The Best American Travel Writing 2013 Read Online Free PDF Page B

that Bill Clinton squeaked through on his way out, Cuba purchases food and medicine from us on a cash basis, meaning, bizarrely, that a lot of the chicken in the
arroz con pollo
consumed on the island by Canadian tourists is raised in the Midwest—the embargo/blockade has always been messy when you lean in close.)
     
    The idea was to spend some days traveling around, before going to see family. Once you see them, it gets emotional, and after that, sightseeing feels wrong somehow.
    The ladies wanted to visit the Havana aquarium before it closed for the day—my wife went there when she was younger—so they took off. The hostility of the hotel workers was to be experienced. I started making up reasons to approach them, just to provoke it and make sure I hadn’t imagined it. My reflex during an odd social interaction is to assume fault, and this can create its own distortion, making it hard to see what the other person is doing, but no, these people were being fantastically unfriendly. It was one of the big, newly built Gaviota hotels—Gaviota is the quasi-official Cuban tourist organization (financed in part by transnational investment but controlled by a prominent Cuban general). Loosely speaking, these men and women worked for the government. It’s not that they were incompetent or mean; they just had zero motivation to be nice to tourists or in a hurry to do anything for them, and for me, after years immersed in a may-I-pour-you-more-sweet-tea culture, the contrast held a fascination. In a way it was refreshing to see people so emphatically not kowtowing to rich white tourists, even if that was you, but of course this feeling was not to be trusted: you liked their unfriendliness because they seemed more authentically anticapitalist that way. Especially wild was a woman about my age at the main reception desk, who evidently had to handle all the complaints about the
wee-fee
service in the lobby. She looked at you dead level and half-smiling when you approached as if in her mind she were already pushing in the blade. At the desk, they sold little scratch cards, with passwords on them, that looked like lottery tickets and in hindsight had much else in common with lottery tickets. But there were no cards that day. “They are in the city,” she said—and in my mind I saw them being unloaded from small boats at night—“but we don’t have them here.” I was advised to try the hotel next door, a few minutes’ walk—another, equally massive, equally generically pan-Latin-style Gaviota hotel. Would a card I bought there work here? “I hope so,” she said, still doing that smile. “But,” I said, “we made reservations at this hotel specifically because you advertised the
wee-fee
service.” A total lie. We didn’t need it. I wanted to see if she would crack. She shook her head so slowly with exaggeratedly sincere sorrow, like a long-suffering teacher forced to tell her most obnoxious pupil he had failed. “I understand,” she murmured, and went back to work.
    Partly what had been clashing were our respective ideas about the role of an individual in solving a crisis. In the United States, we all go around so empowered-feeling all the time, and when you travel you feel it, a sense of hypertrophy, the thing that makes us look like giant babies to the Europeans. Bring us our soda refills or we’ll get them ourselves! The sheer notion that I thought she herself could
do
anything about the
wee-fee
, about getting the cards here faster, was probably genuinely amusing to her. Did I not think she wanted the
wee-fee
fixed? Did I think she actually liked standing there answering the exact same question from a never-ending line of childishly outraged foreigners?
    At the neighboring hotel, they did have cards. But their
wee-fee
was down. “It’s not working?” I asked the man. “It’s working,” he said, “but not right now.” The whole island’s Internet runs through three unpredictable satellites, although I had