The Other Side of Paradise

by Julia Cooke

  So at home, parents quietly—carefully—tried to manage expectations and lend some gray to the black-and-white world illustrated in history books and classes. Alejandra, recounting these stories to me, had widened her eyes and gripped her too-skinny wrist across the table. “Imagine. What do I tell Diego? I tell him that what he says he’s learning is not true, that it’s a little more complicated, and I risk his repeating it in class. What if the teacher is a real Communist and treats him poorly? What if she reports Juan and me to the CDR, tells them to keep an eye on us? Juan sells artwork without reporting it sometimes.” Alejandra didn’t contradict what Diego was taught until it seemed necessary. She told him that Fidel had done many things for Cuba, good and less good, that Americans were not all bad. Then she went to speak to his teacher about his grade. She wanted him to see her fighting for something that she believed was right. The teacher told Alejandra that since Diego had cited an answer that ran contrary to the government history book they’d read in school, he had failed. But what Diego wrote down was corroborated by these two sources, Alejandra argued as she flipped through other texts, and she argued all the way up to the municipal education chief, who told her that “even when the teacher is not right, in this country, the teacher is right.” Diego’s grade stayed the same.

  And this was how Diego began to make sense of what was happening around him. Jose Martí said that to be cultured was to be free, a quote splashed about all over Cuba, and he learned about literacy rates and ballet dancers and yet he saw hypocrisy and hustling and opportunism and hunger. There were people whose actions seemed in direct contrast with not only their words but what he’d been told to expect in school. At some point, his mother wouldn’t mediate these situations for him. Adolescence anywhere revolves around the recognition of a gulf between what ought to be and what is. Young Cubans were told two competing versions of what ought to be and experienced firsthand something that often clashed with both. Whether they were told how to negotiate the distance between the three inputs was variable.

  This was part of the reason why Cuban kids played in the streets, not in apartments or houses. Children were like sieves that information flowed through. Kids saw things that they shouldn’t: a computer that wasn’t registered, as it should have been, with the Committee in Defense of the Revolution, or an unauthorized foreigner, or a delivery of eggs straight from the farmer. Kids could report an anti-Communist quip or attitude to another child’s parent, which, if it bubbled all the way up, in the past had resulted in children being taken from their parents and their parents being put in reeducation camps. It rarely happened anymore, but still home was a place of vulnerability, and children threatened the tenuous peace of the Havanan ecosystems that were both sustaining and possibly deadly: From family to apartment complex to the larger community, trembling circles of trust radiated outward. Everyone had some sort of open secret to hide from the government. But the axes they all held over one another’s heads stayed in the air and children remained oblivious until, at some indefinite but inevitable point of adolescence or young adulthood, they weren’t.

  The day Carlos didn’t get into the ISA, his last hope for his place in Cuba blew apart, I thought. He’d been saving a part of himself that thought that maybe, maybe his country was changing, that left room for the fact that he could be wrong when he said that anywhere else was better than Cuba; he was self-aware enough to know that his perspective, as someone who had lived in the same apartment for his whole life, who had never been anyplace where Granma wasn’t the newspaper and a Castro wasn’t the comandante, was limited. He was smart enough to leave some room for the possibility that what he understood of the reality of other countries might be warped, too, and so he couldn’t truly judge how Cuba stacked up against anyplace else. He had hoped, I realized as I watched him pace, that he could be canny enough to squeeze from Cuba what it could give him so that he could move into the rest of the world without regrets. His failure was complete.

  Carlos’s life would begin the moment he set foot outside Cuba. Anything that happened in Cuba didn’t, couldn’t matter. To him, goals would either disappoint him or keep him in place. If he had to be in Havana he would be there quietly, with no real attachment to anyone or anything. At the drag shows and Divino parties, he didn’t seem to mind not taking men home. He dated two men while I knew him, both handsome, both romances short-lived. He wanted, one day, to replicate his parents’ nuclear family, find a husband, have kids. In the promiscuous overlap of Cubans and gay men, this was who he was: the guy who never took anyone home. At parties, he and his closest friends—three men, one of whom was also named Carlos and two of whom were as tall and attractive as he—stood in a small cluster, talking shit, being present. The LGBT scene offered a sense of belonging and abstract activism, something in which Carlos could participate without the specificity that would cloud his ability to leave when the time came.

  The only thing that would matter from here on out was Divino, or parties, or whatever, and the life in his mind, the life he lived when he fell asleep watching a movie until 5 AM and tricked his subconscious into believing that he was elsewhere, was real as his life in Cuba. He’d wake up in Havana again, to his mother’s lunch of black beans and rice and tostones and chicken, but for those ten, twelve hours, he’d be elsewhere.

  The Ballad of Elaine and Carlos was the drama of the last four decades of Cuban history played out on the tiny stage of one family’s home: Elaine was a member of the last generation of adults who had been galvanized by the opportunities they’d had for education and advancement in the seventies. She’d gotten a free master’s degree just because she could. Carlos was the young generation raised in the throes of economic crisis and cynicism, who struggled to see a reason why he should try. His actions were not correlated to their consequences. He could study for tests or stay out all night at parties, do not much of anything, and the only difference was that his mother yelled at him and wouldn’t give him spending money. Okay, then, he could make what he’d saved from not drinking at the last few parties stretch for a few more nights.

  Together they played a protracted game of the Cuban national sport, waiting, which linked hundreds of thousands of Havanans in a paralyzed stalemate. Waiting for Castro to die, waiting for something to change, waiting for visas to leave the country, ticking off days on a calendar as they passed by.

  /// Fourteen percent of Cuba was over sixty in 2002. Seniors spiked to 17 percent in 2011 and the government predicted that the over-sixty set would compose a full third of the population in 2035. The government reported that the decline in birthrates owed to the high rates of university graduates nationwide, and certainly education did have some impact on the aging population—as did health care and a higher life expectancy—but what helped the rising average along were diminished numbers of Cubans of child-bearing age. So many had left in the nineties, and so many of those who stayed were loath to have children in a country they didn’t trust, a country from which they hoped to depart.

  A Caribbean idyll that was slowly turning gray, wrinkled, and arthritic was only the final detail of a period when real life surpassed fiction in its surrealism. During the Special Period, entire swaths of the city went without running water for years. People cut off clothing tags to patch up their shoes because the only ones for sale in Havana were made of cast plastic, and that was assuming anyone had money. Sometimes the peso pizzas they’d bought, foul six-inch-wide discs of heavy bread with sweet tomato paste, had condoms melted on top of them to look like cheese, which they plucked off before eating. Whoever couldn’t afford even that survived on sugar water and bummed cigarettes. Alejandra’s parents had developed X-rays for the nearby hospital on the sly, gloves on and masks over their mouths as they hunched over their bathtub. None of their friends, certainly, were allowed in for playdates. It was a two-part undertaking: Developing the film earned them a black-market paycheck, and then they brought the silty silver residue to a jeweler, who would make links out of it for
a cut. They stayed up at night twisting one link around another, making chains that they could sell. Alejandra and her sister ate chicken every so often during the Special Period.

  As for teenagers, “They are wavering,” read a report from the massive Union of Young Communists meeting in 1992. “They simply have stopped believing or consider it impossible to resist and triumph. . . . One hears them say that everything is going wrong, that they are tired, that we have spent 30 years saying that we are in the worst moment.” Young adults left. Legally and illegally, on rafts and in speedboats, via student visas, sham marriages, and lonely, compassionate foreigners. Some arrived and others did not. Everyone had a neighbor or friend whose twenty-something kid, niece, nephew, granddaughter, whoever—had just disappeared, a presumed casualty of the balsero crisis, when thousands of Cubans silently took to the Straits of Florida in ramshackle watercrafts made of tires and oil barrels that often fell apart mid-Straits. Sixty-year-old women cried when they talked about the Special Period.

  Elaine told me about the time that she’d taken the boys with her to a social work visit in Centro Habana during the Special Period, to one of the barbacoa lofts constructed to divide a room vertically into two floors. They’d only known squalor à la Miramar before: Miss Havisham squalor, squalor that used to be elegance, haughty squalor. To smell shit in the street, to bat away chubby, lazy flies that had to rest on your shoulder between stops at the overflowing garbage bin and the wall, to feel the living room ceiling press on the crown of your head under the sleeping loft that three people shared and stand hungry beneath it: these tableaux inspired sentiments that Carlos and his brother hadn’t yet felt.

  “Shame, surprise, fear, humiliation. Because we’d thought we were equal,” Carlos told me. The four of them lived in one bedroom but they never lacked food, even if it was just rice and beans, which was still among the only foods that Carlos or his brothers ate. He had never smelled the ammonia stink of a communal toilet that had to be flushed manually with buckets of water carried up flights of stairs that burned enough scant calories so that no one actually flushed it. Carlos’s clothes were always clean and pressed, even if he rotated through the few shirts that he could count on one hand.

  “After the Special Period, we all learned to invent,” Elaine said with an exhale of smoke. “Before it, they had created a system in which we thought we deserved everything. The state was God, and it gave at will. It killed creativity, killed individuality. The Special Period woke us up.”

  Elaine felt a deep ambivalence about moving North. She liked her life in Havana, the visitors and the chattiness and the belonging, but Nicolas had never felt at home in Cuba, was in demeanor distinctly un-Cuban, and her sons would do better elsewhere, she sensed. Carlos did nothing, and Maykel had been driving his gypsy cab more and more, and Elaine didn’t like that he hung out all night with tourists and jineteras. Intellectual pursuit had once been revered in Cuba, but ever since the Special Period, the way to make any kind of living was in service: serving food, doing manicures, driving cabs, renting an apartment. An improving lifestyle had been mostly severed from intellect. All she wanted were two sons who were happy, who had goals and a purpose, who lived honestly. That, she believed with the force of the rest of her life, would not happen in Havana.

  Fourteen months until their visa appointment became ten months, and then eight months, and then even closer—the conversations that Elaine and I had about life in Cuba, about life in the United States, about life in Mexico and why after college I had moved there and not to New York, where I was born, or back to Oregon, where I’d grown up, grew heavier in tone.

  Other foreigners had provided windows to abroad before me, a way to mediate between how the Cuban government said its country measured up to the rest of the world and what was seen on TV: Diego, a Spaniard who lived in my apartment five years ago and was now with his boyfriend downtown, and a Spanish Marxist psychologist named Angeles whom Elaine had met at a conference. Diego was Angeles’s nephew, and when he’d gone to Cuba to attend a university program, they’d sent him to Elaine. Angeles and Elaine argued passionately about politics but loved each other deeply.

  When Angeles came to town, Nicolas and Diego marched into the kitchen with a cooler filled with food and beer. They moved all the furniture out of the living room, because a singer friend of a friend whom Elaine had always meant to call came over and brought a mic and a speaker. Her boyfriend played background tracks on a CD player and the singer’s voice bounced off the pink walls and through the stairways beyond. I bought a bottle of Havana Club at the corner store and brought over some Serrano ham to add to the stash, and we spent the day in the living room with beer and rum and a favada stew that Diego made. Neighbors popped in and out. None stayed for very long. Angeles, a woman so large it was difficult for her to climb stairs, sat at the head of the table and waved her arms as others danced, and Elaine sat next to her, between the party and her friend, her voice silked and content. Elaine and Carlos traveled by sharing.

  Havana was a woman who had once been renowned for her beauty until hard times had soured her. Her hand had gotten heavy with makeup application; her necklines had crept down; her beauty was tainted with vulgarity. But sometimes, when she was alone, after she’d taken off her makeup, she danced in her garden, bare-faced and barefoot, to an old bolero, and the old elegance appeared, normal as a Tuesday evening.

  8

  THE REVOLUTION WILL NOT BE TELEVISED

  ENSEMBLE

  Life appeared to cease when it rained in Havana. Daylight dimmed to a dark gray and humidity sealed envelopes, softened soap until it resembled sun-melted chocolate, and puckered magazines as if they’d been paged through above a steamy bathtub. Few structures were impermeable: roofs dripped, water blew in through windows that didn’t close properly, and uneven floors puddled. Bus shelters were small enough that all but a few people in any crowd would be soaked by the time a vehicle arrived. Streets flooded. Sometimes teenage boys gripped back fenders and surfed behind buses in sneakers, T-shirts plastered to their chests and baggy shorts extended behind them in stiff flapping flags, their knees ominously close to wheels and their faces blazing.

  Mornings felt like late afternoons, full with the sense of people in bedrooms, taking naps. Students came to class so rarely in rainstorms that instructors stopped showing up to sit before a gallery of chipped wooden chairs. Anyone caught anywhere but at home faced fresh coffee and conversation. Any event requiring elegant clothing or a prompt arrival was out of the question, postponed or cancelled implicitly, because not enough people had cars.

  It was the cost, but also the government permits required to purchase one, that kept people from owning cars. Once purchased, color-coded license plates indicated in shorthand what kind of permit any given car had. For example, diplomats got black plates, the first three numbers of which specified what country the car’s owner was from, and blue indicated a vehicle that belonged to the government. The rare coffee-colored plate was for a director of a Cuban company, pale green stood for the Ministry of the Interior, dark green was the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias, the armed forces, and so on. Anonymous drivers were not, in fact, anonymous at all.

  The armed forces had been active that winter, which Elaine knew because she had become a news junkie. Fuzzy CNN en español was her daily companion as she prepared the family’s lunch. One morning, she charged through the door between our kitchens, calling, “Niña, ven acá.” We stood in silence before her TV.

  Soviet-era green planes and camouflaged bodies in formation looked ominous against the dusty earth of an undisclosed countryside location. Trenches had been dug and guns fired and Raúl Castro directed a speech toward a group of rank-and-file FAR men, his metal epaulettes glinting in the sun. These military exercises happened every few years, to stay at ready for a U.S. invasion along the lines of 1961’s Bay of Pigs. It was the very end of 2009 and the four days of extensive maneuvers, strategy sessions, and military parades across the islan
d came seven months after President Obama had lifted restrictions on Cuban American travel, remittances, and U.S. telecommunications firms looking to do business in Cuba.

  “Look at the military man in his uniform, showing everyone how in control he really is,” Elaine scoffed as she resumed cooking.

  Another general gave a speech. “The political-military situation, which characterizes the confrontation between our country and the empire, can go from a relatively normal situation to a much more urgent, confrontational, aggressive one in a month, a week, or even in a night,” said General Leonardo Andollo Valdez.

  “Oh no, no, this isn’t for your benefit, hija,” Elaine said to the TV. She pointed her knife at the screen. “This is for us, just for us. To remind us exactly who’s in charge.”

  Elaine had been barbed and bitter since Maykel had been called to complete his year of military service, compulsory for all Cuban men. He wouldn’t be allowed to apply for an exit visa without finishing it. He had a new girlfriend, a ballerina, and was making good money with the car and had hinted at staying. The weather had been rainy and cool lately, odd for late autumn. And Carlos, she learned, was now too old to apply for a visa as a dependent. Elaine and Nicolas would leave their sons behind and file for family reunification visas in the States. The Reyes family wouldn’t emigrate to Miami together, after all; if the four of them made it, it would be separately.