Cuba on the Verge

by Leila Guerriero

  “There are many more poems in that book. You can start by reading one a day, then two, and so on,” I said.

  “Chico, at that rate he’ll never finish,” Antón said.

  Alberto went back to reading, leaning over the book, nodding his head. He looked like a rabbi over a Torah: rocking back and forth, back and forth.

  “Pinga!” Eliezer swore, suddenly coming out from between the mounds of books. “Nachi peed on the cookie catalog. Alberto: bring something to clean it up. Shit!” he said to Alberto.

  “Is that another poem by Dulce María Loynaz?” Antón asked.

  The following day, I went back to the bookstore and found Alberto at the door, up on a ladder, his head shoved into a corner of the roof.

  “I’m repairing a leak,” he said. “If not, it’ll get bigger and this roof will come down, too. It’s not hard: I just patch it with a bit of cement and that’s that. But you have to know what to do. Unfortunately, Eliezer doesn’t know a thing about construction,” he added, waving his trowel for emphasis.

  “See that?” Eliezer said, coming out from inside. “Leonardo DiCaprio turned mason.”

  Next to the door, a dog was nursing her pups.

  “Lucy had her babies,” Eliezer said. “We need to buy more food.”

  “That’s where all the money goes,” Alberto said as he climbed down off the ladder, trowel still in hand. “A third to feed the dogs, a third to buy books, and the rest to help the hustlers.”

  “And Reinier?” I asked.

  “Muchacho!” Alberto exclaimed.

  “The policeman’s in jail. They’ve had him locked up for three days now,” Eliezer said.

  “What did he do?” I asked.

  “It was stupid,” Eliezer said. “He went to the soccer game on Sunday and got into a fight with some guys who beat him up. Reinier broke a bottle and went after them, and everybody got cut up.”

  “His arm is scratched here,” Alberto said, pointing to his shoulder.

  “So the police came and took him down to the station. Can you imagine? The police took a policeman.”

  Eliezer pulled a wad of bills out of his pocket and handed a thousand pesos to Alberto.

  “Reina María Rodríguez is launching her book at the Pabellón Cuba today. Go quick and buy ten or fifteen copies. But make sure they’re from this collection,” he said, pointing to a book on a shelf. “Make sure they’re exactly like this one: black cover and gold seal.”

  “Okay. Be right back,” Alberto said.

  “I’ll go with you,” I said.

  We left the bookstore, walked up L Street, turned onto Twenty-First Street, and as we walked I said: “Now you can tell me the story of how you came to Havana.”

  “Muchacho!” he said.

  He said he had lived in Bayamo until the age of eighteen, then came to Havana for his military service. He left his girlfriend behind in Oriente Province and went to live in a military barrack near La Víbora. One day, as he was getting a haircut, the barber introduced him to a middle-aged Puerto Rican, who invited him out. They spent a few days together, and this guy fell for Alberto. Once he finished his service and went home, the Puerto Rican kept calling and sending money. He even bought him a motorcycle and a house in Bayamo, and would go visit him every couple of months.

  “He fell in love with me,” Alberto said.

  “And what about the barber?” I asked.

  “I never saw him again. This guy I know told me they put him in jail.”

  Alberto continued his story: his thing with the Puerto Rican lasted a few years, but then the guy started calling all the time, checking up on him, until one day Alberto grew so fed up that he broke up with him over the phone.

  “I’ll take my freedom over money,” he said. “I don’t care about money. What I want is to live a quiet life, not have some guy checking up on me all the time. He showed up in Bayamo one day, without warning, and I lost it. I don’t like to be spied on.”

  Alberto met another girl in Bayamo, and the two of them had just moved to Havana a few months earlier. Then he met Eliezer.

  “And how did you meet?” I asked.

  “At the trial for the murdered Spaniard. I went with my brother; he knew the killer, so the police had brought him in as a witness. And they called on Eliezer because the Spaniard used to go to his bookstore. That’s where we met, in court. There we both were, sitting, listening to the trial, when Eliezer pulled out a book by Pedro de Jesús and began taking notes on the blank pages at the back. I was watching him, couldn’t believe someone could write that fast. He asked me what I was doing in Havana. I told him I was a carpenter, had just arrived and was looking for work. ‘You’re a carpenter and I need someone to build bookshelves for my store,’ he said, so I went back to the house with him. When I walked in, I said, ‘Compadre, you don’t need a carpenter, you need a whole army to straighten things up in here.’ But we kept talking, and he told me he paid twenty dollars a day, so that’s how I started to work for him. He’s a good guy and I want to help him out. With what he pays me, I’m able to support Daykelín and my son, and save a little so that one day I can buy wood to build those shelves for him. Eliezer doesn’t have anyone. Well, he’s got me and Daykelín. She likes him, too; that’s why she cooks for him almost every day. After we close the store, he comes home with me and we all eat together, and Daykelín laughs at his stories. And yeah, he’s got the policeman, too; Reinier’s his boyfriend but he doesn’t want anyone to know that, and well, he doesn’t have him now that they’ve put him in jail.”

  By the time we got to the Pabellón Cuba, it was closing.

  “Come back tomorrow at ten,” a guard told us.

  “Let’s go have a drink, and you can keep telling me your story,” I said to Alberto.

  “Where?” he asked, suspicious.

  “Just over here, on La Rampa.”

  “Okay, but not too far. I’ve got to get back to the bookstore.”

  We walked down the stairs and along La Rampa toward the Malecón.

  Alberto told me that he was with a Spaniard now, a man who comes every six months and sends money, and things have gotten complicated because he spends his days at the bookstore and his nights with the Spaniard, and he gets home to his girlfriend at dawn. Daykelín went through his phone recently and lost it when she found messages from the Spaniard.

  “What did they say?” I asked.

  “I don’t know, stupid stuff. He called me papi, said a few things. She went crazy, started crying, said I was going to fall in love with him. I said, you’re nuts, chica. How can you think I’d fall in love with a man? No, that’s impossible.”

  Alberto stayed quiet for a moment, then said: “It’s so shameful to have to tell your woman that you’re with a man so you can get money!”

  “It would be if you were stealing or killing, but it’s not shameful to be with another person, man or woman. It sounds to me like you like him.”

  “I like them both. The Spaniard because I’ve known him for a long time and he helps me out. And Daykelín because she’s the mother of my child.”

  “Have the two of them met?” I asked.

  “No! And they never can.”

  “But now they both know.”

  “Yes, but they’ve never seen one another, and I don’t want them to. Is it much farther?”

  “No, look. We can sit here, on this patio, and chat a while longer, then I’ll walk you back to the bookstore.”

  We sat outside at the coffee shop on Twenty-Third and O Streets, at a table by the sidewalk. Alberto ordered a beer, and I ordered a mojito.

  “Sure, sweetie, right away,” said the mulata waitress in the typical government uniform: white shirt and black vest.

  “One day the Spaniard went to the bookstore with me, but Eliezer doesn’t like him. Says he looks ridiculous, all fat and old with dyed-blond hair because he’s a hairdresser. But he likes Eliezer, says he’s handsome, and he knows how much Eliezer has helped me.”

&nbs
p; “Enjoy,” the mulata said, setting our drinks on the table.

  The daily spectacle of late afternoons on La Rampa played out before us: students, hustlers, transvestites, government employees, tourists, taxi drivers, pioneers. Everyone was heading up and down the street, a few inches away from our table.

  “I like chatting with you,” I said to Alberto.

  “Take my number,” he said.

  “I’d like to see you before I go.”

  “Tomorrow I work at the bookstore. Saturday I’m going to the beach with the Spaniard.”

  “Sunday then. I’ll take you out for dinner. We could go to El Cocinero.”

  “Your place is better,” he said. “You can cook me some spaghetti.”

  “Why spaghetti?”

  “I don’t know. I just said that but it could be anything.”

  We continued to talk for a while, now with musical accompaniment: a group of musicians had arrived, and the rhythm of their bongos and clarinet fused with the reggaeton coming from the taxis along La Rampa. We walked back to the bookstore, arriving just as Eliezer was closing up.

  “Alberto, the radios,” he said, pointing to some empty cardboard boxes.

  Alberto hurried over to lift them off one of the tables and began packing them.

  “Not like that; like this,” Eliezer said, readjusting two radios. “Unbelievable: you’ve been closing down every night for a year now and still don’t know how to pack.”

  I said good-bye and left as they were piling books in empty beer cases. (“All these boxes here are from either beer or rum cartons,” Eliezer had said to me one day.) I was meeting Wendy Guerra for dinner at Sia-Kara that night, so I headed back toward the Malecón. As I approached the Habana Libre, my phone vibrated. A message had come in from Alberto: “u seems like an exelent im glad to met you see you.”

  “That could be a poem,” I thought, remembering Antón.

  The last time I saw Eliezer was a Tuesday afternoon. I was leaving the next day and this time had no plans to return to Havana. I arrived at the bookstore to find him sitting in the doorway, surrounded by his guys: Alberto, Reinier the police officer, an autistic guajiro, and two others who had just arrived from the country: their skin leathery from the sun, staring with a mix of curiosity and incomprehension.

  “I came to say good-bye,” I said to Eliezer. “I head back to New York tomorrow.”

  “Have I got a gem for you,” he said. “You’ve got to see this. Alberto, bring me the court file.”

  Alberto went into the house and returned with a big, thick folder full of Xeroxes, which he put in my hands.

  “It’s the dissidents’ court file,” Eliezer said. “It’s all there: every accusation, the prosecutor’s questions, even the brand of cameras and equipment they confiscated. It’s the bomb.”

  “How much?” I asked, flipping through the folder, thinking how this official, bureaucratic language might be useful for my Cuban stories.

  “Just imagine. It’s priceless. It’s the only copy in Cuba,” he said, taking the folder out of my hands and setting it on a table.

  A puppy—its eyes not yet open—appeared in the doorway, pulling itself along the floor and making strange noises. Reinier picked it up and dropped it back with the others, sleeping on the mother’s tummy, in the living room.

  “Eliezer told me you’d been in trouble,” I said to the policeman.

  “Ey,” he replied with that smile of his.

  “You should have seen the officer who brought him back,” Eliezer said. “A mulato at least six foot five who could crush your hand when he shook it. Married, two kids, and you know what he said to me? He asked if I could give him a job. Can you imagine? Turns out everyone at the police station wants to work here now.”

  “They need the money,” Reinier said.

  “That one wanted to pick up tourists. Can you imagine? Hustling has infiltrated the police force. In this country, there are two kinds of men: on the one hand, there’s the Cuban macho, so concerned with protecting his woman’s honor that he says, ‘I’ll never let you prostitute yourself. I’d rather sacrifice myself and do it.’ Then there’s the lazy-ass Cuban male who spends all day lying around, scratching his belly, and says to his wife, ‘Hey, we need a few dollars. Head on down to the Malecón, will ya?’ The only difference being who’s the whore, the man or the woman.”

  Alberto and Reinier were playing with Nachi, who had come out from the living room as Eliezer spoke.

  “Hustling is no longer taboo in Cuba. Even the police are involved. There are only three taboos left in Cuba, three things that could get you locked up: one, pedophilia, messing with children; two, counterrevolutionary activities, dissidents; three, drugs. Those are the three deadly sins in Cuba. But hustling? No. Prostitution is an entrepreneurial category. Can you imagine? Self-employed sex worker.”

  “Nachi peed on the dissident file,” Reinier said, holding up the wet folder.

  “Put it in the sun,” Eliezer said, unfazed. “There’s a difficult period coming, a ‘special period’ here at the bookstore. I’ve got to get ready for all the people who will come once the documentary is out. We’ve got a lot of work to do. We’ve got to build bookshelves and repair the roof and renovate the room at the back, make it into a gallery, because now I’ll need to show paintings and photographs and have exhibits and organize screenings, because that’s what people expect now. It’ll be a whole cultural center. And still a dog rescue, and a male brothel, too, because the word is out, and all the foreigners who come these days aren’t looking for books or the culture but for guajiros, and I’ve got to adapt, fix everything up back there, so I’ve got rooms, and the guys won’t have to wander around Havana in search of a room, and it’d be a good time to set up a bar, so the customers have somewhere to sit and chat, with the guys, over a beer, but I need to get a license for that and I don’t know if they’ll give me one.”

  It was nearly eight o’clock; I had to get home to pack. I interrupted Eliezer’s monologue and gave him a hug.

  “I’m not sure when I’ll be back to Havana,” I said.

  “Remember,” he said. “You stay out of the dark spots. Best to stay in the light.”

  CONTRIBUTORS

  CARLOS MANUEL ÁLVAREZ (born Cuba, 1989) is a writer and journalist. In 2013, he was awarded the Calendario Prize for the manuscript of his short story collection La tarde de los sucesos definitivos (2014) and in 2015 he received the Ibero-American journalism prize Nuevas Plumas from the University of Guadalajara in Mexico. In 2016, he cofounded the Cuban online magazine El Estornudo. He regularly contributes to the New York Times, Al Jazeera, Internationale, BBC World News, El Malpensante, and Gatopardo. In December 2016, he was selected as one of the twenty best Latin American writers of the 1980s by the Guadalajara Book Fair in Mexico. His first collection of journalistic pieces, La tribu, was published in 2017 by Sexto Piso.

  JON LEE ANDERSON (born United States, 1957) is an American biographer, author, investigative reporter, war correspondent, and staff writer for The New Yorker who has reported from war zones in Afghanistan, Iraq, Uganda, Israel, El Salvador, Ireland, Lebanon, Iran, and throughout the Middle East. Anderson has also written for the New York Times, Harper’s, Life, and The Nation. Anderson has profiled political leaders such as Hugo Chávez, Fidel Castro, and Augusto Pinochet. He began working as a reporter in 1979 for the Lima Times in Peru, and during the 1980s he covered Central America, first for the syndicated columnist Jack Anderson and later for Time. He has published the following books: Inside the League: The Shocking Exposé of How Terrorists, Nazis, and Latin American Death Squads Have Infiltrated the World Anti-Communist League (1986, Dodd, Mead, coauthored with his brother Scott Anderson); War Zones (1988, Dodd, Mead, coauthored with Scott Anderson); Guerrillas: Journeys in the Insurgent World (1992, Times Books); The Lion’s Grave: Dispatches from Afghanistan (2002, Grove Press); and The Fall of Baghdad (2004, Penguin Press). He is also the author of the biography Che Guevara: A Revolutionary
Life (1997, Grove Press). While conducting research for the Guevara book in Bolivia, he discovered the hidden location of Guevara’s burial, from which his skeletal remains were exhumed in 1997 and returned to Cuba. He is currently working on a biography of Fidel Castro.

  VLADIMIR CRUZ (born Cuba, 1965) is an actor who has appeared in a number of feature films, television series, plays, and shorts. He has also directed films and plays. Cruz studied acting at Havana’s Instituto Superior de Arte, graduating in 1988. He is best known for his role in the Oscar-nominated 1993 movie Strawberry and Chocolate. He won several awards for his portrayal of the young David, among them the ACE Award (Association of Latin Entertainment Critics of New York). Since 2005 he has also been involved in screenwriting and the production of audiovisual projects, and since 2010 he has run his own theater company. The last play he directed was Miguel Will, in 2016, about the lives of Cervantes and Shakespeare. He splits his time between Havana and Madrid.

  IVÁN DE LA NUEZ (born Cuba, 1964) is an essayist, art critic, and curator. He was the first director of La Virreina Centre de la Imatge de Barcelona, in charge of defining the project. He was also director of cultural activities at Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona (CCCB). In 1995, he received the Rockefeller Fellowship for Humanities. He has been awarded the Ciutat de Barcelona Prize for his book Fantasía roja (Red fantasy) and the Espais d’Art Prize for the best art review published in Spain in 2006. Among his books are La balsa perpetua (1998), Paisajes después del Muro (1999), El mapa de sal (2001), Fantasía roja (2006), Crítica del futuro (2006), Inundaciones (2010), and El comunista manifiesto (2013). Some of them have been translated into German and Italian. His curatorial work includes the exhibitions La isla posible (1995), Inundaciones (1999), Parque humano (2002), Banquete (2003), Postcapital (2006), De Facto: Retrospectiva de Joan Fontcuberta (2008), Dentro y fuera de nosotros: Retrospectiva de Javier Codesal (2009), La crisis es crítica (2009), Atopía: El arte y la ciudad en el siglo XXI (2010), and Iconocracia (2015). He has written essays for the retrospective exhibitions of Stan Douglas, Los Carpinteros, Manuel Álvarez Bravo, Vik Muniz, Joan Fontcuberta, Carlos Garaicoa, and Javier Codesal.