CHAPTER 30
GUANABACOA
July 26, 2018
It was the start of one of the most important revolutionary holidays in Cuba, and the big Novalum building on Vía Blanca was draped with two huge flags. On one side the red, white, and blue Cuban flag hung straight and tall. Beside it, the red and black banner of Fidel’s 26th of July movement sagged limply after one of the ropes holding it up gave way and no one bothered to fix it. It was a graphic sign that even with a new president, Guanabacoa wasn’t in much of a mood for celebrating. The cutting machines and stamping presses of the aluminum factory had been silent for months since Cuba had run out of money to import aluminum. Uncertainty about Díaz-Canel, shortages of everything from potatoes to ibuprofen, and an exceptionally warm late July kept the streets mostly empty even on July 26, the day that marked the beginning of Fidel’s revolution. Raúl was in faraway Santiago making an angry speech, but he could have gone to the moon for all that María del Carmen cared. She was busy preparing for one of the biggest days in her year, and it had nothing to do with the revolution. It was the graduation ceremony for the Spanish dance classes given by her good friend Tamara Rodríguez, with whom she’d shared a passion for dance since they were as young as the girls she was teaching.
At nine that morning, Mari showed up at the entrance to what she still called Los Escolapios even though its name officially had been changed to Jesús Garay fifty years earlier. Her cast had been removed, but her head still was not right. The bump she got when she fell had disappeared, but the persistent headaches and dizziness had not, and she seemed to always be in a bad mood as the day wore on. But it was early, and the excitement of finally getting to see Tamara’s girls dance brightened her morning considerably. She had put on a long pink sundress and pulled her hair into a tight bun. The tan arms of her eyeglasses contrasted with the gray in her hair. And on her left hand was Eustoquia’s enameled ring.
She was glad the graduation was being held for the first time in the auditorium at Los Escolapios, and that it had been scheduled for the morning, the time of day when she was at her best. But where were the girls? She checked the time—9:15, 9:27, 9:45 A.M.—and grew increasingly nervous. The performance was scheduled to start at 10:00 A.M. But there were no girls.
“The bus is late,” she muttered to an attendant. Most likely, the girls hadn’t shown up when they were supposed to and the bus driver had had to wait for them. Every year it seemed the girls who enrolled in the class were less disciplined, less willing to put in the hard work that Spanish dance required and, frankly, deserved. It was the age-old complaint of every society about the young. When she was their age, she couldn’t wait to dance. She’d change her shoes and put on her makeup—careful not to spill anything—while she was still in her father’s Ford. She’d get agitated if he insisted on obeying speed limits. “But, Papi, can’t you hurry? I’ll be late!” she’d yell at him. As soon as they arrived, she’d bolt from the car, throw on her costume, and be ready to dance the moment the instructor entered the room.
“It’s all the same to these girls if they arrive at nine-thirty or if they show up at ten-thirty,” she told the attendant. “It just doesn’t matter to them.”
Too nervous to keep waiting outside, she decided to let the staff inside know they’d probably be late starting the performance. She crossed the large courtyard of what used to be a convent and marveled once again at the life-size statue of Christ standing with outstretched arms in the center of the patio, surrounded by tropical plants. Every time she saw the statue, Mari thought it was a miracle that it had never been pulled down the way the Virgin’s statue had been banished from the red patio at La Milagrosa school after the government took it over.
She walked stiffly through the courtyard, then entered the former seminary and what had been the dreary dining room of the priests and seminarians when they lived there. Next to it was the part of the complex that had been the school that Jorge García attended and later directed. Half of the building was shuttered. The other half was in ruins but was still being used as a school.
Mari breathed a sigh of relief as she heard the bus finally pull up. Girls began to trickle in with their parents, their costumes on hangers. Controlled chaos had been a part of the shows that Mari and Tamara put on for more than twenty years, and she did not see any reason to think this year would be different. Passing along their love for flamenco, jota, and the other traditional dances of Spain got harder every year because most of the girls dreamed of getting into a professional dance troupe like the National Ballet of Cuba but weren’t willing to do even a small percentage of the work it would take to get there.
“Hurry, hurry. Go right in. Don’t waste time.” Mari gently prodded them toward the back room, where they changed into their costumes. While their mothers and big sisters helped them dress, their fathers and brothers lingered along the shaky railings overlooking a concrete courtyard, smoking or just staring ahead. A man with a change box under his arm set up a table to sell five-peso tickets. When the performance was finally ready to begin at around ten-thirty, he forced the visitors to enter one at a time, tearing their tickets in half before allowing them to pass.
The auditorium had seen better days. About a third of the 350 seats were unusable. Seat covers were torn, wooden armrests worn down to little more than splinters. The heavy green curtain with gold trim was well past its prime, and there wasn’t a single fan to budge the stale air. The tall windows were opened wide, and the clamor of a scrub soccer game in the courtyard alongside the theater roared in.
At the sound of castanets, the fifteen people in the audience turned around to watch a dozen girls in fluffy white gowns dance down the center aisle, then climb stairs to the well-worn stage. Mari’s job was the same as it had been for many years. She was to narrate the program while hidden in the folds of the curtain. In a stern, academic tone, she welcomed the audience and introduced Professor Rodríguez. They’d created an ambitious hour-long program with fourteen costume changes. The youngest of the girls was four, about the same age Mari had been when she started dancing. The most experienced dancers were in their early twenties. Mari read from a handwritten script as she introduced each musical number, beginning with the lively standard called “¡Que viva España!”
The girls danced in groups according to their age and their intimacy with Spanish dance. With the dark-green curtain covering her, Mari watched them intently. “This one doesn’t smile for anyone,” she whispered, tilting her head toward one of the girls who seemed to be struggling to remember her steps. Music flowed through scratchy speakers that dulled the notes but not the girls’ nervous energy. One performance after another, Mari narrated a brief history of the music, then retreated into silence. When the most experienced girls performed “Amor Gitano,” she sighed. “I love this one. For me this is the true classic of Spanish dance.” The young women swirled and strutted to the exotic music with staccato heel strikes that Mari followed intently. Her eyes focused on one dancer in particular, a slender young woman with reddish-blond hair, glistening red lips, and dark eyebrows that flared across her broad, unlined forehead. She danced with precision and a sharp-edged dignity that suggested the María del Carmen of forty years ago, when she was a young woman immersed in the sounds and sensual movements of Spanish dance. Mari stared as if she were watching herself performing onstage back when she had dreams, when her hopes and visions for the future had not yet been blocked by obstacles that were impossible for her to overcome without denying her true self.
She did not applaud at the end of this performance or any other, remaining singularly focused on her duties as presenter. When the last dancer left the stage at the end of one number, she resumed her narration and introduced the next. Tucked into the curtains, she remained apart from the commotion of the girls preparing to go on. She didn’t see how frustrated Tamara was becoming with the girls until her friend brusquely pulled back one of her youngest students, who’d nearly popped into the audience’s view while she was staring at the older girls dancing to “Mi Salamanca.” Mari slid over and, without a word, took the young girl’s hand from Tamara. “Now, you stay here,” she told the girl, keeping a firm grip on her while motioning for Tamara to go back to the dressing room to cool off.
Just past the halfway point of the ceremony a crisis erupted: a senior girl who’d made several mistakes in her first routine was too embarrassed to go back onstage. She’d begged her mother to leave, and now they were going home, upsetting Tamara’s carefully arranged choreography. When she heard that the girl had gone, Tamara exploded. “It’s the fault of the parents,” she complained to Mari and the other women who were helping backstage. “If they would only instill some discipline in the girls and tell them no matter what happens in an individual routine they have to go on. An artist always continues.”
Mari commiserated with her. “That’s the way it is now,” she said, shielding the microphone so her words wouldn’t slip out over the loudspeaker. “If the parents don’t enforce any discipline, what can you expect from the girls?”
More than an hour after they had started dancing in the molten heat of the July sun and the broiling stage lights, the girls finished their final medley and gratefully accepted the applause of their relatives and friends in the audience. Then, beginning with the youngest, Mari read each girl’s name as Tamara handed out their diplomas. At the end, the girls presented their frazzled teacher with a bouquet of three flowers, including one red rose.
“It’s a disaster,” Tamara said once she was back behind the curtain. “A total disaster.”
Mari tried to calm her down while reminding the girls of what had gone wrong: one dancer’s lack of commitment had affected them all. The girls listened absentmindedly, glad the show was finally over and eager to leave. And so was their teacher, who had one month of rest to look forward to before beginning her twenty-fourth year of classes.
Mari helped out in the dressing room as the girls got back into their street clothes. But she was drained and told Tamara that she needed to go home before her headaches started up. As they were leaving the old building, one of the attendants overheard her telling Tamara about the school and asked her what it had been like when she was a student there. Although her head was splitting, Mari launched into a detailed history, pointing out where the nuns once lived, where the priests once ate, and where she once was told by a music professor not to run up the grand staircase they were standing by.
“It must have been splendid,” the woman said. “Do you think it can ever be restored?”
She had touched a sore point. Mari explained that her family was among the oldest in Guanabacoa, and she’d worked with concerned residents to petition the local government to restore the old complex before it was too late. “Every new priest who comes in makes the same request, but the government’s answer is always the same.” Municipal officials were willing to let the Church restore the convent, but they reserved the right to control the refurbished building, the kind of deal that was no more acceptable to the priests than it had been to Arturo Montoto.
“Once we were considered the Trinidad of western Cuba,” Mari told the woman. It was a familiar lament, sad in its implication of lost opportunity for Guanabacoa and its people. “Now we’re known as the land of collapsed buildings.”
Mari walked out of the convent and through the courtyard, where she said goodbye to Tamara. Her shoulders stooped, her forehead creased with worry lines, she slowly walked down the curving sidewalk that borders Los Escolapios to Corralfalso, hoping to get back inside her own little house before her head exploded. Virgilio had urged her to see a doctor, but there was so much to do. Maybe now that the recital was over, she’d be able to find out what was wrong.
AT AROUND THE SAME TIME that Mari was lamenting the declining interest in Spanish dance, Arturo Montoto was across the street from Los Escolapios making last-minute preparations for the often-delayed opening of his comeback exhibition, the show he called “Dark.”
He had seriously considered showing up to the opening on a horse to make a point about the absurd life of a renowned Cuban artist who couldn’t even own a decent car. In the end, he drove his 1988 custard-yellow Moscovich to the Galería-Taller Gorría, which also made a statement to those who happened to see him and understood that a house painter in Florida probably owned a better car than he did. There’s a wisecrack about cars in Cuba that lists only three kinds of automobiles: good ones, bad ones, and Moscoviches—underpowered, unreliable econoboxes from the old Soviet Union that might not be considered much of a step up from a horse.
Not many foreign tourists found their way to the rough-edged neighborhood in Old Havana where Galería-Taller Gorría was located. But Havana’s cultural elite flocked there. Despite oppressive heat and skies laced with flashes of summer lightning, scores lined up before the doors opened. Arturo wasn’t happy that they had to wait. The gallery had pushed back the opening an hour to seven o’clock without notifying anyone. Bad form, he thought, but typical.
He’d already been forced to postpone the date of the opening several times because he simply couldn’t get the material he needed to finish the projects. Sometimes he wondered why he had been so ambitious. It had taken him years to conceive of and execute the pieces, and he knew that critics were likely to see them as a radical departure from his previous work. He considered them merely an evolution. The sculptures depicted the same ordinary objects that he’d painted so often before, but he had expressed them in a new way that suggested his own sense of the world. As the ideas grew in his mind, so did their scale, but because his vision was bigger than what he had to work with, he often had to set the pieces aside until he got his hands on more resin or an additional jar of graphite. The enormous eggplant he worked on had consumed all the resin he had managed to find and still wasn’t complete. He decided to leave it out of the show rather than further delay the opening, already five months late.
By the time he was ready to have the pieces moved from Guanabacoa to Havana, it took five men to load them on a truck and then set them up inside the gallery. Besides the four gigantic sculptures, Arturo had created four huge canvases on similar themes for the show.
When the doors of the gallery opened promptly at seven o’clock, more than one hundred people poured inside. Pipo was among them. Cary had planned to attend but wasn’t feeling well enough to make the trip across the harbor. The first thing Pipo saw was the word DARK in foot-high letters above Arturo’s name. As the crowd spread over the gallery floor, conversation was subdued. There was no shortage of quizzical looks as people posed in front of the king-size objects. Many were drawn to the huge black egg, the size of a bathtub, with its dark shell cracked open to reveal a gleaming yellow yolk that some couldn’t resist touching. People marveled at the towering slice of watermelon, with its single white seed, and crowded close to it to take selfies. Something about the large black basket in a corner made it seem less extraordinary than the other pieces, and soon a few people were casually leaning against it, chatting. A video loop at the back of the gallery showed Arturo and his assistants working on the pieces, including the one that Pipo, a baseball fan, thought was the star of the show, the refrigerator-size black baseball.
DARK brought out the stars of Cuban culture. Arturo’s old friend Leonardo Padura, one of Cuba’s most popular authors, was there, tanned and beaming. Tomás Oliva, a sculptor, showed up, and so did television host Maritza Deschapelles, along with several actresses and actors. When Jorge Perugorría, the actor who owned the gallery, arrived, a frisson of excited chatter coursed through the room. Perugorría, one of Cuba’s best-known actors, had starred in the film Fresa y chocolate, playing a gay Cuban at a time when homosexuals were being persecuted by Fidel, a period of Cuba’s history that Arturo had lived through and despised. Almost unnoticed in the stellar crowd was Daily de la Peña, Arturo’s twenty-eight-year-old sweetheart, who scurried around in spiky heels and a slinky white dress as she chased after their toddler, Marcela.
Pipo tried to keep an open mind about the show, even though his own tastes tended to be far more conservative. He and Cary had no original artwork in their house, and their decor tended toward shabby chic. “Interesting” was all he said as he checked out the big sculptures and tried to figure out the meaning of the four large paintings that went with them—collages of images shaded over so darkly that they could have been Guanabacoa during a blackout. He opened up far more when Arturo’s sculptor friend Tomás Oliva mentioned that he too had studied in Kiev in the 1970s. They found out that they both had crossed the ocean in the same Russian cruise ship and debated which was worse, the bunks on the ship or the food that was served.
Oliva was impressed by Arturo’s sculptures, and he approved of using the English word dark as the title of the show. “It is shorter than oscuro, and blunter, so it conveys a different sense of the world, one that reflects his vision,” he said. But for Arturo, it was more than a title. He knew critics would see DARK as a sixty-five-year-old man’s growing obsession with mortality. But by using only black, he hoped to encourage people to look at the items from a purely aesthetic point of view while allowing his trademark irony to rise to the surface. In a country where eggs had to be “liberated” before people had free access to them, what could be more exciting than an egg big enough to bathe in?
At about eight in the evening, Arturo, dressed casually in red pants and a navy-blue short-sleeved shirt, stood in front of the baseball and thanked his assistants for doing the heavy work he couldn’t do. Then he took a stab at explaining his art. “To some people this looks like a departure for me, but really, though some aspects are different, it is a continuation of all that I’ve done before, elements I’ve used before.” The paintings, he said, wiping his chin in his odd way, as if he had dribbled coffee, represented a layering of objects that “conforms with the reality of life in Cuba today.” In other words, they showed a world where daily events added up to something more confusing and illogical than the individual elements. The huge black baseball represented Cuba’s infatuation with the game. And in its representation of something so fundamental about Cubans, Arturo felt it also stood for cubanidad—Cubanness—that hard-to-define sense of what it uniquely meant to be Cuban. Like baseball pitchers who use guile to fool batters, Cubans have to luchar and inventar in order to survive.