The Other Side of Paradise

by Julia Cooke

  To make Old Havana’s atmospheric, sagging buildings safe for Cuban residents was an unarguably positive undertaking. Yet as renovators swept through and some people were removed from their crumbling homes, sent to Soviet-style apartment blocks beyond La Lisa or back to the rural provinces they’d illegally come from, something was lost both intellectually and aesthetically. Every building that sported new tiles, historically accurate colonnades, and trompe l’oeil moldings replaced a pocket of the city’s reality with ersatz Havana, a monument to nostalgia and denial, a dictated version of historical accuracy made brighter by more potent paints. I could think of nothing more American in essence, nothing more realistic and prosaic and capitalist than Old Havana as it swapped in a chocolate store where an apartment block had been, as it swathed buildings in cheery pinks and yellows.

  Backstreets, by contrast, felt anarchic and promising. Over time, their elegance emerged. I found a late-sixties bar, with blue velvet stools and windows shaped like ship’s portholes that were filled with fish, which was never open when I wanted a daiquiri. I saw a hulking art nouveau apartment building with boarded-up windows and balconies shaped like climbing vines and I discovered an unmarked antique shop packed with the treasures of dying old dames, where I found a tiny tin notebook with an orange enamel cover. The first page read Movies Seen by Me in the Year 1933. Old Havana was decrepit and unfair and ersatz, but also exciting, rewarding, romantic, tempting.

  The idea of staying in Havana was tempting. I could return to my Communist fairy godfather and ask to extend my visa. It’d be cheaper to stay in Havana to write than to move back to Mexico City or to New York or some unknown destination. Elaine nursed these fantasies on Saturday afternoons as we cooked golden malanga fritters while Carlos pulled out old family photos. “How can you leave? You’ll miss it too much,” she said. “It’ll break your heart. Ours, too. And we’ll be going in just another year. You should go back with us then.”

  But staying in Havana meant accepting being asked to leave at any moment. Most long-term foreigners had considered what they would do if someone rapped at their door at eight in the morning and told them they’d be on the evening flight back to wherever they’d come from. Every expat in Havana knows at least one person to whom this has happened, including the European businessman in his early forties who lived with his family in a tasteful Playa home, who hosted a dinner party I attended with Katherine a month before my visa was due to expire. We ate amid the palms and low candles, chattering of art and politics, when the question arose of what he would do if a MinInt agent arrived at his house. It would be impossible to dismantle their home quickly, the man said, matter-of-factly. He’d leave it all behind if it came to that.

  He clarified: He would take his family and as much of the artwork he’d bought in Cuba as possible, he said. They had already stored family heirlooms and photo albums at the small apartment they kept in their hometown. He knew which friend could help him pack without being incriminated by association, who had another SUV he could borrow to drive as many big suitcases to the airport as possible, and how much money to leave the maid so she’d have enough to live on until she found work again.

  When an expat moves away from Cuba under normal circumstances—a new diplomatic assignment, a move back to company headquarters—state agents inspect everything that will be shipped out of the country. They ensure that there’s no Cuban patrimony, antiques, old paintings, or anything of historical value, and that the list of objects being taken out matches the list of objects brought into the country. In decades past, gusanos who left Cuba hid wedding rings under shoe insoles, swallowed their savings in gold nuggets, were allowed to board flights with only the clothes they wore. Today, they can bring suitcases but no objects. Elaine was selling everything she’d acquired over the years slowly so as not to attract attention, and I wanted to buy her coffee table for my U.S. apartment, to start my life there with something of hers.

  “Is it a sculpture by a modern artist? Because only contemporary art can be taken from the country,” said a lipsticked bureaucrat at patrimonio, which granted permits for art export.

  “Even if a Cuban is legally leaving the country? Like a musician or an artist, going to Europe for a fellowship?” I asked. I ran through the cast of people I knew of whom I could ask favors, who’d help resolver.

  The woman, who’d worn a leopard-print blouse and waved herself with a fan, shook her head mournfully. “No one, mi cielo, no, no, no. You see, there’s a scarcity of furniture here in Cuba. Nothing can leave.” Only what had been brought in by foreigners could be taken back out.

  “Mm-hmm,” said Carlos with pursed lips and raised eyebrows when I came home sighing. “Everything is theirs. Not even our furniture is ours. Que fuerte.”

  Elaine had labeled everything in their apartment: the blender, refrigerator, toaster, rice cooker, cabinet, and most pantry items were emblazoned with small pieces of pink paper with black English lettering. If I was really leaving, she wanted to be able to ask me pronunciation tips for my last month.

  “Sugar,” I’d say.

  “Sucer,” Elaine would repeat.

  “Shoo-ger,” I’d shake my head.

  She waved a hand over her shoulder as she walked to the other end of the kitchen. Lucía had come over and she, Elaine, Carlos, Nicolas, and I shared a bottle of wine and some Cuban Camembert I’d found at Le Select. Lucía hadn’t yet booked a flight for Chile. Her visa would expire in three months.

  “The one thing I know I’ll really have a hard time adjusting to,” she said as she walked back, “is the way that people socialize up there. You all work all the time and only spend time together when you make plans in advance.”

  “Also, something’s going to happen here as soon as you leave,” Elaine said, waving one of her three daily cigarettes around the table.

  We stared.

  “Here in Havana, here, both of you. Because you’re both leaving, aren’t you?” she said, impatient. “I’ve never seen it like this before. There’s a strange energy right now. There’s no rice in Havana.”

  There was no 3 kook rice in la chopin, thinning piles of bodega rice at inflated prices at the agro, people hoarding what they could because the government hadn’t paid the company they imported the rice from, or something. State pre-schools were being given flour for kids’ lunches.

  There was more, too, she said slowly. Rumors of new laws were floating around—that university graduates would not be granted exit visas under any circumstances, for one, that cell phone charges would increase to stem the tide of Cubans who owned them. The requisites for entering university were becoming more difficult, with a mandatory mathematics test that was tough to pass with the preparation students received at state schools. In order to send kids to college, guajiros might have to hire tutors.

  Nicolas nodded. The heat of the summer was when things always got desperate, he said. Summer heat lifted the difference between Elaine’s cross-ventilation and Sandra’s baking shed to transparent and unbridgeable. Heat settled like an iron cloud. Even the playas del este were collective bathtubs, too warm, too many limbs.

  There had been a mass exodus of people from Cuba, he continued, during summers while both of the Democratic U.S. presidents before Obama had been in office. The Mariel boat-lift in 1980 took place under Jimmy Carter, and the balsero crisis of 1994 had led Bill Clinton to institute the “wet foot, dry foot” policy.

  “We’re overdue at this point,” said Elaine.

  But, I said, that very week I had walked by an Old Havana building under construction, asked what it was, and was told by a guard that it would be a school for new Ministry of the Interior recruits. And Raúl had increased the numbers of police in the streets. We hadn’t noticed because the increase had been gradual, but young policemen with the puffed-out chests of new recruits were on nearly every street corner now. Inertia, I said slowly. I thought inertia would reign.

  Havana was a mirror. Elaine needed to believe that other Cuban
s were as dissatisfied as she. Liberal Americans, who pointed rigid fingers at health care and rations as evidentiary claims, wanted to believe that market-driven capitalist ideology wasn’t the only possible political system after the fall of the U.S.S.R. Conservatives cited government repression, inadequate rations, and crippling bureaucracy as proof that, really, it was. The over-scheduled and over-networked tourists who came from the world’s capital cities to visit saw improbably happy Cubans. “It’s astonishing; they’re poor but happy,” I’d overheard a tourist saying at a Chinatown restaurant that week. “We could all learn from them to value what’s really important.” If I saw inertia, it was because somewhere I hoped for it. Everyone was, of course, partially right.

  /// Adrián would leave a month after I did, for a town in Holland that had given him a government grant to study music. We sat in the Miami Vice gleam of the bar at Miramar’s Hotel Panorama, built in 2002 but sweating eighties cool. Adrián played piano in the lobby a few afternoons a week. We ordered mojitos from a waitress in a tight navy suit. He told me how in Europe, he wouldn’t have to study classical composition at all to get his master’s. He had never actually gotten his ISA degree, but he’d get a master’s. See—it was pure jazz, pure avant-garde, pure improv.

  Adrián’s position on his success had changed in the last year. “What have the last two years of my life been?” he repeated my question back to me. “Lots of luck without so much work. A complete loss of innocence. Before, the idea of being good and successful was more idealistic for me. But no matter how I feel, I need jobs.”

  This was part of why he was going to Europe. As a handsome light-skinned black man, he could lean on exoticism as well as talent to push him along. He toyed with the mint in his mojito as he spoke of what he’d learned recently, and what he hoped to learn abroad: “How people act, how they work, how I can use different masks and faces—different personas.”

  In Cuba, he had always known how to alternate hypocrisy and earnestness, how to flip from one into the other. What he hadn’t known was how to tailor his persona to the people who surrounded him, how to talk to businesspeople and then musicians, how to be a chameleon. This was what he hoped to master now, he said. But I thought he was also leaving because he’d finally come to see in his success too much of the arbitrary, too much privilege granted by the Cuban condition, and he wanted to test himself elsewhere. If he stayed, it might break his heart. He’d be back—he’d always be back, and he wasn’t breaking up with his girlfriend, so he’d be back soon, even—but for now, he needed to leave.

  The grant Adrián had gotten was exactly the sort that Adela wanted to find but couldn’t: She had no Internet connection now and wouldn’t spend her mother’s CUC on hotel Internet hours. Adela was living in Havana again and had a handsome lawyer boyfriend, but he would go meet his family in Elizabeth, New Jersey, within the next two months. She’d tried to keep herself distant but she’d fallen in love with him, and now every conversation they had ended in tears. The loneliness she knew she’d feel when he left loomed. She’d have married him if he asked but it wouldn’t happen, she said, it’d wrench up all of the plans that were already in place.

  Adela’s brother had left two months ago, disappeared one day and then, after they hadn’t heard from him for a week, sent an email. He was in Ecuador. After two years of trying legal means, he’d hopped a skiff to the Yucatan, made his way through Mexico and down to Ecuador. They’d spoken on the phone once or twice, but he wouldn’t tell her anything. He didn’t want to remember what had happened to him on the journey, he said.

  Nothing had changed, except that now there seemed to be idiocy rather than nobility behind striving for and, worse, claiming to have achieved perfect consensus among citizens. The closer any of her nascent questioning got to the core of that consensus, Adela saw, the more everything she’d thought she’d known looked different. And even so, Old Havana retained its cheery pastel storefronts, Miramar its graceful avenues, El Caribeño its university mojitos, the book fair its inexpensive paperbacks. Her friends still threw the occasional house party and children still played gleefully in the parks, dusty and bruised from running too fast. Adela had grown up running in the streets, her parents unworried back at home. She could have asked anyone in her building—no, on her block, in her neighborhood, in all of Havana, it felt like—for a glass of water on a hot day without the tension and strain of worries. She’d heard that houses in regular suburbs in Mexico had walls two stories high, and kidnappings. She knew about the pedophiles and teenagers who brought guns into middle schools in the United States. Adela’s eyes said she’d expected more from the world, and more from adulthood. Her mouth kept moving, talking, smiling taut twitchy smiles.

  She would wait until the end of the year, once her social service was done, to ask for her papeles de liberación. “How ridiculous,” she said, “that we have to wait to be ‘liberated.’ I never imagined that I’d want to live any part of my life anywhere else. But almost everyone I know has left or is leaving. You want to know what I think about the youth today? The youth of today are gone.”

  /// Sometimes it’s by consensus that we move on: At some point, like Lucía, you’re the oldest person in the room and the party no longer seems quite so fun. Reckless hope feels more reckless than hopeful; the anxiety of an inevitable but unclear future feels less glittery than stressful; being held at a starting gate generates no potential speed and only frustration. The twinned yearnings of both young adulthood and post-Fidel Havana could, as I had discovered, generate a perfect fervor. But Lucía felt old around people for whom Havana was still golden in its imperfection and possibility.

  Havana was the frenzy of heat and the relief of a dive into water, or hitchhiking from the playas del este to downtown, waiting in sandy feet and a damp bikini on the side of the road, knowing it’d take two hours to travel the twenty miles but not much caring. Living in Havana had, for me, been a sense of simultaneous discovery and impotence, a monolith of governmental control Swiss-cheesed with resourcefulness, grace and squalor, yearning and resignation, passion, anesthesia, innocence, and cynicism. And leaving Havana was walking out of a movie before its final scene. But the movie was too long and the climax never seemed to arrive. The old wooden armrests bit into elbows and the cucuruchos of peanuts and popcorn had long since been eaten. The experience was engrossing, magnetic, until suddenly the nagging sense of the day diminishing on the other side of the doors became impossible to ignore.

  I flew out when my visa expired; the last time Lucía saw Claudio was at her good-bye parties, just before she left at the end of the summer.

  10

  NEXT YEAR IN HAVANA

  On my first visit to Cuba–it was 2003, and I was twenty–I’d left my passport on the small plane that ferried me from Miami to Havana. I had stared out at the countryside, at palm trees stiff and shaggy-headed over the tangle of fields around the airport, at the red earth paths that sliced between one emerald swath and another of paler green. I was so entranced that my passport remained tucked into the pocket of the seat-back in front of me after I’d gotten off the plane. In the line at immigration, I realized my mistake. Dropping my bags on the faux marble floor next to the people I’d traveled with, family friends, I slipped past the men and women in green military uniforms with plastic epaulettes at their shoulders. No one stopped me as I began to run. I sprinted toward the plane, sandals flapping down the tarmac, diesel fuel in my nostrils. A flight attendant met me at the bottom of the stairs, shaking his head. He held up my little blue book. “Lucky girl,” he’d said as I bent over to catch my breath, one hand on my knee and the other gripping my passport.

  In 2011 I was among the first to get off the plane and knew by then where I was going, so I was the first to hit the brown-and-tan plastic immigration cabins. Inside each was a man or woman in a green uniform with plastic epaulettes, sitting under the hanging cameras for which the guards would ask me not to smile. I handed over my tourist visa, the first I’d
had in more than two years, and looked into the security camera.

  At the X-ray station, where agents ensure that no one brings illegal taxable products into the country, someone tapped my shoulder. “Julia? Give me your passport.”

  A man in a short-sleeved button-down shirt told me to wait. Passengers began to trickle out. A Mexican woman from my flight lost her scarf. She glared at the uniformed man behind the X-ray machine, who held up his hands defensively. What would he want with a scarf? A tourist called out: It was stuck under the moving track.

  Another man in a khaki uniform touched my shoulder. He held my passport in his hands.

  He waved me to follow him as he wound through the baggage claim crowd, a strange, silent ballet. When we stopped, I asked him in Spanish what was going on. He told me to get my bags and come find him. He’d keep my passport.

  “A random search,” he called out over his shoulder in English.

  I had recently moved to New York and Lucía was in Chile. “Half the world has congratulated me for leaving Cuba,” Lucía told me a few weeks after arriving in Santiago. “It’s as if I’d gotten out of jail.” It was as if she’d joined a club that hung in a loose crochet around the world, Cubans everywhere who’d made the same choice as she. Within her first two weeks, she got a job and saw a 3-D movie for the first time. She had to leave to throw up after half an hour of Shrek II. “I’m just a simple guajira,” she told me over Skype, laughing.