Guillermo brought me this gallo all the way from Sagua!
The indoor activities finished and I thought my time had come. The next stop would be a shower and a bed. I was wasted. But the best part was yet to come. The promotora from Sagua takes my arm and leads me to the center of the park.
“Just one more thing,” she says almost apologetically. A stage overlooked a flat cement area; a dance floor or a good space for an audience. In the middle of the area is a lone folding metal chair. She walked me to the chair. I look at her, “no jodas,” I says. You are shitting me.
“For favor,” she says, eyes pleading, “They have prepared so much.”
In a daze, I sit and immediately, as if my ass touching the metal flipped a switch, a voice booms from the loudspeaker welcoming "el caminante Guillermo Grenier doing the Camino del Cimarron!"
Two youngish comedians take control of the cement stage, their banter stereotypes the Cuban güajiros and their problems. I become a character in their narrative. The heavy set güajiro, wearing a straw hat and red plaid shirt accuses the other of stealing his rooster. The accused objects strongly.
“Guillermo brought me this rooster all the way from Sagua,” he says. They went on like this for a bit. I didn’t find it hard to laugh. The guys are funny. And me, sitting in a chair surrounded by a crowd and being watched while watching two Cuban comedians from El Purio, that is funny too. Hilarious.
After the comedians, a gifted singer takes the stage and sang Mama Inez. She is a big black woman, loving the stage and belting out a song that would shock the politically correct sensitivities of liberals in the United States:
“All us black folks drink coffee. (Todo los negros tomamos café.)”
A group of young women follow, dressed in yellow, dancing around me to an Afro-Cuban percussion rhythm. They file out to end the piece but one of them comes back and performs a solo Afro-Cuban dance to a guaguanco beat. Salsa moves are a bit too repetitive for me and I’ve never been a good, or even passable, salsa dancer, but the guaguanco, with its mesmerizing beat, invited improvisation. Hitting the beat this time with a quick move. Next time freezing and waiting till the next beat rolls around. I like guaguanco, but not after a forty-kilometer walk. The dancer comes closer and closer and before I know it, she has grabbed my arm and I am on the dance floor, boots and 40 kilometer legs dancing a guaguanco with her. I try to protect her toes from my clumsy boots and did my best to keep up, but the adrenaline inspired by the moment is rapidly wearing out. I shake my head as I stutter-step through the routine.
“Let me see you move like that after walking 40 kilometer, amiga mia.”
She laughs.
I look over to the promotora who is directing the action near the stage and make a very clear “cut” sign across my neck.
“No mas,” I yell out. She laughs but nods.
“I did everything I could to keep her,” he wails in a strong sing song güajiro accent. “I even bought her a Soviet washing machine.”
“That,” I say pointing at him, “is WHY she left you!”
The crowd goes wild.
After their set, the guajiro with the woman problem presents me, out of character, with a small wooden sculpture of a machete in a frame commemorating 50 years of the publication of Biografia de un Cimarron.
He nods smiling.
“Did you sign it?”
He shakes his head.
“All artists sign their work,” I say and offer him my pen.
“Not all,” he says, “It’s yours. You’ll remember me.”
“I will. And I’ll try not to crush it in my pack,” I tell him. “Thank you.”
I put one leg up on my chair and on my thigh signed the books handed to me by the small gathering crowd. The crowd slowly disperses. The promotora approached with a smile on her face. “Ready,” she says.
“I’ve been ready,” I say, “since I walked into town.”
***
I will not be passing the night partying like Estaban often did in El Purio. While the work was not much different than what he suffered as a slave--“The difference being that they didn’t hit you as much as during slavery” (45)-- there were always fiestas to break up the monotonous routines of the ingenio either in the bateys of El Purio or in Calabazar de Sagua, the nearest town a few kilometers to the south. Rumba filled the air in the batey and sensual dances moved the workers; with plenty of “guasabeo y de jaladera” as Esteban told Barnet. The party stopped only at the “toque del Silencio,” the call for lights out to end the day. Folks wanted to stay up all night dancing and singing, if they could. But as it was, noted Esteban, people woke up totally wasted the next day.
If he could find a ride or had extra time, he traveled to Calabazar de Sagua for his good times. Bloody cockfights and gambling made Calabazar a preferred destination. That and the fiestas held during the special Catholic feast days, like June 24th, the day of San Juan. On that day, Calabazar became the village that never sleeps. Esteban would head over, all decked out in his best clothes, hoping for a woman, if he was lucky. La fiesta de San Juan was a time to show off your elegant wardrobe, if you had one. Everyone dressed to the nines and brought the town to life with sacred and profane activities. Decades later Esteban still remembered the event as some wild street pasarela. Hard to forget.
In general, men wore canvas shirts or striped ones. Those striped shirts were very elegant, and they fastened with gold buttons. They also wore jipijapa cloth; almud, which was a cloth as black as tar; and very shiny alpaca. It was said to be the most expensive. I never wore it. (53)
Trips to Calabazar included a night of cockfights at the best ‘valla de gallos” in the region. The blood sport stopped during the holy feast days, but Esteban made the scene when they were running. He was drawn to the blood, to the violence. Took his mind off the routinary daily violence he witnessed at the ingenio. At the cock fights, “La sangre era un atractivo y una diversion.”
The nightly festivities of El Purio highlighted Esteban’s tendency to be a loner, to see things from afar, as he said, even when surrounded by a crowd of people really having a good time and paying him no mind at all. “As for myself, I can’t say I don’t like dancing and the rumba but it so happens that I’m given to seeing things from far away.” (48) His years as Cimarron left their mark. He felt at home being invisible.
The first three months at El Purio were rough and joining in the festivities was not an option. He tired easily at the grueling work. His hand peeled. His feet swelled. The parties beckoned but when he went out, he did not enjoy them. He looked for women, though, even at his drag-ass most tired. Being in the company of women was the only pass time that he remembered as being truly relaxing. That stuck in his memory enough to recount to Barnet eighty years later. Women calmed him. Women drove him crazy. Women were the reason men existed. Of this, he was sure.
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