By Wendy Gimbel. Los Angeles Times. Sunday, March 12, 2000
CONVERSATIONS WITH CUBA; By C. Peter Ripley; University of Georgia Press: 248 pp., $24.95
It began with Columbus, the insistence that Cuba is whatever one wishes it to be. He must have found it very difficult--this ambitious explorer, his head swirling with thoughts of Marco Polo's treasure island and the fabulous court at Cathay--to find himself on an island of the
tobacco-smoking Taino living in miserable thatched huts. So difficult that after his first Caribbean adventure, he declared that Cuba wasn't an island at all, that he had reached the more desirable Indies instead, and he insisted that his men sign an oath--on pain of having their tongues
excised--swearing that the island we now call Cuba was part of the mainland of China.
It seems--now, more than 500 years later--that nothing has changed. Another stubborn, half-mad leader insists that everyone in his power accept the truth of his own vision, even though as early as the 1970s things were going terribly wrong in Cuba, things that challenged Fidel Castro's
invented reality: the country's terrible human rights record, the painful, self-chosen exile of former supporters, and the sense that the power-driven Castro was more caudillo than populist hero.
Since the fall of the Soviet Union in 1989 and the subsequent loss of huge sugar subsidies, Cuba's economic infrastructure has been in ruins. Without the American dollar, to which few Cubans have access, economic survival gets harder and harder. But the solution to Cuba's woes rests not in
communist rhetoric but in capitalist markets. Socialismo o Muerte--one of Castro's favorite slogans--won't do much for people who haven't enough to eat.
A new engagement between Cubans and North Americans seems inevitable. Estrangement between countries so geographically close to each other has little to do with the will of ordinary people. What the leaders of both Cuba and the United States have in common--what gives them both a
dysfunctional character--is the insistence on recruiting everyone to their own version of what's real. Castro wants Cubans to believe they're in a socialist paradise while Americans are in consumer hell; President Clinton and the U.S. government insist that they can't remove the embargo on Cuba
because Castro constitutes a threat to democracy.
In his superbly researched scholarly book, "On Becoming Cuban," Louis A. Perez Jr. writes about the obsessive connection between Cuba and the United States--two countries held together in a cultural, perhaps even spiritual, force field created by their geographic proximity. In
singular imaginative collusion, Perez argues, each country has imposed a cultural vision on the other. And for Cubans, the internalization of culture from the United States has influenced not only the formation of a national identity but also, ironically, the seduction of the country by the
violently anti-American Castro.
In the colonial era, the rule of Spain determined the shapes and the contours of Cuba's reality. But after the Spanish-American War, when Cuba secured its "independence," it voluntarily immersed itself in the culture of baseball, turning its back on that of Spain and the
bullfight. This enthusiasm for everything from the United States, this head-over-heels delight in everything North American, Perez argues, implicates the Cubans in their own cultural domination.
Contrary to the popular notion that North Americans--their sense of Manifest Destiny intact--imposed a foreign reality upon a poor unsuspecting island, Cuba sought out the United States, Perez contends, and embraced its so-called culture of progress because the North American culture held
out the promise of a better life. In other words, this culture saturated the island because of the enthusiastic collusion of the Cubans, who sought deliverance--and who thought they'd found it--in the bright new modern world across the straits of Florida.
Saturation is not the only subject of Perez's argument, but it's the form his comprehensive narrative takes. He inundates the reader with long lists of the cultural debris that, after the Spanish-American War, made its way south to Cuba. Cubans, eager to embrace this up-to-date northern way
of life, collaborated in turning the island into a great American sideshow. Sugar mills--many of them owned by Americans--became the sites of model communities where the bungalows were spic and span, the lawns manicured and the painted porches screened from buzzing Cuban flies.
It was hard to find traces of the colonial past when Cubans breakfasted on Corn Flakes con leche, brushed their teeth with Colgate, drove Buicks and Cadillacs and browsed for household gadgets at el Ten-Cen. (The Cubans called the dime store el Ten-Cen; they had trouble pronouncing
Woolworth's.) Cuban children pretended to be Roy Rogers, Dale Evans and Hopalong Cassidy and cheered at ball games when the batter hit a jonron. Summoning mountains of evidence, Perez argues that Cuban fantasies about the good life came almost entirely from Hollywood movies. He quotes exiled writer
Pablo Medina, who grew up in Havana in the '50s: "More than anything I wanted to be American and live in a suburb . . . and have a pretty blonde wife who waited on me as Doris Day waited on Rock Hudson."
What was true of Cuba was also true of the United States. North Americans headed for Cuba in search of their own private fantasies. A weekend in Havana meant self-indulgence and sexual freedom. Cuban music ("If I find romance in your arms while we dance/Blame it on the rhumba, blame it
on the rhumba") promised a heaven that was wild and sensual. Hollywood movies, with their suggestive titles, raised expectations of intoxication and romance: "Under Cuban Skies," "Cuban Love Song," "Weekend in Havana," "Moonlight in Havana," "Holiday
in Havana" and "Havana Rose."
* * *
Fleeing a world of sexual inhibition and anti-gambling, even anti-liquor, laws--and in search of felicitous weather and astonishing music--American tourists put on their dancing shoes and swayed to the rhythm of the Cuban rumba. Nothing in Topeka or Schenectady could compete with Cuba's
fantastic music, with its sleek racetracks and manicured golf courses, with its flashy cabarets and casinos--and of course, those languorous, sensuous women. "So near and yet so foreign"--that's how the ads put it. If there was a place where Americans savored the freedom to indulge
themselves, it was this sun-drenched island. And it was so close to home, no more than a short hop from Key West. Cuba might be the "Riviera of the Caribbean," but it was also very much like home.
This mutual seduction between the two countries lasted until Fulgencio Batista's coup in 1952. Cuba, its economy on the verge of collapse, awakened from its dream of the good life. It blamed the United States not only for the country's political corruption but for the failure of its own
elaborate fantasy of prosperity. It would find its consolation in the arms of Castro, who would re-imagine Cuba as a Marxist stronghold, beholden to the Soviets and free of North American influence.
What these books have in common is the light they shed on the magnetic, enduring attraction between Cuba and the United States. Cubans may no longer build model American communities, but they depend on the American dollar for their survival. The U.S. government may make travel to the island
illegal, but each day more and more Americans flock to Cuba--for the old familiar reasons: music, beaches and sex. Home after several visits to the island--refusing to see Cuba and the United States as evil and good--C. Peter Ripley makes the case for reconciliation. In "Conversations with
Cuba," he describes repeated encounters with all sorts of people; some are proud of the revolution's resilience; others dream of a house in Miami with American air-conditioning and American TV. Sometimes on his trips he notices habaneros with downcast eyes and senses Castro's shadow everywhere.
In other moments, he is conscious of Cubans moving through their lives just as every one else does: raising their children, cooking their meals, celebrating birth and marking death.
Ripley reveals that he's a snorkeler--diving down but not too far down, considering the many colors of the fish, watching as they swim around him. And it's snorkeling that best describes his gentle, nonjudgmental narrative style. The strength of his writing is that it is simply
observational, it values the search for objectivity. At the end of his book, we're eager for change, for the social evolution that will bring Cubans and Americans together again. The antagonism between Cuba and the United States has faded out; it was after all a function of the 20th century's
worn-out politics.
Andrei Codrescu's "Ay, Cuba!" is a delightful mango and passion fruit sorbet. A Romanian-born journalist, Codrescu imagines that in a 12-day excursion from Havana to Santiago, he can discover how communism failed in Eastern Europe. An exile's unconventional search for the meaning
of his country's past sounds serious, but Codrescu writes about it with both lightness and a sense of irony. He considers the problem between the United States and Cuba to be une affaire du coeur that has nothing to do with communism, socialism or even capitalism. He finds Cuba posed precariously
between the "lost utopia" and the "unpolished hustle." On the other side of the sea wall, 90 miles away in Florida, he imagines a whole other Cuba, its inhabitants waiting to return to their homes and even their graves. A crazy woman on the streets shouts at him for breaking a
promise to marry her. "She was Cuba," says Codrescu, "and I was the United States and her crazy plea was not without foundation."
Sometimes, as in the case of Llilian Llanes' "The Houses of Old Cuba," (with photographs by Jean-Luc de Laguarigue), not much progress is made. The author's and photographer's competing ideologies result in a Marxist reading of the country's history that banishes the
photographer's more romantic view of the island's past and dates the writer's more political view.
Llanes, chief curator of the Museo Wilfredo Lam in Havana, wears official glasses that won't let her see the elitist 18th century Cuban criollos as anything other than unsuccessful modern communists. Over and over again, Llanes' disapproval of Cuba's once less-than-egalitarian society
defeats her admiration of the country's remarkable architecture. She becomes judgmental and inaccurate. Criollo, for example, refers to the Cuban-born child of a Spaniard and not, as Llanes suggests, to a Cuban of mixed race. And can the 16th century presence of the Spanish galleons in Havana--an
event which undeniably brought culture and sophistication to the town--reasonably be dismissed as of "dubious social influence?"
Nevertheless, Llanes' architectural history of Cuba honors the promise of many "coffee table" books, providing us with a whiff of a world that is inaccessible. De Laguarigue's Cuba is filled with romance; through his lens we see a sun-drenched island with enchanting details:
fanlights of colored glass, arcaded facades; iron balustrades and massive doors of carved mudejar wood. Photographing a bohio in Baracoal, a colonial house in Cuba's oldest city, Trinidad, or the Havana palaces of the criollos, his camera captures the particular magic of the island--and that brings
us close to the truth.
In "Cuba," two seemingly uncongenial sensibilities have somehow formed a very successful alliance. The clarity of Elizabeth Newhouse's prose and her scholarly command of Cuba's history anchor David Alan Harvey's gorgeous photographs. In one 15-page essay, she tells us more about
Cuban history than is found in many a lengthy academic study; in another essay, Newhouse's writing allows the "surreal drama" to surface: Daylight Havana is "shimmering like a mirage," and, at night, the city emerges "ghostlike from dimmed street lights."
Without Newhouse's essays, we might not even be certain that this is a book about Cuba. Harvey's beautiful photographs could have been taken anywhere--in Greece perhaps, or Morocco or Tunisia. His romance is not with the crumbling island but with the play of light and color: the perfect
blue sky, the red scarf around a little boy's neck. The photograph of hands clutching a bus handrail hides the exhaustion of their poverty-stricken owners, crushed together into this jampacked bus. The jinetera, prostituting herself for dollars, framed in white light, becomes a magnificent black
Madonna. The photographer's aesthetic vision transforms what could be disturbing, even devastating, into something else, something that is lovely, precious and unreal.
In "Cuba: Going Back," author Tony Mendoza, a native Cuban, returns to the island he hasn't seen since 1960. In a three-week visit, Cuba's present reality challenges his remembrance of its pre-Castro past. The mango tree in the garden of his former house is all that survives
unchanged, unimpressed by the Castro revolution, and he wonders, "What is the life span of mango trees?"
* * *
In his brilliant photographs, Mendoza doesn't betray any interest in the exile's fantasies of return. He teases us, plays with our love of nostalgia, by bathing his black and white prints in sepia, making them look older, warmer. Our expectation is of family portraits: a christening; a
family wedding, children playing in the garden. But in Mendoza's photography, the relentless cycle of expectation and disillusionment comes to an end. He presents us with uncomposed images that are not aesthetic but appropriate to a stark hopeless reality. The present is something you can reach out
your hands and almost touch; the present is what there is.
The crumbling mansions in the Vedado stare out at the empty streets like shellshocked, defeated generals; pre-revolutionary Chryslers, Buicks and Cadillacs loom like army tanks on a cluttered battlefield. To see the once stately homes and the vintage vehicles is to see not opulence but
decline. Through his lens, Mendoza shows us the present disintegrating: An elderly man earns a few pesos filling cigarette lighters; the police check a taxi driver's papers; a small boy plays baseball in the rubble; a sickly dog searches for scraps of food. What the gifted Mendoza delivers is the
topography of a wasteland.
Cuba, so mythical in everyone's mind--but most particularly in the American imagination. What does its story mean? "History will absolve me," Castro once said. But the final judge will not be history; more likely it will be an unchanging, unforgiving geography.
Wendy Gimbel Is the Author of "Havana Dreams."
Copyright 2000 Los Angeles Times |