By Laurie Goering. Tribune Foreign Correspondent. Chicago
Tribune. February 09, 2001
HAVANA During the week, strapping Homero del Sol works as a technician for
Fotovideo Services, a Cuban state videotaping firm.
Come Sunday, though, he cinches on a belt with a big silver buckle, settles
a gray Stetson on his head and heads out to one of Havana's oddest weekend hot
spots: the revolutionary rodeo arena.
Never mind that Havana is an urban redoubt of 2 million. Never mind that
cowboy boots and chaps are outnumbered 100-1 by four-pocketed white guayabera
shirts and hot pink spandex bodysuits.
In Havana, "Pure Cuban Rodeo"--as the arena sign notes--is alive
and kicking in all its dusty, bawling, socialist glory.
"Ninety percent of these guys live in the city," says del Sol,
lounging among the milling horses during a break from his Sunday work in the
rodeo announcer's booth. But with the help of shared horses, homemade equipment
and an occasional coaching visit from Texas, Cuban rodeo is holding its own, he
said.
Havana's whitewashed arena lies in the heart of Lenin Park, a sprawling
green delight on Havana's outskirts filled on the weekends with kids flying
kites, families rowing on a lake and couples trotting about in pony carts.
The rodeo arena itself, like most of the park, was built by Celia Sanchez, a
noted revolutionary who supplied Fidel Castro's rebels in the Sierra Maestra
mountains before their 1959 victory and remained a close Castro confidant until
her suicide in 1980.
On Sundays the arena's parking lot is jammed with bicycles and hulking 1950s
Buicks and Fords; Cuba has few pickup trucks. It's disco and Cuban criollo music
that blares rather than country, but there's no mistaking what's happening down
in the white dust arena, flanked by palm trees and stands of bamboo.
Tail in the air, a calf breaks from the chute and streaks down the arena
with a cowboy in hot pursuit. Seconds later the loop finds its mark. The calf is
flipped upside down, and the cowboy's hands are in the air. It's a fast time.
"Muy technico!" del Sol says admiringly over the loudspeaker. An
exacting technical performance. "Applauso publico!" he yells, and the
crowd takes the hint.
The bulldoggers in red crash helmets rather disconcertingly make their leap
onto the horns of a galloping steer. It's not the picture of Western tradition
but certainly safer.
Bulldoggers who miss the mark the first time around sprint to their horses,
remount, chase the steer again and fling themselves into the air, this time
emerging with an armful of horns and digging their heels into the dust.
Sometimes the steer quickly falls to a judolike flip; other times long seconds
tick off the clock before the dusty wrestling match ends.
Cuban rodeo, like its Latin cousins in Brazil, Mexico and Central America,
has its eccentricities.
In socialist Cuba, rodeo is an amateur sport. There are no professional
cowboys, no cash prizes, no trophies or ribbons for rounding a trio of barrels
on a sprinting horse or sticking atop a ton of spinning bull for eight seconds.
Anybody with sufficient guts and talent can enter free.
"We do this for love of the sport," del Sol says. "There's no
money here, but there's love."
One advantage, of course, is that in socialist Cuba medical care is free.
The cowboy who isn't quite fast enough climbing the fence in front of a charging
bull gets a free ride to the hospital and a free patching up.
Cuban rodeo has no saddle bronc or bareback riding events. The problem, del
Sol explains, is that there just aren't enough horses to spare in Cuba,
especially any with talent for bucking.
There also isn't much money for rodeo finery. The odd cowboy in Cuba has red
show chaps, but silver-laden saddles, fitted Western shirts and ostrich cowboy
boots are the exception. These cowboys ride, more often than not, in well-worn
saddles, jeans and black work boots.
Most of them, like Wilfredo Valdez, a bandy-legged Cuban Marlboro man in a
black cowboy hat and black handlebar mustache, keep a horse or two in their back
yards on the city's outskirts, or they muck stalls for somebody else to earn the
chance to ride.
"I have been doing this 12 years now," says Valdez, leaning on his
little quarter horse mare, "and there isn't a weekend you won't find me
here."
Cuban rodeo is not a sport for rugged individualists. Cowboys are judged in
teams, rather than individually. Horses generally are shared. And sportsmanship
is the rule, even during the tire race, a free-for-all version of musical chairs
in which cowboys race their horses toward a handful of old tires at the end of
the arena and dive feet-first into them in a cloud of dust.
The odd cowboy out loses--there's always one fewer tire than there are
riders--but there are always more pats on the back than angry gestures, even
when two cowboys end up face to face in the same tire at the same second.
Over the years, Cuban rodeo has benefited from a few contributions from its
much-admired but formally imperialist neighbor to the north.
Occasionally, an embargo-evading Texas cowboy, for instance, has stopped by
to offer tips on roping or bull riding, and from time to time del Sol gets his
hands on a U.S. rodeo video to study.
"We're improving our technique," he says. Cuban rodeo may have
only 50 years of history, compared to double that in the United States, but it
is gaining ground. This week, the country is hosting a full-scale international
rodeo, with cowboys from Brazil to Guatemala testing their mettle.
The crowd favorite at Havana's arena most Sundays is one of the odder rodeo
events: wild-cow milking.
A herd of surprised-looking horned cows are driven into one end of the
arena, while at the opposite end cowboys on foot coil their lassos and shake out
loops.
When a hand is dropped, the cowboys sprint down the arena--a comic
sight--and toss a loop at the nearest cow. One member of each cowboy team then
grabs the plunging animal by the horns and hangs on for dear life while the
partner, evading kicks, attempts to get a few squirts of milk into a tin cup.
Then it's a race on foot back up the arena, tin cup in hand, to the
announcer's stand, to the satisfying roar from the stands. | 