All my money was stolen on Saturday. I’m still a bit too upset to properly state just the facts, but I’ll try. A week ago, my daughter had wired me money to the local Western Union office in Matanzas (there are 2) which was automatically converted into convertible Cuban pesos (CUCs). This is by far the best way to exchange US currency into Cuban currency, because the exchange rate is nearly 1:1 minus a Western Union fee of $80 per transaction. I had left most of the money inside of a zippered colorful Guatemalan fabric wallet, which I had placed on a wall-mounted shelf where I kept everything other than clothes: all of my books, folders, teaching materials, jewelry, mosquito repellant, etc. The outside door of the apartment was bashed in hard enough to completely break off the entire lock and chain, which were on the floor behind it. The break-in took place in broad daylight, sometime between 11 a.m. and 4:00 p.m.
The Cuban police are a work of art. This would make for a great new CSI- Special Edition: Cuba episode. They were finger-printing and taking photographs and interviewing me until 11 p.m. and were back again today for another hour or so, with the prosecuting as well as the defending attorneys already assigned to the case. The first thing the district attorney wanted to establish is how long I planned to be in Cuba, for when the case comes to trial. The police detective who interviewed me and wrote out the entire report longhand for me to sign on Saturday night also returned today and I kept staring at him because he reminded me of someone. The four of them were invited to join us for lunch in the Dining Hall, and after one more look at him I had it figured out. I asked him whether he had ever heard of the American comedian Bill Cosby. He had! I told him he looked almost exactly like the actor who played the role of the teenage son in the long-running television series titled “The Bill Cosby Show.” I asked them if they had internet access and they did, and told them to Google it to find a photo of the actor, whose first name I think is Jerome.
Who can tell me the full name of this actor and how old he is today? Send me a photo, please, so that I can show it to the police team. They will be thrilled.
Tuesday, November 1, 2011: Yesterday I moved all of my belongings for the second time since the break-in, into another much larger, much more secure, and more modern apartment. It is the apartment that the Seminary has been using to house the specially-invited foreign guests for short periods of time. It is quadruple the size of my first apartment. Most of the walls have fresh paint, a color of which my daughters might approve, i.e. not ‘eggshell’. The floors are all 12”x12” ceramic tile, white and beige. The bathroom’s walls and shower stall have square foot blue ceramic tiles, an American showerhead with good 2nd floor water pressure, a pedestal sink and mirror, and a toilet with a push-button flush on the top of the tank which actually works (most of the others around the seminary do not) and with minimal rust stains in the bowl. The bedroom has a nice double bed and a large air-conditioning unit. The living room is furnished with a typically Cuban matching set of 2 rockers and 2 straight-back chairs, with woven seats and backs, and glass-topped coffee table. The eat-in kitchen has another carved-wood table and set of 4 chairs, which I am using as my desk for now as I type this. There is a microwave! The refrigerator is a good size but only the top freezer part is working and I have to keep the bottom part slightly open so that it doesn’t roar. There is one electrician who comes to work at the Seminary one day a week, and he has a huge backlog of broken fans, air-conditioners, rice-makers, washing machines, etc. to fix. Luckily, the only thing I have to cook and refrigerate is my own homemade cat food. And the dining room ladies love me because when they asked me, I had antacid tablets and Ibuprofen and ballpoint pens to give them, and the I showed them the baby books Ashley made of the grandbabies, so they give me lots of leftovers to feed Semi. Oh—and the Dining Room Lady in Charge, who is called “Mamita” by nearly everyone, told me that her real name is “Julia” and she hates it. So I took my laptop over to the Seminary Kitchen and played John Lennon’s song for her, and the rest of the kitchen staff gathered around to listen, and since John Lennon is an iconic martyr only second to Che Guevara in this country, you can imagine the outcome. She now proudly answers me when I call her Julia, British pronunciation, of course.
I am told that this will be my home until the end of my stay at the seminary. My new little Cuban Siamese kitten loves the new place. There is a brick-floored outdoor laundry patio off the kitchen with an old-fashioned double-sink. I just found enough plastic-covered old wire to attach to the aluminum slats in the windows diagonally crossing between the living room and the kitchen, to create a clothesline. I feed the cat on this outdoor porch, because of the ants. (One drop of anything edible, liquid or solid, on any surface anywhere, will immediately attract literally hundreds of little ants.)
Last night Semi caught something that looked like a cross between a flattened slug, a huge leech, and an enormous cockroach. He brought it inside to play with it. I took one look at the thing and picked him up with it in his mouth and put them both outside. By the time I came back with a piece of toilet paper in hand to flush the thing away, it looked like Semi (short for Seminario) was literally licking his lips. When I described the disgusting creature to my neighbors, I was told that it was todo muslo “all muscle, highly rich in protein, a healthy treat for a cat.”
Also last night, I and several others experienced the worst thunder and lightning storm of our lives. It lasted for hours and was followed by torrential downpours. Today it was all that people were talking about. We are more susceptible to lightning and thunder because of our location at the highest point of land, combined with a lot of very tall trees. At my house in Haverford, I would grab a daughter or a cat and run out to enjoy any summer or winter storm from the comfort of a porch swing and the relative safety of a covered balcony. Last night, I grabbed the cat for dear life.
By the way, Semi knows who broke down the door and robbed my money. I had left him behind to nap. A friend and I went walking down to the farmers’ market over the bridge at the bottom end of our street, then alongside the river San Juan to the Matanzas Bay. We walked along the bay to eat lunch at a state-owned restaurant (it takes moneda nacional, Cuban pesos, and is thus affordable even for a student) overlooking a small half-moon beach.
The Rector (who is the CEO of the Seminary) had been traveling abroad during the robbery, but upon his return he immediately called me to his office to discuss the robbery. The Seminary does not carry insurance, but he offered to try to raise enough to reimburse me. Instead, we recalculated the sum totals of expenditures directly related to my stay, such as monthly fees for the religious visa, transportation to and from the airport in Havana, and paying back the deacon for the money he had loaned me to hold me until my daughter wired me more money via Western Union. The totals were close enough to one another and we agreed that it was a fair arrangement. The Rector feels that even if the police catch the thief, the money will have been spent. The police told me that the thief has to pay the money back a bit at a time.
I am thankful that all that was taken from my apartment was cash. My laptop was untouched right on the desk; my digital camera right next to it. The case with my jewelry had been opened but nothing was taken. The thief took my Spanish-English dictionary and my bible off the desk and placed them on the floor behind the broken door so that it would not be entirely open. So what I saw when I returned to little apartment was my Semi sitting, quite calmly, right inside the opening of the broken door left slightly ajar.
My life is just now beginning to get back to whatever was starting to become normal before the break-in. The next episode will have to do a bit of back-tracking so that I can finish telling you about the Cuban Pony Express, the 3 days spent at our grandmother’s house on the beach in Varadero with my cousin Alicia, the visit from my 4 students so that we could go ‘swimming in English,’ and last week’s class where I decided to show them the documentary film made in 1992 about my aunt. We discussed their reaction to the film in today’s class. Tomorrow they turn in something in writing. Thus far, since I’m making up the course as we go along, the emphasis has been mostly on verbal communication. The end of the trimester is already on November 25th and I have yet to give them a grade for any written work.
I apologize for the mass-mailing, but if you write to me individually, I will of course email you back in private.
With love from Cuba
Elisa
