by Julia Cooke
They walked or rode to places large enough to accommodate Havana’s growing out and almost-out LGBT community: patios, rooftops, defunct concert halls, or skating rinks. I once met Carlos at a party in an empty Habana Vieja lot where a building had collapsed. Men had long since ferreted away the bricks and beams to sell to renovators on the side because you needed a specific renovator’s permit to purchase concrete and bricks at the state stores. The speakers had been propped on piles of concrete rubble and when you danced you had to be careful to lift your feet high but the place’s capacity had been enormous, larger than most so-called Divino parties.
The one occasion on which the party settled with regularity was a drag show every few weeks in Parque Lenin, an enormous tract of rolling hills and lush foliage twenty minutes outside town. On nights when someone big was headlining, well-organized swarms of young gay men and women gathered wherever a máquina could reliably be hailed and paid $12 for a ride out. Carlos splashed on aftershave and layered the two shirts he always wore to appear not quite so skinny and, one Saturday, leaned in my doorway and told me to come along. We’d meet his crew on G Street at 10:30. From the central avenue, his group, including a theater tech also named Carlos and two linguistics students, found a car that shot along the avenues out of Havana as the streetlights diminished. We wound along the dark roads of Parque Lenin until the parking lot appeared suddenly around a sharp turn, an oasis of vintage cars in a line with lanky drivers who leaned against hoods counting money. To one side, a dozen people lined up outside a door that poured red light into the dark park around the small amphitheater and showered the line with campy pop. Madonna de Cuba was headlining and the crowd was eager.
The Tropicana cabaret setup was here interpreted by a tinsel-loving set designer. Silvery stars and streamers hung from beams that held a small metal roof over the stage. A long, thin runway extended into the basin of the table-service area, where groups sat before bottles of Havana Club white rum and plates of cubed ham and cheese. Red-painted wood beams and cheap siding and the dry parkland outside and a slight smell of stale urine on the side of the room closest to the bathrooms combined to generate a vaguely gamy, 4-H Club feel, amplified by the preening groups of people not dancing in the bright light on the dance floor. The room buzzed with the firefly dramas of a group of people who know each other well, who can swap tidbits and look around and point out the subject of their gossip. Preparation for the spectacle, here, was half of the spectacle: A dozen people fluttered in and out of the bathroom area, not hiding the bare-chested men in tights applying eyeshadow, dresses on hangers behind them, from attendees who waited to use the toilet. Carlos and his friends, who wore jeans and preppy tops or sleeveless tees at their raciest, were conservative here: There were boys wearing satin bras and fake eyelashes or sequined halter tops and dark lipliner, girls in cargo shorts or sequined halters and jeans, some people who’d gotten government-funded sex change operations in the year and a half since they’d been legalized, some cross-dressers who hadn’t and never would. People didn’t look the same and that was the point. Ten years from now, this party’s equivalent promised to be more polished, more separated into cliques.
Ten years ago, Carlos and I might have been put in jail for being at a party like this. Forty years ago, he could have been sent to a work camp for being suspected of homosexuality. “No homosexual represents the Revolution, which is a matter for men, of fists and not feathers, of courage and not trembling, of certainty and not intrigue, of creative valor and not sweet surprises,” the official newspaper El Mundo stated in 1965. Where at the start the Revolution promised an egalitarian society that had lured support from gay Cubans, the new government quickly turned against them. The expulsion of Americans, the rehabilitation of prostitutes, the reclamation of property erected by a foreign force, and money poured into cultivating sportsmen who could do battle on the field: The Revolution was a practical but also a symbolic action, defending a conquered Cuba from the penetration and dominance of the North. Machismo was as essential to the cause as homogeneity. The University of Havana expelled gay students and the Union of Young Communists shunned men they deemed “feminine.”
And yet, wrote gay Cuban writer Reinaldo Arenas, “I think that in Cuba there was never more fucking going on than in those years, the decade of the sixties, which was precisely when all the new laws against homosexuals came into being, when the persecutions started and concentration camps were opened, when the sexual act became taboo while the ‘new man’ was being proclaimed and masculinity exalted.”
Arenas nearly died in jail after being discovered trying to smuggle his writing out. His work captures a sexually fluid Havana where any sex was understood to be better than no sex regardless of gender pairing, but where pervasive homophobia and violence and prison stints layered dark experiences and a sheen of prudishness onto the eroticism. Some members of his crowd were jailed; others were sent to Military Units to Aid Production (UMAP), the Cuban version of a gulag. Gay men were rounded up off the streets or given a false summons to their obligatory military service and hauled off to work in fields or quarries sixty hours per week for 7 pesos per month. They worked alongside practicing Roman Catholics, Jehovah’s Witnesses, long-haired hippies, and “counterrevolutionaries.” The UMAP program ended in 1968 but the camps remained open, paying involuntary internees slightly higher wages. Penal code revisions decreased punishments for homosexuality gradually, over the course of the seventies, eighties, and nineties.
Back then, “Neither teachers nor doctors could be gay. Today, no military person can be gay either,” said Mariela Castro, gay rights activist and daughter of Raúl in an interview shortly after her father’s appointment. Today, there is still no recognition of gay unions in Cuba. Same-sex couples do not hold hands in the street and gay parties and clubs are not advertised as such. But the first year of her father’s presidency, 2008, saw government-funded sex change operations for transsexuals, a measure for which she’d lobbied since 2005. She promised more change, and soon.
At Parque Lenin, someone flicked up the music and a hoot rose from the burbling crowd of around a hundred and fifty, around two-thirds male, all now clapping rhythmically in anticipation. A parade of half-nude Cubans began. A sexy guerrilla fighter ripped off his army-green shirt and aviator sunglasses to show a chiseled face and rippling abs; a woman wore a modified nun’s habit and a garter belt; a goth girl, in fishnets, high boots, bra, and cape, whipped her long black hair like a flag as she spun around. They retreated, flushed and bouncing their way into a cluster to the side of the stage, as the variety show started. A tall transvestite threw her arms out wide while lip-synching to “The Diva Dance,” the blue alien aria from The Fifth Element. A purple-clad drag queen with inch-long talons on delicate hands pounded her chest a la Celine Dion as she faux-sang Cher. Someone did a rousing dance to a Gloria Trevi song. Carlos sang along quietly. Between acts, two men in boxer-briefs pulled a red curtain open and closed. During performances, they stood statuesque on either side of the stage.
There was a pause. The stage cleared and the crowd stared at the curtain, where the two men stood with bunched handfuls of fabric in their hands, at the ready to sprint clumsily backward and reveal Madonna strung up on a silver cross papered with aluminum foil. A roar rolled through the room. She was tall with a chin cleft and red lips. Long blond hair hung over cleavage that spilled from a black pleather bustier. She began with “Like a Prayer,” mouthing the intro words. When the beat line kicked in, she leapt from the cross and roamed the stage. She clasped her hands together (like a little prayer), dropped to the floor (down on my knees), pointed to the audience (want to take you there), and then up at the open sky that winked into the amphitheater. She dropped again to the floor and vogued, her legs scissoring through the air.
The crowd around her wasn’t gossiping anymore. The collective craving for spectacle, for someone to part the curtain and emerge, confident and with a hip swagger and an arm flourish and a presence a
s different as humanly possible from everyone who walked down G Street at four in the afternoon—that craving had been recognized and met. This entire room was in varying stages of standing out. No one leaned into bathroom mirrors applying eye shadow in order to fit into the Cuban crowd. And indeed, when more permits were given to open private in-home bars in 2011, a drag bar lined in synthetic velvet brought into the country in checked suitcases would open on the outskirts of town. On the two nights that I would go with Carlos, the performers would outnumber their audience but, with consummate professionalism, put on a show with verve and sequins just the same, and the two of us would clap and dance wildly alone on the dance floor. Carlos’s arms were a barometer of his emotional state: when he was happy, he carved a radius around himself. He walked with his arms swinging; he pulled me into a casual hug; he danced with slow, broad movements that delineated the bubble of his reach. Whenever Carlos danced at gay parties late at night, his arms moved gracefully and around a wide personal perimeter.
Madonna left the stage to two standing ovations. As had become our routine, I left the party earlier than Carlos. He would stay at Parque Lenin until the party ended around four, and then he would sit in the kitchen to watch TV for a few hours. Nicolas had stretched an antenna out of the kitchen window to catch a cable signal from the state-run hotel across the street. The TV got shadowy, staticky CNN en español, Showtime, and a few local southern Florida channels, since the satellites thought they were beaming to an account in the Keys. Carlos sat in a stiff wooden chair, eating bread with mayonnaise or leftover rice and beans in the bluish glow of SVI and reality TV reruns until his eyes began to slip closed.
Elaine had never been to a drag show at Parque Lenin. But her son’s homosexuality didn’t bother her, she said. It was his lack of goals that worried her. Going to social gatherings was his only aspiration, and lately, he’d been going primarily to gay parties. Elaine was afraid that as Carlos sank his identity into this one community, this one aspect of who he was, he did so at the expense of the other aspects of his personality: his intellect, his drive to debate, his passion for art and cinema. Even his strong opinions, his outspoken nature, his curiosity. All things he could use to make a life for himself if he wanted to. He had never found any motivation, she said. This was part of why she had finally agreed to leave Cuba.
The Reyes family’s appointment at the U.S. Interests Section, the euphemistic name that the U.S. government has used since its embassy was shuttered in 1961, was scheduled for April 2011. A year from the coming April, they’d hand in their papers and meet with a representative of the government that they hoped to call their government, and fingers were crossed that they’d be given Family Reunification Visas, since they’d been sponsored by Nicolas’s sister in Miami. They’d do their best to convince interviewers that they were ideal Cuban Americans, industrious and family-oriented just like so many of the families that had settled among the billboards and smooth asphalt and trim watered lawns of southern Florida.
This was why Elaine risked renting to me—as a yanqui, I paid more than a Cuban would, more even than a German, and she and Nicolas needed to save. Their family was sponsoring them in the eyes of the government, but Elaine and Nicolas had to foot the departure bill themselves: four passports, medical checkups, exit visas, entry visas, plane tickets, and at least some startup capital. Until April 2011, their lives were dominated by a tight-belted routine, their bubble of stasis defined at its edges by the specter of a life, together, that all were envisioning slightly differently but none could imagine.
/// Every aisle of a state supermarket, la chopin, held variations on a theme: aisle one, Herdez canned peas, beets, and four sorts of dark-meat tuna; on two, Canadian corn flakes and Chinese noodles and every imaginable shape of Barilla pasta; three, Tetra Pak milk and Pomi tomatoes; four, an entire aisle of Brazilian cookies in metallic packages, wafers and biscuits and off-brand Oreos; five, all-purpose cleaning products in varying scents, an army of bottles emblazoned with cartoonish gleaming floors glowering down. Most agromercados, the agriculture markets where anything that can be grown in Cuba is sold in local pesos, stocked plantains and tiny bananas and yucca and a few wilting heads of cabbage. There was one agro downtown where piles of bright fresh peppers and firm guavas and the occasional lush head of lettuce were sold at slight markups to those who could pay more, expats and people with family abroad and those who ran casas or in-home restaurants.
Elaine rarely resorted to going to that agro. Too expensive. And somehow she set inexpensive feasts before her family every day at lunchtime. Ropa vieja, the classic Cuban beef dish; pillowy tortilla española with potato, green pepper, and onion; chicken drumsticks with tomato sauce.
A photographer friend of mine, Juan, passed along the number of a man he knew who sold food on the black market. The day I called him, he had bacon, Serrano ham, blue cheese, parmesan, wines, and olive oil, though at later dates he’d also have smoked salmon and mozzarella, too. I placed my order and he said he’d be over in the morning.
The next morning I waited at my window. When I saw the person I assumed was him parking a tinny scooter in the lot, I leaned out of the building’s shadow and called his name softly. He was a thirty-something man with a serious expression and abundantly gelled hair. I pointed at the rickety spiral staircase at the back. Bottles clacked against one another as he lugged them up the two flights to my apartment.
I poured him a glass of cool water as he pulled out the items I’d asked for. He set them on my glass-topped table. Two bottles of Chilean Cabernet Sauvignon that retailed for $9 in the state stores, two for $10 from him. One liter of satisfying, green olive oil, $9. A four-pound bag of grated parmesan cheese. And a shrink-wrapped haunch of cured Serrano ham the size of a small child. Fifteen pounds.
I looked on with awe, glee, and confusion. “Great. How are we going to cut this?”
“You said you wanted Serrano,” he said quickly, pulling out a two-inch thick wad of CUC and licking a fingertip. “If you’d told me you wanted a half of a jamón Serrano, maybe I could have found another client who wanted to split this one and delivered half and half, but it’s too late for that now. If you don’t want it, I’ll find someone else.”
“But what am I going to do with all of this?” I waved my arms vaguely, as if trying to help him see how big the ham looked to me in my small space.
“Mira, what most of my clients do, they go to one of the supermarkets and they give the guy behind the meat counter a dollar or two to slice it really thin on the machine,” he said.
I retreated to my bedroom to see if the only American expatriate I knew in Havana wanted half; I called Juan and he committed to a chunk. Back in my living room, I handed the vendor $70, cleared out the bottom half of my refrigerator, and locked the door behind him.
“Next time, hija, you have to be specific,” Elaine said sternly. “Ask prices, sizes, weights, everything. Next time order an extra olive oil for me and I’ll leave you the money—the doctor says I need it for my cholesterol. Now, if you will, give me a tiny hunk of that fat and I’ll bring you a tupper of the stew I’m making.”
Elaine bought nearly nothing from the state stores, where Canadian cornflakes sold for $12 and olive oil for $14. Items that she regularly purchased through technically illegal venues included cheese, eggs, fish (both fresh and frozen), tomato paste, yogurt, coffee, horse meat (killing a cow merited a jail sentence, since beef was scarce and earmarked for state supermarkets; horse meat, gamier and tougher, substituted well in ropa vieja), wine (when there was money for it, which was rare), clothing, acetone for removing nail polish, pots and pans, and diesel fuel for the car her younger son sometimes rented from a neighbor to use as a gypsy cab on weekend nights. Communist Party officials with state cars sold whatever they didn’t use of their rationed gas and diesel. Employees at all-inclusive hotels filched wine, olive oil, cheeses, prosciutto, and more from storerooms to sell via an immense web of contacts. And ever since the 2008 hurric
ane season, when customs taxes for bringing food into Cuba were eliminated to help families recover from Ike, awkward suitcases had brought in the stock for black-market vendors’ itinerant shops.
Scenes of everyday domestic life included the egg man standing outside the door with an improbable plastic bucket of fragile eggs that never seemed to break in transit. Once cracked, they revealed bright yellow yolks. Every month or so, there was the woman who stopped by with a rolling suitcase filled with Zara pants and cheap men’s briefs that she spread on Elaine’s dining room table after ferrying them in lumpy checked suitcases from Panama. There was a white sateen tablecloth that appeared on my kitchen table around five in the afternoon on the first day that I invited someone over for dinner. Every time I had guests, the tablecloth materialized.
There was Nicolas hefting sacks of rice and sugar onto the kitchen counter, having returned from the bodega, the ration shop, with little else, despite the fact that the unbleached pages of paper promised a long list of items that were rarely available: grains, oil, refined sugar, raw sugar, baby food, bath soap, washing soap, toothpaste, salt, coffee, and cigarettes, signed and stamped after each dispensed serving. Pages detailed specially prescribed medical diets and age categories that Elaine’s family didn’t fall into: extra meat, chicken, root vegetables. For car owners, gas. For children, fish, milk, eggs, soy yogurt, and, when they were available, yearly balloons and cakes for birthday parties. But these items were rarely available at their bodega, for no reason other than “por que la leche es hasta los siete años,” because you get milk until you’re seven years old, slang for “Lord only knows.” The bodega food was usually bad: broken rice with bits of chaff and gravel that required grain-by-grain sorting on the kitchen table, stringy chicken or pork when there was any, small black beans that worked out to a few pots’ worth. But Elaine made do: She used the chicken in stews that camouflaged its quality, bodega rice in yellow pilaf with hot dogs, beans in wet cumin-scented side dishes alongside ropa vieja, meals that lived between the state-sanctioned and the black markets.