by Achy Obejas
There were loose dogs everywhere, yelping excitedly, yet curiously without bite. None ever came up to me, not one ever felt threatening. Invariably mutts, they trailed clouds of fleas, registered whole patches of baldness on their rumps. They would look up through rheumy eyes, gnaw at some terrible itch on their backside, and run along.
One day, at a meeting with educators, one of the members of our delegation got up to speak. The sensitive child of Cuban exiles and the founder of various well-meaning leftist groups in the United States, he’d named his only son after the disappeared revolutionary leader Camilo Cienfuegos.
“The day the blockade is lifted—and it will be lifted . . . lifted soon—it will bring many things,” he proclaimed in halting Spanish without an interpreter. His voice rose and fell, complete with dramatic pauses just like Fidel. “New appliances and timely magazines . . . technological wonders and abundance, yes . . . but . . . it will also bring disasters . . . like greed . . . and racism.”
He became quite emotional then, recounting his own terrible stories at the hands of American prejudice. Even though he was still taking his public speaking cues from Fidel, the personal woes he was recounting were alien to anything Fidel, who speaks only of glories and threats, would have ever talked about. I was embarrassed for him, for all of us.
Then I looked around the room, at the varied colors of the members of our foreign-based delegation, and at the white-skinned, hazel-eyed descendants of northern Spain wearing official Cuban government name tags. The only island Cubans without them were the two charcoal-toned women in the room, one who walked like a shadow behind us, reaching over to pour fresh bottled water from a pitcher into our sweating tumblers, while the other sat stolidly just off a small hallway, ready to hand a few sheets of tissue paper to anyone going to the rest room.
Suddenly, rich red blood gushed out of the speaker’s nose, splattering all over his white guayabera. He looked down at himself, at the way the blood was soaking through the fabric to his breast. It was as if the blood were sprouting from a wound there instead.
“Dios mío, what’s happening to me?” he cried, plummeting.
I was closest to him so I slipped my arms around his body as soon as he began to drop, feeling the warm stickiness of his chest. He was wearing a slender gold chain with a crucifix that snapped the instant I touched him and clanged on the floor as loud as a church bell fallen loose from a tower. As he leaned on me, I heard his heart pounding, the blood beating senselessly against the walls that confined it. His pulse matched my own irregular rhythms.
“¿Qué‚ me está pasando?” he cried as we plunged, his body completely covering mine.
“It’s just a nosebleed, just a nosebleed,” the woman who’d been refilling our glasses said as she dunked her hand in the pitcher’s coolness and sprayed the man’s face with a quick snap of her fingers.
She laid him out next to me and began running her hand from his forehead to his thigh in quick, practiced gestures. I watched, hypnotized like everyone else, until she finished with him and turned to me, her hand like a bird fluttering, closing my eyelids, tracing my neck, around my breasts, and down to the tender place just inside my hip.
Then the other woman came toward us, the single sheets of tissue paper now crumpled into a white rose in her hand, and quietly wiped the blood away.
VIII
Anytime a Cuban returns to the island, we become couriers for those who do not. No matter how obstinate those who remain abroad may be about their exile, how partisan to the U.S. embargo, there is no blockade of emotion.
From the moment flights were first allowed between the United States and Cuba, the return has been something of a spectacle. Peek at the waiting area in Miami International and the Cubans who are going back are easy to spot. They’re the ones in the special holding pen who, in order to get around the weight limits imposed on baggage, wear three and four gaudily colored shirts at a time, boots as big as clown’s feet over sandals or sneakers, belts made from strings of sausages. Women don hats whose brims are dotted with earrings, pins, and other bangles that relatives in Cuba can resell to tourists. Men carry American-brand cigarettes in every pocket, and practical Italian handbags stuffed with medicines they’d normally mock as effeminate in their everyday lives.
Because of shortages in Cuba, those who return also tend to carry extraordinary quantities of foods. When the customs officers open the human-sized duffel bags of the returning exiles, cans of Spam and tuna, bottles of baby food and meat sauce spill from their bellies. I once witnessed a customs inspection in Miami that netted more than fifty pounds of frozen beef, each slab of red flesh chilled solid inside frosty freezer bags. When the customs officer, a dismayed Nicaraguan, objected, the Cuban passenger claimed the meat was not for consumption but for religious practices.
“An offering to Changó,” she said, adjusting the can of sardines she was wearing like an amulet around her neck. “It’s the only way the gods will let my sister out of Cuba!” The crowd of other Cubans who had gathered around her nodded approval (despite the fact that her claim was obviously fraudulent). They looked at the Nicaraguan officer as if he were some poor slob destined for tragedy.
Not all the freight back to Cuba is so perverse or dramatic. Every Cuban carries at least the U.S. allowed limit of $100 a day. Nearly everybody carries thousands more, usually stuffed in their pockets, suitcase linings, and tampon cartons, as if the customs officials could possibly be unaware. Because Cuba’s is a cash economy, credit cards and traveler’s checks are generally worthless, souvenirs from capitalism as alien as the Dow or a drive-up.
Curiously, returning exiles are seldom bodily searched in Miami, seldom asked about the peculiar bulges in their bosoms or thighs. It’s an honor system to which everyone seems to silently subscribe. Even the Cubans who refuse to go to Cuba, who claim they wouldn’t give Fidel a single dollar to prop up his Communist dictatorship, play along: They slip a $100 bill or two for their aunts or cousins into the pockets of some other Cuban who’s going to the island to visit his dying mother. Money’s never trusted to traveling Americans or other Latin Americans, only to Cubans, who, regardless of politics, are the only ones who really understand.
In 1987, it was still illegal for Cubans on the island to have dollars, and there were still enough Soviet subsidies available (and only a nascent black market) that most people weren’t focused on currency. Our most precious cargo wasn’t money or meat, but letters. Because there is no direct mail service between Cuba and the United States as a consequence of the embargo, correspondence can sometimes take months while the envelopes bounce around third countries—sometimes Mexico, sometimes Canada, even as far away as Italy—often showing up in Havana opened, missing pages, more the idea of a letter than a letter itself. As a result, exiles have developed an informal system of sending mail with those who return, who hand-deliver the missives or leave them with a relative or friend for later pickup.
Back in 1987, we were required to be at the airport by nine o’clock at night even though the flights to Cuba didn’t leave Miami until one in the morning, a departure time designed, we were sure, to exhaust us, to have us arrive in Havana at an awful, weary dawn, unbathed and surly.
We killed the time by organizing our mail pouches. The non-Cubans, including the group of politicos for whom I was working, looked on with a mixture of amusement and confusion as a woman with a bottle of milk of magnesium stuffed into a cheese basket on her head claimed to be going to Holguín, on the eastern side of the island, and volunteered to carry all the correspondence for Oriente except for Santiago de Cuba, which an older gentleman with a razor-thin mustache and ten T-shirts bracing his torso took and carefully folded into his Italian handbag. A young, nervous fellow who hadn’t seen his father in ten years took all the letters addressed to folks in Santa Clara, at the central crossroads of the island.
Those of us who were Havana-bound were more inclined to hold on to our own mail, although everyone seemed pleased that
a young woman from Marianao volunteered to take those letters, sparing us all trips to that distant neighborhood.
“Is anybody going anywhere special in Havana?” asked a man wearing many trousers, all of them bunched up on his crotch when he sat down, revealing their many layers like a rainbow at his waist. The non-Cuban members of my travel group stared at him unabashed.
“I’m going to the Arab society, over in Old Havana,” said an elderly grandmother with a plastic shopping bag for a purse. A man with various suit jackets and perspiration dripping off his chin in spite of the airport’s efficient air-conditioning handed her two letters to take to relatives who lived two doors down and who, apparently, he didn’t want to have to see.
I looked down at the correspondence that had been entrusted to me: one letter from my father to his childhood pal, Moisés Menach. I’d heard about him all my life, a supporting character in all my father’s stories about growing up. “I’m going to the Sephardic Hebrew Center, at Seventeen and E, wherever that is,” I volunteered (no one took me up on my offer). My father had suggested dropping the letter there rather than trying to find him; he was unsure of Moisés’s whereabouts after so many years.
My mother had declined to send anything, offering a surprisingly reactionary response: “When I left Cuba, I left everything. This life—the people here—this is what matters to me now.”
“You still have people in Cuba?” asked one of the Americans on my tour group, focusing on the envelope in my hand.
“No,” I said flatly. “This is a favor I’m doing for somebody. I don’t have anyone in Cuba.”
I knew—from the stories of Cuban acquaintances—that there were certain similarities to all first return trips to Cuba. I knew, for example, that at some point I would go looking for our home in Havana, that I would break down and cry at an unexpected moment, that it was assumed I would call the relatives who’d stayed on the island, buy them presents, have an emotional reunion, and promise to stay in touch.
But the only kin who’d stayed that I was really curious about was Ytzak, who was long dead (with an irresolvable mystery), buried outside of Havana in Guanabacoa. I had already calculated that I wouldn’t have time with my heavy interpreting schedule to get out of the city. I told myself I’d pay my respects to him on some other trip, or never. It didn’t matter then. The only other person that vaguely registered was Barbarita, somewhere in Varadero, but my mother had failed to give me an address or a phone number, and I had even less time for that kind of detective work.
On my last Sunday in Cuba, I still hadn’t delivered the letter for Moisés Menach. I had struck up a fairly friendly relationship with one of the government interpreters, a gracious young woman named Estrella Rodríguez, and I was considering simply leaving it to her for delivery. I hadn’t read my father’s letter but I wasn’t worried about its contents. My father is careful with words in his most unguarded moments so I knew this dispatch was simply a page of pleasantries for his friend, nothing the strictest censors could possibly find offensive. It didn’t matter who gave it to Moisés, whether a janitor at the temple or the highest ranking officer in the Ministry of the Interior.
When I approached Estrella before breakfast, before I could even say a word, she surprised me by telling me I could take the day off, that she’d realized I’d had no time for myself and that I, as someone born in Cuba—and on the very day the revolution triumphed!— should have a moment to ponder the consequences.
“Everyone born here, no matter where they live in the world, is cursed,” she said. Estrella was slender but, like me, with hips. If not for her black skin, we could have been sisters, illegitimate relations from a suspicious family tree.
“Not me,” I said. “I’m free. I mean, Havana’s a beautiful city, I grant you that, but no more than Paris, no more than Venice or Prague.”
She laughed. “Everybody who comes to Cuba, especially Cubans from abroad, in spite of everything, they fall in love—with the island, with another Cuban, or with our little tragedies,” she said. “But you, Ale—you, of all people—you think you’re immune, you think nothing can happen to you.”
I laughed, too, at her romantic notions, at her twisted nationalism. “I’ve told you, my being Cuban is an accident of timing and geography,” I said. “And everything’s already happened to me.”
Estrella became agitated. “Don’t say that, Alejandra, don’t say that. There are many things, you’ll see, for which you’re still destined. Just be patient.”
This is the oddity of Cuba as a godless society: Everywhere I went, people mentioned their deities, by name or by implication: through barely concealed bead necklaces that signaled by their color combinations to whom the wearer was devoted, or via shell-eyed Elegguás behind doors, glasses of water, or cigars left to burn on their own. It seemed everybody, like Estrella, thought they had a touch of clairvoyance and was constantly reading signs into the most ordinary words and gestures.
“Respect,” said Estrella, her skin like a starless night, “even if you don’t understand, respect.”
With Estrella to cover for me, I snuck away from the tour group, determined to walk the city by myself in the cacophonous late morning. Havana, it turns out, is the noisiest place in the world. In spite of the lack of automobile traffic, each car on the street made its own thunderous racket: metal squealing, motors coughing, bumpers dangling from the chassis and throwing off sparks as they scraped against the city’s craterous streets. Not to be outdone, buses struggled to the corners, overloaded and spitting black smoke in tiny explosions. In the meantime, radios competed with each other, family dramas played out on the streets as Cubans accused each other of infidelity before their neighbors, then begged forgiveness with theatrical flourishes.
By this time, I had a rough idea of where the Sephardic temple was and I figured I’d make my way there later, drop off the letter for Moisés Menach, and get back to the Habana Libre in time for the big farewell bash. It was rumored that Fidel himself might show and I was intrigued with the idea of seeing him in the flesh.
As I left the hotel that morning, the light was golden but dusty. The low-energy piropos that came my way had a sham Iberian accent, as if I were a Spanish tourist the lazy Havana boys were trying to impress. At first, I was pleased I wasn’t being identified as American. Since I knew I wasn’t quite the carnal comrade of the island, I liked the idea of being perceived as a European sophisticate, a woman of mystery and means.
Later, though, I found myself uncomfortable with my new mistaken identity: The fact is, I like American women, they have always been much more my models of choice than Latin American or European women. So why was I so pleased to have avoided my real relationship to them? I decided that it wasn’t that I was being slowly brainwashed by anti-American Cubans but that it was my very American-ness, the depth of my privilege, that allowed me to feel embarrassed by the possibility of association; that it was precisely because I knew Americans, that for me they weren’t exalted creatures but neighbors, friends, and lovers, that I saw their humanity with all its glorious imperfections.
For the same reason, I told myself, being mistaken for a Spaniard could be appealing—the distance from Spain made the association exotic and cool, and I could picture myself as a Mediterranean Mrs. Peel, sleek and imperturbable.
I smiled to myself. My father, as worried as he was about my being in Cuba, would have been so pleased.
Stepping out of the Habana Libre, I was instantly situated. The exercise of years ago, of trying to memorize the street map of Havana, had come in handy throughout my stay. I found myself anticipating streets and intersections. I knew the order of things, even if I didn’t always know where I was going.
I walked on, past fences choked with bougainvillea, marble mansions as ostentatious as Rome, and soldiers in crisp uniforms with taciturn faces. Everywhere I went, there was laundry flapping on lines hung from balconies and windows. It was all light colors, pastels rippling in the wind.
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p; A few adolescent boys approached me, asked for chewing gum, then leapt back, prize in hand, to the walls from which they seemed to emerge like miniature golems. The Malecón, with its salty spray and cracked facade, was grayer than I’d imagined, bleaker than the photos I’d seen. The few people out seemed pasty and hungover, all staring north across the water. An old man leaned against the seawall with his peculiar litany: “Por el amor de dios, por el amor de dios.”
At some point, as if by magic, I looked up and saw my old apartment building sitting ashen on a residential street in the Vedado. I had remembered it palatial, but here it was, only three stories high, square and barren. There were no Greek columns to hold up the balconies, though I could have sworn I’d run around them as a small child. The windows were boarded up, the terrace from which my father and I had watched the panic during the bombings was chipped and lifeless. The front gate to the building, now slightly unhinged, bore the green and red traces of mold and rust that would paint all of Havana just a few years later.
I took my Instamatic out of my purse and snapped a few photos, thinking that, as much as it would pain her to see this scene, my mother would appreciate it. (It never occurred to me what my father, stuck in his imaginary Spain, might think, or that he’d even miss Cuba.) After a series of shots of the building itself, I turned a few inches and framed the house next door. Surely my mother would remember her neighbors, would want to see what had happened to our old home in comparison to all the others on the street. As I focused, I noticed a man at a whitewashed window, shirtless and sure. He waved. I ignored him and clicked the shutter, then turned my attention to the house on the other side.
I wanted to shoot the whole neighborhood, to give my mother the entire picture, so I focused on the buildings across the street. This would have been my parents’ view, these blue bunkers with balconies on each floor and bars on the windows. I remembered them vaguely, recalled that then—as now—children would race up and down those exposed concrete steps as if they were flying.