The Other Side of Paradise

by Julia Cooke

  The people who are at these bars are the people who didn’t used to go out. I go to another restaurant, a rooftop at which the women have silky dark hair and wear short satin shift dresses with pearls; the men are in polo shirts. These were the people who used to go to each others’ houses only, parties at which Havana felt like a cinematic, glittery version of itself: beautiful women whirling, straight-shouldered men pouring drinks of white rum into plastic cups, mojitos until the mint ran out and then Cuba libres after, windows open in the winter or air conditioners in the living room in the summer. Now the glitter is on display in public; private businesses hand out printed receipts for the first time in my memory.

  In these places, Havana is growing, creating room for ever more restaurant owners and shop owners to join the artists and the musicians in the conspicuous consumption in which we, the rest of the capitalist world, indulge. In these places, Havana could be anywhere else: Miami or Mexico City or the poshest restaurant in San Salvador. You could hop from lovely new bar to lovely new bar, surrounded by clusters of young locals for an entire trip. Two architects I know take me to a new bar down in Habana Vieja for drinks after their office closes on Friday afternoon and tell me that they’re financially solvent for the first time in a long while. They show me a book with a private project they’re working on. Quietly, of course, and in addition to what they’re doing at their government day jobs, but they’re doing something. I have to see this other bar, they say, and we go to another spot.

  I used to go to spinning classes in the back room of the apartment of a woman named Iris, where, on the back porch, women drank water after class and traded the numbers of informal masseuses. Now the spinning is legal, the masseuses are legal, the carpentry business that Carlos’s friend’s stepfather had is legal. The architecture is illegal, still, but they’re doing it anyway; businesspeople hoping to open restaurants with the backing of family abroad are trading the phone numbers of informal architects who will go to legal printing businesses and whip up very professional-looking packets and presentations of what they’ll do to make the café as sophisticated as any in Mexico City.

  The sense of precariousness remains. These businesses could be snatched away; someone with too many ties to the United States could be thrown in jail the way two foreign businessmen who were locked away for a year were; someone who is too critical, as dissident Oswaldo Payá was, could die under suspicious circumstances as he did last year. No one doubts who is still in power. So for some, these changes aren’t anywhere near enough. Upon Lucía’s first visit to Havana after leaving, she tells me that she won’t go back until the Castros no longer occupy the helm of her country. It’s just too sad. “It’s strange,” she tells me, “when you’re in Cuba, you have no perspective on how bad things are, because you’ve never been anywhere else. And then you go somewhere else, and you return, and it’s a different place.”

  Adela leaves for Ecuador in September. A visit, not a definitive exit. The escuelas al campo, where students like Isnael worked in the fields in a yearly solidarity exercise and which Adela got out of attending, have now been officially shuttered. Adrián is still in Europe.

  /// This book is, in a way, the story of an exodus. Even if this generation has not physically left the island in its entirety, this generation has detached from its country’s fate in some deep and meaningful way. Their impatient hopes and dreams are often disconnected from reality because in a circumscribed world, all change is fantastical. Distracted by the dominant uncertainty of their young adulthoods, they make few plans but the plans to leave. Perhaps the most apt factual representation is that they are not having children: In the seventies, there were ten babies born in Cuba for every Cuban who left, but in 2010, according to a national survey, that number had declined to three. Young people cite socioeconomic reasons and “family and personal reasons” for having fewer children than they’d like. Havana continues to hemorrhage its young and ambitious, graying ever faster.

  Cuba is the country that stood up against the giant and continues to do so. Cuba is defined by what it is against: It is not connected to the rest of the capitalist world; it is against the United States and its cynical marketplace, its foreign involvement. It’s a system built around politics and ideology and the security of those politics and that ideology, rather than built around and for the people who compose it. This generation is the first generation of Cubans among whom there is a consensus that discourse floats high above reality, is entirely untethered to what they’re living. They are the last generation raised under Fidel, the first generation raised in globalization, the first generation to come into adulthood in a time when it’s largely acknowledged that nothing works and they won’t have an impact.

  And yet this is not the story of an exodus, because there have been changes. Each five-year plan shifts things in Havana toward the rest of the world. Ten years ago, my college classmates and I invited the Cubans we met to makeshift parties on our dorm’s front porch because they weren’t allowed inside. Those parties had been covertly shut down by state security agents on our corner who quietly told the Cubans in attendance that they were violating the spirit if not the letter of the law. Guests whispered thank yous and left the party. Five years ago I could invite any Cuban anywhere. And five more years on, the lives of the people in this book have shifted: whether they made plans or pursued dreams or not, they are, for the most part, more rooted, in Cuba or elsewhere, in the way that lives inevitably change between twenty and twenty-five, twenty-five and thirty.

  There’s an air of futility to projecting into Cuba’s future. At nearly every juncture, Fidel has done something unpredictable, something brilliant, made some last-ditch effort to maintain control and succeeded. Anywhere else, an increasingly wide divide between the rich and poor would generate tension; wealth and the ability to generate it creates empowerment and demands, and as the ration book is decreased, and as the old guard Communists die and the people who have only ever known not to count on the government for much more than fever medicine and seven pounds of rice per month grow up, the Castro regime must end. Raúl has said that he will step down when his second term ends, in 2018. And still, what would replace him is unclear. After nearly sixty years, who would take the place of a Castro? The strong alternatives left or died, were pushed out by the regime or gave in and started over elsewhere. If everyone who’d left in the last twenty years, in the last decade, even, would return, that’s when things would change, an artist acquaintance tells me that August. So for the time being, since he’s only thirty and 2018 isn’t so far off, he’ll stay.

  There is some Sunday in every Wednesday in Havana, and there’s also a blending of tomorrow and yesterday in today. Havana is a place where everyday existence is so rooted in the present moment, yet thought exists primarily in past or future tenses. Paradise is Cuba’s goal and its context: What the island could be if only; what it once was. But there is no other side of paradise, no way to live in the nostalgic gloss of the past or to start construction of a life on the other side of the limitations of today. Predicting what will happen in Cuba in the next decade is an exercise in humility, because I assume that words on paper will be proven wrong. And so the revision, the recursive exercise that is involvement in Cuba, continues.

  /// “The thing I have to remember that’s just so strange,” said Elaine, “is that when we park the car, I have to get out and look around and really remember exactly where I leave the car. Everything is so big, and everyone has new cars and they all look exactly the same.”

  This was among the first observations she made on my first visit to Miami, back in 2011, spoken while I was driving her to work at a kindergarten in southern Miami where she spent seven hours a day with Spanish-speaking toddlers.

  I’d taken Nicolas to his boss’s house earlier that morning so I could have the car while they worked. As we drove, Nicolas told me that he used to put the lunch Elaine made him every day in the trunk, to keep all of the seats in the car free. In Cub
a, you never knew which acquaintance you’d give a ride to along the way, or who’d offer you $10 to go just a block or two farther than you were going anyway. In the United States, he’d said, everyone had papers and crap all over their back seats. Everyone drove alone. That weekend, when we went to Miami Beach to walk around and cheered at a Marlins game, Nicolas made me drive: He’d been chauffeur since they arrived, since Elaine hadn’t yet taken the test, and he wanted a few days off.

  Elaine and Nicolas had spent nearly all of the $4,500 they’d managed to save over their last few years in Havana on this car. Nicolas worked for a man who installed glass staircases in the homes of Miami’s wealthy and ostentatious and followed up his twelve-hour days with certification classes to become an Electrician. Elaine had rotated through four low-paying child-care jobs since she’d arrived, because it was employment she could get without speaking English. But they were saving money in fits and starts: They lived with Nicolas’s sister and her husband, who took good care of them. Nicolas still didn’t have a cell phone.

  Carlos’s best friend, Ivan, had been in Miami for the first few months after Elaine and Nicolas’s arrival but had to return to Cuba. He’d gotten a speeding ticket that he couldn’t pay and didn’t contest, so his license was revoked. When he kept driving anyway and got pulled over again, he’d been given a court date that he ignored. After a few months, he had wound up with a $4,000 fine and no money, so his mother, among Elaine’s closest friends, bought him a plane ticket back home. If he ever wanted to live in the United States again, he’d have to pay the fine.

  This sort of thing is part of what Nicolas loves about the United States: that there are consequences for actions that grow, step by step, rather than the specter of utter disaster that regulates actions in Havana. Nicolas has not looked back since he left. Nicolas is more American, I sometimes think, than I am: solid and hardworking and independent and realistic, a nose-to-the-grindstone sort of man reinforcing the values of the country to which he’s arrived.

  That Ivan had left wouldn’t be important until Carlos would visit Miami from where he was studying in Brazil and decide that he wanted to stay. By then, Elaine and Nicolas had different jobs cleaning medical facilities and Maykel, their younger son, had arrived, too. They had an apartment of their own and two cars. She didn’t like Miami, Elaine said—reflexively conservative, with little of the intellectual life that had sustained her in Havana accessible to her, because people were spread too far apart for the casual visits of Havana and cultural activities were too expensive—but she said she couldn’t imagine returning to Cuba, its insecurity, its black-market machinations, its ever-present politics, after living on the outside.

  The next time I visit Miami, Elaine and Nicolas and Carlos and his brother have moved into a three-bedroom town-house in a gated Kendall community where swans and ducks roam the grounds. Carlos sleeps on the floor of his brother’s room and my boyfriend and I have his room. It is Carlos’s birthday and a group of twenty or so have gathered on their patio. One of the women who’d studied for the ISA test with him all those years ago arrived in Miami a month ago and she and her boyfriend are there, as well as Elaine’s cousin and her husband, a handful of other acquaintances. Cuba rose like a balloon over all of us, shading every topic brought up as we talked about Havana. There seems to be no “never” when it comes to Cubans and Cuba. Elaine has a new plan now. With the new regulations, since Carlos is technically among the people who can legally spend two years outside the country, she wants to try to keep her apartment, though no one else has remained in the building. The architect’s daughter upstairs has dumped the philandering art dealer and is applying for visas and even the apartment that Che personally handed over is in the final phases of sale. Even after two years in Miami and even with all of its flaws, I think Elaine would rather live in Havana, and I think she hates that fact because it defies her formidable intellect. What she tells me is, “I’m an immigrant in this country. If I lose the apartment, my home, then I lose it, but as long as I can I’ll keep it. If there’s a change and things start to flow differently in Cuba, of course I’ll live there. Because now I’m free. Even if I went back, I wouldn’t be living there like in jail.”

  But for now—never mind next year in Havana, right now in Miami—the trovador Descemer Bueno is doing a concert at the new Friday night party that one of los adolescentes, who’s come up to Miami on a family visa, began. She used to be a tall, genuine, sweet hippie girl, and now she’s a tall beauty in platform heels and an asymmetrical haircut who runs a weekly fiesta called Vedado Social Club. I’m at the Vedado Social Club party on the outdoor back patio of a bar in Wynwood. Twinkling paper globe lanterns cast light from the palm trees and I hear no English spoken. Descemer Bueno is playing songs I’ve heard so many times before, and after every six people who pass where Carlos and I stand, I turn to him and say, “Do I know him?” To which he responds, “Yes, you could recognize him, he’s from Havana, he’s friends with so-and-so,” and we do this so many times that it makes me a little dizzy. By the time the night is winding down and we are standing at the door, getting ready to go, someone taps the mic and says, damas y caballeros, Carlos Varela.

  And I’m twenty again, sitting at the Plaza Vieja a decade ago after a night at the morro club, four or so in the morning and no one else is at the plaza except a lone waiter in a bow tie and waistcoat and the buildings laugh shadows and yellow moldings in the light of the sepia streetlamps. I’ve just arrived to study for the semester and am with a Cuban acquaintance. We’ve been dancing all night and I don’t know where I am exactly, or what time it is, just that the sky will be bright again in an hour or two. I’m sitting in a cast-iron chair drinking a rum and TuKola and the only Cuban singer whose music I know, Carlos Varela, is here; he must be a friend of a friend. Someone puts a guitar in his arms, and he plays the guitar for a few songs’ worth of time. They’re songs about love and patriotism and family and the music bounces across the plaza. It’s a moonlit moment that, even as it unfolds, I know I will remember. And I do; it’s the moment that catches in my mind when someone mentions Havana for the decade that follows, one of the memories that I pull out and examine from different angles when I live in Havana and the city feels too hot, sad, anxious. Havana is also that moment, I will remind myself, it’s the sadness and the magic and the luck, losing the passport and finding it.

  Carlos Varela is playing a concert here next weekend, the posters say. He is right off the plane from Havana, probably taking a week in Florida to visit friends and family, shop before his show. He’s done a few concerts in Miami recently; U.S. visas have been more easily granted to Cuban professionals lately. I imagine that if I was closer to the stage I could smell Cuban laundry detergent. The coincidence feels amazing, that I am here for one weekend and he is playing just one song. Carlos and I listen near the back, our arms around one another, and I think: Havana is this moment, too, and the loop that connects the two.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I owe this book to those who generously lent me access to their lives and thoughts: Lucía, the Reyes family, Liván, Sandra, Isnael, Adrián, and Adela before anyone else. I am endlessly grateful to them and to the people around them who opened their doors to me, included me in gatherings and discussions, and answered my questions, whether interesting, or vaguely rude or obvious, or all of the above. I hope I have done well by the trust they placed in me.

  Thank you to the Havana family, the village—Matthew and Jana, Pamela, Raul, and Aimara for conversation, insight, and odd and necessary kindnesses—and to Alejandro, Nicole, Claire, Aviva, Tricina, Tara, Megan, and the women of Writing Corps for reading, inspiring, and listening at phases early and late. I admire and owe Elaine and Carlos much more than I can fully express here. Endless thanks to Patrick for the IV line of support, intellect, and optimism that he’s offered throughout.

  Various professors and writers affiliated with Columbia University were instrumental in helping me hone the ideas and the rhe
toric of this book: Richard Locke, Lis Harris, Patricia O’Toole, Mark Lamster, Rivka Galchen, Stephen O’Connor, and Phillip Lopate. Thank you. Enormous thanks to my agent, Diana Finch, who stuck with this book from its raw beginning; my editor, Laura Mazer, who stewarded it into existence with sensitivity, honesty, and enthusiasm; and to the Norman Mailer Center and my fellow fellows there.

  Mine may be, I think, among the very few families that not only refrains from strangulation on family trips but is actually often at our best while navigating someplace new together. For this and so much else, I am grateful to my mother, father, and sister.

  SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

  In addition to many news articles–primarily those written by the heroically thorough Havana-based staff of Reuters, but also published by The New York Times, the BBC, and the Wall Street Journal—the following books and magazine articles were instrumental for the research of this book.

  Arenas, Reinaldo. Before Night Falls. New York: Penguin, 1994.

  Bangs, Lester. Main Lines, Blood Feasts, and Bad Taste: A Lester Bangs Reader. New York: Random House, 2008.

  Bardach, Ann Louise. Cuba Confidential: Love and Vengeance in Miami and Havana. New York: Random House, 2007.

  Benjamin, Walter W. Selected Writings: 1913–1926. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996.

  Bishop, Claire. “Speech Disorder: On Tania Bruguera at the 10th Havana Biennial.” Artforum 47, no. 10 (June 2009): 121–122.

  Block, Holly, and Gerardo Mosquera. Art Cuba: The New Generation. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2001.

  Cabezas, Amalia L. Economies of Desire: Sex and Tourism in Cuba and the Dominican Republic. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2009.