rode would go up a hill, he'd jump off and pull his weird taxi by hand, not letting me get off, probably feeling like a real man.

In some village, a buddy of his in a similar jalopy joined him. He was very interested in Russia. He rode alongside and asked, “Is it true that in Russia people shower once a week?” The fact that we have bears walking around the streets and playing balalaikas doesn't surprise anybody. Only contrary to you, Cubans, we have hot water coming out of the tap. And if it doesn't come out, we, like you, heat it and pour it on ourselves with a dipper. You probably meant a sauna and the tradition to fire it up only on Saturdays. Maybe there's some truth in it. Maybe Russians are really somewhat pigs and there's nobody more piggish. I instinctively remembered the last time I'd showered. Turned out it was before Chivirico, I poured water on myself from a dipper on the concrete floor of Olga's “bathroom”.

The village where my Marcelino's brother lives, is small, cute, and covered in little flowers. There are revolutionary signs all around. The only sightseeing-worthy detail is that under a huge rock cliff, men battle in domino from dusk til dawn, even on work days. It had been raining from the very morning but they didn't care. “Yes, it rains here starting from September,” Marcelino's old mother says. From September! And now it's February! I don't know how Baracoa can be considered a touristic place. What were people who all recommended this place were thinking?

What are the poor European tourists, who had come on the same bus, are doing now? Probably sitting on some veranda, chatting and drinking coffee – another wasted vacation.

I go swimming, right in the rain. It's my third time seeing the sea during my whole trip. Along with me, floating around with me are nasty spiky seaweed, a log, someone's shoe. The waves have a dirty-green color, nothing like the pictures in the tourist brochures. The water is still so salty that if it gets in your nose or mouth, it burns.

Marcelino's brother is a sweet talkative guy who also speaks Russian. Their mother is proud: she has six sons, all of their names start with the letter “M”, and all are lucky. Two had studied in Russia. One lives in Germany. He is the one who sent Marcelino his motorbike.

I become bored of the conversation and yawn. No fishermen. No revolutionaries.

Ladles lined up on the wall. A boring country house.

I'm starting to share the views of my guidebooks' author. About every place he

writes: “Nothing happens here”, “There's absolutely nothing to do here”. It seems like this guy is bored to do death in his real life. It's a pity he hadn't written: “It rains here from September to February”.

[Hitchhiking] The next day, under the same rain, I set off for Havana. Leaving the village, I got lucky right away – hopped on the shuttle that was transporting tourists from Baracoa to Holguin.

The Englishmen, bored by the road, were eager to have a conversation about Cuba's economy and politics. Of course, the Americans created such conditions in Cuba, but why? Since the Soviet Union collapsed, Cuba has been a pretty harmless country. And why keep this Guantanamo base? Let's hope that Obama can change something. And Fidel stepped off just on time. Raul is softer, of course. Although Fidel was quite smart as well. He allowed those, discontent with the regime, escape to the States. Because if you don't let out some steam, the country could implode.

And those who stayed, he punished as counterrevolutionaries. Of course this infringes the human rights declaration...

At this moment our car is stopped by some serious armed men in uniforms. They demand to see papers and inspect the bus. After that, just as silently, they let us go ahead. “We shouldn't have taken along the Russian!” the Englishmen joke. “Most likely, she's the one they are looking for.” My left eye starts twitching. They peeked into the car quickly and waved their hand in consent. All in all, the English are very pleasant people. It's especially pleasant to have a leisurely conversation with them in English in the middle of the Cuban jungle.

We run into three or four patrols throughout the trip and they all inspect us suspiciously. The Englishmen explain that, most likely, they are looking for contraband of drugs or weapons because this is the spot where illegal crossing to Florida takes place.

And I remember a story about how Cubans used to hijack planes and ferries in order to immigrate to America. They all said that they were driven not by political, but by economic reasons – to make money abroad and to come back to their motherland. I experience the same feeling as in my childhood, as if I'm watching an

incomprehensible film about spies and criminals. And I'm too little to comprehend the nature of these mysteries. Somebody wants to escape, being chased by somebody. Only to preserve the regime.

But revolution means changing the current order. And while they've been stagnating for fifty years, they still call it revolution. That means double standards.

They call the ones who really want to overthrow the regime 'counterrevolutionary'.

I'm completely confused by these thoughts and decide not to think anymore.

We pass by an abandoned Soviet village. Typical concrete five-story houses remind me of home. But I don't experience any nostalgia, only aversion.

They used to be dorms for workers, but now the production is shut down and nobody lives in these houses. They look like corpses with hollow eye sockets. Just a couple of kilometers away, a cute Cuban village starts, with one-story houses, where motorbikes ring, dogs bicker and reggaeton pounds out of the windows. So, Soviet entrenchment proves its incapacity. The commies didn't manage to teach everybody how to live.

It's after Holguin that my bad luck started. The Englishmen told me, “You got lucky,” meaning that I was lucky to have met them. And saying “good luck” out loud is the surest way to scare it off. Instead of going to the Holguin bus station, I decided to hitchhike, counting on further good luck. And it didn't have to do with money, I just wanted a ride with a twist of the extreme, so I'd have something to remember, not snooze off curled up in my seat all the way.

At first nobody would stop at all. Then some truck passed by and stopped 20 meters away from me. I had to run towards it, competing with a crowd of school kids in uniforms. I thought I'd already seen this truck going in the opposite direction but loaded with animals.

Once I got inside it, I realized I was right: everything was smeared with chunks of fat and intestines, flies were crawling around, nothing could be leaned on, the floor was slippery with blood, and the road was bumpy, so I had to hold on to something.

The school kids flailed back and forth, not afraid to stain their uniforms. I wanted something extreme, so there...

Then I had to wait for a long time again. Ate some crap at a fast food joint. When I came outside, a Kamaz stopped right away, and I asked two jolly drivers for a ride.

And I wasn't even thrown off by the driver's phrase “Everything that's fast is bad.”

The truck drivers promised to get me to Santa Clara by morning. The phrase “Everything is for the best in the best of the worlds” proved itself wrong once again.

To drag along at 30 km/hr in a car that's obvious junk, on a bad road, jumping like a grasshopper -- a meter up, on each bump, even despite the fact that you've taken a relatively horizontal position and wrapped yourself in a sleeping bag, even despite the drivers being good people and buying you two oranges at a truck stop...

They had to stop approximately every half a kilometer in order to fix the engine; the cab had to be tilted, I had to jump out with all my stuff, wait outside, fighting off the mosquitoes, then jump back in.

Then we just stopped in some small town while it didn't look like a break down.

“Where are we? What's going on? Are we waiting for somebody?”

They say, “We are waiting for the police.”

“What, because of me?”

My eyes start twitching again.

There's no way these too chatterboxes could betray me. Is the immigration police really going to deport me again?

“No, ha-ha. To escort the load.”

I still couldn't sleep that crazy night. As soon as I shut my eyes, dreams attacked me. Of us driving down the road, covered with corpses of women, children, old men – some totally white, as if sugared, others – charred to ashes, yet others – simply shot; some fresh, some – totally rotten...

Apparently, there had been something like an atomic war, with many types of weapons and murders. They transmitted something over the radio but I had missed it. And now I'm asking the drivers to stop the car so I could go outside and see what had happened, to photograph and try to comprehend it. But the drivers tell me, “What are you going to photograph when everything had already happened, everything is clear to everybody? If you try to approach the corpses, you'll get shot for sure, who knows who you are?” And really, who knows who I could be? Why don't people around me stop to think who I am? I could be anybody...

Apparently, this dream incorporated some distant memories of a once seen documentary about a civil war in Africa, a couple of other images and, most importantly, my amazement at how absolutely nothing happens in Cuba. It's hard to even imagine that this country once had a revolution, that people sacrificed their life in the fight for something, hid in the sugar cane fields, machine gun bursts could be heard somewhere... Maybe, the dream was just a hypertrophied manifestation of a documentary photographer's hope to find himself in the very heart of events.

I woke up sweaty from shaking in the truck's cabin. The impression from the dream was that much stronger since the road, the truck, and the divers were exactly the same in reality as in the dream. But how nice it was to wake up, although in an unknown point of the long journey, under the boring and blinding sun, but in a country where there's no war. In my dream, I had missed the most interesting: the atomic bombing, the murders, the civil war; and hadn't even come out to look at the corpses. But this dream let me know that I didn't need corpses or war, I didn't want to chase “objective” reality, serving it at the same time. War is much more serious that just photography, but many wars have been staged just for the photographers' sake. I'm leaving this game. I'm in a wonderful, friendly, and very safe country. I hope that never again will people with machine guns show up here. Even if they kill for the sake of the good.

By sunrise, we haven't made even the fourth of the way. I ask to stop, jump out like crazy and tell them, “Thanks! It was the worst night in my life!” Poor guys, it wasn't

their fault. They had told me they were in no hurry. I was the one who invited myself.

I found myself with a bunch of my stuff in my arms in the middle of an empty road.

The sun was rising, the road was surrounded on both sides by a cane field. The cane hid me completely and I remembered some legends about the seventeen partisans who, after the crash of their decrepit boat “Granma”, survived and hid from Batista's soldiers in the same cane fields.

I broke off a thick cane rod, cleaned it and started to chew on the hard fibers, sucking out the sweet juice, watching the red sun hide in the leaves. I remembered how disgusting I found this juice when the old revolutionary bought it for me at the bus stop in Santa Clara. And now I'm stealing it from the government plantations.

The same thing under different circumstances becomes very different in itself...

And then I stood on the empty road and thought about the essence of hitchhiking.

Chasing adventure and lack of rational thinking. At some point this thing stops working. Maybe it's because you grow up, start making some money and you finally have a chance to book yourself tickets. And you start to value time more than adventure. That's it. Here you mess up and lose a lot.

Maybe I'm wrong. If I could turn back time and chose again, I would've chosen another option. Another one, with no Kamaz, full of heat and nightmares. Maybe I would totally give up my hippie habits, become a normal civilized citizen of this society whose actions are ruled by common sense and easily explained to the police. Maybe I will become that person some day, only for now, I'm still drawn by adventure.

Somehow I made it to the spot where civilized hitchhiking took place – to a railway crossing in a small village. As usual, Cubans sat on their sacks along the road, and a man in a yellow uniform whistled at the passing cars. When I approached him and told him in my broken Spanish that I needed a ride, urgently, and all the way to Santa Clara, he immediately... called the police. The policemen politely asked me where I was coming from and where I was headed to, and most importantly, why not by bus?

I'd like to ask myself the same questions. I managed to explain to them that I was a student and had been studying... umm... Spanish... in Santa Clara for a month. I went to visit a friend for the weekend... friend's name? Umm... Antonio... He dove me here and you see... I missed the bus to go back.

The story turned out to be very suspicious, they asked for my papers and not knowing what to say, let me go. I asked, “Hey, will there be a ride?”

They called the man in the yellow uniform over and said something to him. The man nodded and five minutes later caught me a new foreign car. There were people in it whom at first I mistook for representatives of three generations: a father, his daughter and her baby. But then it turned out that he was a Canadian, refusing and not knowing how to speak Spanish, his Cuban wife and their newborn baby. They

were going full speed from a place called “Two Palms” near Santiago to the outskirts of Havana, where her relatives lived. She was dark-skinned, with long hair and white teeth while he looked like an aged, fat and overly hairy Robby Williams. He raced at 140 km/hr and listened to a tape with cheap reggaeton which, apparently, came included with the car. When he was pulled over by the local highway patrol for speeding, he didn't even try to understand them. His wife understood them perfectly but couldn't explain anything to him either since she didn't speak English.

Many girls in Cuba dream of moving to Canada. For that reason they spend nights with a dictionary, trying to learn English at least a little bit.

She was luckier than most. She's sitting in a luxurious ride, her hair is flying in the wind and she's holding in her arms a baby that will probably become a citizen of another, more successful country. They stopped in small roadside shops where he bought her perfume and soap, and she jumped for joy, since these goods can't be purchased by any average Cuban with his salary. The truth is, she wanted it all. She just pointed the finger: this and this and that. And he bought it without a word. And then, behind his back, she whispered, “You see how cool he is.” Maybe some day he will take her with him. But for now he just comes over like to a resort. And I felt so bad for this girl, all these Cuban girls. I was observing their relationship with such interest, as if watching a fascinating movie, that I suddenly realized that the turn to Santa Clara had been long left behind. That meant my stuff and Mateo's hospitable family were behind.

Long live everything new and unexpected.

We were on the way to Havana.

[Havana] So, finally, Havana.

Havana.

I'll write it once more.

Havana.

Or, as Cubans pronounce it, Lyavana.

I am happy to have ended up precisely here at the end of my trip. I was hoping that now, after having wandered around this dusty country for three weeks, after simple

Santa Clara and colorful musical Santiago, I could avoid the typical tourist delights.

At first, I meant to not write anything at all about Havana. What's worse, I can't find words even for that. Havana is too incredible. Too impossible to describe. It's like a thick broth – no matter how much you try it, it's hard to place what the ingredients are.

The walls are of extreme shabbiness, just how I like them. Buildings -- already past restoration, like old men who don't deny their age but find something special in it.

Looking at them, you experience disgust and delight at the same time.

If a city could be compared to a woman, Havana would be the most beautiful prostitute who makes you fall in love with her forever while never falling in love herself.

And I had a choice of what kind of a relationship to build with her.

To look at her from far away, wander mindlessly until my feet hurt. Seriously offer my hand and heart in the hope of at least some type of a rational relationship (but to be rejected every time).

Or just to let it all go, forget about rationality, love like crazy, lose my mind and meet other nutcases on my way.

[Mindless wandering] Most of the time, I simply wander around Havana, small and lost, as if charmed by this city, not capable of taking real action. My time is filled with snacking in the street for national currency, studying the map and trying to measure the magic of the place with my footsteps.

When I was entering the city, I had no doubt where to go. To El Capitolio, of course.

There's nothing Cuban in its hugeness, just as there's nothing Russian in the St. Isaac's Cathedral, and it's not clear why both of them attract foreign tourists so much. Maybe their power is in the fact that in reality, they are even grander than in the pictures of the glossy guidebooks; it's like going to the zoo to see the elephants.

All my rounds wound around El Capitolio, like thread around a spindle.

The first thing I saw stepping away from it, was the Chinese gate. “Rashmon Gate”, as I named it immediately. And beyond it – the Chinese Quarter. It's not like only the Chinese live here, but there are some – it's amazing they've made it all the way to Cuba. There is a whole pastry street here, which is the only place in the country where more than one type of sweets exist and none of them taste like a wet bun with egg and sugar mix on top.

Also, here there's a line to get cheap food that's put in a special folded cardboard box. While you eat, fat stains come through from rice fried in oil. Most likely, when Cuba reaches capitalism, such boxes will disappear, as many cute little things disappear, originating in a country that's been isolated from the rest of the world.

In this city, I met some Russians tourists for the first time. They were two blondes, wandering around El Capitolio like me. Deciding to be photographed, one of them leaned her backside against a shiny pink Cadillac, making it into my camera's view right away. “Hey, look, what a fool, she took a picture of your photo,” her girlfriend nasally pronounced with a Rostov accent, used to nobody understanding her. I turned around and said, “You are the fool.” And left.

Foreigners generally concentrate in the hotel zones and cafes, where polite waiters serve mojitos at amazing speed, and colorful musicians sing real Cuban songs. And sing them well. As if you are listening to that Buena Vista Social Club record. And that put me off my guard, lured me into the trap which I'd been avoiding so carefully. For the third time during my whole trip, I became a tourist.

I entered a cafe and sat down at an empty table. The whole terrace was decorated with huge plants in plastic 'fake terracotta' pots. I looked through the menu and ordered a glass of warm milk for one dollar. My throat was sore from all the icecold drinks, so popular in Cuba. A few minutes after a pleasant musical wait, a waiter in an perfectly white shirt served me with a tall glass filled with white liquid.

On top of the white liquid, floated a small yellowish foam, the type that made me nauseous as a child.

Cuban songs were so beautiful that even the most disgusting foam slipped unnoticed and my throat felt better.

I didn't notice that all of the decent foreign guests had left and I was the only one left in the cafe. The musicians continued to play, now just for me alone. During the break, the trombonist came up to me and asked what type of music I liked. Hot salsa? Sensual flamenco? Real Cuban trova? I didn't know what to say. Because I don't like to order. To demand. Get into the shot of this unending documentary with the shadow of my presence. To take off my invisibility hat. “I like old Cuban music.” And they put on Guantanamera, glancing at me, winking and trying so hard to please.

It was too much. I put a coin on the plate and got up. The musicians halted in the middle of the song and starting putting away their instruments. As I broke out of the cool cafe into the stuffy city, I was deafened by the klaxons and the buzzing of the old motorcycles. It wasn't necessary anymore to listen quietly and nod along to the beat. Even if I screamed right now, nobody would hear me.

Havana is so huge that you could take a flight from one side to the other. It stretches along the sea coast and then is cut into equal squares, like a fish fillet, by nameless streets, which bear only numbers that repeat from neighborhood to neighborhood.

I stayed with Gandi from the Hospitality Club. All day I'd been trying to reach somewhere by phone with no result. In this country, the phone situation is generally difficult.

A cellphone is rare here, almost a luxury, since it's extremely expensive. Every fifth of tenth person has a land line, so it's normal to use your neighbor's phone. Public phones take only cards and very rarely – coins. Til the end of my trip I couldn't figure out where and how to obtain one of these cards. One guy in Havana saw my phone troubles and simply wrote down his phone card number for me, which I could use for free til the end of the month. And then he disappeared just as quickly, without even telling me his name.

I managed to reach only Gandi, which was great luck because I couldn't have met a more conscious person in all of Havana. Gandi is a young teacher, having just finished the university. He is one of the very few who can legally travel the world, thanks to various culture organizations, exchange programs and international conferences. He has just returned from Kenya.

Gandi has internet at home since his mom is a nurse, and medical workers are allowed to use the web, although at a ridiculously slow speed and only for checking e-mail and visiting a few specialized websites. Thanks to all of this, Gandi is more of a “citizen of the world” than most of his fellow countrymen.

Oh yes, it was the second time I spoke English in Cuba.

His house was located in one of the outskirt areas which are very difficult to reach.

His street doesn't exist on the map and none of the locals know where it is. His house doesn't have a number either but is simply called “The Commerce and Gastronomy Building” in the honor of the humble little shop downstairs.

Gandi plans to go to the beach with his friends in the morning and I decide to join them a bit later.

When I decided to go to the beach, I realized that it was not so easy to do. In order to do that, I'd have to leave this unfortunate neighborhood Cojimar (even some taxi drivers don't know about its existence) for the city center, then get to the bus terminal, catch a special bus (number four hundred), first finding out where it stops (none of the locals know). And finally, after finding this place, one must get into the right line in order to get a special piece of cardboard with a number. And then upon entering the bus, the driver makes sure that you've received the number and that it's the correct one, and God knows what else, and only then does he charge you for the trip (some ridiculous amount, half a peso, I think) and lets you get on. I didn't

understand this complicated anti-human system right away and got in line for the bus, passing on the really long cardboard-number line (what are these damn cardboard pieces? Why?), but the driver shooed me away with shame and everybody around laughed, while the more compassionate ones gave me useful advice. This is how I met the lame Venezuelans because they didn't know this system either but treated it with much more tolerance. As it turned out, Venezuelans and people from other poor Latin American countries come to Cuba in order to use local free medical care. Fidel announced an international program that would accept patients with especially difficult cases and no means to pay for medical care. In exchange, Venezuela offered oil.

I noticed little bandages on the earlobes of my new Venezuelan acquaintances. That meant that lameness was being treated with acupuncture. Chinese medicine is valued in Cuba.

“And have you seen the Lenin Park?” they ask me for some reason. And it's true, there's a park named after Lenin in Cuba. But what do I need it for? Gorkiy parks, Revolution squares and Peace avenues – there are so many of them are they are all so alike that just mentioning them makes me sick.

I did manage to get to the beach. Trendy Cuban youth was riding in the bus number four hundred: flat-billed baseball hats, really wide jeans with sculls on their belts for guys and girls in tank tops, hipster pants, open bellies. They sung reggaeton hits, that they knew by heart, all the way.

The beach was called “Tropicoco”, the same as the huge hotel that was situated on it, a mix of tropicana and coconut. After all of the delights of the bus number four hundred, I understood the tourists who came to swim in the sea and lie out in the sun. Although my picky guidebook didn't recommend for anybody to stay here: this huge blue monster had stinky food, a covered pool and its club had been shut down.

Finally, I didn't find Gandi and his friends on the beach.

On one side, there were cane canopies containing a pretentious restaurant where waiters in white aprons served dishes. Next to it on the sand, stood musicians with a whole set of instruments: stand-up bass, jumbo drums, a guitar, playing the already annoying variety of Guantanamera, Hasta siempre comandante, Besame mucho, not even trying to stay in tune, like they would play Ochi Chernie where I'm from.

Fatties sat under the canopies.

Normally, two or three beauties leaned to each big hairy body. I got curious, where they really Cubans? Yes. In front of them stood dishes with pineapples, salmon and seafood salads. Not in any of the families that I got to know (not even in the

fisherman's family) did people eat sea fish and seafood, and that's while being surrounded by sea on all sides...

Seafood is not for ragamuffins. Even oysters made it to the shops on special days and immediately, a huge line formed itself outside. And this one gets it all at the snap of his fingers. He doesn't look like a party ideologist either. His chicks looked at me and giggled.

Turned out he was in the car rental business. He named the prices – higher than in Europe, I guess not to scare off European tourists with excessive cheapness. The system works with a big hotel, so there are loads of clients. “Yes, baby?” he asks the girl on the left, the one that has bigger breasts, and puts a piece of pineapple in her mouth.

To the left of the hotel beach, in the sand, regular mortals hang out, those who don't plan to rent a beach chair for five dollars. Some gang called me over and asked to photograph them as a memento. A mother and daughter who are entertaining some Mexican guests. They weren't wearing a sombrero, so I didn't guess their nationality. One of the Mexicans planned to marry this girl and take her with him to Mexico, which was fully encouraged by her mother. In general, they were super nice and super sweet, it was obvious they had just met. The Mexican offered me warm beer but I preferred Pepsi, although some sand had already managed to get in there. They asked me about my life. I'm twenty two, I have no boyfriend and not even looking. How strange! Also they had some food in a box, the same as they sell in the Chinese Quarter. They offered and, after looking at real food in the restaurant, I sat down with my legs crossed and started eating. Never mind that the box has filled with sand. But along with sand and rice, horrible chunks of chicharon were in there! I disgustedly spat it all out into the sand and gave up my attempts to eat something that day. Then they invited me to go out traditional dancing but I can't even dance salsa. And that's when the Mexican said, “You don't drink, don't smoke, don't eat, don't have a boyfriend, don't dance. Tell me, what are you doing in Cuba?!”

After the beach I was sick for three days, couldn't get out of bed. Probably a heat stroke. I lied in bed, thinking that it was total bullshit – to spend the whole morning getting somewhere (and before that even fly out to another side of the planet) in order to lie around motionlessly, like a stub, get sunburns and sun strokes. Almost all of the Europeans that I've met would burn the first day and walk around red and with their noses peeling for the rest of the trip.

Maybe this crispy crust will be the object of pride upon return, “I've been to Cuba.

Maan, the sun there is crazy!”

[Oficial Defeat] Ballet school.

Being a photographer is very exhausting.

Everybody feeds you, offers you drinks, shows you beautiful views. But what do you photograph? Where are the subjects, the storylines, how does one find them? What can I show the editors upon return? My burnt nose and blisters on my feet?

After the combatiente failure, I had an idea to show Cuban girls from all sides,

especially because they were easy to come up on. The only thing I was missing were the extremes: those who worked in the national ballet and those who labored in the sex industry. Even my uninteresting guidebook had something written about the ballet school. “You will see the luxurious building of the ballet school, and if you get lucky, you'll even catch a glimpse of a short skirt and a slender leg”. But I had to get into this center of creation, the place where I'd be surrounded by short skirts and fluttering legs.

I simply walked in, nonchalantly whistling something, like in the exaggerated Disney cartoons. In a Che Guevara T-shirt, my hair slightly messy, a red tan on my face, and obviously lacking a ballerina’s figure. I was immediately halted by a security guard and asked, what the hell. Without much thought I said I was on my way to see the director. I was advised right away in a servile tone to go up to the second floor and await mister director in front of his door.

And here I am, in the holiest of holy places. I'm going up a stairwell that's fancier than the Jordan stairwell of the Hermitage or any other stairwell I've ever seen. I'm left alone in a huge corridor and it's not clear how long I'd have to wait for. At first I honestly waited, planning to ask if I could shoot here. Then I started throwing sideways glances at the glass doors behind which darted the legs and their owners – butterfly girls and fairy girls. Then I quietly got off my chair and walked down the corridor, walked, walked, walked, turned the corner and, having nothing to fear, entered the classroom and starting shooting with a confident look, as if to say, so I'm the photographer, I 'll take some photos but pay me no attention, keep dancing.

A regular practice was in session, girls with mundane expressionless faces stretched and bent their bodies like twigs, able to wicker a basket if they wished.

They were all equally beautiful. For some reason, no black girls, only white ones or noble-looking mulatto girls. They faces already bore the imprint of arrogance, typical for real ballerinas. They knew that they were the best or at least chosen to become them. Any graduate of the ballet school automatically makes it into the National Ballet of Cuba, and that's not just something, it's the best position a girl could have here. Applause, the best pay, world tours, international recognition...

In one of the rooms -- all girls are 13-14 years old, in red skirts, among them – one amazing and proud Sara. She looks as if she's already a head taller than the rest, as if she's destined to become a star, a prima ballerina. She's the one who will steal the smiles and the applause, fans' yearning and world fame. With a straight posture she steps like a peahen, despite the fact that there are girls who are cuter or have more proportional faces, her eyes shoot such sparks of her own

uniqueness, that you start to believe that she's really beautiful. Everybody around her, the boys, the girls, and even the teachers, repeat, “Sara this, Sara that,” while Sara only replies with a slight nod and immediately turns away in order to gift her patronizing smile to someone else.

I got angry with this Sara. Who does she think she is? She's not even pretty! But then I let go and I knew she would really conquer the world. And I remembered Mateo's poor niece, Sabine, who tried so hard, who was so sweet, but it's as if it was written in her eyes: she'll never become a star.

After shooting everything I wanted, I came back to see the director. He was a darkskinned thin man with a bored face, looking nothing like a dancer, more like a bureaucrat full of his self importance. He said, “Unfortunately, you can't shoot in our ballet school without a special permission from the Ministry of Culture.” In order to get this permission, you have to get accreditation a the Press Center, for the accreditation you need to get a journalist visa, which will take approximately half a year and a whole lot of paperwork: who, where, why. So much for information security policy or, to be more precise, information blockade. And that's while any tourist can not only photograph, but buy any prostitute from head to toe for 10 pesos.

I wanted to tell him all this but just nodded instead, “Ah, sorry, I didn't know.” And calmly walked down the stairs with a flashcard full of photographs.

The tobacco factory was too much in the center, too visible to tourists, too restored, to where it became obvious – it was a tourist trap. A crowd of loiterers in the shop with the souvenir cigars and rum. And it's instantly clear: these are not the same cigars and rum that are sold at the street cafeterias with worn out signs and gloomy picturesque interiors. Even these things are divided: cigars for foreigners and cigars for locals. “Great aroma” and “bitter smoke”.

Dismal Cubans shouting out at the entrance, “It's expensive here! We'll show you where it's cheaper!”

I was in total despair from the feeling of meaninglessness of this trip and everything in general, so I started to shove my way through this crazy crown, repeating my insistent “permiso” (“may I”). What did I need this factory for?

I pushed a chick. She pushed me back. I think it was the story of my bad luck continuing because she turned out to be the factory worker who was in charge of letting people in. Of course I, with my big camera and my rude face, wasn't allowed in. Although whole crowds of tourists went back and forth past me. At first I was told to come later. I wandered around the Chinese Quarter for a bit and came back.

Then they told me to call some serious man with a soap opera name – Jose Antonio, who was supposed to give me and official permission to shoot. Listening to the long tones and the polite murmuring of the answering machine through a public phone, I imagined a teary-eyed scene in a TV frame: “Oh, Jose!”

“Yes, Maria!”

“Let me go into the tobacco factory!”

After getting no result, I headed for another department of the factory, this time a real one, not for show. Some workers sat against a huge restored building and smoked cigars after a work day. This meant that I was late. But the people were picturesque, just what I needed. From smoked-through black women with raspy voices to young beauties, straight out of a Puff Daddy video.

I met a short and funny guy named Ernesto Chupik (ha ha, his name totally went with his look). He introduced himself as the leader of some brigade and promised to get me in the next day.

The next day I was told that it was Saturday and everybody was working, but no visitors were allowed. I smiled at the security guard for five minutes and invited him to the club that evening. “With you – wherever you want. If you want to go to Russia, we'll go to Russia!”

On Monday, I came back, but there was another security guard. I was even relieved because I didn't keep my word about the club. Instead of simply going into the factory with a group of tourists, where I had a fifty-fifty chance, I stayed to wait for my poor Chupik, who finally came out to smoke a cigarette and I had to explain to him for the third time that I wanted to not only get in but take pictures. Chupik started doubting and said he'd get fired. On Tuesday, I came back again, went up to the security guard (a new one) and pretended that I'd just come from Jose Antonio's office. Finally, I was led into the factory and even assigned a special guy who took me around the workshops and even tried to explain things. Meanwhile, I started to shoot these wonderful picturesque women who, maybe, had been growing ripe and becoming this way all their lives in order to get ready for the click of my camera.

And after about five minutes, scared Chupik runs in hysterically shouting, “You can't! You can't!” I've barely gotten started. As soon as I get my camera out again, this ridiculous Chupik tugs at my sleeve again. Finally, instead of getting me the stuff he ruins it for me. And what stuff!

Then I had to sit in the director's office for a long time, explaining that I only started shooting because Jose Antonio had allowed me to do it. He said, “Fine, but there must be a paper. Otherwise, nothing can be done.” But you can't obtain this paper if you are already here without a journalist visa. It's like hitting your head on the wall. Pure bureaucratic delirium. The world they themselves invented and in which they are now stuck. When I finally got through to Jose Antonio, his voice didn't seem sentimental or heroic, as in a soap opera, but a tediously polite voice of a young man playing big boss. He said, “Sorry, if you are not accredited by MFA as a journalist, can't help you with anything.” So much effort for the stupid tobacco factory photos, which you see in every guidebook and brochure anyway. “Only a fool wouldn't photograph the tobacco factory,” my photography coordinator instructed me. I turned out to be that fool. I didn't shoot it.

Cabaret. All of the touristic forums discussed sex tourism and I still hadn't met a single prostitute. They were necessary to equal out the ballerina story. I met some tourists and they told me, “Of course you have to go to a cabaret. There, there are three girls for each customer.”

And I went.

Cabaret in Havana was very different from the one I'd seen in Santiago.

In Santiago – old chicks in torn tights, these chicks stay after the show in the hopes of getting a can of beer out of some customer. Each one of them looks like a tired Geography teacher from a provincial school who lugs home bags of food in the evenings.

And in Havana – the girls are beauties, wind-up dolls, used to the excessive attention on the part of the clients and aware of their value. They look like overgrown high school girls who would be reproached by the school principal for wearing these too short and colorful dresses.

Tourists are seated at the tables. The host asks in a theatrical voice where everybody is from, and the DJ puts on the appropriate national melody. Here, you can find gathered the whole geography of the world's wealth. The only ones that are missing are the kings of the word – representatives of the United States.

“De Rusia,” I say, the host makes a surprised face, the guests applaud in false delight and the DJ puts on a song by T.A.T.U “Nas ne dogonyat”. Only the best can come here, only the most worthy, the richest.

Cuban girl worship the foreigners and swarm around them in flocks. The tourists themselves, coming here, are separated by an invisible wall: the tour guide takes them around the city, saying “look to the right, look to the left”, in restaurants, they are served what the locals will never try, in the hotels -- their towels are replaced every day, they look at the real country only through the tinted windows of a comfortable bus of taxi.

Here are two elderly British sisters with disproportionate facial features, who've hired two groomed Cuban boys – dancers, who have to entertain them and teach them how to dance.

The muscular boys with spiky gelled hair hover around them, and the old hags feel twenty years younger. They do their best to enjoy it, they speak very loudly and laugh, shut their eyes with pleasure when they hear a familiar song, try to dance “with fire”, “to remember”. But all of this joy of the foreigners is something fake, exaggerated, like an attempt to juice a rock. “I'm paying for this so I must enjoy it”.

This is what's called a “vacation”.

This vacation consists of a specific list of pleasures. Food, beach, dancing at night.

Sometimes excursions. For the most intellectual ones. “Curious” facts you'll forget in two hours.

Musicians play for them, they are driven around in shiny cars, singers sing for them, the gigolo boys smile at them seductively, stars shine for them.

No, I'm not jealous, because I see what one must pay for that and how.

The girls from the ensemble come on stage, dance two dances, turning on their heels and waving around the bright tails of their dresses. Some of them try to smile

like robots (after that, one's jaw usually hurts), others maintain stone cold expressions, yet others -- look with unmasked disappointment into the half empty hall, where only few men were sitting, all already with ladies. And then the host comes out to announce that, unfortunately, the evening was already ending. But everything has just started! The tourists aren't not too upset though, they'll simply go to a bar now and sit there all night, like hens on a perch. Everybody was given back the 10 dollars they'd paid for entrance. Nothing terrible or wonderful happened. It was disgustingly regular.

Next time, I went to the Panamericano Hotel, close to where my friend Gandi lived.

Gandi told me that all jinetera girls gathered there at night. Sometimes there was dancing there, and then the girls' luck would skyrocket. There was no dancing that night. In the hall, in red leather armchairs, covering the revolutionaries' portraits, sat three girls in regular for Cuba outfits. They didn't look much different than the rest, maybe just more oily and run down. Even their smoking came out especially vulgar. One of them went to the bathroom to wet her belly, to freshen herself from the heat, and the rest immediately followed her. Such aimless wandering from the bathroom to the bar, then to the hall and back, long smoking without enjoyment, changing the cross of the legs, routine phrases, a general atmosphere of tiredness, disappointment and meaninglessness. I tried to photograph them but it wasn't very meaningful either. They would immediately get up and start posing. The dull lights of the huge hall killed the last liveliness in their faces.

I didn't get to see how they picked up clients and how everything happened after.

But I could imagine it more than vividly. The same rooms with standards cots, an open suitcase from which things stick out, a tiled bathroom, and fast, uninteresting sex... It's like all of this is written on these girls' faces, imprinted in their eyes, grown into their skin.

Finally, I gave them my last cookies and left. In the street, a totally different scene took me in.

Near the hotel grew two gigantic trees with twisted branches. They were totally bald, with no bark, their smooth beige skin slightly peeled. I had a strong urge to climb up one of them and calmly think under the moonlight about everything that had happened. When I had already climbed, I noticed that exactly these trees produced those huge rattling boomerang pods that I'd seen shamans and African dancers have. Now I saw that there were plenty of these things in this magical tree and decided to climb further up in order to pick at least one. But, as luck would have it, I couldn't reach any.

And that's when two cops came up. They told me, “Come down immediately.� I thought that it was that same deal as with seeds and animals that you couldn't take outside of the country. I came down. I had to lie to them that I stayed at the hotel.

Why did I climb the tree? Umm... Well... I wanted to rattle one of these things... The policemen wagged their finger at me and told me to never do that again because it

was dangerous. Then one of them asked, “How many of these do you need?”. “Well, two.” Then he climbed up the tree himself and picked those things for me. I really did end up bringing them from Cuba and giving them to my friends as gifts, accompanied by the nice cop anecdote.

[Crazy characters] Yoanka. I was sitting on the steps of some house in old Havana, cleaning an acidic orange with my finger, when I saw her. A fat chick was walking down the street. She had a a flirtatious 'do and such a shirt skirt on that it was hard to understand how that stripe of fabric could conceal anything at all. The skirt was of acid-purple color and looked more like a piece of frill stuck between two layers of fat.

The girl carried half a pumpkin in her hands. A prostitute? But then why so unappealing? Why in this neighborhood? And why carrying a pumpkin?

I left my orange alone and followed her.

She had a strange reaction to my “Hi, I'd like to meet you.”

Apparently, she had never received such proposals from a girl before. Although in Cuba you can expect any requests from a fine soul of a tourist.

She looked at me suspiciously and glanced at my camera, hanging on my shoulder, half-ready for action, turned around and walked the other way. I persistently followed her.

For some reason her look got to me and I really wanted to find out who she was and how she lived and what she thought and said.

Finally, she relaxed and accepted my presence as a given. “Let's stop by the supermarket. I have to buy powdered milk for my baby,” she demanded instead of asking.

In Cuba, there two types of stores: the ones that sell local goods and the ones that sell imported ones. Local shops look more than lame. Empty counters with Che and Fidel portraits in the background where three or four unappealing goods are displayed in a dejected manner. Rice is always sold by big sacks. Once, dying of thirst, I decided to buy a small package of fruit drink in such a shop. The sales lady looked at me strangely and told me, wagging her finger, “Fruit drink is only for children. Dispensed only for food stamps.” Fruit drink! They can't sell twenty-fivecent fruit drink to a person dying of thirst!

Other shops burst with color. There, you can buy black and white Nestle cookies,

sauce and Maggie soup cubes, the softest toilet paper and canned goods. This is a foreign goods shop. Here, everything is sold for dollars and costs more than in Moscow. Shiny white counters, beautiful transparent shop windows and... almost always empty inside. That's where foreigners and rich Cubans shop. Sometimes even regular mortals come in, but just to gawk at the wonders.

The chick brought me to one of these shops. She put her pumpkin on the counter and started picking things out: I need some of this and that and those over there.

Diapers for the baby, powdered milk, cigarettes, a Snickers bar...

I had to pay for the whole purchase and we went to her house. I felt a bit like Alice in Wonderland, watching the changing kaleidoscope of strange characters appearing in front of me, drawing me into their world.

The house was humid and dark, with no windows at all because on three sides, other houses were stuck to it; the only open side bore the door. Gray walls, bare cement walls mortared at the seams. In a chair sat another chick, looking like a corrupted Madonna, nursing a tiny baby. The baby didn't have a pig tail, like in Carroll's fairy tale, but his belly button stuck out a bunch. It was my first time seeing a hernia. My new friend carelessly grabbed the baby, which started crying, and started nursing and soothing it by shaking it with such force that it didn't help to calm it down at all.

“What's wrong with it?” I asked, nodding at the belly button.

“He was born that way.”

“But isn't it dangerous for its life?”

“Yep. Dangerous.”

“Then, maybe surgery is needed?”

“Yeh, I guess so.”

“So what are you waiting for?!”

“We don't have the money.”

“But medical care is free in Cuba!”

“Yeh, but he's so small, he needs special care. And this care costs ten dollars.”

“So what, you can't afford to pay ten dollars so your baby can survive?”

Of course, I left the chicks ten dollars. But they wanted beer so bad, asking me for it so much that, I'm afraid, the money didn't make it to surgery. Turned out both of the chicks were unemployed. Yoanka, recently having given birth, at one point dreamed of becoming a prostitute but obviously didn't fit professional criteria.

“Too fat,” sighed her sister.

Yoanka was only nineteen but she hadn't received any kind of education and now was a single mother. She says her boyfriend was recruited by the army and, as soon as he came back, they'd get married, but I have serious doubts about that.

Her sister, Yarili, is a twenty-two-year-old jinetera who's also not very motivated by legal income. Yes, she has an education and could work in her field, but in order to do that, she should've done a two year internship in a government establishment at some point. And since she didn't do the internship, nobody hires her. Yarili's tone

gave away her lack of desire.

“You sandals are so nice. How much do they cost in Russia? You're probably leaving soon, give them to me. Do you have any clothes? And perfume? You didn't even bring any perfume? If you want, I'll come pick it all up myself. Tell me what hotel you are staying at.”

“Find me a Russian boyfriend”, she'd repeat. “I want to move to Russia.”

“But why precisely to Russia? It's not much better there than in Cuba.”

“To Russia or to some other place. I don't care. I don't have a boyfriend and I want a foreign boyfriend.”

And I pictured the winter, some deep village near Moscow where, wrapping her coat around her, a half-literate black girl stands, endlessly waiting for the bus. The snow blows her in, little by little, then local thugs come in... better to skip that part, better not watch this... then they bury her in the snow, fast...

Or this scene: some businessman's luxurious Rublevka apartment. Yarili, naked, in crystal pumps with stiletto heels, stepping over the pelt of a polar bear with scary snarling jaws, bringing two glasses of rum on a silver tray to a huge bed under a canopy. In the bed lies a skinny bald asshole with bowed hairy legs. He takes the glass and says in pure Russian, “Get on your knees, bitch.” She doesn't understand Russian but does what he wants...

No, I think somehow it's better here, in the heat and poverty, among the Cuban jungle and run-down street, with intoxicating, like rum, salsa music blasting from all the windows, dances and cerveza with just as poor, but familiar and safe, mulatto friends... .

The old man. Only after my Chivirico adventures with Ramon and the police did I find out that Hemingway had written his book The Old Man and the Sea in Havana, which meant I didn't have to go too far. Then I meet that same old man in Havana, only without the sea. He drinks rum and takes his cigar out of his mouth. His gray mustache constantly curls up. He's eighty but looks like an aged and mummified boy. He has perfect posture, but his gait reminds you of the gait of a stiff corpse that can't perform extra movements, not out of the economy of effort, but out of the stiffness of his body. He moves around the world, not going above the speed accessible to him, yet never stopping, in a way that puts you in awe at how much energy this man has, and how efficiently he's learned to use it with age!

He once was the manager of Tropicana, the best cabaret in the country, but now he watches old bikes and bici-taxis in the parking lot. He has nothing to do with the revolution and never did. Revolutions got in his way, if anything. But he puts up with it, as if it were, for example, heat or rain. If you don't like it – leave. And in order to get used to it, you just have to not give it so much thought.

I met the old man when I was just walking around. I was passing by, my camera on my shoulder, and enough time to waste since I was already half done with shooting.

At first I was drawn by the picturesque parking lot, its walls covered by strange phrases, such as “Rock”, “No toilet”, “There's a dog”. And I simply came in.

“What a doggie!” - to be interested by some nonsense is the second part of the photo session. “Will it bite? Can I take a picture of it?”

Barely anybody reacts to me. I sit down on an empty chair and really start taking photos of the dog. The old man tousles it behind the ear. Or just sits on a chair.

Then some people come to leave the bikes or fix run-down cars. Everybody is respectful towards him, shakes his hands and stays to chat or have a smoke. A flower seller comes, a few unsold bunches are starting to wilt in the basket of his bike. Of course, I'm the one who inherits them, and now they take up my hands, not letting me shoot.

That evening I realized that this was exactly what I was looking for. So I waited patiently for everything to happen by itself. The flow carried me and I just relaxed, being myself to the max.

“Hey Baby!” he shouts at the dog.

A lonely old man who loves he dog, and the dog is crazy about him. For some reason, I know right away the old man is lonely, there is no other way. Loneliness has penetrated his skin along with tobacco smoke and rum.

He doesn't make any unnecessary movements, doesn't utter any unnecessary words; the dog puts its head on his lap on its own and just stays quiet; everything is motionless, silent, but all of this hides invisible tenderness.

A regular parking lot, somebody is fixing engines, naïve writing on the wall, a bunch of flowers in the hands.

I ask a stupid question, does he like this work?

“Like?”, he repeats. “I don't even know, I've never thought about it. There's not much to do here, just be responsible.”

To be responsible simply means being, sitting in a chair all day long. Apparently, that's the secret to longevity: you are never in a hurry, everything happens in the right moment, and maybe bursts into pieces, while you just sit there, earning your bread by holding some responsibility, and you don't have to do anything else, just hold it, and every time, your favorite dog puts its head on your lap, just like in the Pontius Pilate story, when he freezes in eternity, alone with his favorite dog. After you've crucified Christ, nothing can worry you anymore.

“My life has been ve-ery sad,” he starts to answer my question again and falls quiet for a long time. At this time we are already in his home, two blocks away the parking lot; it just happened that we came over to his house to talk, or to be quiet, to be exact. His apartment in old Havana is stuffed with various, at one point luxurious, things that with time have become old junk. A very strange and hard to describe smell hangs in the place – the smell of the magical past, suspended in

time, when you don't know what year or millennium is out there. You don't know and you don't care. On the walls there are Playboy calendars from the 80's, depicting women with crazy perms, not provoking any sexual feeling, they are just the spirit of their time; it's like looking at fancy portraits of beauties of the Da Vinci era.

Dusty nineteenth century books lie around along with dogeared trashy detective novels from the 50's. There are big cigar butts everywhere and dolls – almost every home in Cuba has white dolls, painted black, because dolls were massively imported during the era of friendship with the Soviet Union (where, of course, only white ones were made). This is my childhood doll reborn into a voodoo character.

Sometimes black paint chips away, it looks pretty scary.

I'm drinking strong black coffee and he – rum. That's how love affairs a la Francois Ozon or Kim Ki-Duk start: me and an eighty-year-old, black as coal, old man, saturated with the emptiness of timelessness, almost Fidel's age, but from a totally different fairy tale. In this movie, I am just an actress, but there are also viewers and a director, invisible to me. Or maybe, all of them are me, all in one, and all of this twirls me, rocks me on the waves and doesn't let me stop; I want to peek ahead at the next page of he script...

It got too late and my friend Gandi's house was too far...

Finally the old man offered me to spend the night in the room upstairs while he'd stay downstairs, on the narrow red couch. Upstairs, there's a cozy little bedroom, the ceiling painted to mimic an attic roof. In the corner, there is a santeria altar.

Too incredible and too dream-like. On the bed – a rubber sheet instead of a regular one. I experience a mix of disgust and euphoria from what's happening. Is my old man really a bed-wetter?

No, hard to believe. He doesn't even stink of decomposition. It's hard for a lonely man to take care of himself. But he does.

“What's your secret of longevity?” I ask.

“In smoking, drinking, but all in moderation. And most importantly, I bathe every day.”

In the morning, I discover that the old man has another dog in the house. But this one is always locked up on the balcony and, unlike Baby, is a “total good-fornothing”. The old man opens the balcony, shoves a bowl of food at him, and closes the door again, not paying any attention to the puppy, crazy from joy and hysteria.

The pup is tied with an old rope, which painfully constricts his throat from any pull, which makes him squeal even more; it's a mixed expression of feelings – from joy to despair. Now the poor creature will be locked in a narrow cage of the balcony again, while the old man will calmly go where Baby runs around freely; he will call her over, slowly pet her all day, sitting in his chair, throw her the best sweets that he sometimes buys for himself.

I am taken aback by his ruthlessness. That cold-bloodedness with which he shows the most soulful tenderness and the most meaningless cruelty.

“Why?” I ask.

“Why what?”

“Why do you keep the poor pup locked on the balcony?”

“Because I don't like a dog in the house,” he replies indifferently.

I stay for a few more days.

Partly because it´s just convenient to live in the center of Havana.

And also to be able to tell this old man's story with pictures. To transmit that sorrow in his eyes that he's not aware of himself.

He pays no attention whatsoever to the camera's clicks, no matter how often they sound, maybe because he iss a bit deaf. In any case, he turns out to be the best photography subject.

The old man takes me around the old downtown, peels in a special way the sweet oranges he buys for me every day at the market, buyst me soft toilet paper for dollars, while he continued to use old newspapers. But at the same time, he stays completely cold-blooded towards me. To him, I am something between the spoiled Baby and the puppy on his balcony.

And I keep on coming back to his house every night, sniffing the odd smells, in the evenings, nodding at his monologues (of which I understand only about 10 percent).

He retold me his life. He'd had a lot of women. The one he loved the most was already dead and he'd never forget her. The rest had either left him or he had left them, and most of them are also already dead. Just like his children – the ones who are alive live in some other parts of town, but the old man has no desire to visit them. He wants to be alone, he likes his endless loneliness, he almost revels in it.

He had too much going on in his life and now he fenced himself in with this emptiness and is glad to exist in it. He whisks the dust from the old portraits and shows them to me. “This daughter died from cancer when she was forty four, this son died in a fight... “ He talks about it with distant indifference, as if he's just told me the plot of some movie he had seen a long time ago, the name of which he doesn't even remember anymore.

One time, early in the morning, I came down just in my underwear and tank top, to use the bathroom, thinking that the old man was still asleep. I was very sick: I had a sore throat, my skin was sunburned, I had diarrhea from some crap, plus I was on my period. I was so ill I didn't know if I was alive or not. The old man woke up from my steps and called me over to his bed in a raspy voice, closer, come closer... When he reached out his arms towards me, I yelped and jumped away. It happened so unexpectedly that I still can't believe it. Did it really happen or was it just a fiction of an ill consciousness? That day I left and, it so happened, never showed up at his house again. And now I realize that I don't even know his name for sure. He said something like Josevien, but I don't think such name exists. Even Word underlines it.

The old woman. ...That night I was coming back from a fruitless visit to the cabaret.

After having paid the taxi driver, I yanked at the door of that old man that had given me shelter. The door was locked. Probably, the old man had fallen asleep before I showed up and the neighbors had locked the door. And I thought again, events and magic are the coincidence of many factors, many of which you decide. And decided to climb into the old man's house through the adjacent balcony.

I entered the neighboring entrance, walked up the narrow staircase that reeked in the best Dickens tradition. I unsuccessfully broke into a small hand-made room, separated from the stairwell by shabby plywood. Straight on the floor, strange people slept, guarded by some mangy Puffy who jumped at me, barking. There was

no balcony there to speak of. But I decided to make a second attempt.

A floor higher, I could see light coming through the slit under the door despite the late hour. Some sounds, which I could hear even from the street, were coming through. At first I thought they were soap opera bits – some strange moans, sobs and wailing with an exaggerated theatrical intonation.

I knocked and instantly felt afraid. But it was the only way to the old man's balcony, where I could spend the rest of the night. Although I didn't even care anymore.

After my knocks, the hysterical enthusiastic singing quieted down for moment, then discontent cries could be heard. I got scared, expecting at least the classical skillet to the face. Or the owner opening the door abruptly with a revolver in her hand.

Although, no, revolvers are from another movie.

An old bony black woman opens, sloshed with rum, very black and wrinkly, almost toothless, with her tits on her belly. I don't know how to act and what will happen next. Apparently, she was expecting the neighbors to complain about the noise once again. She was ready to fight. But, seeing me, she freezes and doesn't know what to do either.

Me neither.

In my horrible Spanish, I try to explain, you see, it's locked, no key, can I climb through your balcony?..

“Ahh,” she slowly starts to comprehend.

“Italia!”

“Si, si,” I say, “Italia, Italia. Can I pass to your balcony?”

And, without waiting for the answer, slowly com in.

“Italia!” she shouts joyfully, relishing the word in many different ways. “Italia!”

“No,” I say, “No Italia. Rusia.”

But the crazy old hag doesn't hear me anymore and almost dances: “Italia! Italia!”

I go onto the balcony and stall. You have to be at least Tarzan to make this maneuver. And I'm no Tarzan.

I'm not Tarzan, I'm a little girl totally lost in a strange country, full of bad-tasting cakes and pizzas and laden with photo equipment like an apple tree with apples.

I decide to drag out the moment so I can think.

“Can I take one picture here?” I ask, interested by the altar. And, without waiting, take out my camera.

I start to shoot and the old woman yells, “Pelicula!”

I think, what does that mean? Now she'll definitely hit me on the head with something heavy. But she simply goes on shouting enthusiastically, “Pelicula!

Pelicula!” She thinks I am about to shoot a movie about her.

“No pelicula,” I say, “Photo.”

But she isn't listening any longer.

“How exactly do you want me? Like this? Like this?” and assumes grotesquely sexual poses. Maybe she thinks I'm shooting a porn film of which she's the star.

I just shoot everything around. The old woman performs a one-man show around me by herself. She grabs a broken down guitar with half of the strings missing.

Starts to strum and wail. Then drops the guitar and poses for me in bed.

“Lluvia!” she screams, “Lluvia, do you want me? Do you want my body?!”

The verb “querer” has too many meanings in Spanish. But that's how I interpret it.

With curiosity and pity, I look at her saggy breasts, at her huge white grandma underwear, in a room that's stuffed with ritual objects, where there are more ugly hats and sneakers than the old woman's age. She probably used to sell all this junk.

“How old are you?” I ask in order to distract her in some way.

“Fifty seven,” she lies nonchalantly.

“Where do you work?”

“Nowhere” “And what's this?”

“Clothes. Crappy clothes.”

During this game of meaningless QA, I realize to my horror that I have total power over her, she's ready to obey my every word. But I fall silent.

“Are you a spiritualist?” I finally ask.

“Yes” “I'd like... Hmm... to see some rituals or something like that...”

She's glad I say something, grabs a huge drum and starts to bang it with all her might right into my ear.

I photograph, thinking to myself, although I'm dead tired, I must go on til the end, shooting a story about the fate of this poor crazy old woman, an Afro-Cuban shaman.

But I am too exhausted.

“And now I want to rest a bit,” I declare. There's nothing else left to do, I have nowhere to spend the night.

And the old lady earnestly drops the drum and runs to the other room to make a bed for me.

I lie down on a little mattress, covered with a sheet, and already feel the sleep coming over, when the old lady drops her clothes (oh, horror!) and jumps in bed with me, with the same fervency one would jump off a cliff on the first day of the swimming season.

“Ruvia! R-ruvia!” she moans in a theatrical way.

Oh no! What else will I have to put up with this night?

“Are you a lesbian?” I ask. But it looks like she doesn't know this world.

“Don't you have a man?”

“No, Ruvia, I don't.”

“And children?”

“No, none.”

And she continues to climb into bed with me.

“This isn't working,” I say, “I sleep here and you sleep there. Me – here, you – there.”

I think they used the same line in my favorite childhood movie “Beethoven”, applied to the dog.

The old woman gets up and with canine obedience goes away to the other room, where she picks up the guitar and starts wailing, as an exiled dog would. Then she grabs her crazy drum and sadly beats it for a long time. At this moment I think, “My old man can probably hear all of this while I didn't manage to make it over to his place.”

He probably knows his crazy neighbor well. Maybe she's so crazy because of him?

Not paying any more attention to the noise, I start falling asleep when she suddenly opens the door, already having changed into a nighty, and asks, “Ruvia?”

“Hm?” I reply sleepily to the strange nickname, not knowing what it means.

“Coffe?”

“No, thanks.”

“You don't want any coffee?”

“No, no.”

She leaves. Bangs the drum some more. Then comes back again.

“Ruvia?”

“Hm?” “I'll close the window.”

She climbs on top of my bed and closes the window. I only feel Buddhist resignation: it all must end at one point.

“Go to sleep”, I say.

“Fine, I'm going,” she repeats like an echo and mumbles with inspiration, “Italia... Italia... “ Then she barges in again. Covers me with a blanket.

“Thanks,” I say. “Go to sleep.”

She barges in with another blanket.

I think this goes on all night.

When I try to get my eyelids unstuck in the morning, I find myself covered with four blankets, and the old woman sleeping at my feet, who readily shoves the already cold coffee at me and some unidentified brown food on a plate.

I take the coffee. It's served in a cut-off bottom of a glass Coca Cola bottle. I pass on the breakfast.

Damn, what was I doing here? Shooting a story about broken female destinies? Or find myself stuck in the trap of such destiny?

I get up, glance over the long row of hats and other junk, pick up my stuff and head

for the door.

“Ruvia, where are you going?” the old lady jump up.

“I have some business to attend to.”

“When will you come back?”

“Maybe tonight.”

Tonight! Tonight! Good-bye, Luvia!”

I did really come back there after another unlucky visit to entertainment establishments. After my knocks, the old woman simply opened the door and threw herself at me. A bunch of neighbors watched from behind us, gloating.

The old woman was already prepared for the concert and immediately picked up the drum. She drummed awfully badly (or is this the national style?), in some broken rhythm, sang something, twisting around. The light in the room was on, the balcony doors ajar, so all of this could be seen by the neighbors across the street.

They laughed at my old hag, while she sometimes glanced at them, making signs, like: “You see who I've brought. I told you she really existed. I wasn't lying.”

At that moment, I felt like I was at least Carlson who came down from heaven to the house of the gullible Little Boy. I closed the shutters so that these people would stop gloating at this woman and her myth, that's to say, me. The lack of real shows in a communist country makes the crowd willing to jump at any small event like it was a theatrical play.

Only later did I notice a small man sitting in the room. When the old woman would jump up in ecstasy with her rattle and turn away from us, he'd make signs to me, like, “Don't take her seriously, leave her alone.”

But the old woman did her best to show off in front of me and wanted to be taken seriously. I was ready to cry.

During the break between the “compositions” I asked her, pointing at the depressive dwarf-man: “Who is he?”

“Oh, nobody,” she dismissed him with a wave of her hand.

“Your husband?”

“No, no way.”

“Your lover?”

“No.” “A friend?”

“Yes. Just a friend”.

He sat in the corner and silently worried about her, or maybe about him, or maybe about the whole world.

I simply left without saying anything and this time, she didn't try to beg me to stay.

Her passionate, not pronounced “Lluvia” rang in my head for a long time, while this story became probably my own Cuba. “Pelicula” finally wasn't shot, the old woman was left with her gods and hats, but what else could I have done for her?

[The finale] On my last day, I came back to my friend Gandi. I was full of impressions I couldn't properly express with words. Clear thoughts about Cuba were almost formed in my head. A country where everything is free, is a miserable attempt to make everybody equal, equally happy. Fidel is a demagogue, lost in his illusions and dreams. We've read a lot about the anti-utopias, and Cuba is one of them.

“You think everything is free here?” asked Gandi, “It's just a country where nobody is paid and relatively free handouts are thrown at you. I don't want anything for free. I'm a good specialist, a teacher, pay me a good salary and I myself will buy what I think is right. And then I'll want to work for you. I want to pay for everything I use. I want to pay for the bus because I know that it runs on gasoline, that it's body receives wear and tear, that the driver needs to feed his family. I want to buy a variety of food, I'm sick of eating rice and beans. I only it them because it's the only thing you can buy here, what the government has set a fixed price for. You can't get fish for any money here, although we live by the sea. I don't understand these policies. They try to control everything but only end up losing. A few years ago our government was obsessed with the idea of dresing everybody in a uniform. So that teachers would wear one thing, the drivers – another, and the agricultural workers – yet another. All of the teachers had to wear the same shoes. That's madness, I want to chose my own clothes! If there were any, I could choose, but there's simply none.

Then the state decided to provide everybody with a fridge. Very cheaply, you can even take twenty years to pay the credit off.

But you had to sign up for this fridge and wait in line. Now every Cuban has the same fridge in his house. Even those who are in much more need of a sewing or a washing machine. But in this state, you can't choose.

This is called socialism. Everything for the people. Everything that makes you stop thinking. A taxi driver that gives a tourist one ride, earns more that me in a whole month teaching children science, which took me five years to study at a university.

That's ridiculous. The correlation of salaries is simply unbelievable here, comparing to the international level. This means that we can't buy anything imported from other countries.

The state needs educated people. It gives you education, but then you are obligated to work in a very specific place. After the studies, you have to do a two-year internship wherever they assign you. In general, they send everybody off to teaching, even if you never planned to teach. If they paid their teachers well, they would never have such problem.

Or, for example, two years ago, they thought of a tactic: to find those who have a higher education but works on the side, for example at a bank or a hotel, offer him the same salary he makes, but teaching. The person agrees but doesn't feel comfortable at the school. Why not just offer the teachers the same salary to start with?

Nobody wants to be a construction worker, a a teacher, a police officer. That's why houses fall apart, teachers spend all day chatting with their co-workers, leaving the students on their own to do what they want.

The police are a separate problem.

Nobody respects the policemen here. Right in the street someone might shout, “Hey, hick!� because all of them come from villages. It's their chance to move to the city legally. But they are not familiar with city conditions, city life. And considering that, how can they guard order that they don't understand?

I don't like that in this country, freedom of movement is limited. I want to go to another country, but for that, I must obtain permission, which is hard to do here.

And then, even within your own country, you can't move from one city to another.

It's like you are totally stuck in your town or village. To move, for example, from Santiago to Havana in search of work is already illegal. For now, I'm content in Havana, but I'm not happy with the very idea that I can't leave.

To participate in a meeting is also impossible here. To simply write and article and submit it to a newspaper is unthinkable. Even to organize some art function is very difficult, unless it has to do with revolution propaganda.

Party activists and children of party workers are given full priority when entering a university or applying for work.

This is called socialism here, its' a grandiose myth, a country made up by one person. But Fidel is old and sick now, they say he has one foot in the grave.

The old man was smart because right after the revolution, he gave all of the discontent a chance to immigrate to the U.S., where they were accepted. The only ones left were the ones who truly believed in the regime or were afraid of it, or those, who tolerate it because they love their country despite everything and want to stay in it.

For now, nobody is protesting. To criticize the regime is unthinkable, not only out loud, but in your thoughts. That's why you might think that everybody sincerely loves Fidel. It's just that the discontent has been pushed to the subconscious level.

The youth are expecting that all their problems will be solved with the global changes in the country and in the world.

That Raul and Obama will reach some agreement, that the Americans will soften the embargo and Raul will give more freedom and fresh air to the country.

I don't know if it will be as easy as everybody hopes. But there's no way I'd go to an open protest either. I'd prefer to immigrate from this rotten country.

In this conversation Gandi answered all of the questions that had been bothering me the whole time. After that, we warmly parted and I took a taxi to the airport.

Cuba. A simple country where the eternal question “To be or not to be?” is totally irrelevant. Of course, to be. Through fifty years of stagnation and blockade, through poverty and ignorance, through cheap food and simple clothes, accompanied by salsa music and reggaeton, by the roar of a prehistoric auto, a definite and simple “To be” breaks through.

That's why I came here. I solved my puzzle. I met exactly these people. I visited precisely these places and encountered exactly these situations. My goal was to do a big photo project, but it was just a thread, a connecting link of adventures, which turned out to be important in themselves.

I can't make any singular conclusion about the benefit or the harm of socialism. If it doesn't make people any happier than they already are, what the hell do they need it for?

I was coming back, almost cursing this stupid poverty, this madness and tranquility, these eternal words “Entonces” and “Oiste?” (“So” and “Did you hear?”), the phrase I heard on every corner from the oily men, “Que linda” (“What a beauty”).

I almost started hating these difficulties in achieving the simplest goals and the dumb acceptance of the fact that, for example, you have to flush the toilet by pouring water out of a dipper, or that you have to spend half a day looking for a pay phone. Internet costs six dollars an hour, food – only by lists or in special shops with foreign goods. Grandfather Fidel looked at me from every poster, and his strange Greek nose with a hump betrayed the tyranny, voluntarism and stubbornness of his owner. I was glad that Che had died on time, not making it to the hopeless two thousand to see all of this.

The crazy Cuban myths that I'd heard in Russia turned out to be myths. There are no drug addicts here since they could only afford to smoke once a year. So those who hinted at me going to get high, were totally wrong. Being in Cuba itself, I saw no sense in the songs that are sung in Russia about Cuba.

“My boots still have Cuban sand on them. They don't know how tasty snow can be... “ “When I close my eyes, I see the golden sand of Varadero... “ Sand is just a strip of beach. It's just the crispy crust of a long island-pie. Looks like none of the Russians managed to get deeper than that.

I went to the other side of the planet to see my own country, but as if in a distorting mirror.

Cuba is on the threshold of “something”, but this “something” doesn't come. The feeling of a long, but not oppressive wait, rubbed off on me. “We will wait and new things will come on their own, and while we wait, we'll play domino in front of our houses, rock in our rocking chairs, listen to music on the old radio, go to clubs, cook simple food, flirt... “ Calm and benevolent, without any aggression, the Cubans seem to be a wonderful people.

If not for their optimism, it would be too much like Russia here...

I will miss this easy attitude towards the world and oneself...

My Cuba grew on me forever, penetrated my skin with a spicy scent. Although I promised everybody to return, I don't know if there's any sense in it – I watched my film, I squeezed all the juices out of it. I'm on my way to my unfortunate motherland, holding my Cuba in my fist, like a magical light-bug. No matter what myths are told.

Cuba exists.

It exists and that's the only thing I managed to irrefutably prove during my trip.

Cuba exists and it's more than near. That's what I was thinking, getting on board the plane. Mateo's mother and wife came to see me off at the airport. They had been sitting there since morning.

And maybe had spent the night there. They passed me a huge box of rumpled guava and small sour fruit in shells. Their concern was touching to me, it would be hard to expect something like that from people in Russia.

During the flight from Paris to Moscow, I had a chance to speak Russian, and I noticed I had a funny Cuban accent. They were telling me something about the ticket prices and the dirty games of the airlines, the strange behavior of the French in traffic jams, but I listened not to the words, but to this strange Russian language, which I had almost forgotten.

And then under the rubber soles of my keds, fresh March snow started crunching.

Hello, my gloomy motherland. You are not as close, as definitive and untouchable, as you want to be.

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