Gerardo arrived at Señora Ruth’s house in Vedado before noon to pick me up. He had Giro in a cage in the Lada’s backseat: white feathers around his neck and like straw over his chest, black beak stained with lime, his crest blood colored and wrinkled like a burned little finger, and a shining gray body. He looks more like an ambassador, I thought when I saw him, than a murderer. Gerardo’s cousin had given him fifty CUC to bet, and Gerardo was betting two hundred, almost all he had saved up to send his car to the body shop.
Wajay is some twenty kilometers from downtown Havana in the direction of the airport, very close to Fontanar, in the area of Chico. The earth is red and pasty there, and serves as a quarry for potters. You had to ask around to get directions to the place, starting from the exit off the highway. A man who was going to the cockfight on a bicycle guided us. When we reached a house at the side of the road he recommended we park the car there, where he was going to leave his bike, and continue on foot. If the police came and found the vehicle at the cockpit, they could seize it. Cockfights were supposedly illegal, though everyone knows that the upper ranks of the hierarchy include several fans. It was at a cockfight, on February 24, 1895, in the city of Bayamo, when a group of patriots gave the cry of “Libertad!” (Freedom)—the cry known as the Grito de Oriente because the War of Independence started in Oriente, the western part of Cuba—that began the Second War of Independence in Cuba. “In any case,” explained the man who suggested leaving the car, “ever since some guards went into the cockpit at Río Cristal and four people were stabbed to death—two guards and two cockfighters—now they may call the owner, but they never come in.”
We walked along a path to a ravine you descend into through sickle bush; there, beside the “well of death,” as one guy with a mermaid tattoo on his back called it, two women were selling beer, soft drinks, fried plantains, and mortadella sandwiches. Otherwise there were around fifty men, almost all of them gathered around the espueladores, who attach the spurs to the cocks’ feet. One man held the animal while the other filed the natural spur that grows from its feet, after cutting off the excess with a saw. When he drew the first drop of blood, just a red dot at the center of the filed protuberance, the espuelador cleaned it with disinfectant that also served to seal the wound. Then he spread silicone paste over the scab with a little spatula, evenly over the flat surface of the claw. There he mounted the spur, a long, sharp piece of metal with the slightly curved shape of an elk’s horn, and with the silicone that overflowed, he fused the edges of the join between cartilage and weapon. This was what Manuel and Hortensio, the guys in charge of the maneuver, did with both of Giro’s feet.
Then they handed the cock to Gerardo, and, surrounded by a crowd of bettors who sized him up to decide if they would take a chance on him or not, Gerardo carried him to the scale that hung from a tree like a cloth cradle, where the judges checked his weight. One of them was wearing Bermudas and a straw hat; the other had a mustache and an unbuttoned shirt. Giro weighed 2.4 kilograms, half a kilo more than recommended, according to Hortensio. Gerardo regretted having coddled him so much. Giro had feathers on his legs, unlike his opponent, Indio, an upright and nervous rooster ready for the cooking pot or for war. Most of the bettors went with him, and when his owner and Gerardo entered the cockpit with their respective animals in their arms, the shouts that arose left no doubt: “Sixteen bucks on Indio!” “Twenty on Indio!” Only one shouted, “I’ll take Giro!” Once on the battlefield, with people crowded around the railing, their owners brought the animals face-to-face in the air until they nearly collided, and then they were set loose in the ring. Gerardo moved to one side without leaving the fight, and both animals opened their collars of feathers like umbrellas or shields and started pecking at each other in flight, trying to land blows with their weaponized feet.
Indio’s fury quickly prevailed over Giro’s elegance. Our rooster hadn’t even finished intoning his gentlemanly call to battle when Indio, like a bruiser from any tough neighborhood, stuck him in the side with both spurs and started pecking at his skull. “There!” “There!” “There!” the spectators shouted until their throats were raw. Giro reacted and tried to get his own blows in, but after a few minutes it was clear that it would be a massacre. More than once the two roosters got stuck, and their owners went in to separate them. While Gerardo merely blew on Giro’s face and lowered his wings to encourage him, Indio’s custodian stuck the rooster’s whole head in his mouth to clean and freshen it. Then he spit.
After fifteen minutes both roosters were bleeding, and the long attacks gave way to tired flapping and sporadic stabs, mostly suffered by Giro. When he tried to escape, limping and with one of his wings raised, I asked why they didn’t just call the fight, since it was obvious he could no longer defend himself. But the teenager next to me was clear and concise: “It’s to the death.” The shouts from the public grew louder as our rooster’s agony intensified: “Finish him!” “Get him!” “There!” “There!” There!”
At a certain point, Giro stopped fighting. “He’s blind,” said Hortensio. It was true, you couldn’t see his eyes in his face anymore, it was one big stain of mud and blood; he stopped walking and lay down. Indio turned his back scornfully, while Giro rested his beak on his chest.
Gerardo told me that when he went to get Giro the cock was still trembling. Gerardo himself was covered in sweat, as if he had shared the effort and the agony. He left the dead rooster hanging head down from a branch so he could tie his shoes, then he picked him up by both ankles, between the spurs (which now seemed inoffensive) and the still-warm claws, and we left without saying good-bye to anyone. I had also given Gerardo a hundred U.S. dollars to bet, but what I’d lost was nothing compared to the fortune Gerardo had forfeited. Even so, he cared as little about the money as I did. The next day, he had Giro stuffed by a taxidermist.
Back when the Cuban Revolution seemed infinite, I was among those who saw it as a prison sentence. I came of age when it had already lost its enchanting air, and at least from afar, it was more like one man’s obsession than the will of the people. When I sensed its end was approaching, as happens with parents who lie dying, I decided to stand by its deathbed and hear its last words. For Latin Americans in the past half century, the Revolution was either a dream or a nightmare, and for some it was both.
During the time I’ve spent here, there have been fewer changes than expected. Most people’s lives are largely the same as before. The cities have the same worn-out look, and money is far from being central the way it is almost everywhere else on the planet. There is still little to buy, although you have only to lift up a rock to find the shadows of foreign speculators waiting for the proper moment to swoop in. More than a few are acquiring property through Cubans. McDonald’s already has a map of Havana with dozens of corners marked, where they’ll open franchises as soon as it’s possible. These changes, however, are not yet visible. For the moment, change is an underground force that manifests in an increased willingness to criticize and in the almost complete disappearance of the word socialism in the official discourse and conversations in the street. As I write this, there is, however, a spreading sense of immobility. As my friend Grillo says: “We are still ‘blocked,’ from outside and from inside, and right now nothing moves in Havana, not even the flies.” Few work, and many wait. For what? The next minute, their turn in civil offices, potatoes, a chick to walk past, a guy to approach her.
The Revolution’s great conquest was of time. Cubans are not in a hurry. The time agreed on for an appointment is only an approximate reference. Since public transportation is unpredictable, delay is easy to understand. What’s more, little is lost by waiting. People who work assiduously are rare. Since the salary fixed by the state is around thirty dollars a month, chatting on the corner is almost as profitable as exerting yourself in a profession. More is obtained por la izquierda, or “to the left” (commissions, bribes, and all kinds of kickbacks that function at the edges of institutionality) than by obedientl
y exercising a trade. When it came time to produce, the community’s well-being turned out to be a much less convincing motivator than personal benefit. Efficiency disappeared the moment profit was forbidden. And with it, haste. If capitalism’s success has led to a growing self-sufficiency, socialism’s failure consolidated the need to rely on others in order to survive. It’s true that there are corners where capitalist energy is starting to rise up again from the ashes. In Calzada de Monte, for example, once the commercial territory of the Polish before the Revolution, people who live on the lower floors have opened their doors to the street and turned their living rooms into hair or nail salons, their kitchens into cafés or shops selling prepared dishes, their storage rooms into spare-parts shops, scrapyards, or workshops doing all kinds of repairs. Clandestine businesses exist all over the capital, and the truth is that with a little effort you can find anything, even jewelry from the world’s most prestigious brands. The general tendency, however, is to manage with what’s there rather than obsess over what you lack. It’s something that no politician could ever propose to a people, but for those of us who live in abundance and competition, this tendency constitutes a rest.
That’s how the journalist Abraham Jiménez, twenty-seven years old, explained it when I asked him why he didn’t leave Cuba if things were as hard as he said: “Because I like the people’s self-confidence, I like that they don’t beat around the bush, I like how if you go out badly dressed they laugh with you and not at you, if your car breaks down they stop and help you, if you need sugar the neighbor gives it to you, if you catch a taxi and don’t have enough money, the driver tells you it’s no problem. These are all the good things the Revolution has led to. The Revolution is a badly developed concept. It could have been something idyllic, the most fantastic thing in the world, but along the way it got twisted, and human errors were committed. But on the other hand, it’s created a good human being: the average Cuban. That’s its greatest achievement—not health and education, like so many people say, because that’s over, that’s already gone to hell.”
I met up with Gerardo again a couple of days after the fight to go to Guanabocoa, where we were going to attend a Santeria ceremony in which an ex-classmate of his, who was becoming a babalawo (a priest), would carry out his first toque de santos (a musical religious ceremony). On the way we drove through Centro Habana, and he took a detour onto Calle Animas because he wanted to show me the place where he’d had Giro stuffed. I asked him why he’d done it, and his reply seemed to say much about what people are living through on this island that is so difficult to explain, so contradictory, so liberating and so suffocating: “Well, because the things you love, you want them with you forever. I came to really be fond of that rooster, and so I want him with me, even though he’s dead.”
MI AMIGO MANUEL
BY PATRICIA ENGEL
Four o’clock on a Sunday morning in September 2015. Manuel and I walk along Calle 12, through the dark tree-lined corridors of Vedado. We keep to the middle of the street, where moonlight glows on the pavement. We are a pair of shadows among the silhouettes of stray cats and sleeping dogs until we reach Zapata and we come across more bodies like ours, ambling between broken streetlights, all headed in the direction of the Plaza de la Revolución.
We, like all the others, locals and pilgrims from around the world, are on our way to see Pope Francis. In fact, Manuel and I have already seen him. Yesterday we were riding in his taxi around Miramar and came to a road closure where we saw dozens of people standing at the intersection. We got out to take a look and within a minute, the holy caravan was at our feet: the pontiff standing atop a white roofless jeep, waving to all, close enough for us to reach out and touch the edge of his white cape.
Manuel doesn’t believe in God. He doesn’t believe in much of anything except work, which he does for about fifteen hours a day, with only Sunday for rest. He’s taken me to see countless churches around Havana and its outskirts, yet he always waits for me outside. I tell him what my grandmother used to tell my father, and he, in turn, told me as a child: whenever you set foot in a church for the first time, say a prayer and make a wish and it will come true. But Manuel doesn’t believe in wishes either. He’s forty-six years old. He does not believe in wanting what is out of one’s reach. He has never been on an airplane or a train or traveled beyond the western half of Cuba. Once, in the early days of our friendship, I asked him if he’d ever thought about leaving the island, as so many others have. He shook his head without hesitation. “No,” he said. “Never.” It wasn’t about love for his country, though. Not a shred of patriotism or nostalgia, he insisted. In his case, it was because he could never leave his mother. And his mother, he knew, could live nowhere but Cuba.
Manuel and I met through a friend of a friend. Like so many things I found to be worthwhile on this island, one only comes upon them by personal recommendation, a secret, trusted referral. I’d said only that I was returning to Cuba for the second time and needed to find someone with a car who was willing to drive me where I wanted to go and not ask me too many questions. Perhaps I was defensive, given that on my first trip to Cuba, in January 2013, I’d been detained at the airport for extensive questioning.
The guard who questioned me was friendly. I dared ask him why the security staff had identified only me as suspicious off an entire charter flight from Miami. He said it was the fact that I was not Cuban or Cuban American, yet my government had given me permission to be here and fly direct. Also, I spoke Spanish fluently; if not identified as foreign by my documents, I would have passed undetected. I explained that I was a writer doing research for a novel. I showed him my paperwork and even an itinerary I’d sketched out. He smiled. “Will you make Cuba look good in your book?”
“I’ll write the truth about what I see.”
He nodded.
“You can go,” he said. “But be careful. Maybe you think you don’t attract attention, but everyone, the ones who matter, I mean, knows that you’re here. Understand?”
When I returned to Cuba that July, Manuel and I arranged to meet in my hotel lobby. I found him standing by the entrance, in jeans and a collared shirt, light eyed and smelling of cigarettes. We shook hands and I followed him out to his car, parked around the corner. A tiny white Korean Daewoo Tico, which he explained belonged to his girlfriend, who had inherited it from Russians who left it behind after the Soviets pulled out of Cuba in the nineties. The air-conditioning didn’t work and the windows were permanently rolled down. We started on our way along the streets of Centro Habana, dusty wind blowing in my face. Manuel never wore sunglasses despite the harsh sunlight. I warned him it would lead to cataracts. But he cared more about protecting his skin from the sun, covering his left driving arm with a nylon sleeve. So he wouldn’t get too dark, he said. I turned to him. “You mean, like me?”
I am Colombian. What they call trigueña, falling firmly within the spectrum of mestizaje. But I quickly found that in Cuba I was simply considered dark, not prieta but dark enough for people to feel they could remark upon my complexion openly, saying it was okay that I wasn’t pearl skinned because my hair was straight or that I had a nice nose, as if to offer consolation. But if I stood around outside too long without the cover of shade, it wouldn’t be long before a complete stranger would come up to me and warn, as if I were in grave danger, “Niña, get out of that prickly sun before you get even darker!”
An older couple that I met bragged to me that their daughter was blond, as if that would be her ticket in life. When I went to a drugstore in a hotel to buy a Band-Aid for a blister on my heel, the saleswoman also offered me a tube of skin-bleaching cream.
Manuel would come for me every morning. I’d already done the bit of walking Havana to death. I’d seen all the recommended tourist sights. I’d been to all the museums and gotten lost in different neighborhoods. I wanted to cover more ground, and that was why I needed Manuel and his car. I found that I also liked being in his company. He reminded me of my ol
der brother. A quiet, calm, responsible presence. Our conversation was easy and respectful, and I appreciated it even more when I started noticing that when I was on my own, sitting down for a bite to eat or a drink at a café or restaurant or even a hotel bar as I scribbled in my notebook, foreign men, mostly Europeans or Canadians, would often approach me, mistaking me for a jinetera.
The streets that are on the pope’s official motorcade route have been freshly paved, sidewalks repaired, building façades newly painted in bright hues, as if the decades of neglect that preceded this visit had never happened. But beyond the papal map, the roads remain forgotten, crumbling with neglect. The government knows where to direct the eye, Manuel says. The Vatican delegation will see only beauty, Havana wearing its best party dress, all made up, while the real Havana is kept in the shadows, out of sight.
We walk the edge of Cementerio Colón and have to do a huge loop up Hidalgo to Tulipan because the streets have been blocked off. Of the crowds we joined along Zapata, many have dropped out, not expecting to have to walk so much. With the last pope’s visit, Avenida Paseo was wide open and everyone walked straight up to arrive at the plaza for the Mass. But this morning, still in predawn darkness, the streets are closed and Manuel says this convoluted, labyrinthine passage is just another government manipulation, a ploy to thin the crowd of the faithful, to show that this pope, with his renegade peace-loving rhetoric, can’t pack in an audience as large as any of Fidel’s.
Cuba on the Verge Page 14