Vampiros

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.