Less widely reported was how Cubans in Cuba also protested: when he was arrested, his neighbours flocked to the police station to demand his release. The incarceration, according to friends in the neighbourhood, turned into a month-long hospital stay to treat his alcoholism. Soon he was back, living with his mother and annoying the neighbours once again. He still occasionally replays what I think of as Pánfilo’s Greatest Hits, randomly yelling “jama jama” as he stumbles down the streets. Not many pay him much attention, though in 2014 another YouTube video appeared, of Pánfilo playing Pánfilo, reprising the original — ironically, I think. Even more recently, “Pánfilo’s wife” has had a few moments of YouTube fame.
One day, about a year after his YouTube debut, I was in Havana, heading home with a Cuban friend, when I saw Pánfilo approaching. I made my customary plan about where to walk to avoid him. My friend Emilia headed straight for him and they embraced. She doesn’t call him Pánfilo, she calls him by his name. They are old friends. He was her math professor at the University of Havana.
PREGONEROS: THE MUSICAL THEATRE OF THE STREET
Pregoneros are the street vendors who call out little tunes, pregónes, about what they are selling. The practice goes back to the days of the colonial era and the market vendors who sang testaments to their vegetables and other wares. Socialism in its most dour, anti-market phase in the 1960s and 1970s all but wiped out small business, and thus pregoneros too. But they are returning with a vengeance. Art festivals, such as the Havana Biennial, have recently included exhibitions and live performances of pregoneros, now heralded as practitioners of a lost art form.
A number of popular Cuban songs of the 1920s and 1930s started as pregónes, the most famous being Moisés Simons’ “El Manisero” (The Peanut Vendor). It was recorded by Rita Montaner in 1928, but many will also remember Cary Grant letting loose and singing it in the 1939 film Only Angels Have Wings.
If you haven’t got bananas don’t be blue
Peanuts in a little bag are calling you
Don’t waste them {no tummy ache}
You’ll taste them {when you’re awake}
For at the very break of day
The peanut vendor’s on his way
At dawning the whistle blows
{through every city, town and country lane
you hear him sing his plaintive little strain}
And as he goes by to you he’ll say
Mani! (Peanuts)8
The last word is drawn out, as in Maaaannniiiiii.
Another pregón-inspired song was released in 1994, recorded by the duo Gema and Pavel. Their song, “Helado Sobre Ruedas” (Ice Cream on Wheels), is a sad tribute to the melodies of the ice-cream cart, which had disappeared from Havana’s streets during the Special Period. Canadian sound researcher Vincent Adrisani writes elegantly about how the sound of the ice cream vendor “echoes the complex history of the city.”9
In 2012, Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons and Neil Leonard organized pregonero exhibitions and competitions at the Havana Biennial. They say the return of the pregoneros is changing the soundscape of Cuba, turning the streets into musical theatre. What they call an “ancient vocal marketing strategy” takes up where the lack of large-scale private business culture leaves off.10 Cuba’s billboards sell ideology and history, not toothpaste. Cuban products such as coffee or rum are advertised in print media and posters, but there are as yet no product advertisements on Cuban TV.11 This startling reality was something I only fully appreciated in Canada, watching an episode of The Office with Zaira, a Cuban student, during her first weeks in Canada when she was living in our house. When the first commercial came on, she shrieked in delight. “Oh my god, is this one of those commercials?” she asked, delighted, at age twenty-eight, to see her first TV ad.
A pregonera competition, Prado, Old Havana, June 2015
So pregoneros have the advertising field to themselves. The maniseros of Old Havana are legendary. I’ve seen one woman in particular, who sometimes dresses in colonial-era garb, interviewed on Cuban TV. Her name is Elena and she’s easy to spot on the crooked narrow streets of Old Havana. She occasionally sings “El Manisero” in a deep, beautiful voice.
Recently I came across a pregonera competition, of sorts: a group of women, each singing tribute to the product — pineapples, cupcakes, flowers — they were selling. It took place on the busy pedestrian mall in the centre of Prado in Old Havana, and the women attracted an appreciative crowd. But it’s not just the peanut vendors in the tourist-laden squares and plazas of Old Havana who sing. The residential streets of Havana are filled with people wheeling carts of flowers or vegetables, or carrying towels, brooms, or beautiful strands of onion or garlic braided together. Their melodious voices can make the most mundane household items sound divine. Take “chlorine,” for example. In Spanish, cloro trills off the end of a pregón like a bird. There are also pregoneros who roam the streets promising to buy gold, “whatever little piece of gold,” they repeatedly chant. A musical duo incorporated this pregón into a popular song, parodying youth culture’s obsession with gold jewelry. Life-long Havana residents Olguita and Inés told me about their favourite neighbourhood pregonero, who calls out seeking “empty perfume bottles, brand name,” which he fills with something aromatic and then resells. The neighbourhood pregoneros are not all as impressive as Elena, the famous manisera of Old Havana, but they add a melodic feature to the noisy soundscape of the city. And it’s a great sales technique. When I first heard the onion vendor, I didn’t realize he was selling entire strands — about ten onions — as one unit. I tried to explain that I was in Havana alone for a couple of weeks and just needed a few onions. He smiled. “Don’t you have any friends you could share it with?” he asked me.
CERRO AND MY GAY TRADE UNION
Peeking out just to the left of the hard-to-miss Plaza de la Revolucion is the Estadio Latinoamericano, the baseball stadium located in a neighbourhood called Cerro. Attending a baseball game would be the only reason for most foreign visitors to go to Cerro. Baseball games are fun in Havana, but it is the visitor’s loss if that’s their only destination. Cerro is a conglomeration of unpainted, twisting, narrow streets, much less classically scenic than Old Havana, and with a much denser population than Vedado, its two closest neighbours. It isn’t central, but neither is it difficult to get to. Like plenty of poor neighbourhoods — in Havana I always want to say “more poor”— it shows its sense of pride and despair in equal measure. An artist friend who lives there tells me a story which she says is pure Cerro. There was a large meat-processing plant there for many years, but during the Special Period the government closed it. The reason was not, ultimately, because of the endemic livestock or fuel shortages, but because the workers, knowing their neighbours were hungry, were constantly throwing cuts of meat out the window at people waiting below.
Cerro isn’t as dense as Centro Habana, another poor neighbourhood that bisects Vedado and Old Havana, because its buildings are lower rise, and generally in better shape — which isn’t saying much. More than any neighbourhood I have seen, it is a place where people live life on the streets. Men bring out card tables and chairs to play dominoes. During the baseball playoffs, if the beloved Havana team, the Industriales, are playing, people string cords for the TV and put it outside to watch together, along with most of their living room furniture. Often I make the hour-long trek from Vedado to Cerro by foot up calle G, toward Revolution Square, passing behind the National Library toward the baseball stadium. Once you get into “deep Cerro,” the street life is continuous, in all seasons and at all times of day. It is a neighbourhood unfrequented by tourists, so I pass unnoticed.
My usual destination in Cerro is Mirta’s house. There are several things to look forward to when I know I can spend a Sunday afternoon there. One is the house itself. She lives in an apartment complex known as “los edificios de Pastorita”— Pastorita’s buildings. Pastorita was Pastorita Nuñez, a rare gem of a bureaucrat who, right after the revo
lution, oversaw the construction of several apartment complexes that remain great testaments to utopian dreams of social housing that actually worked. They are exactly the opposite of the Soviet-inspired nightmares outside Havana in Alamar — buildings that appeared in the decidedly less utopian era of 1970s. Pastorita’s buildings are utilitarian, but they don’t look like the crumbling cages that house poor people in Alamar, New York, Toronto, and everywhere else in the world. Mirta’s apartment complex is low-rise, relatively low-density, and looks out onto a lush banana grove. The buildings were designed for maximum airflow, and the balconies provide both privacy and shade.
The second reason to be happy to receive an invitation to Mirta’s is the food; this is closely related to the third and best reason: Mirta and her friends. They are excellent cooks. When I am in town, Mirta and her friends always summon me to what they call a meeting of our sindicato, our union: Mirta’s house is the centre of gay Cerro.
Mirta, Lina, Jorge, and Omar make up the nucleus of the group, though on any given visit plenty of other people, gay and straight, young and old, pass through. This particular gay union local would probably not be recognized as such if one were expecting gay by current North American standards. Gay Cerro ranges in age from Jorge, a youthful forty-five, to seventy-two-year-old Lina. No one is sleek or fashionably dressed. Everyone is poor, even by Cuban standards. Mirta and Lina live on tiny retirement incomes, Jorge is a nurse, and Omar cleans houses and collects groceries for his neighbours. Mirta is the rare habanero I know who lives alone, though recently she’s started to take in tenants from a nearby campus of the international medical school. Her latest student tenant is Emilio, from San Francisco. Emilio grew up the son of a Mexican immigrant farm worker and cannot believe that he has the good fortune to find himself among the 15,000 foreign students training for free in Cuba to become doctors. Mirta can’t believe the irony of having found a tenant from San Francisco, the gayest town in the world, who is avidly heterosexual. They make an adorable couple.
Mirta inherited the apartment as payment from an old woman she looked after for decades. Job options for unmarried women of Mirta’s generation were slim. A surprising number of gay and lesbian habaneros I know have similar career paths, working in the social service or medical field, as nurses or caregivers of various sorts, though I’ve also met several lesbian doctors. It’s tempting to try to generalize this, at least for the men, as part of the overall stereotype that gay equals feminine equals caregiving, and maybe there’s something to that. Despite much publicized recent advances in transgender rights and lesbian and gay rights under the leadership of the (straight) Mariela Castro, Raúl’s high-profile daughter, being gay in Cuba is still not what one might call a wise career move.
Or at least it wasn’t when my friends from Cerro came of age a generation or two ago. Susan Belyea and I once attended Havana’s Pride Day with our Cerro trade union. It was a relatively small but boisterous event, which paraded down La Rampa on 23 Street, about as central as it’s possible to be. It ended with the inevitable, a speech by Mariela Castro. We were certainly among the oldest people in the group, but that probably would have been true in any group of gay people celebrating Pride Day anywhere. This generation of gay Cubans tends not to attend other non-state sanctioned events like the “kiss-in” that gay rights groups have started holding in some of the prominent plazas of Old Havana. They don’t frequent Havana’s handful of gay bars either. I met Mirta through Isabel, her former partner, who works in the art world. Isabel told me that in their early years together, she would occasionally introduce Mirta as her aunt (Mirta is a decade older) at work functions or other social events. And this is in the art world. Of course, gay people, in Cuba as in any other part of the world, who came out in an earlier, less forgiving era, often hold on to residual suspicions, for good reason. In Havana I can never tell if this level of caution is overblown or not. In all my time there I’ve never experienced overt or even subtle homophobia, but as a foreigner — and a middle-aged mother — I am also quite protected.
In deep Cerro, being gay seems less of an issue than being poor. Some of my gay friends’ distance from what is becoming an organized and visible gay community in Havana has to do with money: They don’t have disposable income to spend in bars or on evening wear. Another Cerro friend was recently told by ETECSA — the much-hated, state-owned Cuban telephone company — that her request for a landline in her apartment was at the bottom of the priority list because they have no plans to expand or improve services in Cerro. None. Not “next month” or “next year”. Rather, she was assured she would never have a landline in Cerro. It reminded me of a story from a Canadian friend, who once heard World Bank representatives explain to an international NGO gathering that Africa wasn’t on its global financial projections because “it just didn’t figure.”
Cerro just doesn’t figure in La Nueva Cuba, where the trend toward free market economic reforms has more to do with the freshly painted buildings of Old Havana and the shockingly good new restaurants in Vedado — which is why these days the long walk to Mirta’s house in Cerro gives me an even greater perspective on why I’m proud to be a member of this particular union. It’s the only Cuban house I’ve been in where the men also cook. Jorge and Omar also clean up, and Mirta bosses them around and tells them what they’ve overlooked. The TV is always on, blaring telenovelas, or a strange assortment of US programs, or sports. During a memorable World Cup Sunday, Jorge openly ogled the players’ bums and Omar pretended he didn’t know what sport was being broadcast. “What, baseball season again?” he kept saying. The telephone rings constantly, Emilio blared Mexican hip hop from his room, and heavenly smells wafted from the kitchen.
During another visit we all got to talking about wine. Cerro’s rare, and unlikely, entry into the entrepreneurial world of La Nueva Cuba is a new winery, La Canal, which sells wine made from a range of unusual plants. Mirta had bought a bottle of watercress wine for us to sample. It was tasty, yet Lina pronounced her preference for French. Someone asked her, teasingly, if she had ever been to France (knowing full well she had never left Cuba in her life). “No,” she said, “but I hope to go sometime.” This declaration from a seventy-something, retired, poor Third World lesbian sipping watercress wine could have been pitiable or ridiculous. But, in true Cerro style, it was stated firmly and optimistically. When, on my next visit, I arrived with a small bottle of good French wine for Lina, she accepted my gift graciously. But she was a step ahead of me. She told me she was leaving Cuba for a six-month visit to the US. An ex-girlfriend had invited her, sent her a plane ticket, and the US granted her a visitor’s visa. Miami isn’t Paris. But she plans to sample all the wine she can get her hands on.
WOMEN, MEN, AND THE EVERYDAY BATTLES OF THE STREET
If I had to select one difference between Cubans and North Americans it would have to be how strangers interact with each other. Better said, in Cuba strangers do interact with each other. This can be both a blessing and a curse. The best known and most obvious example is the active interest taken by Cuban men in women — any woman, almost. My Spanish teacher Carolina, a smart, accomplished woman in her sixties, told me that when men stopped commenting on her appearance on the street, she realized she was old. When I heard that, I immediately put her into the category I, like many North American feminists, carry with me almost unconsciously: smart women who need to up their feminist game. Some years later I have a different, more complicated view of what she told me, and not just because I can now see the advance of sixty myself.
The female students I bring to Havana from Canada walk the streets in shock for the first few days, aghast at the amount of attention they receive from men. We prepare them by trying to explain that there are different sexual cultures in the world. We try to get them to understand that Cuban women themselves distinguish between piropos — flattering compliments about appearance — and groseros — lewd or aggressive remarks. I’ve heard it said that Cuban women in Canada start to
wonder how they look, because so few people comment on their appearance. However, the distinction between flattering and insulting commentary by men is lost on twenty-year-old Canadians, and not only because most of them don’t understand the rapid-fire Spanish that they hear on Havana streets. What is easy to miss, for the foreigner, is that street interactions between women and men in Cuba are often also about men proving themselves among other men. Who can come up with the most daring, lewd grosero or, alternatively, who can express the most creative, seductive piropo?12 For those of us from cultures where people barely make eye contact on the street, these distinctions barely matter.
At the extreme end of the groseros are the public masturbators, a form of street interaction in which the patriarchal underpinnings of all of this become — pardon the pun — unzipped and obvious. There’s a relatively deserted stretch of calle G (on the maps it’s Avenida de los Presidentes, a name no one uses) that leads to the Faculty of Arts and Letters at the University of Havana, where my students take classes. The combination of a deserted stretch of street, enormous trees to provide cover, and a steady stream of young women walking to school makes this area a magnet for Havana’s public masturbators. Of course this isn’t only a Cuban issue. The seawall of Stanley Park in Vancouver, for example, provides exactly the same cover. But the many Cuban feminists — female and male — who have agitated about this issue are frustrated that it is sometimes tolerated as “just how Cuban men are.” A valiant University of Havana expert on masculinity, Julio César González Pagés, regularly regales our students with stories of Havana’s public masturbators, some funny, some horrific. But he also talks about the work that he, his students, and many others are doing to try to transform this practice of male sexuality as spectator sport.
Cuba beyond the Beach Page 5