Hand in hand with the charada are the Afro-Cuban religions and the belief that everything has a solution, even the worst health problems or persecution by the authorities, if you treat the saints properly and carefully choose the mountain herbs for your cleansing rituals and the animals to offer the orishas. Any Santeria practitioner, or santero, knows that the owner of the Palo Caballero (a magical stick used in Santeria practice) is Changó, who is found in bay cedars and has the power to do everything because he can both keep you from falling off a horse and protect you from witchcraft and bad influences; therefore, you must always carry in your pocket a little stem from this plant, which serves as a detente bala. There’s also esparto grass, used for foot-baths or when a possession is being disputed—its fibers are tied into a knot and bound to a trunk and the interested party tightens it each day until he’s exhausted his adversary. Additionally, ginger and lemongrass can age Oggún, master of iron and guard of warriors, who in Mayombe is Zarabanda, absolute owner of the vast stretches of land that border the mountain and ruler also of keys, chains, and prisons, whose numbers are the combination of 3 and 7, and whose days are Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and the fourth day of every month, according to Natalia Bolívar Aróstegui, Lydia Cabrera’s disciple and author of a reference book, Los orishas en Cuba (The Orishas in Cuba), which paradoxically is one of the biggest bestsellers published in revolutionary Cuba.
Natalia is a descendent of the liberator Simón Bolívar and belongs to a distinguished Havana family, but at a young age was initiated in the Palo rituals and now lives in an apartment in Miramar filled with the spirits of important people, where filmmakers, academics, doctors, and painters seek out her advice, as do simple people from the marginal neighborhood of Coco Solo, where witchcraft and spiritual malevolence are commonplace.
Natalia explains that in Cuba, regardless of their class or rank, everyone gets cabalistic, turning to numbers and witchcraft. Unlike the Europeans, especially the French—and specifically scholars, whose understanding of reality is square and who don’t accept as real whatever doesn’t fit in that square—in Cuba, and in the Caribbean, and generally in the Americas, for a boy to be born with a pig’s tail due to a family curse seems to be the most natural thing in the world. That’s why in these lands One Hundred Years of Solitude is a deeply sensible and realistic novel, just as everyone knows that the saints have the same tastes as people and that’s why they are grateful to receive tobacco, rum, goat meat, perfumes, honey and other sweets, or a violin to play some music and shake their bodies in religious ceremonies, and there’s also no problem believing that the dead can speak and that the orishas communicate through people they choose as horses to come down to earth at a bembé (orisha religious fiesta). Have you never seen an old and thick mulata dance while completely possessed during a tambor (drum circle), jumping around like a teenager and totally uninhibited when her personality is actually quite the opposite? Natalia can vouch for it all.
As she recalls, in 1957, when a group of university students with whom she sympathized decided to bring Fulgencio Batista to justice in the Presidential Palace, they didn’t take into account that the dictator’s priests had warned him, after consulting Orula, that in his path was the number 93, revolution, and that’s why Batista had built a secret door in his office, through which he escaped from the armed group as they charged up the palace’s stairs ready to kill him. It is also said, and hardly anyone questions this, that Fidel Castro himself, during a trip to Africa, did what he had to do to get the protection of the spirits and deities living in the mountains of Yorubaland, and that’s why, during that trip, for the first time since Sierra Maestra, he took off his olive-green uniform and appeared on TV dressed in white from head to toe. It’s also said that once a renowned santera approached him and said, “Commander, you have nothing to worry about because you will die whenever you desire it,” and the fact remains that he died on November 25, 2016, after stating in Parliament that he was tired, and it was precisely on November 25, sixty years earlier, that Castro embarked on the Granma yacht in Mexico and headed to Cuba to begin the armed battle.
Natalia explains that, on another front, but with the same reasoning, a good palero, or shaman, can help align the stars and tend to any demand, such as the long-suffering employee at a state institution who wants to “cool down” his boss to stop him from breathing down his neck—well, there are spells that help the enemy lose his or her way. And then there’s the office colleague who’s the target of rumors and criticism and, to end the issue and shut the rumor mill’s mouth, turns to a mayombero, also a shaman, who will procure two roots from the plant named apasote, or wormseed—also used as an antiparasitic and to pass gas—and a white-cloth-covered rod, and a lizard’s tongue, and a bottle of moonshine, and will ask the interested party to bring something that belongs to his or her adversary. And what of the jealous woman who goes to the ngangulero’s house and begs him to work his magic so that her husband can no longer get it up with another woman, and regardless of what the palero may ask her to bring, she will bring it, no matter what—a pair of stained boxers, seven black candles, the sweat of a horse, or the bones of an insane dead person from the Calabazar cemetery, once again 68, the graveyard?
The magic of the bolita and the African religions and their pantheon, which the slaves syncretized with the Catholic book of saints when they came to the Americas, in addition to being practical and offering home remedies, has another great advantage: it’s an incredibly powerful psychological weapon for facing life, since relying on its inspiration makes it easier to resist, and no matter how bad it gets, you can always win a parlé, or obtain dark favors from the deities living in the mountain. And here the charada and the saints unite under another resistance mechanism, which Cubans rely on—the choteo (joking around or mockery), studied by philosopher and journalist Jorge Mañach in his memorable essay “Investigating the Choteo.”
Mañach explained back in 1928 that making light of serious things was essential to Cubans, that this “disrespectful habit” was based on the “aversion to all authority,” and that usually the mockery was a subterfuge employed by the weak against the powerful, equivalent to an act of dodging. Mañach said, “Not all authorities are lawful and desirable, and that’s why mockery has always been a resource for the oppressed—regardless of the nature of the oppression.” On par with the Cuban people’s greatest afflictions, he argued, chronic mockery had been one of their great defenses:
It has served as a buffer during adversity, a dock to resist political pressures that are too cumbersome, and an outlet for all types of impatience. In other words, for us, it has been an incredibly effective decongestant. Since its operation consists of belittling the importance of things, in other words, stopping them from affecting us too much, the choteo emerges in every situation where the local spirit is embittered by a false or unwieldy authority.
When facing an uncompromising bureaucrat who’s screwing you over at a window and someone from the middle of the line says, “Forgive him, it looks like he isn’t getting any from his woman,” and the room bursts into laughter, that simple act of insubordination also holds something magical, like betting on 45, the shark or president, because in the blink of an eye, the tension is dissolved.
According to Mañach, there are two types of choteos, “a quick and healthy choteo, basically following vices or failures of attention derived from the same local psychology,” which is what happens when, for example, during a performance in Havana’s Gran Teatro, a tenor’s voice cracks and someone in the audience automatically stands up and yells out, “Hey, you’ll be singing for one less person, ’cause I’m outta here.” And another type of choteo, which is more “profound and skeptical,” originating “from a true failure of authority,” where the choteador, or joker, comically loathes “every principle of conduct and every disciplinary demand: of absolute veracity, punctuality, conscientiousness, of the ritual and ceremonious, of the methodical,” since what he or she is defending
is their independence, just as when you play the bolita you are completely free and powerful the instant you translate your dreams into a number.
Originally, the charada bankers managed the numbers as they pleased, without being affiliated with any other lottery. At a certain time in the morning, “they hung it out,” meaning they randomly picked any number and hung it from the roof of their home, suspended by a cord tied to a ring. Some banks, generously and to encourage bets, gave the players a hint during the day in the shape of a cabalistic verse or riddle: if, for example, they said, “A very serious lady who pays heed to no one,” the nod could be to 5, the nun; “an elephant that walks on tiled roofs but breaks no tiles” didn’t refer to the mastodon but rather would point to 4, the cat. Lydia Cabrera, in her book dedicated to Ochún, which is syncretized with Our Lady of Charity, or la Virgen de la Caridad del Cobre, Cuba’s patron saint, quotes another one of these tricky riddles that someone with Estrella’s experience wouldn’t find difficult to solve, “A bird that bites and leaves.” The dead, like birds, fly; and the dead, arriving through their own will or sent by a witch, bite, hurt, put a spell on a live being, and leave. The number then would be 8, which in charada is not only the dead but also the tiger, the table, the pumpkin, and on and on.
TROPICANA REDUX
BY FRANCISCO GOLDMAN
It was like returning to a lushly primeval mythical island—or like Peter Pan returning to Never Never Land—entering the grounds of the Tropicana nightclub in Marianao, a popular borough of Havana, for the first time in a quarter of a century. In the ensuing years I’d only occasionally thought about my time in this place, it was so anomalous to the rest of my life, but now everything I saw was vivid with fresh recognition, the towering royal palms, fruit trees, jungle plants; the eight nude female dancers sculpted in marble, known as the neoclassical Fountain of Muses; the elegantly spare, red-trimmed glass and concrete architecture of the main complex; and in front of the entrance on its own little island, the statue by Rita Longa of a slender ballerina en pointe, swaying from the waist up like the stem of a water lily in a current, arms held gracefully out, which has become the Tropicana’s emblematic image. Our tattered old taxi stopped at the reception guard-booth in the drive. I left my wife, Jovi, with the driver and stepped into a room whose walls were adorned with enlarged black-and-white photographs of some of the Tropicana’s past star performers. Now, though I didn’t know the name of anybody I should ask for, I had to explain what I wanted to the man sitting behind the desk. I’d last been here in 1993, when I’d written an article on the Tropicana for Harper’s Bazaar, the women’s fashion magazine. I’d spent about ten days hanging around the club, going to shows and rehearsals. Now I wanted to write a new piece, about the current Tropicana in these changed times, and I also wanted to find some of the dancers I’d gotten to know back then, listen to their perspectives on the passing of time, in their own lives as dancers and in Cuba generally. Maybe someone at the Tropicana could help me to contact some of those people.
The man behind the desk looked at me skeptically and said, “They must all be dead by now.”
I wondered if that was a comment on how visibly I’d aged in twenty-five years, though, of course, he hadn’t known me back then. He was about forty, at most, I guessed. “Some of them were teenagers back then,” I said. “They’re only in their forties now younger than you.”
I was feeling a bit of pressure. I had only three days left in Havana to do whatever reporting I was going to be able to do here for this piece. He made a phone call. I studied the photographs on the wall: glittering skimpy costumes, legs, arms, hips, nalgas, fabulous headpieces, portraits of legendary divas, one of an almond-eyed woman with a thoughtful-looking, sensuous expression. I was a little disconcerted to be having an awed crush on a photograph and told myself that was the most beautiful face I’d ever seen in my life. The man behind the desk, on the telephone, was more or less faithfully describing my request to somebody, though his caustic tone of voice didn’t seem to promise that he would help my cause very much.
He passed me the phone so that I could speak to a woman from the administration office named Sandra. I explained myself again, and told her I’d brought photocopies of my old magazine article and lots of snapshots I’d taken back then. Sandra said she would meet us by the entrance—I told her that Jovi, who’d been waiting in the taxi, would be coming, too. Our taxi driver, a man with a heavy, narrow-eyed Slavic face, agreed to wait, but no more than twenty minutes, he said.
It was my photographs that really did it. They’d all been taken with those Kodak disposable cameras; the mobile phone digital camera era was still some years off. Sandra, a warm, hearty woman, sat alongside me in her office, going through them one by one, images of rehearsals and shows, of dancers backstage and some in their own homes, and sometimes she exclaimed in recognition. “These photographs are precious,” she said. “You should do something with them; the people here have to see them. That was a golden era at the Tropicana.” When I’d been there in 1993, the titular director was the legendary Tomás Morales, but the choreographer of the troupe and of the show who I got to know was the also-legendary Santiago Alfonso—such words as legendary, mythical, immortal, and diva are part of the essential and unavoidable Tropicana vocabulary. I’d originally tried to renew my contacts with the Tropicana through Santiago Alfonso. When I’d phoned him from Mexico City and told him my plans—he didn’t have any memory of me, of course—he’d spoken as if he’d be happy to meet and help me out, and I’d expected to be able to quickly get to work. But now, here in Cuba, I’d already wasted two days chasing Santiago on the phone. After telling me several times to phone back, he’d growlingly asked how much I was going to pay and told me that his lawyer had advised that he shouldn’t speak to me unless I paid. This is just for an anthology that’s being published in New York and Spain, I explained. Various writers, I told him, would be writing about various aspects of life in Cuba, and I—Santiago roared at me, “And you think the world needs you to tell it about the Tropicana?” “Of course not, it’s just that—” I’m pretty sure I just began to giggle, with nerves but also because I found his antagonistic onslaught really funny. Frankly, I could even understand his wanting to be paid for granting an interview and providing information; it even occurred to me that it was surprising that request didn’t come up more often. But I didn’t have a budget to pay Santiago Alfonso. And he wasn’t going to help me. That’s why I’d come directly to the Tropicana that day, without knowing who to ask for there.
I was fortunate to have found Sandra. She phoned the current director-choreographer, Armando Pérez, who is known as El Jimagua, “The Twin”; his twin brother, Alberto, has also been a member of the Tropicana family for decades, both starting out as dancers. The possibility of my being able to write a new piece on the Tropicana hinged on this one telephone call. If it didn’t work, Jovi and I would just be having a short vacation in Cuba—not a terrible prospect, of course. After all, it was here in Havana where, on the Malecón three years before, I’d proposed marriage. But the weather was rainy, windy, and cold, the coldest January week, people were saying, that they could remember. Because of the waves surging over the sea wall, the Malecón was closed to pedestrians and traffic. There were going to be no quick trips to a beach or afternoon breaks by the swimming pool. Havana Vieja’s former charm has pretty much been spoiled by the hordes of American and European cruise ship tourists crowding its old streets, driving restaurant prices so high that even a plate of rice and beans with a fried egg on top now costs the equivalent of twelve dollars. The highlight of our days so far had been going to a little food stall run by a boisterous group of women on a Vedado side street, where the customers paid in Cuban pesos and you carried your plate of delicious congri and roast chicken across the street into a little park. I could tell that Sandra was giving an enthusiastic pitch on my behalf. Then I heard her say, as if repeating instructions, “Okay, so they can see the show, but they can’t
sit at the director’s table.” And after she hung up, she told us to come at eight the next night to the performers’ entrance behind the Tropicana. El Jimagua would talk to us before the show.
On the way out, before returning to our taxi, we stole a quick look around. Here was the indoor theater, Los Arcos de Cristal, the Crystal Arcades, a modernist classic by Cuban architect Max Borges, constructed in 1951, which fits into its bowered setting like a tropical glade. Borges went into exile after the Revolution, had a long if quiet architectural career—compared to his significant one in Cuba—in Washington, D.C., and Virginia, where he died in 2009. I went down through the open lobby to find Bajo las Estrellas, the famous Paradise Under the Stars, where the show takes place almost nightly, unless bad weather forces it inside: rows of tables face the stage, which is ensconced among trees, a wall of verdant foliage laced with delicate-looking metal catwalks and bridges where at night, in colorfully blazing and popping lights, female dancers wearing soaring headpieces hover high above the audience. Back in the pre-Revolution glory days, that stage had featured the greatest stars of Cuban music: Rita Montaner, Bola de Nieve, Olga Guillot, Benny Moré, Celia Cruz. It welcomed international performers, too: even Nat King Cole performed there. The nightly audience included infamous mafiosos and nearly every movie star of that era that you can think of, from Ava Gardner to Marlon Brando. Even if after the Revolution the celebrities in the audience were more along the lines of Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin or, very occasionally, Fidel himself, the Tropicana has remained one of Havana’s gaudiest, most effervescent and talent-rich nightly spectacles. Now it was midday; everything was quiet. At the back of the stage was the sculpture of geometric tubes from atop which, I now remembered, the star soloist Lupe Guzmán used to launch her famous swan dive at the climax of one of the show’s most iconic numbers. Before we’d left the wonderful Sandra upstairs, I’d asked if she knew how to contact Lupe, who was in several of the snapshots she’d looked through and who was prominently featured in the Harper’s Bazaar article, too, in a photo with her then teenage daughter, Lianette Beltrán, who was already a sought-out model, both women leaning upper torsos, heads, and golden Rapunzel manes out through the windows of an old fifties-model automobile. Even back then, when she was still performing, Lupe was regarded as one of the Tropicana’s all-time greats. Sandra wasn’t sure where she was now—maybe in Miami, where her daughter had moved decades before to pursue her modeling and acting career. Santiago Alfonso would have known, but his gruñonismo had made me feel too intimidated to ask.
Cuba on the Verge Page 19