by Julia Cooke
Every morning, she spent hours preparing the big family lunch, buying root vegetables and cabbage and tomato from the cheapest agro in the area, soaking plantains for tostones, slicing cucumbers and cabbage and tomato for salad, sorting beans and boiling oil and sautéing peppers. Soon enough, after eating lunch with them nearly every day and helping Elaine in order to learn her recipes, I had to remember to tell her sometime before ten if she shouldn’t set five placemats at the table. She wasn’t a master chef—her dishes were simple, Cuban staples, well-executed with spice and proportion—but she cared. Good food required time and effort and creativity, but it was a daily rebuke to the utilitarianism of the regime, a private nod to the pleasure principle. Eating well in Havana was thrilling for its rarity and subversive in its luxury.
Every morning, I opened the door onto the two-meter-square patio at the very rear of the apartment complex and looked at the familiar skyline of downtown Vedado, the turquoise Riviera Hotel, and further, the indistinct hulk of the Focsa apartment building. I had bought a small fern to put in the corner, which quickly became, as Elaine had said it would, thin from the northern winds that whipped through in the fall. There were trees out back: a lime tree, coconut palms, and a mango tree that mostly hid the garages made of patchwork aluminum siding in the middle of the block. Behind the garages, a few rusty oil barrels, the exoskeleton of a car, chunks of tile piled high, to be used as a mosaic floor in the never-ending renovation of the house next door.
Domesticity constructed a new Havana, a city of routine and immediacy and absurdity.
I walk into the kitchen one afternoon and Elaine and Nicolas are on the floor, butts in the air, miniature skyscrapers of plates in a disorganized suburb around their bodies as they reach deep into the back of the cabinets to clean. “I found a tiny cockroach,” Elaine says, not disgusted but surprised, almost gleeful, vindicated. Nicolas grunts and lumbers past me to the maid’s area sink to wet the towel he’s using to swipe surfaces that had never looked dirty to begin with.
My toilet breaks. The arm that runs from flush to chain is broken and I reach into the water, up to my elbows, to flush the toilet. After a day or two of waiting, why I don’t know, I tell Nicolas and spend an afternoon out of the house and when I come back the top is still off the toilet. Nicolas hears me enter when the rusty grate over my back entrance sings and he follows me to the bathroom to show me: he’s melted a Bic pen over the open burner so it mimics the shape of the broken metal arm. He gleams as I coo at his ingenuity. The back end is screwed just tight enough to grip the metal chain. It works for a few days and then the chain slips off and keeps slipping off and though I reach into the toilet to fix it, reduce to every-other-time flushing because I’m taken with the aesthetic of flushing my Cuban toilet with a melted Bic pen, it gets old. Again, I tell Nicolas, hesitantly this time, and he nods. He spends a day trying to find a metal arm, riding around in máquinas and, by nightfall, he’s found one, and my toilet is fixed, but something is lost, too.
Elaine brings me coffee in the morning the way she does. She high-steps like a cheerleader across the six-inch threshold with a teacup full of sludgy coffee—now with half the amount of sugar that Cubans usually use, how I like it—and today she has the cordless phone in her hand. “Hija, if it rings, answer it. Tell whoever it is that I’ll call them back. I have to go out. There are no sanitary napkins at the stores near here and the bodega has only loose cotton and it’s at this point an emergency.” She’s hitching a ride with the upstairs neighbors, the wealthy art dealer couple, who are driving around to all of the grocery stores on a loop, the weekly run to see what’s where. She doesn’t know when she’ll be back.
There is no toilet paper at any of the stores I’ve been to and I have two rolls left. Elaine tells me about the tiny shop inside the tourist complex ten blocks from our house, Le Select, which is too small to be a regular stop on the food circuit. I buy six four-packs, which join the pantry that is creeping along shelves and into my closets. A few weeks later, I hear from an Italian businessman that the shortage is due to rising shipping costs.
Cuba imported boatloads of paper scraps from Canada to make its toilet paper, he said. The government hadn’t paid the shipping company in a while, so the paper delivery had halted.
/// Carlos decided to apply to college. There was one thing that could keep him in Cuba for a while longer, he told me one afternoon as I sat at my dining table and he, as usual, leaned lankily against the doorjamb between our two apartments, smoking a cigarette: a film degree. Now that people he knew were actually leaving for the rest of the world, many of them armed with degrees and at least some fluency in another language, the gaping possibility of poverty in the world abroad opened wide and dark before him. He spoke little English; he had no training, no degree, no skills. He had never even waited a table or washed a floor. Carlos was smart and passionate and confident, but what else?
Carlos had taken the college entrance exams once before, right after high school. With the help of a psychiatrist friend of his mother’s, he’d been excused from the mandatory military service that all Cuban males completed after high school because of a nervous personality disorder with which he’d been diagnosed. The University of Havana awaited him, he knew it, and he’d requested art history or sociology or communications when he took the exam. But his scores on the “Cuban History” part—which everyone knew was just a way of testing how well you could parrot propaganda—had been too low. He was offered a spot in pharmacology, dentistry, or nutritional studies; all occupations, since they were medical careers, that would complicate his ability to acquire an exit visa when the time came. Besides, they bored him. So he took a short course in theater production that Elaine had paid extra to get him into but quit. He spent three years doing nearly nothing but the occasional favor for a friend-of-a-friend.
Two friends would take the exam, too, and they gathered every afternoon at Elaine’s dining room table for three weeks with books and study guides and a laptop on which they’d saved documentation about the tests of years past. They would be tested on art history, architecture, literature, world history, and film.
“Por dios,” Elaine flushed in the doorway between our apartments the first week. “This boy expects me to feed everyone. Come help me; I want to make that chicken thing you make with the chili you brought from Mexico. We’ll use up what chicken I have and I’ll tell him tomorrow that this won’t do.”
I followed her and we cooked dinner silently, listening to the conversation from the other room. “No, no, that’s new wave, not noir.” Carlos was twitchy with adrenaline, pacing back and forth and drinking the glasses of water that Elaine reminded him to drink. Elaine tried unsuccessfully to hide her emotions: content approval that he had a goal, worried about what that goal meant for her family’s emigration plans. She cooked for his group two more times before the exams took place.
3
JUST HAIR
LIVÁN
By the numbers, G Street is the biggest party in Havana, and not just on nights when generals die. Thursday through Sunday, people perch on the benches, which have splintery green wooden slats, and drink from boxes of rum in the park-like patches of dry grass between the median’s central promenade and the sidewalk. Dozens stand on corners in loose circles that, in time, grow amorphously into the street. When this happens, drivers honk horns and policemen shuffle toward them and the kids retreat to the sidewalk.
I met Liván, Takeshi, and the rest of their photogenic band of frikis—rock and metal fans of the punk-and-anarchist subcategory—around nine on a Thursday night. They loped down the hill with long arms swinging, four in front, and then three, weaving through the clusters of people in their way, pushing each other into onlookers. Their clothes were a mid-nineties punk-grunge hodgepodge: torn jeans, wallet chains, boots, scruffy Converse shoes, inked limbs. Each had sculpted his hair into a Mohawk or some variation on it. They strove to take up space.
The acquaintance I was with snappe
d a candid shot of one of the frikis from the side, and when they all turned around, he asked if he could take a few pictures. They consented with shrugs. He shot each of the boys in sequence as they heckled one another and I sat down on a bench nearby. The camera’s flash made the shiny leaves of the bushes in the background gleam along with the studs in the boys’ lips, eyebrows, noses, and ears. One boy being photographed wore a somber-looking expression that, momentarily, evaporated to reveal an eager smile. Then he pressed his lips together again. Liván stood next to me in a white T-shirt with fuzzy neon polka dots spray-painted on it.
“So, what kind of music do you listen to?” I asked no one in particular.
“Poooooonk,” a different voice shouted from three feet away as Liván opened his mouth.
“I love Joe Strummer,” I said.
Liván sat down. His face was blank.
“From the Clash,” I clarified, too loudly.
Recognition sparked, and Liván grinned. “Us, too,” he said. He introduced himself and the boy who’d just sat down next to him, Takeshi, whose nickname came from a Japanese manga character that he apparently resembled.
“Los Ramo-nays, too,” added Takeshi.
Liván’s hair was twisted into about a dozen six-inch spikes that extended directly out from his head like a fragile medieval mace. “Asere, he looks like a pineapple,” one of the boys crowed when I asked how long it had taken him to construct. I laughed and then saw that they looked at me expectantly. “Nah, it looks cool,” I said. Another shouted, “Yeah, that’s it, looks so cool they’ll send a boat from Miami to come get you!” They snickered.
They answered questions in unison: Where did they live (far away), what had they done that night (gone to Maxim Rock for a concert, but the sound system was broken and they didn’t have cash for the cover anyway), what were they doing for the rest of the night (G Street). Takeshi’s bony shoulders slouched forward as he sat, and the red printed words on the front of his black T-shirt gaped and billowed, indistinct. He drummed his fingers on his knees, tapping the rhythm of a phantom song, and the spikes on his cuff thumped against his jeans. His face was fine-boned and handsome, with deep-set dark eyes and an aquiline nose and full lips. He said he was seventeen, looked about twelve, and turned out to be fifteen. He flashed me his ID to prove his age.
Where they had seemed sharp-edged before opening their mouths, they softened, puppy-like, after a few minutes of talking. We hung out on G for half an hour or so, and I asked if I could go to a concert with them over the weekend. I’d been to a few metal shows when I’d lived in Havana in college, I told them, and I wondered if it was any different now. Takeshi told me to meet them on Saturday at Liván’s house around four or five in the afternoon. We’d go from there.
“You gotta see his room,” he said, with a knowing glance at Liván.
“Yeah,” a few of the boys who’d circled around us murmured. “Totally.”
Liván nodded. “I guess it’s pretty radical.”
They wrote the address and phone number in my worn notebook and ambled down the avenue.
/// Isolation is intrinsic to Havana. For those without a government desk job, email is checked at hotels, where an hour on slow and sometimes out-of-service Internet costs about $8. Cards to access wifi signals in hotel lobbies, a bit more expensive, are usually in stock only at whichever hotel you’ve chosen not to go to, as the indifferent women at the desks say while pointing you toward the exit without meeting your gaze. Prepaid cell phones cost 50 cents a minute for both outgoing and incoming calls—most people can’t keep them charged with money and use them as pagers. Shared fijos at casas are often tied up.
G Street is a product of this isolation and an unstated will to combat it. During the day, it’s a central avenue in downtown Havana with firm topiary hedges, monuments to dead heroes, and curbs painted with strict black-and-white stripes, a Tim Burton–esque flourish in the fecund tropics, all sloping gently down to the ocean. Little distinguishes it from any of Havana’s wide, Paris-on-the-sea boulevards—this area of the city was, in fact, designed in the twenties by French landscape architect J. C. N. Forestier. Colonnaded mansions are set back behind semicircular driveways and rich tropical trees, and on main streets, the government keeps them freshly painted in bright tones of yellow and pink and red that fade to ecru and rose as the sun sets.
On Thursday, Friday, and Saturday nights, Havanans mostly between the ages of thirteen and thirty eat their dinners at home, shed their school or, if they’re older, work uniforms, don the clothes that are like passwords for whatever subculture they belong to, and flock to Calle G. At what quickly begins to resemble a massive outdoor house party, they mill in clusters, lounge on benches, and sit on the sidewalk amid blobs of discarded gum and cigarette butts, their knees crooked in upside-down V’s in front of them. Smoke hangs in the air even when there’s a breeze. Most usually stay until three or four in the morning. Some stick around until sunrise doing what looks like nothing all night long. Every so often, rumors spread that policemen will show up on a Friday night and round everyone up under the charge of “social dangerousness” or “a pre-criminal danger to society,” hazy Cuban legal terms that carry with them up to four years in prison.
Even if it’s only symbolic and really quite tenuous, G Street is the sliver of Havana that belongs to young Cubans—not to their families, like their crowded apartments, and not to the government, like concert spaces and cafés and basically everywhere else. And it’s free. The people on G Street spend what cash they have on tangible goods, clothing and accessories and cell phones. Wearing brand names is a small, silent “up yours” to the Revolution’s goals of non-materialism and equality—Ed Hardy, Nike, and Tommy Hilfiger labels as tightly curled fists against the drab green canvas of identical bureaucrats. The crowd teems under impotent machetes lofted by the statues of patriots on every block.
The friki were the ones who had initially colonized G Street a few years earlier. They’d had to: El Patio de Maria, heavy metal’s only consistent concert venue and gathering spot, was shut down in 2003 amid rumors of drug use. Malicious stereotyping, said every friki I spoke with, each of whom spouted conspiracy theories about how the government just didn’t want the rockers to get any more popular.
Rock had been frowned upon in Cuba since the Revolution swept out mafiosos, Coca-Cola, and anything that sounded like Elvis. The philosophical roots of the Cuban Revolution lay not only in Marxism but in Latin American national liberation movements; the arts were the front line, wrote Minister of Culture Armando Hart Dávalos, of the “political, social and moral development of the society.” Music in English was forbidden. Even as the government has insisted that Beatles fandom was never really a punishable offense, urban legends of listening to the Fab Four in secret shortly after the Revolution abound.
The Ministry of Culture required that radio stations play Cuban music 70 percent of the time. Still, children of the new Communist Party leadership begged their parents to bring back Rolling Stones vinyls from trips abroad through the sixties and seventies. Records circulated surreptitiously, as long as the police who raided the Coppelia ice cream parlor hippie hangout to search for “homosexuals and anti-patriotic dissidents” couldn’t find them in the young adults’ macramé bags. By the late sixties, guitar-strumming twenty-somethings Silvio Rodríguez and Pablo Milanés were growing famous for socially conscious anthems, to the chagrin of ministry leadership, who saw only their resemblance to the American folk movement. But the lyrics were fiery and Communist, and the Casa de las Américas cultural center director, respected revolutionary Haydée Santamaría, supported the musicians—opposition quietly subsided. The music was christened la nueva trova, and it would dominate the public sphere throughout the seventies and eighties. That one of the genre’s main influences was rock and folk rock from the United States and Britain was not discussed.
When a few bands began to openly play rock in the eighties and early nineties, the music genres had
compressed: Strains that were sharply delineated outside Cuba (punk, metal, rock, grunge) lumped together into a loud, guitar-and-drum-based sound with subversive undertones. The police trained their eyes on the friki’s hangouts. Not only was rock still the musical ambassador of the enemy, but the local fan base didn’t have money to spend on CDs or entry fees. The frikis were, as Cuban writer and rock singer Yoss wrote, “distinguished by their dress and attitude: ‘We’re bad cuz nobody loves us; nobody loves us ’cuz we’re bad.’”
Within this vacuum, rock trudged along. El Patio de Maria opened and state venues occasionally gave the bigger bands—Zeus, Metal Oscuro—a slot. The small regional festivals that had tried for footholds before the Special Period found renewed support in the provinces. Bands, punk and metal and grunge, blossomed: Porno Para Ricardo, Tendencia, Venus, more. Rock had a scene in the nineties. It was small, but it was a scene nonetheless. Then El Patio de Maria shuttered. With nowhere else to go downtown—the wide spots of the malecón were the province of hustlers on one end and the gay scene on the other—the Mohawked friki headed to G Street. Even when rock was recognized in officialdom via the creation of the Agencia Cubana de Rock, a splinter organization within the Union of Young Communists, G Street remained the hub. Official rock seemed a Frankenstein music genre.