My first memory of the Cienfuegos Yacht Club, the one that
actually meets, not this building, is a mildy happy one. I was a bored tween and my Mom let me
wear cream eyeshadow. This was a Big Deal, and so I took myself very seriously,
trying hard to act old, to act dignified, to act Yacht Club-ish.
The problem was that the Cienfuegos Yacht Club wasn’t in
Cienfuegos, it was in Miami.
And instead of meeting in a sunbleached building
surrounded by boats, it met a wide boxes of hotel convention room, filled with
brightly dressed people speaking Spanish one or two notches louder they
normally would.
Compared to that, the building in Cuba – our next stop
through Cienfuegos -- seems strangely quiet.
The steps to climb in front of the entrance seem more
ceremonial than functional. I imagine in another life I might have posed here next
to a starched white-tuxedoed date on a Very Formal occasion.
My Mom, our cousin and I walk through the entry.
There they
are, the trophies.
There are the pictures.
There is the history.
I thought it
would be gone.
It’s still here.
The
rumors were wrong.
If I go back to the US, back to Abuelo, with nothing more than this news and this alone I know he will be pleased.
We walk through the main room and out to the back, where the
boats would be. I admire the brave white architecture, I take in the view.
We walk to what
once was a bar area which is now a tourist buffet. The staff has just arrived and are arranging themselves for
a meeting, but they let us in to look around.
Then we walk along the buffet, where bilingual signs explain
the food. The translation for shrimp became shrimps; one of the signs says
“meat bowls” instead of “meatballs.” A tiny bit of me wants to tell them,
correct them, fix this place that is so important to us, but then again, its
just a building.
I don’t feel the pull to find stories here, not today, like I did in the other
places, and besides that, I’m getting thirsty again.
