In the island's countryside the land is lovely, the people are humble,
and life is unforgiving
By Kathy Glasgow. From miaminewtimes.com.
Originally published by Miami New Times February 8, 2001
Lucinda and I reached the Santiago bus terminal at about six o'clock Sunday
morning, December 17, San Lazaro's Dao bands of dark sand. On the other side of
the road, to the north, were rolling green fields where cattle grazed and goats
gamboled, and where white busts of José Martí stood on pedestals
before metal-roofed wooden cottages. Beyond the fields, on the lower slopes of
the distant Sierra Maestra, white rocks formed messages to the masses, such as "Happy
new millennium" and "Onward with the Revolution in 2001." White
rocks marked graves, too, in the humble cemeteries we passed. Along this
highway, locals informed me, lie at least fifteen such graveyards, hastily
plotted during the revolution to bury those who died -- government loyalists as
well as rebel soldiers and supporters -- in the heavy fighting in this region.
Simon's best friend's grandfather, who hid Che Guevara for months at his farm,
also rests in one of those cemeteries.
We arrived at the seaside town of Chivirico at about 9:30. There we boarded
a camioneta, a jitney of sorts, for La Plata, some 90 kilometers to the west.
Camionetas are outfitted with roofs, usually of tarp, and rows of narrow metal
grids that provide seating of a quality similar to a storm grating. Most of us
were forced to stand anyway for the first ten kilometers, clinging to rebars
while the truck bounced and lurched along, spewing great clouds of diesel smoke.
It's always hot inside a camioneta. When we stepped down from the truck into a
dusty courtyard at La Plata, it was 11:30, the sun was high, and I was tired,
hungry, and craving water.
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I thought Paulo was joking when he informed me that the only bus to La
Magdalena was at five o'clock that evening, so we'd have to walk to Benjamin's
house, twenty kilometers away. But Paulo wasn't joking. I knew enough about the
metric system to understand that twenty kilometers is something like fifteen
miles, a hike for which none of us was equipped: I would be walking in
flip-flops that weren't comfortable even on trips from bedroom to bathroom. My
left ankle and foot were wrapped with a cloth tenuously secured by a safety pin,
after I'd twisted my ankle the day before in the town of El Cobre as I walked up
the hill to the shrine of the Virgin de la Caridad.
Furthermore I'd given my Nikes to Lucinda, who was wearing them -- the only
one in our party with shoes suitable for walking. Simon's mother, Luisa, had
brought a small umbrella for the sun, which she bravely unfurled as we set out.
Paulo took the heaviest bags and satchels.
The road out of La Plata was paved, but poorly, with wide dirt shoulders on
either side. Under the blinding sun the sandy dirt burned a desert gold. After
100 yards we turned off the main road to make our way slightly uphill in what
looked like a dry rock-strewn riverbed. About 50 yards to our left was the same
deep-blue breaking sea we'd been tracking since leaving Santiago. For perhaps
half a mile we picked our way along the dirt trail, shaded at intervals by
clusters of trees. Then the steep terrain between us and the sea dropped off,
and we emerged on to a path almost at the water's edge. We were the only humans
for miles around as far as we could tell, overarched in that place by a profound
silence. We heard the crashing of the breakers, the crunching of sand and gravel
beneath our feet, our occasional terse exchanges, and the jabbering of Yulemis,
the two-year-old niece of Marta, who is Simon's niece and who carried the
toddler for most of our long march.
And it was only beginning. The path wound uphill again, and we came upon an
underworldly stretch of black rocks and coarse black sand that glittered like
mica, silver sparks under the intense sun. They must have been disgorged from
below during one of the region's frequent earthquakes. The sun was much closer
to the Earth here and turned the sky an iridescent azure; I remembered Havana as
cold and dark by comparison. The water looked so blue, the whitecaps so foamy,
that the temptation to climb down the jagged rocks and dive in became
unbearable. But by then my ankle and foot were swollen, both feet were hurting,
and I knew it would take all my strength just to negotiate the path.
After an hour or so, Paulo had pulled far ahead of the rest of us. We could
see him disappearing down a hill or around a curve, then reappearing further
away. When I looked into the distance, I saw no end of the trail, and I felt
stunned and angry. I could feel my exposed skin baking and blisters forming
between my toes and on my feet. The other women weren't complaining, but they
were suffering, too. Luisa, a tiny white-haired woman with sharp, squinting
green eyes and a stubborn set to her mouth, was striding alongside her
granddaughter Angelica under the stinting shade of her umbrella. Luisa wore a
sleeveless knee-length blue jersey dress adorned with ruffles at the neck and
waist. Her shoes, black vinyl loafers with soft rubber soles, were brand-new,
purchased two weeks earlier by Simon at a flea market in Miami. She was
delighted with them.
Luisa has been divorced from Benjamin for more than 30 years, though they
have remained close because of their six children and an abiding friendship. She
lives with her current husband, Amadeo, in the green foothills north of
Santiago, above the Port of Boniato and the Boniato prison. She has always lived
in the country and has always been dirt poor; her parents, who immigrated from
the Canary Islands, were farmers in the Oriente. She can neither read nor write.
Before meeting her I thought she would be uncommunicative and a bit dull. But
she's the opposite: Quick-witted and energetic at 67 years old, she has no
trouble articulating her thoughts in trenchant Spanish.
As the matriarch of what has become a large and somewhat politically diverse
extended family, Luisa often serves as a go-between or peacemaker, and sometimes
a good listener who enjoys a bit of gossip. There's been abundant familial
intrigue over the years, much of which I am only beginning to learn, and not all
the stuff of lighthearted chatter. Her own life has been affected by the refusal
of some members of her family, especially Benjamin and Simon, to conform to
Cuba's socialist system. Still, her concerns mostly center on everyday life in
the rural reaches of a Third World nation, and not on the many political,
social, and economic issues often debated in Havana and Miami. Her days are
difficult and burdensome in a hundred ways most Americans never think about:
cooking and bathing without running water, having to walk and ride in cramped
bucking trucks for hours just to get from her house to town and back, no
telephone. It's hard to tell if she's so used to living like that she doesn't
realize how hard it is. There's no sense of struggle about her, and I got the
impression she regards suffering as a waste of energy.
Luisa and Amadeo's two-bedroom house, where I spent my first night in the
Oriente, sits at the end of a path of flat white rocks carefully laid out in the
dirt. Their front porch is about 25 yards back from a hilly paved road that
makes its way downhill to a shallow, narrow river -- really a creek now, after
two years of drought throughout the Oriente -- where women wash clothes and
young boys jump off rocky ledges into the clear water. Also along this road is a
small plywood house, now a modest museum, where Fidel Castro and some of his men
were sheltered in the earliest days of the rebellion against then-President
Fulgencio Batista.
Like their neighbors for miles around, Luisa and Amadeo live with the
constant threat of theft. Not of any household goods (they have nothing of
value) but of their animals -- chickens, ducks, goats, pigs -- which provide
sustenance. During the past five years, residents here have seen countless
animals disappear. When one is stolen, the owner not only loses food, he can be
fined by the government. "If someone steals your pig," Amadeo
explained unhappily, "you are penalized but not the thief. The only way to
keep your animals is literally to keep them inside your house at night." A
few years ago Amadeo, with the help of Luisa and Benjamin's fifth child,
Patricio, built a roofed enclosure on to the south side of their house where the
bedrooms are. So Luisa and Amadeo now sleep on the other side of a gate from two
hogs, two sows, and a litter of ten piglets; about twenty ducks and chickens;
and a half-dozen goats.
Patricio, who is 38 years old and divorced from the mother of his two
daughters, lives down a sloping pasture from his mother in a one-room shack. He
owns a horse, a valuable commodity, and at night brings the animal inside to
sleep in the same room. "I sleep with one eye closed and one eye on the
horse," he said. "The thievery is that bad." He has chosen to
live there in relative solitude to help his mother and stepfather. One of the
hardest jobs is supplying water to the house. Until a month ago, Patricio and
Amadeo had to carry buckets of water from the river a mile away. Patricio at
least had a horse on which to balance the old-fashioned pole with bucket hanging
at either end, while Amadeo carried a second pole on his shoulders. Then Simon
sent them $25 to buy a cart, which the horse now pulls, to transport water.
Patricio hadn't been able to accompany us to La Magdalena that San Lazaro's
Day, nor had the third-oldest sibling, Julieta, who lives in Santiago with her
husband and four children. Several years ago Julieta became a dedicated
Jehovah's Witness, the only one in her essentially nonreligious immediate family
to actively embrace a faith. Most of the family members are Catholics en su
manera, informally, and with strong Santería influences.
After two hours I began to imagine the trek as a trite allegory. It was Hell
in paradise, the way many Cubans describe life on their beautiful tropical
island. Just when you convince yourself it's all about to change, that there is
an end to Hell, you see the same road ahead. I flopped along, angry at myself,
at Fidel, and finally even the Virgin de la Caridad, Cuba's patron saint to whom
I am devoted, because she made me fall in love with Simon and come to this place
of torment. The rocky seaside shortcut eventually led us back up to the highway,
where we could make somewhat faster progress on the asphalt. There was no
traffic at all. The sea was still tantalizingly close, sparkling on the other
side of grassy ledges, at times obscured by high rocks. The mountains were
closer and steeper, their flanks like green- and brown-shaded facets of a gem.
Just once was the vast stillness broken by a Fiat speeding west in the direction
of La Magdalena, the town that by now I was half-convinced did not exist.
Lucinda, the one wearing my Nikes, was lagging behind, sulking over an
earlier perceived rudeness by her daughter and sister Zulema. She doesn't get
along with her family in general, although that's rarely noticeable because they
try to treat one another civilly. Lucinda is 49 years old, the oldest child of
Benjamin and Luisa. She left Santiago as a teenager to go to school in Havana
and never moved back. Her only child, Angelica, was born in 1976; the father, an
engineer, has lived in Miami for several years but never writes or calls.
Lucinda tilts her chin up a little, her round eyes narrowed and her wide mouth
turned down in disapproval. Her hair is well maintained in a blunt
shoulder-length cut. She has two closets of clothes in her third-floor walkup in
Havana's Marianao district, where she lives with a man who is madly in love with
her but whom she scorns. (Angelica and her husband of five years have an
apartment in the nearby La Lisa neighborhood.)
In reality, Lucinda confides, out of earshot of her boyfriend, she is
eternally in love with a man who deceived her many years ago. She talks
elliptically about a past in the "diplomatic service," of foreign
husbands, and Cuban men who have let her down. Now she devotes a good part of
her time re-reading a book that has become a classic of new-age thought, a
Spanish translation of You Can Heal Your Life, by Louise L. Hay. Lucinda talks
about self-reliance and self-love, qualities she learned from the book. "I
don't need a man to be happy," she insists. "I'm not going to look for
a compañero, because if I am fortunate enough to go to Miami, I would
just be leaving him behind."
She says she always wanted to be a writer but instead was encouraged to take
education courses at the University of Havana. She hated teaching. Currently she
works in a bakery not far from her house and hates that, too. Several months ago
she was fired from a job at another bakery; she claims her boss got rid of her
because she complained about him pocketing money from sales. Now she has a
lawyer and has filed a lawsuit against the state, seeking a new hearing. It's no
secret that vast numbers of Cuban employees steal from their workplaces, since
salaries are laughably minuscule. Less well-known is the common (she claims)
practice of aggrieved workers suing the government.
Lucinda lives much better than her relatives in Santiago. Still she can't
escape the sense of having been stymied, by her own nation and her own people.
She, like a million other Cubans, looks hopefully to the United States for her
future. Now that her brother is settled in Miami, it will be easier for her to
come. Simon, however, scoffs at the notion of Lucinda beginning a new life in
the United States. "She hates to work," he asserts. "She doesn't
understand that you have to work hard in this country. She'll get here and have
to take a job mopping floors. She'll never be able to adjust."
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The paved road cut through the rocky slopes; we were imperceptibly trudging
uphill. The sun had passed its zenith and was blazing in the west but wouldn't
cast a shadow from the roadside ridges for hours. It was after four o'clock,
three and a half hours since we'd gotten off the bus at La Plata, when we
spotted a figure sitting beneath a roadside shelter, a security checkpoint. The
road continued past the checkpoint, but it was blocked by a chain stretched
between posts on either side. Paulo was waiting for us, and I rushed to sit down
beside him. "Tired?" he asked without irony. As I mumbled something
about no one telling me we were embarking on a death march, I noticed a
clipboard on the bench. I remember staring at it and wanting to leaf through the
pages but being too miserable to move. Moments later, as the other women and
child straggled in, a Ministry of the Interior guard appeared and picked up the
clipboard.
Everyone else (except the guard) started down a pebbly wash just north of
the station. When I got up to follow, I discovered my feet and legs refused to
move or bend in any coordinated way. The cloth around my ankle hung in useless
rags. At the bottom of the wash, a glass-clear stream meandered over a bed of
large rocks. Instead of crossing the stream over the rocks, I plowed through the
delicious cool water, my flip-flops sinking into sand. I wanted to stand in the
stream but I didn't; the group was moving ahead, and I couldn't fall too far
behind. On the other bank we had to negotiate a muddy trail impressed with deep
tire and horse tracks. Sugar cane grew all around, shoulder high. Then the cane
opened on to a clearing in which a dozen young men and boys were playing
volleyball under tall broad-limbed trees. Around the perimeter of the clearing,
the terrain rose again, and houses sat at intervals among trees, behind wire
fences. I caught up with the others standing outside the fence in front of one
of these houses, a peach-color plaster square with a narrow concrete front
porch. It was only then I realized we had reached the end of the road. We were
at Benjamin's house. The gate was locked, so we climbed through a space in the
fence, and someone went to a neighbor's to get a key to the front door.
Benjamin and Jairo, his oldest son, live there (with Jairo's wife and three
children) when they're not tending to their crops high in the Sierra Maestra
near Pico Turquino, the highest point on the island, 60 kilometers to the
northeast and accessible only by horse and foot. They hadn't yet arrived from
the Sierra when we showed up, so Luisa, Angelica, and Zulema went to work
sweeping the floors and chairs, and washing dishes with the water stored in a
barrel in the kitchen. Paulo walked to the nearby river to bring in pots full of
clear, cold spring water. Luisa used it to make a sweet limonada. Lucinda had
carried three loaves of crusty bread from Chivirico, and she cut slices and
spread them with guayaba paste -- the most delicious food I've ever eaten. Then
some of us -- Marta and Yulemis, Lucinda, and I -- simply collapsed on a bed
covered with a coarse blue blanket. At the head rested a guitar wrapped in a
heavy cloth that we didn't move.
The afternoon sky was dimming. While some of us washed ourselves in the
outhouse (a plastic curtain divided the latrine from a cement-floored stall,
where one dips a cup into a bucket to bathe), others rinsed off in the river.
A half-hour later Benjamin and Jairo arrived, along with Jairo's wife, Beti,
and three little girls (their daughter and two of Beti's from her former
marriage). Jairo, who is 47 years old, wore fatigues, boots, and a machete on
his belt. He and all the other men in his family have wide, bony shoulders
tapering to a narrow waist and hips. His eyes are greenish like his mother's and
seem always narrowed, set behind prominent cheekbones. He has the sad,
thoughtful look of a man who has labored very hard all his life and knows he's
going to have to work like that until he dies. Still his sadness is nothing like
the desperate fear of falling so often seen in American wage earners. After
cleaning up and before repairing to the back yard to begin the slaughter,
dressing, and roasting of a young pig, he sat in a rocking chair on the porch,
fidgeting while Angelica, who works as a beautician in Havana, gave him a badly
needed haircut. As puffs of gray-black hair collected on the cement, he watched
his father grooming a horse tied to a tree a few feet away. The chosen pig was
straining at a rope.
Jairo was a bit wild as a youth; he was into boxing and idling with his
friends. He's had many women and has been in love with most of them. In his
early twenties, he moved to Nicaro, a port on Cuba's Atlantic coast, about 140
kilometers due north of Santiago. There he learned several trades: bricklayer,
cabinetmaker, electrician. He joined the Communist Party, which he believed lent
order and unity to his community. He participated in party activities and still
does today.
About three years ago Jairo came back to live in the country. He remains
loyal to the political system and structure, whose founders established their
first stronghold in these same mountains. But though he describes himself as a
militante, he doesn't fit the fanatical stereotype. He's a regular hard-working
family man who adores his brother in Miami, despite the fact that Simon is a
former political prisoner who has denounced Fidel on Radio Marí. But
Jairo's esteem for his brother doesn't mean he has a great deal of sympathy for
the suffering Simon endured at the hands of the state. "He brought it on
himself," he said without condemnation. And it was true, even though Simon,
like most politically defiant Cubans, probably would not have rebelled in the
first place, had he any hope for his future.
Paulo and Zulema sat on the back stoop with big aluminum buckets of green
plaintains, yuca, and ñame, a potatolike root, in front of them. As they
peeled, they dropped each food in a separate pot of water to be boiled over a
fire in a brick oven just outside the kitchen window. Benjamin and Jairo had
brought sacks of roots and medicinal herbs with them from the mountains; they
would be going back the following week to finish harvesting ñame,
boniato, malanga, and yuca. "The government is telling me they want a
certain amount [of each crop]," Benjamin said wearily, with slight
irritation. "I have to turn most of the harvest over to the
[government-run] cooperative, and they'll pay me. It's not enough, but there's
nothing else to do."
A neighbor, Manuel, a wizened white man in a straw hat, came over to help
Jairo roast the pig -- the macho, as Cubans call it. In the back yard the men
set fire to a pile of logs in the large pit they'd finished digging. His face
and arms illumined by the flames, Jairo expertly thrust a long knife into the
pig's heart. After one squeal of terror, the pig lay breathing rapidly as its
blood coursed on to the dirt. Even before it was dead, Jairo began shaving it,
scraping the hide with a knife to expose the soft pink skin. Then he opened up
the gut and extracted the organs and entrails. Zulema, who was standing nearby,
took the liver on a plate to her mother to chop and cook. The sun had gone down,
and soon the sky would grow black and teem with stars. The fire in the pit was
turning to embers.
Manuel brought a long pole carved from a tree limb and sharpened on both
ends. He held the pig while Jairo thrust the pole through its body. It took
several minutes of thrusting and pushing to position the pig midway on the pole,
but finally the men lifted the carcass, pierced perfectly, and placed either end
of the pole between split stands, also carved from tree limbs, on either end of
the pit.
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Several young men had come to the house by then. One cradled a guitar in his
arms. They pulled up chairs and sat in a semicircle at one wall, and the guitar
player picked through a couple of songs, the others joining in when they knew
the words. Wearing an undershirt, old black pants, and a worn-out fedora,
Benjamin appeared with his guitar, the one that was wrapped in a cloth on the
bed. The young men quickly sat him down at the head of the semicircle. He gently
positioned the guitar, his old-man arms black and skinny but still muscled. He
strapped a capo onto the neck and began to play a traditional son montuno. He
sang with assurance, toying with the rhythm and the words. "Oye," he
announced, nodding to the off-beat, his black-rimmed glasses reflecting the
overhead light bulb. "Me voy pa la pachanga." He picked out a bluesy
break and then threw his head back. "No me llores," he implored. "No
me llores." The young men sang along, smiling and watching his guitar work.
Paulo brought out one of the bottles of aguardiente and passed it around.
Zulema came in from boiling the yuca and ñame. "Come on!" she
urged the little girls, now looking festive in lacy dresses and shiny little
shoes. "Let's dance!" She took the oldest by the hands. The girl,
seven or so, proved a precociously talented salsa dancer. Luisa had finished
cooking the pig's liver, and she brought out a plateful. Cut into small pieces
and well seasoned, it was perfect with the aguardiente. Zulema and I danced and
sipped the liquor; a little went a long way. After a while I stood back near the
kitchen entrance and surveyed the small cement-floor room, barely furnished with
old wooden chairs, no television or radio, lit with a florescent fixture on one
wall. The front window and door were now blocked with the faces and bodies of
neighbors who never came in but just wanted to watch and listen.
"Yo no sé qué me está pasando," Benjamin
sang. "Que no dejo un momento de pensar en ti." I don't know what's
happening to me; I can't stop thinking of you for a single moment.
Almost two years earlier, Benjamin and his second wife, Sofia, both became
very ill with pneumonia. They were in the Sierra when they got sick, without a
phone or car. Jairo came to get Luisa, and together they climbed up the mountain
and persuaded the couple -- who had no intention of seeing a doctor -- to go to
a hospital in Santiago. After they were released, Lucinda invited them to come
to Havana and recover in her apartment. In Havana they consulted an orante, a
kind of Santería seer. The orante, Benjamin now knows, predicted Sofia's
subsequent death, though not in so many words. "He said it would come
because of a child," Benjamin recalled.
He and Sofia eventually recovered and returned to the Sierra. But after
several months, Sofia fell ill again. Benjamin took her to the hospital, where
she died. She was much younger than he. "It was the heartbreak as much as
any disease," Benjamin said. "She had problems with her son; he was in
prison. Right before she got sick, he sent her a letter that upset her. This is
what killed her."
Benjamin reflected for a moment and then added with certainty: "Everything
he ever told me has come to pass."
And now he hints he is thinking about getting married again. His children
are mystified; they don't know who the prospective bride is.
Benjamin says his grandparents on both sides came to the Sierra Maestra from
Africa. He doesn't know which country, but he knows they spoke French because
his parents spoke French. His parents, however, never taught the language to him
or his eight brothers and sisters. "I did learn to read and write," he
said with some pride. "I studied hard and got a good education. It turned
out to be of no use at all."
Benjamin's only career option was to become a farmer like his parents. He
and Luisa were married in 1950, and Lucinda was born the next year. For more
than a decade they lived near Baconao, a coastal town southeast of Santiago.
After the 1959 revolution, Benjamin acquired land (he is somewhat vague about
the exact arrangement -- it might have been a government giveaway or
reallocation) in El Caney, just outside Santiago, and built a house there. They
happened to be the first black people to live in the area; other black families
followed, some moving on to parcels of land Benjamin gave them. He says his own
family, which already was living at subsistence level, didn't prosper under the
economic reforms that came with the revolution. Desperate to improve his lot, he
planted another crop: marijuana. He figures the plants he sold to brokers in the
city were packaged and shipped out of Santiago Bay, no doubt to the United
States. While this enterprise helped support his family, it also got him
arrested and thrown into prison three times. When Luisa gave birth prematurely
to their sixth child, Simon, in a midwife's house in the foothills, Benjamin had
just begun his first prison term. In all he spent eighteen years in prison.
Luisa divorced him after the second incarceration.
"I admit it was wrong to [grow marijuana]," he said. He rubbed his
chin, where white stubble contrasted with the black-brown of his skin. "I
lost my wife because of it. I lost years with my children. I'm not going to say
I had no alternative. But no matter what you do, the government will end up
taking it away anyway. I'm not going to fight anymore." Benjamin looks
gaunt, largely because he can hardly eat anything that doesn't cause terrible
indigestion. His knees are shot. But the thought of retiring doesn't seem to
have occurred to him. He complains about being in pain but never expresses a
desire to stop working.
Out in the back yard under the trees and the vast swirl of stars, the embers
in the pit illuminated the roasting pig, which by ten o'clock was beginning to
smell savory. From next door came the ruckus of Christian hymns, sung with great
gusto. The neighbors recently had converted to some evangelical religion, Jairo
explained, turning the spit. "They won't so much as lend you a cup of sugar
now. They don't socialize at all anymore."
As an appetizer for the hungry musicians and the rest of us, Luisa and
Zulema piled plates with rice, yuca, ñame, and boiled plantains. "Ñame,"
Benjamin said affectionately, lifting a fork of the root. "I love ñame."
In the back bedroom Angelica, Beti, and two of her daughters had arranged
themselves like puzzle pieces on the single bed. After slaving for hours in the
kitchen Luisa joined them. Lucinda, Marta, Yulemis, and another of Beti's
daughters were sleeping in the other bedroom. I decided to take a nap on this
bed. Zulema and Paulo, however, never abandoned the party.
Zulema's home on a rocky hillside in El Caney, next door to the house where
her family had lived a few decades before, has floors of hard-packed dirt,
electricity but no running water, no phone, and no bathroom. Her oldest child, a
handsome 24-year-old man, is in prison for petty theft. So she enjoys her rum
when she can get it, and a good pachanga.
I kept hearing a loud crashing sound during my nap. Finally I rose and
peered into the main room. The musicians had stopped for the moment,
anticipating the feast. It was past midnight, and Jairo had placed two or three
slabs of pig meat on a narrow wooden table at one end of the room. He was
bringing his machete down, over and over, chopping the pork into bite-size
pieces. It was still hot and had been lightly salted. Women and children
appeared at the table, and we picked up the morsels with our fingers, letting
the fat slide down our throats. More aguardiente made the rounds. Zulema was
laughing, hugging me, and quietly scoffing at a suggestion by Lucinda that she
curtail her liquor consumption. "Why can't she stop complaining about
everything?" Zulema asked in a conspiratorial stage whisper. "We're
here to have fun!"
After a while the meat cooled. Our hands, lips, and faces were coated with
shiny grease. It must have been around 2:00 a.m. when the musicians picked up
where they'd left off. Benjamin had only been warming up, and now his voice was
loose and harsh. He sang crazy songs, like "El Paralitico," in which a
man wakes up paralyzed and then debates the mystical reasons for his misfortune.
Apparently it wasn't a case of Elegguá striking him down but one of those
surprises life doles out. "Bota la muleta y bastón/y podrá
bailar el son," he concluded. Throw away that crutch and cane, and then you
can dance the son.
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I woke up at 6:00 a.m. on the bed where a half-dozen of us had curled up.
The bus to La Plata left at 7:00, and we weren't going to miss it. We didn't eat
breakfast, and no one offered a wake-up coffee because there wasn't any, even
though this is a prime coffee-growing area and the harvest was now in progress.
At 7:00 sharp, as the sky was lightening, a bus stopped just past the clearing
where the boys had been playing volleyball. The driver would wait there for
about fifteen minutes. We straggled out of the house. Zulema and Paulo both
looked sick. I felt overwhelmed by the simple exertion of walking to the bus and
climbing in. I was wearing the same dress I'd walked in the day before and
suffering from oozing blisters on both feet. Luisa was having trouble walking
with swollen feet, but she didn't let on. She carried a young chicken in a
plastic bag -- a gift from Benjamin, an addition to her menagerie and an
excellent future food source.
Benjamin planned to stay at La Magdalena for another day and then return to
his harvest in the mountains. He and Jairo walked us to the bus. Jairo stood
outside under a lightpost, talking with some of the men from town. They lit one
another's cigarettes and gestured toward the cane fields. One, then another of
the musicians from the night before joined the conversation. I recognized their
shirts, the same ones they had worn at the party.
Benjamin sat with us in the bus until it was time to go. "We stopped
when the liquor ran out," he reported happily. "I guess it was about
five o'clock." To the east the sky turned pink, orange, and yellow, then a
sliver of sun pushed through the tips of the cane stalks. When I told Benjamin
what a great singer he was, he beamed for a few seconds and said that once
someone had recorded him performing some favorite songs at home. "It didn't
come out too well," he admitted. "It wasn't professional."
And he bowed his head, musing. "I'm 75 years old," he said,
rubbing the back of his sinewy neck under the faded fedora. The cuff of his
pinstripe shirt was unbuttoned; the shirt was rumpled and threadbare at the
seams. "Things haven't worked out for me." He didn't make excuses or
try to put a spin on his troubles. He didn't say anything about growing up black
and in extreme poverty, or about the revolution discouraging individual
initiative. He also didn't say anything about hoping his children would succeed
where he couldn't. "No," he concluded, shrugging slightly. "I
haven't accomplished very much. I did what I could."
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