TAMPA, Fla. -- Sandy Garcia steps into her dark garage and flicks on the overhead light. She squeezes past a riding lawn mower and stacks of books and stops at a bulky object covered in white plastic.
She pushes the covering aside. There, coated with dust and chewed by insects, but still as solid as the man who played it, is her father's beloved upright piano. It still has the mirror on the front panel where he left it and a single broken key, like a chipped tooth in an otherwise perfect smile. Garcia taps the keys and the piano twinkles sadly, out of tune.
The mirror piano has stood mostly unused in her Lutz garage since her father, James Edward "Jimmy" Anderson, died in 1988.
Now she has a decision to make.
In a few weeks, a New York piano tuner turned political activist plans to ship 48 pianos from Port Manatee to Cuba. The idea is to buck the U.S. embargo against Cuba and support the island's young musicians, who are rich in talent but lacking in many other things, including decent pianos.
A friend told Garcia about the project, and she has been thinking about it since. Should she give away the piano? It had meant so much to her family. Her father had acquired it years ago in Buffalo, N.Y. He cleaned buses and the floors of auto shops by day and earned extra money playing night gigs in Canada, where black bands were welcome.
Working the two jobs always left her father exhausted, Garcia says. "But when he played" _ she taps her foot and wiggles her fingers across an imaginary keyboard _ "he'd be very animated."
Weekend afternoons at home, Anderson held jam sessions around the piano. He, and sometimes his band, played the music of Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, Ella Fitzgerald. The children would pile on the couch as drums, bass, piano, marimba and sometimes trumpet blasted around them.
"They took up practically all the space in the small living room, so we sat and listened rather than danced around. It was pretty loud and sort of thrilling," Garcia remembers.
Today, Garcia, 62, is a professor of interdisciplinary arts and sciences at the University of South Florida. Her brother, a Fulbright Scholar in music, and sister had been among the first black students accepted at Stanford University. From humble beginnings, where good grades were rewarded with dimes and quarters, the family had come so far.
"Music played a very big role in our lives, and as I think back, I realize what an influence my dad was on all of us," Garcia says.
Can she part with the piano? With most of the family having long since died, the decision rests with her.
Someone has given her a video about the project. She returns to the house and pops it into the VCR.
Her screen fills with images of young Cuban students banging on crumbling pianos. The narration says they practice hours at a time, some having traveled miles by bus or bicycle to get to their lesson.
Watching, Garcia puts her hand to her heart. The students awaken the memory of her father's dedication and sacrifices.
"It's chilling," she says, leaning forward in her chair. "There are so many parallels."
The piano, she decides, must go.
"I just know," she says later, "that some kid is going to be playing this down there. I can just hear it now."
Shipping a dream to Cuba
Ben Treuhaft jumps out of the Ford Explorer in Garcia's driveway.
"Cut the other way," he calls to the driver.
Garcia, away at a conference, left instructions with a neighbor to open the garage door.
"Come back 5 more feet. Stop there!"
The piano tuner heads straight to the mirror piano. He plays some out-of-tune notes.
"Well," he says with a grin. "We need a lot of pianos in Cuba."
Treuhaft, of bulky build and wearing jeans, Birkenstocks and a bandana, is responsible for getting them there.
Treuhaft, 54, calls himself a "red-diaper baby," the son of two prominent leftists from Oakland, Calif. _ a civil rights lawyer and a muckraking British author whose aristocratic family disowned her for marrying a Jewish-American Communist.
Treuhaft bucked the family's expectations by dropping out of St. John's College. Instead of reading 100 Great Books _ "I think I read one" _ he hitchhiked to New York and became a piano tuner.
He first went to Cuba in 1993 to flout the U.S. trade and travel embargo, now four decades old. He was bowled over by the talent of young Cuban students who struggled to make music on pianos that had been chewed apart by termites and salt air.
All of Cuba's students in more than five dozen music schools must play the piano before taking up other instruments, a rule that exacerbates the shortage of pianos. Few families own pianos. They rely on the music schools.
Returning to the States, Treuhaft started plucking pianos from the attics of friends and clients.
Since 1995, Treuhaft's project, Send a Piana to Havana, has shipped 160 used American pianos to Cuba, through Mexico and Canada. The program has lived up to its flamboyant name. Once, Treuhaft was briefly detained in the San Francisco airport while dressed as a wooden piano, trying to argue that he planned to travel to Cuba as a musical instrument, not as a U.S. citizen.
The government threatened him with $10,000 fines for "trading with the enemy." Later, the Treasury Department granted him a humanitarian license through which to send the donated pianos.
The shipment with the mirror piano on it will be his biggest yet _ and the first directly sent from the United States. Forty-eight donated pianos, collected from donors across the country, are scheduled to leave Port Manatee aboard a 110-foot sailboat in a few days.
With his flotilla of ivory keys, Treuhaft wants to barrel through the embargo.
"We are trying to explain to Cuban-Americans (in Florida) that shipping pianos wouldn't be so bad," he says.
Garcia has agreed to donate the piano and her father's marimba.
Under a blistering sun, Treuhaft and a helper heave, push and sweat. They tilt the piano off a dolly onto the trailer behind the Explorer, wrap the marimba in some blankets in the van and close the garage door.
The group makes a slow right turn out of the driveway, and the wobbling mirror piano glides away.
Wrath of the sea
It's late May and the pianos are ready to go, but no one has heard from the ship. It's four days late getting to Port Manatee from St. Maarten in the Caribbean.
After leaving the pianos in storage in Florida, Treuhaft returned to New York and is now preparing to fly to Havana.
"I heard there has been a storm," he says by phone.
When the Avontuur -- a 1917 sailboat with two main masts and nine sails -- finally trudges into Port Manatee, Capt. Paul Wahlen and his three-person crew have a harrowing story to tell.
First, the currents in the Florida Straits turned against them. Wahlen, a 61-year-old Dutch seaman who has been plying the Caribbean for 20 years, tried steering a new course.
Then the hapless ship sailed right into the teeth of a fierce storm. The captain, pleasant by day, descended on his crew, white hair flowing and eyes ablaze.
"On deck, NOW, on deck, NOW!" Wahlen screamed into the cramped sleeping quarters.
The boat needed to change course or it would be torn apart by a crosswind.
"The bow of the ship, where our quarters were, would rear up in a swell, going up as high as 25 feet and then come crashing down," filmmaker Joe Grant, 72, says. He and his cameraman were on board as part of a team making a documentary about the piano program.
"It became so rough, so much pitching and rolling and crashing that (the cook) was convinced we had been washed overboard," Grant remembers.
The captain barked orders as the two men scrambled up and down the rigging while he worked the sails, cussing and running on deck in his Speedo.
As the journey grew from its intended eight days to 12, from 1,300 miles to 1,700 miles, they ran out of food. Grant survived on garlic and onion sandwiches. The others lived on instant coffee, bread and green tea.
"This trip was an education," Grant says, "and a nightmare."
Now the Avontuur rests snugly against a seawall at the port. A yellow Ryder truck sits next to it on land, holding 20 pianos from California. The mirror piano is in storage nearby, where Treuhaft left it.
Capt. Wahlen is sipping a Smalta malt vitamin drink, getting ready to load the pianos with a massive 1.5-ton crane hovering above his head. Beneath him yawns a 9-foot-deep rusty cargo hold, stretching 120 cubic meters. A limp cotton shirt sticks to his thin frame and smudged shorts now cover the Speedo. His face is creased and his calves are round as grapefruit.
Treuhaft approached Wahlen last year while the seaman was unloading lumber from Surinam in Massachusetts. He asked him if he could handle shipping pianos.
"I said, 'Yeah, why not?' That's how it goes." Getting pianos to Cuba sounded like an interesting adventure.
About noon, Wahlen cranks up the crane. Soon it hoists the mirror piano, twirling it round and round. White rays blink off the mirror. Then slowly, the piano dips and disappears.
No dancing allowed
Treuhaft arrives in Cuba one day ahead of the pianos. His girlfriend, Olga Feher, and a volunteer piano tuner are with him.
Outside the one-story airport terminal, the fierce Cuban sun bores down on Treuhaft's head. Smiling government officials push through weeping reunited families to greet him. They usher him and his group past a 1950s cherry-red Oldsmobile and boxy Russian Ladas to an air-conditioned bus.
It jostles across the sprawling city, past bruised-looking buildings, toward Escuela Nacional de Arte (ENA), National School of Art, the base of Treuhaft's piano project.
"The teachers there can teach you to salsa dance," the tour guide on the bus says with a sly grin.
"I'm sorry," Treuhaft wisecracks, "but the State Department says we cannot."
The landscape of the new home country for the mirror piano unfolds before the tuners. Political billboards on buildings and hillsides remind patriots: "We will continue with the strength and ideas of 42 years," reads one, referring to the 1959 revolution.
The bus stops near ENA, which offers rigorous training in music, ballet, theater and dance for children up to age 18. It's one of 64 art schools in Cuba. As with all schools, including college and postgraduate education, tuition is free.
Treuhaft and his group stop in a restaurant near ENA to meet with school and government officials. Rita Olga Martinez, of the Institute for the Friendship of Peoples, the government's liaison with international groups, welcomes everyone with big grins.
"It's brave, challenging the blockade," she says. "We all know that American officials have taken more weighted measures against Cuba."
"Sssssssssssssssss," Treuhaft hisses. The bureaucrats smile and continue.
"So we applaud much more your desire to keep this project," Martinez says.
In the next two weeks, as Treuhaft traverses the countryside tuning pianos, the bureaucrats who seemed so helpful will try to stick him with several thousand dollars in unforeseen fees.
A broken Steinway
The Avontuur reaches Havana a day after Treuhaft. This time around, the crew sails under billowing sails pressed white like pillows against the endless blue sky.
As the ship sails into Havana Bay, the tall hotels give way to colonial facades along the famous Malecon seafront drive. Building colors bleed into one another in vibrant shades of lemon, rose and aquamarine.
The Avontuur docks about 3 p.m. Treuhaft has convinced officials not to store the pianos in musty warehouses. Instead, half of the pianos will be taken to ENA, the other half to a school in Guanabacoa.
About two-dozen men in string T-shirts and caps descend on the ship with their crane. Treuhaft, arriving late, looks nervous as they unload.
"It's a little dicey," he says.
The crane swings the pianos to the ground. A forklift wobbles with them to one of two waiting trucks, at one point dropping a Steinway on its face, cracking its frame but leaving its insides intact.
Now the mirror piano is brought up. It's lowered onto the forklift and carried to the second truck, which will take it to Guanabacoa. After a few more pianos are squeezed in behind it, workers slam the doors and climb inside.
They pull out, leaving behind Treuhaft and the Avontuur in a haze of diesel smoke. After many years, the mirror piano will soon be in the hands of a real musician.
At the music school
In late afternoon, the truck with the mirror piano drives east of the harbor. Plumes of black smoke rise above Havana's main electricity-generating plant and petrochemical factory.
The truck lumbers over railroad tracks, past horse-drawn buggies and bicycles. A steel sign welcomes it to Guanabacoa.
Guanabacoa (gwan-a-ba-CO-a) is a small municipality about 12 miles outside Havana, developed during colonial days as a major landing site for slaves.
A strong Afro-Cuban culture remains. Guanabacoa is the heart of the island's santeria, or saint worship, the fusion of Catholicism with the religion of the West African Yoruba ethnic group.
The truck stops in front of a white stone building. It's the town's music school, Escuela de Musica Guillermo Tomas. Outside, children in the street kick a ball between knee-high posts.
Under a pink sky at dusk, six men start unloading. No crane, no forklift, just muscle.
"Tranquilo, tranquilo, tranquilo," they call. Easy, easy, easy.
They push the mirror piano out, lower it and carry it through the massive brown doors into the empty school. A bust of Jose Marti watches over the entrance. Workers wheel the piano across the tile floors, past a columned courtyard and into a side room with tall ceilings. In the back are rows of drum kits, congas and dark brown guitars.
The school needs this piano, says assistant administrator Ana Glez-Fumes in tank top and shorts, scribbling down brand names and serial numbers. Three hundred students _ ages 8 to 18 _ share fewer than 40 pianos.
Students come to the school at night and on weekends to steal a few hours of practice.
"Seeing" with his ears
For a week the mirror piano sits in storage at the school. In early June, Jorge Luis Garrido, 54, rests his cane on top of it and takes the boards off the front. With smudged fingers, he hits keys and turns a tuning wrench on the pins. He stares up into space, listening.
Garrido is blind, like most of the few piano tuners left in Cuba.
The government held piano-tuning classes in the late 1960s and early 1970s for about 50 blind people, thinking their sense of hearing was especially strong, an issue long debated by scientists. But fewer than 10 are still living. That means Garrido stays busy, working at the various music schools around Havana.
"This piano is very old, the wood is good," Garrido says, two hours into tuning the mirror piano. "When pianos are older, the sound is brilliant."
Garrido cranks the pins and feels his way underneath the piano to realign the levers for the pedals. All he needs to fix the piano, he says tapping his head, is right here.
"For the moment, this piano doesn't need anything," he says. "The piano will last a lifetime."
Brian's gift
The mirror piano will not belong to any single student at the Escuela de Musica Guillermo Tomas. It will belong, instead, to all of the students -- gifted young people for whom music holds the promise of a better life, as it did for Jimmy Anderson and his family.
One of those promising students is Brian Zaldivar Aldama. He's 13 and wears glasses, and his family's fortunes rest squarely on his narrow shoulders.
Brian lives several narrow streets away from the school, on a bustling road with lots of traffic _ trucks, bicycles, polished Buicks and women in Spandex. His house is square and has a tin door.
His mother is Violeta Aldama, 48. His father is a seaman, gone nine months of the year, and a santeria priest. Brian wears the green-yellow beads of the deity Orula that his father left him for protection.
Brian first touched ivory keys at age 5 while visiting a cousin who had a piano. He played all day and had to be pulled off crying when it was time to go home.
"I sat down and played, and I liked the way it sounded," he says on a June weekend afternoon inside the four-room home of high ceilings and flaking walls. "I played on it the whole time. I didn't want to be away from it."
He pestered his mother to go back. She would wake up early to leave the house by 7 a.m. to take Brian to his cousin's house to play.
"I would come back to go to work by 8," says his mother. "I would work all day and go back to get him and then go home."
They did this for two years until she quit her job as an engineer for the Cuban air force. She hoped that if he practiced enough, he would pass the test required to gain entrance into a music school. Students who graduate from the schools can get good jobs as teachers, work with the national symphony or even tour outside of Cuba.
Later, Aldama and her husband bought Brian a used piano for $250 -- about two years' salary.
"We sold our refrigerator to buy it," she says. "Since there weren't enough pianos at the school and I wanted him to practice, we sold it."
They later saved up for a smaller icebox.
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