The last time I saw Cuba

photo from Generacion Y





The last time I saw Cuba was on the face of what I thought to be Rated B artist. Which is not how I think of Cuba.

The artist was on the last leg of her travel grant, courtesy of NCCA, which allowed her to go to Havana to interact and talk art with the Cuban children. I had the impression she was not so happy about her trip. She kept on complaining about the exorbitant rate the Cuban government is charging tourists as though she wanted to be Tourism Minister herself.

The audience were mostly laissez-faire artists who had little interest in Cuban history and politics, about which the artist herself seemed badly informed. What I thought was, the gringos in the bureaucracy there took her for a schoolmarm from political wasteland Pinas and had her properly relegated to the singing children department rather than make time for her discussing Cuban art and revolution. And so, of course, the most she could tell about the Caribbean island was that it is a poor country, no shopping malls, no colorful arrays of goods to choose from, and how men harassed you, propositioning you so that you will marry them and take them out of the country. When someone in the audience mentioned the US embargo and that it was one country where anyone may address the President by their first name, her IQ dropped. But she was considerate enough to make one upbeat observation, i.e., that there are no prostitutes, no street children, no roaming lunatics in Cuba, something one cannot say of Bayang Pilipinas.

It was unsettling for me. At the time only thing I knew about the downside of the food rationing was that ice cream was not available for everyone and gay artists wanting to get out. I hadn’t as yet read literature about the scarcity of milk and meat. Yoani Sanchez and wordpress.com did not exist then, though of course, I had already noted by then the silences of my French radfem sisters who made visits there, who said they rather enjoyed talking to the fags they met in Havana and that No, they could not cut canes for the Cuban revolution if revolution should come down to cutting canes, that’s so fucking peasant economy which only Germaine Greer could appreciate. I also thought of Margaret Randall, lesbian, feminist and socialist activist, who spent decades of her life working and writing for the Cuban revolution, only to opt out of the country and get back home to capitalist haven America. Made me wonder if women like her, like me, can only grow old and irrelevant there and die broken?

I hadn’t as yet read the fiction of Ronaldo Menéndez. About how zoo directors slew ostriches, crocodiles, monkeys, red-feathered birds, camelids just because there was nothing to eat at home, so that now only hyenas and wolves were left to eat each other. I hadn’t as yet heard of pigs being raised in the bathtubs of the metropolis squealing every morning very far from the river and very close to one’s bed. I hadn’t as yet heard of Yoani’s stories about homemade shotguns in the countryside and farmers’ families staying up until sunrise to protect crops and animals from those who try to steal.

And I do not thoroughly agree that that there are no prostitutes in Cuba. Besides, anywhere where contraception and abortion may be accessed without Catholic churches raising hell over it, and in any place where women as equal partners in a revolutionary project may say to a comrade Quiero hacer amor con tigo any day she likes, who needs to pay for prostitutes for specialized services? Who needs to pay for dowries and weddings.

I remember very well one woman in Margaret Randall’s book. One good thing that the Cuban revolution had done to her, she said, was that now she could marry the man she chose and not that which her parents chose for her. Another woman said that her daughter was her daughter not because she was the one who gave birth to her, but because she chose the girl to be her daughter and the girl chose her to be her mother. The girl just turned up in her door and set camp in her house and they got along fine and that's it. Such arrangement, the mother said, could only be possible in revolutionary Cuba with its revolutionary conception of the family. And then, of course, what do you make of “womanizing” when even in “post-revolution” Cuba, we will not want of women who will defend their men’s womanizing, granting that such womanizing is male prerogative, patriarchal privilege and feudal entitlement?

I don’t know what to make of Cuba now. Once I thought I had been there and shook hands with Fidel and walked with the women in the defense and the production brigades. Once I thought I will not substitute roasted chicken and ice cream for taro and red beans.

Guess it’s just the growing hate I feel for the flabs in my middle. Guess I just miss the Cuba that I once knew.