But the Special Period began in the early nineties, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, and during this terrible phase—which no one here has ever declared to be officially over—we experienced a frightening precariousness. Everything was scarce: soap, oil, toothpaste. We stopped receiving underwear from Eastern Europe. Cuban industry didn’t produce a single garment that could clothe us. Staying clean and shod became an odyssey. Some families decided to exchange their inherited jewelry at the so-called casas del oro y la plata, houses of gold and silver, which belonged to the CIMEX department at the Ministry of the Interior. Jewels were traded for food, household appliances, shoes, and casual clothing, generally of Panamanian origin. The Cuban state needed an injection of gold, silver, and precious stones, and in order to collect such assets it opened exchange bureaus and shops specialized in unequal trade. The fashion offered in exchange included “prewashed” jeans, blouses and shirts referred to as bacterias (describing their printed pattern), bathing suits, and cheap underwear. Swapping their family memories, the Cuban people began to dress differently. These designs weren’t known for their tastefulness, but the broad color palette seeped into our surroundings.
How do Cubans dress today? With very little information on international styles, and without a clear sense of appropriate attire in places like hospitals, churches, or theaters, you’ll often see Havana residents wearing shorts, flip-flops, and tank tops in settings usually associated with sobriety and decorum. The boundary between household clothes and going-out clothes has been erased. The makeshift stores have gradually rubbed out our identity altogether. Recycled clothing and cheap knockoffs have invaded our bodies. From Miami and Panama, we receive contraband of the shoddiest order. From Ecuador or Chinese markets on the outskirts of Madrid, snuck in through Cuban customs, we receive jeans studded with rhinestones, phosphorescent Lycra, odd neck scarves stamped with sundry patterns, squeaky wooden shoes, garish handbags, and terrible imitations of classic purses. In Havana, as in many other places, it isn’t at all expensive to sport a Vuitton bag.
I watch people walking around my beloved city, but I don’t recognize them, nor do I recognize this confusion of bodies and colors. We were different: we once had a way of expressing our life stories through our wardrobes. What has become of them—our years of instruction, our aesthetic education, our museums, still open today, that boast the finest Cuban art, work that lifts us up and makes us proud? I wonder, too, what has become of our bodies, flaunting our (deluded?) insignia.
6.
PHYSICAL EDUCATION
We were born in a secular, nonconfessional state; the church has had no role in education for the past four generations. We grew up in a nation where scholarships (boarding schools for needy students, or for those from other parts of the country who receive study grants from the government), rural schools (combining agricultural work with standard academic subjects), and overcrowding are all part of life.
Starting in fifth grade and through secondary school, students are given short readings on sexual education. Natural science classes include a program that addresses types of intimate relationships, human reproductive organs, different sexual identities, and even the risks of promiscuity and its possible effects on our health. What’s striking, though, is that we already know quite a bit about these subjects by the time we study them in school. I don’t know any fifth-grade pioneer who can’t recite many of the lessons from memory that the teacher dictates from the blackboard.
We Cuban kids usually find our first “boyfriend” or “girlfriend” in preschool. Our first kiss comes in elementary school, and in middle school and then high school and precollege programs—at which point we’re nearly the same age as our teachers—we’re likely to be exchanging theoretical and practical knowledge both in the classroom and beyond it. Here, in the words of poet Sigfredo Ariel, “You only lose your innocence once, and life is long.” Sexual life in Cuba is an open book that everyone interprets in his or her own way.
Our parents assumed dense intimacies, formed brief connections, fleeting marriages that faltered as infatuation waned. They had no material things to protect. Previous social norms were thrown into the socialist bonfire; family ceased to be the altar of personal sacrifice. It was no longer necessary to stoically endure a tired marriage for the sake of children, parents, or external judgment.
And so we grew up with our house keys hung around our necks so we could let ourselves in—our parents would be back late. Adults didn’t necessarily know everything about our parallel world, and adult life bore a strong resemblance to our own: brimming with adolescent emotion and peppered with sexual encounters similar to ours. A generational fusion softened hierarchical distinctions until it melted them together. Antonio José Ponte’s essay “Tener veinte años toda la vida” (Being twenty forever) describes this system of eternal puberty and minimal commitment that afflicts us Cubans.
When people hit their forties, the divorces begin and young lovers join the fray, slipping in and out of former family homes in the wee hours. Those homes, meanwhile, have now become the nests of single women who still feel like teenagers. The beds of women born in the 1970s and ’80s are visited by young men born during the Special Period, and—what a surprise—my generation has replaced our parents’ noble “peace and love” with generally sexist behavior. This conduct is harsh, corrective, occasionally rude, and nearly orthopedic as far as casual sex is concerned; blows, as part of what could be playful erotic language, replace tenderness, and gestures shift from caresses to slaps in a single night.
1. Turn around, baby.
2. Get on top, girl, and move your body, come on.
3. Turn around or I’m leaving you right there.
4. Come on, girl, I want it right now.
Vulgarity, herd instinct, and reggaeton culture have infiltrated sexual encounters in Cuba, which seems to have become a completely different country within a single decade. These tendencies crop up equally among intellectuals, scientists, engineers, workers, musicians, or theorists finishing their Ph.D.s. Physical violence is overpowering tenderness; coarseness overcomes the simple act of gallantry, flirtation, or infatuation. All-out war erupts between bodies: erotic punishment with military trappings and physical pain as a vehicle of pleasure.
What could have been a marginal habit is now a peremptory norm that marks and muzzles the sexual spirit of a country where the body has always been and remains a white flag.
7.
SEXISM IN CUBA
Sexism isn’t expressed the same way in Cuba as it is elsewhere in Latin America. First of all, Cuban men have had to take up child-rearing. Given the many roles the Revolution has assigned to women, men often find themselves alone and juggling domestic tasks. It’s quite common to see a Cuban father braiding his young daughters’ hair in the early morning, sewing on buttons, ironing, and taking his neatly dressed children to school. For many different social and political reasons, these families have been divided, and the father frequently performs both roles in what Latin Americans from outside Cuba would consider a highly unorthodox household.
Lifestyle models in Cuba, as well as domestic gender roles, are a far cry from what Western parameters define as normal.
We Cubans can’t freely access statistics on death or separation due to domestic abuse. But what we can observe in daily life, closely scrutinized by the mass organizations that begin in every neighborhood’s Comité de Defensa de la Revolución and continue in schools and workplaces, is a perpetual struggle for equality among all citizens. From adolescence onward, the Cuban men and women of my generation learned to shoot firearms, generally Russian, as part of our mandatory military training. It would be odd for a woman trained to “defend the homeland,” instructed to “vanquish or die” in her formative years and ever since, to let a man hit her without some sort of emphatic response on her part. Our character is built through the slogan Cada cubano debe saber tirar y tirar bien—every Cuban must know how to shoot, and shoot well.
Infidelity in Cuba is rooted in the informality of human relationships in the resistance movement. Guerrilla groups, mobilizations, coexistence at boarding schools far from home, have made us fickle and fleeting in our emotional commitments. As a result, both women and men can decide to end marriages abruptly after finding love, desire, or admiration elsewhere. Women often maintain long-term parallel relationships that may continue indefinitely. Here, a woman can be as unfaithful as a man; she can abandon a household and then start over, just as a man might, whether she has children or not.
But once again, while female empowerment has taken root in many realms, it remains excluded from the political and ideological one. Today, female political leadership is still unthinkable. It would be impossible to have a female president; the “macho Leninism” of our historical leadership impedes it. That said, women now participate in many sectors where they had no role before the Revolution. There are women sappers, gunners, machinists, and parachutists. Of course, we Cubans would also like to have women government secretaries, news directors, and military leaders. But this kind of equality has remained elusive: such posts have always been held by men, trained in a gender-based tradition that goes farther back than the rules we learned in 1960.
If you try to envision the political leadership headquartered in the Plaza de la Revolución, you’ll see mostly men in olive green, gathered behind the monument to José Martí as they assess a military parade (composed, in turn, of virile soldiers).
Why have there never been female presidents in the socialist world? Why isn’t there a feminist movement in Cuba? Might feminism actually run contrary to the nation’s revolutionary, Marxist, socialist precepts?
For a female Cuban writer, translating the codes of such an idiosyncratic society is no simple matter. The credibility of its actions and figures has no basis in the traditional codes that Western readers are used to. Our situation is not only rooted in magical realism; our very existence has been hounded by isolation and autophagy. To outside eyes, our actions seem absurd, disproportionate, indecipherable, or exotic. The body as the sole space of freedom, our sexuality, our complex relationship with our own customs, surveillance, witchcraft, scarcity, the informer culture, our detachment, our complicated relationship with power, the decisive control of politics over our entire lives, censorship, music, rum consumed as an everyday drug to help us bear the impossibility of taking our own existence by the reins, our ownership by the state, and the interpersonal relationships forged over years of resistance—these are challenging things to narrate. Keeping common sense alive in such an absurd and unusual context is our most difficult task, and we undertake it every day. From within this war, a Cuban woman, naked, wearing only a hat, sweating amid the tropidrama of her island, writes in the sand.
DREAMING IN CUBAN
A CHRONICLE
IN NINE INNINGS
BY LEONARDO PADURA
TRANSLATED BY ANNA KUSHNER
To my father, Nardo, an Almendares fan,
And to my uncle Min, an Equipo Habana fan.
FIRST INNING
My father’s great dream was to be a baseball player. A pelotero, as we say in Cuba. As far as dreams go, his wasn’t very original: for 150 years, the desire to become a pelotero, renowned, lauded, and beloved, has been one of the most common among men born on this island as well as the one that has been most often thwarted. Of the millions of Cubans who have grown up and lived with that aspiration, only a few hundred have fully achieved it and just a couple of dozen have made it into the pantheon of the immortals.
As a child and for part of his adolescence, my father devoted all the time he could to playing baseball. He did it on the barren terrain of Mantilla, the Havana neighborhood where he was born, with kids from the area, but never as frequently as he would have wanted, since, at the age of seven, he was forced to start helping my grandfather and my older uncle in the fruit-selling business that supported our family. Nonetheless, it was thanks to this work that, saving one penny at a time, he was able to afford the tremendous luxury of buying himself a left-handed glove in order to play more and better ball.
Years later, when my father already knew that he would never make his dream a reality—not for lack of effort in his attempts to see it through, but because his diminutive stature made things more difficult—he wished to pass down to his oldest son that cherished aspiration. Before undertaking this task, my father had commended himself to Our Lady of Charity, for whom he had a long-standing veneration although he was not particularly religious, and had asked her that his first child meet three requirements: that he be a boy, that he be left-handed, and that he have the distinction of being the famous pelotero he never managed to become himself. And he promised that if she granted at least the first of these petitions, that firstborn son would have Our Lady’s name, in other words, Leonardo de la Caridad.
Leonardo de la Caridad was born on October 9, 1955, and two days later, when he was taken from the clinic to the family home his father had built a year earlier, in the crib purchased to receive him were the trinkets that usually surrounded newborns at the time: noisy rattles, a stuffed teddy bear, some rubber toy or other, and . . . a baseball.
Eleven months later, when there was no longer any doubt that Our Lady of Charity continued to indulge my father, since his firstborn lifted his spoon and shook his rattles with his left hand, he tried to accelerate the process. He went to a sporting goods store and bought a small baseball player’s uniform with the blue color and the insignia of his dream team: the Almendares club. As a magnificent reminder of that effort, one photo remains, in which Leonardo de la Caridad, dressed in his pelotero’s uniform, takes his first steps in the backyard of the family home. The die was cast, and, going forward, they could always count on Our Lady’s generous assistance.
One of Leonardo de la Caridad’s unforgettable childhood memories was his first visit to an official baseball stadium. His father took him there on a Sunday afternoon, probably in 1962, when he was six or seven years old. By then, the boy Leonardo had proven through his family, social ties, cultural ties, and even genetic makeup that he was an absolute fan of the game of baseball. Of course, at that moment, Leonardo de la Caridad had no definitive notion of how the Revolution happening around him affected nearly everything, including the game of baseball. Nor did he know that the visit to the Grand Stadium of Havana (which would soon change its name to Latin American Stadium) would be the last his father would make to that great sanctuary of Cuban culture and life until the night on which Leonardo de la Caridad would again accompany him, twenty or twenty-five years after that magical and unforgettable afternoon.
When my father agreed to forget his bitterness and return to the stadium, too many things had occurred in his country, in his city, in his house, for him not to have begun a reconciliation with his past, or at least with his passion for baseball. The solicitous Our Lady of Charity had not been able to carry out the task he had commended to her. Although his firstborn was a boy and left-handed—a privileged condition for baseball players—and had become a fan of that sport, similarly infected with the dream of becoming a great player, Our Lady’s powers were not enough to make him a good ballplayer. Despite Leonardo de la Caridad’s spending hours, days, months, years in that effort, playing ball with his neighborhood friends in the same places where his father had thirty or forty years before, the all-too-common and terrible fate had repeated itself. My father’s oldest son would know almost everything that can be known about baseball, he would love and suffer for baseball for the rest of his life, but he would have to park his great desire to be a famous player in the warm, dark spot where all thwarted dreams go. All because neither my father’s efforts, nor the most propitious social and cultural environment, nor the miraculous Our Lady of Charity managed to make a good ballplayer out of me.
SECOND INNING
The Havana of the 1860s was a social, political, and economic hotbed. The capital of the prosperous island of Cuba had all the a
spirations, possibilities, and dreams of the Cuban people concentrated in its territory and spirit. It was this Havana that the boy, adolescent, and then young poet José Martí walked through, in which he forged the indomitable desire for independence to which he would devote his entire life and even his death a few years later. It was a Havana in which whether you were a native-born Cuban (criollo) or a Spanish-born peninsular began to signify a pivotal conflict, two opposed expressions of belonging. Further, which side one fell on influenced one’s opinions about politics, whether one saw the future as breaking with or continuing the colonial condition that regulated life in the country.
Havana of 1860 saw the return of a group of young people who had, after years of living as students in North America, in New York, Philadelphia, and Boston, become fans of playing a new sport called baseball that was already a hit among the Yankees of the great cities of the north. It was a sport with complicated rules, in which—as opposed to other ball games in vogue then and later—the competition was not a fight between two armies on a battlefield with the goal of taking the enemy’s main square. Baseball had a different philosophy: the individual player attempted to return to the house from which he had left (“home”), and the winning team was the one that, with the collaboration of all of its members, managed that victorious return the most times. The rationalist and typically nineteenth-century philosophy of that concept, lacking the military structure of sports like soccer, made baseball a practice that was distinct, modern, intelligent—and chic.
But those first young men from Havana who were baseball fans had another important motivation: this sport, with its slow and deliberate pace and its outlandish uniforms (which were even considered lascivious), was the antithesis of the crude and backward peninsular pastimes, such as the violent bullfights of which Spaniards were such fans. Playing baseball, then, became a way of culturally distinguishing themselves as criollos, of relating to the world from another perspective, of being modern, and it soon became an expression of being Cuban.
Cuba on the Verge Page 9