On my first day in La Habana Vieja, I turned down a side street after noticing a small sign for an antique automobile museum. The museum's wide, open porticoes were shady and cool, so I stood there, peeking inside at some dusty 1930's era cars, but really just getting out of the blistering sun. I was looking around at the colonial-era buildings lining the street when I noticed someone looking at me. The street was wall-to-wall tourists this morning, and a group of six or seven Germans had stopped in front of me, looking over my shoulder at the old cars. The Germans stood between me and the guy who was looking at me. When I met his eyes, he smiled and waved me over.
His name was Ariel. His smile told me he was no angel. He asked me if I needed anything, saying anything in such a way that reminded me to be careful. I said no, that I was all good, and offered him a Camel Light. I could tell that my Cuban Spanish confused him, and that made me happy. It was the same feeling I used to get as a teaching artist working in New York City , watching high schoolers freak out when I started speaking Spanish. "What's he doing speaking Spanish like that?" Ariel had the same look on his face, the same question on his mind. Ariel told me he'd assumed I was with the Germans. I had a small, digital camera dangling from my wrist, a black polo shirt, checkered-madras cargo shorts, ankle socks and running shoes that screamed "tourist!" I told him I didn't blame him for thinking so.
We spent the better part of that morning talking about tourists, Miami-area Cubans, and how most people --- Cubans, Europeans, Americans, etc. -- seem intent at wanting to pass for something: rich, gangsta, pious, beautiful, etc. To Ariel, everybody wanted to be something they weren't. Clothes, money, make-up, and plastic surgery were among the choicest means of achieving this. In Cuba, he said, people found all sorts of ways to front or pass. Ariel pointed to a guy standing near us, whispering to me that the man was Secret Police, there to make sure Cubans didn't harass the tourists. The guy looked like he just walked off the set of a Jay-Z video. He had a South Beach ensemble of designer baggy jeans, ostentatious D n' G sunglasses, chains, spotless K-Swiss, and a Glock discretely holstered along his lower back waistband. Jigga would be proud.
The business of "passing," like the matter of 'The Other,' has always been tricky. There's a measure of duplicity and conceit (and self-loathing, denial?) with passing that goes beyond merely dressing a certain way to impress others. Throughout my trip, I noticed lots of folks like the cop Ariel pointed out. 'Even in Cuba,' I thought, sans rampant capitalism and amid crushing poverty, people want and flaunt distinction or 'membership.' In Cuba & the U.S., as in much of the world, language and skin color are also hard at work herein. One could easily argue that that's been the case for thousands of years, if not more. It's how people roll. Maybe it started with a hominid saying "get the fuck outta my cave," to an large-brow Australopithecus who happened to wander in looking for food; an ancestral version of Charlton Heston screaming "Get your stinking hands off me, you damn bloody ape!" in the first Planet of the Apes movie. Sadly, in-tribe/out-tribe demarcation ain't neither what it used to be nor what I playfully imagine. Just ask the Roma in France. Or a Mexican in Arizona. Or a Honduran trying to travel through Mexico on her way to the U.S.
I grew up Cuban-American in Hialeah, FL. At at school my Cuban classmates called me "gringo" because I was White, and spoke English without an accent, and in my neighborhood, the Americanitos taunted me with "Spic" because my family and I spoke Spanish. I couldn't choose sides because neither really offered me a choice. The American kids had parents who drove cars with bumper stickers saying stuff like "Will the last American to leave Hialeah, please take the flag," while the Cuban kids were more cruel to me. Then, as now, language and the color of my skin marked me. Thirty years later the outfits I wear while performing as the Cuban Cowboy add to the effect. I suspect everyone wears a hat on purpose.
Among Latinos I appear White until I open my mouth. With Whites, there's a perceptible shift when I introduce myself as 'Whore-Hey'. You should know that even the nomenclature is dicey --- White, Latino, Cuban-American, etc. -- as each and every term is under constant debate by cultural theorists, anthropologists, and assorted identity politicians the world over. The duality I'm clumsily trying to get at is also found in my music. Personal experience has informed my writing and prepared me for how The Cuban Cowboys are often perceived: Too Rock for many Latin audiences, and too Latin for many Rock audiences. Sometimes the best I can say is "Come on in! The middle is fine." At other times, and apart from the band experience, I have to smile at the fact that people like me are Tea-Baggers' (or Rush Limbaugh's, or Glenn Beck's, or Jan Brewer's, et. al) worst nightmare: bilingual, highly educated, and, White in appearance. To their mind, I can enter their homes, impress them with great conversation in snappy, folksy English, eat their food, then impregnate their daughters before they even knew that I was one of them thar' La-teen-ohs.
Sometimes, phenotype and things like passing exist on a two-way street, dependent on the direction a person wishes to take in a given situation. For instance, I was asked to leave the hotel lobby on the day after meeting Ariel in Habana. I'd come back from the city, and a doorman mistook me for a Cuban driver, telling me to wait outside for my fare and to move my car while I was at it. It had to be my outfit (see this post's pic: t-shirt, shorts, flip-flops). I had to smile.
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Hialeah, FL 1978 Luis Reveiz was kicking my ass. We were 7th graders at Immaculate Conception School. He was on top of me, swinging away, not really landing any punches but looking pretty convincing. I was pinned underneath him, trying to cover my face while a large circle of classmates shouted "Fight! Fight! Fight!" I remember thinking that there were definite advantages to having big brothers. Luis had two. I only had an older sister. My father wasn't around enough to teach me anything, much less how to fight. I remember staring at my cowboy boots afterward, while the nun gave us both detention. The boots --- burgundy, pointy-toed cockroach killers --- had led Luis and his friends to start picking on me.
At that age, at that school, those boots marked me like red hair and freckles did for some other classmates. I was considered something other than Cubanito. My classmates and I were too young to hyphenate, a la 'Cuban-American' and no one used 'Latino.' Back then, whatever our parents were was good enough for us. That Luis Reviez was Venezuelan did not matter to my mostly Cuban classmates. Ultimately, my boots and attitude made me mas Americano than him, and therefore worthy of a beatdown. No one else wore cowboy boots to school.
I'd begged my mom to buy me those Dingo boots for Christmas that year. I think about them sometimes when I pick out boots for a Cuban Cowboys gig.
I reckon I've been dressing the part for a long time.
Los Chinitos was the name of one of my grandfather's favorite Miami restaurants. He knew the owners from Cuba. I'd never seen or even heard of Chinese Cubans until my grandfather started taking me there. It blew my young mind that they looked Chinese, but spoke Spanish. My grandfather pointed out that they cursed almost exclusively in Chinese, but did love using "pinga" & "pingón" whenever possible. Back then, lots of South Florida restaurants owned by Cuban exiles tried to serve the same food and cop the same vibe as they once did in Cuba. Los Chinitos was no different. Also, just as in Cuba, the waiters would let my grandfather spit out food or just spit whenever and wherever he wanted. I'd see him empty his pipe, or put out his cigar out on the floor. The waiters called him Jefe, and darted about with little brooms whenever he came around. My grandfather was something of a big deal back in Cuba. In today's Cuba, however, the Chinese are the latest Jefe.
My group's tour buses left for La Habana Vieja early one morning. A tour guide explained that the sparkling, new buses were gifts from the Chinese government, or, as he put it, los chinitos. He said Chinese tourists are all over Cuba these days because the Cuban government is enjoying Venezuela-like relations with China. As with the U.S., Chinese interests have expanded far beyond that of the Europeans'. The Chinese own sizable amounts of American debt. They may as well own Cuba's along with the strategic position once held by the U.S.S.R. Not too shabby for a people who first got to Cuba in the early 1800s to work like dogs in the cane fields.
I broke away from my group that afternoon and took a taxi toward the Capitolio, looking for a Chinese restaurant recommended by a good friend of mine.
El Barrio Chino de La Habana is the largest Chinatown in Latin America. "That ain't saying much," I thought as I walked along its Calle Dragones. Having lived in New York City, and, now, San Francisco, lent me some perspective on what I was seeing. Those cities' Chinatowns have encroached ever deeper into what were once Italian immigrant enclaves, making the Little Italys considerably 'littler' over the last two decades. Both cities' Chinatowns boast large, and growing Chinese populations. Immigration and assimilation patterns are mostly responsible, of course, just as they're responsible, inversely, for El Barrio Chino's stasis. It's one Chinatown that doesn't seem to be growing anywhere. I saw far more White tourists than Chinos in the Barrio Chino. Hell, I saw more white guys wearing Chinos than I did actual Chinos.
There were once over 130,000 Chinese living in Cuba. They arrived in the early 19th century to work in the sugar cane fields. In a future nod to some of today's immigrant experience, their "brokers" signed them to 8-year indentured servitude deals. Most were men. All replaced slaves and Spanish prisoners whenever death thinned out the labor force. With another sad nod to the future, 5,000 or so Chinese arrived in the later 1800's after the U.S. expelled them due to then-(like now) rising nativist sentiment. We booted them after their backs built our railroad and logging industries. How nice. Today, Cubans of Asian descent comprise less than 1% of Cuba's population. Most left after the revolution. Perhaps that's why what remains of the Chinese in Cuba have seemingly gotten little or no benefit from the new Chinese presence on the island. The only evidence I saw: the Barrio Chino's gateway entrance, or paifang. It was donated by the Chinese government back in 1999. Perhaps the lack of love can be traced to over a century's worth of mixed marriages and progeny, creating a people not Chinese enough for the Chinese. Or maybe the teetering Cuban economy just isn't as attractive to Chinese support as the teetering U.S. economy is. Either way, current economic trends in both Cuba & the U.S. suggest that the Chinese are once again putting the "D" in "Dynastic."
I take a cab back to Miramar after lunch at Tien Tian. Miramar houses Cuba's foreign embassies. I see some of what the darkness kept from me the night we arrived: a sprawling, monolithic Russian embassy, with a giant phallic tower letting the island know who the big boss used to be. Overgrown walls and rusted razor wire only add to the run-down look of a once mighty Soviet presence. A few blocks later, as the cab nears my hotel, I see Chinese flags flying from several compounds along the Calle 24. I can't tell which of the beautiful homes with the manicured lawns houses the actual embassy. My cab driver can't tell me either, as he paraphrases The Who's 'Won't Get Fooled Again,' with a weary look that says "meet-the-new boss-same-as-the-old-boss."
Irony works overtime in Cuba.
The Hotel Occidental's lobby told me all I needed to know about the disparity between what tourists experience and the lives of most Cubans. Marble floors, high ceilings adorned with modern chandeliers, leather couches placed around glass tables, with some wicker chairs and indoor palms thrown in to remind one that this here's a tropical paradise...with lots of air-conditioning. There were no shirtless men, no women and children with shirts drawn up, exposing their mid-sections trying to keep cool, no one who seemed remotely like the folks I'd glimpsed from the bus along the humid night streets of Miramar.
Music and air-conditioning greeted us as soon as we walked through the doors. A kickass rendition of "Guantanamera" filled the giant lobby space, and we instantly saw that it was being performed by a live band (at 2 something in the morning!). Everyone was handed a mojito and herded toward the back of the lobby, where some of the band members were dancing while the bassist, conguera and pianist held things down. I guess 60 Americans can still merit such a welcome. Or maybe not: it's far more likely that our nationalities did not matter as much as the fact and effects of our being tourists. It seemed that way at the airport as it did when we stood watching an all-woman band move from "Guantanamera" into "El Cuarto de Tula" (the first of what seemed countless renderings I heard in Cuba [played almost exclusively whenever tourists were around] of tunes from the Buena Vista Social Club album).
The people I would later meet along the streets of Habana, Candelaria, and Matanzas would be among the first to tell me that, yes, Cubans working at hotels and in the tourism industry were different, better off than most simply because of their access to tips, mostly in the form of CUCs.
Cuba no longer allows foreigners to use Euros or Canadian dollars. Despite the relatively good relations Cuba enjoys with Canada and the E.U., the global economic meltdown forced the Cuban government to be as inventive as its people. And, believe me, the Mother of Invention spends a considerable amount of time in Cuba. Behold: The Cuban Convertible Currency, or CUC (pronounced "kook").
The CUC has no value outside of Cuba, but wields considerable influence among the Cuban people. Like a ticketing system at an arcade, or tokens at a Native American casino, the CUC affords greater control over markets and people. I learned how it works at the Hotel Occidental. The following account was explained to me by a doorman. I later corroborated the information with other workers as well as assorted staffers at the other hotel I stayed at in Varadero.
The hotel is owned and operated by a Spanish corporation. As they do with the dozens of hotels they "own" in Cuba, the Spaniards pay the Cuban government huge annual lease fees and taxes tied to worker salaries. The Spaniards agree to provide workers @ ten dollars per hour (American/Euro) in pay. That way, the Cuban government gets more from the wage tax they impose on the Spaniards (and, ultimately, the Cuban workers). Although the Spaniards would like to pay the Cuban workers in Euros (which would significantly raise their standard of living), the Cuban government won't allow it. What happens is that the Cuban government takes payment in Euros, which hold higher money market value than either Cuban currency, pockets as much as possible, then pays the hotel workers a minuscule amount in Cuban Pesos. One CUC is worth 25-30 Cuban Pesos. With the average Cuban earning 30-35 pesos a month from their government-issued job, tips and CUCs from tourists make a helluva difference.
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We stood transfixed, mojitos in hand. The all-girl band was killing it. The music came at us heavy like hot bricks, like a bonfire's flames, like great drugs. The singers were dancing and nearly every one of us, men and women, stared, mouths agape at what appeared to be another life form: El Culo Cubano. It moved with precision and certitude, independent of all other body parts. It had its own area code, spoke its own language and made men cry like babies.The Earth and all of its creatures stand still to pay respects. All the singers had it. In all of our exhaustion and musical elation, we could only marvel along with the Mother of Invention, at one of her finest works.
I got a taste of the humidity when we stepped off our plane and walked across the tarmac for Custom's and immigration processing. It was overwhelming to this San Francisco resident. But I loved it, as it literally bathed me in Cuban air. I'd been waiting all my life to set foot on this island, and felt tempted to kiss the ground like the Pope. As a songwriter, and metaphorically speaking, however, I've been kissing this island for years, so I just gave thanks to God, sent a wink to my grandfather's spirit, and accepted a simple fact: everything I heard, knew, or thought I knew about Cuba was about to change.
Perhaps because it was nearly 2 a.m., and I was exhausted, the bus ride from the airport to the hotel was surreal. The air-conditioning battled the heat to make my view appear as if I were looking through a strange, mist-lined mirror; seeing my tired face looking at Cuba for the first time, the only interference being a physical one (the window), with my parents' memories finally falling out of focus.
As soon as the bus got off the highway and onto the streets of Habana's Miramar neighborhood, people and homes came into view. We rumbled down enough narrow residential streets that I could see how lively things were even at such a late/early hour. There were people everywhere: couples kissing and holding hands along sidewalks, entire families walking around, and young men gathered and laughing at nearly every corner. The streets were dimly lit, mostly by one or two flickering florescent lights in porches every other block or so. The bus lurched and came to several complete stops to allow bicyclists and scooters to make their way across our path.
I saw palms, abandoned storefronts, dilapidated buildings galore along the busy night streets. Plenty of well-maintained homes and apartment buildings also blew by my bus window as I thought: this reminds me of South Florida during an electricity blackout (which, due mostly to hurricanes, happened a lot during my youth. Hell, like many kids, I was conceived during a such a blackout!). In exile, from Miami, my parents' generation has always viewed Cuba as a destitute shell of its former self. My long-held suspicion that that view was somehow flawed began growing with every start and stop of the bus. I would soon be seeing more for myself.
The thought of letting go of my parents' Cuba made me nervous, sending a charge through me as the bus pulled into the Hotel Occidental's circular drive.
José Martí International AIrport
"Don't bring any Cuban Cowboys' CDs to Cuba! They'll confiscate them and arrest you on the spot!" Such was but one of of my mother's warnings. She also strongly reminded me not to ever mention that my father was part of the Brigada, the CIA-sponsored exile battalion that was left to lose face and lives along the shores of the Bay of Pigs. The CIA had dubbed the Cubans they trained for two years prior to the attack "Cuban Cowboys." That's where the band name comes from.
To my mild relief, no one gave a shit about the Cuban Cowboys' CDs. Indeed, no one seemed to give a shit about the entire plane-load of Americans that were lining up to have their passports examined but not stamped. The guy who did my intake hardly looked at me, even as he snapped my picture and asked me how long I'd be staying. He was blond, blue-eyed, maybe pushing 30 and had a Russian surname, but spoke Spanish like a Cuban. He nodded me forward and I walked in to a larger hall to wait on my suitcase.
We were herded in makeshift lines toward the one working carousel. While the wait for luggage was remarkably long, it was filled with incessant chatter from Cuban attendants lining the conveyor belt. It was 1 a.m., but these guys were lively and, clearly, used to hanging out and shooting the shit. With the carousel sending out one suitcase every five minutes or so, one turned to the other, laughing and says: "Mucha velocidad, pero poco movimiento!" (Lots of velocity, but little movement). I had no idea that his clever turn of phrase would lurk beneath much of what I'd soon experience on the streets of Havana and Matanzas.
I was finally in Cuba. Waiting in line for something. I was too tired to recognize the wait for what it was: an induction to Cuban society.
Monterey to La Habana
The plane must make an unexpected stop in Monterey. We need to refuel before going on to La Habana. The stewardesses handed out plenty of free Habana Club rum, so most of my fellow passengers don't seem too upset by the detour; that is, until some extreme turbulence kicks in. The turbulence was so severe that the stewardesses fled back to their seats, leaving one of the carts loose in their service station. Bottles clanked. Overhead bins popped open, and lots of people closed their eyes and clung to their armrests. Am I going to die? Die en route to Cuba -- fitting for the guy who broke a solemn oath by getting on the plane.
I was in high school when I swore to my mom that I'd go to Cuba only after Fidel had died. But that was before so much, not the least of which: re-Cubanizing after leaving Miami for college in Gainesville, FL, finding my voice as the Cuban Cowboy, and learning. along with the rest of the world, that Castro will likely outlive Cher. Maybe I didn't deserve to die, but I suppose my first trip to Cuba ought to be death-defying in some way.
I am on airplane filled with Latino school district leaders. We're going to Cuba under an 'Academic Research' VISA in order to get a first hand look at Cuba's vaunted education system. My day-job is sending me. What a country. "How can I refuse?" I say to my mom. She calmed down only after reeling off several scathing, foreboding emails about Castro, the island's abject poverty, and the fact that her Cuba no longer existed. She's immovable, a mountain of resentment with an ice-cap of bitterness on top.
The plane stabilized and starts a slow descent towards Monterey. I see mountain ranges below. I see why the Spaniards dubbed it the 'Land of Kings'. I wonder how the Spaniards described Cuba's Sierra Maestra when they first saw its ridges. Too bad los conquistadors could not have flown in. Perhaps Hatuey would have caught a break. Perhaps he would have seen them coming.
Mountains have always been difficult…Difficult to scale, traverse, deal with. In mountains, people can die as easily as they can hide out for long periods of time. It was/is as true for Fidel as it was for the rebel troops led by Antonio Maceo in the days of Spanish colonial rule. It's as true for Bin Laden, today, in Pakistan, as it has been for me as a first-generation Cuban-American.
For me, the 'mountain' has been an extension of geography: a cultural divide, an inter-generational distance, the space between my dead, absentee dad and me, the unspoken narrative within all the 'Cuba stories' my grandfather used to tell me, the enduring bitterness of my parents' generation at choosing- or having to leave their homeland in the prime of their lives, the hunger of a country for freedom and true independence, and, most immediately, the dissonance between my life as an American and my very Cuban heart.
The plane lands in Habana's Jose Marti International in less than an hour. We'll be deplaning at Terminal 3 --- not the Quonset hut terminal reserved for flights from Miami, but a world-class facility built by the Canadian government (at Cuba's behest) in preparation for a visit from the Pope a few years back. What a country.
Tijuana to La Habana
Memory and fantasy --- not necessarily surrealism -- are two pillars of Cuban-American literary tradition. Events and people must all run through Exile, the third pillar. The final pillar is the individual through which a story is being told. I am a very americanizado, first generation Cuban-American. My memories of Cuba come from Miami. I offer no flying carpets, no open wounds that never clot. My memories are not so abstracted, not so fantastic. If forced, and before making this journey, I'd call my memories hand-me-downs, recycled tires, or an old record record collection from which certain 'hits' arise: 'The Bay of Pigs,' 'Che Murdered Hundreds', and the classic 'Perdimos Todo'; tunes whose melodies filled my head as a child growing up in Hialeah, FL, Miami's blue-collar suburb. At best, my memories of Cuba before this trip are refracted, bounced off of others' actual experiences. My father's lost political ambitions, my grandfather's ranch, my grandmother's abandoned piano were like ice-cubes in my early life's glass of water. Later they became the impetus for many a Cuban Cowboy song.
I grew up in a house and city steeped in bittersweet longing for Cuba. The old joke goes: 2 stray dogs, hungry mangy mutts, were walking the streets of Miami. After fighting for a scrap of food left behind by some alley cat, the dog that lost out on the morsel turns to the other and says: "You know, in Cuba I was a Doberman Pinscher!" For many in my family, life was not only better in Cuba, but fundamentally different; it was as if they were entirely different people. The weird part was that those different people co-existed simultaneously within and without the harsher world of post-Revolution Miami --- a world tantalizingly close to their Cuba, a place many of them chose to forever freeze in time, in their hearts and minds. It was as if I lived with and among ghosts: each Cuban-born person had a spectre-double, capable of overtaking them, their lives, their politics at the mere mention of, say, Fidel Castro.
The exile is thus a person divided into concept and condition. In that sense, one can be consumed or adopted by El Exilio Cubano (and vice versa). Any Cuban-American can tell you this, just maybe not in so many words!
