by Gigi Anders
“Mi heredera,” Mami whispered to me. My heiress.
I gazed up adoringly at her beautiful freckled face framed in mosquito netting as she stroked my chubby pink cheek with her long, cool, pale, tapered, perfectly manicured fingertips. Her green irises were flecked with gold, sun rays that ringed her pupils like petals. The girl with sunflower, not kaleidoscope, eyes.
“¡Tafetán!” Mami murmured. “¡Vamos, mamita, dí tafetán!” Taffeta! Come on, little mama, say taffeta!
Since I was clueless and toothless, this was clearly not gonna happen.
“Champán,” Mami added. “Tafetán color champán.” Champagne-colored taffeta.
It took about a year of hearing this bizarre mantra over and over before I was old enough to finally understand what the fuck my mother was talking about: the color and fabric of my wedding dress.
In the 1950s cha-cha-cha Cuba was the center of the Jubanite universe. Mami says that back then, Cuba had all the modern technology and conveniences of the United States, coupled with the Old World charm, grandeur, culture, and romance of Europe and Africa. It was simultaneously sophisticated and bohemian. Look at the black-and-white photographs from that era, my family’s, anyway: Nobody looks unhappy, hungry, ugly. Our comunidad Jubana was muy bonita, beautifully dressed and beautiful.
Yet we were hardly arrivistes, historically speaking. Sephardic Jews were on the Santa Maria alongside el Almirante Cristobal Colón, Admiral Christopher Columbus, when they marched en masse out of the soft blue waves through the sugar-white sands of the Cuban beach in October 1492 to claim the island for España. The Jews were Spaniards called conversos, or Maranos, Jewish converts to Christianity. They were fleeing those outrageous anti-Semites Ferdinand and Isabella, and the king’s close, personal, sicko amigo, Tomas de Torquemada, the Inquisition’s twisted coordinador. One Marano, Luis de Torres, was Columbus’s interpreter, being fluent in Hebrew, Spanish, Aramaic, and Arabic. De Torres is especially dear to my heart—and lungs—because he first observed and recorded tobacco smoking on the island. He wrote of seeing “many people, women as well as men, with a flaming stick of herb in their hands, taking in its aromatic smell from time to time.”
Columbus found Cuba, which he called the pearl of the Antilles, the most beautiful place human eyes had ever seen. That’s what he reported to his wacky Jew-hating patrons back home in Madrid. La tierra mas fermosa (it’s really hermosa, but in old Spanish they didn’t use H’s) que ojos humanos han visto. The most beautiful land human eyes have ever seen.
What must my then-teenaged Eastern European and Russian shtetl-reared grandparents, aunts, and uncles have been feeling and thinking, pulling into Havana harbor? Were they apprehensive? Happy? Frightened? Dazzled? Lonesome? Relieved? Completely weirded out? All that fierce tropical beauty and shimmering heat, so far removed from the cold, bleak Schindler’s List grayness of home. Here was a bird of paradise dreamland in blinding Technicolor, like Dorothy Gale falling asleep in black-and-white Kansas and awakening in colorful Oz. In Cuba the air was steamy and salty, and through it flew tiny colibrís, hummingbirds, and cotorras, parrots. There were palm trees and coconuts, plantains and fruta bomba, papayas. (In Cuban Spanish, the word papaya is slang for vagina, so we call the actual fruit fruta bomba. Which sounds good for vaginal slang, too, come to think of it.)
Maybe it was Eden, as dreamlike and foreign as Hieronymus Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights.
Unreal. That’s what my ancestors thought. We’re on a different planet now.
In my parents’ and grandparents’ time—roughly from 1920 through 1961—Cuba was, for the most part, religiously and racially tolerant. My family never spoke of experiencing much anti-Semitism. My father’s parents, the less well-to-do Leon and Zelda Andursky, hailed from Poland. In Cuba, the slang word for Jews of any nationality was polaco, Polack. Oye polaco, ¿qué pasa? It was a term of endearment among ourselves, but definitely off-limits for non-Jews. (It’s like blacks calling one another nigger. They can, you can’t.) Gentiles would call us los hebreos, the Hebrews, never los judios. My Andursky abuelos never changed their surname, but Papi did, to Anders, when he began practicing medicine. At the Centro Médico Nacional, he’d overheard hushed comments about “Cuba is for Cubans” and “el médico polaco.” Papi didn’t like it. I love Anders. I think it’s a great name. It sounds like Switzerland. In German, the word actually means “different” or “otherwise.” Plus Anders is the perfect neutral foil for Gigi. It tempers the bubble-bath/poodle/rhinestone connotations, not to mention it beats the shit out of Gigi Andursky as a byline.
Meanwhile, Hollywood movie stars and assorted celebs and politicos were flocking to our island to play: Ava Gardner, Frank Sinatra, Groucho Marx, Dorothy Lamour, Maurice Chevalier, Eartha Kitt, George Raft, Edith Piaf, Cab Calloway, Dorothy Dandridge, Tony Martin, Jennifer Jones, David Selznick, Marlon Brando, Pablo Picasso, and Jesse Owens (who raced against—and beat—a horse). Hemingway was in his Old Man and the Sea prime, Winston Churchill couldn’t get enough of our posh casinos, country clubs, or cigars. And the Mafia, well, you saw Godfather II, right? The $14 million Hotel Riviera, for example, was financed mostly by the Cuban government for Meyer Lansky. (They had a floor show in the Copa Room headlined by Ginger Rogers. Lansky noted that “Rogers can wiggle her ass, but she can’t sing a goddamn note.”)
Papi said Cuba was a corrupt place under the crooked, ruthless dictator General Fulgencio Batista’s rule, and corrupt before him, but it was an alluring, sexy, prosperous, lush, advanced, beguiling, laissez-faire kind of corrupt. You know, fun corrupt. American musical acts went there to play all the time. That’s why Cuban Americans of my parents’ generation think it’s hilarious that the 1997 Buena Vista Social Club CD was such a hit in this country, as if los Yanquis were just discovering the sinuous beauty and earthy soulfulness of our native music.
I asked my mom’s best friend, Eliana, what she thought of the record, and she said, “Dat cheet? Dat was, like, música del campo [country music]. Tacky. Een Cuba I leesehn-ed to Nahpkeen Kohl.” (She always called him Napkin.)
Mami used to listen to “The Christmas Song” crooner, too, until she met Nat King Cole one day at a baseball game in Havana. She ran over to him, confident and full of teenaged life, all freckles and bosoms and red lipstick, and breathlessly asked for an autograph.
Cole slowly sized her up from his seat, paused, frowned, and condescendingly said, “No.”
Mami’s never forgiven a no from ANYbody.
“Wow,” she sputtered. “Joo are really an ASShole.”
She’s hated Nat King Cole’s guts ever since.
Following the earlobe trauma, the other key thing that happens in early Jubanahood is that by age two or so, people stop feeding you just plain old leche and start with the café con leche at breakfast. You know how they say that one drop of black blood in a glass of white milk makes you racially a chocolate milk? Well, one drop of espresso in a glass of heavily sugared hot leche makes you wired. It permanently alters your already nervous system and turns you into a caffeine and sugar addict with an attitude. (So the next time you ask yourself, “What is it with these fucking Cubans?”—remember the café con leche.)
The trick about café con leche is that it’s initially soothing but ultimately stimulating. Soon after I started drinking it every morning I began speaking in whole sentences. I haven’t been able to stop myself ever since. When my parents had parties, which was constantly, I’d sit on the living room’s cool Spanish tile floor in a pair of black ballet tights and nothing else (except the jewelry, of course) and explain the meaning and causes of thunder and lightning. Cuba’s known to have hurricanes every now and then, so I knew this would be a big hit for my audience.
“En resumidas cuentas, todo esto tiene que ver con fuerzas negativas y fuerzas positivas,” I commenced. “Como la vida misma.” The bottom line is that it all comes down to negative forces and positive forces. Like life itself.
The well-heeled invitados
were muy impressed. They approvingly sipped their daiquiris, Bacardi Cuba Libres, and Manischewitz.
“She looks so much like David,” people always told Mami, “you could dress her in a white lab coat and send her to the hospital. No one would know the difference.”
“I don’ agree,” Mami always replied, even though she knew it was true. “La niña ees very Benes. Her hair ees rayt, like mine an’ Bernardo’s.”
No. My hair was and really is auburn, with golden-red highlights. But my mother has always considered redheads as well as her side of the family infinitely superior to everyone else. Certainly the Beneses were richer and more refined than the Andurskys, but none of my grandparents had ever had more than an elementary school education. Papi’s parents were comfortable, middle-class. They’d emigrated as newlyweds in 1927 or ’28 from Zalnik, Poland. It’s an obscure village like Kraisk, that no map shows. Papi was born shortly after they’d arrived, in 1929. Zeide Leon owned Cuban American Textiles, in La Habana Vieja, Old Havana, at #557, Calle Compostela. He and my grandmother, Grandma Zelda—“Baba Zoila” in Yiddish and Spanish—sold upholstery fabric for sofas, chairs, and curtains. They also sold fabric for men’s suits and women’s dresses. The store had no a.c., just two huge standing fans. Mami says in the summer the heat in there was unbearable.
Zeide Leon was short and strong, wiry, well-built. He smelled like steam, from his freshly pressed white short-sleeved shirts, and Aqua Velva. On Sunday afternoons we’d stroll through El Jardín Botánico in Miramar or El Parque Central in La Habana Vieja. I’d pick flowers to bring home to my mother while Zeide Leon kept an eye out for stray cats. When he’d see one he’d pummel it with stones and laugh maniacally. I’d scream and run under Baba Zoila’s full skirts to hide, which only made Zeide laugh harder.
Baba Zoila was bossy, critical, and dyed her beehived hair a matte black-brown. She wore heavy red lipstick, covered her furniture in plastic sheeting, and made a lot of boiled chicken and Jell-O. She doted on my father and held him responsible for Tio Julio, Papi’s brother who was five years younger. Baba Zoila held Mami in medium esteem at best. She thought Mami was self-centered and spoiled rotten. On our Sunday outings, Baba Zoila would tell me, “Your Papi is the most handsome, smart, giving, wonderful person in the world! The best son, brother, doctor, father, and husband! That’s why he’s named after a king. You know King David?”
“Uh-huh. What about my Mami?” I’d ask, shaking the dirt off the roots of my filched hibiscus or jasmine or frangipani or gardenias.
“Your Mami?” she’d reply. “She’s…she’s good, too.”
Good? She was way more than good. She may not have been a biblical monarch but she was a goddamn goddess. And the fact that you didn’t like it didn’t change it; even I knew that. That’s why I thought it was mighty big of Mami to give me the floor, if only fleetingly, at her sophisticated soirées. Here was a deity who could share the spotlight sometimes. I could never compete with her beauty, grace, and charisma, of course, or make Papi pay attention to me, but I could be funny, smart, charming, and una pícara, a cheeky girl.
So I pressed on with my thunder and my lightning.
“¡Y entonces hay un choque!” I said, clapping my tiny hands together once very loudly to illustrate the fury of el choque, the shock, as the two forces collide. That always gets their attention.
“Calor y frío,” I continued. Hot and cold. I’d squeeze my eyes shut, turn my head away from the impact, and slam my palms together again. “¡Ay, que escándalo!” Oh, what a scandal!
Exhausted from my educational performance art, I’d drop backward and faint.
“Coño, super-mona, pero demasiado café con leche, tú,” was my audience’s unanimous verdict. Shit, she’s super-cute but too much café con leche, man.
“A ella le gusta,” said Mami, shrugging. She likes it.
Meanwhile, Tio Jaime was tickling the soles of my feet to revive me. Screaming with laughter, I tried kicking and kicking him away. He’d grab a black stockinged foot and drag me around as I shook my hips and swayed my abnormally large head (threatening to crack it open like a coconut on that hard Spanish tile) as I crooned the Elvis song I’d heard many times on Carmen’s kitchen radio (she called him El Rey): “‘Baby, I ain’t askin’ much of you/Just a big-a big-a hunk o’ love will do/If you’d give me just one sweet kiss, no no no no no no no…’”
“Y bueno, de todas maneras,” Mami concluded, surveying me wiggling down on the floor from the chic elevation of her black peau de soie Dior open-toed slingback stilettos as she delicately dabbed the side of her shapely mouth with the expert tip of her pinky to assure her red lipstick wasn’t wandering, “la niña salió así.”
And anyway, the girl was born like this.
Mami’s bête noire may be Napkin Cole. Papi’s is Herbert L. Matthews. “Herbert ‘El Cabrón [The Bastard]’ Matthews,” my father calls him. “It’s all his fault. Yep. He was a dick.”
Before I was born, in February 1957, the New York Times ran a three-part series written by Herbert L. Matthews, who’d gone to see Castro in his hideout in the Sierra Maestra, the rugged mountain range in southeast Cuba. As author Tad Szulc wrote, at age fifty-seven, Matthews was a highly respected, seasoned pro, a member of the paper’s editorial board, who specialized in overseas reportage. Matthews was an elite: intellectual and reticent but fundamentally quixotic. Matthews’s wildly sympathetic portrait of Castro and his followers turned Castro into a myth of goodness, guts, and social justice. The wonderfully written stories vastly influenced the planet’s attitude toward that myth. After all, it’s the New York Times, for God’s sake.
“[Señor Castro] is a hero of the Cuban youth,” Matthews wrote. “This was quite a man—a powerful six-footer, olive-skinned, full-faced, with a straggly beard. He was dressed in an olive gray fatigue uniform and carried a rifle with a telescopic sight, of which he was very proud…[Señor Castro is] an educated, dedicated fanatic, a man of ideals, of courage and of remarkable qualities of leadership…[who speaks with] extraordinary eloquence…He has strong ideas of liberty, democracy, social justice, the need to restore the Constitution, to hold elections…he is now invincible…invulnerable.
“The personality of the man is overpowering. It was easy to see that his men adored him and also to see why he has caught the imagination of the youth of Cuba all over the island…the best elements in Cuban life—the unspoiled youth, the honest business man, the politician of integrity, the patriotic Army officer—are getting together to assume power…they are giving their lives for an ideal and for their hopes of a clean, democratic…and therefore anti-Communist Cuba.”
“Coño,” Papi says, “qué bruto ese Matthews. Qué ingenuo. Eso nos jodió.” Dammit, what a dunce, that Matthews. What a naïf. That fucked us.
Well, if the august Herbert “El Cabrón” Matthews, who came to Cuba all the way from the New York Times, was mesmerized and taken in, then so were we. Because during that period, and much to Zeide Boris’s horror, my very own mother and Uncle Bernardo were publicly going around with other young people clutching anti-Batista placards. Bernardo even got arrested once for organizing an anti-Batista protest rally at a Havana Sugar Kings baseball game in Havana’s El Gran Estadio del Cerro. Naïve or not, Matthews’s trilogy had provoked a virtually universal groundswell of support for Fidel Castro.
“What’s wrong with you?” Zeide admonished Bernardo after a friend got him released from the slammer. “You’d have to be crazy to get yourself killed over politics.”
Zeide Boris knew firsthand what communism looked and smelled like. And sounded like: As he often said, “When you hear a bark, it must be a dog.”
“Zeide had leev-ed through eet een Russia,” Mami says. “He recogniz-ed Feedehl was joozeengh de same tacteecs. But Bernardo an’ I were totally doop-ed.”
Because Bernardo was totally committed to Castro, he and my grandfather got into terrible arguments. Tío Jaime, Mami says, was “very cool” about the coming revolut
ion. Mami wasn’t as passionate as Bernardo, but she wasn’t on the fence like Jaime, and she was profoundly influenced by Bernardo’s politics. For example, a law school classmate of Bernardo’s, Osmel Francis de los Reyes, was also a virulent anti-Batista Cuban. But unlike my mother and Tío Bernardo, Osmel was being hunted by Batista’s men as a traitor for his outspoken candor. So, like Anne Frank hiding in the secret annex with her family, Osmel holed up at my parents’ apartment for six months in 1957 while Mami was pregnant with me. Mami says the mailman thought Osmel was Mami’s lover because he’d stop by with the day’s mail and see the two of them in their bathrobes, drinking their cafés con leche at the breakfast table. Mami and Bernardo eventually got Osmel asylum at the embassy of Brazil. Osmel moved to Brazil and lived there for years before returning to Cuba, a broken man with a bad drinking problem. I asked Mami why in the world she would take such a risk, especially while being pregnant, and if Osmel was Bernardo’s friend, why didn’t he go hide at Bernardo’s damn house?