by Wendy Dale
“Umberto, if it makes you feel better, I’ll tell you that I’ve never had more fun surrounded by prostitutes and anchovies than I’m having right now.”
By the time I had gotten rid of all my unwanted toppings, Umberto had whittled the women on his lap down to just one. One was fine. I could deal with one. I just didn’t want to have to deal with her alone.
“Be right back. Have to go to the bathroom. You girls sit and chat.”
So there I was: eating pizza in an Italian restaurant trying to find something in common with a fifteen-year-old prostitute from Havana. But it turned out she liked anchovies so she filled the remaining time (and her mouth) by plopping one hairy fish after another in between her well-defined lips.
Prostitution is a sad and inevitable fact of living in Cuba. A woman can make more in a single night using her body than a Cuban doctor can make in a whole year, which means that many women simply can’t afford not to do it. Or as Umberto pointed out with a roll of his eyes, “I’ve managed to find the only two women in Havana who won’t sleep with me for money. And one of them is an American.”
The other one was Mayra, a lovely, pale twenty-eight-year-old Cuban physician we had befriended while strolling through the streets of Havana on our second day in the country. She represented yet another of Umberto’s failed pickups. This was a peculiar habit of my Mexican acquaintance: Instead of discarding women when they refused his advances, Umberto simply accepted the rejection and had them tag along and join us as platonic companions. But that’s not to say he was happy about it.
“How come all I ever meet are intelligent women?” he growled that evening over drinks at a posh hotel bar when Mayra and I attempted to include him in our conversation on U.S.-Cuban relations.
Even the previous night had ended without success by Umberto’s standards. Every woman in the pizza place had either been too tall or too young or too lacking in passion. So he’d sent them away one by one, cursing his luck and consoling himself by glaring at me and adding, “Don’t look so smug. You’re not getting any either.”
Perhaps I can forgive my Spanish dictionary for failing to include the words “vagina” and “penis”; however, neglecting to insert a translation for “hangover” seems to me a great omission in a book that boasts over seventy-thousand entries. Nor is there a listing for the phrase “to have sex.” To the dictionary’s credit, it does include “to make love to,” which is translated as “tener afición a,” but somehow telling a red-blooded Cuban that I want to have an affection (or was it an infection?) for him didn’t seem like it was going to get me very far.
Luckily, getting laid in Cuba is easy, a lot easier than making tacos. (On one of my ventures out of my hotel room in Guadalajara, I had walked past a restaurant with a sign in the window that said: “Taco maker wanted. Experience necessary.”) And finding a bed buddy is especially easy if you are either a man with lots of money (I hear it helps if you’re not named Umberto) or a woman with two arms, two legs, and a head.
Considering that I possessed all the essential limbs and (in spite of his unfortunate name) Umberto was well endowed in the wallet department, he and I left the hotel bar with Mayra and headed out to explore Cuban nightlife.
In a packed club blaring salsa music, I realized that the moment had finally come—I was actually going to get my hands on some real Cuban rum. However, I had not planned on the political dilemma I would face at the bar. What I wanted was a rum and Coke, called a Cuba Libre in most of Latin America, but as I thought it over, I wondered whether this name (“free Cuba”) was in fact the rest of the world’s ironic jab at the communist nation where I currently found myself. I remembered that one Latino acquaintance of mine laughed every time he heard someone order that drink. “Well, in Honduras,” he claimed, “we call it a Cuba Oppressed.”
Not wanting to create any problems for myself, I asked for a “rum and some Coke,” which reminded me of the days of alcoholic ignorance years ago when not knowing what the different cocktails were called, I used to order all of my drinks by their ingredients instead of their names. Instead of a Bay Breeze, I’d ask for vodka and cranberry; in place of a Greyhound, I’d ask for vodka and grapefruit juice; instead of a gin and tonic, I’d order—well, that one hadn’t changed any.
Halfway through my first drink, a thin Cuban man suddenly appeared at my side and asked me with a timid smile if I would like to dance. I gave Umberto a rather large, victorious smirk.
“I’m sorry, were you two together?” the man asked, watching Umberto glare at me. “Do you mind?”
“You don’t have to ask me, compañero,” Umberto answered. “You just might have to ask your government.” Then he added in a loud whisper, “Death to all Americans! Yanquis go home!”
I ignored him and walked onto the dance floor, overwhelmed by the bigger problem in front of me, namely my feet. Salsa is very difficult to master, but when done well it is a mesmerizingly sensual dance. When done poorly it looks—okay, so it looks the way I did it.
As we found an open space among the crowd, I struggled to follow my dance partner’s lead. For me it was still a challenge to combine the essential hip movement with the simple forward-back step. As if to highlight the contrast between his abilities and my own, in between spins, to my great humiliation, my partner would do back flips across the dance floor as people stood back and applauded. Fortunately, within less than an hour, I became a little too drunk to care.
Alcohol, the friend of inhibited dancers everywhere, had come to my aid just in time. The man I was with (I had learned that his name was Alberto) had snuck a bottle of rum into the club so every few songs, we’d creep off to a dark corner and take several swigs, which was having a beneficial effect. My ability to gyrate my hips was consistently increasing while his ability to do acrobatics was rapidly decreasing so in just a short while, our dancing talents were beginning to even out.
During our dance breaks, I had managed to learn a few details about him. He was twenty-seven, had just graduated from college as a civil engineer, and while he looked for a job (how one went about this in a communist country was a concept I didn’t completely grasp), he worked as a supervisor on the bus lines.
He was a few inches taller than me with nice features, a bit on the skinny side but otherwise attractive. He looked like a regular guy—he had short hair and wore a T-shirt and jeans. Like many Cubans, he was light-skinned with green eyes. But it wasn’t his appearance that drew me to him; there was something erotic about him—not in that overboard, sleazy, male swagger kind of way— rather, he wasn’t aware of his power, which made it all the more effective.
During a slow dance, standing provocatively close to each other, it occurred to me that there was an advantage to travel that I hadn’t considered before—the possibility of a vacation fling with no strings attached. Travel would allow me to savor the heart-pounding adrenaline rush of a new romance without having to stick around for the hard part, the predictable part, the “we have to talk” part. Besides, most of the men I had met in my life had proven themselves so good at refusing to commit. I figured that any woman capable of it was just helping to even the score.
Consider this a public service announcement broadcast in the interest of American women everywhere, but there is a Latin lover myth that I think needs to be cleared up before I go any further. In an extensive study I would conduct much too late to do myself any good, I now present my findings in the hopes of benefiting others.
Using the criteria of (1) duration and type of foreplay, (2) duration of intercourse, and (3) probability of subject’s staying the night, Latin men consistently scored lower than all other groups in the first two areas.
“Slam, bam, thank you ma’am” was the phrase characteristic of most participants, with several subjects occasionally falling into the “slam, bam bam, thank you ma’am” category. Though one “bam” was by far the most frequently encountered.
Several subjects did show some signs of recognition of the conce
pt of foreplay, but even the most highly advanced in this area had never put the idea into practice and had discarded it as a theory with about as much validity as the Lamarckian concept of evolution.
To the subjects’ credit, Latin men continually scored higher in the third category than any other group; however, given their consistently low performance in the first two areas, who the hell wanted them to spend the night?
I woke up the next morning in a foul mood. I was still exhausted from the previous evening and the amount of effort it had taken trying to get Alberto into my room—not because I had found an unwilling partner (after all, I had made sure he was pretty liquored up by the time we left the club) but because of the strange law that forbade any Cubans from staying in my hotel.
It had been a ridiculous scene. Earlier that evening, we had persuaded the hotel manager to let Alberto join me for a drink in the restaurant on the fifth floor, on the condition that he didn’t accompany me back to my room. But as the empty glasses piled up and the image of the wall in front of us became more and more blurred, so too did our understanding of the Cuban government’s logic.
Laws, as I saw them, were good for things like preventing robbers from entering my house, stopping gang members from shooting my neighbors, and keeping shirtless people from being served in restaurants. The law, however, was not supposed to infringe on my innocent attempt to have a good time.
Besides, how hard could it be to sneak Alberto in? All we had to do was quietly pay the bill and saunter out, go down one flight of stairs, and turn the corner. Who would have the nerve to follow us? It was a question I would repeat five minutes later as we headed toward my room.
“Who would have the nerve to follow us?” I asked again, this time not rhetorically. Someone was definitely trailing us.
“I don’t know him.”
“Should we run?”
“I think we should run.”
So we sped up our pace and continued out of breath until I slammed the door of my room shut behind us, slightly aware of how ridiculous it was to be twenty-five years old and still trying to sneak men into my room. What could they possibly do to me? Ground me? Deprive me of Cuban TV for a month (not much of a punishment, I might add)? They couldn’t take away my drinking rights, could they?
There was a pounding at the door that left Alberto and me unsure what to do. The knocking came again. We looked at each other and with a deep sigh, I realized that the moment of truth had come. Now my mom was gonna call his mom and they were going to talk about the condom they found in the backseat of the Plymouth Voyager—wait, I wasn’t a teenager anymore. I was a grown woman leaving condoms in the back of Plymouth Voyagers. No one could do a damn thing about it—except maybe that guy pounding on the other side of our door.
Feeling like an adult forced to confront the high school principal, reluctantly I removed the bolt and looked out into the hall. The hotel manager was there, looking very communist.
Alberto muttered some excuse about having come up to explain to me the finer points of Castro’s agricultural plan and then with his head facing toward the ground, he quietly allowed himself to be led out of the hotel into the early morning rays of a humid Havana morning.
The rules at the hotel where I was staying were pretty much in force throughout Cuba. Hotels, restaurants, and shops that admitted tourists wouldn’t allow in Cubans and vice versa, a result of the double economy that functioned on the island. Visitors had to purchase everything in dollars; Cubans patronized stores and restaurants that only accepted pesos and where the tab was about twenty times less than what a tourist would pay, which made me start to rethink this sneaking-around-hotels thing. If one of us was going to be entering every establishment clandestinely, we might as well be sneaking me into Cuban places, where our bill was going to be one-twentieth of the price. I wouldn’t have to change my dollars on the black market—I’d get the best exchange rate on the island by handing all my money to Alberto and having him pay for everything.
The plan worked brilliantly. My former thirty-five-dollar dinner bill got reduced to two bucks; instead of buying liquor in the expensive tourist stores, we’d get a liter of homemade rum on the black market for a couple of dollars. This fortuitous turn of events came about none too soon. I was running out of money and there wasn’t a Wells Fargo anywhere in sight.
My account was full of money, but suddenly I didn’t have access to it. Given the economic embargo, Cuba had no links to any U.S. banks, making my ATM card about as useful as Vicodin past its expiration date. I thought I had arrived in the country with plenty of cash; however, things in Cuba had turned out to be far more expensive than I had expected. I was staying in a rundown hovel with no hot water in a bad part of town that was running me forty-five dollars a night (this same place would have cost two dollars in Honduras).
Luckily, though, in addition to making the switch from dollars to pesos, Alberto moved us both into a private home where they charged just twenty-five dollars for a room. I was slightly curious as to why Alberto didn’t just offer to let me stay with him at his place, but a few days later when he invited me over for the first time, the reason became painfully clear. It was on my fourth day in Cuba when we stumbled in around two in the morning after a long night of drinking.
“Take a seat,” Alberto said, turning on the lights and the music.
I would have loved to, but there didn’t seem to be any space. Everywhere I looked, sleeping people were lying all over the living room.
“Wake up, guys,” Alberto said. “We have company. Wendy, I’d like you to meet my relatives.”
As if this sort of thing happened all the time, Alberto introduced me to his half-awake cousin, her husband, and their two-year-old son, who were visiting from out of town. Hearing all the ruckus, his aunt Mercedes came out of her bedroom and I wondered how many other people this tiny house held. Alberto hadn’t told me he didn’t live alone.
I was feeling terribly self-conscious about the scene we had created and was expecting a shouting match to begin at any moment, but I was the only one in the room who seemed to think anything strange was going on. In a matter of minutes everyone was up, shaking my hand, drinking coffee, and acting like it was a privilege to be woken up in the middle of the night to sit around with a foreign guest. And within an hour, we’d pulled out the bottle of rum and were sitting around laughing, joking, and telling stories.
My new Cuban friends explained the matter to me: Why sleep when you could be having fun?
A week into my ten-day trip and my favorite thing to do in Havana was to sit around drinking rum and smoking strong Cuban cigarettes with Alberto’s aunt Mercedes—my Cuban mother, as I jokingly called her. This was my kind of authority figure—she spoiled me rotten, was nurturing and kind, and was always ready to slug another shot of rum at any opportunity.
In fact, she was so entertaining that I didn’t even miss Alberto while he was off dealing with his relationship drama. His ex-girlfriend had found out about me, and in an attempt to get Alberto’s attention she had downed a bottle of pills. Now she was recovering at home in a weakened state, while Alberto was racked with guilt and remorse, nursing her back to health.
Alberto would show up distracted and distant at night and we’d engage in a total of about ten minutes worth of lousy sex before falling asleep. I wanted to attribute this to Alberto’s anxiety-ridden state, but the truth was, he had been a selfish lover from the beginning. I would have kicked him out, but I kept hoping that things would get better. Besides, I didn’t want to jeopardize the friendship I was forming with his aunt.
I spent hour after hour with her, never getting bored. Sometimes we’d talk politics, a subject she loved to educate me on, but she never mentioned Fidel Castro by name. Fearing that a neighbor would hear and report the slightest criticism, she would simply mouth the words “the bearded one.” Other times, we’d discuss mundane things like the color she thought I would look best in or her plans to do my astrological chart.
> One morning, Mercedes even got it into her head that she was going to teach me how to dance. Loosened up a little by an early glass of rum, she turned on the sounds of Celia Cruz and my first salsa lesson officially began.
It was all in the hips, she explained, somehow managing to move her large flanks with grace to the complicated drumbeat. I watched in awe as my sixty-year-old friend, heavyset and wearing a polyester muumuu, still managed to move to the rhythm like a young girl. I tried in vain to imitate her steps while Mercedes continued swaying to the music, succeeding in lowering her body to within inches of the floor.
“Is that legal?” I asked her, astounded.
“Querida, everything is legal in Cuba. Except, of course, for drugs, prostitution, leaving the country, buying Nike tennis shoes, criticizing the government, staying in Yanqui hotels, drinking homemade rum, buying eggs on the black market, and making fake cigars. But dancing is 100 percent legal. Unless, of course, you do it on Sunday.”
“What?”
“Just kidding. You can do anything you want on Sunday.”
“You can?”
“Yeah, because being religious is illegal!”
Then she slapped me on the back and let out an uproarious laugh, guffawing as she rolled her head around in circles.
English wasn’t exactly the most popular language in Cuba so I was forced to rely on my mediocre Spanish. I still struggled with the subjunctive, which was a verb tense we had all but edged out of our own tongue centuries ago at a time when we were busy incorporating lots of other tidbits from Romance languages, and it was a difficult concept to grasp.
In Spanish, there was a whole verb tense devoted to the concept of maybe. For example, when cuando vengo a tu fiesta—“when I show up at your party”—was converted to the subjunctive, cuando venga a tu fiesta, it was more like saying, “Maybe I’ll come to your party” and you understood that this person was going to try and make it but was excusing himself in the eventuality of being hit by a bus, being mugged on the way there, or finding out that a much cooler party with more expensive booze was going on next door.