Yet Martí was a superb organizer and diplomatist among revolutionaries. The War of 1898 was, in many ways, his creation, and he was one of its first casualties. Though he had no experience in combat and was immeasurably more valuable as a political leader, he insisted on returning to Cuba and taking his place on the front lines, where he was promptly killed by Spanish troops in his first skirmish.
Lawyer, scholar, poet, playwright, professor, newspaperman, conspirator, politician, founding father: Francisco Goldman calls Martí “the great iconic hero-figure of the Cuban nation. [Imagine] someone … being Abraham Lincoln, Ralph Waldo Emerson, George Washington, Walt Whitman all in one person. That’s what José Martí means to the Cuban nation.”
All this in a man with a face like an angelic mouse. The Casa Natal has many relics of the martyr, including the tiny spurs he wore into his one and only charge. Here’s his tiny penknife, his violin, the shackles he wore in prison. Here is a braided lock of his hair, cut when he was four years old. There are photos of him dandling a child on his knee; Martí lets his baby steal the shot, while his own eyebrows lift as if he can’t contain his glee.
The house seems filled with kindness. Yes, it’s beautiful for its recent paint, but also for its spirit, for Martí’s utter lack of pomposity. For all his proselytizing, Martí never once lapsed into the hectoring, drumbeat rhetoric of doctrinaire revolution. Perhaps he could have become a Communist in another century, but he’d never have managed to sound like one.
Havana street dogs are bigger and tougher than Santiago mutts, but just as surprisingly inclined to nap in the middle of the street. More than once in my cross-city rambles I’d seen road-sprawled pooches spring up at the last second of a car’s approach and jump to sidewalk safety—only to lope back and lie down in the same perilous spot.
It’s a hard life. Food is too scarce to guarantee most street dogs a steady supply of scraps and garbage. During the Special Period, many a dog has found its way into a street vendor’s carne de cerdo or some desperate mama’s stew.
Yet there, among the approaching pack, were three ancient beasts, two black-and-white, one the yellow of a pipe smoker’s beard. This chained-off end of Calle Paula, this apostle’s culde-sac, was a refuge for truly venerable dogs, dogs so old that the poignancy of their Cuban street-mutt optimism was all the more acute for cataracts, wobbly gaits, and glad-to-see-you drool. The yellow one was the first and only dog in Cuba to walk up, lean against my leg, and lie down, using my foot for a pillow. Life is good and kind at the Casa Natal de José Martí.
My new friend looked mighty comfortable, but I had a train to catch. A thoughtful person doesn’t want to pet a Cuban street dog, but I was already claimed, so what the hell? I scratched between his ears, exceedingly lightly, yet not lightly enough to keep from feeling dog scalp crumbly like ocean-scoured styrofoam. Even as I yanked my hand back, I earned a doggy smile. My foot lowered his skull softly to the street.
Plunging into the Estación Central, I thought I’d been transported back to America in the bad old late ’70s, when all our cities looked like sets for John Carpenter’s Escape from New York. The cavernous lobby reminded me of years when Manhattan’s Penn Station was a plywood maze and Grand Central a soot-coated dormitory for the homeless; there was the same sense of slo-mo collapse, of patched-over debacle. It didn’t help that so many of the Cubans crowding the station were wearing near-tatters, pants worn through in the knees, shirts torn at the shoulders: clothes that connote homelessness Stateside, though they say nothing certain here.
Of course, the Estación Central is weird in its own Cuban way. For starters, absolutely everything, from floor to pigeon-haunted ceiling, was glazed a deep tobacco brown. A smutty obscurity seemed to radiate from the walls and squeeze light back into the few naked, hanging bulbs. Everything was limned in the heavy sepia of a Daumier painting, making both the iron-wheeled baggage cart and the cobwebbed plastic TV look like relics of the rotten Second Empire.
The station’s snuff-colored gloom was split by a tall, wrought-iron fence. On this side, knots and clutches of people studied the hand-lettered departure and arrival boards, struggled with piles of luggage, and rested on the bench seats or on the floor. Joining a line for ticket confirmation, I saw that there was something wearily apocalyptic about our plight. Like sinners in purgatory, or denizens of Plato’s allegorical cave, all the people on this side of the gate were waiting for revelation and release. Behind us, the doors to the plaza glowed with Havana’s hard daylight, but we were all staring through the fence’s bars at an empty gray space crossed quickly, over long intervals, by men and women in tailored gray suits. They looked divinely cool and authoritative; we wanted them to speak to us, but they knew we weren’t ready.
When the very bored lady at the confirmation booth stamped my boleto “confirmed,” I thanked her. Walking away, I glanced down to admire my prize. That’s when I noticed that the date in fine print wasn’t today. It was a ticket for tomorrow. My stomach seemed to drop through my abdomen like a crashing elevator. What had happened? I could have blamed my lousy Spanish, but I’d made sure the young lady at La Coubre understood me. Now I might be stuck in Havana for another night or another week. There was nothing left in my budget for a taxi back to the Luceros. If I got on the train, the conductor might read the fine print and toss me out into the night at Camagüey or Santa Clara.
Cubans are pretty good at haciendo cola—literally, “making a tail,” that social art the British call “queuing up”—but there was no line in front of the tall iron gate, just a reasonably polite mob of about eighty folks clumped in a rough semicircle. The “special” was supposed to leave a few minutes after six P.M.—in about forty minutes—and the mob kept growing. I moved into the mass of people, past the outer layer of folks who didn’t want to be pressed—older folks, families with young children—until I found the edge of a more crowded core, beyond which it would have been impolitic to push.
There stood a cubano approximately as tall as a royal palm and muscled like the old household detergent icon Mr. Clean. Glossily black, with a small sparkling stone in his ear, he seemed to be the center of an all-ages group of eight or ten folks. Like much of the crowd, they radiated expectancy, as if they were waiting for something more than a train. I wasn’t getting past them, so I settled in, stacking my backpack on the roller bag and working on eye contact. It was no-go with the big man, but I made a few nod-and-smile friends, including a curvaceous lady immediately to my left, a toffee-colored young woman with rad red cornrows and stunning pale eyes, whose smile was almost alarmingly friendly.
We were packed pretty tightly, the core compacting as the mob grew to about 150 travelers. I bumped butts and elbows all around and started to worry about pickpockets. Sure, I was employing my usual multiple-safe strategy, with money hidden in a belt beneath my clothes, in socks, in a neck wallet, and in my bags, but I couldn’t afford to lose any of it. Then there were my wedding ring, crucifix and chain, my notebooks, my tape recorder and interview tapes, my camera and laptop, all squirreled as deep into my bags as possible. I was the only tourist in the building. Heck, I was the only foreigner I’d seen all day. If someone had grabbed my backpack—how much would that computer have been worth in black-market dollars?—zipped through the crowd and out into the street, he would have been 1,000 percent gone before my roller bag and I even cleared the mob.
I decided to get a grip. This was no time to stop trusting the journey, trusting Cubans. I looked around at all the faces, sweat-shiny even in the sepia gloom. It was a privilege to be traveling this way, off the damned tourist bus. I took a deep breath and let it out slowly, started an Our Father humming under our collective hubbub, slowly enough to consider and intend each word. Give us this day …
I’d no sooner intoned a happy Amen than my eyes rose to meet Mr. Clean’s. “Buenas,” I offered.
My reward was a smile lit by a gold front tooth. We completed our travelers’ questionnaires: both bound for Santiago,
he for his home in Reparto Marimon, out past the Santa Ifigenia Cemetery, and I for an as-yet-undiscovered casa particular, preferably near the Conservatorio Esteban Salas.
“¿Te gusta la musica tipica de Oriente?” he asked in his basso lisp. “Are you a music lover?”
“Surely,” I answered, “anyone with ears understands the music of Santiago de Cuba to be one of the treasures of the world—and the envy of all Cuba, especially Havana!”
Though this is entirely true, I parodied my own enthusiasm, poking a finger in the air and swelling my chest to make a joke of the turista chauvinist, the santiaguero wannabe. My friend laughed and introduced himself as Bárbaro.
As an adjective, the word bárbaro has the obvious meanings—“barbaric,” “crude,” “cruel”—and as a noun it means, simply, “barbarian,” which English dictionaries define as a man in a state of savagery. The word’s roots go all the way back to a Sanskrit onomatopoeia, barbara. Apparently the speech of non-Aryans sounded like so much blah-blah-blah—or “bar-bar-bar”—to Aryan ears, inspiring a neologism that could mean either “stammer” or “non-Aryan,” and mocked both. Those masters of condescension the ancient Greeks passed “barbarian” on to the Romans, who were more respectful of diversity yet still needed a term for all the savage louts they were trying to conquer and civilize.
There’s always a certain risky glamour to people and places on society’s edges. Things “barbarian” can be both rude and splendid. Bárbaro is an uncommon but hardly rare given name, a nickname, a noun, and an adjective with many, often contrary definitions: primitive, marvelous, heathen, handsome, cruel, fantastic, thug, bestial, superabundant, beautiful, massive, cruel, wild man, tremendous …
As Bárbaro shook my hand, I noticed strings of red-and-white beads around his wrist and more around his neck. I nodded toward the wrist beads and ventured a respectful murmur: “¡Qué viva!”
I was taking a chance. I didn’t know the etiquette of mentioning a Cuban’s orisha, his protective deity. Maybe it’s offensive, or at least presumptuous coming from a Yankee tourist. So I’d just said, “Long live!” without mentioning a name. I hoped that would be vague enough to ignore, if he so chose, without ruining our brief friendship.
Bárbaro raised an eyebrow in wonder, as if he’d just heard a dog talk. Then he twisted the handshake into an arm-pulling, backslapping hug. “So,” he said with a grin, “you too are on your way to the feast?”
And that’s how I learned what everyone was waiting for, besides the train.
Tomorrow would be December 4, the feast day of Santa Barbara. This daughter of pagans supposedly lived in Nicomedia—the modern Izmit, Turkey, a port on the Sea of Marmara—in the late third and early fourth centuries. According to legend, her father, Dioscorus, was so obsessed with her marketability as a bride that he locked her in a tower to ensure her virginity until he could contract a lucrative sale. Her necessities arrived in a basket she raised by rope. As any fan of Rapunzel or Sleeping Beauty knows, repressive fathers and wicked stepmothers are no matches for the power of young love. Someone slipped a Christian scroll into Barbara’s basket—remember, this is sixteen hundred years before Freud—and the girl, whose name means “wild woman,” fell wildly in love with Christ. She immediately told a holy lie, pretending to be sick and arranging for a visit from a “doctor” who was really a priest. This first man she was ever alone with completed the infiltration of her basket by administering the dewy sacrament of baptism.
Of course, this being a tale of the early Church, its consummation isn’t romance. Dioscorus learned of her conversion, and proceeded to torture her so thoroughly that he grew exhausted and gave her over to the Roman governor of the province, Marcian, who put professionals on the case. Over the course of two days, Barbara was beaten and whipped; her wounds salted and scraped with potsherds; her flesh ripped with iron hooks and burned with torches; her skull pounded by mallets and her breasts cut off before she was dragged through the streets to her place of execution.
She bore all this with incredible courage, strengthened by a jail-cell visit, on the night before she died, from her spiritual husband, Christ.
“Barbara,” Jesus told her, “have confidence and be firm and steadfast, for in heaven and in the earth thou shalt have great joy for thy passion.”
Before departing, Jesus made her body whole. When she appeared before the governor the next morning, the Romans tried to give their gods credit for this miracle. But Barbara insisted that she had been healed by Jesus, so the torturers had to start all over.
The legend says that Barbara’s executioner was her own father, who chopped off her head with a sword. In this way she completed her passion, becoming Christ’s “spouse of blood.” The legend also says that Dioscorus was immediately struck down by lightning, a “fire from heaven [that] consumed him in such wise that there could not be found only ashes of all his body.”
The many themes and telling details of Barbara’s legend became the tenets and emblems of her saintliness. The flames used to burn her and the thunderbolt that avenged her made Barbara the saint to turn to for protection against fire and lightning. She was also counted as a guardian by beacon and lighthouse keepers. The horror of her father’s electrocution—a death that not only hurt a lot but also left the sinner no time to prepare his soul for judgment—made early Christians pray to St. Barbara for protection from sudden death. Connect lightning and instant death to thunder’s roar, and it’s no wonder that Barbara became the patron saint of artillerymen and miners. Spanish sailors and soldiers called their gunpowder magazine la santabarbara, often placing a statue of the saint over the door to ward off catastrophic ignition. By happier association, she became the patron saint of fireworks.
St. Barbara’s image usually carries a martyr’s palm branch or the chalice and wafer that represent Christ’s sacrifice (and transubstantiated presence at each Mass). Many images show her holding the sword that decapitated her. In paintings, stained glass, and elaborate sculpture, she sometimes stands in front of the tower where she was imprisoned, its walls pierced by three windows representing the Holy Trinity. Her aid was invoked by both prisoners—logical, since she was incarcerated by both her father and the governor—and by the garrisons of towers and fortresses, which is a little confusing, since these edifices doubled as jails through most of human history. (Paris’s Bastille was one such fortress-prison; the Morro castles in Santiago and Havana served as busy dungeons and torture chambers long after they’d lost their military mojo.) Because St. Barbara sometimes carries a replica of her tower, or wears a crown with tower-top crenellations, she also was claimed as the patron saint of architects.
Barbara’s virginity and the blood shed in her martyrdom are cited to explain her association with the colors white and red. In the eastern Mediterranean, and especially among Lebanese Christians, her feast day is celebrated with a sugared treat made of white barley and scarlet pomegranate seeds. German and Scandinavian churches—and churches in some U.S. states with strong ethnic German communities—still keep the tradition of St. Barbara’s branch. An elaboration of her legend claims that during her imprisonment, a few drops of her drinking water—or tears—and her faith made a dead cherry twig bloom. On her feast day, bud-bearing branches of cherry trees are clipped and brought indoors, kept warm, and watered. With luck, they’ll bloom on Christmas, guaranteeing freedom from death in the coming year. The blossomed branches are brought to church to decorate the Christmas manger. In the end, for all the distracting lightning and thunder, the essence of Barbara’s story is still her refusal to submit to pagan lust; St. Barbara’s branch reminds us that she made a gift of her cherry to the Lord.
Though St. Barbara was long counted among the fourteen holy helpers—the most efficacious and beloved of saints—the Vatican removed her from the liturgical calendar in 1969, along with St. Christopher and numerous other martyrs for whose existence there is approximately zero historical evidence. But she is still popular throughout the Catholic wor
ld, still officially adored in the Eastern Church. And millions more believers, cultural and spiritual inheritors of the Afro-Caribbean diaspora, know her as an avatar of the Yoruba thunder god Changó.
Changó’s name has come up in this story before, in connection with his inamorata Ochún, alter ego of Our Lady of Charity of El Cobre, Cuba’s patron saint. Ochún is an archetype of compassion and desire. She is Cuba’s deepest understanding of itself, of its greatest need.
Catholicism, the religion in which I was raised, has no interest in balance. There’s no yin-yang in official Catholicism, no automatic acceptance of equal and opposite reactions, of mutual need. There’s a message inherent in the Church’s patriarchal, hierarchic structure: The only right way to be a human being is to be a Roman Catholic ordained celibate male. The farther you are from this definition, the farther you are from God.
Of course, the unofficial and actual Church consists of a multitude of exceptions to its unachievable self, including the myriad ways in which it accommodates our need for mothers as well as fathers, forgiveness as well as failure, the hope of mercy in a world of power: the Church’s fitful commitment to social justice, the sacraments, the cult of Mary.
Santería is, among other things, an unofficial Catholicism. When Pope John Paul II visited Cuba in 1998, he visited Ochún in her palace at El Cobre. But santería is also a New World elaboration of Yoruban and other West African traditions. Santería insists on placing essential principles in balance.
Cuba needs Our Lady, needs Ochún’s healing love.
Santería automatically asks, “And who does Our Lady need?”
She needs Changó.
And who doesn’t? This is a hard world. Sure, we need love and understanding, but hey, we also need will and strength. We need the kind of passion that drives all our ambitions for love and achievement. We need virility, courage, and allies against our enemies.
Yankee Come Home Page 29
