In My Hotel Room in Havana

How long have I been in my room? Hours probably. I can hear the music flowing from the poolside party at the Nacional. There's a poolside party every night. Who might be performing tonight? Someone I want to hear, like Pablo Milanes or Los Van Van. The first few nights I went to the party, drank rum, talked to the few people I had met. But I got tired. Tired of drinking rum, tired of talking with people that I'd run out of things to say to. Tired of the endless wait for some music, which usually never came.

This is Cuba. This is the Havana Film Festival in the 1980s. There's barely any printed program. There's barely any printed anything. Or if there is, it runs out right away. Like snacks at a cocktail party in a country where everyone's hungry. So I go, drink rum, try to talk with someone, go back to my room, up the hill at the Habana Libre, built as the Havana Hilton before the Revolution.

I like it. It's mid century modern. It has serious art, commissioned by the Hilton company back in the day. It has good bars and not too terrible food. It does smell of stale tobacco smoke, but I grew up in this city, where everything smells of tobacco. And the mirrors give back an image twenty pounds heavier. Maybe it's from the days when women were supposed to be over-the-top curvaceous and the prosperous men who married them or kept them were supposed to be portly. At least that's what I remember. Now my enlarged image freaks me out every time I walk down the hall to the elevator, particularly if I'm on my way to lunch. But hunger wins out and I forget about the fat boy in the mirror. Not that I'm hungry like my fellow Cubans who never left. I'm just a glutton. And I drink. Everyone drinks. A lot. I love Cuban rum and in a society where, as in all the Latin countries I've been to, drinking a lot is the norm, I join right in. Of course, alcohol accelerates depression. And I am depressed.

I decide to venture out. On my way to the elevator I'm joined by a young couple who've just come out of a room. They're high, probably on rum, maybe on drugs, certainly on sex. When I say hello, the woman recognizes my Cuban accent and concludes, from my clothes and the fact that I'm staying in the hotel, that I hail from the US. “It's not your fault your parents took you out of here”, she says, both she and her partner shimmering with erotic and chemical energy. Maybe she's Cuban, the daughter of exiles, now in sympathy with the Revolution much to her parents’ chagrin. I can't tell. I'm not focused, barely waking up from my depressed hotel-room solitude.

She touches me. Kindness. Solidarity. I want to strangle her. They're both small, they guy is younger but I have pounds on him. I want to kill them both. They offend me. They offend my depression. I'm not like her – something tells me he's local. No one took me out of here. I was glad to leave. And it was before the Revolution, which my whole family was in sympathy with. I certainly was, but with each visit to Cuba less and less. And right now not at all.

I'm no fighter, but I'm bigger and I'm not high. Maybe I could knock him out. Then drag her back to my room and first rape her and then strangle her. Yes, that's what I want to do. That would short-circuit my depression. That would make me feel alive. A new man. A new Cuban man. One whom no parents took out of here before he decided the Revolution was righteous. One who has come back ostensibly to write about it, but, in truth, is looking for something, the answer to something, the key to something. Well, here's the key. Rape. Murder. Redemption. Revolution.

Right now I can't imagine writing anything. This has been a wasted trip. But I will write. I always do. It will reflect my political ambiguity. It will be clever with an undercurrent of darkness. It will be sensuous. But it will be a lie. The truth is here, in this hotel hall on the way to the elevator, in the company of a young couple besotted with sex and rum and who knows what else. In the offense I'm given unintentionally. In my rage, ripping a tear in my depression. In the crimes I want to commit in the name of my anonymous passage through history. In the pain I want to inflict. In my bloodlust and my lust. In my desire to join the carnage – the killing of rebellious Indians, the hunt for runaway slaves, the public garrotings, the machete charges of the wars of independence, the torture of revolutionary prisoners, the firing squads manned by revolutionaries. I want to be purified by violence. I want to be finally and fully Cuban.

El Accidente

Enrique

In the 80s I lived in Manhattan’s Upper West Side on the corner of Amsterdam Avenue, the main thoroughfare for driving uptown from a night of downtown reveries or going to Harlem in ermine and pearls for even more reveries. If the cars hit the lights right they could keep up a rushed pace, and, given the reveries, every night there were crashes I could hear from my bed, even if my apartment window, open on balmy nights, did not face the avenue but the lovely courtyard of a neighboring building.

The sudden crunch of metal was, as the commonplace has it, sickening. It sickened me as it woke me, for it reminded me of the first time I heard it, many years before, long before I ever dreamed of living in New York. That first sickening crunch of automobile metal hitting automobile metal was the climax of the unhappiness that enveloped me in those years, a moment that remained frozen for what seemed like an eternity of an inescapable bad dream, the time went bad things got worse and that even when things had been much better for a long, long time, my mother, the last of my elders, in her last and 91st year still referred to by the words my family used from that morning on and each time filled me with the dread of hearing an evil incantation. El accidente.

Sheila

We had an auto accident about a year after we came to the USA. Mammy was in the hospital for a week with severe head injuries. We had never been without her and Pappy was no help. He cried and blamed himself for disfiguring her face... he did not cook, we had to remind him to change clothes and shower. Henry and I were scared. From that day forward we measured time “antes o después del Accidente”

Thank God for our grandmothers who came to our collective rescue. Mammy came home wrapped like a mummy, unable to see, her eyes were swollen shut, she had multiple bruises and cuts in her arms and legs and was generally sore. Pappy did not work the following year, our savings dwindling. Mammy started getting stronger, the facial scars slowly disappeared. It was a tough year. Then came the trial, another nightmare in itself... 

Enrique

The fear. In the year or so following the accident I lived a constant anxiety. My mother's scarred face, which would eventually heal leaving her unblemished, kept reminding me of the horror of that moment. The fact that we had no auto insurance drove us deeper into financial doom. Meetings with lawyers, as suit and countersuit were prepared, were confusing even if a little bit hopeful. And my father, whose volatile mental state was stretched beyond anything like health, seemed more desperate and irrational.

Of course, I had no template. What was rational in this country we'd moved to? How did things work? I was too young to know how anything worked anywhere, and my parents were too embedded in the world they came from to understand this one, which was very slowly being revealed to me. My father in particular.

Sheila

We did not speak about it between us. Because of the accident we lost our money that we brought with us. My father had been promised a job that never came through. His English was marginal and he believed Tampa was more Spanish speaking than it was. Also we came with the understanding that we would live with my mother’s sister, Tia Elena, for some time. Plans of mice and men... So we bought a house, down payment, stove, refrigerator, furniture, linens, winter coats for all of us, and behold a house heater with a huge kerosene tank outside! What were we thinking? All our savings going out the door fast and my parents without jobs. Oh we sold toilet tissue, door to door, sewing machines, iodine, combs. Mammy got a job as a seamstress at a shirt and pants factory, Pappy went to cabinet shop, lasted three days, then he hit the streets door to door... And then one year and one month to the date, someone ran a red light and destroyed our beautiful Studebaker that we brought with us from Havana. 

Enrique 

At one point, desperate to find out who the driver of the other car was, he had all of us, which might have included my younger sister, scour the city's telephone book looking to match a phone number we had, I don't know how, with a name. It was madness. And I don't remember if we found anything, probably not.

But my biggest fear was not my father's derangement, but the upcoming trial. No settlement had come from the suit (my father's) and countersuit (the other driver), so we were headed for court. My father insisted this failure to reach a settlement was due to our lawyers “selling themselves” to the other side. It was the template he had from our native country's corruption. Or at least, an explanation where he might lose everything but, to himself and his family, save face.

At the core was the fact that he'd been charged with running a red light. He claimed he hadn't. I had no idea; there was no reason for me to look at the light from the back seat of our Cuba-bought Studebaker that Sunday morning at the first major intersection on the way to church.

Still, my father insisted my sister and I had to say, in court and under oath, that we had seen a green light. I was supposed to lie, perjure myself, in front of lawyers expert in extracting the truth from witnesses. I lived in a panic. For months. As usual, my parents, or at least my father, were unaware of my pain. Not that my father was uncaring; on the contrary, whenever I was sick I could see in his face that terrible empathy I would feel one day whenever any of my own children were hurt or sick and my own nervous system duplicated theirs in distress. But it never occurred to him in this instance that his insistence on my saying something that was not true was hurting his son worse than any sickness or accidental pain.

It ended in anticlimax. At the trial no one called me or my sister to testify.

Sheila

We were the Cubans. The driver of the other car, an American businessman. That was it. Pappy broke down crying when they showed him pictures of Mammy’s face and our mangled car, charged him with leaving the scene of the accident, no matter that he had broken ribs and two children who could not be left unattended. 

Enrique

We were awarded an amount much less than was asked, deducted from which was the small amount the court awarded to the other driver’s suit, minus the usual one-third for our lawyers. It was barely enough to buy a beater car and pay medical bills.

Mostly, my fear was over. The moment of perjury never arrived. I was saved. Or so I thought.

It is only now, as I address this for the first time in my long life, that I know I was never saved.

First brave new world

I’m here to neither bury el Almirante, as Dominican protocol insists he be called, though the one time I went looking for his remains I couldn’t find them, nor to praise him. I leave history to better minds. So whatever you want to call today is fine with me. Raised as a Spanish Catholic from a former colony, I grew up with Descubrimiento mythology, but also with Cuban republican ideology which insisted that Spaniards were a bunch of shits, never mind that Cubans like me were Spanish criollos, under whose boot we suffered until we rose against them. The first to rise, however, were not criollos; they were the people el Almirante called ”indios.”

The Black Legend, an exaggerated (but only exaggerated) tale of Spanish cruelty toward natives spread by Spain’s European enemies, took hold with Cuban republicanism, and if we hacked Spaniards into picadillo with machetes in our wars of independence, it was their comeuppance for all the shit they’d done since they landed, again never mind that I was as Spanish as the picadillo’ed imperialists.

But what about the indios? The first Americans, way before there were Americas or indios, are all over the hemisphere, nations that have refused to die in spite of massive linguistic and cultural loss. Here in the north they present a quandary that extends to nomenclature. Native Americans? First Nations? Indigenous people? Indigenous? Natives? Or to yield to el Almirante, who wasn’t quite right in the head I’ve heard, Indians. Years ago, I gonzoed my way into a closed (no whites) powwow in Albuquerque. The only word I heard was “Indian.”I suppose the only correct, meaning not politically but courteously, way of referring to those whose DNA and cultures precede the rest of us in this hemisphere is to use their nation’s name in their national language. Anyone who has studied a foreign language knows how difficult that would be, and we are talking here about many languages.

They are called “Indians” in Sherman Alexis wonderful stories, which feel natural to me, but what do I know? Is it noble savage myth that makes me sympathize with Indians? Why, when I hear the cadences of Indian English among the Hopi and Navajo I feel comforted? Some kind of chill flows through those cadences that tamps down my neurotic overheat. Is it because I want to believe in shamanic powers? We got plenty of that in the culture I grew up and partially live in. But, like everything from that culture, it’s not chill.

I was at a sweat lodge once and I didn’t do so well. To my shame, I had to exit in the middle of the ceremony because I was feeling claustrophobic from the cramped quarters and the extreme heat. What I did like was sitting outside under the Southwestern night sky and later sharing a bong with the Indian shaman or whatever he was as he looked at me with a twinkle in his eye that asked, are you high enough yet?

My own culture was no stranger to shamanism or purifying rituals, but I wondered . . . Is the spirit world of the American Southwest as imbued with pícaro tricksterism as the world of afrocubano orishas? I imagined such Indian spirits conspiring: let’s fuck with this Caribbean white boy’s head, he who fancies himself more authentic than the Anglo hippie types who sweat in the lodge because he, after all, knows a thing or two (mostly bookish) about animism.

Still, no orisha came to my rescue from indio embarrassment as I slinked out of the sweat lodge. Or maybe it was one of them who whispered in my ear, don’t be such a comemierda, you’re going to have a heart attack because you want to stay macho and hip. I punked out to party with the spirits another day. Actually, that very night, as the shaman looked at me with great encouragement while I sucked on the bong.

An hour or so later I was in my rented car from pre-GPS days, driving from the house in whose back yard lodge I had tried to sweat away the toxins of Western civilization and failed, in a city I did not know, stoned as a goose, wondering which way was my hotel. How I found it, I have no clue. Other than the spirit world that had threatened to roast me alive, like the Spaniards did with the first Caribbean chieftain who rose against them long ago in my native island, took pity on me and showed me the way.

No Comparison

I haven’t kept up with the discipline after its forages into theory, but time was a person “with literature”, which is what a comparatist basically is, had to know at least Latin, without which you were an illiterate; Greek as well, and probably Hebrew, for how are you going to understand the Judeo-Christian tradition if you don’t know the first half. I am schooled in Comparative Literature, but I learned no classical languages. What I’ve read is thanks to translators, my heroes.

I know the classics sustain an ideology of privilege. In my Comp Lit student life I heard  Harry Levin lamenting, in his address as president of the American Comparative Literature Association, that students were foregoing Latin and learning Swahili instead. Today that sounds racist, as it already did to this grad student in — when else? — 1968.

I never studied Latin — or Swahili for that matter. And yet I am a comparatist. Of no stature, that’s true; in fact, I left the discipline a long time ago. But I am a child of the classics. I lived in the times of Achilles, as the movie Troy ends saying. The classical era began the times I was born into, something that calls itself Western Civilization. I dive into those stories like Narcissus desiring his own lips.

My parents gave me a young persons’ book collection, El Tesoro de la juventud, a kind of Encyclopedia for kids. It had simplified yet lively retellings of the Greek epics and myths. I was enthralled. Was I primed to love these narratives because I was born into Western culture, that is, into that constructed arc that begins in classical times?

Possibly. For whatever reason I fell hard, as my choice of a sword-and-sandal movie as a cultural reference plainly shows. The world, East and West, North and South, has many mythologies. I’ve been exposed to some. But none resound like the classics. An ordinary man comes home. And still he is Odysseus. I am no less ordinary. And still I am transfixed by Eros. And if I had to choose a goddess I’d choose she who would promise me Helen and launch a thousand ships. We may not always have Paris, but we will always have Venus Aphrodite.

Les mamelles de Tirésias

She thought my notion that women were the initiators was my refusal to admit agency, a seducer’s (graceless) pose. I think she was beginning to feel I was not so simpatico after all. I concede she may have been right. Quizás, quizás, quizás.

Do men have as much agency as women think we do? We have privilege, yes. But have you observed men in the middle of their privilege and don’t they (we) look ridiculous, like kids in daddy’s clothes? When men act in privilege, reveling in agency, they are, to my eyes and ears, cretins.

I’m sure I’ve played at privileged agency. I’ve also played with cap guns. Maybe the men who play with real guns feel they’re not playing, maybe they are full of confidence and free of self-doubt. Don’t know. Never been there. I’ve heard women, feminists even, admit they find it terribly erotic.

Do gay men know men better than straight men? In Women in Love, D.H. Lawrence had his men get naked and wrestle so they could experience the sweaty intimacy they had with women but without sex. The men, or at least one of them, was reaching for the knowledge of another man at the same level of perfection as the greatest sexual love with a woman.

Yes, yes, Lawrence was an asshole, but he was asking haunting questions that would echo through his century. And yes, he came up with fucked-up answers sometimes (The Plumed Serpent), but he thought things through — and was probably a bore for it.

What do men want? The ones I see in the news wanting, wanting, wanting, and usually grabbing, don’t look real. They don’t seem to have changed since the days of Spiro Agnew. Made in some factory. Stepford Husbands. Expensive clothes but no finesse. A big V8 but shitty suspension, and brakes, what brakes?

I don’t recognize them as my species, never mind my gender.

But that woman who no longer found me simpatico probably thought I was more of a pain in the ass than the Stepford Husbands, what with my constant self-doubt spoken without a censor. And my impossible neediness. You want every woman to fall in love with you, an unhappy girlfriend told me once in accusation — and in front of my wife! I felt guilty as charged.

Can a man know a woman? A transgender question. A Tiresias question. Does a man need to know?

(When I started hormone therapy I knew it could bring man-tits, but it brought no prophetic sight from Apollo, nor a greater understanding of women, same old, same old, same old me.)

A Muggle’s Late Life Confession

I've been binge-reading. Harry Potter.

When the books and the movies came out I noticed them the way one cannot help notice cultural phenomena. It’s there, it makes a splash. Being more inclined to watch popular movies than read popular books, I caugh some of the former. I saw much of the first movie, which featured whiz-bang special effects, like a wizard-school sport played on flying brooms and the usual digital monsters, and some snatches of later ones where Harry and his companions spend a lot time talking — about what I never caught on — wearing really nice sweaters.

There were major actors, like Alan Rickman playing his trademark sneering heavy, Maggie Smith, Emma Thompson and many more. There were wizards who seemed straight out of Lord of the Rings but weren’t. And there was that whole English public school ambience, except with lots of supernatural stuff. Basically I wasn’t interested. Fantasy is not a genre that appeals to me — except Game of Thrones, go figure. Besides, years of literary studies still held me in its grip and I gave popular literature wide berth.

But I changed. Age perhaps. Certainly boredom. First, I started to glut on thrillers. No boredom there. Having sated my appetite for perv Scandinoir, I set out looking for adventure and whatever comes our way. Lord of the Rings, why not? Not bad. Not fab either. And that’s when I plunged into Harry Potter — gently prodded by the lady Joyce, who holds my affections. To my surprise I liked the books. In fact, I thought they were very good. Where I expected nerdy cuteness — after all they were children’s literature — I found growing darkness, with no concessions to reassure the kiddies who were supposedly reading, or being read to, about these accounts of evil and mayhem. 

Don't expect likeable characters to live, I realized. J.K. Rowling litters her fiction with bodies with all the gusto of an Elizabethan playwright. Big prices are paid for any restoration of order. This ain’t Disney.

I wondered, if I liked these books so much, why was I so uninterested in the movies that I never followed the plot or the dialogue and wound up turning them off. The answer lay in technology. Sure, the tableaux were dazzling. Trouble is: too much so. Harry Potter movies are not the Transformers. They’re not even Avatar, a film experience that, though far from deep, integrates special effects deftly into the narrative. The effects are, in fact, distracting. They detract from the complex storytelling and from the themes of power, love and death interlacing in those stories.

Like all good narratives these books leave no loose ends. Everything plays a part. But in a movie, a flying broom eclipses a broken wand. A sneering villain is no match for a digital monster. And, worse, the temptation to leave special effects on screen while more subtle moves are afoot is too tempting for filmmakers, while a writer is forced to turn down the knob on fantasy when dialogue is called for. Great film and great writing can overcome these obstacles. But the Harry Potter films are not great. The books are.

X

Cisgender and, closer to my ethnicity, Latinx are words that reek of academic smugness, of what POTUS (a word that just reeks) and his supporters call elitism. Weird words served over a bowl of quinoa and kale, both of which, to set the record straight, I eat with gusto. Or gustx.

Father, why do these words sound so nasty?, as the lyrics of a Hair song go. Frankly, I seldom write or say them. Not out of any ideological objection; on the contrary, I sympathize with the ideological matrices in which they are embedded. But I find that they don’t come trippingly on the tongue or the page — or the screen. In our rush toward futurism, that very politically suspect notion, we forget tradition, a non-scientific, non-specific and vague-by-definition concept that has, nonetheless, valence.

How long does it take for tradition to normalize words? Depends. Media is a force here, but so is the beginning of words, the place where they were first normal. Because of popular acceptance of and affection for such beginnings, normalization can happen very quickly. It’s one of the paradoxes of race that, racism notwithstanding, Black English penetrates mainstream English at a fast pace. That’s because of the dialectics of race. For every ugly notion about Blacks among whites there’s a strong current that insists that Black folk are admirable, and so is their use of language. Check me as someone happily swimming in that current.

So, not only was the lingo of rap and hip hop (used to be jazz and r&b) hungrily assimilated by whites, but so were the genres themselves. If it comes from the street we love it.

But from snooty, obtuse, and most certainly not-street academia? My own reluctance to cis and x springs from an allergic reaction to the smugness of intellectual elitism, an allergy I share with the POTUSians and their Foxy friends — to whom, to be clear, my physical response is, beyond sniffles, puking.

Can ideology trump (like a good Catholic I just crossed myself) linguistic allergy? I think so. I find myself drawn to gender fluidity, in part because it makes intellectual sense and in part because, born and raised in the Latino/Hispanic (no x’s here) home turf of machismo, I find the latter a big fat lie. A beautiful one sometimes, as in the wonderful Mexican corridos I know by heart. Oh, to die like Juan Charrasqueado yelling, ¡soy buen gallo! But their charm to me lies in that I will never die like that, looking for my pistola and trying to get on my caballo. More likely, I’ll be yelling, give me more morphine! Or begging sweet cousin cocaine to lay a cool, cool hand on my head. Like Mick in his morbid song, I’m trying to score.

For different reasons I wear the same buzz cut as Emma González, the young cubanita that has become the face of the Parkland survivors activism. Proud of the sister. ¡Vaya, mi negrx! (Being Cuban here, so make no racialist assumption). If you call yourself Latinx, I, regardless of my cis-ness, will too. You’ve turned my language inside out.

Cubanito cubanito

The Great Cuban Sandwich Polemic has surfaced on my Facebook newsfeed. Was it invented in Tampa, Miami or (duh) Cuba? Is the Tampa custom of adding salami to the usual roast pork, sweet ham and Swiss cheese mix correct or sacrilege? Was the original pressed or not? The battle continues.

Most partisans agree on nixing lettuce or tomato, as well as its accompanying emulsion, mayonnaise. Otherwise, yellow mustard and slices of dill pickle, yes. Bread, Cuban, of course, and many sing the praises of Tampa’s palm-frond threaded Cuban bread.

I'm one of them. Having lived my adolescence in Tampa, I’m a big fan of its bread, especially from the legendary La Segunda Central bakery, still going strong in Ybor City. In fact, Ybor, today a section of Tampa, was founded by Cuban and Spanish cigar factory owners and workers in the 1890s, and was the home of great Cuban sandwiches, though good ones were and still are found in West Tampa, second home of the cigar industry in the city.

Then there are those who advocate for Key West, the first settlement of the expat cigar industry that moved north fleeing the turmoil of the island’s wars of independence from Spain. Though I’ve never sampled them, there seem to be fine cubanos still made there today.

Some cubansandwichologists explain that Tampa’s inclusion of salami was the influence of the city’s Italian community. Others, and I count myself among them, say that Cuba’s original sanwiche mixto already included something like it. I do recall having those sandwiches as a child at a couple of places in Havana where they added, if not salami, probably a Spanish cold cut (sobrasada?) that gave the mix in the mixto a nice pungency.

The big issue, though, is which are better. Here, even without my Tampa credentials, I would vote for the Florida west coast city. Years ago, I wrote an article on Miami’s Cuban sandwiches and, like so many other Cuban foods there, the traditional ones (non-orthodox innovations were a lot better) were all practically inedible, made with the cheapest ingredients. It seems they have improved as Miami has turned foodie. I hope so. But what I would argue passionately is that the great emporium of the Cuban sandwich was The Silver Ring in Ybor City, where, in truth, I don’t recall if they used salami.

What may be more surprising is that their house-roasted pork was not cooked with mojo, the Cuban garlic marinade and sauce that has become an American staple. According to a journalist I assigned a story on The Silver Ring for a magazine I edited in the early 90s, when the storefront deli was still around, the owner revealed that their pork had no such seasoning. Years later, the father of Rosy, of the great Rosy Bakery in the Sweetwater district of Miami, told me mojo turned pork shoulder too dark while roasting, so he seasoned his with just salt and pepper and brushed mojo on the sandwiches. Curiously, that was only for pan con lechón — pork sandwiches. At Rosy the cubanos don’t include pork, though they’re still good thanks to the bakery’s terrific bread.

These days when I visit Tampa I get great Cubans — and their cousins, medianoches — at the West Tampa Sandwich Shop. In my youth, the Fourth of July Café, also in West Tampa, was a classic, though I don’t recall their Cubans that well: el Cuatro de Julio being the kind of place that was open at the end of a long night meant visits there were made while one was, well, hammered. In recent times, the famous Columbia Restaurant, only survivor of the many Cuban/Spanish eateries of old Ybor City, made a big show of bringing back their original cubano. I tried it and it was fine, but it didn’t blow me away. Maybe you can’t go home again.

However, on my first visit back to Havana in the 80s, I went to a tourist-oriented café near the port where they served tapas of Cuban-made Spanish cold cuts, like the kind I remembered from my childhood’s sanwiches mixtos. It seemed that for all the decline of food in the island they never lost their way with Spanish fiambres. Do they make Cuban sandwiches in Cuba today? Possibly, though I have not been back in years. After all, the Cuban sandwich is known around the world, sometimes in versions that barely reference the original, from Miami, Tampa, Key West or Cuba itself. No matter. Long may it reign.