CHAPTER 31
GUANABACOA
August 2018
María del Carmen finally took her son’s advice and went to see a neurologist. Since her fall, doctors had focused on her broken bones and had done little more than bandage the bump on her head. Now, nearly a year later, the neurologist sent her to La Benéfica for tests, but the equipment there was out of order, and she’d had to wait for an appointment at the neurological institute in Havana. She wasn’t sure exactly what the tests showed, but what she understood was that there had been damage to a part of her brain that controlled emotion, which explained why she hadn’t been feeling like herself. The doctors couldn’t tell her whether the damage was permanent or her brain simply was slow to heal. They prescribed a drug normally given to epileptics and advised her not to watch TV in the dark or sit in front of a computer for too long.
Depressed, irritable, and exhausted, Mari officially retired at the end of 2018, although she continued working with the refrigerated trucking company in Regla as an independent contractor for a few more months as she trained her replacement. After testing fish and seafood for nearly forty years, her pension came to roughly twenty-eight dollars a month. That was slightly higher than the average salary for a state worker, but without family living abroad to help her, she struggled to keep up with escalating prices for food, clothing, and just about everything else. She already knew that she’d eventually have to cut out her one luxury, buying new eyeglasses.
She planned to devote as much time and energy as she could to her beloved Spanish dance, and who knows? Perhaps one day she’d visit the Spain of Doña Eustoquia, which she’d never seen. She hoped to stay active, and besides walking whenever possible, she thought about taking up tai chi at the Arcoíris, a recreation center located a block from the Novalum plant. But she worried about getting there. The number 50 bus would drop her off right in front of Novalum, but it was always packed solid. After her fall, she stayed away from crowded buses.
She isolated herself in the old house on Corralfalso, reading books with a cup of coffee or tea at her side. She withdrew even further from daily life, refusing to look at one more issue of Granma or watch a single additional nightly news program. When public meetings were scheduled in Guanabacoa and around the country on the revised constitution that Raúl Castro had announced on the day he stepped down as president, she refused to attend. Nor did she buy a copy of the proposed constitutional revisions that had been printed on newspaper stock and sold at newsstands for a peso. “An old dog with a new collar,” she called it. It was inconceivable that a constitution put together by a group of Communist Party leaders representing the seven hundred thousand members of the party could possibly address the issues that ordinary Cubans cared about, things like retirement in a country where the elderly struggled every day just to survive.
At times, the quiet of the old house put her in a reflective mood. She couldn’t help feeling bitter when she thought about the limitations that had been placed on her because she had chosen to bear witness to her faith. The injustices had loomed even larger since she learned that the girls who had been most strident in condemning her lack of revolutionary zeal had left Cuba years ago while she had stayed behind. And the girl from the Young Communist League who had been the most ideologically aggressive back then had turned into a devout Catholic, one who Mari said suffered from “political amnesia” and never acknowledged the dark side of her past.
Outside the sanctuary of her home, she was not at all comfortable in the Cuba that had evolved around her. It was a world she hardly recognized. She couldn’t accept the sentiment conveyed by the way the words luchar and inventar had replaced the word robar, nor was she willing to go along with the sense of forgiveness it implied. What concerned her far more than a new president who acted the same as the old one, or a revised constitution that offered no more rights than the one it replaced, was the survival of deeply personal traditions that linked her to the Cuba of fine manners and noble intentions that still existed in her memory.
She continued to look forward to helping Tamara with the Spanish dance graduation ceremonies, though how much longer they could go on became less certain as they both grew older and more fragile. Each year brought her disappointment as, one by one, cherished traditions ended. After her fall she missed the reunion for old girls of La Milagrosa for the first time ever. Later, she found out that so few alumnae showed up that the handful of survivors decided having more would be too sad. The same thing had happened with the reunion of the tuna fleet veterans. Not enough people attended to fill a small room, though Mari was sure that their memories could have filled a cathedral.
No tradition meant more to Mari than the holy day of the Assumption of the Virgin Mary on August 15. Guanabacoa had been linked to that Catholic doctrine since soon after its founding in 1554. By 1743, the official name of the town had been changed to the Villa de Nuestra Señora de la Asunción de Guanabacoa. The high point of the year had long been a ten-day festival that combined a colorful street fair with a solemn religious procession. As a child, Mari used to portray one of a flock of petite angels that marched through the streets ahead of the statue of the Virgin that was carried on the shoulders of local men. By the time the procession ended, she’d have a painful red band around her waist where her mother had too tightly secured the belt that held on her wings.
Cities all over the world celebrate the Assumption of Mary with a procession every year, but none do it quite the way Guanabacoa did. The town was unique in having the statue of the Virgin first brought from the church to a private house where it was dressed in fine clothes by a volunteer known as la camarera. Generations of women in the same family fulfilled the role of camarera, and their fine, large colonial house on Guanabacoa’s main street was the place where the statue, which itself dated to 1680, underwent its yearly makeover. When the well-to-do family of the camarera fled Cuba soon after the revolution, the government seized their house and eventually converted it into the municipal museum. Nearly all of its collection and displays were devoted to Santería and other Afro-Cuban religions, without a single mention of the camarera or the Virgin after whom the town was named.
After the triumph of the revolution, the government prohibited religious processions. But Guanabacoa’s Catholics continued to celebrate the Assumption inside the main sanctuary of La Parroquia, the eighteenth-century church dedicated to the Virgin that dominates the main town square. The three huge doors of the church were thrown open after mass ended every year on August 15 as the faithful inside pleaded, “Take her outside.” On the street, crowds shouted loud enough for those inside to hear, “Don’t let her leave.”
For more than thirty-five years, the statue never left the sanctuary. After the visit of Pope John Paul II in 1998, the Castro government lifted many of its religious restrictions. By 2001, the statue of the Virgin was again being carried through town, though without a camarera to dress her.
On the feast day in the summer when the new constitution was proposed, Mari’s friend Armando delivered a public lecture in the municipal building about the centuries-old connection between the town and the Virgin Mary. The number of devout Catholics in Guanabacoa had dwindled so severely since 1959, and traditional religion had drained out of Cuban life so completely, that only a small number of residents like Mari understood how deeply the procession was linked to Guanabacoa’s history and culture.
“We can’t talk about local tradition and history without talking first about religion,” Armando said at the start of his talk. About two dozen people had crammed into a second-floor meeting room in the town hall. As he began, the sky opened, and an August rainstorm pummeled the old town just as, tradition had it, happened every August 15.
Despite their friendship, Mari had decided to skip Armando’s talk, unwilling to be a part of what she considered the government’s deliberate attempt to draw attention away from the religious aspect of the day by scheduling it just as mass was starting across the street at La Parroquia. Armando also was troubled by the timing, but the museum director had picked the date and time, and he had no choice but to comply with his boss’s wishes. He projected slides onto a blank wall as he ran through the nearly five-hundred-year history of the town and its patron, touching on its founding as a refuge for colonizers’ castoffs, the six months it substituted for Havana as Cuba’s capital, the opening of its first Catholic chapel in 1578. When he put up a slide showing the ruins of the Casa de las Cadenas, some people in the room groaned, making the mayor—who had come in to watch—shift uncomfortably in her seat.
At 5:00 P.M., a few people excused themselves and ran across the street to attend mass. Armando wrapped up just before 5:30 P.M., giving the floor to the mayor, who assured the group that she had plans to restore the Casa de las Cadenas and other important sites. Armando managed to conceal his skepticism. He joined Mari at the rear of La Parroquia just minutes before the new bishop of Havana, Juan de la Caridad García Rodríguez, ended the holy day mass. From the pulpit, a priest then asked the people, “Should we take her out or keep her in?” The rain had lightened considerably, but the skies were still threatening, and the streets were soaked. A procession around the interior seemed prudent, but the overwhelming response was “Go out!” The 338-year-old statue, dressed in fine clothes and a wig of human hair, metal rays of grace emanating from her back, was rolled along on a large cart and lowered down the church’s main stairs. Mari and Armando had rushed out to be in the park when the statue emerged.
By the time they got there, the rain had stopped.
A local band started to play. The statue, on its rolling throne, was mobbed. Bishop García walked solemnly behind it, wisps of incense lingering around him as the entourage passed. Ambling up José Martí Street toward the museum, Mari put her disappointment behind her. The old streets were not strung with colored lights the way they had been before 1959, and the storefronts weren’t decked out with fancy displays. Memories of the feasts of her youth were so strong that she could smell the sweet churros and delectable little hamburgers called fritas that were sold at food stands around the park nearly until daybreak, though not one was there this day to tempt her. But for a few moments, as the Virgin swayed through the street, the band played familiar hymns, and a clergyman swung his silver thurible, Guanabacoa again rose to the glory of her past.
The band played joyfully, though slightly off-key, as the procession slowly passed in front of the municipal museum. The Virgin was turned a block later, coming out on Máximo Gómez Street near Arturo Montoto’s studio. As it approached Pepe Antonio Street, Mari glimpsed her old friend Caridad Guerra slowly marching along with the procession. Caridad, now seventy-one, was as tiny as she had been when she attended La Milagrosa sixty years earlier, and she walked as if she had borne the weight of the tugboat tragedy on her delicate shoulders for a quarter century.
They grazed each other’s dry cheeks with kisses and chatted as they followed the procession back to the church. Bishop García led prayers and took advantage of the moment to gently protest what was quickly becoming the most controversial proposal of the new constitution—a proposition permitting same-sex marriage. The Virgin and her throne then were lifted up the stairs and carried back into the church. No more than half an hour had passed since she’d emerged, a far cry from the two-hour procession through the streets that Mari remembered with such tenderness. Still, the Virgin had come out, the rain had stopped, and the tradition had continued for one more year.
Caridad invited Mari and Armando to her small apartment for coffee, the essential Cuban courtesy. Walking through the old streets still glistening with rain, Mari harangued Armando for having cooperated with municipal officials and not calling them out for failing to preserve Guanabacoa’s heritage.
“I wouldn’t have sat quietly when the mayor boasted about vague restoration plans that will never come to pass,” she huffed.
“Confronting her directly would have achieved nothing,” Armando said. But bringing up the Casa de las Cadenas as he did during his lecture forced the mayor to address the issue publicly. Mari was still angry that the officials had tried to placate them with a sign, and he agreed. “All they really did was taunt us,” he said. He remained pessimistic about chances the building could be saved, but he felt satisfied that he had done what he could to raise the issue again.
Caridad lived in a cramped two-room alleyway apartment with two small dogs that yapped constantly. “Calm down,” she yapped back at them, pushing open the front door. She apologized for the condition of her home. “It’s a mess. My son is fixing the back room.” She told Mari and Armando to sit on the edge of a small bed by the door as she made the espresso. She weighed no more than seventy-five pounds and lived on the double ration of food she’d been qualified to receive with her libreta since she paid the local doctor ten dollars to list her as a diabetic, even though that was one health problem she did not have.
Mari looked up from the bed and was surprised to see hanging on the wall above the table a photo of Caridad’s daughter, Lissett, and below that, a picture of four-year-old Giselle, Caridad’s first grandchild. On the other side of the same picture frame was a photo of her son-in-law, Lázaro, the stepson of Jorge García’s rebel uncle Gustavo, who drove the tourist bus on the night the 13 de Marzo tried to escape. Below Lázaro was a photo of Caridad’s brother Guillermo, who had been so confident about the voyage that he promised to call her from Miami the very next day.
Mari knew that all four had drowned when the 13 de Marzo sank, but she had always been too timid, too respectful of her friend’s grief, to dare ask her about it. On this night, however, she didn’t have to ask. Whether it was because of the nostalgia of the procession, or the melancholy of the rain, Caridad opened up voluntarily. As the coffee perked, she said the sinking of the tugboat still haunted her, not only because of the unbearable pain that had not lessened even after nearly a quarter century, but because the government refused to acknowledge what had happened. Just as Jorge García had done, she had been forced to go to Spike’s widow to give back the libretas of the victims. But the government never issued death certificates for them, saying only that they had left the country. In the crazy quilt of property ownership in Cuba, the lack of death certificates would always obscure the legal title to their house. Back in 1994, Caridad had tried to get some official to listen to her, but when all her efforts fell short, she put a sign on the front door of her house that read IN THIS HOUSE FOUR PEOPLE ARE MISSING. It was an almost unheard-of public protest, but in a country without an independent press or any other forum for people to air grievances, it was the only way to voice her concerns. The government didn’t like it. A member of the local Communist Party came to the house and promised to help Caridad if she just took down the sign. She did. A week later she saw the man in Guanabacoa’s Central Park and stopped him before he could slip away.
Look, he told her nervously, there are no cadavers. If we have no cadavers, we can’t declare them dead. They’re just missing.
“It sounds like a bad joke, one that’s not funny,” Armando said.
Outraged by what she’d been told, Caridad had replaced the sign on her front door and continued demanding a legitimate response. None ever came. After her husband died, she traded that house for another, but she continued to worry that when she died, her surviving son would have trouble legally inheriting the property that was still in his dead sister’s name.
Mari listened to her old friend’s anguish, pained by how much deeper it cut than she had ever imagined. Caridad told her that she’d gone to the Villa Marista headquarters of state security to demand an accounting of what happened in 1994 and was again told that the government had no proof of the deaths. “They told me that there are no records,” Caridad said, close to tears. “No records, as if those people, my family, they never existed.”
The only lawyer she ever found who would talk to her about the case turned out to be Spike’s son, who still lived in Guanabacoa. He appeared regularly on TV to discuss real estate issues, but he never spoke publicly about his father or the tugboat. His advice to Caridad: just fill out the papers transferring the property to her son now without even mentioning that her daughter was dead.
She said she couldn’t bring herself to do that.
Unless they were friends with victims or survivors, most people knew only what they’d read about the tugboat in Granma. Inevitably, rumors had spread. Caridad said that many of them had revolved around Jorge García because of his business training Dobermans and German shepherds. Some people—including her own mother—believed he had been an agent of state security.
“She blamed him for not trying to stop the group from leaving,” Caridad told them. Others in Guanabacoa had blamed Ramel, but in her mind, there was no doubt who had destroyed her family.
“No one was responsible but the government,” she said.
JORGE GARCÍA NEVER LET THE FACT that Caridad Guerra’s mother blamed him for the tugboat tragedy interfere with his friendship and respect for Caridad. He held no grudges against her family or anyone in Guanabacoa who repeated the unfounded rumors. Nothing they said could interfere with his quest for justice.
Along with his numerous testimonies before the commission investigating the Castros, he worked with a translator to self-publish an English-language edition of his book on the 13 de Marzo to coincide with the twenty-fifth anniversary of the sinking in 2019. His nephew, Iván Prieto Suárez, had agreed to pick up the tab. He could afford it. After coming to the United States, Iván had started a trucking company and a real estate business in Miami that made enough money for him to easily cover the few thousand dollars it cost to have the book printed. He was chasing the American dream, but he never let the tragedy of Cuba drift far from his mind. In the front room of his ranch-style house in a marginal Miami neighborhood, on the wall facing the front door where he can see it every time he enters the house, he hung a three-foot-high painting of his father.
Jorge’s daughter, María Victoria, also lived in Miami, not far from her father or her cousin Iván. She tried to put her life back together in the United States, marrying a Cuban man from the province of Granma. She never became an advocate like her father, and after arriving in Miami, she rarely spoke publicly about the 13 de Marzo. In the summer of Díaz-Canel’s ascension to power and the introduction of the revised constitution, she took advantage of the temporary resumption of cruise ship service to Havana to quietly pay tribute to her lost family. She and her husband booked a cruise that departed from Key West. On board the ship, she asked the crew to notify her when they were seven miles off the Cuban coast. When they reached that point, María Victoria dropped a floral spray into the water, roughly marking the spot where she had last seen her son, her husband, her brother, and so many other relatives and friends.
The cruise ship docked in Havana and passengers disembarked to tour the city. All but María Victoria and her husband. They believed their names were on some kind of restricted list because a Cuban official who stood at the bottom of the gangplank checking passports refused to let them through. Not wanting to argue with him, they simply turned around and walked back up the gangplank. On the return trip to Florida, when they reached the same spot, seven miles offshore, she tossed another bouquet into the sea.
THOUSANDS OF PUBLIC HEARINGS on Raúl’s proposed new constitution were held across Cuba. A satirical one was even written into a few episodes of Vivir del cuento, with Pánfilo, Luis Silva’s curmudgeonly character, wondering why so much fuss was being made over one proposed change—legalizing gay marriage—when so much that cried out for change, like the wretched economy and the straitjacket political system, had been left basically untouched.
Miriam Díaz attended one of the meetings in Guanabacoa, even though she didn’t think anything she or anyone else said would matter. “They,” she’d say, tapping imaginary epaulettes on her left shoulder to indicate Raúl and his generals, “have already decided.” Still, she had a point she felt needed to be made: when you are struggling to get by on a measly state pension of ten dollars a month as she did, “who’s worried about gay marriage?” But many Cubans were concerned about the proposal. Signs posted on doorways in Guanabacoa proclaimed I SUPPORT TRADITIONAL FAMILIES. Religious leaders from several faiths across the country opposed it. And even though they knew the same-sex marriage provision was backed by Raúl Castro’s daughter Mariela, and that made it almost certain to pass, Jorgito García and most members of his Methodist church in Guanabacoa signed a national petition to preserve marriage as a union between one man and one woman.
At his studio across from Los Escolapios, Arturo forced himself to become familiar with the new constitution, but he called the whole process of consultations “a carnival” orchestrated to give the impression of public participation when the reality was that, like Miriam Díaz, he believed the final version had already been written. It was Raúl Castro’s last attempt to prolong the revolution that he and his brother had started more than sixty years earlier. Raúl had assembled the constitutional commission and put himself at its head. The draft proposals had been written, submitted to the National Assembly, and approved unanimously, in less than four months, another initiative accomplished in tiempo récord. The consultations led to the final step, a national referendum, early in 2019.
Arturo did not expect anything in the new constitution to affect his life as much as DARK would. The exhibition had been well received. Critics gushed over the monumental pieces. Days before the show closed, Jorge Fernández Torres, director of Cuba’s National Museum of Fine Arts, viewed the exhibition and afterward told Arturo that the show was everything the reviewers had said and more. Fernández then took a proposal to his board, which approved his plans to present DARK, and several other Montoto pieces, at the museum, where they’d be seen by thousands every day. Arturo was overjoyed. His comeback was complete.
But until the exhibit opened, he had to find a place to store the gigantic artworks. He had hoped to sell one or two of them, but he’d had no luck. Had he sold any of the pieces, the government would have taken 30 percent off the top, and he’d have had to pay taxes on the remaining 70 percent. But after his prolonged dry spell, any money would have come in handy. An American baseball team he’d been talking to about buying the black baseball lost interest. He had also gotten queries from Cuban teams, but in the end they had shied away, fearing that the black ball could be interpreted as a sign of the decline in Cuban baseball after so many players had defected.
He wrapped the watermelon, the basket, and the egg in cardboard and found space for them inside his studio. But bringing the baseball back to Guanabacoa was out of the question: no matter how they twisted or turned it, it wouldn’t fit through the doors from the courtyard to the dry and protected area of the studio itself. When it became impossible to find a place to safely store the baseball, the Museum of Fine Arts agreed to hold it until the exhibit opened at some point in the future.
Arturo immediately went to work on his next project. The simplicity of restricting himself to a single color satisfied his artistic urge, and he wanted to do it again, but this time in white. Given all he’d said and done—and not done—for decades, white did not represent optimism about Cuba’s future. He didn’t expect anything positive to come from a new president who was just like the old one, or a new constitution whose lofty guarantees were no more likely to be enforced than those of the one it replaced. He was a man in his mid-sixties who was raising a toddler. If white represented anything other than the reduction of objects to their most basic form, it was the hope that for Marcela, his little girl, Cuba would be not a cursed island surrounded by cancerous waters but the land that God graced with the most precious sunlight in the world.
Arturo was starting to feel trapped in Cuba again, trapped in Guanabacoa, trapped in the studio he had worked so hard to build and that sometimes felt like a fortress under siege. Strangers were always congregating on his front step as they waited for a bus, tapping the door knocker for fun and leaving bottles and trash as if the building were still the dumping ground it had been before he rebuilt it. There were days when the electricity was out, when his cook didn’t show up for work, when the noise from the cabaret behind him became so unbearable that he was desperate to get away. But then reality set in, and he knew that if he wasn’t in Cuba, he couldn’t paint.
He was in his workshop late one morning when his cell phone rang. It was Daily telling him that Marcela wasn’t feeling well, again. She’d been plagued with sniffles and colds, fevers and congestion almost since she’d been born. They’d taken her to the local clinic, and after some tests the doctors determined that she was allergic to so many things that it might be easier to simply say she was allergic to Cuba. She’d do much better in a cooler northern climate where she’d be isolated from everything that irritated her. Did they have such a place where she could go?
Daily didn’t, but Arturo did. He had remained in touch with his daughter Elena in Moscow. He called there regularly and spoke to his faraway family in the Russian he still remembered. Dochka moia, he’d tell his daughter. Vnuchki moi, he’d call one of his five grandchildren when they got on the phone. He might have to brush up a little on his Russian, but he planned to ask Elena to take in Daily and Marcela, at least until the little girl’s allergies could be brought under control.
Arturo told Daily that he had managed to get hold of a few bottles of children’s allergy medicine that wasn’t available in Cuba. “I’m coming right over,” Daily said. There was no time to wait for a taxi. One of her neighbors agreed to carry Marcela to the studio.
A moment after he opened the studio door to wait for her, Daily came rushing around the corner. Then, facing the decomposing walls of Los Escolapios across Máximo Gómez Street, Arturo fetched Marcela from the neighbor who had carried her, took her in his arms in a loving embrace, and squired her into the studio that had become both refuge and prison, a singular place where, despite everything, he believed he had done some of his best work.
A few weeks later, Arturo put Daily and Marcela on a plane to Moscow, secure in the belief that they would be in a better place. On his own again, he tried to get back to his work, and the life he had created in Cuba, but he was having trouble painting. The dirt and pollution from the city streets made it hard to breathe, and the ta-toom, ta-toom, ta-toom from the cabaret behind the studio kept him up half the night. Most frustrating of all were the cuts on his fingers and hands from building a cage for quail chicks that he hoped would eventually give him all the eggs he wanted, without having to wait for the government to liberate them. The irony of it could have been the subject of one of his paintings.
“The revolution promised to create the ‘new man,’” Arturo said, holding out his bruised hands. “After sixty years, where is that new man we were creating? I’ve lived through every stage of it and I tell you that I am that new man. But who am I? What do I have? I’m an artist, and I’m cutting up my hands to make a cage so that someday I can have eggs to eat. That’s the self-sufficient new Cuban man!”
With a mock salute, he repeated one of Raúl’s favorite propaganda slogans with the same irony as when he ordered a “Ha-Ha-Ha” at a bar. “¡Por un socialismo próspero y sostenible!”
“For a prosperous and sustainable socialism!”