I don’t add that he slipped me crisp euros “to buy some new clothes since you didn’t pack an overnight bag.” That something about seducing a man into offering his wallet turned me on. That it didn’t even matter who lay beneath me—it was my own smell and heat and indecency that drove me to orgasm. No, I don’t say that I fantasized myself a full-blown jinetera.

Not that it could be my life: the fantasy would end. My skin is light, hair stringy straight. In Cuba, a white jinetera selling sex goes hungry. It’s the very young, very dark-skinned women these men are after. Everyone knows this. There are jokes even: they didn’t come here to see themselves.

No, I wouldn’t last as a jinetera. What I need is to leave, earn some money, and come back. Buy stuff to sell here. I don’t know.

The German, the anomaly, is in the driver’s seat waiting when we get back.

“I was about to go looking for you two with a machete,” he quips.

We finish our sandwiches while he drives. We sit silently, the three of us, and watch the rural townships go by. And when we reach a small town just miles from Cárdenas, El Alemán announces that he wants to buy liquor “before the expensive tourist places.”

The three of us are a spectacle in this town of maybe two hundred. We walk the broken sidewalks and whole families rush to the windows of their homes to look us over. At the corner cafetería, the shelves are bare. This isn’t La Habana with plenty of food and imports. The people here eye us carefully, and I can see them wondering what we have to offer. I’d be doing the same.

“Pinga, qué mierda,” a man in a grubby undershirt says from a stool before the open-air counter. He’s huddled over a small antenna television tuned to baseball in black and white, slamming its side.

“I haven’t seen one of those in decades!” El Alemán says, turning to me with elation. I smile politely.

On the dirt road that traverses the main street of the town, a group of little girls stops jumping rope to look at us.

“He a Yuma?” one girl asks me. She can pick out the Cuban by sight. She’s tiny but imposing, with a husky voice.

“Shut up, Adalisa,” an older girl cautions. She holds the long telephone cord they’ve been using as a jump rope in one hand and places the other on her hip full of attitude.

“Where’s the nearest store?” I ask the one called Adalisa.

“For what?” she responds, looking Jeanette up and down. A man passes on a bicycle and splatters my leg with mud.

“Rum.”

She points toward the end of the block.