Jubana! (4 page)

Meanwhile, Hollywood movie stars and assorted celebs and politicos were flocking to our island to play: Ava Gardner, Frank Sinatra, Groucho Marx, Dorothy Lamour, Maurice Chevalier, Eartha Kitt, George Raft, Edith Piaf, Cab Calloway, Dorothy Dandridge, Tony Martin, Jennifer Jones, David Selznick, Marlon Brando, Pablo Picasso, and Jesse Owens (who raced against—and beat—a horse). Hemingway was in his
Old Man and the Sea
prime, Winston Churchill couldn't get enough of our posh casinos, country clubs, or cigars. And the Mafia, well, you saw
Godfa
ther II,
right? The $14 million Hotel Riviera, for example, was financed mostly by the Cuban government for Meyer Lansky. (They had a floor show in the Copa Room headlined by Ginger Rogers. Lansky noted that “Rogers can wiggle her ass, but she can't sing a goddamn note.”)

Papi said Cuba was a corrupt place under the crooked, ruthless dictator General Fulgencio Batista's rule, and corrupt before him, but it was an alluring, sexy, prosperous, lush, advanced, beguiling, laissez-faire kind of corrupt. You know, fun corrupt. American musical acts went there to play all the time. That's why Cuban Americans of my parents' generation think it's hilarious that the 1997
Buena Vista Social Club
CD was such a hit in this country, as if
los Yanquis
were just discovering the sinuous beauty and earthy soulfulness of our native music.

I asked my mom's best friend, Eliana, what she thought of the record, and she said, “Dat cheet? Dat was, like,
música del campo
[country music]. Tacky. Een Cuba I leesehn-ed to Nahpkeen Kohl.” (She always called him Napkin.)

Mami used to listen to “The Christmas Song” crooner, too, until she met Nat King Cole one day at a baseball game in Havana. She ran over to him, confident and full of teenaged life, all freckles and bosoms and red lipstick, and breathlessly asked for an autograph.

Cole slowly sized her up from his seat, paused, frowned, and condescendingly said, “No.”

Mami's never forgiven a no from ANYbody.

“Wow,” she sputtered. “Joo are really an ASShole.”

She's hated Nat King Cole's guts ever since.

 

Following the earlobe trauma, the other key thing that happens in early Jubanahood is that by age two or so, people stop feeding
you just plain old
leche
and start with the
café con leche
at breakfast. You know how they say that one drop of black blood in a glass of white milk makes you racially a chocolate milk? Well, one drop of espresso in a glass of heavily sugared hot
leche
makes you wired. It permanently alters your already nervous system and turns you into a caffeine and sugar addict with an attitude. (So the next time you ask yourself, “What is it with these fucking Cubans?”—remember the
café con leche.
)

The trick about
café con leche
is that it's initially soothing but ultimately stimulating. Soon after I started drinking it every morning I began speaking in whole sentences. I haven't been able to stop myself ever since. When my parents had parties, which was constantly, I'd sit on the living room's cool Spanish tile floor in a pair of black ballet tights and nothing else (except the jewelry, of course) and explain the meaning and causes of thunder and lightning. Cuba's known to have hurricanes every now and then, so I knew this would be a big hit for my audience.

“En resumidas cuentas, todo esto tiene que ver con fuerzas negativas y fuerzas positivas,”
I commenced.
“Como la vida misma.”
The bottom line is that it all comes down to negative forces and positive forces. Like life itself.

The well-heeled
invitados
were
muy
impressed. They approvingly sipped their daiquiris, Bacardi Cuba Libres, and Manischewitz.

“She looks so much like David,” people always told Mami, “you could dress her in a white lab coat and send her to the hospital. No one would know the difference.”

“I don' agree,” Mami always replied, even though she knew it was true.
“La niña
ees very Benes. Her hair ees rayt, like mine an' Bernardo's.”

No. My hair was and really is auburn, with golden-red highlights. But my mother has always considered redheads as well as
her side of the family infinitely superior to everyone else. Certainly the Beneses were richer and more refined than the Andurskys, but none of my grandparents had ever had more than an elementary school education. Papi's parents were comfortable, middle-class. They'd emigrated as newlyweds in 1927 or '28 from Zalnik, Poland. It's an obscure village like Kraisk, that no map shows. Papi was born shortly after they'd arrived, in 1929. Zeide Leon owned Cuban American Textiles, in La Habana Vieja, Old Havana, at #557, Calle Compostela. He and my grandmother, Grandma Zelda—“Baba Zoila” in Yiddish and Spanish—sold upholstery fabric for sofas, chairs, and curtains. They also sold fabric for men's suits and women's dresses. The store had no a.c., just two huge standing fans. Mami says in the summer the heat in there was unbearable.

Zeide Leon was short and strong, wiry, well-built. He smelled like steam, from his freshly pressed white short-sleeved shirts, and Aqua Velva. On Sunday afternoons we'd stroll through El Jardín Botánico in Miramar or El Parque Central in La Habana Vieja. I'd pick flowers to bring home to my mother while Zeide Leon kept an eye out for stray cats. When he'd see one he'd pummel it with stones and laugh maniacally. I'd scream and run under Baba Zoila's full skirts to hide, which only made Zeide laugh harder.

Baba Zoila was bossy, critical, and dyed her beehived hair a matte black-brown. She wore heavy red lipstick, covered her furniture in plastic sheeting, and made a lot of boiled chicken and Jell-O. She doted on my father and held him responsible for Tio Julio, Papi's brother who was five years younger. Baba Zoila held Mami in medium esteem at best. She thought Mami was self-centered and spoiled rotten. On our Sunday outings, Baba Zoila would tell me, “Your Papi is the most handsome, smart, giving, wonderful person in the world! The best son, brother, doctor, fa
ther, and husband! That's why he's named after a king. You know King David?”

“Uh-huh. What about my Mami?” I'd ask, shaking the dirt off the roots of my filched hibiscus or jasmine or frangipani or gardenias.

“Your Mami?” she'd reply. “She's…she's good, too.”

Good?
She was way more than
good.
She may not have been a biblical monarch but she was a goddamn goddess. And the fact that you didn't like it didn't change it; even I knew that. That's why I thought it was mighty big of Mami to give me the floor, if only fleetingly, at her sophisticated soirées. Here was a deity who could share the spotlight sometimes. I could never compete with her beauty, grace, and charisma, of course, or make Papi pay attention to me, but I could be funny, smart, charming, and
una pícara,
a cheeky girl.

So I pressed on with my thunder and my lightning.

“¡Y entonces hay un choque!”
I said, clapping my tiny hands together once very loudly to illustrate the fury of
el choque,
the shock, as the two forces collide. That always gets their attention.

“Calor y frío,”
I continued. Hot and cold. I'd squeeze my eyes shut, turn my head away from the impact, and slam my palms together again.
“¡Ay, que escándalo!”
Oh, what a scandal!

Exhausted from my educational performance art, I'd drop backward and faint.

“Coño, super-mona, pero demasiado café con leche, tú,”
was my audience's unanimous verdict. Shit, she's super-cute but too much
café con leche,
man.

“A ella le gusta,”
said Mami, shrugging. She likes it.

Meanwhile, Tio Jaime was tickling the soles of my feet to revive me. Screaming with laughter, I tried kicking and kicking him away. He'd grab a black stockinged foot and drag me around as I shook my hips and swayed my abnormally large head (threaten
ing to crack it open like a coconut on that hard Spanish tile) as I crooned the Elvis song I'd heard many times on Carmen's kitchen radio (she called him El Rey): “‘Baby, I ain't askin' much of you/Just a big-a big-a hunk o' love will do/If you'd give me just one sweet kiss, no no no no no no no…'”

“Y bueno, de todas maneras,”
Mami concluded, surveying me wiggling down on the floor from the chic elevation of her black peau de soie Dior open-toed slingback stilettos as she delicately dabbed the side of her shapely mouth with the expert tip of her pinky to assure her red lipstick wasn't wandering,
“la niña salió así.”

And anyway, the girl was born like this.

 

Mami's bête noire may be Napkin Cole. Papi's is Herbert L. Matthews. “Herbert ‘El Cabrón [The Bastard]' Matthews,” my father calls him. “It's all his fault. Yep. He was a dick.”

Before I was born, in February 1957, the
New York Times
ran a three-part series written by Herbert L. Matthews, who'd gone to see Castro in his hideout in the Sierra Maestra, the rugged mountain range in southeast Cuba. As author Tad Szulc wrote, at age fifty-seven, Matthews was a highly respected, seasoned pro, a member of the paper's editorial board, who specialized in overseas reportage. Matthews was an elite: intellectual and reticent but fundamentally quixotic. Matthews's wildly sympathetic portrait of Castro and his followers turned Castro into a myth of goodness, guts, and social justice. The wonderfully written stories vastly influenced the planet's attitude toward that myth. After all, it's the
New York Times,
for God's sake.

“[Señor Castro] is a hero of the Cuban youth,” Matthews wrote. “This was quite a man—a powerful six-footer, olive-skinned, full-faced, with a straggly beard. He was dressed in an olive gray fatigue uniform and carried a rifle with a telescopic
sight, of which he was very proud…[Señor Castro is] an educated, dedicated fanatic, a man of ideals, of courage and of remarkable qualities of leadership…[who speaks with] extraordinary eloquence…He has strong ideas of liberty, democracy, social justice, the need to restore the Constitution, to hold elections…he is now invincible…invulnerable.

“The personality of the man is overpowering. It was easy to see that his men adored him and also to see why he has caught the imagination of the youth of Cuba all over the island…the best elements in Cuban life—the unspoiled youth, the honest business man, the politician of integrity, the patriotic Army officer—are getting together to assume power…they are giving their lives for an ideal and for their hopes of a clean, democratic…and therefore anti-Communist Cuba.”

“Coño,”
Papi says,
“qué bruto ese Matthews. Qué ingenuo. Eso nos jodió.”
Dammit, what a dunce, that Matthews. What a naïf. That fucked us.

Well, if the august Herbert “El Cabrón” Matthews, who came to Cuba all the way from the
New York Times,
was mesmerized and taken in, then so were we. Because during that period, and much to Zeide Boris's horror, my very own mother and Uncle Bernardo were publicly going around with other young people clutching anti-Batista placards. Bernardo even got arrested once for organizing an anti-Batista protest rally at a Havana Sugar Kings baseball game in Havana's El Gran Estadio del Cerro. Naïve or not, Matthews's trilogy had provoked a virtually universal groundswell of support for Fidel Castro.

“What's
wrong
with you?” Zeide admonished Bernardo after a friend got him released from the slammer. “You'd have to be crazy to get yourself killed over politics.”

Zeide Boris knew firsthand what communism looked and
smelled like. And sounded like: As he often said, “When you hear a bark, it must be a dog.”

“Zeide had leev-ed through eet een Russia,” Mami says. “He recogniz-ed Feedehl was joozeengh de same tacteecs. But Bernardo an' I were totally doop-ed.”

Because Bernardo was totally committed to Castro, he and my grandfather got into terrible arguments. Tío Jaime, Mami says, was “very cool” about the coming revolution. Mami wasn't as passionate as Bernardo, but she wasn't on the fence like Jaime, and she was profoundly influenced by Bernardo's politics. For example, a law school classmate of Bernardo's, Osmel Francis de los Reyes, was also a virulent anti-Batista Cuban. But unlike my mother and Tío Bernardo, Osmel was being hunted by Batista's men as a traitor for his outspoken candor. So, like Anne Frank hiding in the secret annex with her family, Osmel holed up at my parents' apartment for six months in 1957 while Mami was pregnant with me. Mami says the mailman thought Osmel was Mami's lover because he'd stop by with the day's mail and see the two of them in their bathrobes, drinking their
cafés con leche
at the breakfast table. Mami and Bernardo eventually got Osmel asylum at the embassy of Brazil. Osmel moved to Brazil and lived there for years before returning to Cuba, a broken man with a bad drinking problem. I asked Mami why in the world she would take such a risk, especially while being pregnant, and if Osmel was Bernardo's friend, why didn't he go hide at Bernardo's damn house?

“Well, we were johng, joo know? We thought Feedehl Castro was de answer to all our problems.”

The problem Mami had soon after Castro took power was no freedom of speech. At work she'd criticize Castro to some of her colleagues and “Deyd look at me to choht up. And I deedn't like to
choht up. I had to go to de bathroom weeth my friends to talk. Joo become paranoid weeth good reason.”

And reckless for no reason but thrills. Two days after the revolution in 1959, my mother and Bernardo insisted on getting in the car with Papi, who didn't want to go, and Tía Ricky, Bernardo's wife, who was pregnant with Joel, her first child, to go check out the scene downtown. They parked in front of the Hotel Nacional and, except for Papi, began getting out. Papi yelled, “Don't get out of the car!” but the others, as usual, didn't heed his warnings. Suddenly there was machine gun fire. Batista holdouts were firing down from the hotel's rooftop. Papi shouted, “Lie down!” and ran out of the car to protect Tía Ricky by covering her with his body. Nobody got shot or too hurt. The quartet was incredibly lucky and, except for Papi, incredibly stupid.