Adventure Divas Read online

  “How does that go down with men?”

  “I have received criticism from men, even from intellectuals who work in my field. They don’t understand. Some people think that feminism is ‘anti-men,’ but that simply isn’t true. Cuban machismo is special. I call it ‘Machismo-Leninismo,’ ” she declares with a laugh, playing off Cuba’s Marxism-Leninism, an equally powerful institution.

  While she’s speaking, Lizette’s arms and hands move in front of her face, as if molding the ideas in front of her.

  “I think it’s terrible,” she adds, jutting a shoulder forward and raising her eyebrows, “because you can say that feminism has a philosophical current—it is full of ideas, aspirations, tendencies. But machismo, es nada!” she says with a wave of her hand, as if swatting away empty ideas.

  “Machismo has never hurt me. I have prepared for that story, you know what I mean? Machismo is just an awful thing, absurd, uncultured, indecent—I mean, who can defend such an idea? But those are things that culturally take many years to change, and are sociocultural, historical phenomena.”

  Castro’s revolution allowed women, even poor women, access to education and health care and routes besides prostitution out of poverty. That is the upside. The downside is that while the ladies may have equal rights on the books, and now comprise 50 percent of professionals (and might even have mansions for offices), that equality often does not translate into day-to-day reality. There are socks to be washed (by hand, in the developing world) and children to care for, and it’s women who get saddled with the entire domestic burden. In short, cultural traditions, such as machismo, often trump official edicts.

  “Do you ever feel embattled? Tired?” I ask Lizette.

  “We Cubans live in terms of comedy or, rather, in those elements of laughter and sadness which are magnified by the current situation,” she says, referring to the Special Period. “Humor is central to the Cuban sense of resistance. My god! The way we laugh about things. If you are able to resolve things with a certain sense of humor, chica!” she says with a Latina flourish of the hand, “that is the most important thing in life. Yes?”

  Lizette articulates something I’ve been sensing but couldn’t put my finger on: a sort of Cuban duality. There is real struggle, but a joie de vivre appears to win out. And enlisting humor and love as allies seems to be part of the recipe. Bus drivers hug their passengers regularly. Couples nudge and smooch in public like puppies at play. Music and cake are as much staples of the Cuban diet as rice and beans.

  “Life in this country is very intense and people have a strong desire to live and accomplish many things,” Lizette continues. “Maybe I am exaggerating, but this is what I feel happening. I feel so happy. I feel . . .”

  Her eyes get glassy; she looks up and composes her thought.

  “I don’t know, like a missionary.”

  She wipes a tear of pure, unadulterated emotion.

  I am agog. And hoping like hell our film roll doesn’t run out. This is a coup—to have your subject actually cry on camera is akin to getting to the scene of the crime when there is still blood on the street. (“If she cries, it flies” and “If it bleeds, it leads.”) But mostly I am surprised because she is among the most powerful people in Cuba, a player in the government, and she has the self-assuredness to cry on camera.

  “I am very passionate. I enjoy emotions very much. The good ones and sometimes the bad ones too,” she continues, brushing away a tear without stopping her train of thought. “But what I say to you, I say from my soul. Truly.”

  Unapologetically passionate, Lizette is revolutionizing Cuban television and changing the system from within. I leave the headquarters of the Federation of Cuban Women with fewer calcium pills, a satchel full of diva leads, and a reminder that emotion is an undervalued source of power.

  We spend the first half of the following day in the countryside outside Havana shooting b-roll. B-roll is a term for a collection of pretty or illustrative pictures used to glue together the storyline in a film or television show; visual support for a described action or idea. Plus, whenever someone coughs or swears or says something uninteresting in an interview we can simply “cut to b-roll” to cover up the edit of the offensive or dull moment. B-roll is another thing, like Instinto’s rap, that we are collecting in our bag of tricks that will enable us to take big, messy, wonderful meandering epics (a.k.a., life) and reduce them all to a snazzy little story: TV.

  Afterward we speed back to Havana on the country’s biggest highway in a white rental van, running late to meet with filmmaker Gloria Rolando. She has been on our list ever since we read on the Web a speech she gave at a black women writer’s conference.

  Many of our ancestors shed their tears, but many others never shed theirs because they converted those tears into rage, into rebellion and history. . . . Oral literature, the personal histories of our people, are the obligatory reference to penetrate into this universe of the collective memory.

  I respect this independent filmmaker’s commitment to leveraging personal histories for political change, and I am particularly interested in that she explicitly explores race in her work. The party line is that racism doesn’t exist in Castro’s Cuba, and certainly Cuba has less racism than a generation ago, but the realities of race and racism here are complex. As Instinto singer Dori said when talking with the writer Margo Olavarria, “I am Cuban. I am black, very black, but my grandmother was Filipina and my grandfather was Catalan. I have a whole world in me.”

  By the time we find Gloria’s building in the Chinatown district of Havana, we are three hours late. We stuff ourselves into an elevator the size of an airplane lavatory, punch 3, and ascend in pitch black to the filmmaker’s apartment. The lift grinds to a halt and with a flip from the other side, a diamond-shaped window appears, revealing a living space, some sort of schnauzer mix yapping furiously, and a smiling Gloria Rolando.

  “¡Hola, bienvenidos!” She ushers us in, and we move from the dark into the small, tidy apartment. A shaft of fast-fading natural light pours over her tiny balcony and illuminates a rocking chair. Gloria is wearing a bright floral do-rag, a deep-gold cotton sweater, and dangling African earrings that dance with every welcoming kiss bestowed on our group.

  Gloria wants to show me the house where she grew up, so after the greetings we clamber back into Havana’s old stone streets for a “walk and talk.” We dodge carts and playing children on a narrow street in Chinatown. When interviewing Cubans all you have to say is “¿Como estás?” and the floodgates open. Gloria is no exception. Speaking in English, with the slurred charm of the Cuban accent, she tours me around her childhood neighborhood. “I love Cuba very much. I grew up in Chinatown. In Havana we had a big community of Chinese people. I grew up between black people and Spanish, and Chinese, and Jews. This is Cuba: many people and only one people,” she says, guiding us to the right, down a narrow street. Gloria points to a dilapidated façade of what must once have been a spectacular building, with high rectangular windows topped by arched portals. Only now there is no glass, just spaces roughly filled by plywood. Gloria nods toward the first floor. “That was our home. My sister and I were right there when a huge explosion shattered the glass above us.”

  That blast was Gloria’s first taste of the revolution that would eventually reshape her homeland, and her life. With the forced end of the Batista regime, and the social and educational reforms that emerged under Castro, Gloria was able to accomplish what was previously unthinkable for an impoverished black Cuban. She earned a graduate degree from the University of Havana, and became a working filmmaker.

  Unlike Lizette Vila, who works within state-sponsored TV, Gloria is an independent filmmaker. In her work she explicitly explores race through preserving the images and heritage of the African diaspora—the loose community of people throughout the Americas whose ancestors were brought here as slaves.

  Several of Gloria’s best-known documentaries have explored the religion of Santería, a faith that emerged fr
om the collision of the West African Yoruba religion with the Catholicism that slaves encountered in the New World. Forced to convert by their masters, Yoruban slaves continued to worship the guardian spirits, or orishas, of their native religion, but hid them behind the fa-çade of Catholic saints. A similar process took place throughout the Caribbean, giving rise, for example, to the Haitian practice of voodoo.

  “When you grow up living in this kind of neighborhood, you see images of Santería. It was normal for me to listen to the language of the drums; to see altars with many flowers—with Catholic images but also special devotion to orishas like Ochún, Changó, and Obatala.” I figure this religious activity must have been somewhat clandestine, because when Gloria was a kid the government’s ban on religion was strictly enforced. These days, things have loosened up.

  Back in her apartment, Gloria pops one of her films into an old video player and shows me an excerpt. In it a possessed, sweaty, shirtless man is circled by dancing worshippers and repeatedly beats a broad machete into the stony ground. Edited into the scene are shots of an actor playing the part of Oggun, the god of iron, war, and labor, doing pretty much the same thing. She shows me another, more ethereal scene, in which a drop-dead-gorgeous woman in a flowing yellow dress moves sensuously through a swamp.

  “Ochún,” Gloria says, as if this explains it all.

  At this point, my head is chock-full of new information. I have no way to process these unfamiliar words and images. Clearly I must learn more about Santería if I plan to properly reflect Cuba in this show.

  Gloria gets up to stop the VCR and tells me that she recently founded an organization called Imagenes del Caribe (Images of the Caribbean) in order to “do things her way” and pursue topics that most compel her, whether or not she has institutional support. Sounds familiar.

  “Since I took the decision to direct my own documentaries, my own films, I didn’t stop because I don’t have resources. I can’t wait; I don’t have the right to wait. I don’t want to wait,” she says with loads of conviction in her round chestnut eyes. “And for that reason, the struggle is part of my life.”

  Cuba’s shattered economy creates a difficult climate in which to make films. Plus, artistic freedom under Castro, a topic Gloria declines to discuss with me, complicates matters even further. While the revolution helped Gloria get an education, I can only guess that it’s also responsible for restricting her expression.

  As media makers in the United States, I suppose we do not risk being charged as political dissidents, but the fact that all our major media outlets are owned by a handful of corporations (PBS being an exception) acts as its own unique form of censorship. An independent filmmaker might be able to scrape together the money to create a film, but if she or he is iced out of distribution outlets due to a topic that challenges the agenda of the corporate parent company—or simply because the topic is not commercial enough—isn’t this too a kind of cultural censorship?

  “Are there ways in which struggle has actually helped you?” I ask Gloria, noting that the word struggle has come up frequently in my short time here.

  “Struggle is everything for me,” she responds. “Everything. You need to attack the realities; you need to, you know, to be strong. Of course I cry—I am a human being also—and I have to sacrifice many things in my personal life. But I think that is a way I could express my love,” she says.

  Pfffft.

  Shit. The interview comes to an abrupt halt. Our only lightbulb has burned out on cue (and it’s not like we can hustle down to Wal-Mart for another). The orishas are telling us something. But I am frustrated. It is nine o’clock at night and Gloria is leaving town in the morning, so there is no way to continue our interview. We are left with love.

  The love thing still lingers the next morning, when we set out on a cross-country road trip to do more interviews. I don’t completely understand the largesse in Gloria’s use of the word. I assume love, as Gloria expressed it, means love of her people and her heritage. Her work celebrates and memorializes a culture ravaged by slavery. Capturing Afro-Cuban art and achievements, and reflecting it back to the people and to the larger culture, is how she expresses her love.

  James Baldwin said, “Love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within. I use the word not merely in the personal sense but as a state of being or a state of grace—not in the infantile American sense of being made happy but in the tough and universal sense of quest and daring and growth.”

  But this kind of love still feels remote to me. My understanding is more in keeping with Life After God author Douglas Coupland’s musing on suburban youth: “I think the price we paid for our golden life was an inability to fully believe in love; instead we gained an irony that scorched everything it touched and I wonder if this irony is the price we paid for the loss of God.”

  I look out the window at sugarcane fields zipping by, wondering how—if—one can muddle together irony, politics, and love, and end up with something akin to a crisp martini (and not blue Kool-Aid).

  I’m intrigued by some of the tools the people we’ve met so far wield in their struggle to realize their passions and politics: emotion, booty, love. Unusual for a place usually defined by its identity as a pinko outpost and a revolutionary state. Perhaps there is a new kind of pink think brewing.

  Poets, of course, are the natural peddlers of love. Poets are the ones who distill life’s giant je ne sais quoi down to a pot of sweet nectar. So, it is a poet who we are on our way to see. Early on, Catherine tipped us off to Carilda Oliver Labra, and since then we have noticed her poetry in the country’s ubiquitous bookstalls. (As an editor on the lam, I appreciate this reflection of one of the revolution’s successes: Cuba’s 98 percent literacy rate.) Labra is the author of many volumes of award-winning poetry. Her first collection, Preludo lirico (“Lyric Prelude”), launched her career. In 1950, she won the National Prize of Poetry for her book Al sur de mi garganta (“To the South of My Throat”). She took considerable flak in the forties and fifties for the steamy content of some of her work. Her collection Memoria de la fiebre (“Memory of Fever”) sealed her reputation as an “erotic” writer, and for a time her work was banned. But now, with age and increased government tolerance, she has morphed from scandalous hellion into Cuban national treasure.

  Three hours after leaving Havana we arrive at the town of Matanzas, a port city filled with faded austerity that feels relatively provincial after five days in the hustle of Havana. In the early 1800s, booming with wealth from the slave and sugar trades, Matanzas became a cultural Mecca, and it remains so today. The town is often called “the Athens of Cuba,” as it is, and has been, home to many artists, poets, and writers. Labra’s house, small and elegant, oozes intellectual richness and sturdy supple-leather good taste. We walk in and the living room buzzes with a small group of women who seem like handlers and serve us slices of yellow sponge cake with sugary white frosting. The women are fawning and doting and, well, handling. (I later find out they are representatives of the Federation of Cuban Women and are here to help host us.)

  Carilda is wearing a white linen blazer and has big red hair. She is as creased and sparkly and attractive as her home, but the most striking thing about her is that she is in a hurry.

  She is the first person I’ve met in Cuba who is actually in a hurry.

  Carilda is on her way to give a reading in a nearby town but still has us in for a quick visit. Her forty-year-old husband breezes through, evidence that Carilda must still have the erotic spark that created so many poems. She is eighty-one.

  Despite her standing in Cuba, Carilda is little known in the United States and only one of her volumes has been translated into English. A by-product of the economic embargo has been a forty-year constipation in the exchange of art between our countries. Most of the books available in the United States are by Cubans who left with the revolution, or their offspring, the first-generation Cuban Americans. When it comes to music—rap
, say—illegal satellite dishes and bootleg tapes spread that Americana through Cuba. Black-market poetry has yet to become in vogue, even though many organizations, such as Global Exchange, have worked hard over the years to encourage a steady trickle of cultural to-and-fro. There is also the challenge of being published in her own country, not for lack of popularity but, rather, for lack of paper on which to print the books.

  The Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 inspired Carilda to write “Declaration of Love.”

  I ask if I’m wise

  when I awaken

  the danger between his thighs

  or if I’m wrong

  when my kisses prepare only a trench

  in his throat

  I know that war is probable

  especially today

  because a red geranium has blossomed open.

  Please don’t point your weapons

  at the sky:

  the sparrows are terrorized,

  and it’s springtime,

  it’s raining,

  the meadows are ruminating.

  Please, you’ll melt the moon, only night-light of the poor.

  It’s not that I’m afraid,

  or a coward.

  I’d do everything for my homeland;

  but don’t argue so much over your nuclear missiles,

  because something horrible is happening

  and I haven’t had time enough to love.

  “My best poetry,” she has said, “is that which expresses erotic love, but also the love between a man and a woman integrated with universal love. For me, poetry does many things: tells truth, creates and praises beauty, contributes to the intellectual pleasure, allows us to unite with all humankind as it denounces injustice and captures the essence of life.”