by Achy Obejas
I know it’s peculiar, because when I step on the pier at Key West, on the southernmost tip of the United States and where Cuba is closest, I don’t need help spotting Havana. Without the benefit of binoculars, without stars or moon to light the way, even with a mist of clouds, I can always discern through the abyss of the sea the sprinkle of lights on the other side.
The first time I set foot in Cuba as an adult was in 1987, two years before the crumbling of the Berlin Wall and, eventually, the vast wasteland of the Special Period and Zero Option, the economic disaster that came to the island after the fall of the Soviet Union.
On arrival in the wee hours of the morning during that first trip, Havana’s suffocating José Martí International felt more like a bus terminal than an airport, except for the spooky green-uniformed soldiers from the Ministry of the Interior. They watched stone-faced as we waited in interminable lines to get our visas and passports stamped, even though we were government guests arriving on a private plane. It’s not that there were that many people in the lines with us, but rather that the process itself was obscure and required signatures and stamps from a vast number of functionaries—none of whom seemed immediately available.
At the end of the miserably hot and stuffy line, a nurse asked each and every passenger how we were feeling and if we wanted our blood pressure taken. Nearly everyone declined, a few with looks of terror, instantly paranoid about what message they might be inadvertently transmitting about their fears or vulnerabilities. High up on a wall, there was a faded advertisement for Johnny Walker Black that looked like a leftover from the Mafia party days of 1959.
On that first visit to Cuba, I didn’t go as a tourist or a displaced person looking for roots. For me, it was a professional visit: I was interpreting for a group of progressive Chicago politicians and activists.
I’m an interpreter, an oral translator, my father’s daughter but I’m nowhere near his rank and order. I’m not sought after by Mario Vargas Llosa and Carlos Fuentes. I’m not really trained in literature, nor do I teach language to eager graduate students the way my father did, deciphering not only the corresponding grammatical structures but also the layers underneath, the histories of the cultures. I don’t have his patience, so I rarely do written work.
Unlike my father, who loved rhetoric in an intimate and rigorous way, I’m an interpreter of the broad and mundane sort: I stand up in courts and let myself be used like a hand puppet by the witness, usually an impoverished and undocumented Mexican immigrant whose leg was sliced in an industrial accident. (Wrapped in her dirty gray scarf, she looks to me for a moment like a war casualty, a refugee breathing momentary relief in spite of her injuries at a Red Cross camp.) Or I sit in meetings in public aid offices, as if I were Charlie McCarthy on some bureaucrat’s knee, untangling rules and regulations for an unwed mother from Puerto Rico who is about to lose all her welfare assistance because she’s chosen to go to college instead of taking a job at the local Burger King. (“Does she un-der-stand?” the bureaucrat inevitably asks, each syllable monstrously loud.)
I’m the mouthpiece for whom I’m paid to speak, whether it’s the victim or the victimizer. I prefer the victim, of course, but I don’t always have a choice. And sometimes—when the witness is clearly lying, or the bureaucrat is a second-generation Colombian who took the job with public aid thinking she could make a difference—it’s hard to tell which is which.
“¿Es tu primera vez en Cuba?” asked the soldier who processed my papers at the Havana airport. He was young, with just a touch of fuzz on his chin. His Spanish was lazy and familiar.
“Sí,” I said weakly, wondering if I sounded like a foreigner to him. I have no accent when I speak in Spanish; I’m never perceived to be anything but a native speaker. But I knew even then my rhythm was different from his: more neutral, yes, but also more reserved. I knew that simple sí had already betrayed me.
Even before accepting the job, it had become clear to me this would be no ordinary assignment. To begin with, I had to tell my parents it involved going to Cuba.
In the twenty-six years they’d been in the United States, they’d never once considered returning for a visit. When they discussed going back, it was always in the revolution’s aftermath, during the kind of apocalypse that would break their hearts so forcibly that they’d have to resign themselves to life in the United States after all.
My parents are not fanatical refugees, they do not assume everything about the revolution is hideous. As much as they may be alienated in the United States, they’ve made peace with the difficult decision to leave Cuba. Yet when I said I was going back to the island, they paused as if they needed a moment to adjust their antennas, to rearrange their sense of disbelief into something coherent and civil. Then they kicked into exile-style paranoia.
“Be careful—don’t talk to just anyone,” my mother warned me about my upcoming visit. “You will get them in trouble if you talk to them.”
“You could get yourself in trouble,” my father said. “You could wind up in jail.”
They were comfortably settled in Chicago by then, my father a literature professor at Loyola University who walked to work each day along the park trail that runs parallel to the lake, dreamily gazing at the water, whether shimmering or frozen white. He had become a large man, with a bear’s chest and well-padded fingers, a long way from the bony boy from Oriente. He was sixty-seven years old, still vigorous, his hair as white as Ytzak’s when we’d last seen him.
My mother had changed, too. Still resplendent with her hair loose, she’d comb it back and up, always constraining it, pretending to hide the abundance of new gray, reining it in with combs and pins and bands. She had remained thin, but what had appeared as tanned and silken in Havana was now pale, with blue ropes up and down her arms. The mole on her cheek had grown so that doctors suggested she have it surgically removed, but my mother demurred, saying it was her good-luck charm.
She’d chosen to remain a housewife, managing my father’s affairs and growing roses and sunflowers in the springtime. As a child, there was nothing I loved more than to watch her tear into the dirt in our backyard with her bare hands, bending her back into the work until sweat drew a huge Rorschach on the back of her blouse. She was strong, sexy, I thought.
“Don’t think you’ll see anything real,” she said. “You’ll only be allowed to go where they want you to go. You won’t get to see or hear anything they don’t want you to see or hear.”
“If you get in trouble, get a message to Moisés Menach—my old friend from Oriente—you can always find him through the Sephardic Center,” said my father. “He’s a party member, the head of his CDR, that should come in handy.”
He suggested Johnny Suro as a backup in case of emergency, but then they both realized that Johnny, then a vice minister, was probably too high up in the government’s bureaucracy to be so easily accessible to somebody like me.
“Carry your American passport at all times,” said my mother. “If they try to keep you from coming back, tell them you’re an American citizen, that you gave up being Cuban a long time ago—tell them you have nothing whatsoever to do with Cuba.”
As she spoke, I could hear my father’s nervous breathing, as if someone had just given him a swift kick in the gut.
The night before I left for Cuba, I picked up the ringing telephone and heard my father’s timid voice on the other end. I knew instantly my mother wasn’t on the other extension, that this was something private, a concern he wanted to share with me alone. He sighed as if he were an overwrought lover preparing to deliver an unfortunate list of clichés that were, nonetheless, his only recourse.
“Sometimes, it is better to imagine a place than to see the reality,” he said, swallowing hard. “Sometimes, I think, it is better to have that ideal, that hope.” His words flew like stones into a deep, dark well.
My bags sat gaping on the floor of my chaotic apartment, my boyfriend, Seth, who was staying behind, lay exhausted and asleep in our
bed, his body exposed like a centerfold. “Honestly, Papi, I could care less about Cuba,” I said, at the time believing every word. “It’s no different to me than if I were going to Bolivia or Senegal or Spain.” On the bed, Seth turned away, irritated by my whispers.
“Well, Spain, yes, that would be different,” said my father, distracted now, off into his own world of doubts and preoccupations.
Standing in the airless airport in Havana, waiting for the fuzzychinned soldier to finish with my papers, I realized I hadn’t been completely honest: It wasn’t really my first trip to Cuba, but my first return to the Land of Oz I’d conjured in my dreams.
As a child—my English still fractured, my soul yearning for a place of safety in the brutal playground of U.S. adolescence—I imagined a Havana in which everyone moved with my mother’s sensual grace, talked like my father, and looked like me: I’m olive-skinned, with almond-shaped eyes the same blue-gray as Ytzak’s, chestnut-haired and slender but with hips. (There are moments, I know, when I can be as dazzling as my mother, but I have to work at them, I have to want them to make them happen.)
Havana was where I was supposed to have lived, where I should have emerged like Aphrodite from the foam—where my destiny had been denied. Now, here I was, in the city where I belonged, the city that should, would, be mine—especially when American horizons seemed bleak or cruel. As a child, I held Havana out to myself like a secret hiding place, a trump card, the Zion where I’d be welcomed after all my endless, unplanned travels in the diaspora.
At the time, I had no idea my rapturous imaginings about the city were a family tradition, that Ytzak had been in love with an imaginary metropolis, and that my father’s obsessions with Spain gushed from the same fountain.
As a child, I once found a weathered street map of Havana among my parents’ things and began to slowly, methodically, memorize the city. I started with Old Havana, the historic quarter, the cobblestoned, cramped lanes that spoke to me through photographs old and new about a constant cadence, about doors too close together, about a strangely comforting and untidy intimacy. I imagined being there, sitting on a grimy stoop, watching the human parade like a native.
I could, at the age of fourteen or fifteen, talk knowledgeably about how Compostela and Habana streets ran the full length of the district. I could place their intersections with Luz and Sol and inject just the right irony when mentioning Porvenir—a tiny, block-long street whose name means “a hopeful future.”
I didn’t know the landmarks. I couldn’t say where something as grand and imposing as the cathedral was outside of its postal moorings; nor could I say what kind of landmark rested on any corner if it didn’t bump up against the Malecón. But I could do the math in my head and declare exactly when Tejadillo became Trocadero (right after the intersection with Prado Boulevard, with all its decrepit luster), I could talk about how the Malecón stretched all the way from Old Havana past the glamorous Hotel Nacional, how it curved and hugged the city of my birth.
Curiously, I never imagined my parents there, our apartment or the floral shop. I pictured only me, a Cuban me, wild and free.
And then, as I grew older, as the years went by and I blithely came and went from our house in Chicago, slamming the screen door behind me—off to drama club, to swimming practice, to a meeting at the school newspaper, to smoke pot, to rock concerts in the Loop, to rendezvous with long-haired boys or willowy blonde girls—as the need for refuge became less and less, Havana faded, and my Cuban self vanished, like clearwings in early morning mist.
VII
At José Martí airport in 1987, our entourage was gathered up and bundled into private cars, all boxy Russian-made Ladas. We emerged onto a slender street that cut through a residential neighborhood of faded flat-roofed homes. Everything was gray. It was just after dawn and raining in long, hard sheets, but I pressed my face up against the car window anyway, trying to make sense of the swashes of dull colors on the other side. A crowded bus went huffing by, people spilling out of it every which way. There were young girls wearing faded reds, boys in white T-shirts that turned transparent when wet. I could make out the dark circles of their nipples, the penciled lines across their firm bellies.
Cuba had been receiving regular visitors from the United States, particularly exiles, for about eight years then, but as we passed, people stared. The gusanos, or worms, as those who’d left had been called, had become mariposas, butterflies, and just as fleetingly welcomed. There were no smiles among those sleepy faces that morning, only a cool defiance.
Ours was, ostensibly, a fact-finding mission: We traveled to hospitals and factories, saw firsthand how Cuban doctors treated Angolan war veterans, how workers processed rules and regulations in orderly workplace meetings that seemed the very antithesis of Cubans’ natural playfulness. We met writers and artists who were paraded before us as evidence of the revolution’s inclusiveness, its tolerance of the inexplicable. We watched a seniors’ circle doing its breathless morning calisthenics. Several times, we were serenaded by scrub-faced young Pioneros who then presented us with color-crazy bouquets of distended buds.
We were put up at the Habana Libre Hotel, the former Hilton, which was empty but for a few Canadians and Russians. I identified the tourists instantly: They were red-skinned, like lobsters after boiling, and too curious and happy about everything. To my surprise, I was given a private room, for which I was grateful. I wasn’t in the mood to listen to my tour group members talk about the wonders of Cuba anymore than I had to during the regular workday. Whatever Fidel’s real achievements, their revolutionary zeal struck me as touristic, even kitschy.
Everywhere we went there were billboards exhorting solidarity with people all over the world and praising the revolution. In front of the U.S. Interests Section—the same inviolable glass and steel building that had housed the American embassy back before diplomatic relations were severed—a sign decried the U.S. embargo: ¡SEÑORES IMPERIALISTAS, NO LES TENEMOS ABSOLUTAMENTE NINGÚN MIEDO!
Back then, there was construction all over Havana—at every corner, metal spikes poked out of stacks of concrete blocks like long, stubborn blades of grass. Cuban men in loose undershirts milled about the building sites, perking up whenever a woman walked by. They called out with outrageous rhymes full of innuendo or performed long, dramatic monologues about how beauty made their hearts ache.
The women didn’t reject the attention. To the contrary, the saucy strut, the pendulum swing of their hips all indicated it was well-practiced, absolutely meant to be provocative. And I responded: I envied the cubanas’ easy strolls, the confidence with which they answered every salty flirtation.
“Me muero por ti,” said one guy watching a particularly curvaceous local in a skin-tight green pantsuit strut by. “¡Me muero, me muero!”
As if to make his point, he pointed the tip of his drill at his heart and pressed the trigger. The instrument whirred, just centimeters from his chest, but the woman kept going. When it became clear she wasn’t going to turn around, the construction guy smiled broadly, pointed the drill triumphantly at the sky and started laughing, turning his defeat into a symbolic victory of sorts. The workers in his unit howled, high-fiving him.
Just when the noise had subsided and the men were beginning to make as if they might be getting back to business, the blinding green vision reappeared. She stood on the opposite corner, hands on hips, legs spread apart. Her curves were like the slopes of a vital mountain.
“Oye,” she shouted to her admirer, “so how come you’re not dead already?”
And the men at the site, including the original guy who’d threatened to kill himself over her, broke out in applause and hilarity all over again, this time celebrating her audacity. When she swaggered away this time, it was her victory that was total.
All that week I dreaded the moment when some Cuban man would fix his sights on me, my heart in my throat as he decided whether I was due the complicated mix of flattery and possession that came with being islan
d-born, or the courtesy of silence afforded foreigners. There was no way I could answer, and that had nothing to do with my fluency in Spanish. All week I trembled and crossed the street whenever I saw a group of construction workers, their watery eyes just beginning to focus on me.
In spite of all the revolutionary fervor, there was a somber undercurrent in Havana even then, as if it knew what was coming, as if it understood that soon the Soviet Union would be history, the country would be in tatters, and many of its most talented artists, the very people who were introduced to us as products of the revolution, would soon be living abroad.
A little more than a year after my first visit to Cuba, Arnaldo Ochoa, a hero of the revolution, found himself accused of drug trafficking and treason in a television trial watched by millions of Cubans on the island and abroad. He was found guilty and shot to death before a firing squad—¡paredón!—an event that shook Cubans everywhere to the core.
In 1987, I strolled through the city breathing something like burning sulfur in the air. Whether on the majestic boulevards of Miramar or the tight alleys of the historic district, I would run into discarded animal parts: an empty crab shell, chicken bones with the marrow sucked out of them, a fish skeleton so complete and white it looked like an ivory comb. At first I considered these might be offerings to gods I didn’t know, but they seemed much too random, too ordinary and blunt. There was never a red ribbon, a piece of paper folded with spells, or any kind of rock or amulet. Once, I saw a dead rat with its feet inexplicably cut off swelling in the midday sun by the curb.
