In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens

by Alice Walker

“Tell us,” we ask our hosts, “just what is it about homosexuals that threatens the revolution?”

  “We do not bother them, as you do in New York,” they reply. “You’ll never hear of homosexuals being beaten up in the street.”

  “But you do not like them.”

  “We do not condone their actions. We do not approve of them. In Cuba, because of poverty, before the revolution, the Cuban family was nearly destroyed. We believe we must strengthen it.”

  “So homosexuals are seen as a threat to the family?”

  “We believe homosexuality is an aberration in nature—and that the more corrupt the society becomes, the weaker the family structure, the more homosexuality perpetuates itself.”

  “What are the legal sanctions against homosexuals?”

  “They are not permitted to teach,” says one of our interpreters. “And they cannot become doctors. They are not allowed to hold positions in which they can influence youth.”

  This is all to our Dramatist’s liking. She nods her approval. The rest of us are silent. It is their revolution, after all. Perhaps some of us are chilled, thinking of gay friends back home who would not feel as free as we do, in Free Cuba.

  What Cuba teaches is that revolution is not a flash in the pan of injustice. It is, as Fidel says, “a process.” It takes years and years and generations to build a just society. The overthrow of a repressive government is only the beginning of that struggle.

  Everywhere we go, we stress the fact that we are cultural workers, not tourists; that we have come to Cuba to learn, but also to teach. We do not want simply to see films, we want to discuss them with film makers. We don’t want simply to visit museums, we want to see art schools. We want to share our poetry and music and painting with the poets, musicians, and painters of Cuba. We are permitted to do this, and spend long afternoons with writers (there is a scarcity of women writers, and we are offered no plausible reasons why this is so), film makers, and musicians. We can see that great efforts have been made to have Cuban art reflect the masses of Cuban people, that the African heritage is given equal time with the Spanish, and that the “dominant culture” is recognized as being a synthesis of the two.

  All of this is developing. It is by no means complete. The status of the arts is analogous to the development of the rest of the country in direction and change. For example: during our first days in Cuba we were dismayed that the inevitable refreshment of rum and sweets offered us was presented by a black waiter; invariably an older person, male or female. What was this? we indignantly asked our Cuban hosts. Though we realized the occupation of waiter is not in itself demeaning, the consistent use of blacks to fill it is. We were told what should perhaps have been obvious: that before the revolution, blacks were disproportionately employed in menial jobs, in which many remained. Before the revolution, they would have been destined to remain in these jobs until they died. Now, everyone, including the black waiters, studies constantly in order to improve their positions. Education is free, and once having prepared and been tested for a higher position, they could take it. But the main thing, our hosts pointed out, was that the revolution made it virtually impossible for any group to be relegated forever to a servitude of any kind.

  When we saw Cuban child-care centers and high schools, we could see that this was true. No distinctions are made between black, brown, and white, or between male and female. All learn to speak languages (including Russian and English), to make computers, to swim, to study math, the dance, music, science, and geography. In their trim school uniforms, it is impossible to tell a child’s background. Color remains, but beyond color there is a shared Cuban-ness.

  Watching young black Cubans is exhilarating but, frankly, I also felt bereft. Unlike black Americans, who have never felt at ease with being Americans, black Cubans raised in the revolution take no special pride in being black. They take great pride in being Cuban. Nor do they appear able to feel, viscerally, what racism is. The more we insisted on calling ourselves black Americans and spoke of black culture, the more confused and distant they grew.

  Young white Cubans seem equally unaware of themselves as white. (Though older white Cubans certainly retain the racism they grew up with, the revolution does not permit them to display it, except by attitude. The only people who treated us with the arrogance that in this country one considers racist were some of the senior members of the Union of Cuban Writers and of the Institute of Cuban Films. They seemed annoyed that North American blacks dared to question anything about Cuba—including the absence of women in film-making and writing. Nor did they appear attentive to our carefully documented presentation of the experience of black actors in North American films. It was good to feel that these men represent attitudes that belong to Cuba's past and not to its present or future.)

  At the Lenin school outside Havana, an institution for especially bright pupils, I came face to face with my own prejudice. Our group was taken on a tour of the school, given a glimpse of its large outdoor swimming pools and sports area, and shown photographs of its surrounding cedar fields. (In Cuba, all students, even first graders, work as well as study in an educational plan that is almost exactly like that begun at Tuskegee Institute in the late 1880s by Booker T. Washington. Young children raise lettuce; older children raise trees and citrus fruits.) Then we were entertained by what I perceived (with North American eyes, seeing narrowly) as an “integrated” group. Such a group! Black, brown, white, yellow, pink, gold complexions. And such music! Mellow, rhythmic, soulful, lovingly presented. When the group of teen-agers finished, we surged forward to thank them. They were happy, open, expectant. Cuban and human from the blackest to the whitest. And then we presented ourselves as “black” Americans (they presented themselves, unself-consciously and without words, as Cubans, of course), and their faces changed. For the first time they seemed aware of color differences among themselves—and were embarrassed for us. And I realized that as I had sat listening to them, I had separated them, mentally, into black and white and “mixed,” and that I had assumed certain things on the basis of my own perverted categorization. And now I saw that these young Cubans did not see themselves as I saw them at all. They were, like their music, well blended into their culture and did not need to separate on the basis of color, or to present any definition of themselves at all.

  “Of course they know what racism is,” their headmaster explained. “They study it in their schoolbooks.”

  Eldridge Cleaver makes much of racism in Cuba, and it is useless to claim it does not exist. But the older Cubans, in whom racism is endemic, will be dead someday. Young Cubans will not have the social structures that allow racism to flourish. That is revolution. Not instant eradication of habits learned over a lifetime, but the abolition of everything that would foster those habits, and the creation instead of new structures that prevent them from returning.

  A week before I flew to Cuba, I began to dream about my father. For several nights he appeared in a pose I recognized but could not place: standing by the side of a road in front of a filling station, his hat in his hands, watching me as I moved farther and farther away from him.

  It was not unusual for me to dream about my father: he died in the winter of 1973, but my dreams of him before were solely about an absence of something 1 observed, sometimes in his eyes.

  My father, near his death, was a gaunt, coffee-colored man, with a fine large nose and immense dark and intelligent eyes. All his life he worked for other people; rough, unpleasant labor that forced him (along with a wife and eight children) to subsist on as little as three hundred dollars a year. My father, then, was a poor man exploited by the rural middle-class rich, like millions of peasants the world over. But as a child I was not aware of any others. I thought it was my father’s own peculiar failing that we were poor.

  My excitement over finally going to Cuba did not divert my interest from the new dream I was having of my father. Each night it came: him at the side of a Georgia highway, large eyes full of—what?
Me moving farther and farther away.

  I thought of my father’s face as I boarded a Cubana airplane in Mexico City, and again when I was escorted off the unmoved plane and it and my luggage were thoroughly searched by Cuban flight personnel. Three weeks before my trip, a Cuban airliner carrying seventy-three passengers had been blown up over the Caribbean—the CIA held responsible by the Cubans, who believed this barbaric act was the United States’s response to the Cuban military presence in Angola. Was the fear I felt suddenly surfacing the reason I dreamed of my father? Was he trying to tell me now, as he often had in life, that my curiosity about other people and places could endanger my life?

  But the flight, four hours behind schedule, finally lifted us to Havana. And there, waiting for me on the patio of a lovely old mansion liberated from someone who had to have been shamelessly rich, was my father.

  The same dark, coffee-colored skin, the same large nose, the same vibrant and intelligent eyes.

  My father’s name in Havana was Pablo Díaz, and he spoke in Spanish, which I do not understand. His resemblance to my father—even the timbre of his voice—was so striking, however, that when he opened his mouth and Spanish came out, I glanced about me to locate the source of the trick.

  Before the Cuban Revolution, Pablo Díaz had been, like my father, a man who might have belonged to any country, or to none, so poor was he. So unlikely it would have been for anyone in the government to wonder or care what he wanted of life, what he thought, what he observed. He had cut cane, done the “Hey, boy!” jobs of the big cities (Havana and New York), and had joined the revolution early—an option my father never had. From the anonymity he shared with my father, Pablo Díaz had fought his way to the other side of existence; and it is from his lips that many visitors to Cuba learn the history of the Cuban struggle.

  As an official spokesperson for the Cuban Institute for Friendship Among Peoples (ICAP), this black man, telling the Cuban story to whoever comes, increases my respect for the Cuban Revolution. Señor Díaz talked to us about the revolution for three hours, his cadence as steady as a griot’s; every turning in his people’s progress he knew by heart.

  He spoke of the black mambises of the 1800s; of Jose Martí, the “father” of Cuba; of Antonio Maceo, “the bronze titan”; of the attack in 1953 on the Moncada Barracks; the exile in Mexico of the revolutionists; the fighting in the Sierra Maestra; the abdication of the tyrant Batista; the triumph of the revolution; and of Che, Camilo, and Fidel.

  Helping to throw off his own oppressors obviously had given him a pride in himself that nothing else could, and, as he talked, I saw in his eyes a quality my own father’s eyes had sometimes lacked: the absolute assurance that he was a man whose words—because he had helped destroy a way of life he despised—would always be heard, with respect, by his children.

  There is no story, beyond this, of Pablo Díaz. I saw him twice during my two weeks in Cuba. I told him he reminded me of my father. He replied: “You honor me.” In a photograph I have of us posing with our Cuban/African-American group, I see that his hand is resting on my shoulder, and I am easy under it, and smiling.

  The hotel was still in deep silence; it seemed that nobody had waked up. The only sounds came from two maids who were cleaning near the kitchen, but they must have been shouting to each other because I could hear everything they said. One told the other that she had a very beautiful poem. Or rather that she had two. And one of them she had sent to her mamma on Mother’s Day. The other maid talked about her classes in the hotel and that she was taking down a dictation on the United States. They said something about their Ancient History class, and that they were taking a “History of Cuba up to ’57.” One of them said the arithmetic and algebra classes were the dullest ones, but the other said she liked them. I watched them go off with their pails leaving the red terrace floor shining with water.

  —Ernesto Cardenal, In Cuba

  The transformation of Pablo Díaz from peasant to official historian deeply impressed me. I envied his children, all the children of Cuba, whose parents are encouraged and permitted to continue to grow, to develop, to change, to “keep up with” their children. To become compañeros as well as parents. A society in which there is respectful communication between generations is not likely, easily, to fail. Considering these thoughts, I recalled the incident that is the source of the dream I was having about my father. It is a story about economics, about politics, about class. Still, it is a very simple story, and happens somewhere in the world every day.

  When I left my hometown in Georgia at seventeen and went off to college, it was virtually the end of my always tenuous relationship with my father. This brilliant man—great at mathematics, unbeatable at storytelling, but unschooled beyond the primary grades—found the manners of his suddenly middle-class (by virtue of being at a college) daughter a barrier to easy contact, if not actually frightening. I found it painful to expose my thoughts in language that to him obscured more than it revealed. This separation, which neither of us wanted, is what poverty engenders. It is what injustice means.

  My father stood outside the bus that day, his hat—an old gray fedora—in his hands; helpless as I left the only world he would ever know. Unlike Pablo Díaz, there was no metamorphosis possible for him. So we never spoke of this parting, or of the pain in his beautiful eyes as the bus left him there by the side of that lonely Georgia highway, and I moved—blinded by tears of guilt and relief—ever farther and farther away; until, by the time of his death, all I understood, truly, of my father’s life, was how few of its possibilities he had realized, how relatively little of its probable grandeur I had known.

  With a bleeding human eye in his hand, a sergeant and several other men went to the cell where our comrades Melba Hernández and Haydee Santamaría were held. Addressing the latter and showing her the eye, they said: “This eye belonged to your brother. If you will not testify what he refused to testify, we will tear out the other.” She, who loved her valiant brother [Abel Santamaría] above all things, replied, full of dignity: “If you tore out an eye and he did not testify falsely, much less will I.”

  Later they came back and burned her arms with lit cigarettes until at last, full of disrespect, they told her: “You no longer have a fiancé because we have killed him too.” But, still imperturbable, she answered: “He is not dead, because to die for one’s country is to live forever.”

  —Fidel Castro, History Will Absolve Me

  Since my return from Cuba, I have been asked about my sense of Cuban women. Generally speaking, women appear to be well integrated into Cuba’s revolutionary society. There are women doctors, laborers, heads of publishing companies, and so on, as well as teachers, nurses, and directors of child-care centers. With Fidel Castro frequently verbalizing the conviction that the revolution cannot be called complete until women share full opportunities and responsibilities, Cubans—both male and female—actively combat centuries of Spanish/African machismo. The equality of men and women is stressed throughout the Cuban Family Code, which contains the laws that regulate family life. The following articles are from Section I of the Code, listed under “Relations Between Husband and Wife”.

  Article 24. Marriage is established with equal rights and duties for both parties.

  Article 25. Spouses must live together, be loyal, considerate, respectful, and mutually helpful to each other.

  The rights and duties that this code establishes for the couple will remain in effect as long as the marriage is not legally ended, even if the parties do not live together for any well-founded reason.

  Article 26. Both parties must care for the family they have created and each must cooperate with the other in the education, upbringing, and guidance of the children according to the principles of socialist morality. They must participate, to the extent of their capacity or possibilities, in the running of the home and cooperate so that it will develop in the best possible way.

  Article 27. The parties must help meet the needs
of the family they have created with their marriage, each according to his or her ability and financial status. However, if one of them only contributes by working at home and caring for the children, the other must contribute to this support alone, without prejudice to his duty of cooperating in the above-mentioned work and care.

  Article 28. Both parties have the right to practice their profession or skill, and it is their duty to help each other and to cooperate in this direction and to study or improve their knowledge. However, they must always see to it that home life is organized in such a way that these activities are coordinated with the fulfillment of the obligations posed by this code.

  Cuban women with whom I had personal contact were, in almost every instance, like women I already knew at home, so that by the time I left Cuba, it seemed entirely natural to be happy to see them each morning, and to be pleased that they appeared to feel the same. One of these women who, in her patience and gentleness, was an inspiration to our group was Magalys, a young woman in her twenties who acted as our interpreter. What I managed to learn about Magalys is not, I think, unique to her: she is married, her husband works as an adjuster of salaries all over the island and is, therefore, frequently away from home for long periods. This does not appear to bother Magalys: she accepts these separations as part of marriage in a revolutionary country and is busy studying, taking exams in mathematics (presumably for a different kind of occupation than the one she now has as interpreter and guide for English-speaking groups). A lovely, delicately made woman of brown skin and warm brown eyes, she is from time to time distressed because we black North Americans want to claim her as one of us, exclusively, whereas she has been brought up to believe she belongs to the world.

  On a different (possibly irrelevant) level altogether, I was disturbed by the Cuban use of make-up (the first heavily made-up woman I noticed was a curvaceous young soldier in army fatigues who also had her hair in curlers) and have still to resolve my own feelings about, for example, a revolutionary woman who dyes her hair blond—as Haydée Santamaria (who was with the rebels at the Moncada Barracks as well as in the Sierra Maestra) did for several years—or who otherwise (through hair straighteners and whatnot) endeavors to look like someone other than herself.