The Best American Travel Writing 2013 Read Online Free PDF

relations at even the microscopic level, find themselves up against the Florida community, and those are large, powerful, and arguably insane forces.
    My wife’s people got out in the early 1960s, so they’ve been in the States for half a century. Lax regulations, strict regulations. It’s all a oneness. They take, I suppose, a Cuban view, that matters on the island are perpetually and in some way inherently screwed up and have been forever.
    There was a moment in the taxi, a little nothing exchange but so densely underlayered with meaning that if you could pass it through an extracting machine, you would understand a lot about how it is between Cubans and Cuban Americans. The driver, a guy who said he grew up in Havana, told a tiny lie, or a half lie. The fact that you can’t even say whether it was a lie or not is significant. My wife had asked him to explain for me the way it works with Cuba’s two separate currencies, CUPs and CUCs, Cuban pesos and convertible pesos (also called
chavitos
or simply dollars). When I was last there, we didn’t use either of these, though both existed. We paid for everything in actual, green U.S. dollars. That’s what people wanted. There were stores in which you could pay in only dollars. But in 2004, Castro decided—partly as a gesture of contempt for the U.S. embargo—that he would abolish the use of U.S. dollars on the island and enforce the use of CUCs, pegged to the U.S. dollar but distinct from it. This coexisted alongside the original currency, which would remain pegged to the spirit of the revolution. For obvious reasons, the actual Cuban peso is worth much less than the other, dollar-equivalent Cuban peso, something on the order of 25 to 1. But the driver said simply, “No, they are equal.”
    “Really?” my wife said. “No . . . that can’t be.”
    He insisted that there was no difference between the relative values of the currencies. They were the same.
    He knew that this was wrong. He probably could have told you the exchange rates from that morning. But he also knew that it had a rightness in it. For official accounting purposes, the two currencies are considered equivalent. Their respective values might fluctuate on a given day, of course, but it couldn’t be said that the CUP was
worth less
than the CUC. That’s partly what he meant. He also meant that if you’re going to fly to Cuba from Miami and rub it in my face that our money is worth one twenty-fifth of yours, I’m gonna feed you some hilarious communist math and see how you like it. Cubans call it
la doble moral
. Meaning, different situations call forth different ethical codes. He wasn’t being deceptive. He was saying what my wife forced him to say. She had been a bit breezy, it seemed, in mentioning the unevenness between the currencies, which is the kind of absurdity her family would laugh at affectionately in the kitchen. But they don’t have to suffer it anymore. And he was partly reminding her of that, fencing her off from a conversation in which Cubans would joke together about the notion that the CUP and the CUC had even the slightest connection to each other. That was for them, that laughter. So, a very complex statement, that not-quite-lie. After it, he was totally friendly and dropped us at one of the Cuban-owned tourist hotels on the edge of Havana.
    People walking by on the street didn’t seem as skinny. That was the most instantly perceptible difference, if you were seeing Raul’s Cuba for the first time. They weren’t sickly looking before, but under Fidel you noticed more the way men’s shirts flapped about them and the knobbiness of women’s knees. Now people were filling out their clothes. The island’s overall dietary level had apparently gone up a tick. (One possible factor involved was an increase in the amount of food coming over from the United States. Unknown to most people, we do sell a lot of agricultural products to Cuba, second only in value to Brazil. Under a law