Adventure Divas (8 page)

In the pre-revolutionary era, prostitution and domestic servitude were the only options for poor women. After Batista and the U.S. interests—including the Mafia—were gone, Cuba largely did away with prostitution. But with the rise in (and government encouragement of) tourism, and its attendant much-needed hard currency, the world’s oldest profession is on the rise again. This hustling isn’t
exactly
prostitution, but there is a clear quid pro quo at work. Hustling here is not about paying rent or scoring drugs, neither of which are huge factors in Cuba, but about procuring a big meal or a pair of shoes—things that require dollars, not pesos. The “tricking” may not be institutionalized in the way it is in, say, Asia and the United States, where women are peddled by pimps and/or traffickers. Here, children aren’t for sale and the women are free agents, answering to and providing kickbacks to no one. Nonetheless, these are teenagers selling their bodies in part because of a disastrous economic climate; and these are grown-up, wealthy First World men happily taking advantage of the situation. The guys in this bar are on the same make as the “sportsmen” I first saw when we were en route to Cuba. Perhaps this is a negative aspect of Cuba’s booty-owning sexiness. Foreigners come here and, with their pocketbooks and hypersexual voyeuristic lens, engage in the worst sort of objectification.

In addition to the
jinitera
scene (and sometimes integral to it), there are a dozen Hemingway look-alike wannabes. Pooch-bellied, gray-haired, mojito-swilling men sprinkle the bar.

We order a round, and try to film the
jinitera
activity. With each round of mojitos, Cheryl and I get bolder with our shooting; I shoot her doing a cartwheel or speaking to the camera and surreptitiously shift ten degrees right to capture a fifty-year-old German guy with his fourteen-year-old Afro-Cuban date. The girl is amused by our antics; the man, no doubt, hopes our “home video” does not show up in his hometown. “Does our insurance cover an angry john, busted?” I say to Jeannie facetiously, while changing tapes.

Yerba Buena and Havana Club go down like pure potential, and the carefree tune of “Guantanamera” dissolves all worries in the roomful of disturbing sexual politics. The evening devolves into a mojito fest, and the wee hours find us in a dance club, trying to salsa, digging deep for the booty liberation we first saw in Instinto, giving nary a thought to our cameras stacked in the corner like dead, forgotten fish.

Dawn brings
a pounding head, my period, and a dissipated crew. We hail Mary and head for the dock where Captain Cecelia Gomez keeps her boat. We don’t have an appointment but I am hoping we can just show up and find her. When we arrive at the harbor, the crew begins tinkering with their equipment and Jeannie and Catherine go to look for
café cubano.

I shuffle off, heavy with post-party shame, to ask, ask, ask in hangover Spanish. A couple of grizzled boatmen are playing chess on the edge of the dock.

“¿Conocen a la Capitana Cecelia Gomez?”
I ask. A fellow with a green cap points over his shoulder, out over the roiling Caribbean Sea, and says in Spanish, “Sorry honey, she’s out for at least a week.”

“Gracias,”
I say, deflated, and walk over to sit on a cement seawall. I stare out at the ocean and attempt to pull myself together. I am panicked. I have no plan. I am worried that I’m losing the tenuous respect of the crew, who might smell a neophyte director and be wondering what the hell our next move is.

I’m cranky.

We missed our diva.

I have cramps, and it feels like the revolution has moved to my uterus.

I
hate
everybody.

I take three deep breaths, kick a chunk of mud out of the waffled sole of my boot, slide off the seawall, and walk slowly back toward the crew, lamenting the loss of Zen clarity I got from fishing that’s now gone down the hormonal drain. What would a diva do? Where does a “creative” turn in the dark, stymied moments when the meter is ticking?

“We’re going to church,” I announce.

I first read
about the nearby town of El Cobre in Hemingway’s
Old Man and the Sea,
in which Santiago swears he’ll make a pilgrimage to La Virgen de la Caridad del Cobre if he can just land the damn fish. Hemingway donated the Nobel Prize for Literature he won for that book to that very shrine.

We can see El Cobre’s triple-domed church for the last three winding kilometers of the drive up to it. The church is nestled in the foothills of the Sierra Maestra, and pilgrims travel from all over Cuba, sometimes crawling for the final miles, to pay homage to the Virgin.

We walk into the dark, stone narthex. Every horizontal surface is filled with flickering votives, crinkled sepia photos of loved ones, military medals, and an extraordinary number of tiny boats. All are offerings, left with a prayer. Talismans of spiritual grounding. The room is positively thick with the hopes, dreams, sadness, and potential of the Cuban people.

I sit on a stone bench to watch the pilgrims and lean my back against a cool wall. I send up a little prayer for us to meet another diva to complete the show, since we will not have the ship’s captain we were counting on. I immediately flog myself for spiritual dilettantism (which probably nullifies the prayer before it’s even reached the ozone layer). Then I mentally flog myself again for hijacking the prayer because there is, after all, the slight chance it would have worked. The self-flagellating tail chase comes to a halt when a gorgeous dark-haired girl in a white dress enters the church.

“She looks pretty young to be a bride,” I whisper.

“It’s her
quinceaños—
a fifteenth-birthday rite of passage that all girls in Latin America go through,” Pam replies, characteristically informed. This ritual announces that the young ladies are on the market to be married. More social than religious, a
quinceaños
could be likened to a debutante ball in the United States—except that this Latin American tradition is much more widespread and culturally significant.

I’m not fond of dogma, be it religious or political, but I do yearn for ritual, which seems to be the common language of all spiritual quests. Jeannie sees me write down that last thought in my notebook, the contents of which will eventually be used to write a script for the documentary.

“Jeez, Holly, the only ritual you have is your morning coffee jag,” she says with a laugh.

“And who’s responsible for the fact that I was raised in a spiritual vacuum?” I whisper in retort.

“We wanted you to choose for yourself,” she responds, which totally surprises me. My parents were both sportscasters and my dad is an ex–Chicago Bears football player. So Sundays were holy days in my family, but for NFL reasons. I assumed my parents just forgot about the God thing.

I continue to sweat rum in the corner of a rural Cuban church, wracked with cramps, arms loaded with film stock, whispering inappropriate personal baggage to my mother.

“Here they come,” says Jeannie excitedly, “shhhh.”

The girl is led by her mother up to the altar, and is presented to La Virgen de la Caridad del Cobre, Cuba’s most sacred icon, also known as the Black Madonna. The icon is tiny. We are talking a nine-inch deity. But she’s nothing short of the protectress of Cuba.

The Black Madonna is housed in a fittingly tiny glass cage and swathed in a glittery gold embroidered robe. A sparkly gold halo and crown, ten times the size of her head, top her off. My experience with Catholic iconography is mostly limited to giant suburban churches with giant crucified Jesuses (a suffering presence I’ve often felt steals from the joyous wedding ritual at hand). I like this better.

The church is dark and there is an entire
quinceañera
procession between the tiny Virgin and us. Paul has a challenge on his hands. “I cannot zoom in any closer,” he says, a bit too loudly, when I nudge him to move in.

Black Madonna

Legend has it that three young fishermen found the Black Madonna floating off Cuba’s northeast coast in the Bay of Nipe around 1612. The Madonna apparently had a sign around her neck that said Y
O SOY LA
V
IRGEN DE LA
C
ARIDAD
(“I am the Virgin of Charity”). There was a storm, the young men were about to capsize, they grabbed on to her (she was made of wood), and the rest is history.

The Black Madonna represents the melding of Catholicism and Santería. She is Catholic Cuba’s patron saint of charity, and she parallels Santería’s deity Ochún, that vibrant goddess of sensuality I first saw represented in Gloria’s film. My eyes and mind linger on the small sparkling gold burst of energy that commands the room. This icon of faith, who is a draw and a comfort to so many, is complex and real: She is a vortex that represents the melding of Europe and Africa, lover and mother, saint and warrior. A powerful, biracial diva.

Back outside,
Cheryl and I buy a Black Madonna tchotchke made out of scrap metal from a group of young entrepreneurs, and sit down across the street from a nearby schoolyard. The solace of church and a few ibuprofen have lifted my spirits considerably.

I reach in my canvas shoulder bag and take out Sky Prancer, our own lucky, nine-inch deity given to me by my friend Inga. The doll is quickly becoming the show’s mascot and we hope to give her a cameo in every episode. Sky Prancer’s tutu is a bit wrinkled but her blue wings and blue hair and brown skin sparkle with vitality. Cheryl and I walk across the street to launch her with some girls playing hopscotch in the schoolyard. I demonstrate how to pull the string out of her base and send her shooting into the air, arm-wings a-twirl. Cheryl manages the difficult task of capturing on film the doll flying through the air, as well as the laughter of the girls who are setting her off into the bright blue equatorial sky.

That evening,
back in Santiago, we walk into a dollars-only
paladar.
We find a family of four half-watching a tiny black-and-white TV flickering one of
el Jefe
’s fist-waving speeches. The mother, in green housedress, stands and takes us to a windowless back room with two tiny wooden tables covered with red-checkered tablecloths. Over six plates of crispy fried chicken, fluffy white rice, and what might be a kilo of beans, we bat around ideas about how the show, in theory, might end now that we don’t have the captain to sail off into the sunset. The magic and challenge of both travel and documentary is that neither can be scripted. The story is built from the nuggets—or, nutgrabs, as Jeannie would say—that are revealed along the way.

I pass on the dessert of farm cheese and guava paste, excuse myself, and step outside to mull. I lean against a powder-blue cement wall. But an American can’t loiter around urban Cuba very long without getting chatted up, and within two minutes a man named Pablo has introduced himself, in near-perfect English.

“We’re a film crew, with nobody to film,” I say, after the usual pleasantries. I tell him that our last contact has fallen through and that we’re scrambling. We need one more woman, I tell him, to help bring Cuba’s story to life. I jabber on about our visit to El Cobre, and he simply nods, not interrupting me. Then I pause. I hate it when people pour confessional minutiae onto strangers, and now I am doing it to this guy.

Then he turns to me and says, “Why don’t you go see my godmother in Cardenas? Her name is Emilia Machado. She’s a Santera.”

A Yoruban high priestess! That’s
exactly
who we need to bring this show home.
I don’t know who to thank. The Black Madonna? Sky Prancer? Or Pablo? I cover my bases and run back to the
paladar.
We drive all night, most of the way back to Havana, and reach Cardenas at dawn, just in time to be comforted by the roosters’ first crows.

Cardenas is a town
where horse-drawn carriages share the streets with Edsels. We wend our way through cobblestone labyrinths, and despite the all-nighter, I am tingling with the knowledge that this is where the show is supposed to end. Soon we find Emilia Machado’s home. Catherine and I bang on the giant, weather-worn wooden doors. On one a single rusty nail dangles a piece of paper with
EMILIA 312
handwritten in black ink. The door opens slowly. Emilia is very tall, and thin, and wears a purple floral dress and red and white dangly earrings. She has big, black, stiff hair with a few shocks of gray pulsing through it. We sent word asking if we could see her, so she is not surprised. We take in her simple home in a single glance: tile floors and stark white walls, a single bulb hanging from the ceiling. In the corner, an altar with only one identifiable item: a gun encrusted in some sort of molasses and twig recipe.

Note to self: Investigate priestess’s handgun.

Emilia Machado was a Communist Party official for many years. “When I was twenty-five, I became very sick. Through that I discovered Santería,” Emilia tells me of her change of life.

Illness, and a divine cure, led Emilia to leave her job as a party official to follow a life of devotion during an era when religion was banned. We have heard she was persecuted during that time, but this is not something she acknowledges.