Ernesto has a scar on his lower abdomen, a knife slash he received in a prison fight. There, in jail, over ten years ago, was the last time he tasted bread. Today he feels repulsed by the mere sight of it.
“Man, the last time I ate that stale garbage was in prison. I did three years in Santiago de Cuba for prostitution and tourist harassment.”
Three years of his life in the Cárcel de Boniato. During the summer, sprawled out in his bunk, he felt like he was melting in the heat that seeped from the narrow walls. In the winter he suffered from the humidity and he missed bright light and the wind.
“In Baracoa the police had warned me about getting too close to the tourists, but I wasn’t afraid of them. Until one day I got reckless, leaving the salsa club with a group of Brazilians. They stopped me and boom! Into the cop car without a word. Trial and three years in the can. I lost that sweet Brazilian girl—she was crazy for me, man, totally nuts. Imagine it: bad guys, really bad, fighting to survive. And I was just a kid; I was twenty-one years old when it happened. I had to get tough. Anyway, I’ll have this mark on my body for the rest of my life. Two guys even wanted to rape me.”
“And you didn’t learn your lesson?”
“No way, man, the other way around! I left jail even more determined to win over all the foreign chicks around, so someone will get me out of this shitty country.”
That day, in Viñales, Ernesto left the Italian girl and went out in search of his French girl.
“The Italian girl is leaving tomorrow and she’s only here to party, anyway. No chance of marrying her and no way of her getting me out.”
He went to the beach house in Guanabo. When he opened the door, he found Fadih’s entire Cuban family gathered there. This was an audience he wasn’t used to: Ernesto always performs his shows for foreigners. Before he went in, he worried that his charade might be exposed. And that’s exactly what happened.
“Cubans know perfectly well how to identify a jinetero, but I’m not worried; there’s no fear in this body of mine. They’re the ones who made me put on the whole show.”
Fadih’s Cuban relatives couldn’t understand how she hadn’t noticed Ernesto’s intentions. Behind his back, beside me, Fadih’s aunt said, “Let her be—if she gets him out of Cuba just to have some fun, she’ll lose him as soon as they arrive.” Her cousin responded, “But Mom, where else would she ever find a hottie like that?” Fadih, meanwhile, looked radiant with pleasure, as if she were having a sublime experience. Ernesto approached and whispered something into her ear. She smiled and made a gesture that landed as a caress near his neck.
Incredulous stares followed Ernesto everywhere he went: when he got up to go to the bathroom, when he lifted a forkful of food to his mouth, when he pulled off his T-shirt and strode off to the pool, when he walked up to Fadih and murmured sweet nothings.
“Her family’s judgment is normal because they’re Cuban and they can smell it. But no fear. When you’re good at your job, the rest doesn’t matter. The girl’s in love, and this didn’t start just yesterday.”
According to the Cuban Ministry of Tourism, about four million tourists visited the island in 2016, a record figure that Ernesto maximized for his own purposes. Throughout our conversations, he has never for a moment put away his cell phone. His list of contacts is immense. “I’ve been doing this for years now. I have to check my e-mail and Facebook every day to make plans and so all the ladies don’t show up at the same time. I don’t go out much to hunt anymore; I’ve got my own business taken care of and I don’t have to compete with the others. My catch is guaranteed. It’s taken me years to get to this point,” he said once, his iPhone 4 in hand, scrolling through the female faces in his WhatsApp list.
“At first it was hard for me because I’m a shy kind of guy. But I got over that pretty fast, man,” said Ernesto in Café Mamainés. He then launched into a detailed explanation of his modus operandi.
“First you attack with your eyes, pierce them with your gaze, so you’ve got a head start in the conversation, less ground to cover. If a foreign chick looks at you and maintains eye contact and then looks at you again in a matter of seconds, she’s easy prey—she’s yours. You have to be nice and start ahead in the tab. If she’s willing to keep talking, you have to treat her first, start with an advantage, and then you start ordering more and more and learn to feel confident enough that you don’t react at all when the check shows up; you don’t pay a cent.”
Once he’s dazzled his prey, the true challenge begins.
“The real work happens in bed. The rest is just protocol, a duty you have to fulfill.”
According to Ernesto, many women come in search of Caribbean heat, and heat means a high dose of sex. So you have to give it to them. Mercilessly, ruthlessly. At night, in the morning, before lunch, after lunch, in the bathroom, in the kitchen, in the bed, on the floor, behind a leafy tree, in a bush, on the stairs.
“You have to drive them wild, man: six, seven, eight times a day and they’re hooked. No one in the world can do that except for Cubans. And how do I do it? With my mind, man. I focus, I concentrate, I’m having sex but I’m not looking at her tits or thinking about them—just about what that body’s going to deliver when I’m not on top of it anymore. Professionalism, man, professionalism. What little I’ve got in this world, I owe it to my cock and nobody else, man, nobody else.”
But none of the foreign women on Ernesto’s long list could imagine exactly how this man has become an expert in the art of sex.
“After you fuck a chicken till it clucks really loud, after you drill a pig or a goat, then you’re ready for combat, man. Only way to learn that is being a kid in the east, in the countryside. Animals are hornier than women and that’s how you learn to control yourself and not come too fast.”
“Do you keep count of how many foreign women you’ve slept with?”
“Nah, man, I wish. I always regret that. The other day an associate asked me the same thing and I didn’t know what to say. But the number’s got to be pretty high, because I’m not picky—whatever smells like a foreign girl, I’ll smoke it. The fatter and uglier the better; those are the ones who could really use some love.”
In July 2016, Ernesto traveled to Baracoa and spent a week at home. His mother says that he didn’t go out at all, not a single night, and he only left the house to connect to the Wi-Fi in the park downtown. He spent seven days in an armchair in the living room, staring out the window, turning a gold band around and around on his right ring finger.
“He said he’d come to say good-bye, that he’d gotten married and was leaving the country with the French girl he’d introduced me to last year. I actually can’t remember which French girl she was.”
OUTSIDE
EVEN THOUGH HE’S DEAD
BY PATRICIO FERNÁNDEZ
TRANSLATED BY MEGAN MCDOWELL
A man without some kind of dream of perfection is quite as much of a monstrosity as a noseless man.
—G. K. Chesterton, Heretics
NOVEMBER 1, 2016, THE DAY OF THE DEAD
On December 17, 2014, Barack Obama and Raúl Castro stood before the cameras and declared that they had decided to reopen diplomatic relations between their two countries. Up until a few months before, when both heads of state were in South Africa for Nelson Mandela’s funeral and made news by shaking hands, only one U.S. president had been face-to-face with a Castro. The first and last president who met with Fidel was Richard Nixon, who at the time was vice president, in 1959. After that came the Cold War. Che Guevara even said that if, in order to continue the socialist revolution, “it were necessary to embrace the atomic cloud, I would embrace it.” Ronald Reagan baptized the Soviet bloc “the Evil Empire,” and before a 1984 radio address in Washington, while he was testing the microphones, he slipped in a joke that made the world tremble: “My fellow Americans, I’m pleased to tell you today that I’ve signed legislation that will outlaw Russia forever. We begin bombing in five minutes.” The truth is that
the capitalists won and their faith spread over the entire world; that of the leftists, meanwhile, went to hide like dust within the folds of the triumphant ideology.
That December 17 was the feast day of San Lázaro, or Babalú Ayé, the most miraculous of the orisha saints inhabiting the island, where Santeria concealed itself within Catholicism and never succumbed to Marxism. People in Havana could not believe the news. Many people hugged before their TVs. Phone lines were overloaded. More than a few people remembered the saint, and in several of Havana’s churches, as soon as the news was public and without anyone giving the instruction, the bells started ringing.
It was a war finishing, families reuniting, isolation ceding, and an era reaching its end. The empire had given up on inflicting political defeat on the Castros (in this, Cuba won). Instead, it was leaving their subversion in the hands of the market, which, as experience showed, corrodes convictions with an efficiency very difficult to resist. “There’s no going back” was what many concluded. I was among them, and in the following days I decided I wanted to witness the end of the story.
I reached Havana in early February 2015. It was cooler than usual, and the subject on everyone’s lips was the cold wave that, according to the newscasters, should be arriving at any moment. On TV they were warning of temperatures dropping to forty-eight degrees Fahrenheit, which had many people going out wearing unusual and unjustified coats. The air didn’t have that sticky heat that keeps bodies damp and prohibits any kind of formality in the Cubans’ dress—they are used to shorts, unbuttoned shirts, and plastic sandals—but it was a far cry from shivering cold.
“Here, what you expect to happen never happens,” Gerardo told me the day I met him. I was looking for a car so, when I needed to, I could move beyond the circuit of the almendrones—which is what Cubans call the American vehicles from the fifties that pick up passengers along the large avenues—and Regla, the black woman who cleaned Señora Ruth’s house, where I rented a room, had assured me that the best thing would be to come to an agreement with this friend of hers, who very soon became a friend of mine. “Anything you need, Gerardo can make it happen,” Regla told me.
At eight in the morning the next day, Gerardo was waiting for me steps from Señora Ruth’s house, at the corner of Eleventh and G, talking on the phone and sitting on the hood of his car. The gadget pressed to his ear wasn’t really a mobile phone, but a tablet the size of a notebook, and when I got close to him and he guessed I was the person he was waiting for, he began to say good-bye, first with tender words—“yeah, sweetie, I’ll call you, I swear”—but once I was close enough for a handshake, he started to show signs of annoyance—“I gotta hang up, girl, my passenger’s here . . . Yeah, yeah, I told you I’ll call you for sure. Yes, for sure! . . . I mean, how do you want me to say it?! I’ll call you! I’ve told you a thousand times, by God, I’ll call you!” When I was beside him he started to hit the tablet: “Piece of shit contraption!” he shouted while he brought it close to his eyes to be sure it had turned off correctly. “You’re Patricio, right?”
I still hadn’t explained what I wanted from him, and it didn’t seem to matter much to him; when a mulata girl walked past, thick thighs and red Lycra pants that showed her underwear in front and back, he didn’t take his eyes from her ass when he asked me if I preferred them like that, or if I liked them “skinny.” “I like them just like that!” he said, raising his voice so “the female,” as he called her, would hear. She smiled, but didn’t look at him. “Have you tried a mulata yet?” he asked me. I replied that I hadn’t on this trip, and he concluded: “You got time.”
He had a white, rusted-out Lada, on which only the driver’s-side door closed normally. He used it as an informal taxi, and also to move merchandise of any sort, although most of the time he used it to contact his buyers and sellers of dollars. He worked, as I found out later, in the currency black market. His main clients were Venezuelans who came, as he told me, to raspar cupos (roughly, “scrape quotas”), a financial exercise that ended up making their trips profitable through a mechanism that, in spite of his efforts to explain it to me, I never managed to understand. “Forget it: just some capitalist funny business to get some benefit from socialist rules.”
Gerardo and Regla became my friends from everyday Cuba. I wandered the streets with him, and with her I’d talk over breakfast or while she did the cleaning for Señora Ruth, her boss, a Communist who was nearing eighty and who considered Fidel to be “the most beautiful man in the world.” The day I arrived, Ruth told me not to believe anything I was told, because there were people who took advantage of foreigners to “blow nonexistent problems all out of proportion.” She was a history professor and spoke like a teacher. As soon as she left me alone, Regla, who never took the kerchief from her head, came over to me to ask if I wanted some fruta bomba juice (what Cubans call papaya juice), and when she saw that Señora Ruth had disappeared into her room, she clarified that “Ruth doesn’t know anything because she never leaves the house; at most, she makes it to the park on the corner.” Regla was not an enemy of the regime. In fact, during those days she was very grateful because the office of City Historian Eusebio Leal was repairing her apartment in Habana Vieja, near the courthouse. But she stressed: “The things we lack, we really lack. Things are tight.” Regla brought me to a house where they sold fish. She showed me the pig they were raising in the laundry room of the apartment. And she told me that the Revolution wasn’t evil, but it was blind.
The other Cubans I saw, the ones whose houses I visited or who I went out to eat with in one of the new private restaurants that began to proliferate with the promise of the country’s opening up, belonged to the elite. This is not an elite that lives in luxury, although neither does it feel the scarcity that the rest of the population does. It’s very small, as in all the continent’s countries, and within it coexist the heirs with eminent last names, new entrepreneurs, visual artists, musicians, and writers. There are almost no black people among them. It’s not that these people explicitly reject blacks or have racist attitudes, it’s just that black people don’t make it in. It’s very unusual to see an interracial marriage in those circles.
The artist Felipe Dulzaides told me, “Cuba must be the only country in the world where ours is the best-paid profession.” Since Cuba has come into fashion, people in the rest of the world want to find out what’s happening in this country of resistance. It’s no longer seen as a danger, but as a curiosity. The gringos are no longer the enemies (they never were, for the general population); the gallerists of Miami and New York—and Canada and Europe—regularly come through the workshops looking for homegrown talents to export to their countries. The paradoxical thing is that only in the touristy street circuit, which is more artisan that artistic, does “revolutionary folk” painting abound, while in these new, expanding markets, highly sophisticated, conceptual, postmodern, and antiestablishment art predominates. Even Kcho, the darling of the regime, makes installations with rafts and sharks, where it’s impossible not to see references to a dangerous and desperate escape.
What’s happening today to visual artists has long been occurring with musicians, either because they exalt the longed-for Caribbean happiness or because they glorify the revolutionary era—that is, the archeology of a dream. The tourists seek out the music, and the Cubans who emigrate find each other through it, so that if having a guitarist in the family used to be cause for shame, once the Revolution was under way, it became a life raft. Lawyers, engineers, doctors, architects, or economists—people of liberal professions—receive a salary fixed by the state, which today is no more than thirty dollars a month. And since neither prostitutes nor waitresses (the other profitable professions) have the prestige required by any elite, it’s the musicians and producers, the writers and painters who are the true protagonists of that elite. The artists are not only the life of the party, they’re also its owners.
At this point everyone criticizes the government, some more than others
, but in a way that denotes closeness, almost like complaints about a family member. There is no one on the right in that world. Those people left long ago. (According to the writer Wendy Guerra: “Everyone leaves.”) None of the participants in this cultural elite would want Cuba to become a business haven, because there’s a rhythm, a coexistence, in this country’s daily life that they don’t find other places when they travel, and lately they travel often. Pichi Perugorría, who has played some of the most uncomfortable characters in Cuban cinema—the most emblematic of all being Diego, the homosexual in Fresa y chocolate—said one afternoon, between Cuba libres: “Don’t ask me to understand it, but Cuba is where I feel free.”
Every one of the members of this elite has a chosen moment to explain when the story went sour: either it’s with the sovietization, or the Five Gray Years, or General Ochoa’s execution, or the Special Period, or the raft exodus, or Raúl. But there are no “dissidents” among them, just people who are critical and people who are very critical. “Dissidence,” to tell the truth, has few advocates—Guillermo Fariñas, Antonio Rodiles, Laritza Diversent, and not many others—and finds no sympathizers among the citizens. They talk to foreign media, but they have no way to talk to media in Cuba, and even if they did, the truth is that their complaints don’t seem urgent for the average Cuban, who is more worried about the price of tomatoes than freedom of the press or abuses of authority. Nor are there any strong organizations outside the government through which any opposing discourse could take root. Maybe the church, but it is very cautious with Cuba. Since John Paul II visited the island in 1998, the church is no longer a direct enemy. That was the year Christmas was declared a holiday again, after it was suspended in 1969 and officially abolished one year later. As Pope Francis himself let people know when he visited in 2015, there are many values that Christianity and the Revolution share.
Cuba on the Verge Page 12