In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens (24 page)

For several years, I tried to get to Cuba. Because the Cuban Revolution had been achieved through armed struggle, I was eager to see the effect on the people of having used violence to liberate themselves. I was, after all, a pacifist and a believer in the use of nonviolent means to effect social change. After the birth of my own child, I had understood fully the evil of waiting interminably for conditions to change at someone else's convenience, but I still needed to know that the use of violence did not necessarily destroy one's humanity. I wanted to confirm the truth of one of my favorite lines from Flannery O'Connor: “Violence is a force that can be used for good or evil, and among the things taken by it is the Kingdom of Heaven.” For the poor of Cuba, their own country had become “the Kingdom of Heaven.” It was in their own hands, thanks to the Cuban Revolution.

Before the Revolution only 60 percent of those of working age had regular full-time employment.

In the rural population, only 11 percent drank milk, only 4 percent ate meat, only 2 percent ate eggs.

Forty-four percent had never gone to school.

Eighty percent of the inhabitants of Havana did not have enough to eat.

—Ernesto Cardenal,
In Cuba

Today, there is work for everyone in Cuba. Everyone has enough to eat. Every Cuban child goes to school, as do many adults. Illiteracy has virtually disappeared.

Many Americans who visit Cuba complain that life there is hard. And it is. But they do not seem adequately impressed by the fact that poverty has been eliminated, or that nearly all the people can read: that a 300,000-copy printing of a new book can be sold out in days. They do not seem awed by a country that provides free medical care to all its citizens, and labors daily to provide decent housing for everyone. They do not say—as I feel—that a hard life shared equally by all is preferable to a life of ease and plenty enjoyed by a few. Standing in line for hours to receive one's daily bread cannot be so outrageous if it means every person
will receive bread,
and no one will go to bed hungry at night.

I went to Cuba with a group of African-American artists who were selected by the editors of the
Black Scholar
and the Cuban Institute for Friendship Among Peoples. We were there for two weeks—not nearly long enough to comprehend all the things we saw. What follows are fragments of my experience, offered with an acute awareness that my view of Cuba is neither definitive nor complete.

I am sitting in the Pavilion dining room of the Hotel Habana Libre, which, before the revolution, was the Havana Hilton. It is full of people who, twenty years ago, would not have been allowed through the front door. It is as if, in New York, everyone one saw on the Lexington Avenue IRT during rush hour was accustomed to spending the weekend in the Palm Court of the Plaza. I am talking to Black Panther exile Huey Newton and his wife, Gwen. He is saying:

“If I come back to America talking like Eldridge [Cleaver], I hope black and progressive people renounce and reject me.”

I assure him we will.

When the Newtons came to Cuba two years ago, they asked to live “like the people.” They were sent to Santa Clara, “a very small, country town,” says Newton, but a good symbol of how the revolution has changed habits and attitudes in Cuba. He tells me about the Santa Clara park, in which, before the revolution, black people could not walk. And of how this park—now used by all the people—represents the fall of racist institutions throughout the island.

Unable to live “like the people” on rationed food that invariably ran out before the end of the week (and unable to get the knack of wringing the necks of their own live chickens), the urban-raised Newtons moved eventually to their present suite (two small adjoining rooms, for the family of four) in the Habana Libre. Like the majority of exiles and guests of the Cuban government, they use a special identification card that allows them to eat in the hotel restaurant and to order up quantities of strong Cuban cigarettes and light and dark rum.

The resemblance of Huey Newton to some large human cat is striking. One feels his bright brown eyes would glow in the dark. His manner is quick, graceful, lithe, and of a sinewy gentleness.

Before mentioning the chameleonic Cleaver, now a “born again” TV Christian, Newton was speaking of his father, who died shortly after Newton arrived in Cuba.

Now he says, apologetically, “You would probably not approve of him.”

I realize he is wary of me because I am a feminist. It pains me to assume Newton is not. But, thinking how much easier it is to approve of dead people than of live ones, I shrug. “I'm prepared to like him,” I say, puffing on a cigarillo, and hoisting my glass of rum. “Give me his case.”

“We lived on a farm in Louisiana and he did not want my mother to work. He told the white bossman, ‘When you send Miss Ann out in the fields to work,
I'll
send out
my
wife.'”

This did not seem impossible to comprehend. We were eating delicious stewed rabbit, like my father used to make. I smiled to think of myself eating rabbit in a fancy Havana restaurant, talking to Huey Newton about whether I approved of his sharecropper father or not. It was a moment.

“The
prob
lem,” said Gwen, “was that the choice of not working was not made by your mother.”

“You mean she
wanted
to work?” I asked.

“Well, yeah, I guess so,” said Huey.

Suddenly I remembered Louisiana, certainly one of the ugliest American states. Flat, hot, with houses miles apart. Black women and white women might go crazy there from boredom.

“Well,” I said, “I guess I don't approve of your father. I understand, but don't approve. Your father's concern was for his own pride, his rebellion against the white man. It wasn't about your mother.”

Earlier we had been together in their suite. Their two children made a brief appearance. I had brought the family gifts of magazines, books, T-shirt iron-ons for the children. Gwen is a stunning woman, with large, serene black eyes and hair that stands by itself. She and Huey seem to be the only blacks in Havana wearing the Afro hair style. The Cubans apparently consider long hair an expression of antisocial behavior. This is incredible, considering that “longhairs” won the revolution.

Before I left the United States I had heard ugly rumors about Newton. That he'd been a pimp, and had murdered a young black woman prostitute because she called him a punk; that he'd pistol-whipped his tailor (!), and other such charges.

To my indirect questions, he responds that he was vilified and framed, probably by the FBI, and that he fled to Cuba to save his life. He will be returning to the United States, however, because he is both homesick and innocent.

To dissipate the tension that accumulates around this exchange, we talk about trivia: an ideal way to spend an afternoon with exiles who miss their country and who don't speak the language of the country they're in. We discuss movie stars. (He knows some personally, I know none.) Gwen encourages Huey to explain to me the meaning of his favorite movie: it is a Japanese classic called
The Forty Outcasts.
His eyes become brilliant as he describes the story: it is apparently about the sacrifices involved in maintaining one's honor in a society of men whose rules for membership are patently absurd.

Our best poets

write poetry full of holes:

The women who love women, never tell.

The men who love men write of wombs.

The genius who loves both is rendered mute

by the complexity of choice.

The black father of white children suffers in silence.

The mother of the dope fiend is ashamed to reveal her

shame

The poetry is full of holes, I say.

They will not give you life,

but pseudo-life

where all halves can be made to fit.

Is it because they know that even Cuba

that liberated country

would tolerate anything

that helped the Revolution

except a gay discoverer of a cure for cancer

or a Jehovah's Witness

whose musing paradisical agronomy

would provide milk and honey

dirt cheap

for this Promised Land?

—ruminations of the author

And the story of the Cuban writer who was living abroad and came home when the Revolution triumphed. The Revolution became the center of his life. He worked as a journalist with great enthusiasm, with great euphoria, writing propaganda for the Revolution. But they found out that he was a homosexual. They didn't want to wound him by any accusation, and they didn't fire him from his job. They just said that he could go on drawing his pay but that he must stop going to the office. He understood why they told him this and became deeply depressed. He was rejected by the Revolution he loved so much. He left Cuba and committed suicide in Rome.

—Ernesto Cardenal,
In Cuba

We are sitting in a bus outside the Moncada Barracks (now part museum, part school); it was here, in 1953, that the Cuban insurrectionists, led by Fidel Castro, attempted to seize the weapons that would have meant control of the surrounding Oriente Province. They were defeated, temporarily. Fidel fled to the mountains: others were tortured, murdered, or jailed—as Fidel was—after capture.

The Dramatist in our group declaims dramatically that it is a matter of record that half the city of San Francisco is homosexual. She declares further her intention, because of this threat to her and her children, to move. We are ten black American artists—painters, poets, musicians, novelists. I feel a sad bitterness in the air. Some of us say, with disgust, “Move!” It is not that we are gay; it is probably that we have known the pain of moving into neighborhoods where we were not wanted.

When I heard that Jehovah's Witnesses are banned in Cuba and considered counterrevolutionary, I did not feel deeply disturbed, though it meant that some of my relatives, as recent converts to this religion, would be unwelcome there. Cuba's government-sanctioned dislike of homosexuals, however, seemed to me unfair and dangerous. An affront to human liberty and a mockery of the most profoundly revolutionary statement in the Cuban
Family Code:
“All children are equal.” Surely homosexuals are born as well as made? One assumes a Jehovah's Witness chooses her or his religion. But if a child is born a homosexual what is to be done about it?

“Tell us,” we ask our hosts, “just what is it about homosexuals that threatens the revolution?”

“We do not bother them, as you do in New York,” they reply. “You'll never hear of homosexuals being beaten up in the street.”

“But you do not like them.”

“We do not
condone
their actions. We do not
approve
of them. In Cuba, because of poverty, before the revolution, the Cuban family was nearly destroyed. We believe we must strengthen it.”

“So homosexuals are seen as a threat to the family?”

“We believe homosexuality is an aberration in nature—and that the more corrupt the society becomes, the weaker the family structure, the more homosexuality perpetuates itself.”

“What are the legal sanctions against homosexuals?”

“They are not permitted to teach,” says one of our interpreters. “And they cannot become doctors. They are not allowed to hold positions in which they can influence youth.”

This is all to our Dramatist's liking. She nods her approval. The rest of us are silent. It is their revolution, after all. Perhaps some of us are chilled, thinking of gay friends back home who would not feel as free as we do, in Free Cuba.

What Cuba teaches is that revolution is not a flash in the pan of injustice. It is, as Fidel says, “a process.” It takes years and years and generations to build a just society. The overthrow of a repressive government is only the beginning of that struggle.

Everywhere we go, we stress the fact that we are cultural
workers,
not tourists; that we have come to Cuba to learn, but also to teach. We do not want simply to see films, we want to discuss them with film makers. We don't want simply to visit museums, we want to see art schools. We want to share our poetry and music and painting with the poets, musicians, and painters of Cuba. We are permitted to do this, and spend long afternoons with writers (there is a scarcity of women writers, and we are offered no plausible reasons why this is so), film makers, and musicians. We can see that great efforts have been made to have Cuban art reflect the masses of Cuban people, that the African heritage is given equal time with the Spanish, and that the “dominant culture” is recognized as being a synthesis of the two.

All of this is developing. It is by no means complete. The status of the arts is analogous to the development of the rest of the country in direction and change. For example: during our first days in Cuba we were dismayed that the inevitable refreshment of rum and sweets offered us was presented by a black waiter; invariably an older person, male or female. What was this? we indignantly asked our Cuban hosts. Though we realized the occupation of waiter is not in itself demeaning, the consistent use of blacks to fill it
is.
We were told what should perhaps have been obvious: that before the revolution, blacks were disproportionately employed in menial jobs, in which many remained. Before the revolution, they would have been destined to remain in these jobs until they died. Now, everyone, including the black waiters, studies constantly in order to improve their positions. Education is free, and once having prepared and been tested for a higher position, they could take it. But the main thing, our hosts pointed out, was that the revolution made it virtually impossible for any group to be relegated forever to a servitude of any kind.

When we saw Cuban child-care centers and high schools, we could see that this was true. No distinctions are made between black, brown, and white, or between male and female. All learn to speak languages (including Russian and English), to make computers, to swim, to study math, the dance, music, science, and geography. In their trim school uniforms, it is impossible to tell a child's background. Color remains, but beyond color there is a shared
Cuban-ness.