by Julia Cooke
But we had to stop by the Sylvain bakery first, so Sandra could tell Gallego something. He was working one day on, two days off there now, because there weren’t enough jobs to go around and so he split shifts with another neighborhood man. Yessica banged on the door six times as Sandra cupped her hands around her mouth and shouted. After a minute or two, the door cracked, and a tall, muscular, black man with the rotund belly of someone much shorter and fatter grumped out, “What do you want?” as he turned toward the door. Sandra leaned against the doorjamb and raised her eyebrows. Instantly, he tossed open the door, walked toward the back, and shouted over his shoulders that everyone was en llamas because they’d gotten no oil and so they were baking bread licked with water rather than its usual brushing of oil or butter and everything was sticking but they had to make quota so they’d be working late. I walked toward the cavernous production room imagining the machines that must once have sat in front of the now-empty ovens that lined the hall, toward the group of six men in sleeveless white uniforms who slapped dough onto baking sheets. They stopped just long enough to look Sandra and Yessica over while Sandra told Gallego to be sure to bring home what he was supposed to bring home. Then Sandra turned around and we left. He had, she told me, gotten bad about bringing back the portion of breadsticks that, like the salary, he split with the neighbor. She had to remind him. She did everything in that house.
A cursory stop at the malecón was followed by a máquina to Miramar. At the club, we ordered beers, began to drink and sway in our chairs to the music. After a second round, Sandra said that we should go downstairs to buy more Bucaneros—they were cheaper. We could stuff them into my large canvas tote bag and pour them into our glasses upstairs, and the waitresses wouldn’t even notice. Downstairs, when the bartender’s back was turned toward the coolers, Sandra reached her long, pink nails into the shot glass of toothpicks on the bar and slid them into my bag, and then asked for extra paper napkins, which followed the toothpicks. That night she spirited out all six of the accompanying beer glasses for the six beers we ordered upstairs. Three for each Sandra and Yessica, glasses that they wouldn’t have to buy at la chopin.
A man across the room, separated from us by three small aluminum bistro tables, had been eyeing Yessica. At a slower song, Sandra stood and walked over to him, sashayed, really. Since she’d stopped breastfeeding, her body had returned more or less to normal, though her stomach was looser and striated. Leaning over his shoulder not quite close enough to touch, she told him about Yessica. He couldn’t handle her, Sandra murmured, he’d do better not to hook up with her in the first place because he wouldn’t even know what to do with her, she was so crazy and hot in bed, he’d never be satisfied with anyone else. Yessica sat silently, pulling her shoulder-length brown hair back and forth along her lips, hiding her face. She wore white capris and a purple ruffled tank top. The man’s eyes were an evolution of curious to hungry to questioning to skeptical and, as Sandra walked away, disdainful as he turned to his friends and laughed. Sandra shrugged. He was replaceable. She’d work on her salesmanship. It was easier to be convincing when she was talking about herself.
Nothing startled Sandra. She never let on to fear or admitted agitation: not over the cold (she and Mia, Aboo, and Gallego had turned on their gas burner for heat and huddled) or poverty (“I’ve done without”) or Cuba or the world abroad or men. Every situation could be solved. She escaped the police when they’d come after her for using the Spanish ex-fiancée’s ATM card to withdraw a few hundred CUC after—she tossed the card and paid a hospital attendant $30 to admit her, claiming that she hadn’t answered his calls because she’d been sick and the card was obviously not on her person. She did not entertain what-ifs. “Anyone who’s scared should get a dog,” she told me when I next saw her a few weeks later.
But there were stories, she continued. . . . We walked, now, to the cafeteria near her place for cafecitos. Aboo watched Mia. There were stories, Sandra said, of girls from San Miguel who’d gotten into trouble. There was the girl who was offered $500 to eat shit, literally, a fetish that Sandra wouldn’t have humored, but this girl did it and went straight to the hospital afterward. She died within a few days of an infection. There was the girl whose Italian boyfriend had swept her off to Europe and sent her to an optometrist to have a small wart on her eyelid removed. The surgeon was really a black-market organ rustler, and the girl was sent back to Cuba without eyeballs—the boyfriend had a blind daughter and all he wanted was the girl’s eyes. There was the neighbor who married a man from “one of those crazy Arab countries,” Sandra said, “where women are things and sign away their rights when they get married.” He abused her, and she wanted to leave him but couldn’t. He eventually traded her for a camel to another man—traded for a camel! The last straw, the straw after the last straw. She escaped, said Sandra, ran across the desert dying of thirst to the Cuban embassy. Now she’s back in San Miguel. But of course none of what Sandra said could be verified.
Here are the facts, culled from independent newspaper articles, in the case of the April 2010 death of Roberto Baudrand: He was the Chilean manager of the joint-venture firm Alimentos Rio Zaza, which produced milk, fruit juices, wines, and other foods in Cuba, and whose annual profits of approximately $9 million were split equally between the Cuban government and a Chilean businessman named Max Marambio. Before his business career, Marambio had been a guard for the only Marxist president of Chile, Salvador Allende, and when Allende committed suicide after a military coup ousted him in 1973, Marambio went to Cuba to perform elite clandestine missions as a top-level spy. Whether Marambio was in fact a close friend of Fidel Castro was uncertain. The Cuban government had frozen $23 million of funds associated with Alimentos Rio Zaza in association with a corruption investigation. Baudrand had been informed two weeks before his death that he would not be allowed to leave the country until further notice. He had not been kept in police custody, but he had been brought in various times for questioning.
Baudrand, fifty-nine, had been retained in Raúl Castro’s effort to root out corruption at the highest levels of government and business. Corruption, wrote economist Esteban Morales in Cuban state media, was the real counterrevolution. “It’s becoming evident that there are people in government . . . who are entrenching themselves financially for the time when the revolution falls,” he wrote, and those people were more dangerous to the Cuban Revolution than political dissidents.
Here was what the foreign press printed as “possibly” and “maybes”: Baudrand had been retained in association with an ongoing scandal that involved Cubana Airlines. An autopsy by Cuba’s Institute of Legal Medicine found that he’d died of “acute respiratory insufficiency” caused by drugs and alcohol. Maybe it had been a suicide or an overdose. Or, as his family said they had been told, he’d died of a heart attack.
Baudrand had people at the airport, everyone whispered: The “corruption scandal” was really a scheme in which Cubans bankrolled by family abroad would arrive at the airport with nothing and slip aboard flights to Uruguay and Chile and Argentina, filling empty seats. Baudrand paid off enough people between takeoff and landing that his clients would—without papers, without passports—get out of the country on planes that, once grounded in any other country, would mean freedom. No way had he committed suicide, people scoffed, or died of heart failure.
Rio Zaza stopped producing milk, wine, Ron Planchao, and fruit juice. The practical application of this news, and the rumors, was the reality that the only place to buy any milk other than the powdered sort was Palco, the far-off grocery store frequented by diplomats, which sold passionfruit gelato, imported frozen apricots, and $100 bottles of wine. Palco, which cost me $6 to get to in a taxi after some negotiation with the driver, carried a long-life German brand of milk, but only on the days when they’d recently gotten a shipment. Expat housewives bought the Tetra Pak milk in cases for their small children. I bought six at a time.
Rumor was what united individual stories,
pulled them together into arcs with consequences that could be understood by evidence snatched from daily life. And so there was a gulf between what Cubans lived through and what the international media said was happening in Havana. By the time news of any sort made its way through the community, it felt disconnected, diluted, as if it had happened three days earlier and somewhere else. People were still getting deliveries of black-market yogurt and hot dogs and trying their best to make ends meet and not stand out. There had been a food shortage, yes, but new regulations for farmers were helping to increase production and privatization. What impact could that march/beating/death/protest/military exercise have on daily life?
/// Stay inside, the bed beckoned during a storm, whether you are alone or accompanied. It’s not worth leaving, whispered each raindrop as it descended. So I learned to do what Lucía and Elaine and everyone else did. I opened the window to let the sounds gush in and every time it rained I stayed home. Besides, these worlds opened by movie and book and bed all dulled the impulse to speculate on what couldn’t be known. Finite spaces, an imagined reality drawn by someone else, or an interpersonal drama were a relief.
Fernando Pérez’s biopic of nineteenth-century Cuban intellectual and revolutionary José Martí—officially known as the “Apostle of Freedom”—came out that winter. Havana’s international airport and national library are named after him, and his likeness stares down upon the Plaza de la Revolución, the José Martí Anti-Imperialist Platform in front of the U.S. Interests section, and the Parque Central and the old men who talk baseball on its benches. A white bust of Martí sits outside every single school in Cuba, large or small.
Theaters usually showed pirated American films—Avatar had shown on state TV in Cuba while it was still in theaters in the United States—and the crowd at a Clive Owen action film from 2005 was usually only slightly different from that for an Andrei Tarkovsky film at the Cine Acapulco. Martí, though, played at theaters for the better part of two months.
Martí, among the leaders of the first struggles for independence from Spain, was impetuously claimed as champion on both sides of the Straits: He had both insisted on freedom from an imperial force and advocated for democracy. The two sides vaunted different aspects of his philosophy to explain how his vision of Cuba’s future was correct. After 1959, when economic mechanisms of control were severed, Cuba was finally freed from the rule of both the Spanish and the Americans, as he had said it must be; or Cuba was still struggling toward freedom, is still not the democracy that Martí envisioned.
The film focused not on his days as a journalist and exile from Spanish Cuba in New York, or his popular writings, or his death in battle with the Spaniards in 1895 at age forty-two, which had sparked anti-Spanish sentiment into action. This film focused instead on his youth. Martí grew up as the son of middle-class Havana Spaniards and went to school with other children of privilege. In the film, their parents are loyal to the throne, but “Pepe” Martí and his peers begin to suspect that some sort of justice is being evaded in the system they’re ordered to respect. In one scene, a teacher—a bearded, graying, lisping Spaniard—asks them what democracy means, thinking he will elicit a response typical of high-class boys. It is, after all, the 1860s.
One of the boys shouts that in Cuba there is neither freedom of expression nor freedom of the press, both of which are essential elements of a society in which the people rule themselves. An argument erupts over what it means to be a democratic state, why it is important, and how Cuba has never known democracy. The teacher raises his hands in the air as if to tamp down what he’s loosed. His eyes are wild, helpless. Pepe climbs atop a schoolroom chair and says that Cubans must rule themselves. The people will not be satisfied until they see themselves represented in the institutions that rule them. The film rolled on.
On emerging from the dark theater with seats that smelled of the previous day’s rain into the bright street and scent of leaded gasoline, the bustle outside made me wonder if I’d imagined the scene. Perhaps I was reading too much into it, egged on by the events of a dramatic winter. This was a film that was playing in most of Havana’s theaters and had been for months. The rest of the film had been elegiac, calm, with a camera that clung to raindrops dripping from the enormous leaves of plants, a setting in the fecund countryside, costumed militiamen that looked nothing like what Raúl’s troops wore today. Horses pushed carts through streets; there were no Chevys or tanks. The actor that played Martí was distinctly not discussing Castro. But these were the conversations that were had in dining rooms, on patios, in quiet moments among people who trusted one another. The electric, pointed scene became, to me, a collective secret sitting hard and cold in the chest, yet another piece of evidence that change was a when, not an if.
This parallel was Pérez’s intent. “Martí lived through things that young Cubans here could be living through also,” he told me when I interviewed him for a magazine a year later. “So one has to wonder; what would I do? What Martí did, or no? They’re the same issues: freedom of the press, concept of democracy, or the lack of freedom of the press so that no one participates—I see a series of situations that are conflicts for a young person. That had to be in the movie. I wanted a young audience to establish that association.”
If the association was made, it was kept quietly. There were a few key differences between Martí’s era and today’s. Martí had been sentenced to six years in prison at age sixteen for an unsent letter in which he accused a friend who had enlisted in the Spanish army of being a traitor. The student who had led the ISA protest that autumn had simply been asked to shift his words around and show up on state TV. Jail was tangible in the same way that bad cafeteria food or farmers without seeds were tangible. Lack of freedom of expression and the press, wearing hypocrisy for a moment in order to protect your family, were abstractions.
Standing on a chair to shout about woes required innocence: a faith that someone was listening, a belief that the ten, twenty, fifty rapt faces around the chair could multiply, a specific ratio of recklessness to yearning. The young people who’d been protesting in 2009 and 2010 innocently believed that the small pieces of evidence they’d found were enough to link daily life to abstraction in a way that might create a narrative of change. This was what protected them. Food could be addressed and abstractions could be twisted. And so young people who loved their country and wanted to improve it were taught, in the quiet rebuffing of their efforts to push toward change, that if they wanted to participate more than obliquely in the creation of a national narrative, they would be invited to leave. Guillermo Fariñas and other hunger strikers were eventually given exit visas.
Everyone—Martí, Elaine, farmers, Sandra, dissidents—wanted the same thing, the same thing I wanted. They wanted some sense of control over their own futures. In Cuba, you were free to choose your fate until it bumped into the country’s fate. Then you were invited to make your destiny elsewhere.
/// Five days before Lucía was to leave definitively for Chile—seven days before her entry visa expired—an earthquake shook the country from the Andes to the sea. It was the sixth-largest earthquake ever recorded on a seismograph. Carlos, still awake at six in the morning, had seen the news on CNN. He called Lucía in Ciego de Ávila, where she’d spent her final two weeks after giving up her apartment in Havana, to give her the news. “I don’t know whether to scream from frustration or shout with joy,” she told me the next day. She had been tepid about leaving, which everyone said was the normal response during the weeks leading up to departure: Everyone repented the ambition that had driven the desire to leave. Faced with the reality of saying good-bye to everything she’d known for a future she couldn’t imagine, unsure that she’d ever return, and enjoying the weeks of farewell parties that eclipsed the memory of everyday life, Lucía questioned her decision. An undercurrent of anticipation and air of tragedy added up to the expectation of action but no action itself.
Starting a new life in a country dealing with a nat
ural disaster wasn’t ideal, so Lucía decided to wait. There was no way she’d get a job in Chile in the next month, she said, and she didn’t have the money to support herself without one for long. The Chileans gave her a six-month visa extension and the airline charged her a $75 change fee for an open-ended ticket. She could borrow money from a friend and her landlady hadn’t yet found another tenant. She’d leave soon, she said, after things settled down and the Chilean economy began to recover.
9
LEAVERS
LUCÍA
“Did you hear? Claudio left.”
“Left where? How?”
“His brother sent for him. His brother in Miami. Sent a boat. Se fue pa la yuma.”
Claudio, Lucía’s upstairs neighbor, had never talked about leaving. He talked about everything else—on an island of fast-talkers, Claudio was fastest. He was smallish and wiry, his voice nasal, his eyes buggy, and at age twenty-six, his brown hair was already thinning into a widow’s peak. Claudio had quit school at fifteen to lie on a bare mattress in a spare room at his grandmother’s apartment, three floors up from Lucía’s, train the fan on himself, and read. His favorites were William Faulkner and John Dos Passos. He hated Hemingway: “so macho, no feeling, only something you Americans, who lack machismo in daily life, could like.” Classic books were cheap in Cuba, where they were reprinted by the state without fear of lawsuits and sold for next to nothing. After blowing through his grandmother’s library, Claudio read art and architecture history texts and took himself on midnight rambles. He knew which decrepit building in Old Havana had a running fountain in its courtyard and neighbors who didn’t care if he sat alongside it into the early hours of the morning. He’d led me, one night when we left a party downtown at the same time and I was living in Centro Habana, on a tour of the neighborhood’s darkest streets. Here, he gestured, was the only known exemplar of Paris-style art nouveau in Havana: Those spikes up at the top of the building were used, when debutantes in fluffy gowns had idled in the neighborhood’s sitting rooms in the early twentieth century, to hoist baby grands up from the street and through the French doors of a third-floor living room. We wandered for an hour and when I finally told him I was tired, a manic energy in his eyes snuffed out. Claudio craved an audience.