Adventure Divas Page 6

  I remember Lizette Vila talking about her struggle with machismo in the male-dominated TV industry. She used humor as an ally.

  “How do you approach the struggle?” I ask.

  “One of the things that has been especially good for me has been to broaden the idea of struggle. In the sixties there was this idea that we were supposed to be revolutionary—very serious,” she says, making a mock grimace. “You were supposed to just talk at people, not to people. You know, so many people that I met in the sixties who were locked into that style of struggle are looking and saying, first of all, it was boring. You know? And we do not have a right, in the name of social justice, to bore people to death.”

  She pauses for a moment of consideration, then continues. “It’s not fair to ignore people and say that you’re struggling for people. We have a duty to make what we are doing a people activity, which means acting like people, which means being concerned about people, which means including children. I think that’s one of the more important lessons that I’ve learned in my life.”

  I take from this that she means the Panthers’ extremist language alienated many of the people they were attempting to liberate. The fight for social justice in the post–civil rights era meant working to solve the problems caused by a system of racist oppression: poverty, violence, lack of access to education, and hunger, among other issues. There was a disconnect between the needs of the many thousands of African Americans who were suffering due to oppression, and the Panthers’ pumped-up rhetoric of radical nationalism and aggressive takeover.

  “I’d come to see revolution as a process,” she states near the end of her book Assata. Writing about herself as a newly minted revolutionary in the late 1960s, she says, “Back then, people used the word ‘revolution’ just because it sounded hep. Half the time what they were really talking about was change or some kind of vague progress. But the reality of achieving it seemed a long way off.”

  I ask Assata about fear. “I’ve only been here a week,” I say, “and fears, or shadowy commie stereotypes I didn’t even know I had, have completely fallen away.”

  “I had fears too, at first. But with time I learned about the Cuban character, and fear,” Assata says. “In the United States there is a kind of reserve. People are isolated, separated, alienated. At first, I thought the Cubans were nosy—always asking if they could help and inviting me to this meal or that party. But then I realized they’re simply not afraid to talk to each other. I always believed in a ‘people society,’ but my imagination never conceived that a society could produce people so unafraid of other people.”

  Fear keeps people in place, afraid of one another and afraid to connect. We all have fears but perhaps the trick is in what we (individuals, nations) do with that fear. Maybe the United States’ imperialist tendencies grow out of fear—fear of “other” and fear of losing what Americans have. In Cuba, where people have very little, they are not so afraid. Is this a coincidence?

  I am pelted by a strong vibe from Catherine that says that our audience is up.

  I throw out one more question.

  “What happened with the Pope thing?” I ask tentatively, knowing that New Jersey officials had written to the Pope before his late-nineties visit to Cuba and urged him to press Castro for Shakur’s extradition. His Holiness declined.

  “I guess he decided that God was not on the side of the New Jersey State Police.”

  There was speculation that the Pope’s visit might have led to a thawing of U.S.-Cuba relations (making Cuba to Clinton what China was to Nixon). However, on the Pope’s first day in Cuba, all cameras and laptops fled north to D.C. as the story of our former president and his intern Ms. Lewinsky broke—trumping both God and Castro and featuring one naughty—and, ironically enough, Cuban—cigar.

  No press coverage, no change.

  Cheryl shoots a single still photo of Assata standing, looking straight down the lens, her earrings swaying ever so slightly in the Caribbean wind. After a gracious set of good-byes, she disappears around the corner of the stone fence that surrounds the paladar.

  “This is gonna be like no travel show I’ve ever seen,” Pam says, coiling up a power cord. She understands the political hurdles we may face if we include Assata in the show. To many Shakur is a visionary; to others, she’s a fugitive cop killer. The latter identity might rankle television executives.

  “What do you think will happen to Shakur when Castro dies, or the embargo comes down?” I ask Pam, knowing those are the only two things that protect Shakur.

  “I don’t know, but Castro will never give her up, embargo or not.”

  Back on the road, on our last leg to Santiago de Cuba, I can’t stop thinking about something Assata said to me right before she disappeared around that corner. She told me that although she has lived in Cuba for nearly twenty years, she still never feels completely at home. As she said to Christian Parenti in an interview in Z Magazine, “Adjusting to exile is coming to grips with the fact that you may never go back to where you come from. The way I dealt with that, psychologically, was thinking about slavery. You know, a slave had to come to grips with the fact that ‘I may never see Africa again . . . I’ll be separated from people I love.’ ”

  I suppose that is the lot of the exile. The notion of exile must loom large for Assata, and for Cuba itself. There are Cuban exiles in the United States (such as Carilda Oliver’s family), and American exiles in Cuba (such as the Panthers). The ongoing repercussions of the slave trade and revolution-induced diasporas leave huge numbers of Cubans with the constant sense of being uprooted.

  I can feel a new transitoriness growing within my own wandering soul, but my pilgrimage isn’t exile. It’s a choice. And therein lies the significant difference: A pilgrim travels by choice, with a specific quest for meaning, and an exile is pushed into motion by chance, disaster, crime, political upheaval, or the like. The voluntary voyage is about self-discovery and getting the prescription right on one’s glasses. But as Erik Leed says in Mind of the Traveler, “The forced departure initiates a journey that is suffering or penance rather than a campaign or a voyage. Often one-way or endless journeys, they muddle rather than define the persona of the traveler.”

  In short, travelers can go home; exiles can’t.

  Only two precious days of shooting remain, so we bear down on Santiago de Cuba at seventy miles an hour—past sputtering scooters with live pigs strapped on back, past Soviet-built trucks loaded with canefield workers, and through the famous Sierra Maestra mountains, where Che and Fidel hid out and cultivated their revolution. We’ve been stopping periodically to hunt down phones to try to reach Cecelia Gomez, a ship’s captain and potential diva who is said to base in the harbor of Santiago de Cuba. Only feet fill my boots now, and we are down to two slim wads of cash, one in my hip pocket, one in Jeannie’s. Jeannie is chewing her nails. (Jeannie never chews her nails.) We’re short on material and desperately need one more interview—and so far the captain is eluding us. We’ll have to go down to the harbor and look for her in the morning. This late in the day, the docks would be deserted.

  “Don’t worry,” Catherine says, as we’re slowed, nearly to a halt, by a herd of goats crossing the street. Catherine repeats her “never push, never care, and then it will happen” advice, which I’ve come to believe contradicts 98 percent of television production behavior, but I try to make like a Cuban and give destiny some breathing room.

  As has happened so many times in Cuba, we hear our destination before we see it. We drive into Santiago on an audible red carpet of jubilance and drumming and follow our ears down a tree-lined cobblestone street to cruise into the main square in town, Parque Céspedes (where Castro officially declared the revolution won). We chase the wafting sound through the fancy lobby of the whitewashed Hotel Casa Grande and up a dark staircase onto the hotel’s rooftop. A half dozen shirtless men line one side of the rooftop, thumping the taut animal skin that stretches across the top of the three-foot-high bata drums. Women
and men, in a series of advancing lines, their shoulders and bottoms moving in circles to the beat of the drums, are performing traditional Afro-Cuban dance in the balmy glow of a Caribbean dusk.

  It turns out this is a rehearsal of Santiago’s leading folkloric dance troupe, Katumba, and they are exercising the traditions of this province, whose people have the highest percentage of African blood anywhere in the country, largely due to agricultural sugar workers who came here in the thirties from Haiti and Jamaica.

  I get nearer to the line of drummers and am amazed at how one man, using a drumstick in his right hand and only his bare left hand, can create such intense sound. In the Afro-Cuban religion of Santería, bata drums and the accumulated power of the spoken word are believed to play a key role in communicating with the pantheon of orishas who represent, and rule, every force of nature and humanity. Song, rhythm, ritual, repeated verse, and trance possession are ways in which to tap into what is said to be a very interactive and reciprocal relationship between people and deities.

  Gloria Rolando’s films featured the feverish dancing of possessed Santeros and Santeras, who are akin to priests and priestesses. But this performance makes me feel the presence of Santería in this culture, and lulls me into the incantatory power of drums and repeated verse. The sky over the roof deck is purple now, and the dancing slows along with the drumming. One by one, the women begin to fall out of line, and pull their sweats over their shorts. The men put on their shirts and the rehearsal is over.

  We head downstairs for mojitos in the Casa Grande’s lobby. As in so many developing countries, catering to First World tourists is a growing component of the economy in Cuba. Tourism brings hard currency as well as painful new developments. Hotel lobbies are filled with young Cuban women and men looking for foreigner dates. They are called jiniteras or jiniteros; the colloquial, all-purpose word is usually translated as “hustler,” but literally means “jockey”—that is to say, a paid mount.

  In the pre-revolutionary era, prostitution and domestic servitude were the only options for poor women. After Batista and the U.S. interests—including the Mafia—were gone, Cuba largely did away with prostitution. But with the rise in (and government encouragement of) tourism, and its attendant much-needed hard currency, the world’s oldest profession is on the rise again. This hustling isn’t exactly prostitution, but there is a clear quid pro quo at work. Hustling here is not about paying rent or scoring drugs, neither of which are huge factors in Cuba, but about procuring a big meal or a pair of shoes—things that require dollars, not pesos. The “tricking” may not be institutionalized in the way it is in, say, Asia and the United States, where women are peddled by pimps and/or traffickers. Here, children aren’t for sale and the women are free agents, answering to and providing kickbacks to no one. Nonetheless, these are teenagers selling their bodies in part because of a disastrous economic climate; and these are grown-up, wealthy First World men happily taking advantage of the situation. The guys in this bar are on the same make as the “sportsmen” I first saw when we were en route to Cuba. Perhaps this is a negative aspect of Cuba’s booty-owning sexiness. Foreigners come here and, with their pocketbooks and hypersexual voyeuristic lens, engage in the worst sort of objectification.

  In addition to the jinitera scene (and sometimes integral to it), there are a dozen Hemingway look-alike wannabes. Pooch-bellied, gray-haired, mojito-swilling men sprinkle the bar.

  We order a round, and try to film the jinitera activity. With each round of mojitos, Cheryl and I get bolder with our shooting; I shoot her doing a cartwheel or speaking to the camera and surreptitiously shift ten degrees right to capture a fifty-year-old German guy with his fourteen-year-old Afro-Cuban date. The girl is amused by our antics; the man, no doubt, hopes our “home video” does not show up in his hometown. “Does our insurance cover an angry john, busted?” I say to Jeannie facetiously, while changing tapes.

  Yerba Buena and Havana Club go down like pure potential, and the carefree tune of “Guantanamera” dissolves all worries in the roomful of disturbing sexual politics. The evening devolves into a mojito fest, and the wee hours find us in a dance club, trying to salsa, digging deep for the booty liberation we first saw in Instinto, giving nary a thought to our cameras stacked in the corner like dead, forgotten fish.

  Dawn brings a pounding head, my period, and a dissipated crew. We hail Mary and head for the dock where Captain Cecelia Gomez keeps her boat. We don’t have an appointment but I am hoping we can just show up and find her. When we arrive at the harbor, the crew begins tinkering with their equipment and Jeannie and Catherine go to look for café cubano.

  I shuffle off, heavy with post-party shame, to ask, ask, ask in hangover Spanish. A couple of grizzled boatmen are playing chess on the edge of the dock.

  “¿Conocen a la Capitana Cecelia Gomez?” I ask. A fellow with a green cap points over his shoulder, out over the roiling Caribbean Sea, and says in Spanish, “Sorry honey, she’s out for at least a week.”

  “Gracias,” I say, deflated, and walk over to sit on a cement seawall. I stare out at the ocean and attempt to pull myself together. I am panicked. I have no plan. I am worried that I’m losing the tenuous respect of the crew, who might smell a neophyte director and be wondering what the hell our next move is.

  I’m cranky.

  We missed our diva.

  I have cramps, and it feels like the revolution has moved to my uterus.

  I hate everybody.

  I take three deep breaths, kick a chunk of mud out of the waffled sole of my boot, slide off the seawall, and walk slowly back toward the crew, lamenting the loss of Zen clarity I got from fishing that’s now gone down the hormonal drain. What would a diva do? Where does a “creative” turn in the dark, stymied moments when the meter is ticking?

  “We’re going to church,” I announce.

  I first read about the nearby town of El Cobre in Hemingway’s Old Man and the Sea, in which Santiago swears he’ll make a pilgrimage to La Virgen de la Caridad del Cobre if he can just land the damn fish. Hemingway donated the Nobel Prize for Literature he won for that book to that very shrine.

  We can see El Cobre’s triple-domed church for the last three winding kilometers of the drive up to it. The church is nestled in the foothills of the Sierra Maestra, and pilgrims travel from all over Cuba, sometimes crawling for the final miles, to pay homage to the Virgin.

  We walk into the dark, stone narthex. Every horizontal surface is filled with flickering votives, crinkled sepia photos of loved ones, military medals, and an extraordinary number of tiny boats. All are offerings, left with a prayer. Talismans of spiritual grounding. The room is positively thick with the hopes, dreams, sadness, and potential of the Cuban people.

  I sit on a stone bench to watch the pilgrims and lean my back against a cool wall. I send up a little prayer for us to meet another diva to complete the show, since we will not have the ship’s captain we were counting on. I immediately flog myself for spiritual dilettantism (which probably nullifies the prayer before it’s even reached the ozone layer). Then I mentally flog myself again for hijacking the prayer because there is, after all, the slight chance it would have worked. The self-flagellating tail chase comes to a halt when a gorgeous dark-haired girl in a white dress enters the church.

  “She looks pretty young to be a bride,” I whisper.

  “It’s her quinceaños—a fifteenth-birthday rite of passage that all girls in Latin America go through,” Pam replies, characteristically informed. This ritual announces that the young ladies are on the market to be married. More social than religious, a quinceaños could be likened to a debutante ball in the United States—except that this Latin American tradition is much more widespread and culturally significant.

  I’m not fond of dogma, be it religious or political, but I do yearn for ritual, which seems to be the common language of all spiritual quests. Jeannie sees me write down that last thought in my notebook, the contents of which will eventually be used to write
a script for the documentary.

  “Jeez, Holly, the only ritual you have is your morning coffee jag,” she says with a laugh.

  “And who’s responsible for the fact that I was raised in a spiritual vacuum?” I whisper in retort.

  “We wanted you to choose for yourself,” she responds, which totally surprises me. My parents were both sportscasters and my dad is an ex–Chicago Bears football player. So Sundays were holy days in my family, but for NFL reasons. I assumed my parents just forgot about the God thing.

  I continue to sweat rum in the corner of a rural Cuban church, wracked with cramps, arms loaded with film stock, whispering inappropriate personal baggage to my mother.

  “Here they come,” says Jeannie excitedly, “shhhh.”

  The girl is led by her mother up to the altar, and is presented to La Virgen de la Caridad del Cobre, Cuba’s most sacred icon, also known as the Black Madonna. The icon is tiny. We are talking a nine-inch deity. But she’s nothing short of the protectress of Cuba.

  The Black Madonna is housed in a fittingly tiny glass cage and swathed in a glittery gold embroidered robe. A sparkly gold halo and crown, ten times the size of her head, top her off. My experience with Catholic iconography is mostly limited to giant suburban churches with giant crucified Jesuses (a suffering presence I’ve often felt steals from the joyous wedding ritual at hand). I like this better.

  The church is dark and there is an entire quinceañera procession between the tiny Virgin and us. Paul has a challenge on his hands. “I cannot zoom in any closer,” he says, a bit too loudly, when I nudge him to move in.

  Black Madonna

  Legend has it that three young fishermen found the Black Madonna floating off Cuba’s northeast coast in the Bay of Nipe around 1612. The Madonna apparently had a sign around her neck that said YO SOY LA VIRGEN DE LA CARIDAD (“I am the Virgin of Charity”). There was a storm, the young men were about to capsize, they grabbed on to her (she was made of wood), and the rest is history.