by Julia Cooke
Adrián was the guy playing piano at the Jazz Café every Monday night while those people came in and out. He and his new band weren’t a name yet and they didn’t have the recognition to play their original songs as regulars anywhere, so he played Cuban standards with a house band and took whatever else came along. Even so, the money he was earning was starting to place him in the category of the people who didn’t need to use the menu or pay covers at restaurants like Jazz Café.
To Adrián, Cuba was just like anywhere else, with an elite that had sorted out how to work the system and a large portion of the populace that hadn’t had either the conditions or the savvy to navigate the maze. He hadn’t been born into anything, he was quick to point out: his parents were black university professors who’d never had a ton of money. His ascent demonstrated something about success in Havana, that it still existed and could be achieved through hard work.
Purchasing an apartment would demonstrate something else, something about Adrián’s investment and confidence in Cuba’s future. This was why Adrián was saving up. The sort of place he wanted would cost him around $20,000 under the table, with the deed trading hands via a sham marriage, probably. “I’m getting ready for whatever’s coming next. Learning from everything, just in case,” he said. “Plus I’m exploding.”
Nonchalance-encased yearning was a trademark of Havana’s cultural elite. These were people who spent a few months outside the country every year; people who summered in Spain or conspicuously didn’t discuss the woes of being on peripatetic band tours—one night here, two nights there, three nights in Madrid or Antibes if they were lucky. At gallery openings when their artwork was shown in Switzerland and Mexico, small knots of Europeans or Latin Americans formed around them because these people, in Diesel jeans and trim blazers, weren’t what a Cuban was supposed to look like. They booked airplane tickets on computers at the Meliá Cohiba, got 2-kook mani-pedis from women who made house calls, kept haunches of black-market jamón Serrano on kitchen counters, worked out in the back room of a Miramar house where guys who rode with the Cuban national team taught spinning on rusty Schwinn stationary bikes. They drank vodka, not rum, and their Wednesday nights were often spent with a bottle of it and a friend or two, talking about art and books and politics and life. They lent each other essay collections by Dave Hickey, Taschen tomes on contemporary art, mp3s of musicians like Ed Motta. They didn’t go out much to Cuban bars or to tourist bars; they went to each other’s houses, to parties where furniture slid to the outskirts of the living room to make space for a dance floor so that attendees could finally dance salsa, do a casino round. They did wine nights to which each invitee was expected to bring a decent bottle, usually purchased at the diplomat grocery store or the Meliá wine shop because the black-market vendors sold only the mediocre wines served by all-inclusive hotels. They were coolly disinterested in what mainstream Cubans did, but a significant swath of the rising cultural elite, like Adrián, corroborated one success of eltriunfodelarevolución, always spoken as if it were one word—the egalitarian arts education system that had made them. They were also evidence of a political and artistic reality.
People like Adrián worked their way up the professional ladder inside Cuba first, playing in local bands or showing in local galleries until they were noticed by a visiting international music producer or curator. Then, if they were ambitious, they’d begin to travel abroad, to collect exit visas procured through the National Union of Cuban Writers and Artists or another MinCult entity with ease proportionate to their prestige. Abroad, they’d be the face of a new Cuba, well-dressed and talented, living proof that the yanqui newspaper articles on dissidents and poor people who fished cans from the garbage to make toys for tourists weren’t the only Cuban reality. They were proof that exit visas were, in fact, granted, proof that the education system worked, at least for some. A portion of their earnings, whether through foreign record contracts or sales of canvases to visiting art collectors, was paid in taxes to the state. All but a very few kept apartments in Havana, even when they got foreign grants to live abroad for a spell. Most made sure to visit Cuba every eleven months, because if they stayed out of the country for longer, they would be seen by the law as having defected. That benefitted no one—not the artist, not the government. Someone who defected was an immigrant. Someone who kept residency was a Cuban.
And so they discussed dreams and plans with alluring ease, as if the constructions of success would rise out of concrete and I-beams as easily as the words floated from their mouths. Their phrasing hid the bite of failure, no hedging or trailed-off sentences. They didn’t bring up having lived in an Old Havana barbacoa, or whether they’d ever seen someone stabbed on a street corner because whoever did it just couldn’t take the degradation, the policeman every two corners who kept ordering you to show your carnet though his eyes glinted with recognition when he saw you. Many of them moved. In nice neighborhoods like Vedado or Miramar, and all the way out to Siboney and Nautico—neighborhoods that held embassies and foreign businesses and the arts and sports schools—shoulders were straighter, slang was less vulgar, and privacy was respected. These were the neighborhoods where foreigners stayed in casas, neighborhoods that bewitched with easy hospitality and attractive residents.
Adrián wanted an apartment in a good neighborhood, but not one of the foreigner-ridden, expensive ones. Nuevo Vedado, maybe, where modernist apartment houses hid in the low hills just behind downtown Vedado, or a nice house in El Cerro, where he’d grown up, or La Víbora, where apartments were great and still cheap. “And soon, before things change,” Adrián told me as he rolled a joint in his apartment a few days after his concert. “Ninety percent of young people here don’t do anything, they’re just waiting in their houses for a change to come, but they aren’t preparing themselves for it.”
I paused, thinking. “But what are they supposed to do? I mean, the system here doesn’t exactly—”
Adrián shook his head as he interrupted me. “Look, at the end, if you don’t do well, it’s your own damn problem.” His impatience thickened the air. “It’s not the system’s fault. The doctors, the teachers, the ones that are really, really good, they live a good life. It’s the bad ones that complain.
“That’s what I don’t like about so many Cubans,” he continued. “Even the educated ones, they talk so much shit about Cuba, but they’ve never even seen what it’s like outside. It’s hard out there, too. In a different way, but it’s hard.”
He lit the joint, took a hit, and passed it to me. “Bro, you’re an asshole, you think you have some right to a good life and lots of money just because you went to college? No, you were given the chance to study and now it’s on you to make it yourself. Beyond the Revolution or socialism or capitalism, I’m talking about opportunities. At the end, everyone who makes it in anything in any system is good at what he does. Don’t talk shit, don’t complain, because in the end, every system gives anyone the opportunity to use it.”
I shrugged and we moved on.
Adrián would never admit to me that he felt lucky. To admit that his success was partially the product of having the right skill set in the right country under the right cultural policy, I thought, destabilized him. If his success was due to his own enterprise, then he’d earned his toys; the narrative he was constructing about himself, his life, his work, and his place in Havana held.
There was a looseness about Adrián that made him credible when he said that he’d never really considered defecting on any of his trips abroad, a looseness that I thought could only really survive in Cuba. Every time he came back from a long trip, it was as if Adrián breathed deeply for the first time since he’d left. He earned money abroad and spent it at home: to support his girlfriend, buy his parents a new air conditioner if theirs broke, take taxis. He’d miss Havana too much, he said, the resolviendo, the Cuban women and their combination of dependence and independence that existed nowhere else, the crazy, romantic alchemy of Havana. I’d felt that det
ail, too, every day since I’d moved here: walking down the hill from the Hotel Nacional toward the malecón on a hot, dry, windy afternoon, smelling the salt air and watching how the sea seemed to press against the cars that sped around the curve.
No, Adrián talked about travel and foreign jobs but he’d only ever live in Havana. He hated how polite people were outside Cuba—he called it fake—and couldn’t understand why socioeconomic classes were kept so rigidly apart. It struck him as hypocritical that people acted one way at work and a different way at home. “There’s doble moral here, too, but at least it’s the sort that I understand. You have to use your head in a different way. Other people, like French people, can’t handle chaos. Cubans react more suave. In Cuba, autonomy doesn’t exist,” he said, one of the grand contradictory statements that exposed how conscious he was that I was interviewing him.
Adrián’s notion of himself held as long as he was onstage in one way or another. It cracked when he was forced back into his younger self, such as when we ran into an old mentor on the street that afternoon as we left his apartment, a guy who played now with the famous salsa orchestra Charanga Habanera. He retreated into momentary reflection, a sentence on how far he’d come and how it was all doing something he loved.
He shook himself normal again, a dog waggling off the water, and suggested we grab a mojito at the Hotel Nacional.
/// There was a Charanga Habanera song on every DJ’s spin list that year. The song is sung by a Cuban man, speaking to a girlfriend who’s just gone to the other side of the Straits. She says Miami’s crazy, he croons. She feels good and she has money and the nice car she always dreamed of, but she can’t find the gossip, the flavor of Havana. What she doesn’t have is all over the screen in the music video: dirty dancing in bikinis by a clean-ish pool, a pile of kids chicken-fighting and laughing, girls giggling together while sunbathing. She sits on an immaculate white couch, alone, a remote on the coffee table, a cordless phone in her hand as she talks to him. He rubs it in: “Tu llorando en Miami, yo gozando en la Habana.” You’re crying in Miami, I’m enjoying Havana. In the chorus, he asks her:
Cuentame como te ha ido
Si has conocido la felicidad.
Cuentame como te va
Yo por aqui, muy bien, tu por alla, que bola?
Tell me, how have things been going
Have you found happiness?
Tell me how you are.
Me over here, I’m really good,
You over there, what the hell?
The song is uncommonly catchy. Dance floors filled every time the intro horn line sounded at any party. The last line of the chorus emerged like a mantra, its last words, “Que bola?” shouted with arms in the air in mock confusion.
Adela knew how to dance to this song. She didn’t look like she should—unlike the stars of the music video, she had neither classic dark Spanish looks nor mixed-race skin, but long, thin, light brown hair and the start of a wrinkle between her hazel eyes because every time she got worked up talking about politics or philosophy, which was often, she furrowed her brow. The wrinkle had been developing since she was around nineteen, when I met her. Now she was twenty-four and a recent graduate of the University of Havana.
The sentiment of “Gozando en la Habana” agreed with Adela. Adela was the most patriotic Cuban I knew who wasn’t a seventy-year-old campesino. We’d met talking politics at the university, where we’d spend hours with a group that included a Mexican philosophy student and a German political historian, discussing politics under the weeping fig trees in the grand porticos of the university buildings. Inside, the wooden desks had been painted so many times that the surfaces were soft, and still they wore the names of their favorite students. There was little breeze in the classrooms, the bathroom toilets had no running water, and the tank with the bucket that you were to use to flush manually was rarely full. The sense of noble knowledge being imparted clashed with the stench of piss and cigarette smoke. But outside, in the bright patios with sloppily landscaped trees gone to elegant riot, students sat on benches and debated politics, philosophy, art theory, literature.
The United States was thick in its engagement with Iraq, which loosed Adela’s policy perspectives. Americans invaded foreign countries whenever it was convenient, using conscripts who “volunteered” for service after sitting in putrid pools of entrenched poverty, wars voted for by a “democracy” of wealthy white men whose children were safe in private universities. Americans used poorly paid workers in factories abroad to make products that were discarded by Americans after mere weeks, and were then sold to the ranks of middle-class climbers in whatever country the product had originated while American bosses raked in the cash. A country that kept to itself was the only ethically defensible nation. A country that exported doctors rather than businessmen, this was the philosophically correct policy.
Adela rarely grew impatient, rowdy, or rude while debating. She usually laughed at what she deemed stupid, a high-pitched giggle reserved for an ill-considered claim. She detached only when whoever she spoke with didn’t address her points but instead began to point toward Cuban policy. And even then, it was a simple shift in the focus of her eyes, in whether she looked at you and furrowed her brow or glazed into the distance. She hated feeling plucked from a case, as if people were marveling at her amid relics of other obsolescences from years long past, she later told me: look, a young Communist! She hardened against people who thought they knew her. She was unclassifiable. She hadn’t joined the Union of Young Communists, though eleven of the thirteen sociology students who graduated with her belonged to it, because she fancied herself an “independent militant,” too ardent even for the UJC. The UJC was filled with impostors who just wanted better social service assignments after graduation. “The selection isn’t how it was before,” she complained. “They used to pick the vanguard, young people who were really critical, who questioned. The young people today who show off their UJC cards, they have no questions. They don’t even read the local press, much less El País to get another perspective.”
Adela wanted to be like Haydée Santamaría, whose apartment had been the Havana haven of the radical youth movement under Batista, who fought alongside the men at the Moncada barracks on July 26, 1957, who later headed the Casa de las Américas cultural center, who supported cultural icons like Silvio Rodríguez and his trovadores. Santamaría had recognized talent, art, passion, love of homeland, and a commitment to social justice. She was a role model. Adela cited the 5-peso entry to museums and free concerts as Santamaría’s inheritance but left out the part where she committed suicide on July 26, 1980. She was fifty-eight.
Adela had just moved to Tarará, a beach town twenty minutes by car from East Havana and the first of the playas del este beaches. After graduating from the University of Havana, she’d been sent there to complete her first year of social service. Chinese teens had descended in clusters on the country to learn Spanish, part of a recent agreement between Fidel Castro and Hu Jintao. Adela had been asked to teach a group of twenty of them for a year, and though she’d politely declined—she preferred to perform her duty within Havana, at an editorial house, say, or the university—the “asking,” as it turned out, was really telling.
Adela had never lived in a beca, government student housing, before. Throughout her childhood, her mother, a well-connected woman with the dyed red hair of an aging pinup from whom Adela had inherited lively eyes and wide, high cheekbones, had pulled strings to get her out of the escuelas al campo, the harvest volunteer work that all Cuban schoolchildren had to do. And when it came time for high school, Adela’s allergies were bad enough to get out of being becada.
Everyone who went to one of the high schools that tracked into the University of Havana had to live in a beca, a dormitory outside Havana, unless they were artists, sportsmen, or infirm. The only two city high schools that tracked into the University of Havana were where the second-tier athletes and the kids with a medical reason not to live in the be
cas studied. Top athletes in sports like baseball, track and field, and boxing, in which Cuba consistently ranked at the Olympics, lived in their own sports facility on the outskirts of town and were expected eventually to compete at the Pan-American Games while the lesser athletes went to college. So the ranks of sailors, horseback riders, and practitioners of other sports in which Cuba rarely placed were swollen with the children of the elite. Doctor’s notes were, for the right people, also procurable.
Through high school and then college, Adela stayed in Havana, with her mother and stepfather and older brother in leafy Miramar, with her own bedroom and her books: Voltaire, Marx, Nietzsche. Adela talked about authors as if she’d had dinner with them the night before. She attended the annual February book fair with saved money to buy specific, sought-after books from small Argentine and Spanish presses. Her most treasured tomes lived on a shelf in the old mahogany headboard that took up most of her bedroom: Julio Cortázar, Jorge Luis Borges, Jorge Mañach.
She brought some of those books with her to Tarará, but there was no way to bring everything to the small room she shared with another teaching student. More important, with only one day off every two weeks and no quick way to get into Havana, Adela couldn’t go to the library or to the museums or the film festivals that had sustained her since high school.