The Other Side of Paradise

by Julia Cooke

  THE OTHER SIDE OF PARADISE

  Life in the New Cuba

  Copyright © 2014 Julia Cooke

  SEAL PRESS

  A Member of the Perseus Books Group

  1700 Fourth Street

  Berkeley, California 94710

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form without written permission from the publisher, except by reviewers who may quote brief excerpts in connection with a review.

  ISBN 978-1-58005-532-1

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.

  987654321

  Cover design by Raquel Van Nice

  Interior design by Domini Dragoone

  Distributed by Publishers Group West

  To my family, y mi familia

  CONTENTS

  INTRODUCTION

  1STORM

  Lucía

  2UNDER THE TABLE

  Carlos

  3JUST HAIR

  Liván

  4AMIGOS

  Sandra

  5LIKE THE STARS

  Isnael

  6TARZANS AND CIRCUS CLOWNS

  Adrián and Adela

  7SPECIAL PERIODS

  Carlos and Elaine

  8THE REVOLUTION WILL NOT BE TELEVISED

  Ensemble

  9LEAVERS

  Lucía

  10NEXT YEAR IN HAVANA

  EPILOGUE

  August 2013

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  Some names have been changed at the subjects’ request, and in recognition of the reality of living in a one-party country. A few details of character and chronology have been changed, though not ones pertaining to real political people or specific news events. The facts remain true and nothing has been exaggerated or invented.

  INTRODUCTION

  There’s a bar in downtown Havana, a backroom bar next to an outpost of the government-run Sylvain bakery chain where foreigners buy 65-cent bottles of water. The bakery used to sell flaky pastries, but a bite of their white frosting usually revealed toothache-inducing harshness, the sharp result of sugar and water hardened together without enough fat—bakers often lifted butter and oil to bring home on the occasions when these products arrived at Sylvain. And anyway, Cubans never bought pastries or water here—Cubans buy TuKolas and H. Upmann cigarettes, which the Sylvain still stocks, along with packaged chocolate and vanilla sandwich cookies and Nestlé ice cream. You could always find cheaper, better, flaky, and buttery pastries if you knew where to look, and now there are more small cafés and bakeries than ever in Havana, but TuKola is still so much tastier than peso sodas.

  The bakery and the bar, El Caribeño, reside on the ground floor of a generic three-story apartment building whose corners are splotched with black mold. There are usually more people on the building’s stairs than in the bar: when there’s a flash rainstorm and people wait for fifteen minutes for the sky to clear, when no one has money for a drink or a TuKola, when apartments are hotter than streets. Russian Ladas are parked in the Partido Comunista de Cuba Parqueo next door. There used to be a small sign outside El Caribeño, palm trees curling parenthetically around the bar’s name on the street corner, but it’s been taken down. It was always easy to miss amid the much larger silver or neon signs for bars, restaurants, cabarets, music, music, music, attractions in this tourist-heavy neighborhood for visiting crowds of Canadians, Italians, Brits.

  Here in Vedado, dark jazz clubs are lined in wood and velvet or mirrors. The ocean cups the malecón just down the hill from hotels where gangster Meyer Lansky hosted starlets and singers in the fifties, and white curtains billow around columns at restaurants in twenties sugar baron mansions. Vedado is casually suspended in the country’s nostalgic past, shot through with swing, Cuban slang for charm, personality, style—even the slang reinforces the illusion! Sinatra could have sipped a daiquiri right over there, the palm fronds that crinkle in salty breezes seem to whisper. There are mansions with florid moldings and thick palm trees shading front yards, apartment buildings with porthole windows and delicate cantilevered stairs, broad balconies over which middle-aged women lean, squinting into the sun and smoking cigarettes that silk the street with Cuban tobacco. Some neighborhood structures have seen facelifts and paint jobs; others are scabby with patches of flaked-off paint that spread weekly.

  The building that houses El Caribeño fits into the latter category. Water-toting tourists who poke their heads in usually don’t enter. The Hotel Nacional’s seafront patio with its rattan loungers, freshly cut lawn, and burbling fountain, with the wall of previous visitors like Naomi Campbell, is a block away. El Caribeño is open-air, too, but it’s lit by fluorescent lightbulbs and furnished with sticky metal chairs instead of rattan and it’s on a busy street across from the gutted high-rise Hotel Capri. A tang of metal hangs in the air from ongoing renovations at the Capri and the ocean is lost amid washed-out faces and scaffolding and persistent dust. The radio plays reggaeton or local pop, not the Buena Vista Social Club, and the only pictures on the wall are posters for local Cristal beer. But this place usually hosts at least a patron or two. Mojitos cost five pesos in the moneda nacional in which Cubans receive salaries, or 20 cents in Cuban convertible pesos, the Cuban tourist currency that’s pegged to the U.S. dollar. Here, in a downtown area that caters to CUC-wielding tourists pleased with the price tags on $3 drinks, is a bar that locals can afford.

  To be sure, they are not great mojitos. Bow-tied bartenders scoop four (five? six?) teaspoons of sugar into a glass with harsh peso rum, a squeeze of lime juice from a Tetra Pak box, an anemic stalk of mint, and a top-off of tap water. At least that’s what composed my very first mojito, which I drank quickly at age twenty while pretending to understand my conversation with the two charismatic men who’d brought me and a friend to the bar and whispered the only phrase I did catch, that mojitos here were very cheap, just one dollar each. A long time later, I’d frequent a back table with a University of Havana alumna named Lucía and rotating clusters of students thrilled to pay someone to make them a drink. And a while after that, Adrián, a young jazz musician who lived across the street in an apartment owned by the (Che) Guevara family, would smirk when I suggested coming to El Caribeño for a quick drink after one of our interviews. There were so many other, better spots opening since Raúl was in charge, he’d say. I would mostly walk past it, too, after I’d moved to Havana and started serving drinks at the apartment I rented, or stopped drinking mojitos altogether.

  Havana reveals itself in snippets that build, one atop another, in a constant waterfall of places and scenes. Drink prices prove negotiable. The cluster of people outside a gas station or at a bus stop is an inflexible and enforced line. The Russian Lada or old American jalopy—a chugging Ford or Studebaker, with a mismatched door or hood ornament—is a taxi. That heavy stroller lugs not a husky baby but five dozen cups of black-market yogurt sold door-to-door from beneath a lace blanket. Consequently, the supermarket is the worst possible place to buy food, but gas stations are the most reliable spots to purchase cheap wine, except for the few months when the businessman helming the wine company dies under questionable circumstances and there’s a diplomatic inquiry and production halts altogether and there is no cheap wine anywhere on the island. And this flexibility is ever more striking for its contrast with the essential fact of today’s Cuba, the inescapable bearded face that’s helmed the country for fifty-plus years, growing slightly grayer, jowls dropping yearly in portraits that get switched out and replaced but never taken down.

  /// In 2006, Fidel Castro rounded the curve into his eighties and transferred presidential duties to his brother as he battled a vague but grave stomach illness and the dogged newspa
per headlines that chased it: Intestinal bleeding! Stomach cancer! Surgeons stumped! Imminent death! The Granma state newspaper insisted that he would be fine, yet in February 2008, Fidel formally handed the reins to his younger brother Raúl and gave up the pretense of returning to office. Speculation fluttered, but few facts were known to the public other than that the new president had been the loyal and pragmatic minister of the armed forces for fifty years, and possessed not quite one-tenth of Fidel’s charisma.

  Raúl and Fidel and Che and the rest of los barbudos, the bearded revolutionaries, had pushed former president Fulgencio Batista and his coterie onto a plane—their wives still in New Year’s Eve party dresses—a half-century earlier after the insurrection they’d begun when Fidel was twenty-six years old. Raúl had been twenty-two when they attacked the Moncada military barracks in 1953, the first violent strike against the old order, and Che had been twenty-five. Batista and the presidents before him, Ramon Grau San Martin and Carlos Prío, had billed themselves as revolutionaries, too, because Cuba’s history as a constant colony lorded over by someone else was a convenient foil for someone who wanted to appear independent. But these new grizzly boys had both the age and the struggle to fit the title: They’d only ever lived in the Cuba that had failed to materialize after independence from Spain in 1899, the Cuba of extreme inequality and puppet presidents. They’d decided to fight. They suffered privations and violence to attain power, and their youth had amplified both their struggle and the changes they implemented when they won. What followed is common knowledge: socialism, expropriation of property or death to the ruling class, many of whom fled to the United States; reliance on the Soviet Union and strict regulation of citizens; an economic implosion when the U.S.S.R. crashed in 1991, and a slow accretion of change in the years since.

  I started to learn Cuban history when I enrolled in a University of Havana class called “History of Cuban-U.S. Relations, 1901–1959.” I’d taken a semester off from college to study in Havana, but, on my first day, I’d understood startlingly little of the rapid-fire Cuban Spanish as I sat at the front of a classroom of thoughtful twenty-year-olds who smoked cheap, unfiltered Criollo cigarettes from wrinkled paper packets in the hallways between classes. The chairs were made of dented metal and pressed plastic and bright sunlight flecked the floors with the imprints of the trees outside the open windows. The ceilings peeled, every student took assiduous notes on thin paper pads, and the only word I distinctly heard was enmienda, repeated over and over. So after class, I walked to a bookstore and found a middle-school history textbook. Later that night I flipped through page after page of illustrations and captions: “Workers were poor, illiterate, and miserable before the triumph of the revolution,” “during the neocolonialist rule of the United States before 1959,” “then cheering people greeted the guerrilla fighters,” and “we love Comandante Fidel.”

  Enmienda, I learned, referred to the Platt Amendment, the 1901 American resolution to withdraw the remaining yanqui troops occupying Cuba after the Spanish-American War and establish the U.S. government’s right to intervene in Cuban politics, turning it into a self-governing colony. But in that moment, the fluorescent lights—an initiative to replace all of the country’s incandescent bulbs with energy-efficient Chinese models—hummed overhead, and I thought, Every single young person that I will meet has read this textbook.

  Everyone my age sat under the same lightbulbs and had read the same book and I was hooked: Not only was Havana romantic and steeped in drama and history and humor, but it was inexplicable and strange and split from every cliché I’d heard or read about the city. Because the fact was, there was tremendous diversity, rebellion, and sophistication among the young people I met, both while studying at the University of Havana and on visits and reporting trips in the years to come. Some danced salsa sinuously, though they couldn’t afford to go to concerts at the Casa de la Música, the city’s main tourist venue for salsa and casino. Others preferred to headbang in dilapidated amphitheaters on the outskirts of town among self-described anarchists. Nearly everyone wore jeans, not the threadbare Lycra shorts that news stories had cited. None of them drove old cars or could pay for rides in the glossy well-maintained Chevys that gleamed through the streets. They, and I, rode in 10-peso gypsy cabs or, more often, in packed buses on commutes that felt like being slurped up through a drinking straw, pushed toward the back by sheer momentum, and spat out only after hollering “Chofe, this is my stop!” and elbowing toward the door.

  Months after trust had built around study sessions and then drunken evenings and then political debates, I saw that the Cubans I knew passed around frayed copies of People or Spanish political rags, USBs loaded with Portishead or Daddy Yankee, carefully preserved copies of The Unbearable Lightness of Being between brown paper covers for discretion. I heard the complaints of a recent college graduate, my history instructor, Yoel, who for his lack of ideological zeal had been denied a job in international relations and was assigned to teach teenagers instead. His class held overt disapproval of U.S. neo-imperialist foreign policy and an oblique yet critical analysis of Cuba’s one-party system. In the four years after I’d studied in Cuba, I moved to Mexico City, began to work as a journalist, and took a few reporting trips to Havana. When I searched for him on one such visit, he’d disappeared. The email address he’d given me bounced my letters back and no one at the university knew his whereabouts.

  Brown paper cladding, discreet USBs, double entendre: the protective mechanisms of a well-adapted generation of Havanans. Beneath the rambling discussions I had with young Cubans in bars and under weeping fig trees, on white sand beaches and at backdoor parties—the public places where Cubans were allowed to socialize with foreigners—history and politics thrummed, even in the mere detail of the fact that they, by law, were not allowed to enter my apartment, which was classified as a “hotel.”

  Absurdity was abundant: Granma came out every day with near-identical stories about Communist Party resolutions and policy revisions, and American newspapers published stories on “cyber-rebels” and independent libraries that no Cuban I knew had heard of, much less visited. The Mesa Redonda TV news program was on every night to decry whatever the United States had recently done in the Middle East, followed by old reruns of CSI: Las Vegas or Gilmore Girls.

  I wanted to know what it was like to grow up in Havana in the last generation of Cubans raised under Fidel. I wondered how young adults felt when conformity was so encouraged, when kids at every school country-wide read identical textbooks and washed with the same soap and wore matching uniforms of white shirts with colored pants for boys and skirts for girls. All advertisements were controlled by a single political party. Every Havanan had at least one family member, whether distant or close, living abroad, but few young people had ever left the country—exit visas were not customarily granted to the under-eighteen set. And yet the isolation that defined their childhoods had begun to erode when they’d been adolescents: After the U.S.S.R. crumpled, leaving the country shockingly poor, the Cold War time capsule of Soviet-allied Cuba had opened to a tourism industry that filled hotels with Canadians, Italians, Brits, and Mexicans on tour packages. New treaties with China brought thousands for visits long and short. In 2008, Havana teemed with foreigners and change was already starting. Raúl legalized the sale of computers and cell phones to Cubans and began to tax the previously under-the-table payments that foreign companies had always made to local staff. Where it had been illegal for Cubans to enter hotels and tourist residences, Raúl struck down “tourism apartheid” a month into his presidency.

  Havana was poised to shift away from what Fidel had shaped but forty-nine years in, its twenty-somethings had only ever lived in the city that failed to emerge from the promises of the Revolution. Not many wore beards—only profundos, the intellectual hippies, really had unkempt facial hair anymore—but the parallels were clear. I wanted to collect the stories of today’s young Cubans in the fragile pillow of transitional time between
Fidel and whatever would come next; I wanted a hint at what their Revolution could resemble.

  /// Long after I’d discovered that you could buy five mojitos for a dollar at El Caribeño, not just one, I would spend a year traveling back and forth between Havana and Mexico City, conducting interviews that began just after Raúl stepped into the presidency. Reporting without the requisite government permits could get a foreigner trailed by the secret service and kicked out of the country, so I was as discreet as possible. Then, in 2009, I would move to Cuba with the help of a Party bureaucrat I privately called my Communist fairy godfather. I packed two suitcases and all the money I thought I’d need and I found an illegal apartment and learned where to buy groceries.

  Havana captured my imagination because of its pervasive drama and uncertainty but also because of what I’d initially thought of as its layers. The bars I hadn’t recognized as important, the informal mechanisms for traversing the city and procuring food, the people whose diversity and revolt emerged in well-hidden fragments—these details enticed and enthralled. Nothing in Cuba had clear associations with anything in my past. I never read anything that matched my experience of the place, freeing me to interpret alone, and time seemed to slow there, accordioning out in days and weeks during which my task was to edit those interpretations. No matter where I was during the years after my initial experiences in Cuba, some part of my mind remained in Havana. I could spend more time explaining how I now understand those initial reactions to Cuba as a product of my own upbringing and education in mainstream, upper- middle-class American society, or as a coming-of-age myself, a first bite of independence in a country so unlike my own—but that’s not the point. The point is that long after the romance of being a stranger in a new land rubbed off, after gypsy cab price negotiations and black-market food purchases became frustrations indicative of larger ills, after I’d listened to so many stories of privations and indignities borne during the worst days of post-U.S.S.R. poverty and matter-of-fact recounting of families fractured across the Florida Straits, after I’d watched unexpected roadblocks smack down along carefully laid paths out of Cuba and even paths to better lives inside the country, after I began to suspect that I didn’t know who surrounded me or what their intentions were, and after I started to yearn for something that simply was what it professed to be, without revision or footnote, grace remained. That grace was entirely created by the people in the following pages.