Ay, Cuba!: A Socio-Erotic Journey

By Andrei Codrescu and David Graham

The NPR reporter offers an “engaging and enlightening” window into late-90s Cuba, “from the cafes in Havana to the mysterious lairs of Santiago de Cuba” (Kirkus Reviews).

For NPR commentator Andrei Codrescu, reporting from Cuba on the eve of Pope John Paul II’s 1998 visit was an opportunity to understand the realities of life in a country that has long been the subject of stereotypes and misconceptions. Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, Cuba was the last place to witness a “laboratory of pre-post-communism,” as it toed the line between its socialist past and its uncertain future.
 
On the streets of Havana and the beaches of Santiago de Cuba, Codrescu met people from all walks of life—from prostitutes and fortunetellers to bureaucrats and writers—eager to share their stories. Uncensored and compassionate, his interviews reveal a world where destruction and beauty, poverty and pride exist side by side. Traveling with photographer David Graham, whose powerful images illustrate the energy pulsing through everyday life in Cuba, Codrescu captures the humanity of a nation that is lost when it’s reduced to a political symbol. With the United States resuming relations with Cuba for the first time in decades, Ay, Cuba! is more relevant now than ever before.  

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Media
• Release date: May 19, 2015
• ISBN: 9781504017992

Andrei Codrescu

ANDREI CODRESCU (www.codrescu.com) is the editor of Exquisite Corpse: A Journal of Books & Ideas (www.corpse.org). Born in Romania, Codrescu immigrated to the United States in 1966. His first collection of poetry, License to Carry a Gun (1970), won the Big Table Younger Poets Award, and his latest, So Recently Rent a World: New and Selected Poems: 1968–2012 (2012), was a National Book Award finalist. He is the author of the novels The Blood Countess, Messi@, Casanova in Bohemia, and Wakefield. His other titles include Zombification: Essays from NPR; The Disappearance of the Outside: A Manifesto for Escape; New Orleans, Mon Amour; The Hole in the Flag: A Romanian Exile’s Story of Return and Revolution; Ay, Cuba!: A Socio-Erotic Journey; The Posthuman Dada Guide: Tzara and Lenin Play Chess; Whatever Gets You through the Night: A Story of Sheherezade and the Arabian Entertainments; The Poetry Lesson; and Bibliodeath: My Archives (With Life in Footnotes).  

Book preview

Introduction

It’s the twenty-first century, people! A new pope, a new hope, and a new Cuba? Maybe. But here is a new introduction to my ever-true and getting truer 1999 book, Ay, Cuba!

Ay, Cuba, whispers the doddering old Cold Warrior, whose finest memories hark back to a college break in Havana in 1959, when, during a hot tropical night, he had some of the most exquisite creole cuerpos relieve him of his senses and his wallet. Those were the good old days, and the soon-to-retire senator still has a vivid dream or two every five years, of long and slender bodies flowing in the neon rainbow of the Copacabana nightclub. He’s been angry at losing his beloved whorehouse to Castro in 1959, and even now, he’s not really over it. Nor are the old Miami ricos who lost their mansions and monumental marble tombstones when they had to flee with nothing but their diamonds in the probosci. Nor are the old CIA hands who felt that Jack Kennedy sent them to their deaths when he betrayed them at the last minute. At the core of all the deeply held sorrows of these and other Embargo Siempre geriatrics is the regret that they didn’t offer Fidel a contract with the Washington Patriots. Hiring him to pitch would have been just like letting Hitler into art school, or publishing Stalin’s poems before he quit mailing them out. All the time-rusted hatpins who kept our absurd Cuba policies in place for decades know that their past stupidity is equaled only by their current irrelevance.

In 1997, when National Public Radio producer Art Silverman got the bright idea to have NPR smuggle us onto the island just before the visit of Pontiff John Paul the Second, I was giddy. My 1989 reports from Romania for NPR and ABC News got rave comments, and by 1997 our media was already missing communism. In Cuba, you could still get it for the price of a cheap ticket from the Bahamas or Canada, and of a few men-on-the-street and heavy dissenters interviews with the then state-of-the-art minirecorders with minicassettes. The idea was to record the real Cuba just before the pontiff and the world press descended on the island to suck every jinetero or jinetera of his or her already-polished-and-ready stories.

Havana really got its best suit on for the occasion. Christmas was officially approved for the first time since Castro’s takeover, and scrawny Christmas trees were suddenly trucked from the mountains just before they were turned into pencils. Even tinsel was found somewhere, probably left over in the wardrobes of the wives of officials Castro shot with some regularity every few months. These Christmas trees, stuck with obvious frontal promiscuity in the windows of the better hotels (once casinos) attracted mobs of people who practically licked the windows clean before the policia gave them the heave-ho. Out of nowhere, there came the rusted sounds of a loudspeaker pouring forth Christmas carols in Spanish, a noise so odd that the music Cubans had been listening to for years, Castro’s voice, rhumba and samba displays for Spanish tourists, and Miami pop and sports for those clever enough to rig coat hangers into antennas on the roofs of their slum dwellings, seemed suddenly of another era. It was like the return of Frank Sinatra to the Copacabana. Whole families of whores in Lycra uniforms appeared on the Malecón, some of them still fresh from sham marriages to Spanish farmers that the Spanish embassy did good business in.

Well, Cuba was a hoot. Naturally, not all the Lycra in the world or the scrawny resurrection of Cristo could hide the obvious: The country was desperately poor, shining with the kind of poverty that an old suit emits when it’s pulled out of naftaline for a wedding or a funeral. Everyone hustled. Even Cuba’s highly touted (by the regime) professionals, educated for free, were taking out a night or two to screw a few dollars from a tourist or a reporter.

Of course, we tried to get away from the obvious and get to what mattered: the people. Cubans are a great people. They are warm, they are funny, they are joy-loving, they are talented, they are loud, they are inventive, and above all, they hate the fat Commies who put their country into the hospital for generations. We discovered things Cuba had long ago convinced the West no longer existed: racism, bigotry, crime, corruption, drugs, licentiousness, intricate and colorful superstitions. It’s not as if these things were suddenly let out of the closet where they had lain dormant since 1959 when Castro put the thumbscrews to the mobsters. They had existed while the idealist anti–Vietnam War activists went to Cuba in the 1960s as part of the Venceremos Brigades to harvest sugar cane, for the crop meant to show the superiority of socialist economy (and failed); they were there when the Russians subsidized the economy for the right to stick their atomic dicks at the US (we met quite a few Cubans named Ivan from that glorious period—they all hated Russians); they were there when the CIA invaded and were annihiliated and Kennedy was assassinated; they were there as two American presidents tried to restore some kind of normal relations with Cuba, and couldn’t; they were there when other American presidents and politicians used them as filler for the Commie hogwash pandering to rich Miami gusanos (worms—Castro’s catchy name for them); and they were there now, waiting for the pope and the world press to tell everyone the truth about Cuba, which was already obvious but not to the Cubans who were kept from news, censored, and ignorant about the outside world.

They couldn’t wait to tell their stories, and they told us a lot of them before the rest of the world press came. We ran back and forth like badly disguised detectives, pretending to be film-festival goers, and couldn’t wait to see what kind of phony megamuffins were about to be delivered to our colleagues trailing the pope. And then the pope came, and the world press came, and there were no stories about Cuba. The news had broken out of Washington, DC, that a bit of the president’s jizz had been found on Monica Lewinski’s blue dress. The entire horde of major media—war-hardened, high-priced reporters and their crews—packed up and flew back to Washington the very same day. Who knows? A fleck of that precious jizz might’ve still been loose somewhere (for a price). And so the Cubans and their truths were left to stew in the tropical sun as Castro and the pope shook hands. (If they washed them afterward, I didn’t see it). The greatest historical relic, souvenir, and single tchotchke of that papal visit was a T-shirt bearing the image of El Barbuto shaking hands with the spiritual leader of millions of starving Catholics. (I have two of these shirts, by the way, so if anyone’s interested, let’s talk.)

We had Cuba to ourselves. As you can tell from David Graham’s lovely pictures, it’s impossible to make Cuba not look sexy. Not that David tried: He was like a high school kid let out for the summer to discover the world, and he was serious enough, but his camera, much like Walker Evans’s in the 1930s, just couldn’t take an ugly picture. The light didn’t let them do it. Writing can go on and on about this or that horror, but pictures have their own story to tell. We did discover many things, as you will see in the book, including the Cuban genius for baseball and the weird, mystical flames of Afro-Caribbean Catholic hoodoo. For me, it was like fresh déjà-vu, like those wonderful and hideous cookies you loved when you were a kid. I was a brat back in Romania, making fun of apparachiks in bad suits. My colleagues were trying to be serious, and even the police made a mild attempt at correcting our attitude. It didn’t work; it was all a shabby cardboard circus where a few old sloganeers lived well while the people starved.

Paradoxically, poverty does have a spiritual quality: Unencumbered by things, unable to watch much TV or shop for fun, the Cubans were warm and attentive to one another; they were charged with passion, even love sometimes, erotic or pornographic, but they were live, interesting, human. They were not boring. We wrote poetry with people we’d just met over a glass of cheap rum.

It is now 2015, and a black president had the balls to take on the Cold War mothballs and begin to promise the living a chance for normal relations with Cuba, whatever those may be. His declaration in December of 2014 was mild enough, but it hit people full in the face like an old copy of the New York Times in a gale-force wind. I mean, Cuba was like a lump in the American brain: It was possibly malignant, but better left alone. There is hardly anything controversial about Obama’s action, however; Americans have been going back and forth to Cuba for years; they have married Cubans, they have bought property there, they have stolen and popularized old and new Cuban music, they have salsa’d in illegal clubs all over Havana, they have gotten over from Florida in fishing boats (whole slews of Cubans came to us on leaky rafts, and some of them went back in them after a stint in US jails). Obama is stating the obvious. It’s time for that game to be over. If anything kept Castro and his palace guards in power, it was the US embargo, which the Castros used to justify misery. Maybe some smarter Cubans will now quickly take over the country. The other alternative—the Miami Cubans turning the island into assisted-living casinos—is too horrible to contemplate. But it could happen; anything could happen. Stalin reincarnated in Russia. Can Che Guevara or Bugsy Siegel be far behind?

Andrei Codrescu

March 1, 2015

The Ozarks, Arkansas

PROLOGUE

The nicest sketches

drawn in our school tablets

always lead us to death.

And courage? What is it without a machine gun?

—Heberto Padilla, State of Siege¹

One autumn day in Washington in 1997, when communism seemed to have prolapsed forever and the world looked in danger of becoming eternally boring, my friend Art Silverman said: Would you like to go to Cuba? Art is a senior producer at National Public Radio, and he firmly believes in stimulating my pseudo-journalistic persona. In 1989, he had contrived to send me to Romania with an NPR team to witness the momentous and violent finale of the last red domino in Europe. I filed a series of emotional reports from my homeland, reports that gained me an undeserved reputation for reportorial acuity. In fact, I had been overcome by sentiment returning to Romania after more than a quarter century in exile, and I had invested my observations with poetic feeling. The hard-boiled journalists fled Romania in droves when it became apparent, shortly after the execution of the dictator Nicolae Ceauşescu and his wife, Elena, that the shooting had (nearly) stopped. The typical hard-boiled journalist, seasoned in Lebanon, Somalia, and Iraq, had little use for a revolutionary operetta that had produced only a paltry harvest of bodies. For the most part, the collapse of Eastern European communism had been a bloodless, velvety affair; and that sort of thing, after decades of unrelenting cold war and arms races, was bound to be disappointing to the purveyors of frontline Hemingwayesque prose. That aftermath was better left to eggheads and poets, which accounted for my success as a journalist.

What happened in 1989 in Romania and elsewhere in the fearsome red empire is still a mystery. The nuclear-tipped red menace, on the basis of which the West had built the mightiest war machine on earth, turned out to be some kind of sheep exhausted by having to wear its weighty wolf skin. I returned to Romania several times after the revolution, and understood less and less of what had happened in 1989. The only thing I did understand was that the people we’d called communists hadn’t gone anywhere and were still pretty much the same, though they had changed some of their vocabulary for the sake of the times. It was now de rigueur to say mister instead of comrade, but it was a new habit and the older folks kept slipping and saying commister, or the native equivalent.

The mess that followed the execution of the Ceauşescus, the so-called post-communist era, continued—and continues—to exhibit this split personality and has made it nearly impossible to gain any kind of normality. The Romanians of the post-Ceauşescu age still have a long way to go before they can trust each other and go about their business without fear. The situation is compounded by the fact that the elite of the Communist Party and the secret police have adapted with great speed to the new conditions. In the age of post-communism, different gangs are battling for power and money, using whatever it takes to sway the frightened populace, including fascist sloganeering, kitschy nationalism, gobs of nostalgia for paternal authoritarianism, and, of course, that perennial best-seller, anti-Semitism (without Jews). Democracy and capitalism, fearful words at first, are now tossed about quite as casually as all the other words, because they are, after all, just words. What is actually going on is too feudal for Westerners to understand, but it is a legacy of what went on before, namely so-called socialism.

Perhaps an explanation for the quick collapse and the subsequent mess might be found in Cuba. Here is one of the last socialist countries in the world, a place nearing the end of its great experiment, as Milan Kundera called it, a place where the communist ideology continues side by side with an encroaching and inevitable capitalism. Cuba is a laboratory of pre-post-communism and an ideal environment to study the dying beast while it is still (barely) breathing. Perhaps the nasty decomposition now taking place in Eastern Europe can be studied in Cuba because it is not yet total.

Cuba? I said. Great idea.

I had only a vague idea why it was a great idea, but I knew why it was a great idea for Art. Winter was coming to Washington. Cuba is in the Caribbean. Weirdly enough, I don’t have much interest in tropical paradises. Jamaica, the Bahamas, Tahiti—you can have them. There are certain parts of the world I simply don’t care for. I am immensely attracted to Central and South America, the Mediterranean, the east coast of Africa. If I were an imperial writer like W. Somerset Maugham or D. H. Lawrence, for instance, two men who at a certain point in the mid-century divided the world between them to produce vast literary properties, I would leave the tropics to the competition. I have always loved the story of Maugham checking into the hotel in Oaxaca where Lawrence was staying and trying to invite Lawrence for breakfast, lunch, or dinner, or just coffee and conversation. After a month or so of being snubbed, Maugham gave up. He understood that Lawrence was laying claim to Mexico and telling Maugham to stick to the Indian subcontinent. I can barely imagine that sort of grandeur: Mexico is mine! Of course, when the sun set on the British Empire, only the writers were left to cover its missing limbs. But I have never felt ownership of any place, not even Romania, though I wish that those writers who keep insisting on writing about it would take an elementary course in the language.

The more I thought about Cuba, the more it made sense. In addition to explaining the mystery of the demise of communism, Cuba also held clues to the bewildering behavior of the victorious West. In the eight years since the collapse of the USSR there has been a mad scrambling in the United States and Europe for a new enemy to justify the maintenance of huge military machines. Eight years during which no adversary with the systemic authority of the red Ism arose. The specter of Islam, though skillfully painted in the most dreadful colors, failed to engage the public imagination to the same degree.* Ah, we missed the old commies! Not I personally, but Jesse Helms, the CIA, the Reagan Republicans, the Army, the Navy, and the Air Force.

Ah, but the Ism still twitched in China, Laos, Vietnam, North Korea—and Cuba. Of all these islands of commiedom, only Cuba engaged the full attention of our quickly thawing cold warriors. China was too big to mess with, because when you messed with China you messed with AT&T and Coca-Cola, which is to say with America. President Clinton, in one of the most astounding about-faces in American foreign policy, decoupled the issue of human rights from America’s policy goals. The policy of human rights, which many commentators considered the winner of the cold war, was simply unhitched from the wagon of our concerns. The moral authority on which the West based its claims of superiority over the authoritarian East was dropped like the proverbial hot potato, an act akin to dropping Faith or Grace from the Catholic canon. Without the bother of human rights, China could go right on filling its jails with dissidents, selling the human organs of executed convicts, and using slave laborers to produce cheap knockoffs of Cartier watches. With China protected by AT&T, North Korea on the brink of mass starvation, and other Asian communist countries too insignificant to bother with, only Cuba remained both a potent symbol and an unwavering target.

Cuba was in bad shape. After the loss of its Soviet patrons, the Cuban economy collapsed. But the Castro death watch was losing steam. A book called Castro’s Final Hour by Andres Oppenheimer was already four years old. In late August 1997, a Miami television station reported that Castro had died, which caused the Maximum Leader to give one of his energetic mega-speeches and prove his ill-wishers wrong. Good-bye to the imperialists’ hopes, he said. Pass what may pass, fall who may fall, die who may die.² The implication was that the Revolution would go on even if he died, but that he had no intention of dying.

The situation in Cuba at the end of 1997 resembled, at least superficially, from what I read, the situation in Romania in the eighties when austerity measures and poverty became unbearable. Facing economic disaster, Castro resorted to an unprecedented, out-of-character move that proved just how desperate the situation had become. He allowed the introduction of a rudimentary market economy, and the legalization of the dollar, which became quickly the only worthwhile currency on the island. Before this, owning dollars in Cuba was a crime. Many people went to prison for holding a small banknote. Now there are at least eight names for the dollar: fula, guano, guaniquiqui, varo, peso, verde, and, the official term for foreign exchange: divisas. European, Latin American, and Canadian companies were now invited to invest in joint ventures in Cuba. By the end of 1997, there were more than three hundred joint ventures in Cuba, mostly tourist resorts and hotels.³ Cuban citizens were permitted to open small private businesses, such as hotels with a limited number of rooms, and private restaurants with no more than twelve tables. Some state land was turned over to tightly controlled cooperatives, and surplus produce was funneled to private markets. Expensive but previously unavailable goods, such as shoes, perfume, and sunglasses, became available in stores, for dollars only. Since the average monthly wage in Cuba was twelve dollars, these stores were clearly out of the reach of ordinary Cubans. These timid steps toward capitalism were taken in the hope of preventing a political collapse à la Romania, but also because Cuba’s newest model for socialism, China, was doing the same.

There were also reports that Cuban musicians, artists, and writers, who had been censored, suppressed, and jailed, were being allowed more liberty. Cuban music, in particular, was becoming a valuable export and one that, Castro hoped, would not involve the export of the musicians as well as of the music, as had been the case in the past. In short, the regime was willing to do anything for hard currency (dollars) while maintaining some kind of ideological rectitude in a vacuum.

On January 21, 1998, the Pope visited Cuba. This event brought the island into the news and precipitated whatever processes were already taking place. In 1996, Castro had visited the Pope in the Vatican and invited him to Cuba, setting off shock waves among Cuban Catholics, who had been harassed and imprisoned throughout the life of the regime. There were very good reasons for Castro’s pilgrimage to the Pope. After the loss of Soviet support, Cuba needed help to end the U.S. embargo. There were delicate political maneuvers that made possible the Pope’s visit. The Cuban exiles in Miami were furious: they saw the papal visit as a Castro trick to shore up his dying dictatorship.

Conveniently, Castro, always quick to adapt, remembered that he had been raised Catholic, that his life had been saved by a Jesuit priest who didn’t allow Batista’s soldiers to shoot him, that his mother had been a believer.

Reviews for Ay, Cuba!

[Guy Cabell · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Andrei Codrescu, a commentator on National Public Radio, among other things, visited Cuba 20 years ago and compared it to his former homeland of Romania after its release from communism. He finds similar psychologies and sociologies of people and culture between the two places, but not completely, for Cuba has other unique influences imported from the African heritage of its residents. His interviews with the people there are enlightening and mildly entertaining, but the overall story is rather open-ended and I guess that I was looking for something more. As Mr. Codrescu notes in a new introduction, Cuba has decidedly avoided the fate of Romania, has remained communist, and it would be interesting for him to visit another time and analyze how this has happened.

[jphamilton-1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

In Ay, Cuca!, Romania-born author and NPR personality Andrei Codrescu, tells about a twelve-day trip to Cuba, but he doesn't write about hotels, restaurants, and sites to see. The trip was on the eve of Pope John Paul's historic visit to Cuba and his famous meeting with Castro, but he doesn't write much about that either. He has concentrated this book more on the lives of the Cuban people. Ay, Cuba! is more a very humorous telling of a fascinating journey through politics, culture, religion, eroticism, and, seemingly time. Codrescu's past familiarity with another struggling communist government (Romania), and his present stature as a commentator, give the reader a look through an eye that doesn't blink at the special world that is Cuba in the 1990's. It's a world where the Cubans want aspirin and American T-shirts almost as much as the tourists crave Cuban cigars. Andrei Codrescu has a great way of getting involved in situations that make for interesting reading. In an attempt to learn about the women on the streets, he befriends a woman, and, while he doesn't have the expected sexual experience (because she becomes ill), he does learn something. Comforting the ill, naked woman, Codrescu tells her how beautiful and sensual he finds her—as he does most Cuban women. He's told that most American men feel that way. She coldly explains that it's because, in this struggling country, most Cubans eat so poorly that they're near starvation—and, sadly, Americans find this look sexy on women. Another adventure is when he looks into Santeria and a confused and stripped-down Codrescu finds himself being beaten with a live chicken in a religious ceremony. There are some great pictures, by David Graham, of the people, the buildings, and the great old American cars that not only still run, but have evolved into some new Cuban art form. These images are a colorful compliment to a book that is an interesting and humorous look into a society officially closed to Americans. (4/99)