The Other Side of Paradise

by Julia Cooke

  When he got going, Claudio connected hot dogs and symbolism and patriotism, or Meyer Lansky and state-mandated curfews and policemen who checked carnets, reeling paragraphs that left the Cubans in the group nodding and slapping their knees and me cartwheeling behind him, wondering if I’d understood correctly. He was the most intellectually sophisticated person I knew in Havana, though he’d never eaten at a restaurant and he didn’t own a TV.

  Claudio had only begun to work the month before I heard that he’d left town. With no high school degree, no party affiliation, and no military service, the only job he could get was as a janitor. But thanks to a friend of Lucía’s, Claudio was a janitor at the National Union of Cuban Writers and Artists. At least he was surrounded by like-minded people, he had told me one afternoon as he pulled old film stills of Cuban actors from the sixties out of a manila folder he’d found in the bottom of an abandoned filing cabinet. He thrust them in front of me. Someday, he was sure, someone would recognize what he was.

  Then one day his mother called him with the news that his brother had sent for them. The brother had paid someone in Miami to ferry them north in a good speedboat that could carry a few dozen people. Claudio and his mother would arrive on American soil and be granted residency under the “wet foot, dry foot” policy. So they went to one of the provinces where the coastline wasn’t as heavily guarded and huddled in two rooms for five days with the forty-three people who’d be their shipmates. Twenty men, nine children, and the rest women. But word got out, the house was raided, and they were put in jail for twenty-four hours. They were released and headed back to Havana. This happened three times in four weeks: a train out east, a few days’ holding pattern, waiting for the sign that the bought-off border guy was on duty. Guards, tides, coast guard all had to line up right. The other times they weren’t arrested, but the timing hadn’t been opportune. Claudio told me the story on the phone, trying to get hold of Carlos. He’d decided to stay down there, not far from Lucía’s hometown of Ciego de Ávila, and wait for the next attempt locally. He had not, in fact, left.

  Lucía had spent much of her time in Ciego since early in the winter. It wasn’t that her parents didn’t understand why she wanted to leave; everyone knew why young people, especially young professionals, wanted to leave Cuba. But Lucía’s imminent departure had been such a source of stress for her mother that her vitiligo, the skin condition that the sixty-year-old thought she’d beaten—Cuban doctors had developed an effective treatment—had returned. Lucía didn’t want to feel guilty, but it crept up on her anyway, slithering through the days she’d hoped to keep spending enjoying Havana. Though she’d moved back into her apartment, into the twin bed surrounded by milk-crate nightstands piled now with fewer books since she’d given most away, she would relocate to Ciego for two weeks of nearly each month until she rescheduled her flight.

  Lucía was waiting not, I thought, for economic stability in Chile, but for a sign. She wanted some assurance that she was making the right decision, some sense of what awaited her. Her group of friends had been slowly thinning, and she knew it would continue, but none of those who’d departed had come back to visit and spread stories of their first few months gone. As her peers continued to leave, she’d begun, in her last year in Cuba, to run with a group she referred to as los adolescentes. Los adolescentes were the throbbing heart of every party, standing in circles and pulsating: jumping up and down if excited, dancing as if they were trying to get to heaven. They talked fast and laughed faster and they wore trendy clothes, last season’s Old Navy polo shirts for the boys, sent out by cousins in Miami, and stacked bangle bracelets for the girls. They came from good families and were studying what they wanted to study: graphic design and sociology and art. They walked to class jauntily, greeting the same old woman who’d sold them morning coffee every day since they began. On the days they got their student stipends from the government, which they knew weren’t enough to help their families, they bought cangrejos, croissant-like rolled pastries, at the kiosk after class, or they traded their pesos for CUC and bought a bottle of red Vino Nazareño for $5 or they went to Turf on a Thursday. Later, when someone’s aunt had left her Habana Vieja apartment to be looked after while on a trip, they pooled money for Habana Club rum and someone brought a boom box and, under lights that anywhere else would have dissuaded dancing, they talked shit and danced and grew slowly drunk. Four would pass out on the queen mattress in the bedroom, another two on the hard sofa in the living room, and as the sun rose clear and sharp in the broken, picturesque streets, shining off the water in the gutters from the women who’d already mopped their front parlors, they’d sit on a corner, waiting for a bus that’d take them back home to unsurprised and unworried parents in Vedado or La Lisa.

  Lucía had been an adolescente once, though she’d lived in the beca for students from the countryside. She knew acutely what she was leaving behind: homeland, a source of income, friends she loved, concerts and film festivals where she knew people and could talk her way into the after-party, her family. She didn’t work that hard and had enough for rum and cover charges and second-hand clothes, the boyfriend jeans she’d just bought at the peso shop to wear with the pumps that her father, who made leather goods he sold at a Cayo Coco resort, had designed for her based on shoes in a foreign fashion magazine a Canadian photographer had left behind. But her choice was either to leave or be left. Someday, when Lucía was a little older, twenty-year-old friends would feel more foolish than companionable. This—the knowledge that she’d be pressed down into ever-younger social groups, back into a phase of life she’d already left, or be largely alone—was the only assurance she would get.

  So Lucía spent time in Ciego, trying to remind herself that she had a game plan and it might get worse before it got better, but it was under way. If I came to visit her, we’d have to share her brother’s downstairs room, she told me on the phone one afternoon, as she’d done for her entire childhood. He’d just gotten his girlfriend pregnant and was building an addition to the house, a second-floor apartment in which his new family would live. There was dust everywhere, but we could get to Cayo Coco in one of the employee buses that brought out tour guides like her brother and lounge for a day on one of the most beautiful beaches in the Caribbean for an 8-CUC day pass. She’d been only once before, to visit a ballerina friend who’d vacationed for a week at an all-inclusive hotel with her Mexican boyfriend. Lucía was determined to spend what was left over after plane tickets and everything else to see her country before she left it. I, too, saw more of Cuba that spring. My visa would expire at the end of June.

  If Luis Buñuel were to take a pencil and a pad of paper and sketch out a lush countryside, it might look very similar to Cuba’s. There are highways that halt mid-road with no signage to announce the asphalt’s end, horses and buggies that clop along the shoulders, and rioting plants that climb power lines. Fields are tilled by oxen and skinny yipping farmers as double-decker tour buses filled with sunburned Europeans roar past. When I boarded a bus to Ciego, away from what could be called Havana’s suburbs, I saw a white bridge that stretched over the highway with no onramps on either side and a man standing in the shade of a large tree with a white bandage around his head, waving his arms back and forth slowly, urgency leached from his motions. A billboard in the middle of a field with no power lines exhorted citizens to save energy. The two young adults in the seat in front of me went over what they would say at a Christian mass that Sunday. A woman six seats up cackled every few minutes throughout the six-hour ride.

  Ciego was a low, spread-out town. The houses along the main road were set back from the sidewalk like animals on haunches, their front paw columns extended over the sidewalk to offer shade. The styles varied: Some were sixties mod with geometric shapes, painted mint green; others were ornate, faux-colonial confections in shades of pink and yellow. The colors were uniformly washed out. The propaganda became less pointedly directed at the yanquis than in Havana. There were no images of Georg
e W. Bush, but “Our Heroes Will Return” on a star with five points bore the faces of the five imprisoned spies, and “Fair Ideas Are Invincible” was scrawled alongside an image of Fidel drawing up plans for the Moncada attack.

  Lucía and I walked through town, chasing the shade with our weekend bags slung over our shoulders. We took detours so she could show me the park where she’d hung out with her middle-school friends and the local branch of the Coppelia ice cream parlor, and we arrived at her parents’ house in the late afternoon. A wooden door with ridges that had turned to cracks down the middle opened onto a dark front parlor and then the room where her parents slept. From there, the house circled an interior patio. Lucía’s father was working in his shop out back and her mother had just begun to make dinner. After introductions, Lucía took over stirring the spaghetti while her mother, a short woman with stern hazel eyes, made sandwiches for us to take to the beach the next day. Then she took a plastic bag of rice and, after carefully folding back the frayed tablecloth from half of the dining room table, poured its contents onto the wood. I observed for a moment and then joined her work. We sat side by side and used the pads of our fingers to separate white rice grains from the small chunks of gravel and bits of chaff, pushing each into two piles.

  The next morning, Lucía and I hitched four rides to reach Cayo Guillermo: a hotel employee shuttle, a pink-and-white vintage Ford, and a delivery van with rusty refrigerators clanking in the back, and then, finally, we slid into the front seat of a tourist minivan full of confused Brits, on their way from their all-inclusive resort to the secluded beach.

  And after we’d shown our paid day passes and given our carnet numbers to the police, the beach was a postcard. Fine white sand and translucent water, perfect neon blue to the horizon. Lucía was the only local and was rewarded with free gifts from the other Cubans who staffed the facilities: the initial rides, but also complimentary beach loungers and extra beers. We left late in the afternoon in the back seat of a car driven by a tanned, elderly Italian man who’d already spent three weeks at a hotel on the cay. He dropped us at the gas station where we’d meet the employee van at six.

  The next day, we cooked with Lucía’s mother and visited her cousins, ate ice cream with her brother at Coppelia, watched a movie on TV, and toured Ciego on bicycles. People moved around Ciego on bikes, which was considered the lowest, most disdained form of transportation in Havana. Since there had been little gas during the Special Period, bikes were the main form of transportation through the nineties and were now a painful reminder of deprivation and degradation. If you didn’t have the money even for bus fare, you rode a bicycle. In Ciego, one young couple in faded T-shirts sat up straight on separate steeds, arms draped around one another’s shoulders as they pedaled along. I saw only one CUC store, which sold rum and soap and TuKola. There was no dollar option at Coppelia the way there was in Havana. Everyone waited in the same line.

  Her brother, Jorge, told me a story as we waited for a table. He leaned against the iron railing as he spoke, his hand wrapped around the spike at its top. Once, when he took a group of Canadian tourists on an excursion into Ciego from Cayo Coco, he noticed a mother and her daughter quietly sobbing in the back of the bus as they rode back to the hotel. He approached them, weaving his way down the aisle, and asked them what was wrong.

  She shook her head, as if she didn’t want to tell him what was wrong, but continued to whimper while consoling her young daughter. He shrugged and went back to the front of the bus.

  Ten minutes later, he looked back again and saw that they were still crying. Again he spoke to them, asking if anything had happened—if they were hurt, or felt sick, or if anything had been stolen. The mother shook her head tragically. I imagined the furrow of her brow, the mournful cast of her eyes.

  “It’s just . . . the poverty . . . it’s so sad. I don’t know how to explain it to my daughter,” she sighed as Jorge watched from his crouched position in the aisle. Here he almost knelt toward the pavement of the sidewalk. The people in front of us in line shuffled a few inches away. “Never, not even in Haiti, have I seen such abject poverty.”

  At this, Jorge said, he stood up and began to talk. His knees locked as he stood now and raised his hands like a conductor. He didn’t mean to, he said, but he was later reprimanded for giving a political discourse on the tour bus back to the hotel. There was apparent poverty and then there was what you couldn’t see, he said. Cubans were educated and waltzed into any hospital they wanted at any time and went to museums practically for free. There were plumbing systems and rural schools and free art universities and, yes, the ration book was inadequate, but at least everyone got seven pounds of rice per month. There was no comparison with Haiti.

  “I mean, Haiti? This is worse than Haiti?” he said, gesturing at the spherical topiaries at the door and the melting piles of ice cream in bowls. We were now at the entrance. “It turned out the lady had never even been to Haiti! She was talking about what she’d seen on TV.” We walked toward a table.

  I woke up the following morning as Lucía’s mother arrived home with shopping bags: two faded plastic soda bottles that she’d refilled with juice and a Tupperware of bread.

  “Looks like breakfast,” I said.

  “Communist sweetbread.”

  She giggled.

  “Yes, Communist. We call things that are bad or cheaply made ‘Communist.’ This juice is Communist, too. See?”

  She poured me a glass and I pulled off a piece of the thin, sweet, gooey bread.

  “Dale, vamos,” Lucía said to me as she walked into the kitchen and over to her mother.

  “If it’s good, could we call it ‘capitalist’?” I asked as I finished chewing. “This bread’s pretty good. It’s Sweden or something. Some socialist but also capitalist.”

  Her face broke into a smile as she shook her head. Lucía laughed, then put her arm around her mother and nuzzled her neck. For a few moments, there was no sound but me and her mother, reaching our fingers stickily into the Tupperware and emerging with chunks of bread between them.

  “Idiots.” Lucía broke the silence as she raised her head. “Everyone wants to live in Sweden. But right now we have to go formar cola at the train station”—wait in line to pick up the numbers that would give us seats for the crowded bus ride back west. We hopped on our bikes, went to the station, returned home for lunch, and then left.

  As we sat on the bus, huddling together in the aggressive air conditioning and piling on all of the clothes we had with us as the sun dipped down, Lucía told me that her mother enjoyed visiting her in Havana, but enjoyed returning to Ciego, too. There was less to worry about in the country for an upper-middle-class Cuban: there were food co-ops of sorts, relationships with farmers just outside town who traded pigs for shoes. There weren’t as many occasions to spend the CUC that her father and brother made in tips out on Cayo Coco. Worries that Lucía was beginning to consider as she planned her departure—paying rent and health care and dealing, if she had kids, with sending them to schools—weren’t on Jorge’s radar. There weren’t as many police around; the CDR meetings that her mother had attended, she said, revolved more around neighborhood beautification than snitching. Less resolviendo was required. Many of Lucía’s childhood friends had stayed close to home. Of course if you were poor you were still screwed, and maybe even more so than in Havana—hurricanes tore through and ruined houses and you couldn’t put them back up, and then what could you do—but for families like hers, things weren’t so bad. There was less of the daily indignity of being the second-most-important nationality in Cuba.

  That night, the baseball playoffs were ending. Havana’s Industriales team was playing Villa Clara at an away game and television sets city-wide were tuned to the same station. Every time the Industriales scored, cheers floated through the streets. Every time a fight broke out in the stands, shouts and laughter bubbled through open windows. Every time they were scored on, yelps and boos could be heard everywhere. After a fe
w days in the countryside, the game seemed more of a metaphor than anything else: a long, drawn-out struggle between the country and its capital.

  /// I took a different route every time I walked to the Plaza Vieja in Old Havana from the capitol building, where the máquinas dropped passengers. The plaza was in the restored section of Habana Vieja where the buildings looked like pastries with white curlicued rosettes, a Disneyland of Spanish colonial architecture restored by the Office of the Historian of the City of Havana. The historian, Eusebio Leal, had worked out a deal: A portion of the profits made in the tourist corridor funded further neighborhood restorations. From a fiscal perspective, Old Havana was a tiny functioning town within the greater city proper. Wooden scaffolding increasingly appeared on blocks ever farther from its core. Leal’s economic scheme was widely seen as an eventual model for the rest of the city: a socialist mid-point that incentivized profit while maintaining government oversight.

  The border between the renovated area and what hadn’t yet been fixed was unmarked but unmistakable. The streets of the unrestored old town looked, at first glance, to be a mess of pocked facades and barbacoas—makeshift lofts that residents had installed in rooms with colonial double-height ceilings. Entire swaths of the area just behind the Plaza Vieja, which had kook-charging restaurants and a new Cuervo y Sobrinos luxury watch shop, had no running water. Children in droopy school uniforms carried buckets in the streets. A chaos of power lines burst from each building, reaching to invite electricity into rooms that hadn’t been rewired for over half a century. Doorbells had long since given up, so people stood in streets and cupped hands around mouths. The only public parks were the size of buildings that had surrendered, crumpled to the floor and left holes occupied now by kids with big ears and knobby elbows and patched-up baseballs. The area was disorienting: The unbroken shades of dusty gray buildings all looked the same and the ocean wasn’t visible.