Havana

by Mark Kurlansky

  Thirty years before, the Cuban national anthem, which is still the national anthem of Cuba today, had called for martyrs. “The Hymn of Bayamo,” or “La Bayamesa,” was written in 1868 by Perucho Figueredo, supposedly while still on horseback after the Spanish defeat at Bayamo, and it states, “Que morir por la patria es vivir” (To die for the motherland is to live).

  An ineffective soldier, Martí became a powerful martyr. The revolution loves him. Its bitter opponents love him. Both Communists and Fascists quote him. The Spanish he bitterly opposed all his life admire him, as do the Americans he mistrusted. Only a martyr could do this.

  •

  Martí was the first in Cuba’s long tradition of martyrs and suicides. In 1958, when writer Reinaldo Arenas was a fourteen-year-old in the rural town of Holguín, he decided that he and his friend Carlos should run away to the mountains and join Castro’s guerillas. They could not be like the real guerrillas, los barbudos, so called for the beards they wore, because they were too young to have beards, but they could, in Arenas’s words, “take part in some battle and lose our lives.”

  Arenas recalled a trial, soon after the revolution, of a group of air force officers accused of trying to bomb Santiago. Fidel Castro himself was prosecuting, but the judge, himself a woolly-chinned barbudo, a member of the movement, could see that the officers were innocent and ruled in their favor. Then, having gone against the movement, he shot himself.

  There were numerous suicides in the early years of the revolution. Olga Andreu, a woman who hosted clandestine readings of dissident writers, mostly writers who had applied to leave Cuba, jumped off her balcony without explanation one day. A revolutionary named Eddy Suñol, in charge of the many executions of “traitors” in his area for fifteen years after the revolution, put a bullet in his own head. Arenas wrote, “Suñol’s death was just one more suicide in our political history, which is an endless history of suicides.”

  Arenas also had an economics professor named Juan Pérez de la Riva, an aristocrat who was the only one in his family who stayed to support the revolution. A romantic who was always unlucky in love, he was allowed to periodically visit his family in Paris and jumped off a bridge every time he went there. But he never succeeded in killing himself. Finally he fell in love with a woman who loved him in return, and they were happy. Now he wanted to live, but he got throat cancer and died. That is a perfect example of a Havana story.

  In Havana, suicide is a respected alternative. It certainly did not damage Hemingway’s standing in the city. Arenas wrote about the high rate of suicide among prisoners at the Morro. It was a means of escape. Slaves had also felt this way. If you ask an Habanero, “How are you?” a frequent answer will be “Still alive.” A similar response is used almost everywhere in the Caribbean where there is a history of slavery. For slaves, death was ever present. It also meant resistance and escape, as there was the common belief that, once dead, a slave’s spirit returned to Africa. The Tainos also resisted the Spanish with mass suicides.

  Arenas, who used to tell many suicide stories, ended up killing himself in 1990. When he saw cats leaping off Havana balconies, he thought even the cats were attempting suicide, which probably says more about Arenas than about cats. He went into exile and contracted AIDS and decided to avoid an unpleasant death by killing himself. But first he wrote an autobiography, significantly titled Before Night Falls, which resembles Martí’s Versos Sencillos in that it begins by telling the reader that he is about to die and wants to get the book out before he goes.

  Another lost writer is Guillermo Rosales. A Havana native born in 1946, he wanted so desperately to leave Cuba in the 1970s that, according to Arenas, he conceived of a plot to disguise himself as Nicolás Guillén, who, as a supporter of the revolution, was free to travel. Eventually Rosales managed to get to Miami without a disguise. There, he lived an unhappy and marginal life in halfway houses in the 1980s, but he continued to write, often destroying his manuscripts if there was no interest in them after a short period. In 1993, he destroyed all his manuscripts and fired a handgun into the side of his head. He left behind two novellas and five short stories—brilliant work, just a tease, enough to hint at what we are missing. Isn’t suicide on one level or another usually an act of aggression, a form of attack? Weren’t the slaves right about that?

  A number of Havana mayors have killed themselves. Wilfred Fernández, a loyal Machado supporter, was arrested in 1933 when Machado was overthrown; while imprisoned in La Cabaña, he shot himself in the head. Mayor Manuel Fernández Supervielle put a bullet in his head in 1947 over his failure to live up to a campaign promise to improve the city’s water supply.

  The most spectacular Havana suicide in anyone’s memory was that of politician Eduardo Chibás, often called Eddy and sometimes called El Loco, because buried inside him was a kind of fervor that makes people wonder. He considered himself a “revolutionary,” but then, so have most Cuban politicians. For two hundred years, “revolution” has been an overused word in Cuba. When Castro came to power, many were surprised to find that his earlier proclamations were true, that he really wanted a revolution.

  What made Eddy Chibás an unusual politician was that he was so wealthy that he had no interest in stealing, so he didn’t like politicians who did, which was most of them. He originally supported Dr. Ramón Grau, a physician from a wealthy tobacco family who replaced Machado. But by the 1940s, he and many others suspected Grau of corruption, and Chibás organized a movement against him called the Orthodox Party. Of course, Grau and Chibás both claimed that their party was the heir to Martí’s “revolutionary” movement. Young Fidel Castro was an Ortodoxo.

  Chibás ran against Grau’s chosen successor, Carlos Prío Socarrás, but Chibás was too unattractive for Havana politics. Short, stumpy, and balding, with thick glasses, he lost. This was more than El Loco could bear, and he rented a radio station from which to broadcast hour-long Sunday afternoon diatribes against Prío. With his squeaky voice, he was not even attractive for radio. Nevertheless, in 1950 people started turning against Prío, and Chibás started to become popular.

  Just when he was riding high, though, he made a mistake by railing against an alleged incident of corruption that seemed false—it seemed that Chibás had been misinformed. He started to lose all his credibility.

  This being Havana, it was time to consider martyrdom for the cause. At the end of his next broadcast diatribe, on August 5, 1951, Chibas announced, “This is my last call,” a declaration often mockingly repeated for months in the heartless humor of Havana. Then he took out a .32 caliber revolver and shot himself in the stomach, a slow and painful way to die. The final pronouncement, the shot fired, the body thumping onto the table by the microphone—it was all supposed to be a dramatic message for his listeners. Except that, as Cabrera Infante said, “being a true Cuban politician,” Chibás had talked beyond his allotted time, and during the whole grand finale the station had cut to a coffee commercial. El Loco died of his wound a week later.

  Arenas’s grandfather had set up a radio with an antenna fastened to a bamboo pole, because he wanted to hear the Chibás Sunday broadcasts. On the afternoon of the final one, Arenas’s great-grandmother was leaning into the radio, and just before the finale, lightning struck the antenna, traveled down the wire, and electrocuted her. At the funeral, Arenas’s mother was in tears, and he went to comfort her. “I’m not crying because of my grandmother,” she said, “but because of Chibás.”

  •

  In this city devoid of commercial advertising, a certain poster about death is everywhere. It is the Korda photograph of Che with the message SOCIALISM OR DEATH! This might strike a traveler who didn’t know Havana as a little strange. Why not something positive about socialism and life? Why not “Long live socialism”? But the rhetoric of the revolution, just like the rhetoric of Martí and the independence movement, was all about death. Castro, like Martí, always promised death. “A revolution,” he said, “is a struggle to the death between
the future and the past.” A struggle to the death does not seem like a great future unless you have an inordinate appreciation of death. In fact, the angry-eyed Korda portrait is about death. It was taken at a funeral on March 5, 1960, for victims of an anti-revolutionary saboteur who had bombed a freighter.

  In the language of the revolution: “Men die. The party is immortal.” Or the slogan that most reveals the revolution’s roots in the language of slave uprisings: “We will drown ourselves in the sea before we consent to be anyone’s slave.”

  It is fitting that while such pronouncements are being made from the José Martí platform at the Plaza de la Revolución, turkey vultures—aura tiñosa in Cuban Spanish—birds of death often circle overhead. It is as though nature was displaying a Cuban sense of humor. These birds are very large and ugly, but graceful in flight, as is evident as they loop over the Martí statue. Naturally, in Havana street humor there are many explanations for why the vultures are drawn to this spot, but few scientific ones.

  Perhaps they just like statues. A few miles away, in Cojímar, the birds circle over a bust of Hemingway. The town of Cojímar looks a little roughed up, as do all Cuban towns, but its one pristine object is the concrete platform with stairs leading up to the ring of pillars surrounding the five-foot stone block with the green bronze bust of Hemingway. He wears the same silly grin that he has at El Floridita. It is poor form to speak badly of this large metal bust that lacks aesthetic appeal and doesn’t even look much like Hemingway, because it was paid for by the meager earnings of local fishermen who gathered their metal fittings and propellers to melt down for this likeness of their hero. The fishermen like the statue, and so do the buzzards.

  •

  From the outset, the revolution seemed in search of martyrs. Fidel, Martí-like, often spoke of his own death, his readiness to die. In 1956 in Mexico, preparing to land in Cuba to begin the insurgency, he said, “In 1956 we will be free or we will be martyrs.”

  Fidel understood the political value of martyrdom. The first time the people in Havana started to notice him was when he leaped onto Eddy Chibás’s grave at his burial in Colón cemetery and delivered a stirring speech. But unlike Martí and Chibás, Fidel envisioned living and being in power, and doing both for as long as possible. When he finally died at age ninety in 2016 he probably improved his stature, because in Havana a dead hero is worth much more than a decrepit elderly one, even if he was kept out of sight.

  Many were killed by Batista’s men—thousands according to Fidel—and plaques and monuments were erected to them. But none were large enough to be a Martí-size martyr, a martyr who could stand for the cause.

  On October 28, 1959, a twin-engine Cessna airplane carrying Camilo Cienfuegos crashed at sea and was never recovered. Dead at age twenty-seven, not yet a year after Castro took power, he might have been the martyr of the revolution. Everyone loved Camilo, who had the revolution’s most seductive smile. But there were problems. The best friend/nice guy is not ideal martyr material. Also, no one knows how Cienfuegos died. The plane just disappeared. Naturally, some said that Fidel had him killed, but there is no real evidence for that. He was probably the best-liked revolutionary, and his death is remembered every October 28 with flowers tossed into the murderous sea. But a true martyr needs to die in a showdown.

  Then there was Che, who was not the nice guy, but the pure revolutionary, the Robespierre of the Cuban Revolution. In France in 1792, when the Convention accused Robespierre, who would become the author of what was called the Reign of Terror, of allowing the French Revolution to become too bloody, with too many executions, Robespierre replied, “Do you want a revolution without a revolution?” That was Che’s point of view as well.

  Fidel Castro admired Robespierre and his Reign of Terror and even said, “We need many Robespierres in Cuba.” He had one, but Che, always the revolutionary, grew restless running a government and directing a bank. He left to continue the revolution, first in the Congo and then in Bolivia, where the Bolivian army, along with the CIA, killed him. Now the revolution has its great martyr, the revolutionary who gave his life for revolution, killed by the CIA. Legend spread that his last words were “Shoot—you are only going to kill a man.” In some tellings, it is “Shoot, you coward . . .” There is a good possibility that he never said any of these words, in which case it would be interesting to know who made them up, because they embody a very specific personality: brave, militant, macho, and with little regard for human life.

  THIRTEEN

  How to Argue in Havana

  But we can’t lean only on poetic delirium. Let’s seek support too in what we can call scientific delirium.

  — JOSÉ LEZAMA LIMA, Paradiso (1966)

  Havana always seems to be in a state of delirium, and every Habanero seems to have his or her own form of it. Poet José Lezama Lima lived in a state of poetic delirium, which ran afoul of the Cuban government’s carefully reasoned scientific delirium. Lezama’s masterpiece of poetic delirium, Paradiso, infuriated the Cuban government, though they probably didn’t understand it, since it is so dense and wandering that no one really understands it. All of Latin America hailed Paradiso as a work of genius except the Cuban government.

  The book ignores all rules of plot and narrative, and takes flight in all directions. Julio Cortázar, the celebrated Argentine novelist and a great admirer of the book, wrote, “At times, reading Paradiso, one has the feeling that Lezama has come from another planet.”

  How could the Cuban government condemn a book that no one understands? Chalk it up to scientific delirium, the revolution’s elaborately constructed set of rules and principles and correct ideals.

  In Havana, sex is always a favorite subject, and the more explicit the better. Cabrera Infante wrote a short story about a man who had sex with a sea turtle, and no one batted an eye. But when Lezama wrote about men and men having sex (as well as men and women having sex; one detailed scene described a man having sex with a young woman and then with her young brother), it was considered perverted, and the government banned his work from being published.

  Lezama, who refused to leave Havana, spent the rest of his life in a kind of internal exile, unpublished and without work. The popular poet Dulce María Loynaz had a similar fate. She was a very different kind of writer but they had both committed the sin of ignoring revolutionary delirium—they had their own.

  Until recently, there was almost nothing less acceptable in Cuban society than homosexuality. In Havana, men were always ostentatiously male; a male friend was not a “buddy” or “dude,” but a “gallo,” a rooster. On the streets, the worst thing you could call a man was maricón, pájaro, ganso—there were, and are, dozens of pejoratives, as well as a whole other set of negative phrases for lesbians, most of them containing the word tortilla, meaning “scrambled eggs.” Gays were sent to obligatory military service camps, where they were subjected to cruel and backward attempts to “cure” them with electric shock therapy.

  Then, suddenly, in the 1990s, with the flexibility granted to an absolute dictatorship, the state completely reversed itself on the subject. Today, openly gay people can—not commonly, but sometimes—be seen in Havana at rock concerts or street parties. Homosexuality is also dealt with in books and films.

  The strength of the Cuban police state is that it is difficult to know what will lead to trouble. The state accepts criticism. Desnoes’s novels, Padura’s mysteries, and Gutiérrez’s films are full of criticism of the state. But when Lezama wrote about homosexuality, that was a different matter. And when Villarreal, the man who ran the Hemingway house, ran afoul of the government, it wasn’t because he criticized the revolution, which might have been acceptable, but because he showed no interest in the subject at all. In Havana, what could be more suspicious than not having an opinion?

  Foreign reporters have always been perplexed at how freely the people of Havana talk about political issues. But there is no police state that could keep Habaneros from talking, from expressing o
pinions, from joking and poking fun at authority. That is almost the definition of an Habanero. García Lorca called them hablaneros, from the verb hablar, “to talk.”

  In addition, the government is constantly changing the rules of the game—and it seems certain that it will continue to do so. But despite all the changes, Havana remains Havana.

  Habaneros seem to understand their country’s ever-changing rules, but they are confusing to a foreigner. One night I was walking down a dark and deserted street in Centro Habana, cautiously looking around. Since the embargo had cut off the use of U.S. credit cards, my pockets were stuffed with cash. My caution must have shown, because a tall, thin young Cuban walked up and said, “Don’t worry. You are safe in Havana. There are two million people and one million of them are police.” (Habaneros love to walk up to strangers and make this kind of declaration, usually with an element of ironic humor.)

  The tall, thin young Cuban was only slightly exaggerating. The police are everywhere in Havana. The green-uniformed MININT, the internal security police, are tough-looking in that way that Cubans can look. But the regular gray-uniformed Havana police are, to be candid, the sexiest police force I have ever seen—beautiful young men and women in uniforms so perfectly molded to their forms that you wonder if they have their own tailors. These police seem to spend their days on the street in groups of two or three, always a mix of men and women together, just teasing and flirting with one another.

  Foreign reporters get very excited when people refer to either of the Castro brothers by one of their numerous nicknames or indicate the bearded Fidel by stroking their chin, as though they wouldn’t dare use their names. But of course Habaneros love nicknames and hand gestures. Habaneros flap their arms like a bird to say “I’m leaving.” They don’t hesitate to refer to Fidel or Raúl by name, and they love political humor. A popular joke is: The Revolution’s three great success stories: health care, education, and sports. Its three great failures: breakfast, lunch, and dinner.