It doesn’t hurt the state’s inferential image that this ritual photo is often taken as a group shot, including not only immediate family and friends but also the couple’s padrino, their spiritual godfather. A Cuban’s padrino guides him through life by consulting the orishas, those West African gods—such as Ochún—who found New World life in syncretistic harmony with Catholic saints. The orishas became shape-shifters, their divinity discernible in an infinity of symbols, from numbers and colors to saints and celebrities. Their altars, in the homes of padrinos and millions more Cuban believers, are often visually hectic assemblages of candles, flowers, cigars, and other offerings to spirits represented by dolls, statues, masks, flags, and photographs. It’s not unusual for an altar to welcome orishas with forms or images of St. Barbara and various Mary avatars, Indian caciques, Pope John Paul II, painted skulls, Jesus, and, yes, Che Guevara. He’s often present at altars that honor the popular thunder orisha Changó, and sweet Ochún, the goddess of love.
But it’s obvious, and has been for almost as many years as Che’s been dead, that the Revolution’s love-at-first-sight stage is long past. If the people’s triumph was ever a no-strings-attached orgy, that memory’s about as relevant as any failed marriage’s early, ecstatic sexual history. Now the people’s power, poder popular, is trussed up and struggling like an S&M submissive who’s forgotten the “safe word.” The government’s still sexy, but …
I sat in the Centro de Prensa Internacional’s lobby for three days, looking at abstract pudenda long enough to think all that through. At last I paid almost ten bucks for a card enabling an hour’s slow, censored access to the Internet on one of the balky computers the CPI makes available to journalists, just so I could send an e-mail upstairs, where the official I was waiting for might or might not have been.
Then I took a walk over to Habana Vieja, Old Havana, heading down Calle Obispo, Bishop Street, famous for Hemingway-linked hotels, restaurants, and bars, including the Ambos Mundos and La Floridita. On the lookout for a cheap, walkaround lunch, I took a chance on something the government-run fast-food emporium called “pizza,” which turned out to be a thin tomato gruel smeared over a length of greasy, baked sawdust, topped with an unsettlingly translucent substance advertised as “cheese.” This last ingredient emitted a wan, chemical reek so drear that I complained about it when I got home to Alamar that night. Yolanda’s grandson David let me in on the Havana rumor that pizza “cheese” is merely melted latex condoms.
I believe.
While I was still trying to eat the thing, I came to a crossroads where a cop was detouring foot traffic around a building under reconstruction. She was a motorcycle policewoman, sitting astride her enormous Japanese imitation of a Harley-Davidson cruiser, and her sense of style went way up above and beyond the call of duty.
Tight-strapped, shiny black, nearly knee-high leather boots. Black jodhpurs, spandex-snug around her powerful thighs. Blue uniform shirt tailored to sheathe her muscle-thick torso like shrink-wrap steel, tucks and darts turreting each formidable teat. Wraparound mirror shades, of course. Her hair a helmet of fantastically disciplined cornrows, studded every few centimeters with big, jewel-bright plastic beads.
All this was impressive enough, and she knew it; she couldn’t keep from embellishing the Cuban cop’s professionally merciless frown with flourishes of an equally merciless smirk. She saw herself mirrored in our eyes, in our startled and even alarmed fascination, and liked what she saw. But it wasn’t until I got within a few paces that I caught the consummating details: mesh-backed, fingerless leather biking gloves, the better to set off fake fingernails well over an inch long, polished white and painted, each one, quick to tip, with bright red lightning bolts. Red and white, the colors of fulgurant Changó, orisha of lightning and thunder!
¡Qué poder!
What power! And not just hers, though she deserves to be an international icon of dominatrix chic. She’d put her kink in service to the state, and her style reflects the dark side of the government’s sex appeal. Power is supposed to be the ultimate aphrodisiac, stiffening both user and used. So when the Cuban state can’t please its hungry, frustrated people with yet another erotic recital of their old love-honor-and-liberate Revolutionary wedding vows, it breaks out the metaphorical whips and straps, ties dissent to the bedposts, and reminds everybody who’s boss. Make them eat some of that “pizza” off the floor. Make ’em say that stuff on top is cheese. You’ve got to be cruel to be kind.
The savvy Castro regime has connected Che’s iconic passion to this dark-side force, too.
In the rebels’ first days in power, Che presided over show trials and executions of hundreds of Batista’s supporters in Havana’s La Cabaña fortress. The majority were policemen and soldiers who had taken an active part in the torture and murder of revolutionaries, dissidents, and innocents, but the trials were so swift and the sentences so harsh as to shock Stateside onlookers. “Revolutionary justice” created enemies among relatives of the slain—many of them already self-exiled in Miami—but the trials were very popular with the masses.
In this period, Che also helped organize a secret police agency, Seguridad del Estado, generally known as G-2. After the failed, U.S.-backed Bay of Pigs invasion empowered the Revolution to clamp down on all opposition, G-2 was reorganized and re-branded as the Ministry of the Interior. In Cuba: A Global Studies Handbook, Ted Henken describes MININT as “a large, bureaucratic organization with a wide range of security-related responsibilities, not unlike the newly formed, controversial and quite unwieldy U.S. Department of Homeland Security.” Its components include the counterintelligence vice ministry, the vice ministry of the economy, both the national police force and a paramilitary army, immigration control, identification control, the prison system, and even Cuba’s firefighters.
All this power is directed from the Ministry of the Interior building over on the Plaza de la Revolución. And on a wall of that building, facing the plaza where, until recently, Fidel used to harangue the people, Korda’s image of Che is translated into a five-story steel sculpture.
It’s really a sort of stenciled graffito on steroids: Korda’s portrait is so well known that we need connect only a few of its essential dots to recognize Che. And stripping it down to a few giant steel pen-strokes makes its message all the more usefully ambiguous: Is this revolutionary ardor or anger? Cruelty or kindness? The wall behind the face, MININT’s wall, says the answer is classified. And who are you to be asking questions? Let me see your ID …
Concerning which, the e-mail from the ground floor seemed to have done the trick. When I returned to the CPI, I received my laminated pass at last, and walked off down La Rampa to remember the Maine.
A squall had passed over the city. Wet streets mirrored a dull sky, and the Atlantic was battleship gray. From a hundred yards off, the monument to the USS Maine was hard to read: a pair of columns rising forty feet from the center of a long, dark, slump-shouldered mass. In the language of form, the odd splice of spire and spread didn’t say “sorrow,” or “triumph,” or “on this spot was founded …” Columns are inevitably boastful, but these looked strangely like chimneys; the sinking horizontals seemed mournful, but maybe that was just the midday gloom.
I stood on the rise that lifts Havana’s Vedado district a dignified height above the Malecón, the city’s famous four-mile waterfront drive. Vedado means “preserved” or “prohibited.” Centuries ago, the forest west of old Havana was protected, since it helped protect the town from its many enemies. Malecón means a breakwater or seawall, often topped with a walkway or road. If you have an image of Havana in your head, it’s probably a photo of colorful, crumbling mansions facing the sea across the Malecón’s elegant rampart. Yet the Malecón is one of the city’s more newfangled landmarks.
Havana has suffered almost five hundred years of the ocean’s jealous tantrums. When the United States took control of Cuba in 1898, a barrier and seawall promenade had been on the drawing boards of Spain’s
colonial government for decades. But in the thirty years prior to losing Cuba, Spain put down three major rebellions, wars in which poor men’s farms were deliberately destroyed and grandees’ sugar mills torched with a vengeance. Spanish troops and Cuban patriots sent the island’s wealth up in smoke. War debt soaked up any profits left unembezzled by colonial administrators. Expensive civic improvements such as a seawall promenade remained imaginary.
Of course, Cubans were promenading long before there was a Malecón. Promenades were an important element of urban life before the age of the automobile. The daily ritual of seeing and being seen, with all its opportunities for gossip, matchmaking, and doing business, could be performed afoot, but was all the more impressive from the moving pedestal of a horse-drawn carriage. The carriage was doubly attractive to Spanish culture, with its Moorish-derived emphasis on women’s concealment, symbolized by the mantilla and the fan, vestigial forms of the veil and the mashrabiya lattice window. From Madrid to Manila, centuries of Spanish society kept upper-class women shielded and chaperoned. The only acceptable way for young ladies to meet prospective husbands was the paseo, the evening promenade in their father’s ostentatious coaches, preserving a pretense of isolation while displaying themselves as marital merchandise.
Havana embellished the paseo tradition with its own conveyance, the volanta, an open carriage cut down to elegant essentials—a couchlike seat, floating on arched iron shafts between high, thin-spoked wheels—the better to show off its occupants. A supposedly forbidden but assiduously flirting beauty posed in a volanta became the city’s unofficial image, the essence of its international reputation. Visiting Havana in the nineteenth century, a female Briton observed that the six P.M. paseo “is the grand event of every day; gossip then goes on at a great rate, every passer-by is scanned and scrutinized, appointments are made, and reputations are sneered away.”
Unfortunately for the paseo and the volanta, the United States became an overseas imperial power just as the motorcar began its ascendancy. The Malecón that Yankee engineers started building in 1901, at the San Salvador de la Punta fortress guarding the harbor mouth, gradually extended west to wrap all the way around the original port city, its modern center, and the newly fashionable Vedado. The road was engineered for motor traffic, not the languorous, hoof-clopping paseos.
Today, the Malecón’s east- and westbound arteries pass on either side of the Maine monument. Speeding cars, trucks, and buses cut the memorial off from pedestrians—or they would, if habaneros could afford enough gas to roll the city’s thousands of permanently parked cars. Cuba’s economy being what it is, there’s only just enough traffic, this cool, overcast midday, to make a sensible person ask whether the dash over to the memorial is quite worth it.
As far as most U.S. citizens were concerned, the mad dash of a war that made them Havana’s civic benefactors was all about the Maine. It was worth fighting because the Maine was worth avenging.
It’s true: “Remember the Maine!” had some competition, as a war cry, from “¡Cuba libre!” Cuba was a beautiful, even desirable neighbor in distress. All through the 1800s, her shrieks and cries could be heard across the water, and everyone knew what her brutal and bloody-minded master, Spain, was capable of. But, like a good neighbor, Uncle Sam had tried to mind his own business.
The way most Americans saw the matter, it wasn’t until 1898, when the battleship Maine’s friendly visit to Havana was greeted with a masterstroke of murderous treachery, that we had no choice but to fight. Cuba would be free at last, because the Maine—and its innocent crew—must be remembered.
America’s newspapers ran lurid illustrations of the Maine’s martyrdom. Double-page, four-color newspaper spreads and glowing magic lantern slides offered variations on a theme: Framed in inky night, a sunlike explosion illuminates the ship it’s destroying. Broad beams of energy rip deck from hull. Their searchlight shafts transfix men and cannon falling through the black sky.
I walked downhill and across a handsome plaza of pale stone tiles until I stood on the verge of the Malecón’s broad eastbound road. It’s a highway, really, two or three vehicles wide and uninhibited by lane markings, but I was close enough to appreciate more of the Maine monument’s elements. Horizontally, the memorial is a hundred feet and more of stacked, low steps. Two larger-than-life, classically draped female figures stand together on a sort of marble shelf at the columns’ base, beneath some greening bronze words I can’t quite read from here. One of the females is definitely bigger, taller, and, well, more butch than the other.
She’s Columbia, our once-familiar avatar.
As early as the 1600s, some Europeans were referring to the New World as “Columbina” or “Columbia.” Three-quarters of a century before the first drawing of Uncle Sam, artists started using Columbia to represent the United States. In an ode to General Washington, the poet and ex-slave Phyllis Wheatley of Boston gave Columbia life as a literary conceit, a “Goddess … divinely fair,” personifying “[the] land of freedom’s heaven-defended race!” Columbia became a standard metaphor in poetry, prose, and two-dimensional art.
It’s hard to say when Columbia made the first of her many sculptural appearances, which include her twenty-three-foot-tall portrait atop Philadelphia’s 1876 Memorial Hall (now home to the Please Touch children’s museum). In the round or on the page, she can usually be distinguished from other allegorical figures by her “liberty cap,” a soft-peaked, red Phrygian bonnet. Former Roman slaves wore a similar cap to mark their emancipation, and our Founding Fathers associated it with hard-won freedoms. That Smurfy cap was a fetching crown to Columbia’s patriotic outfit, which often featured a starred blue bodice and a long skirt of red-and-white vertical stripes.
Most illustrators imagined her figure on the practical side of dainty, her age intriguingly poised between innocence and experience. By the 1890s, she was drawn as a nationalized “Gibson girl”: modest but modern, athletic in a tennis-in-skirts way, smart, capable, and cute. Columbia was the sweet, hopeful spirit of the New World, her maidenly virtue a useful contrast to Uncle Sam’s combative business sense. We Americans recognized ourselves not only in lanky, cranky Sam—who started life as a caricature of a Yankee peddler, a skinflint with a quick wit and quicker temper—but also in “Lady Columbia,” as she was often labeled in the era’s plentiful political cartoons. From the mid-1800s and on into the early twentieth century, when we dickered, bristled, or brawled, cartoonists chose Sam. When we yearned, aspired, made peace, or forgave, they conjured Columbia.
She did crucial work in World War I, appearing in ads, posters, and pageants to inspire enlistment, bond buying, and home-front sacrifice. And then she all but dropped from sight. Americans hardly heard from her until 1924, when she turned up on Havana’s Malecón.
If that was Miss Columbia they were seeing in newspaper photos of the Maine monument’s dedication. She had certainly changed. Staring across the Malecón now, I knew who she was, but it was mostly a matter of context. If I hadn’t known I was looking at a Maine memorial, and if she weren’t standing next to a shorter, sexier girl bedecked with trinkets and beads—obviously Cuba—would I have recognized that stolid matron in the liberty cap as sweet, supple Columbia?
Heavy classical drapery hangs from her weight-lifter shoulders like a wet-carpet poncho. A mighty fortress is her bosom, and her once-winsome features have been heavily reinforced. The brow nearly beetles; that jaw could crack nuts. Her formerly ingenuous smile is so faint it’s a challenge, a glimmer of gunfighter cool.
What happened to democracy’s sweetheart? Why did Americans stop identifying with her? Why did she virtually disappear from both popular and official art, and why did the Miss Columbia who turned up on Havana’s Maine monument look so strange?
Columbia had defined us in contrast to the Old World, where privileged elites routinely sent ignorant and disenfranchised masses to war for a patch of real estate or a greater market share. She symbolized a nation intent on domestic affairs, a nati
on that heeded Washington’s plea to refrain from international alliances and foreign wars.
But by 1920, we just weren’t that nation anymore.
We stopped seeing ourselves in kind, compassionate Miss Columbia—or, more’s the pity, stopped seeing Miss Columbia in ourselves.
Other nations also had trouble getting in touch with our feminine side. The broad-shouldered, lantern-jawed, almost-Adam’s-appled Columbia on the Maine monument looks as if sculptor Félix Cabarrocas stuck a wig on a hunky Marine. And who’s to say he didn’t? Marines were easy to find in post-1898 Cuba. Our warships considered Havana Bay a home away from home, and Marines and sailors felt the same about her bars and brothels. Between 1898 and the Maine monument’s completion in 1924, Marines invaded Cuba three times to protect U.S. interests; the last occupation force departed Camaguey less than two years before the dedication ceremony.
From where I stood, across the broad oceanside road, it was clear that the monument had seen better days. Panels of its marble cladding have gone missing, and the whole structure is deep-layer dingy. Of course, it stands between two busy streams of traffic fueled by sooty Venezuelan gas. A cloud of nasty diesel smoke began to drift my way as a roaring camello downshifted around the Malecón’s closest curve.
Camellos are streetcars designed to be towed behind big diesel tractors, a low-budget solution to public transport in the “Special Period in Time of Peace.” Nicknamed “camels” for their two-hump shape—a saddle between the front and rear wheel clusters accommodates two sets of folding doors at street-step level—these dirty-yellow trailers became symbols of a new, dog-eat-dog social spirit.
A ride on a crammed, rush-hour camello is “just like Saturday night,” Yolanda’s daughter Yoli warned me. “Sex, drugs, and bad language!” I hated to impose on the Luceros and their neighbors for rides into the city, but everyone in the family tells me not to chance the camello.
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