by Julia Cooke
1
THE STORM
LUCÍA
Porosity is the inexhaustible law of life in this city, reappearing everywhere. A grain of Sunday is hidden in each weekday. And how much weekday there is in this Sunday!
—Walter Benjamin with Asja Lacis, “Naples”
Lucía was pretty pleased with herself. No real preparation, other than filling up a few two-liter plastic bottles with water now spiced with TuKola and lemon soda, and she’d slide through this ciclón just fine, she knew it. Well, she didn’t know it, but she sensed that she’d get through Hurricane Ike the way she got through everything: clinging to the edge by fingernails, a big grin slopped across her face. Everyone else was scurrying and getting ready, hanging clothes, pegging boards to windows, waiting in line to clean out supermarkets that had held barely anything to begin with—what was the problem with not eating much for a few days? Her Brazilian medical student friends, twin sisters both named Ana, had gotten back into the country on one of the last flights from Mexico and would crash with her through the storm. They’d brought tortillas and, inexplicably, cans of tuna fish—inexplicable because this was one of the few things that Lucía and everyone else knew was reliably stocked at Cuban supermarkets—and Lucía had saltines and guava paste and her water. Now was when living on the very inside of a Soviet-style concrete block with windows that opened onto interior air shafts and other people’s living rooms was an advantage, unlike every other moment she’d lived in this flat. Even if water licked inside the jalousie blinds that granted minimal privacy from the family in apartment 5D, even if her flat flooded, what would it damage, the fraying couch that wasn’t hers? Her room had one tiny window and it was on the other side from where she kept her books. She moved her TV, pushed a few pieces of furniture away from the windows and closed up as tight as she could; otherwise, she sat and read a bit and talked to the Anas and waited.
Four tropical storms had pushed through the Caribbean in August alone. Now it was a September Monday in 2008 and Hurricane Ike blustered straight at Havana. Not straight at the city, to be fair, but it had touched down that morning on the northeast coast of Cuba as a muscular category 4 storm and no one was sure where it would head from there. It was expected to tear up the east, continue southwest, and barely avoid Havana and the two million inhabitants in and around the city. Or it could swerve in and hit the city itself, an unpredicted tantrum but possible.
I’d arrived a few days before and though I’d met Lucía years earlier at University of Havana parties, I wouldn’t see her until just after the storm. From where I sat on the porch of the ground-floor Vedado apartment where I rented a room, the street shuddered from the crisp dry waves of heat. The clouds and humidity were gone, as if the storm had slurped up every drop of moisture. Cubans scrambled through the streets; the small clusters of prattling neighbors or schoolmates that usually hovered on corners, benches, retaining walls, under boughs of bougainvillea, and on steps, enacting Havana’s characteristic languor, had never assembled that morning. People waved instead—curt arm gestures, a nod of the head—or hollered a shrill word or two as they passed.
Throughout Vedado, rangy shirtless men climbed ladders to hammer sheets of plywood against floor-to-ceiling panes of glass. Laundry lines sagged from upstairs windows. Worn T-shirts and heavy jeans flopped in the wind—housewives had done their washing and mopping in anticipation of the days to come, when they wouldn’t have water for cleaning or sun for drying. The clacking sound of dominos hitting card tables had disappeared along with the hoots of the men who played everyday games on the strip of dirt and hardy grass between the sidewalk and street; they’d noted scores and would resume in a few days. One newscaster’s insistent monotone floated through open doors and windows. On TV, he shooed a gray triangle across a map of Cuba to demonstrate the likely path of destruction. Ike would just skim Havana.
The tall señora of my casa particular smelled like perfumed soap and competence as I approached her in the kitchen. Her two preteen sons mostly stayed in the bedroom that her mother-in-law would share with her, her husband, and their two children while I inhabited their second bedroom for $30 per night. I watched as she peeled potatoes, asking what I should do to prepare for the storm. Stockpile water? Buy canned food? Cubans knew hurricanes, she said—“Nothing, m’ija, nothing at all.” Of course she’d be taking care of me, she smiled as I hovered awkwardly. She’d boiled water for me to drink. Remember how she’d written down my passport number in that logbook for the authorities? She was accountable while I was in Cuba, she said before turning away. I wasn’t to worry; she’d keep me safe. So I left the house.
This Havana was sharply active, confident. As Hurricane Ike rapped at the door, promising to push a few of the city’s old buildings to their knees, scenes seemed to have postcard-crisp edges. A dozen people outside every gas-station convenience store enacted the último system, the way that Cubans form lines outside stores and bus stops: The last person to arrive and join the milling group shouts último; whoever was previously last in line raises a silent hand; and the new last person takes his or her place as the último, to be unseated by the next to arrive.
But by late afternoon, people had disappeared, pulled dry clothes inside, and shuttered windows. Whiteboards outside the Coppelia ice cream parlor announced flavors—Almendrado, Avellana, y Vainilla—to phantom crowds. The only sound was the wind, rattling loose beer cans down the street and shaking the leaves of trees like an eerie symphony of hundreds of newspapers crumpling in unison. In the ocean, frothy white-caps nicked the water’s surface.
Electricity and water had been shut off throughout the city that afternoon. Back at my casa, my señora had filled a tank, stocked candles for every room, and left a pitcher beside my bed. She moved assertively, cooking and entertaining her children and elderly mother-in-law in the dark. The old woman’s home had been deemed unsafe to ride out the storm by the local Committee in Defense of the Revolution (CDR), the neighborhood pipeline from street to government, of which there was one office per block.
When I peered out of my room a few hours later, my señora sat in her nightgown in a rocking chair at the end of the hallway. The ten-year-old perched in her lap, his legs splayed out to the sides of hers. He held a book close to his pert nose in the yellowish light. Outside, I had never seen Havana’s nighttime streets so empty, as if waiting for a shootout. A tinny clanging sound, something loose on the neighbor’s roof, announced the storm’s arrival.
/// Lucía and seven of her friends sat in the living room of her sixth-floor flat, sipping one weak, warm rum and cola after another, smoking cigarettes, and laughing while the rest of Havana played out the human dramas born of too much family time. Their only source of news on the storm was what they overheard through the open windows of the apartments around them. Hours had lost shape and meaning once the eye of the storm had passed through about fifty miles from Havana on Tuesday morning and left only minor damage in the city. What began on Tuesday afternoon as two friends walking over to Lucía’s to hang out with her and the Anas had become on Wednesday a slightly tipsy band of parlor-game-playing refugees from their jammed family apartments, nagging mothers and aunts and exiled elderly relatives who didn’t seem to mind being stuck at home, dads and uncles who sat on front couches and drained bottles of peso rum.
Electricity and water wouldn’t return to Havana for a few days, though only sixteen buildings were downed city-wide. In those that had solidly withstood the storm, the hurricane parties were in full swing. Among young adults in Havana, where you spend a hurricane is an issue that’s more about socializing than safety.
Chaos consumed the countryside to the east. More than two and a half million Cubans across the island had left their homes, decamped on orders to find somewhere safer. Nearly ten thousand tourists had repacked rolling suitcases and moved from hotels in the storm’s path to other government-owned resorts. Hurricane Ike had destroyed thousands of houses; pulled up harvests of rice, beans,
plantains, and sweet potatoes; shattered half a million eggs and killed a million chickens. Cuba reported its first storm-related human fatalities in years: four people dead in the provinces. The count was in the high double digits in Haiti. Later, the cost of the storm’s damage to the Cuban economy would be estimated at $7.3 billion.
This was some of what I told Lucía on Wednesday afternoon when I knocked on her door around noon. Boredom and impatience had sent me deep into my address book and Lucía, a friend of a friend, was the only person I knew who was home. She hadn’t left her apartment since Monday.
“Is water on anywhere?” she asked as I walked in.
“Next word: Triscaidecafílico,” a voice called out from the kitchen.
“Water but no electric,” I said.
“I won’t get water until we get electricity,” Lucía said, as if gesturing toward an apology for what her nose now failed to detect as her own body odor. One of the people in the room pushed a drink into my hand. They were three statuesque ballerinas, the Brazilians, the boyfriend of one of the women, and Lucía, who wouldn’t have been mistaken for a dancer: medium height, slightly pudgy, but pretty, with intense light-brown eyes beneath high, naturally defined eyebrows, pale skin salted with freckles, and a crooked, sudden smile.
“Oye, triscaidecafílico!” the voice hollered and everyone quieted down and began to scribble on the sheets of paper they held.
“A midget who lives on the third floor of . . .” said one ballerina a few minutes later.
“An orgasm induced by a three-fingered man or woman,” and on and on, each of them offering up a faux definition in a homemade version of Balderdash.
Lucía lived alone in an apartment that wasn’t hers. The flat was a light-deprived space furnished with two torn plastic couches under molding ceilings and a bucket in lieu of a shower head. Ash streaks clawed up her kitchen walls from the time she’d blown up a pot making rice while drunk, but it was a place no one else called home.
After graduating the year before from the University of Havana, Lucía was putting in the two years of social service that “paid for” the degree. She should have been sent back to Ciego de Ávila—the town where she’d grown up, right around the knuckle of the crooked finger of Cuba—to live at home, as all unmarried young people did. The only way to get an apartment of your own was to register on the never-ending list for state-granted homes and wait: years, decades, possibly never if rules were followed in overcrowded Havana. The government kicked most people from the provinces who didn’t have permits to live in the capital right back to the country. But she’d asked a friend’s mother if she could list their house as her official address in Havana and the papers had gone through the system unnoticed. Then she found an apartment that family friends from Ciego wanted to rent so they could retire back home with a steady income. They shared a last name and so when inspectors came around, she claimed to be a cousin.
She paid around $100 per month, which she earned by renting out her spare room via word of mouth and an Internet forum for shoestring travelers. Foreign backpackers and freelance photographers relished having a Cuban experience at a rate of $10 a night. These were all punishable offenses, but Lucía had a way of making people want to do things for her, with her. Her friend’s mom had begun to claim the Havana-residence-registration plot as her own idea.
If Lucía had been born in a different place, or in the Cuba that didn’t exist but might have had certain twists and turns of history gone differently, her career trajectory could have, hypothetically, gone like this: She’d have moved to Havana, waited tables or tended bar while working toward her degree, and wound up managing the restaurant or bar. She’d have quietly done favors for people whose quid pro quo mattered and would find herself in her early thirties a well-paid producer or manager of some sort, possibly mid-level in an entertainment empire or maybe at hotels or a media conglomerate.
But that Cuba certainly wouldn’t exist at least until Fidel died, and who knew if it could come into being even afterward? Lucía wasn’t waiting to see. She was twenty-five. Her twenties would be over before she blinked and the old man could hold on until well into her thirties. She didn’t want to still be “inflating balloons,” as she called what she did every day at the Cuban national TV station: preparing managerial reports, manipulating data at the behest of higher-ups to reflect a brighter outlook than reality. Her salary was $12 per month, deposited directly into her Banco Central de Cuba account, but she also got a desk with an Internet connection. So she arrived around noon on weekdays, left by four, and hushed up in between, because she had a plan, and she couldn’t act on that plan until after she successfully finished her social service.
The smell of cigarettes, sweat, and spilled TuKola, Cuba’s sugary riff on Coke, fermented in Lucía’s apartment and someone suggested heading out to the malecón. A few clusters of people already dotted the curve a block or so apart. Once cash had been collected for another bottle of rum and the ballerina and boyfriend had gone off to find an open store, the Brazilians began to talk about their hometown, Recife, where they’d lived until moving to Cuba for scholarships at the Latin American Medical School. Lucía had met Ana Two on a bus heading back to Havana from Ciego, when the line had been too long and she’d asked the youngest person in it if she could cut with them. Ana had said yes.
Ana One, who wore her hair in braids, swept her arms across the horizon as she told us that their city was built right on a beach, rather than a seawall. People walk around in bikinis, added Ana Two, whose hair was brushed out and pulled into a ponytail. Which made the group pause to reflect: What if Havana had been built on the other side of the port, the one closer to the eastern beaches? What if Havana were graced with sand instead of this, its malecón promenade, the city’s collective couch and the rocky shore below?
“There would have never been a Revolution,” said Lucía, with a clap of her hands. “Imagínate, with all of that tourism, with that kind of economy and setup, Fidel and Che and Raúl never would have gotten anywhere.” Everyone laughed, murmured in assent, and then paused awkwardly, the pillow of empty time that hovered around politically sensitive statements made in large groups with newcomers. Imagined scenes of a Havana that resembled a Spanish colonial Ipanema unfurled into the silence.
Lucía poked the air with her index finger. “And the point is, obviously, caballero, obviously, that it’s thanks to the malecón that we have the triumph of the Revolution!”
/// In the days following the hurricane, the U.S. government pledged battered Haiti $10 million in aid. Cuba was offered $100,000 and a promise of more if the country allowed a U.S. team in to assess the damage. President Raúl Castro, who’d worn his new title for only six months, said no. All Cuba needed, he said, was for the restrictions of the fifty-year-old trade embargo to be provisionally lifted so the country could buy food and building materials on credit. While it was legal to buy certain items (medicine, food, construction goods) from U.S. businesses through a humanitarian loophole, they had to be paid for in cash. Under the embargo, companies from third-party countries that traded freely with Cuba could be subjected to fines and their executives denied visas to travel to the United States.
Washington’s response was no. The embargo wouldn’t change unless human rights improved and political dissidents and anti-Castro journalists were released from jail. Throughout the week, newspapers across the United States, except in southern Florida, published editorials and op-eds: The foolishness of a policy that hadn’t achieved its goal of regime change in Cuba in half a century seemed magnified in Ike’s wake. The appearance of such articles alongside news of booming imports from China, Cuba’s new political ally and role model, highlighted the political insincerity being criticized. But the fact that public discussion of an outdated American policy toward Cuba did not spark retribution from the more militant Castro critics in the U.S. spoke of a shift in the swirl around the politics, a distinct cleft between the then and the now. Then was a time, thirty
years ago, when pro-engagement editorials in El Diario–La Prensa resulted in exile-made bombs exploding at the paper’s offices on New York City’s Hudson Street. Then was when an American citizen, a Cuban American who lived in Union City, New Jersey, could be killed with semiautomatic artillery in front of his thirteen-year-old son on a suburban street—the mind conjures images of a cul-de-sac, a picket fence sloshed with red—for participating in dialogue with the Cuban government. In the now, these editorials inspire scoffing and angry discussion. In the now, former Hialeah mayor Raúl Martinez, running that fall for a Miami-area seat in the House of Representatives, urged the Bush administration to relax restrictions on remittances and travel in response to Ike’s devastation.
The embargo stood solid and unchanged, less an effective public policy than a legal expression of a collective wish. In November, Martinez lost the election with 42 percent of the vote. Throughout Cuba, “The Revolution is more powerful than mother nature!” appeared in a cartoonish font, scrawled brightly across walls in the weeks following Ike.
Lucía had heard the language of this political drama for as long as she could remember words, seen cartoon images as a child not of Charlie Brown but of Uncle Sam being admonished for his neocolonialist ways, played along as emergencies ranging from imminent invasions from the North to hurricanes either happened or dissipated into little but expended energy. That Thursday night, two days after the hurricane, she and her friends were less interested in Washington than in jumping the line to get into the Turf Club. Bus service had just begun and little was open after the storm. All the lights on the walk between my casa and Turf were out. But beneath the glimmer of the three functioning streetlights on the dark block, around forty people swarmed into a disorganized queue. A fuzz of conversation arched above the crowd, which funneled toward a bouncer at the stairs above the doors of a basement club, which burped out intermittent bass chords when anyone entered or left.