It has been almost fifty years and, as Martí would say, an eagle has flown over the sea since then. More than an eagle, actually. My memory remains intact, but I can’t see myself in the city, can’t find myself on the streets or on an improvised neighborhood field wearing that outfit: because no one, almost no one, goes around the streets of Havana in a baseball player’s uniform. In contrast, I see dozens of young people walking around the city (and through all the cities and fields of Cuba) with Cristiano Ronaldo and Real Madrid shirts, Messi and Barcelona, Müller and Bayern Munich. What has happened? Have the city and the country been switched on me, and with them, the passions of their inhabitants? How is it possible that for decades, they played baseball, talked about baseball, lived for baseball, but they now play soccer and dream of the teams of the Spanish league, the English league, the German league? Is this only a generational change of paradigms, or is it something deeper?
Cuban baseball is living through its deepest crisis today, in all senses. The arrival of the hard years of the 1990s, when everything was lacking and the country was practically paralyzed, deeply changed Cuban society, for good and for bad, or for neither: society simply changed, so one of its basic expressions also changed—baseball. In recent years, for economic reasons, there has been an unstoppable hemorrhage of Cuban players of all levels and ages who leave the country by the most diverse paths, in search of fate and a professional baseball contract, preferably in the United States. The mysticism capable of allowing three decades of Cuban players to opt for “free ball” over “enslaved ball,” that preserved a high competitive level in the national championships and the fame of unbeaten records in international tournaments, no longer exists. Economic pragmatism has imposed itself over physical proximity and ideological propaganda, thus hundreds of Cuban ballplayers have left the island in search of fulfillment, in both sports and business.
Parallel to this, the official Cuban media, which did not broadcast a U.S. Major League game for fifty years, began to give greater space to professional soccer programming, especially European soccer, and thus soccer fans were created. Why favor professional soccer over professional baseball if they both have the same economic nature? Because if Cubans become passionate about soccer, nothing happens: it’s a fever without any larger complications. In contrast, if they become familiar with another kind of baseball, in which some of their emigrated compatriots even shine, the political and social results are different.
But even when no possibility of watching much professional baseball exists (for the last two or three years, a few edited games are broadcast per week, better if there are no Cuban ballplayers involved), the result is the same: the players who can and want to will continue to emigrate. There is no reversing that process.
What is happening in Cuba, what I see and, above all, what I don’t see in the streets of Havana, is not a simple phenomenon of fashion or sports preference: it is a cultural trauma of unpredictable consequences for the Cuban identity. In Havana’s alleys and barren fields, children play soccer and not baseball, they dream of being like Cristiano Ronaldo and Lionel Messi, they suffer over Real Madrid or el Barça, implying a serious wound in the nation’s spirituality. Could we reach the point at which we Cubans cease to be baseball players and become soccer players? Anything can happen. But, if it happens, it would imply many losses, because without the passion, without the “vice of ball,” Cuba would be renouncing one of its essential, defining brands.
NINTH INNING
The history of Havana and of its residents would not be the same without the sustained presence of baseball throughout a century and a half. Havana’s pride is intrinsically linked to the practice of that sport. In the cathedrals of Cuban baseball echo the screams of fans who saw, among so many memorable things, Adolfo Luque’s and Conrado Marrero’s artful pitching, Orestes Miñoso’s colossal hits, Agustín Marquetti’s decisive home run in the 1986 series, and so many indelible feats that flood our shared memories.
The city’s culture and history are also made with baseball games, with baseball players, with the national passion for ball. And now, has the game ended? I hope not. Because it hurts deeply to lose a source of pride, to no longer have a worthy dream.
—Mantilla, Havana, July 2016
THE HUNTER
ERNESTO THE JINETERO
BY ABRAHAM JIMÉNEZ ENOA
TRANSLATED BY ROBIN MYERS
It was raining cats and dogs in Viñales, 183 kilometers from Havana, and Ernesto had the Italian girl naked on the kitchen table in a rented house when his phone started to vibrate. It was the French girl. After lunch, as the Italian girl was washing the dishes, Ernesto had come up behind her, pressed the length of his muscles against her, the breadth of his bare pectorals, his entire virile self, and had begun to kiss her softly along her neck, shoulders, and back, before turning her around and undressing her right there. He’d forgotten that the French girl had e-mailed him the day before to confirm her arrival that very morning, and she’d already spoken with her family—the French girl had Cuban relatives—about introducing him. So Ernesto devised a way to leave the Italian girl alone for a few minutes, shimmering with arousal, so he could go to the bathroom and answer the French girl’s call.
ERNESTO: Salut, mon amour, est-ce que tu es bien arrivée?
FRENCH GIRL: Yes, mon amour. When do you get to Havana?
ERNESTO: Aujourd’hui, ma chérie.
The Italian girl was flying home the next day, in the evening, which was a problem. Back from the bathroom and carrying on as if nothing had happened, Ernesto knelt on the kitchen floor and kissed his way up her legs, like someone scaling a scaffold, until he returned to her face and made love to her for the fourth time that day. Then he lied: “My sister says my mother’s gotten sick again—I’ll have to leave for Baracoa right away.”
It was two in the afternoon when they finished, exhausted, slicked with a cream of sweat, and the Italian girl, quenched and rapturous, stretched out across the cooking pans and cutlery as if on a waterbed.
I met Ernesto in August 2015 on the sad, rough sands of Guanabo, a beach east of Havana. It was the second time the French girl, Fadih, was coming to Cuba. They’d met four months earlier, when she visited the island for a Cuban cousin’s wedding. We all ended up at the same summerhouse with a pool, rented by the mother-in-law of a friend of mine who comes once a year to see his two daughters and his mother-in-law. The mother-in-law, in turn, has been married for over twenty years to a Congolese man of French origin and divides her time among Congo, France, and Miami. One of the Congolese man’s nieces is Fadih. Fadih was born in Brazzaville, Republic of the Congo. She’s enormously fat; she must weigh about 250 pounds. Her skin is black as charcoal. She is thirty-three and bespectacled. Her family had never seen her with a boyfriend until Ernesto appeared.
“I captured Fadih in the airport when I went to drop off a Spanish girl. It was her first visit to Cuba and she ran into me on her way out the door. A sign, right? It’s all going great,” Ernesto told me that day in the beach house. Then he plunged elegantly into the Guanabo water in his nylon briefs, neon yellow, fitted closely to his thighs.
Fadih’s trip to attend her cousin’s wedding was supposed to last five days, which evolved into two months. Her run-in with Ernesto at Exit #4 of Havana’s José Martí International Airport would change her life.
“You have to be ruthless. She looked sort of lost and I pounced. I immediately pocketed the address of where she was staying and her phone number at the house. And, of course, I whipped out my most seductive face to see if I could hook her.”
Every night that week, he called her or appeared outside the building where her relatives lived and invited her to go sit on the pier. Fadih would drink beer; Ernesto, fruit juice.
“It just so happened that she showed up when I didn’t have any girls here, so I could spend a lot of time convincing her.”
Fadih ultimately changed her return ticket and set off with Ernesto to explore Cub
a. They went to Viñales, to Trinidad, to Pesquero in Holguín, and ended up in Baracoa, where she met Ernesto’s mother.
“After all that me-time, no woman can resist. They lose it. Bringing her home was a point in my favor. I know how to work the foreign girls. I peddled her everything beautiful about Cuba, plus my own assets, you know what I mean? In the end she really believed that I didn’t just want to go on vacation, that I wanted to get serious.”
In the early 1990s, with the fall of the socialist bloc and the disintegration of the USSR, Cuba fell on its hardest times. The national economy abruptly stopped receiving the metric tons of commercial privileges that its sister nations had been sending to stock the country, and the island sank into a swamp—an outcome even the gloomiest forecasts hadn’t predicted. Financial crisis gradually swallowed up the great social achievements made by Fidel Castro and the triumphant Revolution of 1959. Cuban society started to experience a metamorphosis.
The hunger, scarcity, and discontent sparked by the 36 percent contraction of the GDP—between 1990 and 1995, according to statistics from the Centro de Estudios Económicos de Cuba, every Cuban adult lost between 5 and 25 percent of his or her body weight—brought dormant perversions to a boil. Prostitution was an emergency exit out of the crisis. During this so-called Special Period, some decided to weather the storm by clinging to their convictions alone. Others threw themselves into the struggle for survival. And so, in this savage time, when everything was justified in the name of getting by and the government offered no response at all, jineterismo was born—the range of illegal or semilegal activities, including prostitution, undertaken to acquire money, comforts, or mobility from foreign tourists.
The Special Period ravaged Ernesto’s household. His mother, who had a government job, was laid off in one of that era’s massive budget cuts, and his father died suddenly of a heart attack when Ernesto was only eleven. He had no choice but to go out and earn a living as a child, which is how he ended up joining forces with the other boys in his neighborhood; together, they’d go to the most heavily touristed area of Baracoa and ask foreigners for money. He dropped out of school, but at first he didn’t tell his mother. He let her wake him at six thirty every morning and dress him up as a little red-kerchiefed pioneer. He’d leave the house with a backpack full of books, but instead of continuing on to school, he’d hide the pack in a derelict two-story house, untie his neck scarf, pull off his white outer shirt, and run off to the old historic part of the city: the hotel zone.
“My mom found out, man, because I’d always come home chewing gum and bring her baskets of bread and jam and cheese and cans of soda and American coins. Where was I going to get all that? She couldn’t say anything, because if I didn’t bring stuff home, we’d starve.”
A month after our first conversation in Guanabo, Ernesto and I met up in Havana to talk some more. We sat in Café Mamainés, in Vedado. Fadih was in Paris and Ernesto was coming from Varadero, where he’d sent off a German girl who called herself Judith and had just flown back home. The next day he had to go to the airport and pick up an English girl. That night he would sleep alone in a rented room in the Miramar neighborhood, and the next morning he’d set out for a hotel in Varadero with the English girl—the same place he’d checked out of with the German girl less than twenty-four hours before.
Ernesto only officially finished the first part of middle school, but by age fourteen he could already communicate in English and Italian. He’d transitioned from stalking tourist buses, clamoring for gum and sandwiches, to prowling around the historic district, where he’d recommend restaurants and charge commission. He went from begging for quarters, fifty cents, a dollar, to selling Cuban bills stamped with the faces of José Martí and Che Guevara. Until he realized that he could obtain far superior dividends by making foreign women fall in love with him. “At the end of the day, they’re here for us,” he told me the day I met him on the Guanabo beach, turning his back to Fadih’s Cuban family.
All his international shoulder rubbing made him a polyglot; he enriched his repertoire with German, Portuguese, and French. He started doing gymnastics and conjured a university air: he used to say he was pursuing a bachelor’s degree in physical culture.
“Man, I know I’m hunky and sweet and my skin’s the color those foreign chicks are looking for, but no one likes a moron. Sometimes I read the Granma paper, you know, and I watch news on TV so I can talk about the world, too.”
One day he decided to start systematically eating breakfast at the expensive cafés in Havana, all the tourist spots, and in hotel lobbies and restaurants. But this tactic yielded no results other than financial losses.
“I realized that wasn’t the way. If I was going to conquer the foreign chicks, I’d have to dazzle them Cuban style: rum in hand, salsa, catcalls. And you can only pull that off at a nightclub.”
The reigning scarcity imposed during the Special Period meant that Cubans saw foreign tourists as veritable gold mines. The Cuban government tried everything to prevent the proliferation of this attitude. For years, the government legally forbade its citizens from visiting hotels and tourist centers. It was an authoritarian shield worthy of a preschool: Cubans didn’t know how to behave around visitors, so they couldn’t have anything to do with them. It wasn’t until 2008 that a series of new legislations, promoted by Raúl Castro, allowed Cubans to enjoy many of the rights held by foreigners. Even so, this change couldn’t altogether eliminate the tension surrounding the outsiders who come to relish things that insiders can’t experience at all. The Revolution had unwittingly shot itself in the foot: in confining Cubans, it transformed foreigners into superior beings, aliens. Which is why, no matter where you are, you’ll so often see Cuban/foreign couples, romantically imbalanced and united by money. You can tell with a single glance that one of their pockets, the woman’s or the man’s, is the sole attraction. Old ladies trying out stylish outfits and walking hand in hand with their latest catch, exhibiting him: a burly, brown-skinned, charismatic, Caribbean twenty-something, a good dancer, with dreadlocks or braids. Or a grizzled foreigner relentlessly smoking his Cuban cigar while talking to a slim, honey-skinned girl with curly hair and full lips.
The jineteros are everywhere, especially in tourist areas and ever-proliferating trendy bars. They’re bona fide squadrons, armed with the gift of gab, soldiers who have transformed their Cuban identity into a pointed dagger they’ll sink into the flesh of the foreigners who have long yearned for this particular pain.
It’s been over a year since Ernesto last traveled home to Baracoa, Guantánamo. He says the next time will be to say good-bye to his friends and family, to leave the country and never come back, because he’s sick of living in squalor.
He’s a nomad who lives all over the island: from one end of the country to the other, from rented house to rented house, from hotel to hotel, or in the houses of his clients’ friends. No fixed whereabouts: his clients always fund his stays, and they’re the source of the money he sends his mother each month. Ernesto’s mother is seventy-six years old, healthy as a horse, and she uses this money to fund her business selling grated-coconut candies in Baracoa.
“I’m a professional and this is my job,” Ernesto told me, smiling, at Café Mamainés. In order to carve out a niche and ultimately triumph in such a vast market, he added, he had to focus and distinguish himself. “There’s lots of competition, lots of people in the same business. I don’t eat fatty foods, and if drinking can’t be avoided I prefer rum and whiskey. I avoid beer at all costs—I drink it only if the client deserves it. I just kiss the edge of the glass without swallowing much yeast, wetting my lips with the foam, which helps me keep the ladies excited. I’m not a vegetarian, but I prioritize vegetables. I have to stay fit.”
When he doesn’t have clients to attend to, he concentrates on physical exercise. He doesn’t lift weights. He prefers planks, pull-ups, and the parallel bars, combining everything with various types of sit-ups. He also goes running, though he
doesn’t overdo it; he doesn’t want to get too thin. Ernesto’s body looks handmade, a Roman statue from head to foot. His skin is light brown. His eyes are almond shaped and his hair is long, curly, just grazing his firm shoulders. At age thirty-four, he has a gymnast’s build. No flab, all muscle, but not over the top, either. He knows he has to tempt all tastes: he lives to serve, a mannequin on permanent display. His goal is to attract the attention of absolutely any foreign woman: blond, black, Chinese, olive-skinned, fat, thin, tiny, tall. He waits for a woman to fix her eyes on him, and this will lead to a few days of leisure, eating in restaurants and private joints, going to the beach, sleeping in air-conditioned rooms, before he scrapes some money off his foreign companions in the form of the commissions he charges at the places he takes them or through various dirty tricks (he’ll sell them tobacco, rum, or some other merchandise at a higher-than-normal price). When the dreamy days come to an end, anything—some sandals, an iPhone—serves as payment. There are no set rates. Just perks. A subtle agreement, barely tangible and never mentioned, that the foreign women know to heed.
“We don’t talk about it, but most of them already know. No need to sign a contract. There are others who don’t realize, poor things, and they figure the whole thing out when they’re already over the moon.”
If the client is satisfied with the performance and pleasure of the service offered, and if the fling continues to evolve over the Internet, it may well culminate in a wedding. And, more to the point, in Ernesto getting off the island. Moving to another country. Any country; it doesn’t matter which.
Cuba on the Verge Page 11
