Havana Noir (26 page)
T
here it was, framed by the oval of my airplane window: a shout of palms and prickly grass, low concrete buildings with exposed stones in hopeless need of As we descended, plumes of smoke, both paint and repair. black and white, spiraled up to meet us. I’m told exiles returning to Cuba sob as soon as the plane door pops open and the blinding Caribbean sky spills before them. But not me.
When I stepped onto the tarmac, the wet tropical air pawed at me reeking of mildew. The skies were a sweet pastel but I could barely see. I held my breath for the first few steps thinking the smell was just a bad patch—one of those sulphurous smoke trails having descended back to earth perhaps—but all was lost the minute I had to respond to the military guy with the official passenger list flapping wildly on his clipboard. His finger pointed at something and sweat ran from behind my ears.
“Yep, that’s me, Malía Mercado,” I muttered. It’d be rude to hold my nose or cover my mouth, so I was praying for my senses to acclimate quickly, very quickly. How could anybody stand this for long?
“María Mercado, sí,” he said, and went to correct the spelling on his neatly typed list.
“No, no—Malía, not María—Malía’s right,” I said in my best Spanish.
“Malía?” he asked, a hint of a smile disturbing his officially somber face.
“Yes, it’s Hawaiian,” I said, the Spanish accent my parents had added notwithstanding.
The military guy nodded. “Ah, well, it sounds Chinese,” he said.
I’d been warned by my parents and my sister Rocky, whom I was visiting, that most Cubans don’t feel the least bit uncomfortable making racial comments. And when it came to Asians—who were all Chinese to the Cubans—it was a longstanding pastime to base double-entendres on their supposed inability to pronounce the ferocious Cuban
R
, which the Chinese were said to render as
L
s. Thus, in this guy’s mind, my Malía couldn’t be anything but a mangled Chinese María.
I nodded at him, not exactly hiding my annoyance, which seemed to amuse him. But behind me the line was lengthening—I could sense the next passenger within inches of me, like a restless shadow—so the guard motioned me toward the blurry building in the distance. My bags were promised inside but mostly I was praying for shade. My heart was fluttering in the sticky strait jacket the humidity had wrapped around my chest.
“Buenas tardes, compañera,” I heard a voice say just behind me. It drew my immediate attention because it was so cheery, and because the Spanish was so masticated and rough.
I’d noticed him before, on the hop over from Kingston: a forty-something American with a weedy mustache and long strands of thinning hair. He was slender but I could tell, even with the scorching wind making his Che Guevara T-shirt billow into a small, curvy balloon, that he was probably really fit. He had the sunbaked look of a cyclist, lean and disciplined.
“First time back?” he asked me with a wink. He’d come up behind me so we were walking side by side, unexpectedly in step.
“Uh…yeah,” I said. “How’d you know?”
He shrugged. “I’ve been coming for so long, I can just tell.”
We pushed back the doors to the terminal. Not that the air-conditioning inside was much relief. I imagined a small unit hidden somewhere huffing and puffing as I scanned the waiting area, men and women in uniform milling among the passengers. Neither their rank nor purpose was clear to me.
“They won’t bite,” the man said, his head nodding in the direction of the customs officials. “They’ve forgiven you.”
“Forgiven me?” I asked.
“You’re an exile, right?”
I nodded involuntarily. Being Cuban without being born in Cuba is a tricky proposition; the notion of exile even more complicated. But I’d just met this guy and I certainly wasn’t going to go into any kind of philosophical discourse while I was melting away in the tropical heat. Exile residue required more time to explain than I had right then.
“Forgiven…? I guess I don’t—”
“Yeah, forgiven you,” he said.
“For what?”
“For abandonment,” he said, grinning now, “maybe even treason.”
“Wha…?”
He grinned from ear to ear, immensely pleased with himself.
“Fuck you,” I said, and stormed away. This was my first time in Cuba (I was taking a semester off from my studies at the University of Hawai’i and was to stay in Cuba one month)—maybe my last too—and I sure as hell wasn’t going to cause a commotion at customs.
I grabbed my bags but kept a wary eye on the jerk. A baggage handler stacked box after box next to him. They were perfectly square, identical, and the handler treated them with loving care. The jerk, for his part, ignored the returning exiles, not even trying to hide his contempt as he looked over and through them with their anxious faces and excess baggage. While the mostly elderly in the crowd struggled with their overstuffed suitcases, he reached around them for his own bags, holding his arms out as if to avoid touching them. I couldn’t help but notice that his lips didn’t move, keeping any sort of courtesy from slipping out. In turn, the exiles eyed the jerk’s Che T-shirt with pained expressions. In Havana, even in customs, it certainly seemed redundant.
This guy, however, appeared to know everybody in any kind of official capacity: the customs inspectors, the nurse, the woman who checked the luggage tags. He shook each of their hands, even hugged some of them. In a few strategic cases, he gave out little presents—bribes? I wondered. It all seemed very acceptable. I wondered if I’d have to come up with something at any point. As per my sister’s instructions, I had brought plenty of generic ibuprofen, Band-Aids, deodorants. I’d also brought wasabi and packages of seaweed, macadamias, Kona coffee, and spices. Would any of these count as gifts here? And if so, would I know when to make an offer?
I lost sight of the guy when we stepped out to the searing sun. It took me a minute to adjust to the maddeningly white light (for a second I thought I was hallucinating, or fainting) but then I spotted Rocky—she was jumping up and down, just like the Cubans around her. Her dark frizzy hair was pulled back carelessly, an orchid with fat watery petals behind her ear. She seemed as eager to hug me as they were to hug their relatives, all apparently recovering from long separations. Except that Rocky—it was my childhood pronunciation of Raquel, which I’d soon learn had become
Roh-keee
in Havana—had just seen me briefly three weeks before, back on the family homestead on the other side of the world, in Honolulu.
Rocky’s unexpected return to our barely acknowledged Cuban homeland was, in fact, precisely why I had followed her back to Havana. Maybe because she was born in Cuba and uprooted early, she had always been emotionally tethered to it, considerably more so than my parents, certainly way more than me. When our parents won the visa lottery to enter the U.S., they were almost relieved to wind up in Hawai’i, so far away from all known Cubanness that most of the time, when we were confused for Puerto Ricans or Portuguese (“Potagee,” as the locals not so kindly said: “How do you get da one-arm potagee out da tree? Wave at um”)—the islands’ few Latinos—they never bothered to correct anybody.
It’s not that they weren’t proud of their Cubanness, but rather that folks in Hawai’i were completely indifferent to it. As a kid, Rocky used to walk around with T-shirts emblazoned with legends such as,
Not only am I perfect, I’m Cuban too!
, drawing stares from the Hawaiians, Samoans, Filipinos, and other Pacific islanders who looked at her sorrel skin and probably assumed she was one of them. (Though Honoluluborn, I elicited nothing but haole wariness with my freckles and blondish hair.)
All my life, I’d listened intently to Eddie Kamae and Keali’i Reichel; Rocky swooned to Charanga Habanera and homemade tapes of the band Porno Para Ricardo. I ate poi stirred with milk and sugar; she flatly refused it in any form, preferring when my mother sliced the taro—which they called malanga—and fried it in olive oil. I took hula lessons after school while Rocky had my dad teach her how to dance timba, and later, when she deemed he’d taken her as far as he could, she began buying videos that showed her how to shiver and thrust. My dad teased her about being so Cuban, and I said once that she was Cuban squared, which in the family vernacular became simply “Cubed.”
“Zenzizenzic,” suggested my mother, the scientist, upping the stakes, “to the fourth power.”
When my parents first arrived in Hawai’i—when Rocky was six and before I was even born—they each found fantastic, ridiculously well-suited jobs. My mother’s a marine biologist and got plugged in to a government-funded program that operated for a while off Ni’ihau, a feudal island community, normally off-limits to all but its residents. I think she was the first Cuban to ever set foot there. She spent days diving, coming back to our house with bizarre creatures and assorted ocean debris. For a while, her prized possession was an organism called a xenophyophore, which was about the size of a golf ball and looked like a moon rock. I could never tell if it was dead or alive but when it finally, officially expired, my mom moped around for weeks.
My dad also landed on his feet. In Havana, he’d studied Chinese. In Honolulu, that skill became a bonanza. Moreover, his experience coming from a Communist country gave him an aura of expertise well beyond language, even if the Cuban and Chinese models really had very little in common. As a result, he was able to pick and choose consulting clients, and our lifestyle slowly became more and more comfortable—a fact that seemed to shock my parents, who’d dreamed but never expected much in Cuba.
Whenever something wonderful happened—and in their minds, a working car and a full fridge fit the bill—my parents were dazed by their good luck. Delighted by how sunny their lives were in Hawai’i, they added a fist-sized volcanic rock—representing Pele, one of the Hawaiians’ main deities—to the tropical tableau of Oshún and Yemayá on their altar.
We weren’t Hawaiian but we identified with the natives in unexpected ways. Perhaps after all of those years hearing about America’s imperialism from the Cuban government (and because Hawai’i really didn’t seem American to us), my family drifted seamlessly into Hawaiian sovereignty activities and frequently found ourselves at rallies and other independence-related events. For me, it was what we did in Hawai’i—it never dawned on me that these issues didn’t matter to the rest of the world until I began to travel.
Rocky, however, was completely indifferent to Hawai’i. Rocky’s return to Cuba, initially just a visit under the auspices of a Japanese travel group, had been a total shock to my parents—but not to me. Rocky had always aimed her brown Cuban irises at the horizon, convinced that Hawai’i, for her, was a geographical accident. In fact, if I speak any Spanish at all—and I confess that mine is tentative—it’s because Rocky, even as a kid, insisted on talking in Spanish at home, long after we were all functioning mostly in English and I was deeply immersed in Hawaiian language classes.
“We’ll have to know Spanish when we go back,” she’d say, while my mom, dad, and I just kind of looked away, out to the Pacific. It all seemed so foolish then.
“Aloha, Malía! Que bolá!” Rocky exclaimed at the airport, all feisty and mostly Cubed. She unraveled her warm arms from around my neck and led me by the hand toward a shiny Fiat, where she flung my bags into the sliver of a backseat.
“Spiffy car!” I said, admiring the unexpected little sportster. It really stuck out next to the sad tangle of the patched Eastern European models with no names that populated the parking lot.
“We’re going to be tight,” she said, grinning.
“Tight? We can fit in there, no prob!” I said.
Rocky shook her head. “No, there’s one more person, a friend of Dionisio’s,” she said.
Dionisio was Rocky’s fiancé, her reason for staying in Cuba, and the real source of my parents’ concern. We’d seen him in photos: a winsome young man in his late-twenties, just about her height when she wore flats, pale and soft featured. She’d fallen for him on that first trip three years ago and she’d never looked back. But for an annual trip to Honolulu to see us, she’d stayed in Cuba, translating and teaching English to foreigners and Cubans with dollar connections.
Technically, I was in Havana to visit Rocky—a trip organized during her brief sojourn in Honolulu weeks before—but, frankly, more than anything I was to serve as a kind of scouting party for my parents: They needed time to acclimate to the idea of returning to Cuba, and even more so to the idea of their eldest daughter’s wedding (though no date had been set, we all understood it would happen). Because Dionisio was a doctor, his chances of leaving Cuba were virtually nil. Marrying Rocky meant little to the Cuban authorities, who expected him to stick around and perform medical duties until he’d given back enough to justify his free education.
“That’s our guy,” Rocky said, pointing with her chin in a way Hawaiian locals think particular and which the Cubans, as Rocky explained later, claim as uniquely theirs.
I turned my head to see, then snapped back to Rocky. “Are you kidding me?” There, striding toward us in all his smug glory, was the jerk. He was alternately waving hello to us and goodbye to a guy who was carting away the boxes. “He’s…”
“He’s a friend of the family,” Rocky said before I had a chance to finish. “A really good friend.” Her look was cautionary.
“La Hawayana! Raquelin,” he oozed, taking my sister in his arms. As his chin rested for a second on her shoulder, he winked at me from behind her back. She hugged him too, but quickly, not letting it go beyond courtesy. “And this is the baby sister?” he said, laughing as he pointed at me.
“I’m nineteen, I’m not a baby,” I protested, realizing immediately how childish I sounded. “And we’ve met,” I said, my embarrassed words aimed at Rocky.
“Oh yes, we’ve met,” he said, extending his hand to me but pulling it just as I approached, bringing me in to him for an unexpected—and unwanted—embrace. I decided to play like Rocky, feigning courtesy. “I’m Tom Mahler,” he continued, “practically Dionisio’s brother. Which means I’m practically your brother-in-law—that’s what we’d be, no? In any case, family!”