CHAPTER 6
OLD HAVANA
1981
Soon after Cary returned from Kiev with a husband, a degree in economic engineering, and an understanding of the differences between Soviet communism and the Cuban system she believed in, she was given her first job. A telegram directed her to show up at the offices of the textile industry in Old Havana and report to the chief of personnel in the children’s clothing division.
“Who are you?” the chief asked when she walked into the office on O’Reilly Street in what, decades later, would become the heart of Old Havana’s tourist district.
“An engineer,” Cary said.
“Engineer?” He stared at the young black woman. “What kind of engineer are you?”
When she explained that she had graduated from the University of Kiev with a degree in economic engineering, the personnel chief looked puzzled.
“What’s that?” he asked, repeating the question that Cary’s mother had raised five years earlier. “Either you are an economist or you’re an engineer.”
She told him she had been trained in the most modern methods of organizing production and maximizing the efficiency of work.
He looked puzzled. If she was an economist, he’d know where to place her. The same if she was an engineer. But this strange new category, imported from overseas, had him temporarily stumped. “All right,” he said at last, just to move on. “We’ll find something.”
She was put to work on salaries and workflow, figuring out such things as how many blouses or sheets a seamstress was expected to sew in a day, and what the material and salary requirements would be for that worker. Her training in Kiev enabled her to handle the work so proficiently that she was quickly promoted. And as she rose in the ranks of the ministry, she was pressured to get more involved in the Communist Party. Cary was twenty-eight, a dedicated worker and a true believer in what Cuba had become, but she wasn’t sure she wanted to get involved in the political side of communist life. Pipo had been encouraging her to join the Communist Party since they were in Kiev, but when she had asked her mother what she should do, Zenaida insisted that she’d already given enough to the state. Cary told her she wanted to do all she could to help Cuba, but her mother said she was being foolish, that she didn’t really understand what Cuba was truly becoming.
While Cary had been out of the country Cuba had changed, and many people—not just the well-to-do families that had gone into exile right after Fidel took over—had grown weary of waiting for the revolution to fulfill its promises. She was still in Kiev during the long, ugly standoff at the Peruvian embassy that triggered the Mariel crisis. She hadn’t seen the surly criminals being let out of their prison cells or the bewildered mentally ill patients who were pushed out of their asylums and forced, on Fidel’s orders, to board the boats that had come from Miami to collect the antisocial scum that he was only too glad to be rid of. Zenaida admitted that she too had grown tired of the revolution and had been tempted to leave with all the others. But she didn’t want to go while Cary was so far away. And there was another reason: the discrimination she had experienced working with Americans at the Guantanamo base had made her wary of the United States.
The bottom line, she told Cary, is beware: Cuba isn’t the place you think it is. Then one day she did something that confused and disturbed Cary. She waddled over to her dresser and came back with something in her hand. “You see this?” Zenaida held up a battered blue Jamaican passport that her own mother, Sarah Ann Ewen, had presented when she landed in Cuba in 1922. In it was the photo of a young black woman staring into a future she both craved and feared. “Someday, if you decide to look for a way to get out of Cuba, you have this,” she said. Her message was clear. Your grandmother left home to search for opportunity, and someday you may need to do the same.
Cary was deeply offended. It was inconceivable that she’d ever consider herself anything but Cuban, and leaving her beloved homeland was beyond unthinkable. Disregarding her mother’s cautions and complaints, she simultaneously joined the Young Communist League and the Communist Party. She also became active in the Federation of Cuban Women after helping Raúl Castro’s wife, Vilma Espín, set up a project in Old Havana called Quitrín. It provided job opportunities for women sewing traditional Cuban clothing, mostly billowy white dresses and men’s crisp white guayabera shirts. Cary greatly admired Espín, who had fought in the Sierra with Fidel and Raúl, and who had become an outspoken advocate for women in the new Cuban society.
By immersing herself in the system so thoroughly, Cary hoped to avoid some of the obstacles her mother had encountered in her life. Zenaida had never joined the Communist Party, and when she needed help she had no one to advocate for her. And nowhere had she suffered more, and needed more help, than in her perpetual search for a place to live.
Housing was a long-standing problem in Cuba. As early as 1953, after his attack on the Moncada barracks failed and he was thrown into prison, Fidel had promised that once he succeeded he would wipe out the “infernal cuarterías” and overcrowded tenements and replace them with so many houses and modern apartment buildings that Cuba’s severe housing shortage would be just a bad memory. For a brief time after 1959 it looked like he might be able to keep that promise. The new government confiscated private houses and apartment buildings from owners who had gone into exile, properties like the houses where Arturo Montoto and other art students lived after Batista fled. All investment properties were taken over, even if their owners remained in Cuba, which was what happened to María del Carmen’s family when her uncle Virgilio’s garage and the property adjacent to the house on Corralfalso were seized. Without paying the owners anything, the regime redistributed their properties, often splitting a single house into multiple dwellings without regard to building codes or safety. The exodus of more than 750,000 exiles in those early years had freed up valuable living space and made Castro popular with all those who moved into the vacant houses and apartments. But the need for housing remained enormous, especially in Havana, where families like Cary’s from the eastern end of the country flooded in despite government attempts to keep them in the provinces.
Castro focused his most ambitious building efforts on the outskirts of Havana, putting up countless Soviet-style five-story apartment blocks. He seemed to turn his back on the old capital and the colonial past it represented, allowing the dignified buildings in Old Havana and the newer ones in the Vedado neighborhood to fall into ruin. At the same time, he eagerly confiscated monumental works of his predecessors and claimed them as his own. The Plaza de la Revolución, one of the most visible images of the communist government, had actually been completed by Batista’s government in 1958 and was originally known as the Plaza Cívica. Fidel renamed it and tacked the iconic profiles of Che and Camilo Cienfuegos, a popular rebel commander, on the facades of the bland office buildings surrounding the monumental space. Elsewhere around Havana, Fidel converted the massive legislative building that resembled the U.S. Capitol into a science academy and technical library. And he took over the elegant brick tower just off the Malecón in Central Havana that Batista’s administration had started building to house Cuba’s Central Bank, and made it into the revolutionary government’s premier hospital.
The government had called Havana “the Capital of all Cubans,” to emphasize its central role in the country’s economic, political, and cultural fields. And at times after the revolution it seemed that every Cuban was intent on living there. The city was a powerful magnet that pulled in people from every other province. No matter what the government tried, no enticement was strong enough to keep people from both ends of the island from swarming into Havana to find work, to find food, to find a way to survive. Two and sometimes three generations of the same family stuffed themselves into tiny apartments in Old Havana’s ancient buildings, straining the electric grid and overworking the water supply.
In the 1980s, the government tried to ease the crunch by helping people build their own housing, a nontraditional approach to the problem. Volunteers were organized into microbrigades according to where they worked and were given time off from their regular jobs to build multifamily housing on public land with construction material and some assistance provided by the state. In return, they were promised a chance to get a decent place to live.
Zenaida had spent much of her life searching for decent housing. From the moment her mother died through her troubles with Aristede in Guantánamo, and then when she moved back to Tacajó, she rarely had a place of her own for very long. Things didn’t improve much after she arrived in Havana. She found a place to live when she took an off-the-books job taking care of an elderly man who was in poor health. When Cary and Esperanza joined her in Havana, they lived in a school dormitory, but Zenaida was desperate for something stable, and she thought the only sure way to find that was to join a microbrigade that the hospital was forming to erect several multifamily buildings in San Agustín, a neighborhood on the outskirts of Havana.
At first, she worked as a nurse at the construction site, taking care of the volunteers’ cuts and bruises. A makeshift clinic was built of wooden planks and an asbestos-fiber-panel roof. It wasn’t much bigger than a closet, but there was enough room inside for her to bring in a cot so she could sleep there. Although she knew nothing about masonry or plumbing, she volunteered to carry concrete blocks and sift sand for making cement. When construction ended, she was disappointed to learn that party officials and veterans of Castro’s military adventures in Africa had been given apartments, but not her.
She was not deterred and volunteered for a second microbrigade in San Agustín. During the project, she lived in a construction shack without a kitchen or a bathroom. Esperanza also lived in the shack while she attended classes at the School of Architecture and Cary was in Kiev. One night, a drunken Russian worker forced his way into the shack. Zenaida punched him so hard he stumbled out.
After working on two separate housing projects over four years, Zenaida finally got what she had been promised: a two-bedroom unit with living room, dining room, kitchen, and bath. She wrote Cary in Kiev, telling her that she and Esperanza already had decorated their new home, putting up curtains and painting the bathroom blue. When Cary came back to Cuba on vacation after her first two years in Ukraine, she brought sheets, towels, pots and pans, and a small refrigerator that she’d purchased in Kiev for the new apartment. But by the time she got off the ship in Havana, the government housing agency had kicked out her mother and sister after they had been in the apartment for only three months. It was an arbitrary move, but not an uncommon one in a tight housing market controlled by the state. An army veteran who lived with his family in an overcrowded apartment in Regla, the small waterfront town bordering Guanabacoa, had been given Zenaida’s apartment. She was promised another, but nothing was certain.
Disappointed, Zenaida and Esperanza had moved in with relatives in Old Havana. But it was tight, and they ended up arguing constantly about sleeping arrangements and using the stove. Odors from a broken sewer pipe made the apartment so rank that some nights they preferred to find a spot on the five-mile-long Malecón seawall, which Cubans call the longest sofa in the world, and sleep there.
Soon after she had arrived on vacation, Cary pulled her sister aside and told her they had to do something. They caught the ferry and crossed Havana Harbor to Regla and found the officer’s apartment at the far end of a long, dark corridor that reminded them of their cuartería in Tacajó. Cary explained their situation to the officer’s surprised wife and asked if there was any way she could speed up their move to the new apartment so her mother could take over theirs. The officer’s wife looked suspiciously at the twin sisters pleading on their mother’s behalf, but then agreed to help.
Finally, after so many years of wandering, Zenaida and her girls had their own home. They hadn’t been in the Regla apartment for more than a few months when Zenaida was given a larger apartment in Building 6A of a new microbrigade complex in the Bahía neighborhood, just outside Guanabacoa. She and Esperanza moved into apartment 21, and when Esperanza married a tall, deep-voiced man named Miguel Mitchell Palacios, an accountant who lived in the same complex with his mother, he moved in with them. After Cary returned from Kiev, Zenaida made room there for her and Pipo too.
BY THE TIME CARY was promoted to the national workforce office of the Ministry of Light Industry in 1983, she was a card-carrying member of the Communist Party and had proven that her degree in economic engineering was not just a fancy play on words. She was in a good place at the right time. The Third Congress of the Communist Party in 1985–86 launched a concerted effort to bring more blacks and women into positions of authority. Race was still a sensitive issue in Cuba. Many white families had pulled out and left after Fidel embraced communism, and centuries of intermarriage had resulted in a large mestizo population. But despite the government’s efforts, there remained advantages—both real and imagined—to being white, or claiming to be. Recent census figures indicating that more than 60 percent of Cubans consider themselves white are based on self-reporting, and an afternoon spent on any street in Cuba raises questions about the accuracy of that number.
As a young black woman at a time when the government’s affirmative-action policies were vigorously enforced—at least within state enterprises—Cary kept moving up at the ministry and within the party. Pipo did well too, at the construction-standards institute where he worked. With their combined salaries, they had enough money to slip away for occasional weekends at the Riviera Hotel on the Malecón and for a yearly vacation at the beach in Varadero.
Cary’s revolutionary fervor continued to intensify even as her mother became increasingly embittered. Zenaida had started to listen clandestinely to Radio Martí broadcasts from Miami and, within the walls of her overcrowded apartment, she dared to criticize Fidel. It was different for Cary. As she made her way to work in Old Havana every morning, she saw signs that the revolution was fulfilling many of Fidel’s promises. Children were going to school. The clinics and hospitals were taking care of everyone. And Cuba’s friends in the socialist camp were helping Fidel withstand the pressures of the U.S. embargo. They were crowded in Zenaida’s apartment, but every Cuban Cary knew basically lived the same way. Nobody had a lot, but everybody had something.
The biggest challenge she and Pipo faced at this time was starting their own family. After the miscarriage in Kiev, Cary lost several other pregnancies. Once, she was already three months pregnant when she attended a work meeting wearing a yellow maternity dress. She rose to speak, and while she was making her presentation, the front of her yellow dress turned red. That was her third miscarriage. There would be several more. Esperanza did not have the same kind of problems, and her son, Leonardo, was born while they all were living in Zenaida’s apartment. Cary celebrated the arrival of the family’s next generation, but she told Pipo there simply wasn’t room there for all of them. They needed their own home.
Cary volunteered for a microbrigade several times without being accepted. She wasn’t strong enough to do the work. But Pipo was. His engineering degree and background in construction standards made him an ideal brigadista. Cary pushed him to join, telling him that continuing to work at the institute was unlikely to bring him recognition no matter how good a job he did there. Applying his skills as an engineer to a microbrigade, a project that the comandante himself had initiated, was far more likely to get him noticed by the people who counted. And she assumed they had risen far enough within the system to ensure that, if he did the work, they would not be passed over for their own apartment the way Zenaida had been not once but twice.
In 1987, Pipo volunteered for a joint microbrigade that his workplace and another institute were forming. Of the thirty-three people in the brigade, fourteen were assigned community projects like building day-care centers and medical offices. The remaining nineteen were left to construct, with some help from the state, a thirty-unit apartment building on the slope of one of the many hills in Regla. When Pipo first looked over the building site, nothing about it seemed promising. Regla was known as the “Little Maestra” both because of the revolutionary fervor of its inhabitants and for its physical location on a series of steep hills that mimicked the majestic Sierra Maestra, where Fidel had fought. All he saw was a giant mound of dirt, overgrown with weeds and garbage, that sloped down toward a waterfront tank farm that stored jet fuel shipped in from the Soviet Union. There was nothing majestic about it.
Regla was an industrial town, but this construction site was an urban wasteland so bleak that only the extreme shortage of housing could make it seem like a decent place to live. The job ahead of the brigade was enormous. The state sent in bulldozers and backhoes to dig out the building’s footprint and pour a concrete foundation, but most of the rest of the project was left to the crew of nineteen—fifteen men and four women. Their first task was to figure out what they knew and what they needed to learn. And fast. Workers had plenty of incentives to do the job right, but desire alone couldn’t ensure that measurements were correct, or cuts straight. They needed a construction manager. They turned to Pipo.
He was given the blueprints for Model SP79, a long, narrow rectangle without color or adornment. It was a utilitarian-style Soviet model that was being used all over the island. SP79 rose five stories, with six apartments per floor ranging in size from one to three bedrooms. After the foundation was laid, the brigade broke down the project into a series of individual jobs that could be handled by volunteers with minimal construction skills. They learned as they went, experimenting on the bottom level and developing masonry, plumbing, and electrical expertise as they proceeded to the upper floors. The four women in the brigade learned how to cut and lay tile in the ground-floor kitchens and bathrooms. By the time they reached the top floor, their work looked professional.
Pipo made sure the crews followed the blueprints carefully, but he used his own judgment to enhance the building they all hoped to live in. He applied extra cement where the beams were joined to make the floors sturdier and more soundproof. He put additional steel plates in the stairs and increased the number of connection points for railings from the three indicated in the blueprints to five. Taking a lesson from what he learned in Kiev, he instructed the crew to vibrate the forms to eliminate any cucarachas, air pockets, that could weaken the concrete.
The microbrigade finished SP79 with few delays. It was opened ahead of schedule in 1989, two years after ground was broken. It was an achievement that—as Cary had predicted—was recognized by higher-ups, including Fidel. The huge Karl Marx Theatre in Havana was reserved for a special ceremony honoring the microbrigades. Fidel personally acknowledged Pipo’s hard work and awarded him a white construction helmet that, decades later, Pipo still treasured.
Cary stayed at home with her mother on the night Pipo went before the housing commission that would distribute the new apartments. He thought they had only a slim chance of getting one because his workplace was entitled to just half of the thirty units, and some of the apartments surely would be held back for veterans and Communist Party officials. They also were at a disadvantage because they had no children, and families with kids were given special consideration. But a Bulgarian engineer on the commission spoke up in his defense, describing how hard he had worked on the building. Give them a big apartment and they’ll have children, the Bulgarian told the other commissioners.
As the hours passed without any word from Pipo, Cary worried that their application had been denied. “Do you think we’ll get it?” she asked her mother. “It’s hard to say.” Zenaida sighed, clutching a set of rosary beads.
It was after 10:00 P.M. when Pipo finally returned. He bounced out of an old American car that worked as a taxi and shouted, “Twenty-four four, twenty-four four!”
“What’s he talking about?” Zenaida was watching from her window. Cary wasn’t sure. “Twenty-four four” could refer to his birthday, April 24, but what did that have to do with anything? When he burst into the apartment smiling ear to ear, Pipo explained. Yes, twenty-four four was his birthday, which was meaningful because their new home was apartment 24 on the fourth floor of SP79. And who could believe it? Twenty-four was an end unit, one with three bedrooms.
They moved into their big new apartment in October 1989. It took many trips on the bus to move all the dishes, glasses, sheets, towels, and other household items Cary had purchased in the Soviet Union. When her neighbors dropped in, they were impressed. Not only had she decorated her home with things that were unavailable in Cuba, Cary and Pipo had the large apartment to themselves. And they were only in their early thirties.
A few weeks after moving in, she heard the news that the Berlin Wall had fallen. But they were too busy to think much about it or what it might come to mean for Cuba. She tried to keep politics out of their new home, but she couldn’t block it completely—nor could she forget how just a few months earlier she had added her name to a petition to execute a man whose most serious offense may have been that he was too popular.
General Arnaldo Ochoa was a highly decorated veteran of Cuban military campaigns in Africa, an able commander to whom Fidel had awarded the nation’s top military honor, Hero of the Revolution. The specifics of the case against him were murky. Ochoa had been convicted in a show trial of drug smuggling and treason and had been sentenced to death. Many Cubans believed that Fidel was simply trying to get rid of a potential rival and pleaded for him to be pardoned. As a member of the Communist Party, Cary was expected to sign a statement of support for Ochoa’s execution. Ochoa’s trial had been televised, and the official news media took every opportunity to lay out his alleged crimes, without giving him much chance to defend himself. Cary felt uneasy about condemning a hero of Cuba’s foreign wars to death when, to her, the evidence seemed inconclusive. She confided in an old friend in the party and asked what she should do.
“Negrita,” he told her, “these guys are going to kill Ochoa whether you sign the petition or not. Listen to me. Sign it, and don’t look for problems for yourself in the future.”
She signed. She wanted the party to see that she had been loyal, but there was nothing about the execution that made sense to her.
That same confusion enveloped her that summer when Cuban television was filled with images of the caskets of Cuban soldiers who’d been killed in the African campaigns. Young men sent so far away to die, and for what? The images, night after night, seared into her memory, and she couldn’t help but notice that many of the mothers waiting to receive the remains of their sons were black. Did we have a revolution for this? Cary wondered.
But then her thoughts turned inward, and she put those doubts aside. Within a year of setting up house in SP79, she was pregnant for the eighth time. After all they’d been through, she and Pipo tried not to be too optimistic. They decided that if this pregnancy went to term, and if the baby was a girl, they would name her Milagrita, their little miracle. An aunt, her father’s sister who was deeply into Santería, the Afro-Cuban religion that mixes Catholic saints with African deities, offered to say prayers over her in a special ceremony. Although Cary was named after the Catholic patron saint of Cuba, she also had been initiated into Santería, and had allowed her aunt to perform the same ceremony during her earlier pregnancies, which all ended in miscarriages.
This time, she thanked her aunt for offering to help but told her she preferred not to invoke the Santería gods again.
In January 1991, her contractions began, and Pipo rushed her to the hospital. She needed a cesarean section, but thirteen years after the first miscarriage in Kiev, she held her baby, a healthy boy they named after the doctor who delivered him, Oscar de la Concepción de la Pedraja, a friend from Tacajó whose brother, Octavio, had fought with and died alongside Che Guevara.
Their family was delighted, and no one was happier than Pipo’s mother. She hadn’t been thrilled with the ambitious young engineer whose skin was so much darker than Pipo’s. The long-held notion of trying to mejorar la raza, literally to improve the race, by having lighter-skinned children, was still widely accepted in Cárdenas. Pipo’s younger brother had married a blonde woman from East Germany while he studied there, and his mother had hoped Pipo would follow his example. Then, for many years, the color issue was moot because of Cary’s many miscarriages.
Now that Cary had borne a child with caramel-colored skin much lighter than her own, all was forgiven.
RACIAL SENSITIVITIES HAD DEEP ROOTS in Cuban culture, and María del Carmen discovered that no laws or party congresses could correct all of them. After her chance encounter with Román Calvo at the chapel, they had continued to meet as friends whenever he was on home leave. He was not one for small talk, but they did have their work in common, and when they got together, usually over coffee, he smoked several H. Upmann brand cigarettes and told her about his adventures on the open seas. She confided details about her quiet life in Guanabacoa, her worries for her aging parents, and how out of sync she felt she was with what was happening in Cuba. She even asked him for advice about a romantic relationship with someone she had started seeing, a local man whom her family did not approve of because of the color of his skin. Despite her parents’ strong opposition, she continued seeing the man, and they had a child together. But the relationship didn’t last, and like her great-grandmother Eustoquia with her first husband, Mari let his name be lost to history.
After he found out that her relationship with that man had dissolved, Román—who shared Mari’s European ancestry—told her bluntly that she had simply picked the wrong man. He and Mari both were quite shy, and their romance could hardly be described as whirlwind. In 1990, more than a decade after they’d met in the chapel, they finally were married in a ceremony there. He formally adopted her son, Virgilio, and moved his few belongings into the house on Corralfalso. Theirs was not a typical marriage. When Román left on a sea voyage lasting months, they’d stay in touch by ship-to-shore radiograms. But because they were not authorized to send personal messages, they kept their conversations brief and eventually developed a language of their own. “How are things in your department?” he’d ask. It was their code for news about home.
The bits of information she received let her know where in the world he was. She kept busy caring for her son and her parents, putting in her time at work inspecting tuna, and visiting the Capuchins’ chapel. He dealt with the loneliness of so many nights at sea by working on mathematical puzzles, smoking one H. Upmann cigarette after another, and sometimes gazing at the vast night sky, imagining that she was looking up and seeing the same stars.