by Julia Cooke
“Meet me at the Hotel Nacional at 7:30. It’s important. Make the time. I will check this email again at 6:00 to make sure you got this and will be there. I have some information for you,” Mike emailed me a few days later. A second note: “I can’t tell you over email. Please don’t tell anyone I’m being cryptic.”
I waited on one of the couches on the patio under the Hotel Nacional’s soaring pink ceilings. When Mike arrived, he stood over me and looked around. “Down there. On the bluff, where it’s less visible,” he said, motioning for me to follow him. The ocean glistened beyond where we walked, through the grassy pathways that led to the cannons on the Nacional’s bluff above Twenty-Third and malecón.
“Look, I didn’t mean to freak you out with my email,” he began. “It’s just that the other day, while we were walking in Old Havana, a contact of mine saw us. They’re on to you.”
I stared at him.
“This guy I know, he’s plugged into the CDR. He said they have a whole file on you. They know you’re doing interviews with . . . with jineteras, right? Yeah, yeah, jineteras. I can’t be seen with you.”
“Well, but wait. What do you mean? Am I in danger? Are my sources? Could my visa be revoked?” The air seemed to have stopped moving around us.
Mike shook his head. “Just keep it quiet and be careful. This is life in Cuba right now. There’s too much going on. Don’t stop, for God’s sake, don’t stop. Just, maybe, maybe lay off the sex workers.”
He left before I did and after fifteen minutes staring at the ocean I walked the mile or two back home in a night so humid that the streetlights seemed to make pink polka dots on the avenues. American “tourists” had come to Havana with financial and technical support for political dissidents, had come to try to assassinate Fidel, had come with dubious intentions and an overwhelming sense of grandiosity that stemmed from what Joan Didion called, in her 1987 book Miami, “a more fluid atmosphere, one in which the native distrust of extreme possibilities that tended to ground the temperate United States in an obeisance to democratic institutions seemed rooted, if at all, only shallowly.” If in Miami that rooting was shallow, here in Cuba it was nonexistent. Extreme possibilities were all there were in Havana and this, for temperate Americans, was an intoxicant. We either lived in the pages of a Graham Greene novel or were consumed with prosaic gestures of daily life gritty enough to have been erased long ago in the logical States. Katherine was rumored to cooperate with the Cuban secret service, the cost, it was said, of being allowed to live in Havana. That Mike had veiled motives and was trying to manipulate me felt as true as the possibility that he was overwhelmed with paranoia and intent on spreading it thin. Grandiosity was, in my case at least, chased with the quick throb of realistic inconsequence.
Sometimes there was something of relief in the surrender that Havana forced on privileged foreigners. You couldn’t eat what you wanted to eat, porque no hay, there wasn’t any, and you couldn’t visit a neighborhood with new buildings because it didn’t exist. Every car, townhouse, staircase, and avenue kept the patina of a city that had given itself to the passage of time and to which I was of no consequence. The people around me were who I knew them to be or they wore masks; someone was reporting on me and though I could compose theories, I had no way to firmly learn who.
/// Isnael was blaring Enrique Iglesias’s silky voice through the house as he worked the next few times I saw him. Reggae-ton, his music of choice, was roundly prohibited at Katherine’s house due to its filthy lyrics. Iglesias, or what Isnael called “la música romántica,” was a close second. Isnael was in the process of swiping a sheer silver paint on all of the walls.
“Did you find a pen?” he asked me one afternoon.
I hadn’t, I told him, which wasn’t entirely true. I’d looked at two underground vintage shops and hadn’t seen anything: Havana, I sensed, was rife with old fountain pens, an ocean of them under the skin of what was technically “for sale,” sitting in cups on desks in back rooms of Miramar houses and buried in drawers in Old Havana apartments, but I hadn’t seen one yet. Still, I wanted to go back to see Marielena again with him anyway, I said, if that was okay. We agreed to go the following week after work.
As it turned out, he’d hardly seen her since the ceremony a few months earlier, he told me as we retraced our steps out of Vedado. He had not made saint yet. He’d been working hard and trying to save, but every time he got close he’d splurge on a new pair of shoes or taking a girl out. He knew what girls liked, see, so it was hard, he confessed, for him to avoid dating altogether. Dates were expensive, what with club cover charges and drinks, so he tried to keep it casual, take a girl out once, have a fling, drop her before it got too serious and she expected more: gifts, dinners, wine. And somewhere along the way Isnael had realized that he liked things, too, and experiences—what money could buy. He liked to go to El Túnel, the club in La Víbora where government nightlife promoters promised weekend nights that lasted into daylight, and wait in the slam of perfumed people outside and know that if he got to the front of the line, he could pay his own way in. He liked to buy himself new sunglasses when his broke. He liked to treat his mother to a pizza if she got hungry while they were out. Yet these activites all depleted his resources and slowed him down, so he was determined now to be either working, at home sleeping in the room he shared with his mother at the end of the alley a block over from Marielena’s, or on the bus between the two.
As soon as we arrived, Marielena again shooed me into a chair and Isnael into the kitchen, this time to help her strain a bean soup she had made for dinner. The upstairs half of her house was tight with ceilings low enough that I watched my head. Isnael stooped as he stood at the stove and clattered the bowls he rinsed for us. Marielena said she remembered my last visit but wore the distracted smile of someone who could be lying. After ten minutes of idle chatter, Marielena complimented my Spanish—she’d hardly heard me speak last time, she said—and nodded over at Isnael.
“This one over here wants to learn English,” she said as Isnael served soup and sat down.
I raised my eyebrows. I had never heard Isnael utter a word of English.
He ate a spoonful of soup and glanced away. “I want to speak two more languages by the time I’m thirty.” Spanish, English, and maybe Portuguese. Though Chinese would be the most useful, he said solemnly, if he wanted to be the next president of Cuba.
There was a momentary silence. From within the hierarchies of Santería, I suddenly saw, the hierarchies of Cuba seemed less rigid, more scalable to Isnael. In his world, the world that mattered to him, there were less firmly demarcated boundaries between concrete and abstract power. But there they were, and vertical hierarchies in Cuba were solid as a pyramid with a Castro-shaped capstone at the top. A Presidente Isnael seemed even less probable to me than an Isnael who could see the future.
It had always been community that made Havana feel magical: Webs of people enabled the odd coincidences that felt mystical to me. Santería was a part of what contributed to the sense of community in Cuba, but more important: the Cuban system itself had created it. With unreliable institutions and a vast distance between, as Ernest Hemingway would have said, the mere players and the owners, informal social structures among citizens who didn’t rank on the hierarchy picked up the slack. Community stood behind all religions, and so religion, even when Santería receded into the background, appeared to weave through nearly everything in Havana. This, not well-fed spirits, was what made Havana inherently religious, this tension between the providential and prosaic, between being open to new experiences and staying on my guard, was what made me feel so engaged in Havana, what kept me coming back.
“What president?” Marielena asked with a sharp laugh as she ladled more soup into his bowl. “Those old, white men will die and other old, white men will take their place.”
/// “You know there are always turns in the road with Cuba but in the end you will have everything you want—I am positive of this,” Mi
ke wrote in our next email exchange, the last we would have while I lived in Cuba. “You and I both know it won’t be easy, but we’ll be there.”
This, my foreign-ness and “being there,” was what unlocked Havana’s potential and coincidence to me. Even so, a few months later I would wind up dating a younger man. It would be years before I would connect him to Marielena’s prophecy. We weren’t together for long, just long enough that he answered my door once or twice.
6
TARZANS AND CIRCUS CLOWNS
ADRIÁN AND ADELA
I try to, at the hour of showing my reality, preserve its ambivalence, because that is the purpose of the artistic discourse. Other discourses—religious, political—have different goals, but the base of artistic pursuit is ambivalence and complexity.
—Cuban filmmaker Fernando Pérez
If you asked a naïve twenty-year-old Miles Davis fan what a young jazz musician’s day-to-day might resemble, he’d probably describe Adrián’s life. When he was in town, Adrián squatted at a Vedado apartment that an uncle of his, a professor at the university, had left vacant for a few years while teaching at another Caribbean university. He had moved in at age twenty-three, a year and a half ago, and taken charge of its upkeep. There were two mattresses on the apartment’s floor: a double in the bedroom and a single in the living room where his friends often crashed. The only other pieces of furniture were an upright piano, a small circular table and two stools, and an end table next to his bed with a framed photograph of himself and his girlfriend, who lived there with him. She’d helped him paint the place the color of old Pepto Bismol. The color was discounted the weekend they’d gone to the store and Adrián wanted to get the job done before leaving for Europe.
His fridge held cool water, a half-full bottle of vodka and a half-eaten bar of chocolate, pasta sauce, rice, and a thumb-sized packet of pot. When friends stopped by, mostly other musicians or art students, Adrián liked to light a shisha he’d brought from Morocco and sit for a while on the large patterned throw pillows he’d bought in Spain, laughing over what they’d all said the last time they’d smoked. Sometimes they’d turn on the twenty-inch flat-screen he’d picked up in the Dominican Republic. The walls were bare but for a moody, black-and-white photo of him that hung in one corner of the living room—the same image from his MySpace music profile, which he maintained on hotel computers every week or so.
Every day, Adrián woke up and practiced. Recent afternoons he’d been recording soundtracks for a local telenovela for 5 kooks a session, which was crappy pay but curried favor with the right people. If he wasn’t working, he went to auditions, among them for a steady gig on a cruise ship. He didn’t get it—they’d wanted someone over fifty. Gray hair, the Buena Vista Social Club type. In the early evening, a few friends, mostly musicians or art students, would stop by, and then Adrián would leave for his evening gig, meet up with people after, come home, sleep late, warm up on his piano, and on and on. The year of upward mobility for Adrián was 2009. That year alone, he’d done a concert for a rich guy’s New Year’s Eve party in the Dominican Republic, a quick run with the showcase group Hijos de Buena Vista in Russia, and a five-week tour in France and North Africa with a salsa singer’s band. He’d saved most of what he’d earned, 250 Euros per show playing piano with the salsero’s band; he walked everywhere while abroad and returned to Havana with toys. A Swatch watch from Europe, Ray-Bans and the TV from the Dominican Republic, a white MacBook with a French keyboard.
Adrián had been studying at music-oriented schools since he was seven years old, when he scored well in an aptitude test and earned one of around fifteen coveted spots in a local music school. From there, he’d tracked into the music middle and high schools. He was right now supposed to be attending the Instituto Superior de Arte, the bucolic art university that Castro had set down on what had been the Havana Country Club’s golf course, a corollary to the sixties mandate that radios play local music and galleries show local artists. This was the university to which Carlos had applied. Its mellow hills and filled-in sand traps held facilities for visual arts, dance, music, and theater that culled students from around the country, but Adrián had begged out of class to go on a national tour with one of Pablo Milanes’s daughters a year ago and had been returning in only the most cursory way since. School trained classical. Adrián wanted pop or avant-garde.
He was trying to launch his own jazz quartet, a group of musicians that he’d headline. All had been friends since elementary school. All spent most of their days playing music, talking about music, reading books on music, listening to music. All spoke with the aspirational language of people with contingency plans and professional networks and bank accounts with an accumulation in them, not just the dregs of their last direct-deposit government paycheck in pesos. The sax player had just taken a job abroad. Adrián was testing a replacement. If he could get the band up and running, Adrián said one afternoon with the easy confidence of the privileged, maybe he’d stick around Havana more, tour with musicians less. “You know how the world likes the Cubans who live here, not there,” he told me with a shrug and a gesture toward the rest of the world.
The band’s third concert would happen in three hours at La Zorra y el Cuervo, the jazziest of jazz clubs in Havana, a cave of burgundy velvet and dark wood entered through a vintage phone booth on Twenty-Third. Adrián was informal about dates—he showed up an hour late and was infuriatingly cheerful for interview appointments, sent me a text message at seven-fifty on a Monday night to say he’d be playing at eight—but this time he’d invited me three days in advance to go with the band to their show. La Zorra y el Cuervo was a few blocks from Adrián’s apartment. He hoped it’d be jammed with the tourist crowd that set aside at least one night of their Havana package tours to hear Latin jazz.
The new saxophone player would meet us there, but the drummer had just knocked on the door with the friend who used to play sax with them. We waited only for the bassist.
Adrián flicked on the TV and streamed a video of Brazilian funk artist Ed Motta, who sounded like a Portuguese blend of Stevie Wonder and Jamiroquai, as he wound cords into loose loops. Nailé, who had just returned from Spain with the Cuban pop musician for whom she played drums, sat cross-legged on the floor as the two boys began to pack bass, amps, Adrián’s keyboard. She held a stray guitar in her lap, steady against the rubber of her tennis shoes, and tapped on it with her thumb and pinkie fingers as she shook her head in rhythm with the swingy, synthesized songs. She had shaved her head a few months ago and now kept her hair at less than an inch long. I sat in a chair next to her, my elbows on my knees.
One song ended and another began, with a faster beat and an electric guitar that did occasional solos between bouts of Motta’s singing. The tiny man on the screen was hugely overweight, the stage was color-blocked, and the band wore pink-striped and polka-dot ties like R&B–crooning Pee-wee Hermans. The scene started to resemble a cliché even as it began to occur, a scene from a movie about Afro-Cuban musicians with ambition and talent to spare, young people going places in a harsh country, but the energy was genuine: Adrián and the saxophonist paused their packing to watch the screen. No light illuminated the living room but the TV and a square of white from the bare bulb in Adrián’s bedroom. Nailé’s earrings dangled, pendulums in time with the music. They should try to steal this rhythm, she said, try it out sometime and see what they could do with it. She jumped to her feet. CDs from a precariously placed disc holder on the table rained down with a clack and arrayed themselves on the floor like rainbowed fish scales. No one looked. The two boys had taken their shirts off, because why get them sweaty and damp, and the light from the TV glinted on their shiny chests. Adrián danced lankily. “Taka taka taka-ta-ta, see? Like that. Taka taka taka-ta-ta,” he said. It was more electronic than anything they’d done before, Nailé said to me, but what the hell. Experimentation was half the point.
When the song ended and the packing resumed, Adrián told me that on
ce, when he was sixteen, he had grabbed at a loose electric cable when he tripped in the street. The current went in the palm of his hand, through just below his right armpit, and out his right foot before he let go. A stiff, dark, spidery scar ran along the palm of his hand and splintered out in rays at his wrist; he had a wide, kidney-shaped scar on the side of his chest. The sole of his foot was singed two shades darker than his skin and his toes were wonky, which was also why he didn’t exercise, he added. He wore his hair in a large afro that he twisted into thick spikes like black meringue. His hair was not crazy because he had been electrocuted, but his hair was crazy and he had been electrocuted, he said.
They didn’t fill La Zorra y el Cuervo that night. It wasn’t empty, either: Around twenty foreigners showed up, plus a few teachers from the Instituto Superior de Arte. The club was cold with the meat-locker air conditioning of fancy establishments in tropical climates, and Adrián grinned and mugged with the microphone as he introduced each song to the tourists, who’d all brought sweaters. When he played, his head seemed to loosen from his body, waggling above the piano, painting the air with the thick soft tips of his hair.
I sat with Adrián’s old friend, who would play for a year at a luxury hotel in Southeast Asia. He was leaving in a few weeks and though he would miss “blowing up along with the band,” he couldn’t turn down the promise of financial stability. His salary provided more money in a month than what his parents made, combined, in two years.
/// If Adrián was going to spend more time in Havana, he was going to do it on his terms: in an apartment he’d bought where he didn’t have to worry about rehearsing too loud or too much and pissing off the neighbors. He wanted to play with his quartet, traverse the city not in guaguas, buses, or máquinas but only in private gypsy cabs, or buy his own car, if he could, and eat at places like the Jazz Café. The Jazz Café at the intersection of Paseo y malecón had a jovial host who approached the table when local regulars came in, sat down, didn’t look at the menu, and instead asked for a screwdriver or a whiskey, and whatever was freshest from the agro that morning. The 10-kook minimum consumption bill that kept other Cubans out was always waived. Dinner and two drinks usually came out to around 7 or 8 CUC.