by Julia Cooke
“I feel imprisoned,” she complained to me over the phone a few weeks into the assignment. “It’s as if they had told you, after you graduated from Georgetown, that you had to go to Florida to inspect houses for mosquitoes. What? Why? Is this what I’ve been prepared for, what I’ve studied for all these years? Is this all you expect of me?”
I laughed.
“The installations are nice, imagine, they were all ready for the Chinese,” she said. “I was sad when I got here but I tried to contain myself. One girl was crying, crying, she couldn’t stop, she just had the phone glued to her ear and was crying. What could I say to her; I didn’t even know her! I laugh so I don’t cry about the whole thing.”
/// In the early months of 1959 after eltriunfodelarevolución, Che Guevara had holed up in an abandoned mansion in Tarará, complaining of sickness and exhaustion, asthma that wouldn’t let up. Guevara’s choice of accommodations in the suburban beach town, billed by the New York Herald Tribune in a 1952 article entitled “Cuban Vacation More Than Just Havana Nights” as “an exclusive summer colony, every resident being a member of the Tarara Yacht Club,” was a source of derision among some, including a journalist who published a story revealing Che’s new home as one of Tarará’s poshest estates. In response, Guevara published an open letter to editor and Compañero Carlos Franqui of the Revolución newspaper to say that he “had to occupy a home of one of the members of the old regime because my salary of $125 as an official in the Red Army does not permit me to rent one large enough to house the people who accompany me.”
Later, Tarará became the locus of Cuba’s medical diplomacy. In the nineties, the town erected dormitories to house children from areas downwind of the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster while Cuban doctors treated them for exposure. After the Special Period, in the era of Hugo Chavez and tightening bonds with Venezuela, poor Latin Americans came to Tarará for eye surgeries funded jointly by the two countries. And in 2007, the town began to host a few hundred of the two thousand Chinese high school graduates who arrived every year to train as translators. They were taught by young college graduates in their social service year who fit Cuba’s public relations persona: racially diverse, energetic, good-looking, Communist.
Though she didn’t want to be in Tarará, Adela fit the requirements. She lived in a small peach-colored house behind the hulking yellow student dormitories, where T-shirts could be spied from the highway, drying out of windows, with five other young women and a cocker spaniel. The window in the room she shared overlooked an empty blue swimming pool with dried brown palm fronds clustered at the bottom. Beyond, she could see a broad swath of sea. At night she heard nothing but the waves and the palm trees that flopped in the wind.
There were aspects of her imprisonment that Adela enjoyed. The view. Independence from her family. Instead of being strong-armed by cohabitation into talking to her mother at home, Adela spoke with her once a week on the phone and saw her on a day off every two weeks. It felt so adult. She got a computer in her classroom with access to the Internet; she read the Spanish newspaper El País daily and posted thoughtful quotes from Simone de Beauvoir and John Keats on her instant message status. She learned about China, whose instant noodles and spicy sauces filled Cuban supermarket shelves. Adela would rather have experienced these things because of something she’d chosen to do, but within her annoyed resignation was a nugget of excitement.
“You have no idea how hard it can be, with the different codes we have,” she wrote me in an email. “They express themselves differently in every way. They’re introverted, but if they open up, they seem even stranger because how they think about absolutely everything is entirely different. Their parents teach them that they’re little emperors, the hope of the family.” In one of the first Spanish exercises she’d assigned, a dialogue she’d instructed them to pair up for, her students had each written both sides of the assignment alone. “Imagine it! One person, reciting: Hola. Hola. ¿Como estas? Yo estoy muy bien, ¿y tu?”
Though Adela had known foreign students before, they had always been one or two within a classroom of dozens of Cubans. She’d never been a minority in a room before and she seemed to be squeezing something from the experience. Adela learned to use chopsticks to eat her rice and beans, and a favorite student taught her to make dumplings, stiff hats of flour that she filled with spiced onion and chard and presented to me on a plate one afternoon. She ate tofu: slimy and a little bland, she said, but kind of good. She reported these cultural experiences solemnly. There were so many different ways of being, she seemed to say with every observation. I thought back to our multinational group of acquaintances in college, walking together in the dark morning of May Day from the University to the broad, open Plaza de la Revolución, where Fidel would give his speech, and wondered what she’d observed about me.
But with only two days off per month, Adela missed the December and February film festivals and got only a slice of an afternoon at the book fair. And since Tarará was a place of governmental mission, anyone who visited her needed to get a special permit from the police. She wasn’t allowed to invite me or any other foreigner to visit her, even if she spoke to a higher-up and vouched for me. When she offered to sneak me in toward the end of her year there, other resentments bubbled out in the tone with which she used to cite Haydée Santamaría. I spent ten minutes in the compound: Adela had flirted aggressively with a teenaged guard and I slipped in on the promise that I was Mexican and definitely not a yanqui and I would be inside for just long enough for us to change into our swimsuits. After touring the winding roads of what was essentially a suburb surrounded by an iron fence, we returned to the beach to sit in the sand. It was too chilly to swim. Offerings that Santería devotees had made to Yemayá, the powerful female orisha of the seas, had washed up on the shore: squash, a bloated watermelon, chicken feathers twisted among clumps of dried seaweed.
Adela was troubled that Fidel, the intellectual and charismatic dinosaur whose continuing dictatorship she had tolerated out of allegiance to and respect for what he had initially accomplished, had replaced himself with Raúl, a military man who was as much of a dinosaur as his brother, less intellectual, and with zero charisma. She didn’t understand why Raúl had then fired Felipe Pérez Roque, the forty-something-year-old minister of foreign affairs who had been widely viewed as a pragmatic, thoughtful Cuban politician for a younger generation, along with ten other high-level government ministers and officials. “We all had to idolize them until, suddenly, they were fired, and the only reasons that we were told as to why they’d been fired were obviously fake. And por colmo, the ‘Letter from Fidel’ that day in Granma began talking about Pérez Roque and ended talking about baseball! The condescension was just . . .” She trailed off and shook her head.
Adela was alarmed that an email she’d written to a friend about a philosophy conference she’d attended on a day off had been forwarded around the community without her permission. She had complained that the Cuban intellectuals seemed to have lost the ability to debate among themselves, to be analytical and to argue. In response, she’d received emails from fellow students and academics both praising her courage for speaking up and chastising her for speaking too critically out of turn. As her frustration mounted, it was compounded by the fact that every time she tried to use the state-issued computer in her classroom to open the websites of European study grants, the screen froze. She forwarded me a flier for a study abroad expo with stops in every Latin American country but Cuba.
And she was angry that part of her job involved writing personality profiles of her Chinitos. Adela was asked to analyze their habits and attitudes toward authority in written reports she’d turn in at the end of the year. The task loomed as her time in Tarará drew to a close. If they were under covert surveillance, she reasoned, someone was probably writing some sort of report on her, too. That, she later told me, was why she always sent me emails rather than calling me. She was convinced that the phone was tapped, and she could
more easily control what she wrote in an email than what she’d say.
/// After she spent a year at Tarará, Adela was reassigned to complete her second year of social service at an academic editorial house in Havana under a lecherous fifty-something boss who made inappropriate comments daily and had once put his hand on her leg. She could move back home to Miramar. Until that year, she told me, she had been naïve, too idealistic. It was the sort of realization that corroded her from the inside, creeping over her memories and beliefs until it seemed that she couldn’t trust anything she’d thought or even been up until then.
Her grandfather had felt ill one recent morning, and she’d taken him to the hospital. They gave him an electrocardiogram and told him that he was having a bit of muscular pain; they handed the printout to Adela before she left. By that evening he was dead, she told me. Heart attack. Overcome, she asked her father, a doctor who lived on the other side of the city with his second wife, if the printout showed any signs of the attack, and he pointed out a tiny irregularity. “There.” She carried the paper around with her, folded into a pocket of her wallet. Its edges wore tiny tears though she took it out carefully.
There was nothing she could do, not about her boss or about the doctors or about Raúl or Pérez Roque. “I only talk about these things when you’re here,” she said. She shrugged tightly and laughed. “Everyone knows all of this already. I’m the last person to learn. It’s better not to talk about it. I can’t do anything about anything for the next year, so why?”
Her options, as she saw them, were as follows: She could stay in Cuba, work as a professional under one of a number of aging bosses while making hardly any money, burn inside at the state of the country she loved, but live in it and remain silent to avoid consequences and wait. Or she could leave, try for a scholarship, not defect, of course, but plan to come back at some indefinite but inevitably improved future point. At least she had come to these conclusions, she said, while she still had life in front of her. What was really heartbreaking were the older people who had given up so much for something that was so obviously bankrupt. Whenever I talked to her, I had the feeling of someone stuck in a room with all the lights turned out, feeling around in the dark for a door.
She held up five fingers. “How many fingers do I have up?” she asked me. “No, there are only four fingers. See, it’s like in 1984. It doesn’t matter what you say, or what reality says. Only what they say matters. Patria o muerte: valga la redundancia.” Patriotism or death, the revolutionary refrain: both mean the same thing.
/// People like Adrián worked toward art and beauty. Flashes of beauty and grace were part of what had kept Adela suspended in contentment for so many years: reading, but also wandering the halls of the national art museum, their gallery layouts known by heart, drawn to the room of Wilfredo Lam canvases to be transported by his moody Cubism. Listening to pop troubadour Carlos Varela give an impromptu concert just for students at the bottom of the university steps, the cupolas and sepia buildings of Centro Habana dominoing out behind the stage in the sagging sun. Films, and stiff wooden strips of seventy-year-old movie theater armrests biting into elbows, munching cones of popcorn or peanuts while traveling to Paris, just for a few hours at a 10 AM movie showing, or for the entire week of the French Film Festival if Adela wanted.
Beauty ran contrary to the very tangible goals of the Revolution: It served no productive end. It was the historic domain of the leisure class. It opened portholes to unknowable worlds. The expansiveness of all art was, as Reinaldo Arenas had written, a “dissident force, because a dictatorship is itself unaesthetic, grotesque; to a dictator and his agents, the attempt to create beauty is an escapist or reactionary act.” But the Cuban government had colonized its country’s art. After years of suppressing what didn’t directly support it, the regime had mellowed into a cultural policy that promoted a vision of pluralism. This particular dictator and his agents didn’t need to understand why one would create beauty to know that the cheap escapism it provided to a country hemmed in by ocean could, in fact, be productive. And this dictator had learned that creators of art could speak for the freedoms of his country more effectively than he, pinned in place as they were by privilege. Pre–Special Period cultural policy, lifted straight from the repressive Soviet Union, had ignored the propagandistic possibility of art. During the Special Period, an indecisive miasma of permissiveness and strict regulation gave rise to lugubrious films made of reels developed in Venezuela and artworks cobbled together with whatever materials could be found. Films and paintings exploded with double entendre, artists were jailed, thousands defected, and an independent art space hosted enraged political performance pieces by artists like Angel Delgado and Tania Bruguera. Delgado took a literal shit on a copy of Granma in the early nineties, landing him in jail for six months before he left for Mexico; Bruguera would spend much of the next decade in Chicago, though she kept a home in Havana and visited often. In interviews in which she was inevitably questioned about censorship under the Castro regime, she would nod to its existence but also point out that in the capitalist world, there was self-censorship, too, equally implicit and equally powerful, revolving around art’s salability. Over the course of the next decade and a half, a system of gentle self-censorship settled into Havana’s art scene. Its borders shifted and moved depending on one’s chosen artistic expression—music, dance, writing, theater, visual art—and one’s aversion to risk.
By the 2009 Havana Biennial, to which thousands of well-heeled international art professionals flocked, Bruguera, who had held a lecture series entitled “Art of Conduct” from 2000 to 2009 in her home in Habana Vieja to instruct young artists how to walk the fine line between censurable and prized, got an official exhibit for the artwork created through the lecture series. “I’ve worked on pieces that have been censored (also outside of Cuba),” Bruguera had explained in an interview in 2007, “but I thought that this one should work from inside the system to exist, because its success would not come from its censorship, but precisely from its survival (the possibility of building something).”
At gallery openings for artists whose work was just oblique enough to be mounted, I saw the occasional state security agent, the stonewashed jeans, short-sleeved button-down shirts, and cell phones in belt holsters a giveaway. They were usually too well-pressed, their clothes a fatal combination of new and out of fashion amid a well-dressed group whose casual nods to whatever trends ran through Europe or the States marked them, too. Even those who lived outside the true financial elite wore their hair the way they’d seen Spanish women do it or the H&M blouse they saved for special occasions with the long, beaded necklaces that sold for a few CUC in the artisan market downtown. Clusters of artists and art students socialized among themselves. At after-parties, we all danced to “Gozando en la Habana.”
/// While Adela had been moving back to Havana, in late 2009, Adrián moved, too. He was now living in an apartment lent to him by Che Guevara’s granddaughter, a freckle-faced teenager who seemed to have a crush on him. The amount of time he spent in Havana was so minimal these days, he told me, that her family let him use it if he did minor upkeep. He was still saving to buy a house, but now his daydreams set him down in a beach house at one of the playas del este. I saw him at a few parties where Raúl’s grandkids trailed eddies of discreet whispers. He fit right in.
7
SPECIAL PERIODS
CARLOS AND ELAINE
The day that entry exam results for the Instituto Superior de Arte were posted, Carlos woke at seven, showered and dressed, and headed over to the school office ten blocks from his house in order to be there when they posted the list on the door. He was home by nine. They hadn’t even put the test scores next to people’s names, he said as he paced back and forth in front of Elaine and me, only pass and fail. He had no way to know how he’d done, how many answers he’d gotten right or wrong.
The only people granted spots in the film program, he said, his face sour, were the
hijos de: the daughter of someone who worked at the school, the young new wife of one of Cuba’s important actors, the son of a government official. He crossed his arms tight against his chest, leaving pale marks when he moved his fingers. It wasn’t fair. Cool morning air wafted from the kitchen through the living room, lifting arm hairs and dispersing cigarette smoke.
The scores had been posted at eight. At eight-thirty, as he was walking home, he’d stopped to get his shells read by a santera. She had described Carlos’s family, his goals, how he felt in that precise moment. He stood over the kitchen table, where Elaine and I sat, leaning onto his tented fingers. His knuckles were turning white and his nose pointed into the air. His voice rose with every detail and for the first time, neither Elaine nor I told him to quiet down. “Me dejó frio,” he shouted, it was staggering. She had looked at him from beneath her head wrap and told him that there was nothing left for him in Cuba. He was destined to make his life elsewhere, she told him.
“I was born to do things in life,” Carlos spat as he started to pace again. His eyes roamed as if hunting for the man he was certain he would become were he just given the chance. “But not here.”
That he’d been denied a spot in school was vindication. He retreated into his room to disappear into the fiction of The L Word or Lost on my laptop, to nap and dream that he was elsewhere—a friend had come over with a hard drive and copied dozens of movies and TV series to my external hard drive. Carlos spent a week watching television. He emerged to eat lunch and smoke in the living room and, eventually, to go to the weekend’s parties and concerts.
School had one sole objective, Carlos told me later: indoctrination, “to make you function politically like they want you to function.” Propaganda, state news programs, the novels that the local publishing houses put out—they all reflected what the government deemed the best of Cuba, a country of mythic proportions and importance. I thought of Juan and Alejandra, with whom I’d become closer over long afternoons of coffee and discussion. Alejandra’s eight-year-old son, who loved to draw and race me down the streets of Vedado, had come home from school on various occasions saying, “Mami, did you know that Fidel made Cuba great for the Cubans? You never told me that.” Once he asked her, “Why are all Americans so bad?” And finally, recently, “Mami, why did I fail this question on a test, when the history program we watched on TV said that the answer I wrote down was correct?”