The Other Side of Paradise

by Julia Cooke

  Mia woke up with a yowl and Sandra asked me to grab her while she prepared a bottle. She was trying to stop breastfeeding so her breasts wouldn’t sag too much, she said, so she was giving the baby formula that her father had sent out from Miami. I watched her, ten feet away from me in her kitchenette. The silence was swollen and barbed. I looked down at Mia: She had huge, chubby cheeks, and milky-blue, slightly slanted eyes, like Sandra’s, but shh, she said—it was what made her look like Bong. I commented on how much she’d grown.

  “Any news from Bong?” I asked.

  “Well, he called the other day,” she said, “first time I’d spoken to him since I told him I was having his baby, months ago, that time when the call dropped. ‘Sandra,’ he says, ‘how’s the baby?’ Identical to you, I say. She’s your carbon copy. ‘Really,’ he says. ‘I can’t wait to meet her.’ Then the call went dead. He said he was coming next month, though.”

  Before I retreated to the illusory romance of downtown Havana, Sandra looked at me wide-eyed and asked me to do her an enormous favor. Could I lend her $5? To pay off the man who’d sold her the black-market yogurt once and for all? She promised she’d pay me back as soon as she could.

  5

  LIKE THE STARS

  ISNAEL

  Every day, Isnael arrived for work in the uniform of a repartero: faux Puma tennis shoes held together with tape, embellished Ed Hardy–style T-shirt, tight-ish jeans, and a belt with a silver Playboy bunny buckle. He’d turned twenty-one that year, but Isnael still had the limbs of a teenager. Every day, he changed into painting shorts and cheap sandals and worked with the expansive calm of a yogi, scrubbing old paint off the walls at the house of an expatriate acquaintance of mine for a few under-the-table dollars a day.

  Katherine, the only American I knew in Havana, had recently moved in and hired a team of young men to help resuscitate her ramshackle Vedado house. The old woman from whom Katherine and her Cuban husband had bought the house—a former servant who’d been left behind in 1960 as guard until the Communists were gone and her employers could return from Miami—had rented it out to local film crews who made telenovelas in the living rooms. She’d had no source of income and though the Instituto Cubano de Artes Cinematográficas paid in pesos, they paid. A set designer had once used a cheap blue watercolor on the walls, which had faded almost instantaneously yet still clung persistently; repainting was futile and would only infect whatever color was laid atop the blue. Isnael’s job was to use bucket after bucket of water to dilute the paint until it slid in slim rivulets over the ornate molding and into aquamarine puddles on the floor tiles. So he worked painstakingly in sections, beginning his mornings atop scaffolding at the height of the eighteen-foot ceilings and descending through the day.

  The paint was capricious, Isnael told me the first time we met. “In places it comes off easy,” he said as he pointed, with just a swipe of the rag he kept tucked in the belt loops of his cut-off jean shorts. In other spots, it wouldn’t let go no matter how he scrubbed. He gestured to a crackled section near the molding. Even after he went over those areas with a toothbrush, the paint left sea-blue veins in the fissures of the old walls.

  Isnael worked without complaints or questions, his three-inch afro and lanky brown arms freckled by the day’s end. During his lunch breaks, he taught Katherine’s son how to make an omelet or cheese sandwich. He often gave half of his lunch to the neighborhood strays. He looked constantly amused. After the departure of the other $3-a-day handymen, burly sweaty young men who hooted incessant jokes, Isnael stayed—he had become indispensable as babysitter, bartender, and all-around errand boy at the big old house.

  He had gone to school to be a children’s art teacher, I learned. There was such a shortage of teachers in Havana that a few years earlier the government had created a special high school curriculum to track teenagers directly into teaching jobs at age nineteen. But the pay wasn’t as high as he’d been told it’d be, so after a few months he began to buy bread at the local bakery and wander into his neighborhood selling door-to-door at a slight markup. He quit teaching slowly, by not showing up except to collect the paychecks that came for three months after he taught his last class. Then he painted meticulous portraits of faces made of fruits and vegetables, banana noses and grapes for curly hair à la Giuseppe Arcimboldo, to sell black-market to an artist who claimed them as his at the tourist artisan fair. It was the painting middleman who’d passed on word of the wall-scrubbing gig.

  If Isnael had a knack for patient work, work that required stillness and focus, he explained to me one day, it was because he was destined for it. He was a “son” of Yemayá, the orisha or goddess of the oceans and patron of motherhood. Her “children,” divined in the third stage of initiation into Santería, were maternal, dignified, and nurturing. As he told me about his religion—“the religion,” as it was called, to which 70 percent of Cubans reportedly adhered—he looked at me more intently. He gave such detailed answers to my questions about rituals, deities, and symbols that I swam in their specificity. His enthusiasm assumed everyone else’s knowledge, too. It allowed no room for overview or backing up to the beginning. Neither his clothes nor his employment mattered as much to him as this, his religion.

  Isnael felt spirits. That was how he first realized he had a gift, a calling, and that it was Santería: he would dream something, and then, days, weeks, months later, it would occur. The spirits told him things. Disembodied voices sent him bits of knowledge, like this: One time Isnael was waiting for a bus, and he said to the friend he was with, “As soon as it’s our turn to get on the bus, it’s going to start raining.” And it did. He never felt alone.

  Maybe the spirits were why I kept coming back to his country, I said to him idly one day. “Maybe someone here put a hex on me and I can’t shake free of it.” I laughed.

  Isnael nodded. “We should find out,” he said, gravely.

  Havana had always felt suffused with a light mysticism, with coincidence and potential—my Communist Party godfather, people who connected me with the sources I sought, a home with Elaine and Nicolas. This was part of what had kept the city alive in my mind even when I was away for long stretches of time. I’d never been religious, but I’d also often found religion appealing in an arms-length, abstract way.

  I was only mostly joking, I realized as I walked away.

  /// Santería derives from the Yoruba tradition of West Africa; it first came to Cuba with the slaves that Spanish colonizers shipped out from current-day Nigeria and Benin to cut sugarcane. Its rituals were cloaked in Catholicism during the years of iron-fisted, work-to-the-death colonial rule. Slaves worshipped icons of saints instead of their own orishas, Santería’s pantheon of deities; how devout, the Spanish plantation owners might have thought, not knowing that Our Lady of Regla represented Yemayá and Saint Barbara stood in for Changó. Throughout the first half of the twentieth century, Santería proliferated mostly among black Cubans while white Cubans attended Catholic churches, even if only occasionally.

  Fidel Castro’s Revolution was at its start a white, middle-class one. His was a language of equality and indignation, but the men and women who fought with him were predominantly white, so white that during the first battles with Batista’s army, the government men were shocked: “When Captain Yañes came upon Castro hiding asleep in a bohío, it will be recalled that the soldier who found them cried: ‘Son blancos!’ They are white!. . . It is not clear how many of the rebel army in the Sierra were black but a majority certainly were not, and Almeida, a mulatto, was the only officer of importance who was,” wrote Hugh Thomas in his encyclopedic history Cuba, or, the Pursuit of Freedom. Cuba had long been a place where multiracial alliances coexisted with persistent racism and discrimination, a place where white families hired black help in order to emulate the American South but the president was a mulatto who may have had some Chinese and Indian blood, too. By the standards of demography, Batista was the more progressive leader. He was also a santero. Castro had
gone to Catholic school.

  But then the rebels claimed the country, and tens of thousands of the wealthiest whites fled to Florida, and Castro told American journalists in January 1959 that his new government would work to erase racial discrimination once and for all. That same month, Castro gave his first nationally televised speech. As he spoke, two white doves—the representation in Santería of Obatalá, the divinity who shapes humans from clay in heaven—flew in to perch on his shoulder and podium and rested there for the entire two hours of his half-marathon oration, their white wings tucked in at their sides. In 1962, a North American survey found that 80 percent of black Cubans were wholly in favor of the Revolution, compared to 67 percent of whites.

  That decade, religion, with its hierarchies and costly rituals, was pushed out in the name of a higher order, that of Marx and Lenin. Socialist “new men” could not bow to an esoteric power. Religion was outlawed—Christmas was illegal—and Santería was again practiced covertly. But the religion’s emphasis on quiet but tightly knit social structures lent organization to neighborhood communities. It was also promiscuously, exuberantly able to fold traits from other faiths into its rituals. Rituals from European spiritism and African palo monte, Catholic icons and chants popped up in Santería ceremonies that likely seemed more practical, more visceral than baroque church rites. Where it had been known as the religion of the black maids before, Santería’s following became more mixed as the racial, socioeconomic hierarchy of Cubans flattened, as universities got darker and Afro-Cuban rhythms pervaded airwaves and mixed-race marriages, like that of Isnael’s parents, proliferated.

  Then the U.S.S.R. fell. Socioeconomic equality among people with different skin tones backslid as remittances from Cuban Americans—who are, according to U.S. census information, 85 percent white, a bit more than 10 percent black or mixed-race—benefitted predominantly white Cubans. As the government pushed to attract tourists, it employed more whites than blacks, from taxi drivers to waiters to tour guides, in order to reflect the best possible vision of itself to visitors from arguably more racist European and Latin American nations. Flicking on the TV to watch a Cuban telenovela revealed whites in leading roles. Papers like “Are Blacks ‘Getting Out of Control?’ Racial Attitudes, Revolution, and Political Transition in Cuba,” which stole part of its title from a white Havanan’s response to a 1994 riot in a blacker neighborhood, were published in sociology journals in the United States.

  Estimates of Cuba’s racial breakdown vary wildly. On the government’s 2002 country-wide census, black and mixed-race Cubans were reported to compose 35 percent of the country’s population. The U.S. State Department and the University of Miami’s Institute for Cuban and Cuban-American Studies puts the figure at 62 percent. Cuban economist and political scientist Esteban Morales Domínguez, whose 2007 book The Challenges of the Racial Problem in Cuba was published in Havana by one of the main local academic presses, raised that number to somewhere between 62 and 72 percent, because mixed-race Cubans, he said, claimed their white heritage on the self-reported census. What’s most likely is that about a third of the country is of pure European descent, or white; another third is of African descent, or black; and a final third is something in between, or mulatto, the decidedly un-PC term that Cubans use, often tenderly in conversation and defiantly in official documents.

  In 2005, Morales Domínguez found, 73 percent of scientists and technicians were white. Eighty percent of professors at the University of Havana, too, and these numbers held for the rest of the country. Blacks were unemployed at double the rate of whites, which, he wrote, led to more black-market activities, and therefore jails filled with 85 percent darker-skinned Cubans. Anecdotally, this would explain why blacks were stopped by police on streets at far higher rates than whites. But that was more likely due to the fact that an overwhelming majority of Cubans—three-quarters—agreed with the statement that “racial prejudice continues to be current on the island.”

  Santería was the place where the weight of that prejudice seemed a bit lighter. As soon as Isnael had told me what some of the ritual objects looked like—a chain across the doorstep, a wooden or stone vessel filled with sticks and other objects in an entryway, both of which Katherine had at her house, or the multicolored beaded bracelet Isnael wore—I noticed them in the homes of most people I knew in Havana, black or white, foreign or local, old or young. Prohibitions against religion had been dismantled in 1997 and small shops with religious paraphernalia sprouted along the main streets of Old Havana. Sandra was a devotee; she was a child of Changó. Everyone else I interviewed had at least gone to get his or her shells read at some point, a ritual along the lines of getting tarot cards read. Most people had written someone’s name on a piece of paper and placed it in the back of a freezer to push that person out of their lives.

  Isnael’s real goal was not to work at a European expatriate’s home, even though his was an enviable gig with a steady flow of kooks. Isnael wanted to climb the hierarchy of Santería and make a living in the religion, charging clients, both foreign and local, for spiritual consultation. The Mexicans and Swedes and Italians who came to get initiated provided windfalls and the Cubans stabilized the incomes of babalawos, priests. Santería was a growth industry: apart from the believers, there were the Cubans who got initiated as a status symbol, since it cost so much, and the flush foreigners who bragged about initiation back home. So Isnael would work as long as it took him, on a salary of $ 2 a day, to gather around 65 CUC to buy the materials he’d need for the ceremony to “make saint” and be formally inducted into Santería, plus more to buy new white clothing to wear for the following year so he wouldn’t invite any negative energy via his clothes. His madrina, to whom he’d apprenticed himself, trained him every weekend and most weekdays. He was convinced that he was looking at a long path, filled with hurdles and trials, but he was equally confident that if he stuck to it, he would be grande in religion, he said. Marielena, his madrina, had foreseen it; the ancestors had shown her as much. As Isnael told me, the ancestors are sacred in Santería, maybe even more important than the orishas. When something is wrong, it might be because someone has asked their dead to meddle in your affairs. When something goes right, thank your ever-present ancestors.

  One Wednesday afternoon, I called Katherine’s house. Her son picked up the phone.

  “Oh! Isnael wanted to tell you something,” he said when I identified myself. He shouted for Isnael, and a sharp clack echoed down the line as the receiver dropped to the floor.

  I heard Isnael’s flip-flops squeaking along the tiles and he picked up the phone. There was a misa, a ceremony on Friday at Marielena’s house, he said. They were going to bring some ancestors’ spirits down to earth through the body of a medium.

  “So, if you want to come, you can—it’s a $10 derecho,” he said.

  I was curious to see him in his role as religious apprentice, rather than painter-babysitter-bartender, and wondered what the spirits would tell me. The derecho, another Cuban acquaintance told me that night, was the fee for the right to participate in the ritual as an outsider. Ten CUC for foreigners, 10 pesos for Cubans. “I can’t wait to hear what she tells you,” the girl mused. She wrinkled her nose. “The whole place will reek of black people.”

  /// The asymmetrical room, with low ceilings and yellow paint, was dusty from a renovation that Marielena and her husband had just begun. A scuffed mallet rested in a corner. The living room was empty of furniture except for the dozen chairs that were just starting to fill up, a few offerings, and a small refrigerator that hummed softly in a corner. There was a naked fluorescent lightbulb overhead, the kind that made everyone under it look half-dead.

  Years ago, the plot of land that Marielena and her neighbors occupied in the inland Diez de Octubre neighborhood had been someone’s backyard or garage. Like the rest of the block, it had been squeezed full of homes accessible by passageways that led past the older street-front houses, the ones with moldings and columns and secon
d-floor open balconies where the wind whisked through drying clothing, and into these homemade houses. Out on the street, pastel plastic buckets hung from pulleys off second and third stories, as in Centro Habana; women leaned out of windows and refused to come to the street to buy bread or cigarettes. Coins descended; goods went up. On the street, neighbors hovered in doorways smoking and small packs of children flitted from one corner to another, and though these multifamily townhouses hunched shoulder-to-shoulder, more austere than their wealthier Vedado cousins, still there was a resemblance. Past the street, the center of the block was anarchic, heavy. Cinderblock was the reigning medium: Space and ventilation were minimal.

  Marielena’s home was down a tight fifty-meter hallway. Isnael got quiet as we approached. He’d been telling me more about Santería: As we’d walked through the thick yellow air of 5 PM Vedado, he’d stopped at every bodega on the way to the bus stop to ask for puros, cigars, because when the spirits come to inhabit someone’s body, they like to smoke cigars and drink alcohol, physical pleasures of which they are deprived in the spirit world. The bodegas were all out of the peso cigars.

  On the bus out from Vedado, as we clung to hot handrails, Isnael had told me that people often got initiated into Santería for reasons that revolved around health—to hedge against a worsening sickness or to thank the deities for helping save someone.