Cuba on the Verge

by Leila Guerriero

  SECRET CUBA

  BY MAURICIO VICENT

  TRANSLATED BY CECILIA MOLINARI

  Singer Ibrahim Ferrer’s official biography states that in 1996, when he was called upon at his home on Indio Street to participate in the Buena Vista Social Club album, which would garner Compay Segundo, Rubén González, and other eminent Cuban musicians international fame, Ibrahim was making a living shining shoes. He was on the brink of his seventieth birthday, and like many of his Vieja Trova colleagues, at that stage of his life he’d already thrown in the towel and survived as best he could in a Havana devastated by the Special Period’s austerity. The power outages on the island had reached fourteen hours a day, tractors on farms had been replaced by four hundred thousand oxen, and, in the absence of public transportation, the government had distributed one million Chinese bicycles so the country wouldn’t be at a standstill, while on TV and in the plazas Fidel Castro ended his speeches with the slogan “Socialism or Death.”

  The country had plunged into its deepest shortages after the collapse of the socialist bloc, and while popular vegetable gardens flourished on Quinta Avenue and chicks were distributed to the people so that they could raise them and turn them into food, as an individual lifeline each person was also allowed to seek self-employment in hundreds of fields, such as shoe shiner or manicurist, continuing down to absurd options like button coverer, clown, or spark plug cleaner.

  While Ibrahim shined shoes, on busy San Rafael Street some of the new personal manicurists set up shops in the middle of the sidewalk with tables and chairs to serve the public. It was the worst part of the crisis: TV shows featured recipes such as minced banana peels or grapefruit steaks; on summer nights, people dragged their mattresses out into the street to cool off and sleep through the power outages; a homemade deodorant made of baking soda and milk of magnesia was invented. Reality was so stark, there was no way to escape it. It was just too heavy.

  Back then, when two or more Cubans ran into each other in a line or at a party, it was hard for them not to talk about “how bad things are.” It was every day, every hour, and everywhere, so much so that one of the San Rafael Street manicurists, who’d had enough of people using their nail-fixing time as a means of catharsis, had placed a sign on her table with a warning: “Talking about things is strictly forbidden.” To fend off negative energy, next to this phrase, the woman had drawn the number 33 and a turkey vulture, which Cubans call aura tiñosa.

  Ibrahim knew all too well what that woman meant by the symbols on her sign, given that his livelihood derived from another activity of his, which couldn’t appear in any biography: he was a number runner for la bolita, charada being the most popular of them, a numbers game brought to Cuba from China, where numbers are associated with figures of animals, people, or things. La bolita, like all gambling, had been forbidden after the Revolution’s triumph. Nevertheless, Ibrahim was a charming number runner and he had many clandestine clients in the Los Sitios neighborhood, where both his beautiful voice and number running expertise—which included writing down numbers according to his clients’ experiences or dreams—were much appreciated.

  The San Rafael Street manicurist had written down, as a spell, the number 33 and drawn the vulture, the figure equivalent to that number in the numbers game, which Cubans use to designate any evil that clings to you or suddenly befalls you—bad news, a union meeting, unresolved paperwork. If you dreamed that you were walking across a cane field barefoot and were bitten by a snake, you unquestionably had to bet on 21, the serpent, or maybe 8, death, or 83, tragedy. If, however, you imagined that the neighbor’s wife across the street escaped her husband and spent the night partying with you, the number was 58, adultery, although you could also bet on a parlé with 66, or go for a candado with the two previous numbers and 12, hooker or bad woman.

  Obviously, if as you left your house you stepped on dog shit, or a pigeon crapped on you, or you had any such accident, there was no question: 7, excrement—which was also the number for Yemayá, the orisha owner of the sea in one of the two main Afro-Cuban religions, the Rule of Ocha, which is also called Santeria. However, just in case, it was a good idea to also bet something on 38, money, because everyone knew that stepping on a piece of shit brings luck and personal development.

  The charada, according to Cuban poet Gastón Baquero, is the illogical linkage of apparently logical things that happen to us during the day and especially at night, while we sleep, and in that cartography of dreams you travel through the fantasy you’ve experienced and guess at what you’re about to experience, or what you have inside and don’t know yet. Baquero said that these enjambments were not the result of ignorance; on the contrary, they were completely poetic and one of the most obvious expressions of the inexhaustible “magicifying” skill of the Cuban people, understanding this to be the ability to transform the surrounding world into something magical, a power that was the source of both strength and resistance in Cuba, like choteo (mockery)—when people make fun and light of what they can’t deal with—or the belief that if a woman cleanses herself with mountain herbs or offers a goat to Changó, ruler of thunder and virility, equivalent to Siete Rayos (Seven Lightning Bolts) in the other main branch of the Afro-Cuban religion, Rule of the Palo Monte, or Mayombe, she can tie down her womanizing husband.

  When old Estrella, in a La Aurora tenement, told Ibrahim Ferrer that dead Prudencio, a Haitian who had been appearing in her dreams for more than forty years, had come down to see her the previous night and had whispered in her ear that she should bet on 22, the toad, but that in addition to betting twenty pesos on that fixed number, she was also going to bet another twenty on 31, the deer, the Buena Vista Social Club singer thought this made perfect sense because he knew all too well that Prudencio had been a light-skinned black man and in charada the 31 not only meant deer, but also betrayal and mulato.

  If the man who is awake is nothing and only the sleeping one is lucid, as Baquero argued, everything made overwhelming sense when Estrella woke up in the morning at the bunkhouse she called home and told her neighbor: “Listen up, Martillo, check out what happened to me last night, because at one point I saw Prudencio at a distance and every time I see that black man it means something, and I’m telling you, I’m sure if I do a good job at interpreting what happened, I could become rich: I was at carnival when I felt someone calling me and inviting me to dance, the drums were beating at full volume and I could hear at a distance a corneta china and people seemed crazy, and then a fist and knife fight broke out and I hid beneath a table thinking they were going to kill me.” After that story, Estrella and Martillo would sit in the doorway and begin to rewind and search for the hidden connections: “Hey, Martillo, if Prudencio appeared, I’m sure I have to bet on 64, which is large death and silent death, and not on 8, which is also death, but that death talks and Prudencio didn’t speak to me in the dream.” And after that first conclusion, they’d both continue going over it all, because there was no coincidence at play and everyone knew that the dead and the fumbes, or Santeria spirits, communicate with people through dreams, revealing ways to help them improve their situation or warning them of dangers.

  From then on, what takes place is an endless game of chess because, as noted by ethnologist Lydia Cabrera, everything, absolutely everything—dignitaries, animals, trades, moods, people, Catholic saints and orishas, weekdays, trees, and bushes—can be translated into numbers, and Cubans believe that the connections between these numbers and things are traced with a drawing pen from the great beyond without us even realizing it, and that’s why we must sit down and think it through to discover them. “So, tell me, Martillo, isn’t it true that in addition to large death, I should bet on 76, the ballerina, because during the dream I didn’t stop dancing until the fight broke out, and also on 50, the police, because if there was a brawl and knives the police must have surely followed, and the fact remains, Martillo, that if people looked crazy it could be because there was a lot of beer and they’d had
a lot to drink at the carnival, so the right number is 49, the drunk, and if I hid beneath a table and made it my home and shelter, I should bet ten pesos on 7, the snail, because I turned into a snail . . .”

  It’s understandable that, following this shattering logic, Sunday, November 27, 2016, was a bad day for the bolita bankers in Cuba. None other than Fidel Castro had died the night of the twenty-fifth, and the next day, November 26, people overwhelmingly bet on the numbers that represented or could represent the Cuban leader, starting with 1, the horse, given that this was what Fidel’s followers and adversaries called him.

  They had no luck. However, the following day, Estrella and others like her, dream and charada scientists, hit it big in the numbers game: the winning numbers were 55, the father; 54, flowers; and 2, mariposa, or the butterfly, which in addition to being an insect was the name of Cuba’s national flower. “I won twenty-two thousand pesos, son, almost one thousand dollars for a bet of no more than sixty. And it was just a matter of deciphering the dream,” said the woman, convinced that Prudencio was the one who had once again blessed her.

  Back in the nineties, when Ibrahim wrote down the list of numbers for his neighbors at Los Sitios, the bolita was played by using the last numbers of the Venezuelan lotteries Táchira and Zulia (which were drawn on alternate days), so people followed the Venezuelan results on their shortwave radios. The last digits of the first three winning numbers were the valid ones, so, for example, if Táchira had drawn 34,537, 7,062, and 11,905 on Wednesday, the relevant numbers for that day were 37, 62, and 5.

  There are one hundred numbers at play in charada, but the combinations are practically endless because they can be played as fixed numbers, running numbers, in parlé (a combination of two numbers), or in candado (three at a time). Betting one peso on fixed number 37, the black hen or witchcraft, can get you a seventy-five-peso prize. If you chose the parlé of 37 with 62, marriage, you get one thousand pesos for each peso you bet, and if you’re in luck and you chose to go with a candado using the previous two numbers and 23, vapor, the prize equals three thousand pesos. The same ratio is used if instead of pesos you bet dollars or convertible pesos (at the exchange rate of one to twenty-five).

  Naturally, on special days such as December 17, the feast day of San Lázaro, which is syncretized with Babalú Ayé, the most beloved and miracle-working orisha of the Yoruba pantheon, bankers limit the amount of money you can bet on number 17, since, in the event that it were called, it could bankrupt the bank.

  For some time now, thanks to communication improvements and more leeway with DirecTV’s clandestine antennas—which Cubans call “the channels”—the bolita is no longer ruled by the Venezuelan lottery, but rather by the one in Miami, more specifically the Cash 3 and Play 4, the two games drawn daily, one at 2:00 P.M. and the other at 8:00 P.M., which is the important one. Barely five minutes later, in the tenements in La California and Mil Condones, or in the entire neighborhood of Jesús María, come the buzzing from balcony to balcony and the questions: “Hey, Cacha, what telephone number was called out?” “Evaristo, what riddle did they use this time to kill us off?”

  Although gambling in general, and charada in particular, has been illegal since the triumph of the Revolution, there’s a high tolerance for it. In Cuba, the bolita is a national sport, but that doesn’t mean people aren’t careful not to give themselves away. The bolita is played from east to west, in big and small towns, in the cities and on the farms, and it is played by the rich and the poor, from the most downtrodden Cubans to the new wealthy class of young women with homes in Miramar, who despite their refined taste know all about how the 35 is a spider, the 40 a priest, and the 10 a large fish. But no one brags about it.

  At the apex of the bolita is the banker, the moneyman, the one few know, and he must be a solvent and trustworthy person because he’s in charge of supplying the cash on the following day for the winning bets. Beneath the banker is an entire well-compartmentalized, Gothic scaffolding, with the number runners who go house to house during the day writing down people’s numbers and picking up their pesos, which they later deliver to higher-ranked collectors, who then go to the big guy, the banker. Many of these links don’t even know each other. There are small, medium, and large banks, which can have several partners, but they’re all ruled by the same law—trust—given that the following day they must pay up even if the number drawn was 63, the murderer, the day after a well-reported crime had shocked Havana.

  The charada vice entered the island together with the first ships arriving in Cuba in the mid-nineteenth century carrying Cantonese and Macanese people, and with it came the entire magical world of symbols, hexagrams, fire dragons, red moons, elephants with golden trunks, and I Ching readings, an entire poetic and ancient philosophy that crossed paths on the island with another culture no less fantastic, that of the Yorubas, Congos, and Ararás of Africa, who traveled to the New World on slave ships together with their pantheon of deities: Osain, ruler of nature and all mountain herbs and plants that have magical powers; Oya, the queen of the cemetery; Elegua, the road opener; Obatalá, owner of all heads.

  In a short time frame, four great races met on this Greater Antilles island. The first to arrive, the pre-Colombian Indians, traveled on canoes from the continental lands of the Amazon and the Yucatán and from other Caribbean islands. The Siboney and above all the Taíno left their food and some words—including the word Cuba—in addition to tobacco and its spellbinding smoke, used to communicate with the gods. Then came the Spaniards, devoted to the cross, playing cards, and the guitar; the black Africans, worshippers of the mountain’s herbs and sticks and uniquely connected to the forces of nature; and the Chinese, with their lottery, opium pipes, and fiery spells.

  In a classic essay, “The Human Factors of Cubanidad,” the Cuban ethnologist Fernando Ortiz compared Cuban culture and its formation with an ajiaco, the most genuine local stew, made of various types of legumes and pieces of different types of meat. Throughout half a millennium, Cuba was an open casserole in which a dense and sedimented sauce with copious dressing was thickened. “This unique and primitive spelaean dish consisted of placing on the hearth a casserole filled with boiling water and adding to it vegetables, herbs, and roots, which the woman grew on her parcel of land according to the seasons, as well as the meat of all types of vermin, quadrupeds, birds, reptiles, fish, and seafood, which the man caught in his predatory runs across the mountains and coast,” explained Ortiz. “Anything edible ended up in the casserole, uncleaned meats that were sometimes already rotting, unpeeled vegetables often with worms that gave them more substance. Everything was cooked together and seasoned with strong shots of pepper, which masked all the insipidness with the exciting crowning of its spiciness. That pot provided, time and again, everything they wanted to eat; the leftovers remained in the same container for the following meal. The next day, the ajiaco was awakened to a new boiling point; water was added to the pot, as well as other viands and little animals, and it was boiled once again with more pepper. And so, day after day, the uncleaned casserole, with its stock-filled bottom.”

  Cuba, an open casserole, a pot cooking on the fire of the tropics and beaten by the hurricanes, where the four bloodlines blended together with their superstitions, customs, rhythms, traditions, and legends, with their heroes and traitors and their universes filled with myths, such as that of the light of Yara, which floats in eastern Cuba—to this day the Baracoa guajiros claim it is the spirit of Chief Hatuey, who was burned at the stake for rebelling against the Spaniards and who once in a while comes out and walks across the fields.

  Also in that stew are the four races’ unique ways of conceiving time and reality, their fears, their profound beliefs, and their differences—since among the Africans there were Yoruba, Mandingo, Bantu, and Carabalí, all as different from each other as a Castilian from an Andalusian—and their ways of understanding the world and defending themselves from power and their ability to invent stories and turn the image
of a saint or the root of a ceiba tree into magic. All of this over time blended together and became one root and one culture, Indian, black, white, and yellow, like the famous Chinese charada man, who had thirty-six tattoos on his body of birds, cats, peacocks, prostitutes, ships, wasps, diamonds, monkeys, and sailors, next to their corresponding numbers.

  Only by accepting the rolling boil of this miscegenation is it possible to comprehend the figure of the incredible Wifredo Lam, son of a Chinese man and a black woman, who with his brushes dragged into surrealism his entire heritage and a world of dreams and masks filled with supernatural beings, simultaneously human, animal, and vegetable. Or the worlds of José Lezama Lima, Alejo Carpentier, Guillermo Cabrera Infante, or Nicolás Guillén. Or to understand the reason why, years ago, an ex-minister of Cuba’s foreign affairs department planted himself in the home of a famous Afro-Cuban priest, follower of the Rule of Palo Monte, and sacrificed roosters and rams in a unique ceremony before a nganga carrying gunpowder, machetes, and bones of the dead, in order to enter the political bureau of Cuba’s Communist Party, atheism’s temple; or why some old Catholic women who go to church every day in Cuba place a small jet stone in their grandson’s cradle to protect him; or why, when opening a bottle of rum, even the most skeptical Marxist pours one out for the saints; or why even the police, whom Ibrahim Ferrer avoided while collecting bets in the neighborhood, placed a bet on 4 on Saint Barbara’s Day.

  In 1974, Gastón Baquero said that playing charada, and following all the rules, obeying the superstitions, was a way of philosophizing. “Moreover, it’s a way of having faith in transcendental things, in the tremendous mystery of the universe and the presence of man in it. It’s poetry for poeticizing the surrounding reality, changing it, subjecting it to the laws of magic.” He continued: “It’s moving for a few hours into the realm of that which is wonderful and abstract. It is traveling to the world of the unknown, no matter what. That’s how Columbus discovered the New World and how the Americans reached the moon.”