The Other Side of Paradise

by Julia Cooke

  When we wandered the streets of Vedado and Miramar for a few hours later that week, Carlos was in no rush, since he neither worked nor studied. He wore plaid shorts and neon yellow faux Ray-Bans and stood in the doorways of places we saw with his arms crossed. But nothing fit: the three apartments were either big and expensive or, in one case, small and dark, in an enormous hulk of Soviet concrete, off the main bus and máquina routes. I told the smallest apartment’s owner that I’d call her the next day.

  As we walked back to his place, Carlos deemed me more high-maintenance than even himself. He looked shocked that such a thing was possible. “M’ija, estás en Cuba,” he said. “You’re not going to find a big, cheap, legal, centrally located apartment with a balcony. It does not exist. I don’t know where you think you are but you’re not in Nueva York—get used to it. Adjust your standards.” His chiding echoed in the blue, graffitied stairwell as we climbed to his fourth-floor apartment.

  We reached his floor and Carlos opened the door onto a large living room in jewel tones—magenta on the walls and lush emerald potted plants in one corner—with shiny marble floors and natural light ribboning in. His mother, Elaine, was neither rude nor discreet about looking me up and down as Carlos introduced us. She wore a green-and-yellow-plaid apron, which she removed and hung next to the stove before joining us in the living room. The dog, Carolina, trotted out behind her. The tiny black cat, which Carlos had plucked mewling from a dumpster on his way back from a party early one morning and named Oscar (de la Renta), clambered across knees and Elaine swatted at him. I spent the rest of the afternoon on sofas around the coffee table.

  The Reyes family spoke with their bodies: eyebrows rising, mouths gaping with laughter, hands clapping together to demonstrate agreement or slapping the table to show dissent. There were fingers lifted to silence someone else—usually in vain—and hands shaking in the air alongside heads to emphasize a point. Elaine shook her head and clucked a “no” when anyone offered to help make another round of espresso but smiled at the edge of her sink when I cleared the coffee cups anyway.

  Things I learned that afternoon: Carlos’s brother, Maykel, didn’t understand the northern European women who dated the black Centro Habana santeros downtown while they went through the rituals of initiation for Santería, and neither did Elaine, really, but she was too polite to agree with Maykel in front of someone she didn’t know. Elaine had worked as a special education specialist for the state until a few years ago. While she was studying for her master’s degree, she’d fallen asleep every night at the kitchen table after putting the boys to sleep. Nicolas, Carlos and Maykel’s father, had been an athlete, a shooter. He was thicker around the middle now, at close to fifty, than he’d been before. He reclined into the couch while everyone talked and though he spoke rarely and quietly, everyone else shut up when he did uncross his legs, lean into the group, and open his mouth. Carlos liked talking about politics, but he spoke too loudly when he got excited and Elaine clapped her hands sharply and pointed at the open windows to shut him up.

  As light seeped from the evening, Elaine asked Carlos if he’d shown me the apartment at the back of theirs. She and Nicolas had turned their apartment’s third bedroom and a service area into an independent flat: They’d added a terrace, a galley kitchen, and a separate entry in the eighties, and now it was a small one-bedroom apartment connected by two closed, locking doors with theirs. It had a slim living room, clean tile floors, and a wall of windows. The twenty-something Cuban girl who’d been there for two years was leaving for Milan sometime soon, going to visit the Italian boyfriend who paid her rent. She was just waiting for her passport to come through, said Elaine. No one knew if she’d return. The Reyes family didn’t have a permit to rent to a foreigner—but they didn’t have a permit to rent to a Cuban, either, and a German wintered in the flat upstairs and a Chilean political science student lived below without a problem. I was a yanqui and so my residency was more political and symbolic and thus the consequences more grave. But Elaine was willing to risk it if I was. Especially if I was staying for more than a few months. Renting was their family’s only source of income, and they needed to save if they ever wanted to move out of Cuba. Elaine could ask the girl to find someplace else to stay for her final months in the country and I could pay what I’d have spent on the small, dank apartment.

  From that first afternoon, Carlos’s family represented what I loved about Havana: afternoons spent in debate, old-world hospitality, an apartment alive with people and the exchange of ideas, a fuzzy but definite feeling of complicity.

  “Ay m’ija, si,” said Carlos.

  “It’s ideal,” echoed Lucía, who had just arrived to drink coffee and join the conversation.

  Two days later, I moved in.

  /// I’d been staying in Centro Habana, where the slam of architectural relics—brutalist, art nouveau, modern, and baroque buildings in a row—and the barrage of activity—peso snack stands, men who filled defunct lighters with fluid, gyms where I lifted weights made of old car gears—offset the overflowing trash bins, overpacked apartments, and clouds of fat flies. There, the dim streetlights snagged shadows on colonial-era moldings and buildings huddled in ocean mist that smelled more of rotting banana peels and urine than salt. Houses and apartment complexes in Miramar had pools and yards through which the sea breezes passed undisturbed, giving even the homes that were blocks from the water a hazy sense of swimming.

  This modernist apartment complex didn’t look like much, four blocks from the coast and set ten meters off the street behind a stand of stiff, browning palm trees and a reflecting pool with no water. Compared to the rococo mansions a few blocks farther into Miramar and the pink art deco house directly in front, Carlos’s building looked brown and plain and riddled with apparent rot.

  Each of the two Z-shaped buildings, pushed toward each other with a would-be garden between them, was five stories high, with deep balconies and X’s made of yellowed masking tape on most of the windows. A few hens and roosters pecked around the rocks, dry leaves, and litter in the reflecting pool. The once-majestic building was Miramar in miniature, a dollhouse of prestige and poverty, history and gossip, left to encroaching decay but found in architecture textbooks on Tropical Modernism. It had been designed by the Cuban firm Bosch and Romañach in 1950 on a commission from a man named Guillermo Alonso, who may or may not have been Guillermo Alonso Pujol, vice president of Cuba under Carlos Prío. The complex was still sometimes used in architecture classes to demonstrate effective cross-ventilation.

  There were two apartments on each floor off the blue stairwell and an elevator papered in curling wood-printed plastic that worked one week out of four. When it was functioning, everyone rode the lift even just to the second floor until it left a neighbor stranded inside hollering and waiting for someone handy—Nicolas or one of the other men—to pry him out. Each front door off the stairwell had a metal grate, crusted with rust or painted crisp white. Behind the grates, most doors stayed open throughout the day. Shards of arguments or TV blare bounced through the bare stairwell.

  The exterior didn’t match the gleaming floors in Elaine’s apartment, the rich oiled wood window frames, the tall banana-leaf plants that towered over the living room couch, the bright afternoon light, the throw pillows that Elaine had stitched and then stuffed with obsolete VHS tape because the scant stuffing available was better used in bedroom pillows. The apartment had been meticulously cared for even as the building’s facade crumbled. When the heat from cooking dampened the hair around Elaine’s temples, she leaned against the polished aluminum countertops in her kitchen, smoking a cigarette and sipping from an espresso cup, feeling the wind blow around her face. “If there’s no air in my kitchen,” she often said, “there’s not so much as a breeze in Havana.”

  Elaine was a black ponytail bobbing around the kitchen as she chopped vegetables at the aluminum counter or cleaned, or she was statuesque, sitting at the table or on the wicker love seat in the front win
dows, smoking a cigarette silent and still enough when she thought no one was around that the smoke rose around her face into a veil. Nicolas was always trying to get her to stop, she said nearly every time she lit a Popular, though I never heard him mention it.

  They’d met in their early twenties and married after just a few months of courtship that included a first date all-night beach party out at the playas del este over which Elaine’s father had been livid. Elaine had moved from a small city in eastern Cuba as a child when her father, an active Communist, was assigned a Party job in Havana. She grew up in La Lisa, a neighborhood to the west, in the house where her mother, father, sister, and niece still lived. It had once been graced with a yard but now smelled like what the neighbors were cooking. She’d married Nicolas, moved in with his family because there’d been no room with hers, and raised children in the rear apartment accessible from a new, separate entrance that, once Nicolas’s father had died and his sister and her family moved to Miami in the Special Period, became their livelihood.

  Nicolas had lived in this very apartment, which had belonged to a wealthy landowner, since his birth nearly fifty years earlier. His father had been the rich man’s chauffeur. The man and his family had fled for Miami in a first surge of emigration that included nearly a quarter-million Cubans, mostly from the upper classes, who departed between 1959 and 1962. Nicolas’s father, a working-class white man with more to gain than to lose from Castro’s increasingly Communist reforms, stayed behind and moved into the apartment on orders from his boss. If the rich man couldn’t have the flat in which he’d invested less than a decade earlier, he wanted it claimed by someone he deemed deserving. In October 1960, the government passed an Urban Reform Law that prohibited housing rentals in order to do away with owner-renter hierarchies, slumlords, and corporate rental agencies. All rental properties were expropriated and turned over to the government. A year later, another law confiscated all property that had belonged to the Cubans who’d left the country, now baptized gusanos, worms. Renters and squatters were allowed to buy their homes by paying rent to the government for between five and twenty years. Soon Nicolas’s father owned a sprawling modern apartment.

  In the years since, families had changed shape but remained in residence. Fifty years of lore floated through the blue stairwells, which were usually dark because no one paid for lightbulbs in common areas. The man downstairs had amassed too much wealth in the economic opening of the late nineties by working for a foreign company that paid in dollars as the rest of the country starved. He had to leave Cuba or face confiscation. His adult children lived there now. An old lady rocked in a chair on her balcony every day, mid-morning to night, in one of three identical house dresses; her children had left Cuba in the nineties. A younger cousin brought her food and waited to inherit the apartment. The seventy-year-old woman across the hall had fought as a teenager in the Revolution and been an intimate friend of Che Guevara’s, Carlos told me—Che himself had given her this apartment. Upstairs, a parade of swarthy Latin American men entered and left one apartment in which a flirtatious art dealer lived. He sold the work of minor mid-century Cuban artists, because no work by the major ones could be taken from the country, and his wife’s father, an architect and the original apartment owner, had designed the flat in which I now lived. All four floors had added a galley kitchen, a balcony, a rusted spiral staircase, and an independent entrance to the maid’s quarters in the eighties. Cuban apartments divided and multiplied and contracted and changed according to necessity.

  There was a time when Elaine had lived alone in the small apartment, when Nicolas traveled to compete. Nicolas had done well enough as a shooter that he’d been sent to Venezuela in the late eighties. Elaine told me one afternoon, when we were, as usual, doing not very much but getting to know one another, that Nicolas had almost stayed in Venezuela when the boys were very small. There was a daily hush around eleven in the morning, when Nicolas ran errands or fixed things down in the garage and their two sons were still asleep. I liked to work in the mornings and usually took a break to bring back the coffee cups I told Elaine I didn’t need her to leave when she heard me moving around the apartment but which she set anyway, full of sweet espresso, delicately perched on the edge of my glass-topped table. We sat down to talk about who I was interviewing, about her family, about my family, about Cuba, about anything.

  It was the Special Period and Nicolas had always hated living in Castro’s Cuba. If he stayed, it meant leaving Elaine and abandoning his sons at least until they were eighteen, when they could leave Cuba. Athletes, who represented so much time and money invested in a sports complex that sportswriter Michael Lewis credits with having created the “highest-valued entrapped pool of human talent left on earth” in the form of Cuban baseball players, couldn’t simply defect and expect to visit their sons every six months.

  Cuban shooters are good, too: they medalled at the Olympics in 2004, 2008, and 2012, long after Nicolas had quit. Unlike visual artists and musicians, whose skill could be privately monetized, Cuban athletes in any of the number of sports for which the country is known—baseball, boxing, even ballet, which resembles sport as much as art—struggled only for pride, a government paycheck, and what they could make under the table from interview seekers or private clients wanting lessons. Their skill was corralled and siphoned into national glory and their homes were as crumbly as anyone else’s. Even Olympic medalists did not live like generals.

  So ballerinas defected, six at a time while on tour in Mexico; boxers and judo champions and soccer players slipped from the hotels where their teams stayed during competitions or qualifying tournaments and claimed another citizenship. Seven months after Hurricane Ike, during the two days preceding an Olympic qualifying soccer game for the under-twenty-three team, seven Cuban players would walk away from the Tampa Doubletree Hotel—leaving the Cuban team to lose to Honduras 2-0 with only ten total players—and claim asylum under the “wet foot, dry foot” policy: any Cuban who made it to American soil couldn’t be deported. Imagine those ten players, sprinting back and forth trying to keep good face and wondering, when the game was over, if they were making the right choice, going home. The government would send them back out all the same, anyway. The Revolution’s great achievements were education, health care, and sports, as the joke went; its failures were breakfast, lunch, and dinner.

  Nicolas could probably have sent his family more money from abroad than what they made now but he’d have been absent, a bargain made by plenty of athletes’ wives and the meaning of which Elaine did not kid herself about. She was not going to be stuck back in Havana, financially stable but alone, raising two fatherless boys in her nominal husband’s sister’s house while Nicolas dutifully went to Western Union every month and started over with a new wife, a new family.

  But the nineties didn’t unfold that way. Nicolas came back and gave up shooting, and his sister moved to Miami. Elaine quit social work, they started renting out the flat, and their joint profession now was keeping their home in order, keeping the renter in their back apartment content. Elaine and Nicolas were the sort of couple who wove a constant conversation around themselves. They were forever talking to one another, picking up a thread when he returned from running morning errands, when she finished cooking, in the afternoons when they sat in the front of the living room, in the mornings behind the closed door of their bedroom, their voices knitting near-visible intimacy. She curled her knees into her chest in the wicker garden chair in the front portico or tucked her feet beneath her. He slouched, the curve of his back fitting perfectly into the chair. Nicolas didn’t talk much to anyone but Elaine. He liked to be busy: fixing anything in the apartment or building that needed it, sanding, oiling, or repainting their old furniture, errands. If they left it would be together, all of them, sometime in the near-ish future, and for Florida, not Venezuela.

  Elaine had told the neighbors over coffee and cigarettes that an acquaintance in the housing authority had helped her get a spec
ial permit for me to live with them as Carlos’s fiancée. Everyone in the apartment complex knew he was gay—he’d come out four years earlier—but sex or the promise of it made countless transgressions of the law at least defensible.

  Still, the potential consequences of the government catching the Reyes family renting to me without a casa particular license rippled: It might be problematic for my Communist fairy godfather, since he’d vouched for me in the visa process, and crippling for my research, since I’d possibly be asked to leave the country; it could leave Elaine and Carlos and their family homeless, since illegal rental was grounds for confiscating the apartment.

  I was instructed never to answer the doorbell or the phone due to my accented Spanish. I went further: I’d have taxis drop me off at the corner or a block away, since Cubans rarely took cabs and the woman who watched the street from her rocking chair was a permanent fixture on the building’s façade. El chivateo, the threat of being ratted out, lurked everywhere and I hoped it would appear nowhere.

  I called a few other landlords and told myself I was trying to find someplace legal to live. But the truth was that once I’d moved in with the Reyes family, I knew that I’d never live far from them in Havana again.

  /// “Hola, divino,” began the man’s voice on the message machine that Carlos called every Saturday night. “Tonight’s party will be held at . . .” and then the theatrical voice gave an address. When it said, “I’ll see you there,” you believed it and so you followed the voice to the addresses of rooftops, basements, and back patios under eaves of aluminum siding. People called from living rooms in La Lisa or pay phones on Centro Habana streets or whoever’s house they were at on Saturday evening, and then they boarded buses or jammed into máquinas heading downtown.