The Other Side of Paradise

by Julia Cooke

Lobbies were also places where hotel security could most easily identify the women in spandex and pleather halter tops. The Riviera was Sandra’s beat. Some nights she’d stay out on the malecón and other nights she’d slip one of the hotel workers 5 or 10 CUC to stay from around nine at night until she found a client. The $50 she charged gave her a good profit margin. She’d order a TuKola at the bar and proposition any man whose eyes lingered on her, murmuring words like “girl” and “the night.” At the club, now called the Copa Room, she’d shimmy up against a man and make him feel like he was the best dancer in the room. She complained later about their terrible dance moves and sometimes she stopped walking in the middle of a San Miguel street, raised her arms straight out to either side, and shuffled awkwardly back and forth while shivering with giggles to show me how badly they moved, but someone usually took her up to his room or whisked her off in a taxi to another hotel.

  A tenuous confidence built between Sandra and me. I’d sit with Sandra on her patio and watch the nightly Brazilian telenovela on her neighbor’s TV, which he dragged to the shared patio outside. Her neighbor was leaving for Panama soon, where he’d work as a physical therapist, always any day now. I watched her untangle her ten-year-old neighbor’s jumping rope and tally scores from the lotería, the numbers racket that all of San Miguel played, on small scraps of chicken-scratched paper, and, though she diligently tried to explain how numbers were assigned to lucky objects and happenings, I never understood the rules. Other days, we’d drink cheap coffees or beers in the cafés in San Miguel and talk about not very much and then we’d hitchhike downtown together, where I’d leave her around the Riviera and head back home. I wore Birkenstocks to Sandra’s spike heels and demurred when she asked me to buy her a cell phone or told me how great her half-brother was in bed.

  One afternoon I met Sandra in a park in Habana Vieja and, when she started dropping hints about being hungry, we went for pizza at one of the area’s many tourist-trap restaurants. Oil-stained white tablecloths hung limply atop vibrant red ones. We sat and, while I went to the bathroom, she flagged down the waiter and ordered a plate of olives.

  “Ay, Julia,” she sighed when I returned, stretching out the round vowels of my name, “estoy en estado.” She shoveled the bland green olives into her mouth, filling her cheeks with them. She’d been eating like a horse, she said, peeing four times an hour, and had what looked like a spare tire—she thought it was Mumúa’s baby. He’d gotten out of jail recently and was the only man with whom she didn’t use a condom.

  Abortions were free and relatively fast and she’d terminated pregnancies in the past, but they’d told her that any more would endanger her ability to ever have kids, so she would have a child in seven months. “Besides, I’m alone,” she said quickly as if brushing the obvious fact from her shoulder. “It’s not the same to have someone to live for, someone to fight for, as it is to be alone. Aboo will die, my mother doesn’t talk to me, and Gallego runs off with anything with a skirt. I need someone.”

  Mumúa wanted to make a family of them, but Sandra had a plan, she reported, jaunty again as she dipped French fries in the olive brine. She’d tell Bong, the Italian who visited Havana every four months with a millionaire invalid boss, that he was the father. As Sandra told it, theirs was a torrid, Jane-Austen-in-the-tropics tale, the hunt for an advantageous match. Bong, who had a wife and kid back in Italy, wanted to move to Cuba to be with her, but his boss, who had promised to leave his fortune to Bong, wouldn’t hear of it, so they snuck around. Since he was crazy about Sandra, and he looked something like Mumúa, she’d tell him the baby was his. Then he’d support her until the old man died and Bong could divorce the wife, marry Sandra, and take her and “their” baby away from Cuba, or at least to a better house on the island. “If he asks for a genetic test, I’ll just say no,” she summed up, bobbing her head between bites of food.

  The details were fuzzy, though. She had never actually seen the invalid boss. In one version of the story, Bong hailed from a town in Italy where everyone looked like they were Asian—Sandra wasn’t sure which town, didn’t care—and in another he was actually Filipino Italian.

  When I asked her what she’d do for money if she did leave, she was dismissive: “Aiouuuuuulia, anything, anything,” she said with a wave of her hand. She was a young, single mother with a ninth-grade education and few marketable skills. In Cuba, her baby would be guaranteed health care in a system that boasted a laudable record; despite the decrepit appearances of most of the country’s hospitals, world health organizations cite Cuba’s infant mortality rate as better than that of the United States. Her child would learn to read and Sandra would be guaranteed at least some food to get him or her through the first few years.

  Sandra’s plans for the future were like clouds she thought she’d walk into; they’d envelop her and then everything would be different. She’d find a boyfriend who’d marry her and get her the hell out of Cuba, where the life she’d lived for twenty-one years bored her: the same inadequate ration food, the same lack of privacy, the same eternal wait for buses to get downtown, the gloom that rolled in when her days were occupied by sleeping and boredom. It was the languid sense of time—which I soaked up in Havana—that suffocated Sandra. Foreigners opened up wormholes of opportunity: Sandra could have money, sleep in hotels, buy H. Upmann cigarettes for $1, eat her favorite dessert, Jell-O, every day. The dreams Sandra imagined were the size of all the rooms she’d ever been in.

  A few weeks after we’d had dinner, Sandra stopped talking to Mumúa. She’d seen him zipping toward home on his motorcycle with a pretty little thing clinging to his back. Privately, I was glad that Mumúa was out of Sandra’s life. So she’d listed Gallego as the baby’s father on her carnet de embarazada, the I.D. card with which a pregnant woman can claim state benefits. With her carnet, she was entitled to medical care throughout her pregnancy, including house calls if she couldn’t make it to the clinic and enough sonogram pictures to show off to neighbors, plus, she said, “a cradle that never shows up, a roll of gauze to use as diapers, little bottles of perfume and cream, two baby outfits, and four cloth diapers.” She had already bought an extra roll of gauze from a woman who would use disposables. In stores, disposables retailed for around $12 for a pack of twenty, or, on the black market, $14 for forty. Sandra hoped that, if Bong pulled through and decided to support “his” child, she’d use disposables once the baby came. It wasn’t an exit visa, but it was progress.

  /// “If you could just get her to dress differently from the rest of the jineteras, maybe wear less skimpy clothes, you know, less spandex, she’d make more money,” Lucía said at lunch one afternoon.

  I’d told her what Sandra had also said to me that spring: that she’d been having a hard time finding clients even before she’d gotten pregnant. Lucía was taking English classes at the TV station so she’d be better prepared to leave once she got her exit visa. The process had stalled: It would be something like two years, long enough that she just waved her hand into the muddled future in explanation, before she could get an appointment with the Spaniards. And her family friends in Chile had visited Santiago—they lived a few hours from the capital—without getting an email from her confirming that she did in fact need them to file her carta de invitación. They’d come and gone from the city and wouldn’t be back for another two months. Another two months before the paperwork would be filed. The news had launched Lucía into a week of puffy eyes.

  In any case, we spent an afternoon every week or two trying to talk in English and usually failing. We often wound up watching Friends with English subtitles instead. Lucía wrote down the words she didn’t know and paused the show every few minutes to ask me the vocabulary she’d missed and then laugh at the jokes she hadn’t gotten. Our conversation had begun in English but we’d flipped back into Spanish because she didn’t know how to say “prostitute” or “dress.”

  “Well, but she’d never listen to me. She thinks I’m a lost cause, I think. Or asex
ual, or gay, or something,” I told her. “But not someone to consult on how to get men.”

  Neither was Lucía, to be honest. The one time she knew clearly that she’d found love, she had told me—not flirtation, not boredom, not a challenge—her love had up and moved to Miami. Lucía got knocks at the door sometimes on Valentine’s Day, men who held money sent from Florida via the underground version of Western Union, and otherwise she kept it casual in the realm of love. Flings who left the morning after, even when they were repeat visitors, or who acted like friends.

  That day Lucía had made a rich pinto bean stew over rice with slices of salted avocado. “But the jineteras who leave just a little bit to the imagination get the richer tourists,” she said. Her mouth twisted with a combination of sympathy and cynicism, the sense that she was in on something that Sandra wouldn’t intuit. This was reflexive knowledge for Alejandra and Elaine, too, who often asked after Sandra. They and Lucía had known women who sold sex, but the high-school-or-college-educated sort, who worked casually and only sometimes and wore clothes that were either tight or revealing but not often both. “Obviously.”

  /// Tourism statistics in Cuba didn’t dip in 2009, after the U.S. recession and Hurricane Ike, but Sandra swore there were fewer foreigners around. And since she was visibly pregnant during more or less the same period, she had moved on to a second money-making plan. She and Yessica bought two hundred cups of yogurt every few days of the sort that retailed in the kook supermarkets for 75 cents each. They paid a middleman 15 cents per cup and then walked the neighborhood to sell the yogurts door to door at three for a dollar, doubling their profits.

  Anyone who had seen Sandra and Yessica pushing their yogurt-filled baby stroller down the streets of San Miguel might have wondered at what would have been a very pudgy child inside it. I had shown up at Sandra’s place, but Aboo had told me that they were wandering. I found them near the main avenue, struggling to free the stroller from one of the holes that yawned across the street. Yessica and I took charge of the stroller, while Sandra waddled along the sidewalk, sticking her head into open doorways and windows to tell people that she was selling yogurts for half the store price. Every few doors, someone would come out, hand them a few kooks, lift the yellow, lacy blanket that covered the stroller’s seat, and paw through its contents for the desired flavors.

  Sandra was imminently due. Her stretchy pink and gray T-shirt snuck up her belly, which protruded nearly a foot from her petite frame, revealing thick purplish marks. When I’d come and gone from Havana at some point earlier in her pregnancy, Sandra had exhorted me to bring her cream for her stretch marks. “What do I have if not this body I’ve got,” she’d said, outlining her hips. “If I lose this body, I lose everything.” When I returned, I brought cream and prenatal vitamins. “Coño,” she had said, “gracias. I’ll have to run these by my doctor, but I bet they’ll really help.”

  We snaked through the area. “Baby’s still cooking, China?” whistled the man who leaned against the counter of the near-bare corner bodega, where rations were dispensed. Sandra rolled her slightly slanted eyes.

  “Child’s coming out walking if she stays in much longer,” muttered one woman as she sauntered by.

  “When are you due?” asked a girl as she pressed her hands against Sandra’s swollen belly. “Today? Tomorrow?”

  “If it were up to me,” she said, “I’d go straight to the hospital right now and get this baby the hell out of me.” The temperature stretched toward a hundred degrees of mostly humidity.

  When we reached the main avenue, Yessica and I stayed on the sidewalk with the stroller as Sandra popped into shops—laundromat, cafeteria, Banco Nacional de Cuba—to advertise her wares. At the bank, the girls stopped for thirty minutes to rest in the air-conditioned ATM cabin, which hardly anyone used, and sort out who wanted what inside. They ferried pineapple and strawberry yogurts to customers and sold upward of forty cups while I stayed with the stroller. If a policeman came, Yessica said sternly, I was to invent some excuse and ditch it. Sandra giggled: “The yuma comes to Cuba to sell yogurt. That’s how bad the economy up north is.” When one yogurt spilled open and the bitter smell of synthetic strawberry began to stink, Sandra whisked a towel embroidered with a yellow duckie out of her purse, which had at one point been my purse, a black faux–patent leather tote I’d given her—she’d noted at our Habana Vieja pizza dinner what a good diaper bag it would make, and I’d left it with her. She wiped up the yogurt and stuffed the damp towel into the interior zip compartment.

  Once the stroller was empty, Yessica turned it back toward home and Sandra walked me toward the bus stop. It was late afternoon and the amber air was dusty. As we paused at a corner to let a truck turn, she pivoted toward me. “I’d like to ask you something,” she said. “Will you be the baby’s godmother?”

  I felt her at my side, gauging my response as she studied the ends of her long hair for split ends. The truck passed and we crossed the street. I needed to redraw the lines between us, I knew then, and if that meant she’d toss me aside, foreign and writer and all, I’d do it anyway. I wished that there was a part of me that wanted to say yes, or believe she’d asked me out of genuine sentiment, but there wasn’t. The problem, I explained to Sandra, was that though a friendship had developed between us, I was still interviewing her in a professional capacity. If I was the godmother of her child, I would be seen as being too involved, and my “bosses,” hazy as they were, would find even our formal interviews suspect. She nodded. We were on the main street among sweaty men in undershirt tanks, old ladies with shopping bags, and girls with hair in netted ballerina buns. We passed under shaded colonnades that had been painted, vandalized, and repainted darker shades, a mottled patchwork of scratched-out signatures, expletives encased in bubbles, and declarations of love, “PR+SN” and “Yosey Lulu.”

  Sandra shook her head and pursed her lips. “No,” she said. She laughed and, after a beat, nodded. “Of course I’d rather maybe be famous. You just keep doing your job. Yessica wanted to be godmother anyway.”

  /// Two days later, Mia Jacqueline was born. In Sandra’s freezer, which was only slightly cooler than the tepid main compartment of her refrigerator, yogurts were still stacked three-deep. On her first day home, the day after Mia’s birth, five neighborhood children were playing in front of Sandra’s house. A nearby gingko tree had been shorn and its limbs, studded with bunches of large, hard green seeds, were strewn throughout the street. The kids collected the seeds, which resembled neon olives peeking through the cages made by their cupped hands. High-pitched squeals carried across the street as the children taunted whoever’s collection quota was slipping behind the average. Soon they’d accumulated two Lilliputian mountains in the pots they’d spirited from their mothers’ kitchens. They planned to tell everyone that they were grapes, which was the most expensive item for sale in the fruit market, and sell them by the bucket.

  A skinny horse pulled a man down the street on a carriage made of splintery planks of wood. The man banged a hammer against a thin strip of aluminum, collecting organic trash and grass to feed to the horse. I sat on a stoop with one of Sandra’s neighbors, whose boyfriend had gone to the hospital to give Sandra a ride home in his small Russian car. The neighbor and I smoked cigarettes and talked about her kids.

  As the car pulled up, with Gallego cradling the tiny, sleeping baby in his arms, the kids crowded around it, leaving finger-shaped smears on the windows. They hooted until the street’s mothers emerged and shouted them home, saying they’d have to visit later. Sandra and Gallego emerged from the car looking every bit the part of exhausted new parents.

  Sandra hobbled down the alley toward her apartment, bleary-eyed. Everything hurt, she said. Everything. All non-essential furniture in her two rooms had been moved outside to the patio that she shared with two other families. A crib had been assembled in the windowless back bedroom, and the two twin mattresses that Aboo, Gallego, and Sandra shared in turns were piled one atop anoth
er to make room for it. Her father in Florida had sent a suitcase of baby goods and Sandra would sell the overstock. Fourteen baby bottles decorated with Winnie the Pooh licking honey from a jar sat atop the old washing machine that was the kitchen counter between cleaning days.

  I sat in a rocking chair next to Sandra. The baby squirmed on her knees. She had stuffed her bra full of tissue paper and stowed a lighter between her swollen breasts, and she waved to gesture that I should light a cigarette for her. I grabbed the packet off the table, lit the cigarette, and handed it to her; she kept one hand on the baby’s belly and held the cigarette with the other.

  The Cuban government almost never granted exit papers for children. The consequences of this fact hadn’t seemed real, I supposed, until Sandra had held Mia. This would be her life, she spat—these two rooms, these neighbors, motherhood. My presence in her home felt suddenly cruel. I sipped my coffee, nodded, and slipped away after fifteen minutes or so.

  /// It was a few weeks before I went out to San Miguel again. White baby linens hung thick as curtains on the patio’s laundry lines. Aboo waved me inside, brushing off my offers to help her hang the white gauze squares they had cut to use as diapers. Sandra was out, the baby was asleep in her crib, and I sat down to wait. I’d brought a bag of old clothes, girly hand-me-downs from Juan and Alejandra’s toddler that they’d in turn been given by friends and neighbors. An army of ants carried thumbnail-sized bread crumbs up the lavender wall. The room smelled tangy. When Sandra arrived half an hour later, she bustled into the apartment, pulled open her black faux-patent purse, and asked me if I wanted to buy some air fresheners. I laughed, relieved that she seemed happier.

  “So that’s what you’re doing for money now,” I said.

  She shook her head and busied herself making coffee. “Nah, not for long. An amigo comes out this weekend from Spain—he’s Cuban but he lives in Spain—and I ran into his daughter around here last week. ‘China, he’s crazy to see you,’ she says, and I tell her that I’ve just given birth, so she comes to see the baby. Of course she said Mia was beautiful. She is a cute baby, thank god. Anyway, ‘You call me as soon as the cuarentena is done,’ the girl says; ‘you can see my dad as soon as you’re ready.” So, she continued, she was cutting short her cuarentena, the forty days in which mothers were admonished by Cuban nurses not to engage in sexual activity with new partners.