Eating Fire: My Life as a Lesbian Avenger (22 page)

I wasn’t thrilled about going. The idea was kind of horrible and interesting at the same time. Like meeting someone’s parents. Ana’s mom, Faustina, asked if I thought I’d like it, Cuba. “Maybe,” I told her.

“Everyone likes it . . .”

“I guess so.”

“I’ve never known anyone not to like it.” She pursed her lips in outrage.

I bit back all my rude responses.

27.

I’m not sure how to describe the trip. It wasn’t a vacation, and I wasn’t your average tourist out for mojitos or mambo or some revolutionary thrill. Call it a visit to an alternative dimension, with a hint of what we’d become if we embraced programs like TIPS or fear-mongering politicians. If the full weight of state homophobia was allowed to come down on queers, or any group, like they’d pushed for in Oregon and Colorado.

Cuba. I thought it should have been bigger. At least as big as Texas for all the room it took up in my skull. But coming in on the plane you could see it was just this ordinary island of brown and green. The same size as Kentucky. My first glimpse was weeds sprouting from cracked tarmac and soldiers everywhere in their olive-drab fatigues. One by one, we entered into little plexiglass cubicles where the door slammed behind us, and a boy with a skimpy beard and AK47 demanded to know why we were there. There was so much I was tempted to say, but the little guy with the wispy beard offered, “¿Familia?” And I said, “Yes, family.” And that was that. I was through. They didn’t even check my luggage where Ana had asked me to stash a VHS of
Lesbian Avengers Eat Fire Too.

Gerardo and Nancy were waiting at the gate in coats and scarves, the only dark faces in the crowd. These were Ana’s teenage friends. Gerardo Fulleda León, the playwright now with his own modest theater company. Nancy Morejón, the poet who hobnobbed at the Casa de las Américas. I thought I should get it on video. I had our new camera there in my hand but didn’t raise it to catch the awkward hugs. They were Ana’s first gestures on the island after thirty-five years. It felt wrong to film. Too voyeuristic.

They had a gypsy cab with a pink rhino dangling from the rearview mirror instead of a flag. Right away the cops stopped us, because visitors are supposed to use official taxis, but Gerardo told them we were relatives, all of us. And they let us through. We took a long decaying highway. There weren’t any golden arches or Speedo stores, but there was plenty of advertising if you count the building sketching Che in broad strokes, along with
¡Hasta la victoria siempre!
Always, until victory. The apartment we’d rented in Vedado was surprisingly big and clean, with a balcony that gave you a view of the crumbling Malecón and the ocean if you craned your head a little, though you didn’t want to linger. There were cracks running up and down that building, too, and iron railing on the stairs that formed new piles of rust every day.

Conversation was awkward. Gerardo would start sentences, shrug, and say, “You know . . . ,” leaving a big ellipse, as if the words had decayed in his mouth. Then Nancy said some vague thing to Ana about “what happened to you” and seemed to be giving her smarmy absolution for getting the hell out. And when he saw my eyebrows go up, because Ana didn’t have to apologize for anything, Gerardo changed the subject with a funny story about Ana’s departing words—or was it a letter from Paris in which she proclaimed that she was leaving to join another revolution? And when the ’68 student revolution happened in France, he imagined her there in the center of it, manning the barricades and throwing stones.

Ana blushed twelve shades of red. “Did I really?”

And we all laughed like it was a joke, though of course it was true. Afterwards, she’d organized Parisian dykes—or tried to. In New York, she helped birth other little smoldering revolutions like the Lesbian Avengers, though we didn’t talk about that or even acknowledge we were all queer. In fact, when Nancy talked about a young interviewer asking her about the members of
El Puente,
if they were gay, she proudly said, “I threw them out by their ears.” I looked at Ana and she looked at her shoes. It was the first time I’d seen her back away from a fight, maybe because I’d stuffed her full of Xanax to get her on the plane.

Nancy asked something about September 11, but her eyes glazed over as soon as Ana started to talk about what it was like. In Cuba then, the outside world was nothing more than a dream shaped by the official media. Even Nancy only had brief glimpses during her trips abroad for poetry readings and academic conferences. And if you hadn’t grasped the world before the attacks, afterwards you missed the huge global shifts. They’d missed a lot of them. Four decades’ worth. Couldn’t conceive of what it was like to sit in a chair in front of the computer and gather the world in your arms like sea foam, let it go.

Ana herself was just a ghost for them, despite her short scarlet ’do. She was still some teenage prodigy with dark hair and a pressed white blouse, whom the government had targeted by mistake. Who later rose like Santa Barbara with her sword to publicly defend
El Puente
when the group itself was attacked. Though Ana had confided to me her act was less than heroic: “After jail, I was numb. I just didn’t care.”

I didn’t say a lot. Ana had told me to keep my trap shut because they’d probably have to report our conversation. Instead, I grinned too much, showing my straight, white American teeth. I laughed inappropriately. Then Ana suddenly started on a rant about Bush the warmonger, stripper of civil liberties, the go-it-alone guy.

Light was fading when we were finally alone in the apartment. We didn’t talk too much between us, just tried to unpack and arrange things. I jumped like a cat at little sounds. The worried-looking woman who rented the place told us not to answer the door if anybody knocked. Everything was legal, but members of the
comité de defensa
liked to harass her, sometimes press for bribes.

When we got hungry, we grabbed a flashlight and ventured out on our own.

There wasn’t any light at all except a few bright squares coming from windows and a faint veiled moon. The sidewalks were a ravaged mess. The concrete would sometimes rise six inches, sometimes eighteen. We fell into holes even with the flashlight, stepping around piles of dog shit and rubble from buildings that had collapsed from hurricanes, but mostly malign neglect.
Take that, you shimmering city of degenerate capitalists!
No need for bombs: it already looked like Kabul, or the Bronx circa 1970. And like the Bronx at night, there weren’t any humans in the street until we got to Calle something or other where Ana began to murmur the refrain that would accompany us through the trip, “This used to be, this used to be.” This used to be a club.
El Puente
held a reading there. This used to be a bar where La Lupe sang. This is the corner I stood on during the October crisis in 1962 when American bombers were circling overhead, and an oblivious José Mario was babbling on about some boy he’d just met.

At a café, we planted ourselves at a table and tried not to breathe. The diesel fumes blocked out the sea. We ordered a couple of ham and cheese sandwiches, and beer for Ana, Malta for me. You could pay in pesos if you were Cuban, dollars for foreigners—my god, how they hopped for greenbacks, clearing away the Cuban riffraff to make more room for us tourists. At the next table, a Canadian guy made a complicated deal with two sleazy gray-skinned hustlers that involved a couple of bottles of rum and a blowjob. Behold the Revolution’s New Man.

I wrote down that the beer was named Hatuey for an Indian chief barbequed by the Spanish Inquisition.

We had a guidebook and played at being tourists. We hit ancient convents and museums and art galleries and spent an awful lot of time running away. There was the day we dropped off medicine and videotapes at a government AIDS clinic, and I was so impressed by how clean and cheerful it was that I asked them if I could do a video for
The Gully.
The woman’s face contorted in horror and she sent us to the subdirector, who sent us to the director, who said nobody could say a word unless we went through official channels. “Here’s the address and phone of the government’s press office. Should I call for you?”

“No, that’s fine. We’ll be in touch later.” And we fled the premises, only stopping when we got to a park near the old Writer’s Union, and Ana’s old high school where the student militia had marched around a statue of Antonio Maceo’s mother. Not far away, baby Pioneers piled onto buses with their little red handkerchiefs. Later, we spotted them at a demo in the center of town. They cheered speeches at the appropriate moments and got snickered at by tourists. There was a local election coming up, and they offered all the usual pageantry, speeches, and ballots just like in Florida. Or Puerto Rico.

Once a guy screamed at me when I videotaped laundry hanging in the ruins of a collapsed building with vines curling up the rubble. “It’s not picturesque. Go away.” The streets were full of simmering people, most of them men, and hissing air like leaky tires. “Hey mama, mamacita. Psst. Psst!” In Havana, they tended to be poor and white. Elsewhere, poor and black. “Hey mamacita, hey.” I finally shouted back in Cienfuegos where Ana showed me her childhood home, the school she went to.

We were followed around by a young black kid who must’ve been all of ten years old. He was trying to hustle Ana, telling her how beautiful she was: “Hey mama, mamacita. I’m sure there’s something I can do for you tonight.” After him was the gauntlet of a dozen large hissing men, “Oye mama, hey mamacita, pssst, pssst.” When a few grabbed their dicks, I screamed at the whole gang of them to shut up and leave us alone, “Enough already! I’m not your mother” (in Spanish). Then this one guy, after consulting with his buddies, charged forward to chase us down the street, screaming in English, “Fuck you, you bitches!” He was dressed all in white, a recent initiate in Santería, and must’ve thought he was Changó.

That was the day we realized we’d rarely seen women in the Havana streets alone after dark. None at all in Cienfuegos. Even during the day, they didn’t linger but marched purposefully. We also started noticing the “Fuck you’s” in English scrawled almost everywhere. All that free-floating inarticulate rage. Directed at surrogates mostly, instead of the people in charge.

There was also that mob that we ran into in Santiago de Cuba. We’d spent a dozen hours in a tourist bus inhaling stinking fumes and cataloguing all the downed telephone lines and rusting metal of the glorious projects in the countryside that Havana had been defunded for. And when we arrived at the bus station in the Santiago twilight, we were engulfed by a crowd of gypsy cab drivers all reaching for our arms, our bags. Groping our shoulders. Sniffing after dollars with bared fangs. It was like hell. We didn’t want to be swallowed up and forced into an illegal cab. What if the cops stopped us and Gerardo wasn’t there to smile and lie?

The rejected cabbies sneered at us, got ugly. “Where are you from?” “Here, Cuba. Born and bred,” Ana told them. “No, señora. There’s nothing Cuban about you.” Or maybe that came from the mob of women in Trinidad. Banishing Ana for what? Her red hair? Her new shorts? Her dykeliness, again? Palish skin? In Santiago, a bus station employee had to extract us. She took us around the back way and explained they’d lost control of the place a long time ago. When things got really bad, they’d call the cops who would come and break a few heads, but nothing really changed.

The Santiago hotel was its own separate inferno. The terrace a mix of drunken elderhostelers and scrawny little European men with these beautiful mixed-race Cuban women, not yet allowed there on their own. The day after we arrived, a couple of snaggle-toothed Swiss bastards started eying us. Got more and more aggressive with each polite rejection until it was Ana’s turn to go berserk and scream, “Not all Cuban women are whores! Fuck off!” And the waiters came and couldn’t decide which of us to throw out. And Ana let them have it, too, these shitty little Cuban pimps who did nothing but whore women out or reduce us to beggars. Like that older black woman we’d seen earlier in the day who trailed us begging for “Savon, savon.” Soap. Soap. Too old to offer herself. Too black.

The revolution was mostly a bust for her, too, even if the government had legislated an end to racism. And as beautiful as the law can be, it has to have roots in society and requires activists for a cultural shift to be enforced. At home, Ana has this mushy, rotting little book called
Cómo surgió la cultura nacional
(How the National Culture Arose), centering Afro-Cubans in the heart of Cuban history. The author, Walterio Carbonell, didn’t fare well. He was on the verge of launching a negritude movement, a kind of Black Power thing like they’d had in the French Caribbean, when he got dragged off to jail, along with all his papers, even his typewriter, as if it could write by itself. Afterwards, the renaissance of black culture was carefully controlled.

One Sunday afternoon in Havana, we went to a community center to watch a rumba group. The audience was mostly Afro-Cubans dressed in their Sunday best with a few white tourists. The patio was shabby and hot with broken concrete. Two young black men tried to do rap, dressed all gangbanger with new jeans from somewhere and do-rags. But it was hard to pull off. The sound from the mike cut in and out as they worked their arms and rhymed about Antonio Maceo, Cuba’s one black hero from the nineteenth century. The middle-aged black audience stared at them in amazement, waited for the rumba group. It turned out to be a mediocre band plastered with Adidas and Nike logos. They barely went through the motions. Two or three white tourists squealed and applauded. After a couple more Hatuey beers, a few locals joined in with an equal lack of enthusiasm.

We visited a black writer friend of Gerardo who had this enormous two-bedroom apartment with a fabulous view that was absolutely great if you didn’t mind that the woman running the elevator was a stone-faced capo keeping track of your comings and goings. But your status didn’t always protect you. Even Nancy who could get an exit visa whenever she wanted, got detained by the cops for being a hooker when she was showing around a foreign white male writer. “I told them, ‘You can take me in if you want to, but you’re going to be sorry.’”