VII

At José Martí airport in 1987, our entourage was gathered up and bundled into private cars, all boxy Russian-made Ladas. We emerged onto a slender street that cut through a residential neighborhood of faded flat-roofed homes. Everything was gray. It was just after dawn and raining in long, hard sheets, but I pressed my face up against the car window anyway, trying to make sense of the swashes of dull colors on the other side. A crowded bus went huffing by, people spilling out of it every which way. There were young girls wearing faded reds, boys in white T-shirts that turned transparent when wet. I could make out the dark circles of their nipples, the penciled lines across their firm bellies.

Cuba had been receiving regular visitors from the United States, particularly exiles, for about eight years then, but as we passed, people stared. The gusanos, or worms, as those who’d left had been called, had become mariposas, butterflies, and just as fleetingly welcomed. There were no smiles among those sleepy faces that morning, only a cool defiance.

Ours was, ostensibly, a fact-finding mission: We traveled to hospitals and factories, saw firsthand how Cuban doctors treated Angolan war veterans, how workers processed rules and regulations in orderly workplace meetings that seemed the very antithesis of Cubans’ natural playfulness. We met writers and artists who were paraded before us as evidence of the revolution’s inclusiveness, its tolerance of the inexplicable. We watched a seniors’ circle doing its breathless morning calisthenics. Several times, we were serenaded by scrub-faced young Pioneros who then presented us with color-crazy bouquets of distended buds.

We were put up at the Habana Libre Hotel, the former Hilton, which was empty but for a few Canadians and Russians. I identified the tourists instantly: They were red-skinned, like lobsters after boiling, and too curious and happy about everything. To my surprise, I was given a private room, for which I was grateful. I wasn’t in the mood to listen to my tour group members talk about the wonders of Cuba anymore than I had to during the regular workday. Whatever Fidel’s real achievements, their revolutionary zeal struck me as touristic, even kitschy.

Everywhere we went there were billboards exhorting solidarity with people all over the world and praising the revolution. In front of the U.S. Interests Section—the same inviolable glass and steel building that had housed the American embassy back before diplomatic relations were severed—a sign decried the U.S. embargo: ¡SEÑORES IMPERIALISTAS, NO LES TENEMOS ABSOLUTAMENTE NINGÚN MIEDO!

Back then, there was construction all over Havana—at every corner, metal spikes poked out of stacks of concrete blocks like long, stubborn blades of grass. Cuban men in loose undershirts milled about the building sites, perking up whenever a woman walked by. They called out with outrageous rhymes full of innuendo or performed long, dramatic monologues about how beauty made their hearts ache.

The women didn’t reject the attention. To the contrary, the saucy strut, the pendulum swing of their hips all indicated it was well-practiced, absolutely meant to be provocative. And I responded: I envied the cubanas’ easy strolls, the confidence with which they answered every salty flirtation.

“Me muero por ti,” said one guy watching a particularly curvaceous local in a skin-tight green pantsuit strut by. “¡Me muero, me muero!”

As if to make his point, he pointed the tip of his drill at his heart and pressed the trigger. The instrument whirred, just centimeters from his chest, but the woman kept going. When it became clear she wasn’t going to turn around, the construction guy smiled broadly, pointed the drill triumphantly at the sky and started laughing, turning his defeat into a symbolic victory of sorts. The workers in his unit howled, high-fiving him.

Just when the noise had subsided and the men were beginning to make as if they might be getting back to business, the blinding green vision reappeared. She stood on the opposite corner, hands on hips, legs spread apart. Her curves were like the slopes of a vital mountain.

“Oye,” she shouted to her admirer, “so how come you’re not dead already?”

And the men at the site, including the original guy who’d threatened to kill himself over her, broke out in applause and hilarity all over again, this time celebrating her audacity. When she swaggered away this time, it was her victory that was total.

All that week I dreaded the moment when some Cuban man would fix his sights on me, my heart in my throat as he decided whether I was due the complicated mix of flattery and possession that came with being island-born, or the courtesy of silence afforded foreigners. There was no way I could answer, and that had nothing to do with my fluency in Spanish. All week I trembled and crossed the street whenever I saw a group of construction workers, their watery eyes just beginning to focus on me.

In spite of all the revolutionary fervor, there was a somber undercurrent in Havana even then, as if it knew what was coming, as if it understood that soon the Soviet Union would be history, the country would be in tatters, and many of its most talented artists, the very people who were introduced to us as products of the revolution, would soon be living abroad.

A little more than a year after my first visit to Cuba, Arnaldo Ochoa, a hero of the revolution, found himself accused of drug trafficking and treason in a television trial watched by millions of Cubans on the island and abroad. He was found guilty and shot to death before a firing squad—¡paredón!—an event that shook Cubans everywhere to the core.

In 1987, I strolled through the city breathing something like burning sulfur in the air. Whether on the majestic boulevards of Miramar or the tight alleys of the historic district, I would run into discarded animal parts: an empty crab shell, chicken bones with the marrow sucked out of them, a fish skeleton so complete and white it looked like an ivory comb. At first I considered these might be offerings to gods I didn’t know, but they seemed much too random, too ordinary and blunt. There was never a red ribbon, a piece of paper folded with spells, or any kind of rock or amulet. Once, I saw a dead rat with its feet inexplicably cut off swelling in the midday sun by the curb.

There were loose dogs everywhere, yelping excitedly, yet curiously without bite. None ever came up to me, not one ever felt threatening. Invariably mutts, they trailed clouds of fleas, registered whole patches of baldness on their rumps. They would look up through rheumy eyes, gnaw at some terrible itch on their backside, and run along.

One day, at a meeting with educators, one of the members of our delegation got up to speak. The sensitive child of Cuban exiles and the founder of various well-meaning leftist groups in the United States, he’d named his only son after the disappeared revolutionary leader Camilo Cienfuegos.

“The day the blockade is lifted—and it will be lifted . . . lifted soon—it will bring many things,” he proclaimed in halting Spanish without an interpreter. His voice rose and fell, complete with dramatic pauses just like Fidel. “New appliances and timely magazines . . . technological wonders and abundance, yes . . . but . . . it will also bring disasters . . . like greed . . . and racism.”

He became quite emotional then, recounting his own terrible stories at the hands of American prejudice. Even though he was still taking his public speaking cues from Fidel, the personal woes he was recounting were alien to anything Fidel, who speaks only of glories and threats, would have ever talked about. I was embarrassed for him, for all of us.

Then I looked around the room, at the varied colors of the members of our foreign-based delegation, and at the white-skinned, hazel-eyed descendants of northern Spain wearing official Cuban government name tags. The only island Cubans without them were the two charcoal-toned women in the room, one who walked like a shadow behind us, reaching over to pour fresh bottled water from a pitcher into our sweating tumblers, while the other sat stolidly just off a small hallway, ready to hand a few sheets of tissue paper to anyone going to the rest room.

Suddenly, rich red blood gushed out of the speaker’s nose, splattering all over his white guayabera. He looked down at himself, at the way the blood was soaking through the fabric to his breast. It was as if the blood were sprouting from a wound there instead.

“Dios mío, what’s happening to me?” he cried, plummeting.

I was closest to him so I slipped my arms around his body as soon as he began to drop, feeling the warm stickiness of his chest. He was wearing a slender gold chain with a crucifix that snapped the instant I touched him and clanged on the floor as loud as a church bell fallen loose from a tower. As he leaned on me, I heard his heart pounding, the blood beating senselessly against the walls that confined it. His pulse matched my own irregular rhythms.

“¿Qué‚ me está pasando?” he cried as we plunged, his body completely covering mine.

“It’s just a nosebleed, just a nosebleed,” the woman who’d been refilling our glasses said as she dunked her hand in the pitcher’s coolness and sprayed the man’s face with a quick snap of her fingers.

She laid him out next to me and began running her hand from his forehead to his thigh in quick, practiced gestures. I watched, hypnotized like everyone else, until she finished with him and turned to me, her hand like a bird fluttering, closing my eyelids, tracing my neck, around my breasts, and down to the tender place just inside my hip.

Then the other woman came toward us, the single sheets of tissue paper now crumpled into a white rose in her hand, and quietly wiped the blood away.