Cuba on the Verge

by Leila Guerriero

  Ripped, worn, mended, everyone-and-their-mother’s blúmers: pieces of nylon with tattered, discolored, hot, shapeless elastic bands. This garment was unquestionably the property of a girl who had no relatives abroad. Her parents lived solely off their wages. They were workers, farmers, steadfast revolutionaries, austere souls who had little to give their children.

  Socialist passion-killing blúmers: cotton underpants, always enormous, decidedly unsexy, covered with little Misha bears and blue or purple flowers against a white background, whimsical snowflakes, smiling matryoshka dolls. This girl’s family certainly included a student in the old Soviet Union or a diplomat in the former socialist bloc, or maybe a sister married to a German, someone the state had classified as a “foreign technical expert.”

  New, brightly colored lace blúmers, or the famous semanarios, “weeklies,” stamped with the day of the week you should wear them: it was wise to start bidding this co-student farewell; she was certain to desert the island soon. She’d have a grandmother, an aunt, or a sister in Miami or Madrid, someone who selected sexy garments at a distance in order to “save” the teenage girl from crude Soviet aesthetics. She always loaned us hers so that we could go out with our latest boyfriend. Where might she be living today? How many girls lost their virginity in those borrowed blúmers?

  A philosophy of scarcity was written in our dorm bunks, a narrative that cast prudery aside and took up herd mentality as an instrument of resistance. Many of our novels are clearly rooted in this state of mind.

  Daughter of a humble leftist intellectual, I went commando during my teenage years. Dorm culture, the upper bunk at boarding school, is a privileged place for a writer, and the post-battle landscape is a true subgenre of literaCuba: stark autofiction. The self stripped bare.

  3.

  WOMEN’S LIBERATION IN CUBA

  My mother used to say that women’s liberation wasn’t a slogan; it meant having an electric washing machine and a can of food so she could conjure up a meal after her long workdays at the radio station. Women’s liberation, in her case, involved finding practical ways to make her life easier so she could keep tending to social activities and to me. She’d spend twelve hours at a stretch in the broadcast car, waiting to transmit the arrival of various socialist-bloc presidents: Erich Honecker, Nicolae Ceauşescu, Leonid Ilyich Brezhnev. It all made her nervous—the ideological pressures, the security measures, the crowds. And when she returned home, what was awaiting her there? A small child, nothing or almost nothing to cook with, a pile of dirty laundry, dishes to wash, and no detergent.

  While revolutionary heroines Haydée Santamaría and Celia Sánchez were indisputably popular among and beloved by the Cuban people, they always maintained a certain political discretion that allowed them to work on their own projects in the background, without affecting the male leaders at center stage.

  Today, however, things have changed. Confrontations between women and the police are hardly uncommon. Women want to march; the police obstruct their demonstrations. The Ladies in White, for instance, demand the right to march peacefully for the release of brothers or husbands serving time as political prisoners, and they are frequently suppressed. There are female bloggers in Cuba, too, who write freely about their realities. Cuban women are gradually opening their own businesses, deserting the so-called state sector, seeking their autonomy, defending it from the obstacles of power.

  My mother died young, but there are questions I wish I could have asked her: Could all of this be part of a new women’s liberation movement? Will we have a female Cuban president someday? That said, and despite the “macho Leninism” of our leaders, women after 1959 started distancing themselves from the traditional domestic model—devotedly throwing themselves into revolutionary tasks as the family shifted into second or third place—and countless laws were passed to guarantee equality for women. For example, few countries have a longer mandatory maternity leave than Cuba: here it starts during pregnancy, at thirty-four weeks, with eighteen more weeks of paid leave after childbirth. Later, if they wish to, mothers can opt for an even longer leave period, up to a year, but receiving only 60 percent of their typical salary. In addition, divorce is a swift process in Cuba, allowing people an easy exit.

  Not all such developments are the fruits of the revolutionary saga. An abortion law, for instance, has existed in Cuba since 1936. Back then, a woman could have an abortion if her pregnancy resulted from rape or endangered her health. Later, in the early revolutionary years, this right was gradually expanded. Indeed, my generation now views abortion as a means of contraception. Actual contraceptives grew scarcer and scarcer, while promiscuity, overcrowding, troop mobilizations, and economic deprivation meant that the rate of undesired pregnancy rose considerably on the island.

  Monsignor Antonio Rodríguez, dean of the Seminario de San Carlos y San Ambrosio, a Jesuit school, explains that the tolerant attitude toward abortion shouldn’t be seen as a phenomenon caused by the Communist Revolution of 1959: “Catholicism in Cuba was never deeply rooted; it has always been a minority religion. People before the Revolution believed that women should be able to abort.”

  Perhaps this is why the freedoms introduced by the revolutionary government were so swiftly adopted by most Cubans—and why social changes were assumed so naturally, without blame or resentment or surveillance, by a church that was increasingly fading into socialist society. Going to church was seen as a betrayal, but getting a curettage abortion was considered a routine medical procedure. A Cuban woman can have a curettage performed or undergo menstrual regulation and continue on to school or work without being instilled with the idea that she has committed a physically or emotionally traumatic act. Getting a curettage done in Cuba is much more common than going to the dentist. Every neighborhood outpatient clinic has a modern menstrual regulation facility. In this sense, I can say that Cuba is the country with the highest number of legal pregnancy interruptions in the world. When women go for a checkup and a pregnancy is detected, the doctor always asks the same question: “Are you going to leave it in or take it out?” It’s usually the second option, and we don’t always inform the men or let them participate in this process. We’re the ones who decide.

  However, beyond the law and whatever empowerment it might bring, the island is full of women who must face life alone. One in every five Cuban women is abandoned due to political or economic exile. One in three marriages or consensual unions ends within five years. And Cuban women, domestically speaking, are the ones who negotiate between reality and fantasy in order to survive: we all know that a child in Cuba can’t live on just forty Cuban pesos (less than two American dollars) a month. But that’s what divorced fathers legally contribute to mothers who hold custody of their children.

  As for me, I’ve been censored in my country for describing women’s realities. This means that I’ve published very little of my work in Cuba. Every time I finish a book, I think of the other female poets and novelists who are restricted by this dense editorial silence. And then I hope for the best and send my work to publishers or media sources in the rest of the world, thinking, every time, Will something happen to me in Cuba because I’ve written and published this text?

  4.

  BETWEEN FIDEL AND A NAKED WOMAN

  Where did Fidel live? Who were his female companions, his partners, during the fifty-seven years of his rule? What are his children like?

  Do heroes and martyrs have families, marry, divorce, behave like human beings?

  The only physical observations I’ve read of two important figures in the Cuban Revolution, the only comments on the size, gestures, and clothing styles of Fidel himself and of Celia Sánchez, I found in an issue of the magazine Bohemia, while researching my novel Nunca fui primera dama. Ironically, the text was written by the American actor Errol Flynn after visiting Fidel’s top-secret hideout in the Sierra Maestra, the nest Celia Sánchez equipped for the two of them.

  The subject of Fidel’s intimacy is entirely seale
d off. The details of his personal life have been protected to the point of total mystery, his connection to Celia Sánchez even more so. Their habits and rituals, as well as her conduct in the Comandante’s presence, are little known. Here is Flynn’s description of his encounter:

  ME AND CASTRO

  by Errol Flynn

  [Fidel] placed his ear against the tiny speaker of a radio receiver. Lying on a table, less than half a meter away from him, was a Belgian revolver: a dreadful-looking weapon. For a moment, he paid no attention to us, and then his eyes scanned the room. It was medium-sized, lightly furnished, with the appearance of something set up in haste, giving the impression of constant bustle, of people coming in and going out every minute. Celia Sánchez had a pink orchid pinned to her right shoulder. I held out my hand to her and lowered my eyes to the height of her waist. Hung there from her thin silhouette was a .32-caliber revolver.

  My slight unease didn’t prevent my clinical Hollywood eye from taking action. I instantly noticed that she wasn’t built like most Cuban women; she was slender. I looked at her beautifully formed body. I’d calculate her measurements at 36-24-35—not those of the average Cuban woman. Very dark hair, brown skin, and luminous eyes that never missed a single detail, that missed nothing at all, constantly returning to the Comandante. Once the transmission was over, Castro lifted his head, saw us, and stood.

  He is more or less my height; that is, six-foot and half an inch tall. There is a grace and simplicity in his movements and a humility in his manners that I confess I hadn’t expected to find. In sum, he wasn’t the imperious figure I had imagined meeting; these weren’t the gestures and figure of a man with his authority.

  My first impression was of his natural composure, one accentuated by reserves of strength and energy. He doesn’t look like someone who has been browned by the sun. He gave no signs of having spent five and a half years in jungles, in the mountains, outdoors, which is what I thought I would encounter. His face is soft, as are his hands. Actually, his hands aren’t soft, not at all, but they gave an impression almost of delicateness, without veins close to the skin. They looked much more like the hands of a man who has spent his time at a desk, not behind a machine gun. His handshake was firm but not especially vigorous. In a way, I expected to feel nerves of steel between my hands, but there was nothing supernatural about his physical appearance.

  He was wearing glasses, and as he began to speak with me, I observed that his secretary, Celia, tended to him with utmost consideration. While he spoke, she removed his glasses, without him seeming to notice. She cleaned them and slid them back on, affably but subtly, as if to avoid bothering him. An interpreter helped us converse.

  “I suggest,” he told me, “that you go to the town of Palma Soriano. This place has just been freed by the liberation forces. The people there will be happy to see you, and you will see how Cubans feel about being released from Batista’s grip.”

  That was when I asked what I should call him and when we settled on Fidel and Errol.

  (From Bohemia, February 1959, p. 50.)

  The Cuban secret services care a great deal about having uninterrupted access to our private lives. As a result, the Comités de Defensa de la Revolución (Committees for the Defense of the Revolution, or CDR) were born: entities responsible for the constant surveillance of every neighborhood. For those people who erect large barriers to prevent neighbors from seeing into their houses, a housing law exists to fine them and make them expose their inner world to public view. A Cuban with privacy is a suspicious element, a red flag.

  Leaders, moreover, don’t typically allow themselves to be glimpsed in a domestic, family-oriented environment. An abyss lies between Fidel and a naked woman; the vertigo of love unsettled him. Our leaders don’t present themselves as mortals: they don’t like to display this affinity with us criollos, passionate beings derailed by love. Apparently, Cuban heroes neither suffer nor divorce. They aren’t susceptible to desire and they don’t feel pleasure. Legend has it that Fidel Castro didn’t know how to dance, had no interest in music or parties, and struggled to spend time with his family. People also say that Fidel had multiple romances, all short lived—the result of his obsession with staying active around the clock as he ran the country. And that he had a wife named Dalia Soto del Valle and several children from different marriages or relationships. For security reasons, very few know the precise location of “Punto Cero,” where his true home was said to be.

  Cubans’ private lives, then, must be officially public, but the lives of the politicians who govern the country are mysteriously private.

  The current president of Cuba, Raúl Castro, is the widower of Vilma Espín, also a revolutionary fighter. He is said to be a family man, but no one knows anything about his life today. As for the female figure’s relationship to Cuban heroes, leaders, and rulers, she isn’t even in the background. She simply doesn’t exist.

  5.

  FASHION IN CUBA TODAY

  Before the revolutionary triumph, we were a country of suits and ties, drill jackets, straw hats, and pearl necklaces. We were also a country of discreet elegance, poor but stylish. People went to work in their finest attire, starched, ironed, and mended. All of this appears in countless films or archival images.

  Decades of sacrifice followed, forcing us to recycle our clothes: we made dresses from old suit linings, drew lines up and down our legs with eye pencils to simulate the effect of a fine stocking sheathing the stretch of flesh from calf to thigh. Then came the harsh years of khaki pants, uniforms, and work boots. Those who left or died handed down their belongings to us, and in 1980, with the so-called viajes de la comunidad—community trips, the first attempts at contact between exiles and islanders to be tolerated by the revolutionary government—we started receiving packages full of imported clothing. These garments replaced our basic items with designs that were rarely appropriate for our climate or lifestyle.

  The secret service appropriated guayabera shirts; women started going out in curlers and household clothes. There were always people fighting for some sort of stylistic coherence, but an army of bad taste was enlisted against them, armed to the teeth with shields produced by the country’s economic realities.

  Dressing well, for the few who could, was an ideological problem, a petit bourgeois form of conduct. You would only see Cubans in uniform—or, at most, in khaki slacks, humdrum Yumurí-brand shirts, or crude, heavy Jiqui-brand pants.

  In the late 1970s, from her post as the secretary of state councils and ministries, Celia Sánchez Manduley created the Taller Experimental de la Moda, the Experimental Fashion Workshop—a business devoted to producing Cuban styles based on fresh, modern, accessibly priced fabrics and designs. In the eighties, Caridad (Cachita) Abrahantes launched another fashion business, Contex. There, as the head of the men’s design department, the Cuban designer Lorenzo Urbistondo astutely and creatively revived the sacred Cuban guayabera shirt, proved it was possible to devise new styles from our roots, made women’s shirts lighter, and did away with the horrible safari suits that Cuban leaders were so fond of wearing when they weren’t in uniform. In 1987, Cachita inaugurated the fashion house La Maison, headquartered in an exuberant mansion in the elegant Miramar neighborhood. The goal was to offer tourists, as well as Cubans of a particular stratum or background, a catwalk with beautiful criollo models, displaying the finest fashion produced on the island—an island subsumed in the profound crisis and isolation precipitated both by the U.S.-imposed economic embargo and by the revolutionary leadership’s self-blockade.

  In this universe of the “square under siege,” which lasted a little over three decades, we learned almost nothing about what the world identified as trends, fashion, or style. Only minimal exchanges with the so-called socialist bloc allowed us to clothe our bodies with items that, frankly, never seemed very tropical, and which certainly weren’t designed to embrace the sizes and curves of Cuban men and women. Around this period, Catarritos appeared—a brand of horri
ble Russian shoes easily disintegrated by regular tropical downpours.

  In those years, the loan and sales shop El Louvre opened its doors, presenting “elegant” coats and clothes for people traveling to countries in Eastern Europe or elsewhere in Latin America. But this store was only patronized by the privileged few, who could leave the country under exceptional circumstances. As of the mideighties, girls turning fifteen had a place to acquire a pair of shoes for their quinceañera: the store was called Primor and it offered heels that had been popular in 1950s Havana. Briefly, a crafts market was allowed to set up shop in the plaza in front of the Havana Cathedral. There, at least for a while, we bought sandals and shoes more suitable for our sultry climate—but the state’s resentment of the profits of those who manufactured these wares put an end to their sale.

  Telarte was among the best initiatives to appear in Cuba. Founded in 1974, it produced textile products from 1983 to 1991. This business, funded by the Ministry of Culture in conjunction with Contex and the Fondo de Bienes Culturales (Fund for Cultural Assets), was a marriage of visual artists and the textile industry. Luckily for us, this unprecedented experiment resulted in fabric designs by important local and international artists—figures like Mariano Rodríguez, Robert Rauschenberg, Raúl Martínez, Luis Camnitzer, and Manuel Mendive. For a few years, they dressed bodies that had long been eager to distinguish themselves from the uniformed masses.