Hace calor en la Habana mi hermana...
I live two
blocks from the ocean, and people sell bananas outside my door. The sun is hot.
Havana is a
distorted city, where everything is too cheap or too expensive. If you let
them, prices gravitate towards ones paid by rich foreigners—pale people with
big cameras and strange ideas, wearing shorts and Che Guevara hats as they come
in daily from cruise ships or from Europe. They look in Cuba for heaven and hell.
A woman and her friend sit near me as I use the internet at a fancy hotel. She's
from Michigan, retired in Miami. "I'm so glad I found a piece of
revolutionary art," she explains, glancing at CNN on the flat screen TV.
Other
prices settle towards the demands of almost-middle-class and almost-extremely-poor
Cubans, all of whose disposable incomes are low, who hang bags down from fourth
floor balconies to pull up powdered milk, who yell out of windows to other
windows, who talk to everyone and resolve everything. They keep heaven and
hell across the sea. Some respect the saints.
I ask
MS what she wants to do with her life. "I want to do everything I
can't do," she says. She lives in a two-bedroom apartment with 7 other people.
The ceilings are high, and they've built extra rooms, like tree-houses, halfway
up the walls. Yemaya, the black virgin from Regla, looks on from a shelf.
There are days when I go to the slums. A dirt path down from a bridge leads to a neighborhood,
a well-designed, cement house with blue tiles, sinks into a wide, sweltering expanse
of wood and metal shacks, hundreds, connected by alleys and bootleg
electricity, bootleg constructions that get better with sweat, barrels of improvised
water, people from the provinces, no libretas, no dollars, no power, but not
kicked-out, yet. Men make charcoal by the river. They tell me they sell it in
the busy part of town.
There are nights when I jump into one of the thousand ancient,
bulky, fifty-cent maquina-cars, where you aren't supposed to slam the doors, and
the driver blasts romantic bachata from the stereo and sings obnoxiously,
riding towards Capitolio, towards the breathing, colonial ally-streets of Jesús
María, the neighborhood that people tell me to look out for, where the watching
people in reconfigured maze-buildings, tell T I'm coming before I get there.
T's mom
cooks me yuca and garlic chicken, and tells me about the saints, Yemaya and
Ellegua, Ochun. A is dancing crazily in the street outside. T and I
wander out of the barrio, flag another car to meet the piquete--C, or
O, or I--out to the wide, quiet avenues of Vedado, a hidden discoteca,
or down Galeanos, past angry transvestites, people fighting, past sheep-looking
tourists with shiny phones and shiny clothes, us out for drinks and music,
leaning on someone's soon-to-fall balcony, tapping out beats and dancing, sweating,
in and out of love, and, later, to the malecón waterfront with a big yellow moon
over the soft, disintegrating city skyline.
It's a
cartoon skyline, twisting into the jet-black ocean, and a cartoon moon, shining
onto a far away ship. Vampiros, I'm thinking, are in la Habana. And I've got a
5-cent bag of popcorn, some cardboard-box rum, and someone with me singing out
of tune to a ringtone beat. And que bola
mi socio? And coñooooo acere. And
que va, que va.
People talk
about saints, and the saints are here. They play tricks and distort the world, opening
paths. And other people tell the more savvy tourists that it's not heaven and
it's not hell either. Now that I have almost 30 years of life I'm starting to
suspect that heaven and hell can be almost anywhere. And I'm starting to suspect,
too, that this blurry, distorted, dreamworld city is actually a comic book
version of heaven and hell both, tangled up in a knot. More than that, it's a
path that's open.
