The camello is mostly gone now. The fleet was retired more than a decade ago and what survived was reassigned to provincial routes that I never rode. But when I think about what living in Havana actually felt like in my twenties, the camello is what I think about first. The shape of it — the hump in the middle that gave it the name — and the smell inside it on a hot afternoon, and the way you learned to stand with your shoulders angled at a particular degree so that nobody's elbow ended up in your kidneys for the forty-five minutes it took to cross the city.
I lived in El Vedado the year I started taking the camello regularly. My grandmother's apartment, the one I still keep, was a fifteen-minute walk from the Malecón and a thirty-minute walk from the university. I was studying then. I had a small grant from a foundation that paid for almost nothing, and I spent the money I didn't need for books on the things I cared about more — the films at the Yara, the occasional concert at the Casa de la Música, dinner at a paladar in Centro that a friend's mother ran out of her own dining room.
The camello connected me to the parts of the city where my friends lived. Cerro, where the journalist I was sort of seeing rented a room with three other people. La Lisa, where my cousin had moved after her divorce. The bus would arrive when it arrived. There was no schedule, or rather there was a schedule that everyone knew was theoretical. You walked to the stop and you waited and the wait could be ten minutes or it could be an hour and a half. There was no way to know. There was nothing to do but stand there and wait with everyone else who was also waiting.
What you actually did while waiting
I think about this now, in Miami, where my phone is in my hand approximately every eight minutes and where the bus that comes by my mother's house has a digital sign telling you exactly how many minutes until the next one. I am embarrassed by how much that has changed me. I used to be able to stand at a bus stop in Havana for forty minutes without checking anything because there was nothing to check.
What you did was you talked to the person next to you. Not always. Sometimes you stood there with your headphones on and your eyes closed and everyone else respected that. But often you talked. The woman with the bag of mangoes who was going to her daughter's in Marianao. The man in the guayabera who had retired from teaching mathematics and who still walked over to the school three afternoons a week to help the kids who were struggling with fractions. The students from the music conservatory who were going home for the weekend and who had brought their instruments and who occasionally, when they got bored enough, would unpack them on the corner and play.
I learned more about Havana during those waits than I learned in any class. I learned which neighborhoods were tense with which other neighborhoods. I learned the gossip about which singer was sleeping with which dancer. I learned the price of cooking oil at three different stores and which store had it that week. I learned the names of approximately eighty people whose names I still remember and who I have not seen in a decade and who, if I saw them tomorrow at the corner of L and Twenty-Third, would recognize me and ask after my grandmother.
The thing about patience
What I think the camello actually taught me was that patience is not a quality I was born with. Patience is a thing that the absence of alternatives produces in you. I was not patient in any deep way during those years. I was bored, mostly, and irritable, often, and I had places I needed to be and the bus was not coming. But the boredom and the irritation had nowhere to go. There was no faster option. The taxi I could not afford. The bicycle I had not yet bought. So I stood at the stop and I waited and the boredom turned, over months and then years, into something that resembled patience but was probably closer to acceptance.
The first year I was back in Miami I noticed I had lost it. Not all of it. But enough that I would stand at the crosswalk at Bird Road and Coral Way and tap my foot when the light didn't change fast enough, and I would catch myself doing it and feel like a foreigner in my own body. The Yanet who had waited an hour and twenty minutes for the L4 with a bag of groceries melting in her lap had become a Yanet who could not abide a thirty-second crosswalk.
What I have tried to do, in small ways, is to recover some of what the camello gave me. I leave my phone in the kitchen sometimes. I take the long way to the supermarket. I sit on the porch in the evening and do nothing. I don't know whether any of it works. I know that when I go back to Havana — which I will, in three weeks, for my grandmother's birthday — the patience returns within forty-eight hours, because there is no choice, because the internet is uneven and the lines at the bank are real and the taxi you ordered may or may not arrive.
What the city is now
The camello is gone. The transport situation is better than it was when I started taking the bus and worse than it was a few years later, and the swing between better and worse is one of the things you live with. The shared taxis — the almendrones, the old American cars that follow set routes — have absorbed much of the demand that the buses don't meet. The yellow vans cover more of the city than they used to. The bicycle culture has expanded.
What has not changed, as far as I can tell, is the waiting. You wait for the almendrón that has the route you want. You wait for the bank to open. You wait for the friend who said she'd come by at six and who arrives at eight-thirty without apology because the bus did not come and there was nothing she could do. The waiting is still the structure of the day, even though the specific things you are waiting for have changed.
I think about this when people in Miami ask me what it was like to live there. The honest answer is that it was a lot of waiting, and that the waiting was not, in the way it sounds, an absence of life. The waiting was where most of the life happened. The conversations at the bus stop. The slow afternoon in the panadería line. The hours sitting on the seawall because the friend you were going to meet was running late and there was nothing else to do but watch the water. That was Havana. That was a lot of what living there meant. I do not know how to describe it without sounding like I am romanticizing it, because the inconvenience was real and the exhaustion was real. But the waiting was also where the city was.
I am writing this in Miami on a Tuesday morning. In about ten days I will be back in El Vedado, in the apartment with the high ceilings and the broken air conditioner, and I will walk down to the corner to wait for someone or something, and I will stand there, and I will, slowly, remember.
