Adventure Divas Read online

  It is difficult to convey. The best thing about working with your mother is that you know, on a deep level, that someone always has your back. But you also feel, on an equally deep level, that someone is always on your back.

  Cheryl and I take off after breakfast to explore the neighborhood around our hotel while the others prepare the gear and make production arrangements. On last night’s drive to the hotel some “bad neighborhood” radar was going off, but in the light of a Caribbean morning Havana feels transformed. The crumbling Spanish colonial mansions are opulence in decay. We walk down narrow streets lined with stone buildings colored in a varied palette of chipped mustards, dusty corals, and chalky sea-foam green. My middle-class American brain thinks Urban Outfitters wet dream but knows the living conditions for most Cubans are anything but stylish. Music wafts out from behind clean, taut laundry that gently dances on drying lines strung between the wrought-iron balconies of La Habana Vieja.

  Cheryl and I are the youngest of our crew, that is, the only ones who weren’t alive to hide under school desks during the Cuban Missile Crisis. We met last year covering a Snowboarding for Breast Cancer event in Lake Tahoe. Cheryl’s mission in Cuba is to capture “atmosphere,” the spaces between the words that often tell the real story. I watch her swing her hand-cranked Beaulieu camera with athleticism and grace, her celluloid soaking up the gritty textures of Havana. She shoots from the hip, literally, and ends up dancing with her subjects as often as filming them.

  “Lots of arches, but none of them golden,” I say to Cheryl, noticing the Spanish architecture and the dearth of fast food. Seattle, with its social reserve and pandemic of Starbucks, feels like a stark contrast.

  “Yeah, it’s weird,” she says. “Less than a hundred miles from the U.S. and no neon, no commercialism.”

  Decades into the revolution and the U.S. economic embargo, Cuba is one of the few countries in the world not drowned in consumer culture or subject to the whims of international capital. Certainly the Cuban people are suffering from economic deprivation, and the middle-aged revolution is in need of more than retooling, but there is something unique, if not honorable, about a country that has never been pushed around by the IMF or given a high school contract to Coca-Cola in exchange for a blackboard.

  Cheryl and I have wandered far from our hotel, lured along like Hansel and Gretel by a photogenic trail of political propaganda that is splashed along sides of buildings and across billboards, which effectively replaces advertising: LA REVOLUCIóN! CHE VIVE!

  “Let’s shoot that one,” I say to Cheryl, pointing at a giant billboard with a cartoon figure of a wizened Uncle Sam, in an oversized red, white, and blue top hat, being yelled at by cartoon Cuban revolutionaries from across a body of water: MR. IMPERIALIST WE HAVE NO FEAR OF YOU! the rebels proclaim in giant red letters.

  Images of the dashing Argentine revolutionary Che Guevara gaze intently over public squares and he is lionized on every peso. He was intelligent, sensitive, literary—or so the legend goes.

  “In an easier time, Che would have definitely been a fly fisher,” I say.

  “Muy guapo,” says Cheryl, panning slowly across a twelve-square-foot silhouette of his image painted on a cement wall. Live Che was pivotal in the revolution that freed Cuba from the grip of President Batista, “Mr. Imperialist’s” Cuban puppet of the 1950s. Dead Che’s martyr status (he was executed by U.S.-trained and -armed Bolivian counterinsurgency forces) has been leveraged for four decades by Fidel Castro in order to forward his own ideas, and to cement his power.

  Fidel Castro’s own image is not prominently displayed, yet el Jefe is omnipresent, like oxygen: all around, influencing everything, but invisible (except when delivering one of his epic speeches on state television).

  Castro has done many unforgivable things. His ongoing persecution of artists and political dissidents, internment of gays and lesbians, and failure to make good on his promise of many years ago to hold free elections are just a few among them. But part of me has to tip my hat to this rare political leader who can elude the CIA’s exploding cigars and poison pens (a couple of the Agency’s more entertaining assassination attempts) and flip the birdie at Uncle Sam for forty years and running.

  Cheryl has her lens trained on a strong, curvy woman who is striding by in a red, white, and blue Lycra jumpsuit. “Women really own their butts here,” I observe as the woman turns down another street. Just then, a young man walks up to speak to us.

  “De donde eres? Canadá? Inglaterra?” he inquires.

  “Los Estados Unidos,” Cheryl responds cautiously. He is only mildly surprised, and is very friendly. “The bar where Hemingway drank mojitos every afternoon is right around the corner,” he says with a smile, switching to English.

  Hemingway. Thus, the Fidel-Che-Ernest trio of Cuba’s male cultural icons is complete. But just as Libya is not “one man in a desert,” as the saying goes, Cuba is not three men and a cigar. We are more interested in finding our own brand of icon. “We want to interview women who are passionate, visionary, and independent—you know, divas,” I explain. The man backs away slowly, smiling kindly, and walks off.

  On Day Three, dawn cracks hazy over Havana’s Malecón waterfront and I no longer think I can see Florida.

  “We’ve got to get something in the can,” says Jeannie, sipping a coffee, ever sensitive to our abbreviated schedule. She’s right: We have to make an hour-long documentary in nine days with a paltry ten hours of film (all we could afford). We lined up some interviews from the United States, but our production schedule isn’t complete and we’re prepared to lean on serendipity to fill in the gaps. That is why Cheryl and I hit the street and join in a local stickball game happening in a nearby vacant lot, where chunky remnants of a building from an era past mark the bases. Baseball is probably our respective countries’ most profound common love, and the easy way these boys are playing confirms that the sport is not a new love to this culture. While Cheryl bats a double, I chat up twelve-year-old Oscar. “What’s happening around Havana? ¿Hay música? ¿Fiestas?” Oscar bunts at a rock with his bat, sending the stone zinging into what was once a load-bearing wall. He says his cousin said he knows someone who knows someone who said that there’s a girl rap group called Instinto performing in a “basement” near Revolution Square in a little while. “Basement” doesn’t sound promising but “girl” and “rap” and “revolution” do.

  “Yeah, I know of Instinto,” says Catherine, when I ask her. “Definitely worth checking out. They’re one of only a few female rap groups in Cuba.”

  We grab our gear, pile into a ’57 Bel Air hardtop taxi (or so says Paul, breathlessly), and are unloaded twenty minutes later near a massive statue of José Martí. Revolution Square is home to a slew of ministry buildings in all shades of gray, the requisite Che mural, the Comite Central of the Communist Party, and all the offices where Fidel and his ministers work. In short, we are inside the Beltway, madly running toward a basement full of rappers.

  The basement is in fact an underground club (my bad translation) called Café Cantante, which is underneath the National Theatre. In the afternoons it opens to alternative youth bands. We pay our five pesos and descend into the darkness. We are immediately enveloped in a womb pulsing with teenagers and twentysomethings, showing considerable skin. The place is absolutely in blossom—pheromones zinging between people and off walls with an abandon that only takes place below the Tropic of Cancer. The fourteen-year-old girl in her first tube top, working the brand-new goods, epitomizes the high-pitched atmosphere. It is dark, which sucks for filming purposes and sends Paul into a funk. Yet when Instinto takes the stage they light up the dingy space. Talent. Voice. Belly. Booty. Confidence. In a word, divas.

  Each member of the trio takes turns rapping front and center while the other two support. The skinny lead singer wears flowing loose cream pants and a snug-fitting halter top. The muscular girl with the black cap has on a brown silk collared shirt with a single critical button done under h
er strong, round breasts. The third performer, in tight jeans, a tan T-shirt, and sneakers, moves like magic under a jubilant cascade of long corn-rowed hair. But what they wear is quickly eclipsed by their more forceful elements of style.

  Come on, get closer

  I don’t want to shock you

  I want to rap you close

  There is no wizard here

  What I do is art

  (It works much better in Spanish, when it all rhymes and there’s lots of body language involved.)

  After ninety sweaty minutes, Instinto climbs off stage and Catherine and I walk up to their lead singer, Iramis. “We’d love to arrange an interview and performance somewhere with better light. Are you interested?”

  “Sin problema. Estaremos encantados. Pues, ¿de donde son ustedes? Yo tengo un primo en Miami,” Iramis responds, looking at me. (“No problem. We’d be delighted. Hey, where are you from? I have a cousin in Miami.”)

  Two hours later, Janet, Iramis, and Dori meet us at a cobblestone square and, with three unified claps of their hands, begin an a cappella street performance that would have MTV execs drooling.

  Instinto creates its beat, covers ground, and conveys a message, with a groove so deep it looks accidental. They glide across the square, taking turns sidling up to the lens, delivering a booty politic, and backing one another up.

  Mid-performance, a nearby grammar school lets out, and little girls and boys in red school outfits organically merge into the scene. We keep shooting. Instinto’s oomph washes over the kids, who start doing their best to emulate them. Now, smooth, grown-up hips move in fluid rotation, next to tiny bodies that throw their whole selves into the effort.

  Instinto performs three nearly flawless takes for us and in between each we talk about what fuels their music, and the effect they have. In broken Spanish, I ask the obvious. “¿Hay instinto en su música?” Is there instinct in your music?

  “There is sooo much. Too much. Everything we do, we do with instinct. Everything comes out very fluent,” says Iramis, “very, very spontaneously.”

  “We are like a vitamin for other young women,” adds Janet (pronounced yan-nay).

  “We are seen as a symbol of courage, because rap is a genre that is almost always about protest. So we are different from other women’s groups in Cuba, which are mostly salsa, and they don’t have the flexibility to say what we say in our music. We are proud of that,” she concludes, chin up, smiling at her colleagues.

  Wobbly antennas atop high-rises may have yielded the first sounds of hijacked rap from the shores of Miami, but Afro-Cuban rhythms, identity politics, and local realities were quickly infused to make a distinctly Cuban art form. Rap has become a vehicle to express frustration about poverty, racism, and the daily challenges of living in contemporary Cuba.

  “We take the North American influences of hip-hop, soul, and rap and put it together with our roots, which are salsa, rubancora, rumba. Then we sing—we have these three beautiful voices, no?” She grins. “—and say what we want to say.”

  Word is we’re smooth as wine.

  We are instinct personified.

  Rap is my addiction,

  To deny the affliction of prejudice.

  Yes, this music has more Americana flavor,

  But it’s made by my people and me.

  We mix and we conquer.

  We do it for you.

  My rhythm is smooth.

  My group is smooth.

  My wine is red.

  Instinto brings it all to you.

  Satisfied with our footage, we sit with Instinto on a stone stoop, drinking flat soda, watching children of all shades play in their clean, worn clothes. A couple nuzzles in front of a brown building across the street. A smiling man sways his hips as he perches his baby on the hood of his old blue De Soto. He is holding her arms in the air, and teaching her to dance. Relaxed couples bike by us—girls on handlebars, boys peddling—and the light turns from rich yellow to rose to hazy burgundy, a muted rainbow that works in sync with the colors of the buildings. A man and woman lock eyes ever so briefly as they pass each other on the street. Both look back.

  At the risk of trading on certain Latin stereotypes, I’ll say that sensuality is a food group here. Cuba feels intrinsically sexy, in the best sense of the word. There is a particular self-possession that shows itself in everything from a glance during a salsa move, to the deliberate stir of a mojito, to the steady gait of a cane cutter making toward the fields.

  From what I’ve witnessed, checking one another out is normal, and it goes both ways between men and women. The streets are filled with lingering, unself-conscious head-to-toe-to-head-again appreciations that begin and end with eye contact. This is a bit of a shock to my system, as Seattle is the home of loose-layered fleece and Nordic reserve. A Cuban “appreciation” in Seattle would probably result in a restraining order.

  Two women, both in tight red pants, are walking toward us. One wears a tight lime-green halter top, the other a white sleeveless blouse. I am starting to discern a certain dignity, a two-thousand-calorie richness with which Cuban women move through space. Both have a magic, invisible string connecting their well-postured shoulders and fully possessed, proud, round buttocks. I wonder if booty consciousness suggests an alternative seat of power here in Cuba and, if less impacted by the shame and insults imparted by consumer cultures that employ the female body primarily as a marketing tool, women here experience a healthier delight in the sensuality of life—in other words, are better set up to “own it.” As the two women pass by I see they are carrying a white sheet cake on a piece of cardboard.

  As we pack up, Janet tells us they will create a rap for us to use in the show, and Catherine agrees to mail the song to us after our departure. We will use their rap to mimic a classic device in Cuban films in which an omniscient singing narrator tells the stories of the characters in the film. Rap has the ability to tell many stories, and theirs will help create the TV parable of our cross-island road trip. “Great job,” I say to Paul, who has had to maneuver almost as deftly as Instinto (and do so backward) in order to film them. I turn to wave as we are about to leave and see Iramis snapping her fingers, teaching a little girl in a white cotton shirt and red skirt a particular hip-born move.

  We speed across town to see Lizette Vila. Paul is getting whiplash admiring the old cars that weave through the potholed streets. “Qué bonita,” he muses as we idle next to an old De Soto at a stop sign. These old cars are painstakingly preserved and have been maintained through decades of extremely limited resources. They’re very valuable to their owners as taxis, which provide access to tourist dollars.

  We arrive in Vedado, a beautiful neighborhood filled with mansions built in the teens and the twenties, and now the center of Havana. We pull up in front of a magnificent Spanish colonial mansion—once a rich guy’s house but now the headquarters of the Federation of Cuban Women (FMC). The rich guy is probably in Miami with his bag packed, ready to return to this grandeur the moment Castro dies. That will be an interesting knock at the door.

  Catherine hands the driver a dollar. “Muchisimás gracias,” she says.

  Having sat in a fair share of dismal basement offices with putty-colored carpet and pressboard furniture usually missing a leg—that is, the typical “women’s organization” office in the United States—I find the marble and swank of the Federation of Cuban Women refreshing. The federation, a nongovernmental organization to which most women in the country belong, was created by Castro right after the revolution to defend Cuban women legally, socially, economically, and culturally. Castro officially criticized the macho ideal (which saw women at home and inferior) because it was at odds with the society he was trying to create—a socialist society in which all people work together to create political and economic quality. It’s ironic that in the most deadlocked years between the United States and Cuba, the seventies, both countries endeavored to make significant feminist strides. Cuba worked from the top down, implementi
ng policies and laws to institutionalize equality. The United States, working from the bottom up, was abuzz with consciousness-raising groups but failed to pass the Equal Rights Amendment.

  Lizette Vila shares the values of the FMC and has created what seems to be the Cuban version of Adventure Divas. We have landed an interview under the guise of covering her show and getting some interview leads, but Lizette herself has a reputation as a pistola, whose frankness sears through rhetoric, political or otherwise. She is a honcho in the government-controlled television association and represents Cuba on the international stage. In a nation where no women worked in television and film before 1960, Lizette has now made her mark as the president of the Cuban Association of Cine, Radio, and Television; a prolific producer; and the creator of Te Cuentan las Estrellas (“The Stars Will Tell You”). Despite its soap-opera title, the show is about the achievements of take-no-crap Cuban women from all walks of life who, by example, inspire others.

  Lizette arrives solo yet enters the room with the g-force of a person with an entourage. A blur of energy in a bright pink silk shirt and scarf, she plants a kiss on each of my cheeks. “Bienvenido mi amor, mi amor,” she says dramatically, her short brown hair perfectly framing her face.

  I give her the calcium pills we brought from the States at her request. The embargo and the country’s general economic disarray have left medicines and vitamins in short supply. “Gracias, mi amor,” she says.

  We sit in the windy, sun-dappled courtyard of the mansion. In Spanish, with Catherine translating, she explains her TV show.

  “A housewife—a star; a scientist—a star; an athlete—a star. But the concept of ‘star’ is about the light she radiates, the space she fills. How can I tell you . . . the environment she illuminates,” she emphasizes with a smile, as a thick band of sunlight washes across her face in uncanny timing. “It is with this vision that the program was created,” she says.