Cuba and the Night Read Online Free

people love it. It’s almost like they want to be conned: they want to be wooed with false promises and poems and pretty lies. They want to be given a line, to be told that they’ll be held till the rivers run dry and the moon falls from the sky.”
    “I should have thought they’d much rather have bread.”
    “Sure. But that’s the beauty of it. Making them forget the things they haven’t got. It’s like, who thinks of food and money when he’s on the beach with his girl? Who worries about human rights when he’s singing a love song on his guitar? Who gives a fuck about anything when he’s in the middle of making love?”
    I thought about what I wasn’t talking about, and all the false promises and lies I’d seen in my time. But that was beside the point, I thought: you could help people most by not giving them the burden of your heart.
    “Anyway, if you want to get a feel for this place, you should go to Nicaragua sometime. The whole country’s just like this huge black hole. The main cathedral’s just this big gutted place with crows rooting around in the grass. The capital’s nothing but an empty field. But you read the newspapers, and you think it’s the last frontier of the cold war. East against West, Marx against Ford. And the truth of it is, the whole place is just a few
campesinos
with shy smiles, sitting around in empty huts and asking how Dennis Martinez is doing with the Expos. That’s the craziness. The contras want dollars so they can get cable TV. The Sandinistas want cable TV so they can learn how to get more dollars. And all the while the people are going down by the handful.”
    I was talking too much, I knew, saying things I wouldn’t believe in the morning. But Hugo was more generous—or polite—than I’d imagined: he just sat there, taking it all in.
    “So it sounds as if you’re on a mission against politics.”
    “Oh, I don’t know. Anyway, politics is kind of beside the point when half the people round you are starving. Listen”—I stopped for a moment, and looked at him—“I’ve been talking your ear off. I’m sorry, my friend. You get so whenever you see someone who speaks English, you go crazy.”
    “That’s fine,” he said. “I know the feeling. Still, think I might be shoving off now.”
    “Okay, you shove off, then. I’ll see you later.”
    “I do hope so,” he said, and left me to my drink.
    I n the morning, I felt better: hell at first, but at least Hugo had helped wipe out the memory of the girl and the hotel. That was the great thing about hell: it made it good to be in purgatory again. And the other thing was that it was always good to shoot in Cuba: it must have been the easiest place in the world to make pictures. You just got off the plane, and you were in the thick of it. One guy was making some girl, and the others were trying to swim out, and a woman was weeping for her son in New Jersey, and the guy over there was trying to sell you a pigeon. Everywhere you turned, everything was happening, and everything that was happening took you away from all abstraction and into something human, where answers weren’t so easy.
    I guess the other reason I was happy to be here, if I stopped to think about it, was that it was good to be out of myself for a while. After the separation, things hadn’t been too easy on the home front. I figured the thing to do now was just concentrate on the pictures. Play the part of the photographer that everyone expected; focus on the job and work out the angles. Live by the book for a while. If I had to choose between a partner and a job, it made more sense to choose the one I could make a living out of.
    Besides, I knew it was better not to get too hooked on things. That could only lead to heartbreak. When I was a kid, I’d believedin everything around. Politics and revolution and even love eternal. But after the breakups and the wars and the long nights in Taipei, I’d learned a safer rule of thumb: people let you