La Ruta

The heat was murderous. But that morning, the entire canine species of Havana seemed ready to copulate. I saw a dog huddled against an arch-way on Paseo del Prado, penis protruding, red as an American fire hydrant. For a moment, he stared at me as if requesting mercy. In a shaded arcade farther down the avenue, a bitch in heat stood, legs wide, her ass an open doorway. Three mutts of varying sizes surrounded her, taking turns trying to climb onto her back as she growled and showed her teeth, until the largest of the dogs settled onto her spine, biting at the fat of her neck, and she cried, paralyzed. I and a few other strangers paused under the balustrades to observe the act, remembering a time when my mother would have covered my young eyes with her hands and dragged me away with her quick steps, but as quickly as it had started between the beasts, it was over.

I stopped on the median where the permuta crowds gather, looking to make a home trade, to see about registering our place. It could take years to find someone who wants to swap apartments—maybe sooner if we were lucky and found a three- or four-way exchange. But Florencia insisted nobody would want to move into a cavernous relic with tilted walls on a fourth floor of Centro Habana. If it's not good for us anymore, why would it be good for someone else?

The permuta market was a mess of shouts and tangles, brokers taking notes on who had what property in their possession and who wanted to move where. I tried to get in on the chaos, telling as many people as I could that I had a one-bedroom in decent condition to trade, with electricity and running water, but I could see I'd need a few hours for this endeavor, time I didn't have when the morning rush had already passed and I'd not even begun my work on la ruta.

I walked back to my taxi. It's never been mine, but I drive it all day so I can't help but claim ownership over that Frankenstein: a 1950 Chevrolet shell with a 2009 Hyundai engine and Kia parts, painted matte black with plasticized seats until my cousin gets the money to replace them with real leather. It's his car, you see. Bought with a decade's salary from working in the machine rooms of oil rigs from Mexico to Brazil, Trinidad to Venezuela, ten months at a time. It was a dusty carcass when he purchased it from a junk collector in Boyeros. You'll never save that piece of tin, the guy warned my cousin even though he was used to the resurrection of every kind of condemned machinery. It took years of investment and mechanical experimentation by some of the most experienced machinists of Havana. I drove a delivery truck in those years, but my cousin told me to have faith. His almendrón would be ready one day—next year, he'd say, or maybe the year after—and he'd hire me to be a real cash-collecting taxi driver.

Now my cousin sits in his house in Nuevo Vedado all day, enjoying the air conditioning he recently had installed, playing dominó with his neighbors, watching dvds pirated through his Mexican connections, and going to bars at night in search of a girlfriend. I drive his almendrón, up and down las rutas, along avenues from Marianao to Regla and Bejucal, giving my cousin his daily cut of 30 cuc, which I earn in seven or eight hours on the road. What I earn beyond that, I get to keep.

After I left the permuta crowd, I paid the parqueador his chavitos for minding the car. He wanted to know how long and how much the restoration took—everybody wants to know what it cost to get our Frankie running, Cubans and tourists alike. I told him six or seven years, and ten thousand dollars. He let out a low whistle.

"For ten...