CRISTINA GARCIA Simple Life Dutek frieassee & la cubana, of course, captures the Cuban's gift for overconting obstacles. IT WAS ABOUT FOUR IN THE MORNING, AND I WAS SITTING ON THE porch of my aunt’s house in Guanabo, a seaside town east of Havana, catching up on eleven years’ worth of family news. The ocean breeze stirred the fronds of the coconut palms on her modest prop- erty as we swayed in our rocking chairs, keeping time with the rhythm of our stories, interrupting them with frequent bursts of laughter. Not fifty feet from us, the surf broke against an outcrop of rocks and a narrow lip of beach. In the midst of one reminiscence or another, I heard a harsh buzzing sound, and then all was blackness. “ Corto, otro apagén,” my Tia Amada said, referring to the frequent blackouts of electricity that plagued nearly every town on the island. But just as she was about to launch into her familiar litany of com- plaints against what was known as the “special period” in Cuba, a time of renewed sacrifice and deprivation, Tia Amada noticed my face. I was staring up at the sky, speechless with wonder. There was no moon that night, not even so much as a single bulb burning anywhere in the vicinity, but above us, the heavens looked as if they would collapse with stars. This was the unintentional gift from the apagén. 14Simple Life 15 To me, that moment represents what I love most about Cuba. No hay mal que por bien no venga. This is a quintessential Cuban expres- sion, a kind of mantra. Roughly translated, it means “good comes out of even the worst experiences.” I heard it at least a dozen times a day. Cubans are masters at making the best out of any difficult situa- ion. Resolver, to resolve, is probably the most commonly used verb in the language on the island. “Resolver” can mean resuscitating a twent ‘ar-old Russian Lada for a ride to the beach or tracking down a single out-of-season sweet potato for a dessert offering to Yemayé, goddess of the seas. One Saturday afternoon in Havana, I casually mentioned to my uncle, Tio Jorge, that I was yearning for a piece of cake. About four hours later a prim man appeared at our door carrying an enormous coconut layer cake topped with fluffy pink meringue. It turned out that the delivery man was, in fact, a heart surgeon who bakes cakes on weekends for extra cash. He is in high demand for weddings. In Cuba “resolver” means to survive, to overcome all obstacles with inventiveness, spontaneity, and most important, humor. Recently my Tia Amada, who rents out part of her beach bun- galow to foreign tourists, received a request from her guests, a de- manding Canadian businessman and his wife, for a duck dinner, My aunt, unfazed, assured the couple that they could expect their duck promptly at seven o'clock that evening. Need I add that my aunt had never cooked a duck in her life? That day I accompanied Tia Amada to the farmer’s market to track down a duck. There was only one available, scrawny and unsightly with ha it for four dollars. Fplucked quills. She bargained hard and bought Back home, my aunt proceeded to wash the creature from her limited supply of freshwater (none was running from her faucets), and then shaved the duck from beak to claw with a antique razor that once belonged to her father. No matter that Tia Amada’s oven has not worked in years. No matter that her pre-Revolutionary pots and pans were now in16 Travelers’ Tales * Cuba advanced stages of disrepair. We schemed over how to best cook the beast on top of the stove. Finally, with a blunt knife and a ham- mer borrowed from a neighbor, we hacked the duck to pieces and opted for fricassee. The Canadian and his wife got their duck, savory and delicious, served with rice, fried plantains, and a fresh green salad. They said it was the best duck they had ever eaten. My aunt and I laughed for a long time over the bird, reliving the small adventure, recounting it to relatives in ever more clab- orate fashion, By the end of agund place andl Pike the telling, we might even say I sorry not to go there again. we'd gone to Warsaw to “ve- —Walker Evans, after photo- solve” that duck. graphing Havana in 1933 After a long day of such high-intensity resolving, my family would sit around and tell chistes, jokes. Cubans turn everything into chistes, most of which are aimed at themselves. There are no sacred cows on the island, including El Jefe, Fidel Castro, Neighbors might come by and join in on the fun, as the bottle of rum or marrasquino, a sweet local liqueur, is passed around. Often, someone would put a cassette in the tape deck, and the party would be on. Dancing is de rigueur. My uncle has taught me a decent cha-cha, and [ can almost make it through a guaracha with- out tripping over my self. Mambos, I’m afraid, the hot ones, the ones that scorch your shoes clear through to your arches, continue to elude me I took my daughter with me to Cuba when she was two years old, the same age I was when my parents left the island for good. Over the years nostalgia clouded my parents’ memories, bitterness the facts. It was impossible to get a true picture of what we had left behind. To me, Cuba was a beautiful daydream, colored by all that might have been but was not. In fact, | had no direet contact with my family on the island until I visited them for the first timeSimple Life v7 at the age of twenty-five. At Christmas I took my daughter for her second visit. My r tives continue to go crazy over her. Her great-grandmother Gloria accuses her of not being a girl at all but a wunequita, a little doll. Her great-uncle Jorge, an industrial engineer, spends hours entertaining her with handkerchiefs he fashions into a gravelly voiced rabbit named Pepino. Her second cousin Estrella repeatedly demands wn beso rico, and my daughter happily complies with a kiss. I know now that I want to go back to Cuba as often as possible. My daughter will grow up knowing the island and her family there. For her, Cuba will not be an abstraction of lost hopes and misplaced longings, but a place of memories, good and bad mingling like any others. Whether my daughter will fall in love with Cuba the way I have, I cannot tell, but the opportunity to do so is one of the great- est gifts I can offer her. Cristina Garcia is the author of Dreaming in Cuban,The Agiicro Sisters, and Monkey Hunting, Her novels have been translated into a dozen lan- guages. She lives in Southern California.