by Julia Cooke
Within moments of arrival, I was pushed up against the sticky chain that barred the entrance—Lucía had hollered above the din and pulled me through the crowd to join her group at the front. She passed me a tepid green plastic bottle filled with rum and lemon soda and waved a greeting to someone who’d joined the line behind me. Water was back in most homes. Those who hadn’t showered had applied abundant perfume.
Turf was dilapidated, maze-like, and so thoroughly soaked in cigarette smoke that the walls reeked. But on Thursday nights, when a DJ spun Justin Timberlake, Lynyrd Skynyrd, local rappers Los Aldeanos, and on and on, it attracted pop musicians, children of the government elite, Lucía and her foreign friends, university students, artists—los miki. Mainstream, cool-hunting Havanans. Lucía spent money on the $3 cover fee for Turf rather than a package of toilet paper for home—they cost about the same amount and Granma was printed on thin soft stock.
Past the bouncer, a bow-tied, waistcoated man stood at an old-fashioned cash register taking the cover charge. The dance floor beyond was lit by two mandarin-toned lamps set into the low ceiling and a flashing light that thrust the room into intermittent half-darkness. People shimmied and sang along to the English lyrics of Amy Winehouse: “Rrrrehab, I said! No, no, no.” Girls’ tank top straps slipped from their shoulders and boys mopped their foreheads with shirt hems. Nearly everyone wore Converse or Adidas tennis shoes.
It was hot enough that night that when my arm brushed anyone else’s, we traded a film of sweat. The ceiling peeled, uneven patches of solid blue slipping away to reveal an archaeology of paint jobs. Brown, red, and farther down, the grainy white concrete of the structure itself. The seating area just past the bar that separated the dance floor from the tables, where I sat with a group of Lucía’s friends, was stifling.
“You know what they call Raúl Castro,” Mari said to me, leaning in to the table. Mariselys, with a perky voice and shiny hair, was a lawyer but hadn’t practiced since finishing her social service the year before. She managed a pop band and would soon marry a Frenchman. She wanted Lucía to take over the band—“she’d be perfect at it, wouldn’t she?”—but Lucía, Mari said, was planning to leave Cuba around the same time as she. “Raúl is Julio Iglesias,” she continued. “Because la vida sigue igual”—(life stays the same, the title of a collection of his first hits).
“The only thing that changes here is who’s sleeping with whom,” said Lucía. Whether this was due to Raúl Castro or the U.S. bloqueo didn’t matter. Neither side could be trusted. What one saw, heard, did, felt, or needed held weight, not what Granma said, not what Washington said.
A little before 2 AM, the DJ interrupted a Beastie Boys song to instruct everyone to leave the club. A collective groan floated up and Lucía’s friends looked around. People began to shuffle out. This was unusual, ridiculous, they muttered. Turf stayed open until at least three, sometimes later. Lucía, Mari, and I waited outside, collecting her friends one by one until we all crowded together, one node of the multitude that stood in the empty street. Lucía turned around in a circle, trying to find out what had happened. A neighbor had complained, someone reported. The block’s CDR had dispatched an official to chastise the club management. Since the rest of the neighborhood still didn’t have power, it looked overly decadent to allow the cover charge–paying youth to keep dancing. Three dollars was almost a week’s pay on a government salary.
Whether or not that was the real story was irrelevant. Getting information in Havana was a game of telephone in which a snippet of news from a well-connected acquaintance, read on a foreign news website or seen on CNN in a hotel lobby, was circulated via word of mouth. News that came from the collective weighing, editing, and fact checking of the rumor at hand would always be more valuable than what the government called “truth.”
The crowd of about a hundred partiers dispersed into the night unfazed. Lucía and Mari hitched rides to a friend of a friend’s house, the Nuevo Vedado home of a well-known artist whom someone was sleeping with, where Brazilian modernist chairs sat beneath paintings that sold in blue-chip Manhattan galleries. The rest headed to the malecón, to the nearby University of Havana dorms, to any place but home.
/// Not everyone in Havana had access to dollars, which were necessary to buy toilet paper or go to Turf. The use of U.S. currency was a relatively new phenomenon: Though dollars had existed in Cuba before the nineties, sent by family members who lived abroad and stashed inside mattresses or behind loose bricks, it was illegal to use or even own yanqui money until a few years after the fall of the U.S.S.R. The Revolution had distanced itself from the only paper currency that had been in general circulation on the island until 1934—the peso had been introduced in 1914 but wasn’t widely used until after the Great Depression.
Prior to the nineties, Soviet subsidies had held the Cuban economy aloft while a certain sense of idealism dominated the national consciousness. Literacy rates hit 99 percent and for the first time in history, all Cuban citizens had health care. The ration booklet provided over a hundred monthly necessities and there was little crime. Cuba was also a police state whose one political party had a rigid grip on nearly everything. Plenty of people opted out even back then, but, while Havana before 1990 was by no means perfect, older Cubans have told me in rose-tinted lament, at least there was a sense of upward trajectory.
When the U.S.S.R. dissolved in 1991, Cuba lost around 80 percent of imports and exports and over a third of its gross domestic product. The government dubbed this economic crisis the “Special Period in a Time of Peace” and tried to cope. Its main tactic was to embrace foreign currency and coax tourists back to the island. In 1993, the government legalized the use of the U.S. dollar. When it did, the egalitarian society that Fidel Castro had tried to create was cleft by a distinct, unarguable economic disparity; haves and have-nots depending on one’s access to dollars and anyone who had them. Lucía had been ten years old then, and her memories were hazy. Electricity was cut because the government couldn’t afford more than a few hours each night and summers were so hot without fans that her family dragged their mattresses to the sidewalk in hopes of catching nighttime breezes. After dinner one night—she had cooked, and I had given her $5 to buy the black-market lobster tails that we ate atop pasta with pepper and scoopfuls of butter—she told the Canadian in residence and me about an uncle who’d taught her to churn butter from the black-market milk he brought over. The Special Period didn’t hit as hard in the countryside as the city, and Lucía had an aunt in Venezuela who sent what dollars she could spare. Lucía was a have, though she hung there by the barest of threads.
Implausibly, Cubans got by, even if adults lost an average of 5–25 percent of total body weight between 1990 and 1995, as a Canadian study found, even if they marinated, fried, and ate banana peel “cutlets” for dinner, even if thirty thousand rafters took to the seas in rickety, dissipating skiffs in 1994 alone. By September 2008, there were two Cuban currencies. Dollars had been dispensed with as the government cited the need to retaliate against further sanctions from Washington, and the Banco Central de Cuba printed the CUC, which Lucía and everyone else called kooks, fulas, or chavitos. The rainbow-hued kooks were printed on thick stock and embellished with holograms. They were worthless outside Cuba, since they weren’t recognized by any international bank.
One CUC bought 24 pesos in moneda nacional: flimsy slips of paper in which local salaries were doled out and basic goods like sugar and rice and vegetables grown in Cuba were sold. The green, 1-peso bills were always rumpled and sweat-stained; the red, hundreds were often crisp, unsullied by frequent use. Average monthly salaries in Cuba hovered around 300–400 pesos per month, or 12–16 kooks. Although foreigners rarely used moneda nacional, Cubans had to use kooks if they wanted imported goods. Shampoos and deodorants, packaged foods, chocolate, toilet paper, most cleaning products, and milk—the government provided milk rations only for children under seven years old—were all sold in la chopin, the CUC stores, where eve
ryone went shopping.
The Special Period had taught Cubans to resolver. In the gulf between literal and colloquial meanings, to resolver implies questionably legal activities, since at least one step of nearly every solution to any problem in Havana today involves the black market, and always indicates an exchange of favors. Sentences in Havana would feel barren without resolver, for example, “I can resolver that for you” or “¿Resolviste?” meaning “Did you get ———— sorted out?” You could resolver in order to seek pleasure and fun or to acquire more prosaic necessities. It could be a mutual activity, too. When I left my casa particular for a cheaper one in dusty Centro Habana a few days after Hurricane Ike, my señora didn’t charge me for my meals—a different permit was required to serve meals to foreigners and she’d have to show the government her receipt logbook. She just told me to chip in what I thought was fair. Me resolvió; le resolví.
/// Lucía’s office soon cut off Internet access for all but its highest-level employees, she told me one afternoon in the lobby of her pistachio-colored office building next to the artisan street fair where vendors sold toy cars made of beer cans and ashtrays with Cohiba cigar logos. She shuffled her feet in her plastic flip-flops. The distance between her shoulders and her toes seemed shorter than usual. She avoided my gaze and stood in awkward silence, and when finally I said I was hungry and wanted to grab some croquetas at Pollo Ditú next door and did she want to come along, she shook her head, gave me a small, bleary smile, and said she had a little more work to do and we parted. Walking away, she looked like a dog who’d lost its owner and run out of energy circling the park to look for him. Lucía needed the Internet to implement her plan to leave Cuba.
She needed to be in touch with some family friends in Chile, who had offered to write her the carta de invitación that she’d need to travel abroad. Once she finished her social service, she could apply for her tarjeta blanca, her exit permit, and if she could pay for a visa and a plane ticket and a little bit of money to start off, she could leave. Lucía’s thirties would, she hoped, find her settled into whichever country offered her a visa first: Chile or maybe Spain. New legislation offered Spanish passports to the grandchildren of political exiles who’d left under Franco’s rule; one of her grandfathers had settled in Cuba from Spain. She had a year of service left.
Within a week or so, she’d send a text message to the cell phone I rented from an entrepreneur who rented her family’s phones to short-term foreigners. Lucía’s own cell phone, a gift from a tourist who was due for an upgrade back home, unlocked from its home network by a computer programming student in a fourth-floor Old Havana back room, was rarely charged with enough prepaid funds to send messages, so her texts often came from anonymous numbers. “Concert at Bertolt Brecht tonight 9 PM outside come this is Lucía.” She’d gone home that one sad afternoon to lie in bed and read one of the many books that she stacked on stolen milk crates next to her twin bed. Then she’d watched Friends and a pirated Kusturica film on her tiny television. She’d left the cleaning until the following day, and then the next, because she had no foreigners staying and couldn’t get any more until she could check her email—an hour on a hotel computer cost $8 that she didn’t have.
Then a friend came over. Someone always came over. Sometimes it was her upstairs neighbor Claudio, who could talk his way into or out of absolutely any situation in Havana, who’d come downstairs to lie on her couch to read, too, because he lived with a grandmother whose presence sometimes became oppressive. Then Lucía would eventually come out and sit there being miserable and hopeless with someone else—Claudio had dropped out of school at age fifteen and therefore couldn’t work or leave or do anything else but talk or read, really, both of which he did voraciously, single-mindedly, rapidly. Then she’d be convinced to go with him to whatever was happening in Havana at night. As long as there was something going on somewhere, a 5-peso concert at Bertolt Brecht, a free open mic night out in Miramar, a drag show at Parque Lenin, any spectacle at all, she was fine. She’d use a single spritz of Estée Lauder Sunflowers, of which her aunt sent her free-gift samples, pull her hair in a pony-tail, and go, and, eventually, after a few days, she’d feel better. Eventually, Lucía would resolver the Internet situation.
The Anas registered for an in-home Internet access code, which was limited to foreigners; a Cuban filmmaker friend of Lucía’s offered to split the bill if he could use half of their monthly allotted hours. Lucía spent a little less time at her office, now. The connection was slow and the line was usually busy so she often spent afternoons at her friend’s place in an attempt to connect.
Young Havanans weren’t waiting for Julio Iglesias. They were resolviendo their way through hurricanes and sometimes even from small towns in the middle of the country to Spain or Chile.
2
UNDER THE TABLE
CARLOS
“I think I know who can find you an apartment,” Lucía said.
I sat on her couch picking at fraying white vinyl. My address book lay open on my knees. I’d moved with a ten-month student visa, plans to take a weekly class on popular culture, two suitcases and visions of a terrace, and balustrades, an apartment close to a main bus and máquina line, preferably in Vedado. After two weeks I’d found nowhere to live. A legal resident foreigner could rent only from an authorized casa particular owner or directly from the state, apartments priced for businesspeople and reporters on expat packages and usually bugged. A “real estate agent” with frosted pink lipstick set foreigners up in long-term casas and took a cut; she shook her head when I told her I hoped to pay less than $25 a night for a monthly rent. On a full apartment! She didn’t return my calls. Foreign students lived in crowded becas, dorms, but anyone who could afford to stay elsewhere did—the Anas had moved into an apartment of their own and I was by now too old for dorms. Lucía was my Yellow Pages, my best hope to map out opportunities.
That weekend the government tossed the city into a forty-eight-hour “national time of mourning” after Comandante Juan Almeida Bosque’s fatal heart attack a few days earlier. Concerts and parties in all state-owned venues were cancelled for the forty-eight hours following the death of the eighty-two-year-old: third-ranking government official, guerrilla commander from the 1959 Revolution, highest-ranking Afro-Cuban in government, lover of literature and music. He’d composed upward of three hundred songs himself. Maybe this justified the fact that hotel cabarets and bars catering to tourists stayed open. But locals were supposed to mourn. That afternoon, as the middle-aged driver of my máquina, collective taxi, had circled the plaza de la revolución, where thousands of older Cubans had queued up to pay their respects, he broke into an Almeida-written song in a voice quavery as an old record. “Sure, he was just another old man revolutionary,” he’d said slowly when he finished the verse. The other Cubans in the back seat had offered a few claps. “But Almeida was special.”
“Super fula,” crazy fucked up, was Lucía’s take. But since everyone would be on G Street that night, she could introduce me to Carlos, whose mother rented out a small apartment.
The avenue’s broad, grassy median, where every weekend young people gathered to drink and gossip, was so full with teenagers and young adults that night that people walked in the gutters, shuffling through discarded cigarette butts that old men garbage collectors would sweep with thinning brooms around sunrise. Clouds of conversations bumped into one another, intertwined, lost themselves among the mass. Discarded juice boxes of Ron Planchao rum resembled leaves flattened along the road. One boisterous boy shoved another backward into one of the boxy topiary shrubs. It bounced him back to standing as if in slow motion. He waved his arms in indignation, turned away, and disappeared into the crowd.
“We’re really sad tonight, can’t you tell?” Lucía shouted once I found her on a bench. “You know, Almeida and all, generals dying, time of mourning. Vaya, vaya, vaya.”
“Dropping like flies,” said a tall guy with a pronounced pout.
A
cigarette dangled from twenty-two-year-old Carlos’s long fingers. He reached behind him to flick the ash to the sidewalk as he turned to look at me, leaning his cheek in for a greeting. He twisted back to the center of the group and shouted a response to whatever someone had just said. His eyes were thoughtful and calm, but the rest of him was brusque, agitated, exaggerated. The more he spoke, the faster his hands and his words flew. When I seemed confused he turned to look at me curiously down his beaky nose, and then turned, deliberate, back to the group. He and his friends, gay men who worked in theater and film, were on G Street until they headed to the weekly pop-up “Divino” LGBT party, the only activity that hadn’t been cancelled in Almeida’s name, because “the gays don’t respect anyone’s rules,” Lucía said.
The apartment that his family rented was occupied by another tenant, Carlos said, but his mother knew all about the apartments for rent in their neighborhood. If I called him in a day, two days, maybe three, he’d have a few names and numbers of friends of his mother’s that needed renters. He pulled my address book from my hands and wrote his phone number and name in wobbly capital letters. He pushed his black hair, a deflated Elvis ’do, out of his face. When we walked to the party, Carlos loped along the sidewalk in front of the crowd. Once at the rooftop terrace, he joined me to lean against the building’s edge, thick as a concrete bench, on the opposite side from the speakers that blared muddy trance music. We nursed warm $1 beers and talked about movies, how Keira Knightley seemed always to shift between benign bewilderment and manic, open-mouthed excitement.