The Other Side of Paradise

by Julia Cooke

  Within a few years, G Street had become the epicenter of Havana’s teenagers and young adults, the place for people who traced firm differences between themselves and what appeared on telenovelas or the people who went to the official P.M.M. (“Por un Mundo Mejor,” For a Better World) shows, thrown by government nightlife promoters.

  Groups on G Street are differentiated mostly by the details of their sartorial choices and what kind of music comes out of the speakers on the cell phones that they don’t have money to use for calls. There is a hardly visible but serious line between the mikis, the hipsters, and the profundos, the intellectual hippie-bohemians who often wear the same jeans and Converse, but listen to Silvio Rodríguez and Bob Dylan and accessorize with knit purses instead of fake Coach. The friki, identifiable by long hair, black clothing, piercings, and tattoos, are not the emo, who wear black and pink clothes, bangs like curtains across their eyes, and raccoon-circle eyeliner, and both hate the repa(rteros), who come from Havana’s repartos or poorer neighborhoods, listen to timba groups and some reggaeton, and wear anything brand-name.

  Uniform poverty gave every choice of self-presentation meaning and commitment. Real Nikes or fake, red or black nail polish, tight jeans or looser ones, hair worn in a single long braid or half-back and puffed up in front with bobby pins, music in Spanish or English or perhaps Italian. The groups on G Street offered a genealogical map of youth culture in Havana for anyone with the stamina to study it.

  /// Liván lived on a plain street in La Lisa. Getting there required either a long wait for a heaving bus or the good fortune of hailing a máquina headed that way from downtown. What was usually a flat ten-peso charge for a ride along Havana’s main avenues in patchwork old vehicles of the Chevy-Studebaker persuasion doubled on journeys to the outer boroughs. These long trips funneled Havana into a tiny village: talkative strangers traded news, baseball scores, and shopping tips, and acquaintances who traveled the same routes hopped in and out of back seats.

  Decades ago, Communist Party officials like Elaine’s father had asked for homes in La Lisa, because it was there that they could sow vegetable gardens and enjoy fresh air. But most of those yards had since filled in with ramshackle home additions and the neighborhood had sprouted colonies of squatters. By the time I met Liván, a common way to say, “I’m screwed” in local jargon was “I’ll have to live under the bridge to La Lisa.”

  Liván’s street was a ten-minute walk up a slight incline from the main road, in the nicer half of the neighborhood. The sidewalks were laced with grass and the street’s potholes were speed bumps for the few cars that bounced by. The odd wood-frame house, one every block or two, looked rickety and impermanent amid the faded pastel concrete of the others. In the occasional undeveloped lots, ferns, palms, and banana leaf trees grew in a riot and bougainvilleas clambered around undulating chicken-wire fences. These lots, combined with the sound of chirping birds, gave La Lisa an indistinct countryside feeling, a vestige of what the neighborhood must once have been.

  It was mid-afternoon and the pungent scent of coffee emerged from doors and windows. The monotone singsong of a man peddling itinerant repair services—“re-pa-ra-ciones ma-quinas de gaaas”—echoed from a few streets over. As I turned onto Liván’s street, growling tones of heavy metal began to crescendo. Liván’s mother leaned against the rail of her porch smoking a cigarette. She smiled and nodded, kissed my cheek, shouted “Bertha,” and gestured to herself. Her grin revealed that she had very few teeth. She waved me inside.

  Hers was the same single-story, shotgun-style home that could be seen all over Cuba: entry living room, narrow hallway, two bedrooms with a bathroom between them in the center, and a kitchen and dining-room area in the back. Small patios bookended the house. The front living room held two wooden benches, a shelf with a few books on it, a stereo, a TV, a WWF poster of Stone Cold Steve Austin and a photo of Liván and three of his brothers, blond and angelic in matching white T-shirts. Down the hallway, the same group of kids who’d gathered on Thursday smoked cigarettes around the doorway of Liván’s room.

  He had papered and painted the walls and ceiling of his bedroom with images and words: a Cypress Hill poster and one of a droll telenovela heartthrob named Maite; a Nickelodeon image of a grinning, greenish SpongeBob SquarePants; a Cuban flag with a punk manifesto scrawled on it; multiple photos of Che Guevara. Liván had written a marginally coherent rant in block letters six inches high: “To be punk is a form of life not only a type of music. I am punk, I vent my aggression at Che and reggaeton and if you don’t like it go to 23 and G because there’s nothing else to do here.” On another wall, he’d painted symbols in finger-thick yellow paint:

  On all four walls, he had pasted sixteen fines he’d been given by policemen, small white sheets of paper scrawled on with handwriting so similar they could have been written by the same person on different days. Disorderly conduct, talking back to policemen, being in public without identification. Each offense carried with it a fine of seven to thirty pesos, all unpaid. In the far corner of the room, the lumpy mattress he shared with a younger brother wore thin flowered sheets.

  Liván and two others boys watched Takeshi fix another kid’s hair in the bathroom. Takeshi stood on the toilet bowl to get a better angle. His brow was furrowed and his skinny arms moved gracefully around the crown of the other boy’s head. He held them in a first-position circle that haloed the green leaves on the printed plastic shower curtain in the background. As I poked my head in, he flashed me a grin and told me to wait in the living room to see the finished product. They used soap, the kind that their mothers got on the family ration book, because gel was only sold in la chopin and none of them had enough CUC to buy it.

  The eldest of the crew was the only one of them who worked. Erlán, whose bulging mid-section and music taste (he liked the Doors, the Grateful Dead, and AC/DC) gave away the solid decade he had on the others, cut hair in Centro Habana. He was twenty-six and had a young son, he told me later, but he didn’t see the boy or his mother often.

  Bertha pulled me aside to ask me how far away Kansas City was from Oregon, where I’d told her I was from. In her hands she held an envelope of photographs in a grease-stained Walmart envelope. “Pretty far,” I answered. Why did she ask? Her eldest son lived in Kansas City. She pulled out the stack of pictures and showed me photos of him, a stockier, darker version of Liván: his arm around a young woman in a kitchen; smiling next to a package of hot dogs, a few red, juicy steaks, and a grill; in a field of sparse snow, his arms extended wide; with a handful of snow, his tongue stuck out toward it and face scrunched up. Were phone calls cheap up there? Could she give me his phone number so I could call him and tell him I’d seen her and Liván? Or give him mine? “Sure,” I said, and we traded numbers.

  We left after they had plied each other’s hair into spikes that would begin to flake white within the hour and, as the evening wore on, droop low over their ears like leaves of a too-ripe vegetable. As I followed them out of the house, saying good-bye to Bertha, she ducked in toward me. “Their thing is just hair, you know, nothing more,” she said, shaking her head. Their jeans were dirty and torn but their shirts were clean, fresh-smelling.

  Erlán jangled as we walked the ten blocks down the street to the bus stop. He had made a wallet chain out of beer and soda tabs he’d linked together. Since the government shops didn’t sell much along the lines of their punk-y tastes, he explained, the boys made do. See Takeshi? Takeshi had bought his heavy boots from an electrician and added spikes and studs that he’d pried off a bracelet a foreigner had given him. They swapped clothes among themselves, bought at the peso shops where second, third, and fourth-hand clothing was resold, or offered government workers cash for the rationed items that they’d be issued every few years. If they saw a guy in an old Metallica T-shirt, they’d offer him a few CUC for it. A boy named Alejandro with an eight-inch tattoo on his shaved skull wore a T-shirt that read, “Carthage College Greek Week 1997. Paint the town Gre
ek!” with lambdas and deltas floating around it. He had spray-painted it with black and pink dots, torn the bottom hem, and drawn anarchy symbols and “Punk Not Dead” in English across the back. I pictured him crouched on the tile floor of a cramped downtown apartment, stretching the fabric taut to write on it with a Sharpie.

  The bus stop cleared out as we arrived. A bus pulled up and we climbed on, but no one paid; all the boys shouldered brusquely through the standing passengers at the front to the open seats. The one girlfriend who’d been at Liván’s house, a grinning sixteen-year-old with braces, had left and I was the only female present. A teenage girl and a middle-aged woman shrank back from the group as if the quills of the boys’ hair were sharp.

  We got off the bus and walked uphill. As we neared the amphitheater, a muddy, blaring noise grew louder. I walked toward the swooping bandshell, splotched with mold and surrounded by a tall fence, but Takeshi grabbed my arm. The boys had literally not a cent on them, he told me, so they had to scheme. We sat on the curb.

  As I reached up to pass Liván a cigarette, I got a good look at the tattoo on his knuckles. A-N-A-R-Q-U-I-A, one letter on each finger to spell the word when he held his hands in fists together. It looked homemade but had cost him 5 CUC—he had gone to a black-market tattoo parlor to get it.

  “There’s not much you can do about anarchy here, but once I was hauled off to a police station for throwing a bottle at a cop car,” he said. “It’s like the Clash says: I can study, but it’s for nothing, because it doesn’t help me in life or to make any money or any anything.” Liván had spent the three years since he’d dropped out of school at age fourteen doing not very much.

  What were his goals? I asked gingerly. He looked away. He wanted to leave Cuba, he guessed. Go to Kansas, maybe, join his older brother.

  And then?

  He shrugged and looked away. “I don’t know, anything, whatever. Aren’t there punks there?”

  “Hey, so,” Takeshi jumped in. Would I pay for two extra entrance fees? It was 20 Cuban pesos, just shy of a dollar per person. Sure, I said. Ten minutes later, we had regrouped. Three of the boys had talked their way in and two had snuck in via a back entrance. Around a hundred and fifty kids had converged, but how many viewers had paid was unclear. A band, Hipnosis, was setting up.

  When they began to play rough, monotone guitar riffs, the pink and purple lights on stage created a dissonant bubblegum effect. All around me, sweat flew from the headbanging. Takeshi emerged from the crowd and handed me a cup of rum, smuggled in by a friend of a friend. When it was over, we headed to the street and waited for a bus to take us to G. It was around ten at night.

  Liván was woefully drunk from rum he’d gulped out of other people’s bottles. I asked him if he’d rather just go home, and he shook his head emphatically, cartoonishly. “If my mom sees me like this, she’ll kill me,” he slurred. “She won’t let me out of the house for a week.” He swayed off to another bus shelter a few yards away to make himself sick and carry on.

  Takeshi sat down with me. He’d heard me asking Liván about goals, he said. “Wanna hear mine?” he asked earnestly. “Find my media naranja, my soul mate, and settle down. Might as well find a woman and treat her right. As long as she likes punk. I dumped my last girlfriend; she liked fusión and miki music.”

  After half an hour or so, an off-duty school bus stopped. He was going as far as an intersection a mile from Twenty-Third and G, the driver shouted as he cranked open the door, and the two dozen kids who’d gathered at the bus stop whooped and pushed inside.

  /// In a 1977 essay, music critic Lester Bangs wrote that “the roots of punk was the first time a kid ended up living with his parents till he was 40. The roots of punk was the first time you stole money out of your mother’s purse and didn’t know what to spend it on because you weren’t old enough to buy beer . . . Punk is stupid proud consumerism. Punk is oblivion when it isn’t any fun and unlike winos you do have a choice in fact; you’re young.” Okay, then. By Bangs’s estimation, nearly everyone on G Street was a punk. And there were invisible punks in other pockets of the city, too, kids who’d dropped out of school or government jobs, who hand-washed crappy Brazilian imported T-shirts with logos they didn’t understand in buckets in the sink and sat around their parents’ houses all day long until, at night, they lined up outside a neighborhood club they couldn’t pay to get into, just because. Cuban society had created an environment in which Bangs’s version of punk—the rebellion-for-rebellion’s-sake kind, not my pop punk, Joe Strummer-as-progressive-prophet version—thrived. Liván and his crew were just the ones who applied the word to themselves.

  For them, G Street fulfilled the same functions as the Internet: email, Facebook, and YouTube, rolled into one, a place for party planning and public identity shaping, a place to go to seek an audience for whatever you wanted to perform. I’d gone to a breakdancing practice session once and watched skinny kids spin and flip and shout and clap for one another in an abandoned restaurant with marble floors and full-length frames that had once held windows. At night, they performed on G.

  G Street was also how trends spread. With only state-controlled media and no advertising campaigns to push products or fads through society, trends relied on subcultures and gossip. For example: A fashion-conscious skater watches a video of skating tricks on a friend’s dad’s PC and sees a trucker hat; looks cool, he thinks, and he finds some old fisherman on the malecón who’s wearing one, a really old one. “Compadre,” he says, “I’ll give you 5 kooks.” He sews it back up or frays it a bit or maybe he gets a friend who’s in graphic design school to draw a tag on it, make it look cooler. Other kids see him on G Street; what the hell is he wearing, they think—until they see the same style in a 2004 American movie that’s showing on TV or in a dog-eared copy of, maybe, a People magazine or TV y Notas that some tourist left behind years ago. Aha, they think. They find hats, too.

  G Street was alive in a way the Internet could never be. The frikis didn’t have to talk to the mikis for their joint presence to say, We are here, and there are so many of us. They all refused, in their tiny, fashion-conscious ways, to accept the dreary reality of state stores that sold things they couldn’t afford. And even Communist Party cars had to slow down around the intersection at Twenty-Third on Friday nights because the streets were so swollen with people. But G Street was vulnerable to its physicality, too.

  First, its dimly lit spaces would diminish as high-powered floodlights were installed up and down the avenue. The gray-suited cops, young, burly men from the provinces who stood in sets of three or four with their hands deep in their pockets, multiplied. And one day, when I would hop up on a retaining wall to sit and wait for friends, I’d feel pointy rocks jab into my backside and stand up, an angry glow spreading through my chest. They’d been set in a fresh layer of concrete to discourage loitering. I thought of the friki who’d attended the first few punk rock shows sponsored by the Union of Young Communists back in 2007. Had the speaker wires been too new, the ambiance incongruously upbeat? I’d once heard a bouncy young emcee shout, “On the anti-imperialist stage, long live rock-and-roll!” and “Let’s enjoy some good rock music!”

  The police were nominally monitoring G Street to catch drug use, because what drugs were sold in Havana could be found on or around the avenue. But for the most part, the people who had the money to spend on illegal drugs, about five times more expensive per person than a $1 box of Ron Planchao, weren’t really the sort who hung out on G Street. Those people were more elite than Liván and Takeshi; they could afford club entries and got their trends from black-market DVDs of new Hollywood releases and friends who traveled to Spain. Sure, some kids snorted ground-up, state-issued painkillers and bought Ketamine for 5 CUC each in the dank stairwells of nearby apartment buildings. But it was more common to overhear the two guys who told everyone that they were vegetarian vampires and lived off the human energy released by sex, trying to convince a girl that really, it was true, than to catch
someone in the act of a drug deal. Not much of anything actually happened on G Street.

  And that was the point. G Street was a place to be unique together, rebellious and risky enough to be a public register of boredom without actually placing young adults in much danger. In any case, it made them feel that they were doing something: being seen, being different, pissing someone off, getting away with it.

  4

  AMIGOS

  SANDRA

  I was hanging around the restaurant Floridita, spending time in the red light district, roulette in all the hotels, slot machines spilling rivers of silver dollars, the Shanghai Theater, where for a dollar twenty-five you could take in an extremely filthy stripshow, and in the intermission see the most pornographic x-rated films in the world. And suddenly it occurred to me that this extraordinary city, where all vices were tolerated and all deals were possible, was the real backdrop for my novel.

  —Graham Greene, on Our Man in Havana

  If there was one thing Sandra knew well, it was hair. She knew hair from root to split end. In beauty school, she had learned the shape of the human head and how the best thing to do when trimming its hair was to section the skull into eighths, she told me the first time I met her. Her long nails shone red as she held her hands in front of her to demonstrate on an imaginary client. Her gold rings glinted. When she tired of hair-cutting techniques, she waved her hands and her fingers sparked in the thick night like fireworks.

  I’d shown up at the intersection of malecón and Paseo that night with Juan, who wanted to introduce me to Sandra. He’d shaken hands with a group of roving musicians in baseball hats encrusted with silver sequins and asked if anyone had seen la China, the nickname Sandra’s slanted eyes had earned her. We’d sat down by the water and within ten minutes Sandra crossed the street toward us, taking deliberate, high steps; shaking her head to free her hair from ornate, dangly earrings; and looking at us with half-closed eyes as if we held a camera that shot photos for Vogue. Juan had introduced me, said I was doing book research and I’d explain the rest—and then he’d gone in search of cigarettes and disappeared. Sandra had flicked sharp eyes along my body, taking in my flats and bare face as I leaned against the waist-high seawall. She’d swung up next to me and I offered her the extra can of Cristal beer that I’d bought. When she spoke, her voice was throaty and low, and I thought more of New Jersey than Cuba.