Eating Fire: My Life as a Lesbian Avenger (23 page)

28.

We wondered what would happen next. If the Communists would perpetuate themselves like in China. If they would collapse like the former Soviets into corruption and crime. Civil society was as rusty as our balcony. There were a few hopeful signs—rappers who didn’t bother with official gigs, doing protest songs about cops profiling black kids, tyranny passed off as revolution. Sometimes these
raperos
got pulled in by the police when their impromptu concerts got too big, or by security when the content was too hot, but they kept it up. There was a Cuban metal scene, too, radically raunchy in a place were the bureaucrats still pretended they were as pure as the Holy Virgin, while regular people fucked tourists to survive. Later on, bloggers like Yoani Sánchez would emerge, bothering the government merely by refusing the ellipse and writing honestly about their lives.

Before we left, Gerardo borrowed an apartment and organized a party for a bunch of lesbians and gay men. They mostly didn’t know each other, but rum flowed like water so it didn’t matter. When everybody’s eyes got bright and shiny, we turned on the VHS and slipped in
The Lesbian Avengers Eat Fire Too.

I’d avoided seeing it until then, and felt weird, watching my younger doppelgänger talking about lesbian visibility and activism, while I was standing right there in Cuba where so much was forbidden. Queer parties got busted sometimes. A visiting Pedro Almodóvar got arrested once. Every now and then, somebody would get four or five people to hold a demo, and they’d all end up in jail. Not that you didn’t see queers. Our first night there, we’d passed a cinema with a huge chic gayboy crowd outside, socializing and cruising. They even had their own Elton John reigning over the space with his sparkling glasses, though the cops could have chased them off at any time. The only protected queers were organized by Castro’s straight niece who promoted such a medicalized understanding of LGBT people you felt like Ike was still in the White House.

But the Avengers was their history, too, with a Cuban dyke as the cofounder, and Cuban Americans like Janet and Lidia and Belkis.

I don’t know what they expected in the video. To Cuban ears,
Vengadoras Lesbianas
sounded more like the Baader-Meinhof Gang than a bunch of superheroes or crafty British spies, images the founders had been thinking of when they sat around Ana’s table in prickly chairs and tried to come up with the first action and a name. The Cuban audience actually sighed with relief when they saw the marching band enter the screen and got the idea. We paused now and then to translate the interviews or speeches and explain all the black and brown faces. U.S. TV hadn’t been widely pirated yet, and they’d assumed all Americans were white, or most of them anyway. At the very least, they were sure we were still segregated, kept apart by water hoses and police dogs and hate.

They giggled nervously when they saw me scuffle with cops on Fifth Avenue. And were horrified to hear of queers getting killed in Oregon. A young dyke murmured, “At least that doesn’t happen here. We’re very tolerant.” But another rebuked her in quiet outrage. They were impressed with the fire-eating, and chuckled at my shaved head. And oohed and aahed at the massive Dyke March in Washington, and the sight of us, there, in front of the White House, which even they recognized. And laughed out loud at waltzing dykes.

Afterwards, something weird happened. Arguments broke out. People started completing their sentences. The young commissar-type who declared that Cuba was tolerant, and went on to explain how it was no big deal when she took her girlfriend to office parties, had to listen to an older dyke tell her what happened when she and her girlfriend had tried to rent a hotel room with only one bed. And somebody else told one of their stories. And somebody else told one of theirs. It seemed to be the first time most of them had talked openly about their lives as queers and this thing called homophobia. I told the baby commissar that there were still antigay laws on Cuba’s books, like the one from 1971 that prevented queers from teaching.

“But they’re surely not enforced?”

“Yes.” I should have told her about Josefina Suárez. About Lina and her sister as well, but I would have had to start so many decades before. And do it all in Spanish. And Gerardo himself had warned us about talking openly. I thought about those Polish journalists who got busted for not having the right visa, remembered we were trapped on the island. And in a couple of days, I’d be sealed again in a bulletproof cubicle. I kept mum.

We’d been encouraged to see Lina. “Things had happened to her.” Ana didn’t know her well, though they’d roomed together briefly when Lina had arrived in Havana from the provinces, a cardboard suitcase full of poems. It was the tail end of
El Puente.
Ana left soon afterwards.

Two women answered the door. They looked like poor rural whitish Americans with too-tight polyester clothes and bad hair and broad smiles featuring decaying teeth. We handed over some real coffee that we’d bought at the dollar store and exchanged a few pleasantries with Lina and her sister before the poet launched into her story.

I’d been all ready with my dyke sympathy, but what she talked about were the black feet, dangling from the bunk above, like two dead crows. In the cell, there was nothing else to look at, she said. If she sat up, they were inches from her face, scaly, dark, and rotten. She shivered like my mother did at interracial couples or a dyke holding a coffee cup. Lina hated their pale soles more than the stench from the slop bucket, unwashed cunt, the old rags they used for menstrual blood, the iron bars, the stone walls. Hour after hour, day after day, they hung unguarded and black in her space. If she had a knife she’d cut them off. Or kill herself.

We didn’t know what to say. Couldn’t even exchange glances. “Why were you in jail?” Ana asked.

“I’d been asked to direct the big Communist Youth literary magazine. I guess because I’d won a big prize for my first poetry book.” (It helped that her parents were fixtures in the Party, Ana told me later.) “It went fine until they asked me to quit publishing homosexual writers, and I asked why. ‘Their writing was the best around,’ I said, ‘and none were enemies of the revolution.’”

The answer launched her into
inzilio.
“You get it, right?” she asked. “Not exile, but inzile.” Afterwards, people would cross the street to avoid her. Nobody would give her work or touch her poems. Finally, she couldn’t take it and went to the Spanish embassy, demanding that the guards kill her before she did something. They didn’t. They took her to the authorities. And even though one of the Cuban guards testified on her behalf, they convicted her of actually attacking the place. It was payback for publishing queers.

She got sick in jail, couldn’t stand at attention, and got dragged from the cell by her hair and tossed into solitary. “They thought I was faking.”

When her family got her out of there a couple of years later, her hair fell from her head in chunks. She was covered in rashes and filth, could barely tolerate water or raise the weight of her head. She showed us a picture of herself the day she was released. “Ninety pounds.” They fed her with IVs, and a shrink diagnosed her with paranoid schizophrenia.

Ana and I looked at each other. “Of course,” said Ana, rolling her eyes.

Lina pooh-poohed Ana’s mild suggestion that the diagnosis had something to do with politics. All the best poets were mentally ill. She told us a little proudly how bad she still felt, the pills she had to take. Then she read aloud a poem she composed for the mysterious beautiful Ana, while my flesh crawled. Then tried to sell us some books.

Her sister had her own stories. Girlfriends who killed themselves, mostly after getting denounced in school auditoriums.

“Ladykiller,” Lina taunted her. “Ladykiller.”

Her sister’s eyes teared up. I had the camera there at my side but didn’t bring it out, afraid it would stop the flow of their stories, afraid to have them there on tape.

Lina didn’t tell the whole story. Like how she embroiled Josefina in her troubles. Ratted her out as a dyke. Got her inziled, too. We went to see Josefina a day or two afterwards. She would have been a good New Yorker—stubborn, opinionated, relentless, talked a mile a fucking minute. Made us feel oddly ourselves. She lived in this big apartment taking care of a father that she’d stashed in a back room for our visit. There was dog hair everywhere, and piles of mildewed paper and books. “You brought coffee. Great. I need something since I quit smoking, and you can’t get pills. I don’t know how people work.” She dumped filthy cushions off something for me and settled Ana in the chair previously protected from dog hair by the stacks and stacks of papers she removed to the floor. She herself perched on a hairy sofa with an enormous poster of Che behind her. She kissed and patted the dog as she talked and talked, explaining how she’d probably have been left alone except that Lina embroiled her in everything.

Hours after Lina was arrested, Josefina was called into the office of the philosophy department and asked to resign. The department head was waving a statement from Lina detailing how she and Josefina had been lovers. That Lina had gone over to Josefina’s that day, quarreled with her, then taken a knife from the drawer, before going to the embassy where she attacked the guard.

“Was it written in her own hand? Not just something typed and signed?” Ana asked, finally talking.

“Yes, I think so,” said Josefina, a little irritated that we upset the rhythm of her story.

“Did they force her? During interrogation?”

“Had she actually been at your house?” I asked.

“Yes.”

“And did you fight?”

“No, of course not. She’d been there, but I didn’t notice anything in particular. We’d broken up months before . . .”

“How long were you all together?” Ana asked.

Josefina counted out the years.

“Was it your knife?”

“Apparently.” The dog ran to the door and barked madly. “Come back here, sit down, be quiet,” she yelled. Howl, howl. “Be quiet!”

Josefina wasn’t interested in the details, just what came next. They wanted her to sign some mea culpa, breast-beating letter resigning because of her degeneracy, but she wouldn’t. “Because what does sex have to do with anything?” And after she was fired and entered her own
inzilio,
there were pleas from her friends to make some conciliating, self-deprecating gesture so that they could give her some related, nonteaching job. But she refused. And had been fighting the bastards ever since. Writing letters, haranguing officials, quoting Marx at them. In daily, weekly, monthly, yearly letters analyzing their false dialectics.

Somehow she stayed out of jail. Maybe because she bent over backwards to show her loyalty to the regime. She told us that after a trip to Paris in which she had shown up unannounced on Ana’s doorstep, she’d gone straight to state security to tell them all about her visit when she got back to Cuba. She didn’t even give them a chance to call her in.

I don’t know what my face showed, but Ana’s mouth was hanging open. What could you possibly say to that? What could you say to anyone about anything in that strange fucking country where you had to contort yourself into unrecognizable shapes to survive?

And Josefina talked about
El Puente,
digging out the broadsheet they circulated establishing the group, a few old diary entries describing their nefarious, degenerate activities that largely consisted of talking, drinking, bumming money, reading, walking, eating pizza, drinking beer, swilling rum, sitting on the beach, and talking, talking, talking.

She had a photo of Ana in the “psychiatric clinic” after her own stint in jail. Ana asked about the other queers purged at the same time. Plenty ended locked up in concentration camps, jailed, suicided. Had she seen it coming? Josefina waved her hand dismissively. “Not my department,” while Che stared meaningfully into the middle distance, a few dog hairs clinging to his face.

I should have said all that when I talked to the young communist at the party, plant more seeds of information. Already, you could see her worldview shifting. At least a little. But I didn’t. And Ana kept her own trap shut, was just a friend of Gerardo’s, though every now and then I could see him pointing at Ana and telling somebody, “I told you about her.” And they’d get a disturbingly reverent expression on their faces.

I felt like a traitor, like a coward sitting in the room with all these queer Cubans, knowing more about their own history than them. More about their present. We informed a lesbian in gender studies at the university that there was going to be an LGBT conference in Havana. She hadn’t heard about it. And probably wouldn’t unless she was handpicked for it. Later on, though, outside queers would tout Cuba’s openness, never asking if it was largely for external consumption, like the restaurants, like the hotels. Never wondering if you can have social change at all with proxy organizing. Whites organizing blacks. Straights representing queers. There was stuff even Gerardo didn’t know. Ana never told him that when she was interrogated by state security all their questions were about
El Puente.
Who was gay? Who had degenerate counterrevolutionary tendencies?

No, I chatted, I smiled. I entertained. When a couple of girls complained about being harassed and asked me what to do when they got called
tortilleras
in the street, I suggested they handle it the New York way, and say, “¿Y qué? So what if I am? You got a problem with that?” We all knew they wouldn’t do it, but it seemed to make them happy knowing somebody somewhere could talk back.

29.

I came back with different eyes, went into the Key Foods and had to walk right out, overwhelmed and a little disgusted by the gigantic slabs of pink salmon. Mounds of dimpled oranges. Entire shelves of plastic sacks of perfectly polished unbroken Uncle Ben’s rice. The sidewalks were dangerously smooth. And compared to Cubans, the people were incredibly fat. And loud. Like a bunch of fat parrots chattering away. Despite the threat of TIPS, they still finished one sentence, went on to the next, then started another, spilling their absolute guts in the middle of the streets where anybody at all could hear them.