by Julia Cooke
There’d been personal change, yes, but that year also brought a slow introduction of grinding change to Cuba: During the summer of 2010, fifty-two dissidents had been released from jail. In September, the Cuban congress passed a raft of three hundred economic reforms that would, over the course of the next five years, move one-fifth of the state’s five million workers into private business, free up state businesses from party and government administration, authorize Cubans to buy and sell homes and cars, decentralize some decision-making, and decrease dependence on the state via rations and state meals. The implementation of these changes had already begun and, officials promised, would continue to layer one shift atop another. Among the first was the legalization of 178 non-professional jobs, among them “handyman,” “hair stylist,” “button-upholsterer,” and “clown.” For the first time, any activity that the government hadn’t trained someone to do at a university, which didn’t involve buying and reselling the same goods in Cuba, could be practiced legally. And simultaneous leadership shake-ups at some of the country’s biggest companies had put military men in positions of power. Over ten members of Raúl’s cabinet, too, were now Cuban military. That March 2011, the last two political prisoners who’d been arrested in 2003’s “Black Spring” were released. The American USAID contractor was still in jail, and in October, international businessmen would begin to be jailed, too, on charges of corruption and possible espionage. It was a simultaneous contraction into ever more isolation at the top and a loosening at the bottom.
My three bags surrounded me as I considered the questions that the guard posed casually, though he stood straight and tall: I’d been to Cuba before, hadn’t I? When? What years, months had I spent here? What did I study? Where had I lived? Where was I staying this time? The man was about my age, with shoulders that fit perfectly into his plain khaki uniform, neither scrawny nor gym-built. He had light skin and dark hair and looked like someone I might have flirted with at the University of Havana when I’d studied there. I was on vacation, I told him. Okay, and where was I staying? With Carlos, I thought, and tried to remember the address of a casa particular. Foreigners still had to be registered somewhere, and this knowledge bleached all logic from my mind. The casa on San Lazaro where I used to live, I could have said, or even the Hotel Riviera, with its diamond-shaped pool. But despite these proper responses, with addresses and names out of my mind’s reach, I told him I would stay with a friend. His questions sharpened.
Why had I come to Cuba? Who was picking me up at the airport? How did I meet this friend? Could I please spell out her full name? Did I know her phone number?
I began to measure the possible area between what he knew and what I knew: I knew academics and writers who, after publishing work critical of the regime, had been told on landing at Jose Martí International Airport that they’d be on the return flight out. I knew that I carried magazines in my bag with contents pages that listed my name on them. We both knew that I had no journalist visa.
I wrote down Katherine’s name. How much money was I bringing? Credit cards? What was in my luggage?
Forty-five minutes had ticked by and no one remained in the hall but a small cluster of six men, all wearing jeans and short-sleeved button-down shirts, scowls, with no luggage and cell phones clipped to their belts. The man questioning me told me to wait a moment and he retreated to their group. He gesticulated as he read off the sheet of paper on which he’d been taking notes. No one looked my way.
He returned after a few minutes. “Follow me,” he said. “Can I look in your suitcase, please? Is it heavy? Do you need help lifting it?” He bent down, lifted my duffel bag with soft chivalry, and gestured that I should roll my carryon and follow him.
The money exchange attendant flirted with a man who leaned against her counter. Their giggles echoed.
I trotted behind the guard to catch up, spilling questions as I approached him. “Will my friend get in any trouble? Is this because I am an estadounidense?”
“No,” he said as he lifted the first of my two suitcases onto the inspection table. “We just want to have someplace to locate you, you know, in case of emergency, since you don’t have a hotel or casa particular listed. What if there’s a hurricane or something?”
He pawed through bikinis, a towel, a bag of sunscreen. He saw the shiny hair of a stuffed animal, a bottle of gummy vitamins for Juan and Alejandra’s toddler, and the gigantic bag of tampons that I’d leave with women here. I simpered: Vitamins! A stuffed animal! For my Cuban friends!
He glanced at my shoes in the next bag, less interested now. Then he saw the stack of four New Yorkers and a Czech novel that I’d ordered for an expat friend online, under which lay the rest of the magazines.
“What is this book? What does the title mean? What are these? Show them to me.” He flipped through magazine pages, his face stern, and then he pointed at the movie listings. “How do you pronounce this movie, in English? It was playing at Cine Acapulco last week.”
He helped me zip my bags back up and sent me out the sliding doors and into Cuba.
“I was afraid you’d slipped past me,” Katherine said, releasing the arms she’d been clutching. We got into her car, and I told her why I was late. “Yes,” she said as she flicked on the radio and rolled down the window, “that happens. It’s happened to all of us.”
We headed back to her place, where we drank fresh mango juice. The bird-of-paradise bushes in the garden were flowering, red and fuchsia, and all the doors of the house were open and everywhere it smelled like fresh-cut grass and oranges. I would stay with her for a few days while I figured out what to do. Hours later, I had read half a novel in the garden with my feet up, taken a cool shower in the hot afternoon with the wind blowing through the bathroom. Everything before that moment had washed off me. Why wouldn’t someone have interrogated me at the airport? Why wouldn’t I have been shown that I was being kept tabs on, and then allowed to enter the country? I was back in Havana.
/// The most visible consequences of the economic reforms were hand-painted signs for new businesses all over the city: a seamstress, someone who sold handmade candles for Santería ceremonies, hundreds of small cafés that peddled mediocre food, a few good in-home restaurants. Women in doorways sold more than just 1-peso cafecitos now: You could buy cookies and sweets, a sandwich from a snack stand. For the first time since I’d begun going to Havana eight years earlier, I spent no time hungry out of the sheer impossibility of finding food to purchase at certain hours of the day. There were even late-night cafeterias.
A year of renovations had left Katherine’s walls shimmery silver, her paintings hung, her roof replaced. Isnael had gotten a new tattoo of a scorpion on his left shoulder, just above the meat of his shoulder muscles, because he was a Scorpio. He was still saving to make saint, he said, though he didn’t look like someone who was trying to save money: He wore new shoes and had acquired a cell phone. He knew which neighborhood cafés sold the best cheap food to bring home for dinner. These days, he spent more time as a companion to Katherine’s son than as anything else. Renovation materials were still tightly controlled, so there wasn’t much for him to do around the house. We sat on her couch one afternoon and he tinkered with her PlayStation console. He’d become pretty good at a certain warcraft game, he said, and it was hard for me to tear his attention from the screen once he began to play, to show me his newly acquired skills. He didn’t understand the English directions on the screen, though, and kept killing his allies.
I visited with the punk rockers and learned that Liván didn’t hang out with Takeshi anymore, because Takeshi had gotten more emo than punk, which offended him. I brought my computer to his house one afternoon to show him the image my photographer friend had taken of them on our night out so long ago; Liván had been almost nineteen then, and his features had begun to soften as he’d grown up and gained weight. His mother, Bertha, leaned over my shoulder. “See how good he looks,” she crooned. She patted his head and he pulled away. T
he only thing that had changed other than Liván’s sharp jaw and his group of friends was the quantity of tattoos he had. He’d gotten a few new ones, including a large, sickly green image of SpongeBob SquarePants that slid down his calf. He liked Bob Esponja because “I don’t know, he’s the most loco of the cartoons,” he said with a shrug. It was professional-looking and new, with precise lines and subtle colors, not just black and red in blurry lines like the PUNK FULA on his wrist or the ANARQUIA on his knuckles. Tattoo artist: newly legal.
“They just want to go to G Street, all of them,” said Adela of her students. She was still teaching philosophy at the university. She said that today’s nineteen-year-old college kids simply tuned out for anything that had to do with Marx, which was half of the state-mandated syllabus. There was no engaging them. They sat on G Street and drank or they flirted and went home with each other, and that was it. We sat in her bedroom and she pointed at a book by Marx on her shelf and said, “He was a sociologist and an important figure. They should know who he is, at least. But G Street is all they do.”
Adela hadn’t left Cuba. I had often wondered, in the year since I’d left Havana, if I really knew who Adela was. Journalists had been duped by pro-Castro revolutionaries in the past, the most famous being Manuel David Orrio, a spy who’d posed as an dissident journalist long enough to be profiled in the Chicago Tribune and denounce a handful of real dissidents who wound up in jail. The paper retracted the profile when he tore off his mask to jeer at those who had believed his pose, crying tears of joy on state television at the anti-Castro activists who’d been put in jail by his testimony. They were his recompense for years of lies. Once, drunk at a party with Lucía, a friend of hers had slurred to me that no one around me was who they said they were. He’d dated an American and the secret police had knocked on his door the day after she’d spent the night for the first time to interrogate him. I’d dismissed his words as boozy hyperbole, but the reality was, any one of my sources could have been someone spinning false stories of spliced families and sodden dreams.
We drank our sweet espresso and headed into the kitchen to make more. She’d heard that changes were happening in Havana, she said, with sarcasm that promised me she knew the new rules to the letter. But the change that she pointed out to me as she spooned coffee into the espresso maker was that the government agriculture ministry was blending its bodega coffee with ground peas. Coffee production was down this year. “You know what we call it?” she said with a dry laugh. “Osama bin Laden: It can explode the coffee maker and cut you up.”
The tourism ministry, at least, reported swelling numbers: A 13 percent increase in revenue from tourists in 2011, with a year-long revenue of $2.5 billion, had boosted the formal economy. But that June, Sandra wasn’t seeing any of it. We had met at nearly exactly the same spot of our first meeting. It had been tough to find clients lately, she said, and her new Cuban boyfriend, sitting next to her on the malecón, nodded. “I’ve been here last night, the night before, all last weekend, and nothing,” she said. She dabbed her forehead with an orange washcloth so she looked dewy but never damp. The boy shook his head. He was a cute mulatico, short and skinny with an Ed Hardy baseball hat. Sandra gestured toward the Riviera and the Meliá Cohiba on the opposite corner: “See how few lights are on?” She was brusque and stiff, as if her insides had puddled down and a shell kept her upright. “Not even worth paying to get in.”
Though it was legal to open small businesses like salons, Sandra couldn’t fall back on her beautician training because a neighbor with a quicker reaction time already had a monopoly on her block. Gallego was in jail, seven years on charges Sandra wouldn’t detail. Mia was nearly two and back home with Aboo, same as always, doing fine. No sign of the Italian. But I could come over tomorrow. She’d call when she woke up. “That’d be great,” I said. Before I left, she asked me for money. Just $5 or maybe $10 or whatever, just so she could get a cab home.
Whatever change was happening in Cuba, taking place at the top and promising a downward trickle, it hadn’t reached these people yet. Their lives still seemed like snow globes shaken by someone else.
I didn’t have much cash on me but I handed Sandra a $5 bill and walked away, feeling like there was a fire at my back and I was gliding toward the air that fed it. She never called the number I gave her.
/// My small apartment had been rented to a Chilean, so I shared Carlos’s room with him. “Estás flaca y amarilla,” were his first words to me when I arrived. Thin and yellow.
His second words were, “What do you want to drink?” He stalked toward the kitchen. “I have water, juice, cola, coffee?” He posed half in the living room, one eyebrow raised and his hand resting expectantly on his hip.
Elaine and Nicolas had gone to Miami two months earlier and left the boys in Havana. Maykel had gotten out of his military service, but six months later he’d been in a minor car accident in his rented gypsy cab. One sudden Saturday morning just after Elaine and Nicolas had interviewed at the U.S. Interests Section and been given their visas, an acquaintance had rapped at the door of their Miramar apartment. The owner of the car was going to press charges, though Nicolas had already repaired the car himself. The family friend felt wronged, I supposed, and knew that Elaine and Nicolas had been saving. If they waited until the following week, they’d probably not get to Miami for months, if ever—until the legal proceedings had wrapped up. Nicolas went to the airport to see if the two of them could fly to Miami that night, before government offices opened on Monday. He could better help his son by sending out money from the U.S. to pay off the car’s owner than by sticking around to show up in court. In the end, Elaine had eight hours to pack and leave.
We’d spoken on the phone frequently since she arrived.
“Ey, niña, you have to check on the boys and report back,” Elaine ordered me. “From the emails everyone sends me, it sounds like they’re doing well. It seems what they needed all along was to live without me.”
Carlos had his own Interests Section appointment for November 2012, but he hoped he wouldn’t make it. The first day I saw him, he’d just returned from the Brazilian embassy. He vibrated with excitement. He was applying for a scholarship to study in one of the country’s smaller cities, a grant that, the woman at the embassy said, the Cuban government had prohibited them from advertising widely in Cuba. He’d heard about it through a friend of a friend. “All the better for my chances,” he said with a grin as he paced the apartment. I sat in a chair under one of the plants, in front of the floor-to-ceiling frosted-glass jalousie blinds. The living room felt cavernous: The dining room table and chairs, two sofas, a coffee table, and the wicker set that Nicolas sanded each year and Elaine had painstakingly painted a fresh white all had been sold. We drank water out of cheap glasses, not Elaine’s fifties metallic polka-dotted ones—she’d managed to get rid of nearly everything.
In Brazil, Carlos would be given free tuition at a school where he could study, among other subjects, film, advertising, or design. Elaine’s sister lived in a small town in the North and as long as Carlos didn’t defect, their apartment would stay in the family. He could rent it for money to support himself. His plans glimmered, hazy skyscraper fantasies cloaked in mist. The paperwork was under way.
Elaine was not happy. A care package she’d sent recently contained socks for Carlos, toothbrushes (the only ones for sale in Cuba were rough on the gums), and DVDs with photos. Here were Elaine, Nicolas, and Carlos’s cousins at the mall; at a pool party; next to an open grill with all kinds of beef on it; in front of an open trunk, the handles of white plastic grocery bags fluttering.
She wanted him to keep his Interests Section appointment and join them in Miami. As his plans solidified, as paperwork was processed and airfares were researched, she became increasingly convinced that hers would be yet another Cuban family split across the borders of so many countries. But Carlos didn’t want to move to the United States with so little English, with no degree, with no experien
ce doing anything but getting by and having fun in Havana.
One afternoon, Carlos called my cell phone as I walked away from the underground antique store to which I thought Elaine had sold much of her vintage glassware.
“I need to tell you something important but it’s too expensive to talk on the cell,” he said, his voice deep with tension. “Call me from a land line, because I’m freaking out. Ay, no, never mind, just come home.”
In the fifteen-minute máquina ride, my thoughts unraveled beneath the passenger chatter. Men in button-down shirts, MinInt, my magazines, Carlos’s apartment, the same stale story.
I found Carlos chain-smoking and jittery. We sat at the kitchen table and he told me that a cousin of Elaine’s and her husband had come over. She had asked for coffee and he had dropped a stuffed backpack on the floor.
“We’re not leaving,” the husband said to Carlos. “When you leave, this apartment should be ours, not yours and not the government’s, but in order for that to happen, we have to live here first. I’ll sleep here even if it’s on the floor.”
When Carlos said no, that the apartment was his, the cousin began to shout. “We know that you’re doing things that shouldn’t be done here. We know that you’re renting to a foreigner in the back,” she cried, “and we’ll call the police.”
Carlos told them to leave and never to come back, but he was shaken. If the cousin followed through, not only could Carlos lose his family’s apartment, but the exit permits for his brother and himself would be in jeopardy. Why would the government do a favor, handing out passports and exit visas, for a citizen who’d flouted its laws?
Carlos’s hands trembled as he lit one cigarette after another. His brother was in the back telling the Chilean that he’d have to find other accommodations.