Mataguá
The town reminds me of an old-west settlement. Flat faced buildings with verandas facing wide dusty streets.[1]The Casa Cultural is a grandiose, early 20th Century mansion with majestic, sculpted columns holding up the ceiling of spacious main room leading to a central courtyard through the rear. One small card table with three folding chairs around it near the front door furnishes the entire cavernous room. Two cultura workers, a young woman whose name I miss, and Samuel, the man who will be my host for the evening, elegant in a white shirt and beige pants.
“You must be hungry and tired,” says the young woman. “You can go eat with Samuel at the restaurant. The Manicaragua leaders will be here in a little while. They were waiting for you.”
I quickly recount our day of waiting and she listens as if she cares but the weariness of her eyes betray disinterest. “They’ll explain. Go eat.”
Towns this size in Cuba are not benefiting from the boom in private restaurants exploding in big cities. Paladares are sprouting like mushrooms in most large cities and along the narrow, well-trod tourist routes. The only game in most small towns are the established state funded watering holes.
There are no paladares or casas particulares in Matagua but the food at the government run restaurant tastes fresh. The waitresses in their black skirts, white shirts and meshed stockings serve us a menu selected specially for the occasion: congri (black bean/rice mixture) salad, some meat. It seems like pork but could be chicken. I was a relative newbie at this meat-eating thing, so I ask. “Voy hacer una pregunta estúpida. Qué clase de carne estoy comiendo?” What kind of meat am I eating?
“Puerco,” he says, without the slightest surprise.
I explain why I am asking.
“Not many vegetarians around here,” he says, pouring me some water. “Not by choice anyway.”
Back at the Casa Cultural, the promotor from Manicaragua, a man this time, and his posse wait for me to extend their welcome and to let me know that they had been waiting at the bridge in the town of Minas Bajas, the “lower Minas Bajas”, rather than in the bridge on the terraplén. I tell him about the jeep spotted driving around the area.
“So that was your jeep. The white one?”
Yes, they assure me.
“I knew that you would not forget about me.”
“No. We didn’t forget but we are sorry that you’re not staying in Manicaragua tonight. We had a hotel room ready for you. A nice hotel room. And a guide through the mountains like you asked for.”
I feel guilty for deviating again from my established route. I know how hard it is to mobilize resources in Cuba. I do my best to explain the change in the itinerary as necessity, emphasizing the lack of communication with Cienfuegos as being the primary reason for the decision. They are disappointed but pretend to understand.
***
I head with Samuel to his house. It is not far. Nothing is far in Matagua. The one floor wooden house stands on an incessantly active corner. A cement sign shaped like a boulder sits like a natural geological formation in front of his yard announcing that at this precise corner begins the Comite de la Defensa de la Revolucion #42 (the Committee in Defense of the Revolution #42). Next to the sign stands a bench that during the few hours that I was there, was never empty. A small crowd of men, women and children buzz on and around the corner. Folks chatting, talking on the phone, sitting on the curb. All the activity makes sense once Samuel explains that this specific corner was one of the few areas with decent cellular reception in the neighborhood.
I join the crowd to call home. The signal only motivates a couple of erratic bars but it is better than the plenty of nothing that is available elsewhere. Those of us lucky enough to hook a connection have worn down the sidewalk in a ten square-meter area across from Samuel’s house, careful not to bump heads as we listened with the necessary intensity to the almost transparent voices crawling down the anemic signal into our ears. No es facil.
Samuel lives alone. His white, one story house smells of freshly ground coffee and moist greenery. When home, he swings the doors and opens windows wide, the warm air current drifting between the front door of the living room to the back door past the kitchen. The three bedrooms in the typically designed Cuban house open into these two main spaces. Today the steady breeze weaves in and out of rooms, bringing in the smell of mangos and pig pens. Friends, too, flow in and out while I unpack in the main bedroom; his room. Tonight, he sleeps in what he calls the spare bedroom, but which looks more like a storage room full of stained brown boxes with a dusty mattress leaning against the wall.
Bulky, dark wood furniture, gloomy with nostalgia for a by-gone era, makes the room seem smaller than it is. On the dresser rests a black and white picture of a young black woman in front of a house, maybe this one, and a stampilla, an ornamenal stamp one picks up at church, of St. Christopher. The picture is old, and its age makes it look blurry, as if taken during a foggy day. The blurriness makes the memory it captures even more distant, melancholic even. The picture looks sad and it knows it.
The walls of the room are clean; no cobwebs but the paint is chipped, like the walls suffer from psoriasis. Rumors of a green past life persist through the fading beige façade. The legs on the dresser, the bed, the small divan next to the bed, all wobble, as if they had all been born with the same defect. Not a speck of dust anywhere even though the windows are always open.
Right outside my bedroom window, on the neighbor’s property on what seems to be a zero-lot arrangement, is a pigpen. The pig rustles, grunting intermittently, in urgent, short bursts.
His brother works hunched over on the spokes of a bicycle on the side of the front porch. I sit with Samuel and drink, rocking one of the two wooden rockers on the narrow porch.
“He had a stroke a couple of years ago,” Samuel says when he sees me wave at his brother. “He’s a young man. Can’t work really. I help him when I can.”
“That bicycle he is working on. That’s the one I was going to walk with tomorrow.” He says. “My back is hurt. Still not in good shape after the operation.”
He explains his injury and how it has hobbled him. “Heavy lifting. Working. Nothing dramatic. It comes and goes. But when it comes, mi madre, como viene!” he laughed. It comes with a vengeance.
“Although,” he says, “my asthma seems to be ok.”
He raises his fist to his chest in a centurion salute to indicate ok.
“Are you sure you can walk out with me?” I asked.
“Sure,” he says.
I settled into a restful, quiet evening. My feet need massaging, lotion, some loving. I take a cold shower in a hard chorro (jet) of water which digs into my scalp and skin with enough pressure to make it worth it. Above the sink in the bathroom hangs the frame of the mirror that once filled it. There is not one mirror in the house, I realize. In fact, I have not run across a mirror in such a long time that I really have no idea what I look like after a week of walking.
The windows have no glass and a pan in the kitchen only reflects a smokey, elongated version of my face. I make a mental note to look in shop windows when possible to do a quick assessment of how I am holding up.
***
“How are we getting out of town tomorrow morning?” I ask Samuel.
I have a long-standing habit, developed during the years of walking the Camino de Santiago, when exiting a town efficiently could make or break a morning’s walk, of running some reconnaissance the night before on the possible exits from town.
“Ok. There are two ways out. Let’s go up to the Coupet gas station. A left turn there will put you on a guardarraya out of town to Jorabada, where we’re going.”
“Then there’s this way,” he leads the way to the right after showing me the gas station a block away. At a large plaza with an open-air stage on one end, elevated on a half shell back drop, he says, “This turns into a discoteque on the weekends.”
There is always a place for music and dancing in Cuban towns. In that regard, things have changed little since Esteban watched the criollos and the mill workers dance the night away in the nearest town.
“Over there behind the stage is the old railroad line. That’s a shady walk most of the way to Jorobada.”
“Well, that’s the one we’re taking then,” I say. Walking old, overgrown railroad lines is the best way to go. Always.
“Ok,” he says. “That’s the way we’ll go. My daughter lives near here. Can we go see her, if it doesn’t bother you?”
“Of course,” I say.
Samuel’s daughter lives in the last house at the end of a dirt road on the edge of town. Beyond rises a field of sugarcane; black stalks, an advancing army of impossibly thin undead against the last hues of the sunset. “I was married,” he tell me. “Four times” He smiles. “I’m looking for number five.”
He pauses, thinking about his love life.
“I have friends, lovers even, but nothing serious.” He smiles and looks at me. “A man has to have a woman. A wife. Not complete without one.”
He sounds like Esteban talking. Estaban never stopped looking for women and, women were always looking for him, even if they did not know it before they found him. His visits to towns after emancipation always had a woman-searching purpose. In Havana, after the war was over, he told Barnet that the women went crazy for the liberators. In the carnival atmosphere he conquered over fifty women in a week. This is an impressive memory, whether accurate or exaggerated, that will provide warmth and comfort as one goes gentle into that goodnight. Samuel is looking for señora number five, the keeper, he hopes. Looking at his handsome, perpetually smiling face, it would not surprise me if had some interesting tales of carnivals and such.
His daughter’s house has a retail operation set up on the front porch and the living room. Ladies’ apparel, evidently. Bras and panties hanging everywhere. The daughter shrieks when she sees him
“Papi!” she cries, flinging her arms around his neck.
He introduces me as a friend visiting town. She is in her mid-twenties, beautiful honey colored skin. Lighter than her dad but not as light as his other Nordic blonde, with a complexion to match, daughter who appears from the back room.
“What are you doing here?” he asks surprised.
“Eh? Visiting. What are you doing here?” she says, head cocking, hands on hips in mock exasperation. He kisses her.
“Nothing. Just didn’t expect you.”
“We’re eating,” says the first daughter. “Want to eat with us?”
I put both hand on my stomach. “We just ate. Thank you.”
We sit in the two chairs that fit into the compact living room, the sales items hanging on ropes from window to wall like festival flags. Two white guys come in and sat on the floor. One is the husband of the blonde -- a thin, dark haired twenty something, as light skinned as the daughter. His friend looks like the bassist for U2, short cropped blond hair on top of a densely tattooed body; arms and shirtless chest covered with fading black ink.
The spectrum of phenotypes in Samuel’s family is Cuba today. The social construction of race, that which Americans from the United States consider to be so black and white, becomes complicated in any country where colonialism and massive utilization of African slave labor form part of the foundation stones of the society. I remember one of my first days in the United States, standing in line with my father to sign up to receive the survival assistance offered by the U.S. government to Cubans arriving in the 1960s. In front of me stood an immense man, who patiently explained to the government functionary taking his information that he was not black, that he was mulato, that his cousin was black but that he was mulato. The functionary, I am sure, looked at this dark-complected man, and saw a black man, a Negro, as the word was used in 1960s. But in Cuba, the history of race construction ran a different route than in the States. My immense dark Cuban was not a Black Cuban. He was a mulato Cuban. To fill out government paperwork labeling him a black man, a Negro, was inaccurate and I’m sure he felt apprehension at having official documents identify him as such. [2]
In Esteban’s day, in the days of proto-Cuba, before independence from Spain, the social world was blacker and whiter. In Esteban’s day, Cuba could claim, with equal authority, to be the most Spanish of Spanish colonies (aka the whitest colony) and the most African of Spanish colonies. The abolition of slavery occurred late in the game and the Spaniards were loathed to create anything but a hierarchical society based on race and religion. Although the colonizers had their way with African women, and Esteban pointed specifically at the priests as the worst offenders, it took decades for the current color pallet to become uniquely Cuban; where black, white, mestizo, and mulatos each saw themselves as equal partners in the making of Cuba. The war of independence from Spain established the foundation for the equal expectations of rights, in the nascent republic. Not to say that prejudice and injustice disappeared but the conflicts that arose between blacks, whites, mulatos and mestizos stemmed from each group’s firm belief that each had as much right to establish the rules of the game as any other group since all fought side by side and shed massive amounts of blood at the beginning of the national enterprise. Esteban fought for his rights after independence, as we will see soon enough. But the issue is far from settled. In today’s Cuba, racial equality remains a contested terrain.
Pointing at me and smiling Samuel says to his daughters, “this guy is walking to Cienfuegos.”
“Caminando?” asks the tattooed guy.
“Estas loco!?” says the blonde daughter.
[1] When, a year after walking into Matagua, I watch an episode of Westworld where Ed Harris shared a drink and some bullets on a wooden table on a dusty street in front of a bar, I thought, hey, that is Matagua!
[2] The Cuban census clearly indicates how differently Cubans view the concept of race. The Cuban census since its inception in the 1800s has been taken by door to door canvasing of the population by census workers. The “race” of the individuals in a household is not self-reported, as it is in the U.S. census where we sit with a form and self-identify our ethnicity and race. In Cuba, the census worker looks at the respondent and marks the race based on visual interpretation. Since the 1800, Cuban censuses report that approximately 60% of the population is identified as “white.” Any traveler from the United States will dispute this total since so many Cubans will appear to be “of color.” But you, my dear traveler, have no say in it. You cannot construct the racial categories of others anymore. At least that element of colonialism has lost its currency.
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