HAVANA

In the summer of 1960 I went to Havana. On July 26 Fidel Castro would always deliver a mammoth speech in Revolutionary Square and he needed people to fill the square. Over a thousand of us young men were packed into a sugarcane train and we arrived in Havana after a trip of almost three days. Most of us were sexually aroused on that train; all those sweaty bodies pressing together. I was also aroused, but obstinately persisted in my absurd macho posture, which I found difficult to abandon because of the prevailing prejudice.

By then I had two girlfriends: Irene, whom I had known before entering the school, and Marlene, who was now generally considered my steady girlfriend. They took turns coming to the school on Sundays, which were visiting days. I was very “macho” then, or tried to be, although sometimes I had platonic relationships with other boys. These were manly relationships which included tests of strength, simulated wrestling matches, and horseplay.

We arrived in Havana and the city fascinated me. A real city, for the first time in my life. A city where people did not know each other, where one could disappear, where to a certain extent nobody cared who you were. We were lodged at the “Habana Libre” Hotel, that is, the Havana Hilton, which had suddenly become “liberated.” We slept six or seven to a room.

Needless to say, the “queers” in Havana had a ball with us students, who after six months without sex suddenly found ourselves in the middle of the city. Monzón, a friend of mine, told me that one night he fucked more than twenty queers, at ten bucks a head. He made a small fortune during his stay for the Revolutionary parade. He was a strikingly handsome man who later held various positions with the Revolutionary government. I once met him again on the street, over ten years ago, and he told me he was directing some state company, constantly traveling to Bulgaria and other socialist countries.

The fact is that this first trip to Havana was my initial contact with another world, a world of many faces, immense, fascinating. I felt that Havana was my city, that somehow I had to return. Anyhow, during our short time there, our job was to parade and, of course, parade we did, all day, in Revolutionary Square, applauding, repeating the slogans of the moment, even with a certain enthusiasm. I also had a brief romance with another girl; she was from Havana, eager to conquer some revolutionary “hero”: a student, a Rebel Army soldier, or a peasant. Later she sent several letters to me at school, which I did not answer. In her last letter she sounded angry and wrote that she was coming to the school to see me. I showed the letter to several of my friends and they laughed, but I was terrified by the thought that the woman would show up and cause a scandal. She wrote that she was pregnant and that the baby was mine, which was preposterous, since all we had done was rub against each other on the public square; that baby was as likely to be mine as Fidel Castro’s.