Author's
Note:
This travel narrative describes experiences during a trip to
Havana in December, 2006. It does not attempt to provide a
comprehensive account of contemporary gay life in Cuba. Nor does
it offer comment on broader social and political factors that
shape life in Cuba. In 2008, the government of Raul Castro has
shown quiet, tentative signs of increasing tolerance of gays and
lesbians.
The
DJ turns the music up. A mix of Latin rhythms and techno beats
punches through the night sky towards the stars. The crowd grinds
closer together, hips sliding as though on swivels, arms
stretching into the air. Faces flash. Eyes lock for an instant
before the surge of movement interrupts. The bottles of rum are
nearly empty and the fiesta accelerates with abandon.
Four
drag queens lounge in the shadows chattering through an ember
glow and cigarette haze about the spectacular show they put on
earlier. Each performed three songs, lip-syncing lyrics of love
betrayed, defiant femininity and outrageous kitsch. Each paraded
three dazzling outfits, from skin-tight body suits to strapless
dresses held up only by cleavage. Gold-sequined shoes made it
look as though one drag queen strutted on a pedestal of sparks as
she worked the catwalk. The audience gasped as another appeared
in a bikini and stiletto heels, leapt into the air and landed in
the splits. Admirers approached the stage and paid their devotion
by stuffing Peso notes between skin and fabric.
Tonight's
fiesta is hidden in an old farmhouse's courtyard on the fringes
of Havana. A cool night breeze weaves between the dancing bodies.
In a quiet shadow of the courtyard's stone wall a pair entwines
with fumbling urgency. The world beyond the wall has vanished and
only the sky looks on. Unpolluted by the distant lights of
Havana, the three-starred belt of Orion, the silent hunter, burns
bright as he stalks his arc of sky.
It
would have been impossible to find the fiesta without the help of
my host in Havana. I will call him José to protect his
identity. Around midnight he took me to the edge of Vedado, a
lively district west of central Havana where crumbling art deco
facades line the streets. We waited on 23 Street next to the
Yara, a 1950s cinema. Young, blinking couples emerged from the
theater and plotted their next move into the Havana night below
the cool glow of the hundreds of energy-saving light bulbs
studding the Yara's awning. Hesitant, tentative tourists from the
nearby Habana Libre Hotel explored cautiously. A steady stream of
people emerged from the Copelia ice cream parlor, a 50s-style
complex of cast concrete with legs that arch like a spider's and
support a central torso of circular pods with seating and
stations for serving. Classic cars and old Soviet Ladas clattered
up 23, trailing ribbons of black exhaust. The rhythms of salsa
music, infectious with muted joy, pulsed from nearby clubs.
We
leaned on a stone embankment next to the sidewalk, waiting. José
is in his late 40s with flashes of grey in his short, dark hair.
His eyes are full of life but weary with the street smarts that
it takes to get ahead in Havana. He was watchful as we waited,
gauging those passing and those milling around.
"Hssssssst."
José
hissed and nodded at a teenager with long, sandy blond hair from
a bottle who walked up and down the sidewalk and then rested
against a tree.
"Hsssssst."
The
boy's wrists were wrapped in leather straps and bracelets. He
turned to José, nodded and took a step closer.
"Fiesta?"
José whispered.
"Yes,"
said the boy.
José
returned to my side and explained that we needed to wait until we
found enough people to fill a car. It would be cheaper that way.
The four cars parked on our side of 23 Street were all unmarked
taxis. The drivers were friendly to the idea of the fiesta and,
most importantly, knew the location. José explained that
the fiesta regularly changed locations to reduce the threat of
problems.
As
we spoke, a rat emerged from the tangled shrubs on the
embankment, shimmied along the top of the stone wall, cast itself
to the sidewalk three feet below and waddled into a hole.
"Do
the police cause problems for gay people?" I asked.
"No,"
José replied. "Gay people cause problems for gay
people."
Gay
life in Cuba is filled with such cryptic, contradictory messages.
I had reserved a gay-friendly casa particular, a rented
room in a private home. The only clue that it was gay-friendly
was a discreetly placed rainbow flag atop a dresser in a
photograph of the room that the renter emailed me. It turned out
the room was occupied for the days I needed but the renter
suggested José's casa as an alternative. He confirmed that
José "thinks exactly like me about the life."
Nothing
was said about gay life, but on my first night in Havana, José
took me to a cafe halfway down La Rampa, the slope of 23 Street
between the Yara and the seafront. A group of a dozen young men
had pushed tables together and sat gossiping and giggling. Two of
them kissed. Some rolled-up their t-shirts to show their
midriffs. Others wore over-sized belt buckles and low-riding
jeans.
"What
kind of bar is this?" I asked José. "What
reputation does it have?"
"It
attracts people who like different things," he said. "People
from the other side."
Later
I would learn that police had raided this bar a few nights before
I arrived. The raid began with several undercover officers
filtering among the tables discretely listening to conversations.
Then uniformed officers burst in and checked everyone's identity
papers. Some were detained for not having permission to be in
Havana. Others were detained for having contact with foreigners,
which is forbidden. José was at the bar when it was raided
but was not hauled away by the police. He did not tell this story
when I asked if the police caused problems for gay people, I
heard it only later from one of his friends.
Though
it is not illegal to be gay in Cuba, systematic police harassment
seems designed to make it uncomfortable. However, systematic
police harassment seems to make nearly all young people
uncomfortable. "We can't even walk into the tourist hotels,"
one young straight man explained. "We might see a different
country that way. You can walk right in, but they would
stop me. Two million people in Havana and one million policemen,"
he said shaking his head, disgusted but resigned.
The
inconspicuous loitering at the Yara, the subtle language of
identifying one another, the glances, the hissing, the
whispering, and fiesta's location known only by the drivers of
the unmarked taxis were all part of slipping away from the
watchful eye of the police.
José
eventually discovered two more who wished to go to the fiesta. We
piled into a bright blue 1956 Dodge, the engine clattered to life
and we escaped. The driver turned the Cuban music up and cranked
his window down. Buffeted by cool night air we sped through
nearly empty streets, the stoplights turning green upon our
approach. Our unknown destination pulled us past leaning palm
trees, past the lighthouse-like memorial to national hero José
Martí, past figures edging along the street lugging jugs
of water, past cast-concrete bus stops where people seemed to
congregate not for transport but for companionship, then
factories and sugar cane fields as Havana receded into darkness
behind us. The lights grew sparser, the roads narrower. Had there
been anything to say, the wind and music would have swept the
words away.
We
sped along for perhaps 20 minutes before the driver slammed on
the brakes and snapped off the headlights. Buried in night, we
swerved from the paved road and up a steep, dirt driveway. The
driver flashed his headlights, revealing for an instant a
sheet-metal gate. A pair of young men peered out and then swung
the gate open. We slipped through without stopping and the gate
clanged shut behind us. The heavy old Dodge stumbled to a stop
next to a high stone wall, the engine expired with a rattle and
wheeze and the night was suddenly silent and still.
José
had been here before and knew that the battered sheet of metal
against the stone wall was a door. He pulled it open, revealing
an arched passageway through the wall. The only suggestion of a
fiesta was a rainbow lamp the size of a tennis ball nestled in
the apex of the arch, casting tiny splashes of color on the
stonework. The passageway opened into a narrow room where a
votive candle flickered and set shadows dancing across the crude
stone walls. We passed through the room and another lifeless one
like it before the relief of entering a vast courtyard buzzing
with life. We'd found the fiesta.
The
organizers were still preparing for the drag show, testing the
lighting and sound. In the center of the courtyard a gazebo had
been decorated with strips of cloth and strings of lights. This
stage was augmented by a catwalk created by covering a row of
tables with a swath of threadbare carpet. A bed sheet draped from
an overhead wire gave the powdering and preening drag queens the
suggestion of a backstage area.
We
took a seat at the tables clustered around the stage. The chairs
were crafted from welded re-bar and sheet metal, all painted deep
green. The rum was served by the bottle, mixed with sparkling
lemonade and drunk from plastic cups. At last, to a swell of
music and the cheers of the 150 or so patrons, the night's
hostess took the stage in a flowing dress and burst into a
breathless number.
The
subtle language used to discover one another, the looming threat
of the police, the unmarked taxis, the metal gates and stone
walls, the quiet brooding of Havana, all seemed to vanish in the
joy and defiance of the drag show. The production had a simple,
homemade feel but could only have been the result of an
astonishing amount of work and dedication. Cuba is a country
where "disposable" lighters are refilled, re-flinted
and repaired by craftsmen in the streets. The camouflage t-shirt
José has worn to the fiesta cost him the equivalent of
what most Cubans earn in two weeks. One can only imagine the
clandestine connections and sacrifices necessary to get one's
hands on chiffon or sequins or makeup or high-heel shoes sturdy
enough for a man's feet.
The
drag queens pulled glamour from the rubble, uncovered the chic
among the shabby and brought life to the living. They worked the
crowd into a glow. With the show over the stars become us as we
dance in the tiny space we've found between the courtyard walls,
the ground below and the night above. We are the Seven Sisters
burning blue. Orion, our pursuer, draws no nearer. The rum
tingles through our fingertips. The beauty blinds.
A
young man slips in front of me, moving soft and supple. "I
will teach you to dance," he says. "If you want to
learn, you have to watch. Watch me. Watch me," he half
whispers, his eyes half closed. His body pulses to the music but
his sleepy eyes remain steady on mine. "Do you understand?
Watch me."
A
mustache is just beginning to suggest itself in a downy haze on
his upper lip. He lifts his shirt as though by accident, flashing
a swath of tight flesh and a narrow trail of hair from belly
button to belt buckle.
José
tells me that most of the young men here "estan en la
lucha." Literally "they are in the fight." They
sell themselves. The young man trying to teach me to dance is a
fighter.
"How
old are you," I ask, seeing now a melancholy beneath his
hypnotic movements.
"Eighteen,"
he says. "But I have experience."
Invisible
in the night sky above us as we dance are dark stars, stars so
dense their light cannot escape their gravity. The fighter is a
dark star. Fighting like light the gravity of fate.
Sometime after
4 in the morning José and I return to Havana and join
several hundred other late-night loiterers along the Malecón,
a walkway where the city meets the sea. It is a relaxed, informal
gathering with people sitting along the sea wall, waves crushing
into rock behind their backs. Others walk up and down the
sidewalk to see and be seen. Along this stretch of the Malecón,
at the base of 23 Street, most of the people are young and gay.
They fill the air with joy and laughter and music and gossip and
flirting and friendship.
A
crowd encircles a rickshaw equipped with a battery-operated radio
playing irresistible Cuban music. The crowd dances in the open
air and spills into the street forcing cars to honk and swerve.
The drag queens from the fiesta make an appearance, attended by
small entourages as they strut up and down the street. Fighters,
some looking as though they are in their early teens, lean into
the traffic and press their hips towards passing cars in hopes of
luring a customer. A pair of policemen watches discretely from
the other side of the street and occasionally walks along the
sidewalk, but they do nothing to disperse the crowd.
I
ask one young man, a 23-year-old fighter, why the fiesta must be
so hidden while the nightly party at the Malecón is so
open and obvious. "You're here as a tourist," he says.
"You don't know what it's really like." The fiesta, 23
Street and the Malecón are only one facet of gay life in
Havana, and he's right, I cannot know what it is really like.
Dawn
will soon enlighten Havana. The night's stars will fade out.
Orion will vanish and abandon his quarry. The Seven Sisters will
dissolve. The drag queens will wash away their makeup and stow
their sequins. The fighters will retreat to repose in shadows. We
will become invisible once again. But for now, shrouded in the
failing night, our secrets are safe. For now we dance.
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