by Julia Cooke
As we talked, we understood: This was why Elaine wanted him to come to the United States instead of going to Brazil on a scholarship. If he went to Brazil, he wouldn’t be starting new elsewhere, he would be on a temporary leave. And Elaine was tired of fighting, of being a Cuban in Cuba.
Carlos would, like Lucía, go to whichever country gave him a visa first. It didn’t wind up taking so long, but if the process had stretched out, elongated a year and a half, Carlos wouldn’t have needed to get an exit visa in the first place. The blanket requirement for exit visas for all Cuban citizens would be among the next large changes to be implemented. Exit visas had been put in place by a government, in 1961, that saw so many of its most valuable citizens leaving that it feared a mass exodus. Fifty years later, the tarjeta blanca was dismantled by a slightly different government, one that knew that those who’d had the enterprise to seek exit visas would still be the citizens who could afford to leave without the requirement. Prices for passports and plane tickets and entry visas to other countries hadn’t changed; those who earned the average Cuban salary of $18 per month were still equally limited.
And among the 178 new careers possible for Cubans, there were no permits for engineers, architects, lawyers, doctors—professionals who’d been trained by the free revolutionary education system. Anyone deemed important to the “human capital created by the Revolution,” the new law stated, could not practice independently.
The way I saw it, the closer anyone got to questioning the rhetoric that protected power, the invisible lines separating the owners from the players, the harsher the rejection. This may have applied everywhere, as much in my own country as in Cuba, but in Cuba, young people have always known it. I grew up very American, optimistic and believing that I could do something in the world if I tried hard enough. In Cuba, young people had already changed the world. The word “Revolution” had already acquired a meaning that was close enough to the present that there wasn’t room for another definition.
The sense of being stuck in a maze had magnified. Among those who could benefit from the new regulations, envy was rampant: Carlos’s cousin, his brother’s family friend, a diplomat acquaintance who had been robbed on the streets of Miramar. Among those who wouldn’t, who lacked entrepreneurial spirit or family funds from abroad or a deed to a well-placed apartment, fear was rising. So were complaints of hunger, I was told: “It’s the first time since the Special Period that I’ve heard people saying, ‘Caballero, que hambre tengo,’” Alejandra told me one afternoon. How hungry I am. For the first time, Cubans were being told that they should be able to make it on their own. Wasn’t that what people had demanded for so long? Wasn’t that enough?
Maybe it would never be enough. Hope in Cuba was the desire to live in a world that didn’t actually exist. In Adela’s idealism, she’d thought that Cuba could be that world, as had I, at least at first. For some people, Nicolas and Lucía, abroad had always held the promise of that world, the “anyplace else” to which their hope had fled.
But hope and Cuba were a tricky combination, I thought. There was little room in Havana for hope of the large-scale variety. That sort of hope had been all used up in the sixties. No, small-scale hope was strewn all over individuals and relationships: Isnael and the continuing negotiation between fantasy and reality in the life he was starting to make for himself; Lucía and adulthood in Chile that didn’t feel quite comfortable, yet, she said, but still, it was hers to construct and it stretched out enticingly in front of her; Juan and Alejandra, the photography tours they were now planning to lead and an upcoming trip to Spain, the first time she’d travel abroad; Carlos’s scholarship and Elaine and Nicolas and my ticket to visit them in Miami. I would see them in a month and we’d speculate together, hot air about what could happen next year in Havana.
EPILOGUE
AUGUST 2013
The first thing I notice–and I notice it before I even hit the ground in Cuba, in the Cubana de Aviación line at the Cancun airport—is the bling. A young couple hovers in line behind me, holding their Cuban passports and pushing two plastic-wrapped cardboard boxes, one with an image of a carseat on it and the other a stroller. The young woman wears a sizable diamond on her left ring finger. I am not quite impartial, because I am wearing a diamond ring, too: Juan, in New York for eight months on work, has asked me to bring an engagement ring to Alejandra. If it doesn’t fit, there aren’t jewelers that he’d trust to resize it in Havana, so he wants me to ferry it back to New York on the other end of my trip.
The ring used to belong to a Cuban woman whose husband left her when they arrived in the States shortly after the Revolution; she waited twelve years for him before going to the Washington Heights resale shop where Juan found the ring and its story. Elaine told me on the phone last night to be sure to wear it because that way I have plausible deniability and no one will make me pay taxes. Tomorrow Alejandra and I will sit on her porch and she’ll slide the too-big ring along her finger and talk about the symmetry, how she has been waiting for Juan to come back from New York for so many more months than she’d anticipated. He got a single-entry visa and his project has taken longer than planned so though he’s sent friends to Havana with bags of clothing, money, and this engagement ring, he can’t leave the country himself. While I am in Havana, I will see diamond rings on women at the new rooftop restaurants, and strands of pearls, too, and black-and-white iPhones that sit on tables, waiting to buzz with the news of which bar everyone will be at after dinner.
The changes that have swept through are evident in different ways at Jose Martí International Airport. There is a new line at immigration, “Residentes en Cuba,” and it’s longer than the others. Before, there were so few Cubans traveling that they just slid into any Canadian- and Mexican-populated line. And the tourist visa no longer requests the address where the foreigner will stay. No one cares where I or anyone else will reside while in Havana anymore. At the baggage carousel, there is a trio of women in high platform heels who sweep enormous, bulky duffel bags onto carts while speaking rapid Cuban and there is a man who picks up four Hankook tires, all wrapped in plastic, while telling someone on a cell phone that he is at the baggage carousel right now and just has to pass through customs to pay taxes on the tires. He will be outside in ten minutes.
“Do not eat from any of the new street cafés, eh,” Elaine admonished me. “There’s cholera in Cuba but, of course, no one official is admitting it.” But there are no new cafés on the streets of inland Marianao as my taxi driver takes me into the city via the back roads, and when I ask him how business has been lately, he says it’s the same as it’s always been except he’s paying higher taxes now. There are a lot of Argentines around lately, he says, and they’re annoying as hell but they’re great tourists so he’s not complaining.
/// Official emigration numbers held mostly steady in Cuba throughout the first decade of the twenty-first century. Things weren’t as bad as the nineties and change was rippling. But emigration rose slowly and in 2012 they spiked almost as high as the statistic for 1994, the year of the rafter crisis that littered the Straits with bodies. This number—46,662—is acknowledged in accompanying news reports to be largely composed of the young and the educated. Fidel Castro’s legacy, the family scattered as from a saltshaker across the globe, is the inheritance of his brother, too.
This news is announced in August, when I am in Havana. What’s also announced in the foreign media is that a man sets out from the Marina Hemingway to cross the Florida Straits on a paddleboard. Twenty-eight hours later, he’s made it across. I also read that seven Cubans in their forties and fifties have died in state hospitals after drinking industrial methanol, thinking it was rum. But the only news that really travels, the news that sprints laps around the city on people’s lips, is that the U.S. State Department is lengthening most Cuban visitor visas from six months to five years, including multiple entries, which used to require further visa applications and $160 fees.
An era has e
nded in Cuba. Whether he planned to or not, Raúl has, in his half-decade tenure, implemented a Stalin-esque five-year plan. Exit visas are no longer required of Cubans who’d like to travel or leave, but also: Even before the number 46,662 is officially released, everyone is talking about the measures that the government is taking in an attempt to stanch the flow, economic reforms and then some. People can freely buy and sell cars and homes and they can keep their property if they leave. And now the length of time that someone can stay outside the country without being considered a defector has been stretched to two years, which can be provisionally lengthened another twenty-four months. You can close the door of your home for two years, now, without any consequences, or, if you know you’ll be leaving for good and you want to deed your home to someone else, you can do that, too. You can even take your children with you—you just have to pay for their passports and visas. Homeownership, parenthood—the terms now resemble what they mean elsewhere in the world.
Sandra is doing more than talking about it. She’s bought a house. Revision: Her Colombian husband bought her a house. And it’s not quite a house, it’s two rooms, a front room that’s painted the dark pink of old roses in their last bloom, with a couch that spits me to the floor when I sit on it because the cushion isn’t connected to the bench. After I’ve tried her number (disconnected) and her aunt’s (no Jaqueline there, but the man who answered had heard of a woman named La China and would try to get her the message), Sandra called the number I’d left her (Alejandra’s) and gave an address ten blocks from her old place. She’s across the street from an empty factory, down another alleyway. I knocked on the door and Mia, who is now nearly four, answered.
Across from where I am splayed on the ground there is an overturned chair and a nightstand, made of black glossy wood, with children’s shoes spilling out of its bottom half. Mia begins to pull shoes out of the pile. I sit on the ground and she shows me her favorite pairs: the clear jellies, the wood platforms with white pleather straps, and cute bright blue T-straps, but her favorites are the ones with pink marabou, which she doesn’t know look like a Barbie version of what Marilyn Monroe might have worn. I stand up finally, brush myself off, put the cushion back on the sofa, and sit gingerly on it.
Sandra has not yet emerged from the back room, so I sit with Mia and let her model shoes for me. She has enormous dark eyes and waist-length black hair hoisted into a fuzzy side ponytail. Some of the sandals are broken, she points out; others are too big for her, she says, hand-me-downs from a neighbor. Sandra appears at the refrigerator in the back room, drinking a glass of water, pushing the hair out of her face and tipping her head back to drink. The front room is a living room and the back room holds a kitchenette, a bed, and a crib. She turns to me with the same “Hoooooolia!” as ever. She is wearing black spandex shorts and a yellow lace-trimmed camisole. The shadows of her wide, dark nipples spread across the front. She looks the same, only older: same mole on the right side of her cheek, same big smile, more wrinkles, same darting black eyes.
All of her electric devices have failed her in the last week. Her cell phone, her blender: They are both broken and she will need new ones. Plus now she has no money. Her husband lives in Cali but comes to Havana every twenty days to spend ten days here with her and Mia and their ten-month-old daughter. He leaves Sandra with $500 each month, which supports her, but this past trip was cancelled for some reason or another and he didn’t bring her money and she had to go down to the fountain at Paseo and malecón to try to earn some. They were married three years ago. It’s their third anniversary around now, she says, and I press her to be more precise, because the math isn’t adding up. The last time I saw her was two years ago on the malecón and she was with another man: short and skinny, making lively hand motions when he spoke. She had called him her boyfriend but he wasn’t the Colombian. She shakes her head and says she doesn’t know what I’m talking about, she doesn’t know who I’m describing because she’s been married to Ivan for three years now and she never had any boyfriend like the one I’m describing.
“Mami!” Mia shouts. We turn to her. She wants to go to the fair down the street, a collection of mini-carousels and games that squat in a park where there used to be grass. She stands with her tiny hand on her tiny cocked-out hip and requests 5 pesos for the carnival ride, a two-story metal contraption that puts kids in a cage and swings them up and down in half-circles. Sandra asks if I have any Cuban pesos and I hand Mia a green five-peso bill. Mia looks at Sandra with narrowed eyes as Sandra says, “Don’t ask any men for money this time, yahear?” and then, to me, “I’ve gotten complaints from neighbors about how she asks people for money for the rides.”
Sandra doesn’t wear a ring; she has nothing on her fingers today. She’s not moving to Colombia, she says, because she wouldn’t leave until she’d bought a place.
“What if he leaves me? What am I left with? Stranded in Cali with two babies, have to come back to Cuba to live with Aboo”—Aboo rents her own place down the alley from Sandra. “I’d have nothing,” Sandra says. Now she has her two rooms in San Miguel, which are hers, really hers, signed over to her, and now she can go to Cali because as long as she returns for a visit every two years, they will stay hers. She just has to finish fixing up the bathroom first—she’s only bought half the tiles she’ll need but they cover the important part, the shower part.
There are no new restaurants or shops amid the defunct factories and de facto living spaces of San Miguel, and it takes just as long for a car to get down the pitted streets as it did two years ago. No one seems to be overseeing the carnival games, and as I get into the car that will take me back downtown, the gypsy cab driver who’s waited for me all afternoon hopes aloud that the rusting metal leaves no children mangled or hurt. He’s walked around it a few times and it seems unsafe. He lives in Vedado and once he’d taken me out here, he insisted on waiting. This neighborhood has gotten rougher, he says, and he won’t charge for the ride back into town; he’s heading back anyway and he feels better knowing he hasn’t left me in a troublesome situation out here. The cops rarely come this deep into San Miguel anymore, he says. We drive away and I try to spot Mia in the crowd and think I see her white crop-top and black ponytail.
Consumers no longer need permits to buy renovation materials. In fact, the new laws for homeownership encourage them to build. The banks are giving out small loans for exactly this purpose, though the complaint now is that there’s not enough material to go around. This means that Katherine’s house renovation has sped along. There’s an airy new kitchen and a new studio in the back. Isnael is in the garage when I arrive, cutting wood for a canvas frame, and as I walk past, he calls my name. He’s wearing clothes that were once white and are now covered in grime and swipes of blue, pink, green, yellow, and black paint; but his clothes have the intention of whiteness, the clothing of recent Santería initiates in their year of dressing purely. He made saint last October. He wears all white and the bracelet of the initiated children of Yemayá. He’s good, he says. Still working at Katherine’s place, especially now that her husband’s art is selling well. Isnael acts, nowadays, more like an artist’s assistant, like a right-hand man, and he likes it. His work is here, now, and it’s a good thing, he says. His faith is his faith and his work is his work.
The entrepreneurial sector of Cuba had hovered around 150,000 permits—for restaurants, rooms, other small businesses of which there were few until the range of options widened—until these current reforms. As of June 2012, there were 371,200 small businesses in Cuba. Money is floating around in the open now, trading hands from artist to assistant, from patron to chef and chef to waiter.
There are businesses everywhere. On one Old Havana street, in the unrenovated back area, there are two carpentry garages with crib sides and dressers and planks in progress. In a car repair garage, an old Ford hunkers up on stilts. A man at a cart peddles produce and it’s avocado season, so he’s propped the avocados on their round bases with their eyes poin
ting toward the sky. A street-front shop sells Chinese water filters and sticky lipstick, a pastry cart offers señoritas and pasteles de guayaba that put Sylvain’s anemic sweets to shame.
Just down the street and to the left, toward the ocean, there are four people staffing a religious-objects store. In a country where religion used to be illegal, it’s the busiest locale on the block. A sign in the front reads, “LA ENVIDIA ES LA RELIGION DE LOS MEDIOCRES”—envy is the religion of the mediocre—and the shop is thick with beaded necklaces in every imaginable color, and bracelets, urns, statuettes, wood bowls, sculptures, and maracas with shells on nets around them. The shelving extends twenty meters into the back of the house and six customers wait at two different counters. Down the street, Oasis Nelva sells potted succulents and palms and bonsai, which are advertised on professional-looking plastic in the windows. A man flattens out bumpy pots at a tinware shop across the street. Everywhere there is sound: grinding, sanding, the radio, a hammer, shouting.
I go to a “sport bar” called La Chucheria where I wait for a table behind two middle-aged women poring over the schedule for 3-D Extreme movie theater. Tickets cost $3. They sit down and a woman and teenage boy emerge, both dressed in a style I associate with any cosmopolitan world city—she in a shiny black asymmetrical raincoat and tight blue cotton skirt, he with big headphones around his neck—and she is distinctly Cuban as she chastises him for standing in the drizzle with their takeout, three pizzas and three milkshakes. She taps on a white iPhone and then tells someone she’ll be a little late getting home; they’re waiting out the rain. The waitresses wear matching black Nike tennis skirts and the customers sit in translucent plastic Philippe Starck chairs with the café name engraved on the back. Cuban reggaeton and Enrique Iglesias play low on a flat-screen above the porch. There is no toilet paper in the bathroom.