Adventure Divas (5 page)

By the time we find Gloria’s building in the Chinatown district of Havana, we are three hours late. We stuff ourselves into an elevator the size of an airplane lavatory, punch 3, and ascend in pitch black to the filmmaker’s apartment. The lift grinds to a halt and with a flip from the other side, a diamond-shaped window appears, revealing a living space, some sort of schnauzer mix yapping furiously, and a smiling Gloria Rolando.

“¡Hola, bienvenidos!”
She ushers us in, and we move from the dark into the small, tidy apartment. A shaft of fast-fading natural light pours over her tiny balcony and illuminates a rocking chair. Gloria is wearing a bright floral do-rag, a deep-gold cotton sweater, and dangling African earrings that dance with every welcoming kiss bestowed on our group.

Gloria wants to show me the house where she grew up, so after the greetings we clamber back into Havana’s old stone streets for a “walk and talk.” We dodge carts and playing children on a narrow street in Chinatown. When interviewing Cubans all you have to say is
“¿Como estás?”
and the floodgates open. Gloria is no exception. Speaking in English, with the slurred charm of the Cuban accent, she tours me around her childhood neighborhood. “I love Cuba very much. I grew up in Chinatown. In Havana we had a big community of Chinese people. I grew up between black people and Spanish, and Chinese, and Jews. This is Cuba: many people and only one people,” she says, guiding us to the right, down a narrow street. Gloria points to a dilapidated façade of what must once have been a spectacular building, with high rectangular windows topped by arched portals. Only now there is no glass, just spaces roughly filled by plywood. Gloria nods toward the first floor. “That was our home. My sister and I were right there when a huge explosion shattered the glass above us.”

That blast was Gloria’s first taste of the revolution that would eventually reshape her homeland, and her life. With the forced end of the Batista regime, and the social and educational reforms that emerged under Castro, Gloria was able to accomplish what was previously unthinkable for an impoverished black Cuban. She earned a graduate degree from the University of Havana, and became a working filmmaker.

Unlike Lizette Vila, who works within state-sponsored TV, Gloria is an independent filmmaker. In her work she explicitly explores race through preserving the images and heritage of the African diaspora—the loose community of people throughout the Americas whose ancestors were brought here as slaves.

Several of Gloria’s best-known documentaries have explored the religion of Santería, a faith that emerged from the collision of the West African Yoruba religion with the Catholicism that slaves encountered in the New World. Forced to convert by their masters, Yoruban slaves continued to worship the guardian spirits, or orishas, of their native religion, but hid them behind the fa-çade of Catholic saints. A similar process took place throughout the Caribbean, giving rise, for example, to the Haitian practice of voodoo.

“When you grow up living in this kind of neighborhood, you see images of Santería. It was normal for me to listen to the language of the drums; to see altars with many flowers—with Catholic images but also special devotion to orishas like Ochún, Changó, and Obatala.” I figure this religious activity must have been somewhat clandestine, because when Gloria was a kid the government’s ban on religion was strictly enforced. These days, things have loosened up.

Back in her apartment, Gloria pops one of her films into an old video player and shows me an excerpt. In it a possessed, sweaty, shirtless man is circled by dancing worshippers and repeatedly beats a broad machete into the stony ground. Edited into the scene are shots of an actor playing the part of Oggun, the god of iron, war, and labor, doing pretty much the same thing. She shows me another, more ethereal scene, in which a drop-dead-gorgeous woman in a flowing yellow dress moves sensuously through a swamp.

“Ochún,” Gloria says, as if this explains it all.

At this point, my head is chock-full of new information. I have no way to process these unfamiliar words and images. Clearly I must learn more about Santería if I plan to properly reflect Cuba in this show.

Gloria gets up to stop the VCR and tells me that she recently founded an organization called Imagenes del Caribe (Images of the Caribbean) in order to “do things her way” and pursue topics that most compel her, whether or not she has institutional support. Sounds familiar.

“Since I took the decision to direct my own documentaries, my own films, I didn’t stop because I don’t have resources. I can’t wait; I don’t have the
right
to wait. I don’t
want
to wait,” she says with loads of conviction in her round chestnut eyes. “And for that reason, the struggle is part of my life.”

Cuba’s shattered economy creates a difficult climate in which to make films. Plus, artistic freedom under Castro, a topic Gloria declines to discuss with me, complicates matters even further. While the revolution helped Gloria get an education, I can only guess that it’s also responsible for restricting her expression.

As media makers in the United States, I suppose we do not risk being charged as political dissidents, but the fact that all our major media outlets are owned by a handful of corporations (PBS being an exception) acts as its own unique form of censorship. An independent filmmaker might be able to scrape together the money to create a film, but if she or he is iced out of distribution outlets due to a topic that challenges the agenda of the corporate parent company—or simply because the topic is not commercial enough—isn’t this too a kind of cultural censorship?

“Are there ways in which struggle has actually helped you?” I ask Gloria, noting that the word
struggle
has come up frequently in my short time here.

“Struggle is everything for me,” she responds. “Everything. You need to
attack
the realities; you need to, you know, to be strong. Of course I cry—I am a human being also—and I have to sacrifice many things in my personal life. But I think that is a way I could express my love,” she says.

Pfffft.

Shit. The interview comes to an abrupt halt. Our only lightbulb has burned out on cue (and it’s not like we can hustle down to Wal-Mart for another). The orishas are telling us something. But I am frustrated. It is nine o’clock at night and Gloria is leaving town in the morning, so there is no way to continue our interview. We are left with love.

The
love
thing
still lingers the next morning, when we set out on a cross-country road trip to do more interviews. I don’t completely understand the largesse in Gloria’s use of the word. I assume love, as Gloria expressed it, means love of her people and her heritage. Her work celebrates and memorializes a culture ravaged by slavery. Capturing Afro-Cuban art and achievements, and reflecting it back to the people and to the larger culture, is how she expresses her love.

James Baldwin said, “Love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within. I use the word not merely in the personal sense but as a state of being or a state of grace—not in the infantile American sense of being made happy but in the tough and universal sense of quest and daring and growth.”

But this kind of love still feels remote to me. My understanding is more in keeping with
Life After God
author Douglas Coupland’s musing on suburban youth: “I think the price we paid for our golden life was an inability to fully believe in love; instead we gained an irony that scorched everything it touched and I wonder if this irony is the price we paid for the loss of God.”

I look out the window at sugarcane fields zipping by, wondering how
—if—
one can muddle together irony, politics, and love, and end up with something akin to a crisp martini (and not blue Kool-Aid).

I’m intrigued by some of the tools the people we’ve met so far wield in their struggle to realize their passions and politics: emotion, booty, love. Unusual for a place usually defined by its identity as a pinko outpost and a revolutionary state. Perhaps there is a new kind of pink think brewing.

Poets, of course,
are the natural peddlers of love. Poets are the ones who distill life’s giant je ne sais quoi down to a pot of sweet nectar. So, it is a poet who we are on our way to see. Early on, Catherine tipped us off to Carilda Oliver Labra, and since then we have noticed her poetry in the country’s ubiquitous bookstalls. (As an editor on the lam, I appreciate this reflection of one of the revolution’s successes: Cuba’s 98 percent literacy rate.) Labra is the author of many volumes of award-winning poetry. Her first collection,
Preludo lirico
(“Lyric Prelude”), launched her career. In 1950, she won the National Prize of Poetry for her book
Al sur de mi garganta
(“To the South of My Throat”). She took considerable flak in the forties and fifties for the steamy content of some of her work. Her collection
Memoria de la fiebre
(“Memory of Fever”) sealed her reputation as an “erotic” writer, and for a time her work was banned. But now, with age and increased government tolerance, she has morphed from scandalous hellion into Cuban national treasure.

Three hours after leaving Havana we arrive at the town of Matanzas, a port city filled with faded austerity that feels relatively provincial after five days in the hustle of Havana. In the early 1800s, booming with wealth from the slave and sugar trades, Matanzas became a cultural Mecca, and it remains so today. The town is often called “the Athens of Cuba,” as it is, and has been, home to many artists, poets, and writers. Labra’s house, small and elegant, oozes intellectual richness and sturdy supple-leather good taste. We walk in and the living room buzzes with a small group of women who seem like handlers and serve us slices of yellow sponge cake with sugary white frosting. The women are fawning and doting and, well, handling. (I later find out they are representatives of the Federation of Cuban Women and are here to help host us.)

Carilda is wearing a white linen blazer and has big red hair. She is as creased and sparkly and attractive as her home, but the most striking thing about her is that she is in a hurry.

She is the first person I’ve met in Cuba who is
actually
in a hurry
.

Carilda is on her way to give a reading in a nearby town but still has us in for a quick visit. Her forty-year-old husband breezes through, evidence that Carilda must still have the erotic spark that created so many poems. She is eighty-one.

Despite her standing in Cuba, Carilda is little known in the United States and only one of her volumes has been translated into English. A by-product of the economic embargo has been a forty-year constipation in the exchange of art between our countries. Most of the books available in the United States are by Cubans who left with the revolution, or their offspring, the first-generation Cuban Americans. When it comes to music—rap, say—illegal satellite dishes and bootleg tapes spread that Americana through Cuba. Black-market poetry has yet to become in vogue, even though many organizations, such as Global Exchange, have worked hard over the years to encourage a steady trickle of cultural to-and-fro. There is also the challenge of being published in her own country, not for lack of popularity but, rather, for lack of paper on which to print the books.

The Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 inspired Carilda to write “Declaration of Love.”

I ask if I’m wise

when I awaken

the danger between his thighs

or if I’m wrong

when my kisses prepare only a trench

in his throat

I know that war is probable

especially today

because a red geranium has blossomed open.

Please don’t point your weapons

at the sky:

the sparrows are terrorized,

and it’s springtime,

it’s raining,

the meadows are ruminating.

Please, you’ll melt the moon, only night-light of the poor.

It’s not that I’m afraid,

or a coward.

I’d do everything for my homeland;

but don’t argue so much over your nuclear missiles,

because something horrible is happening

and I haven’t had time enough to love.

“My best poetry,” she has said, “is that which expresses erotic love, but also the love between a man and a woman integrated with universal love. For me, poetry does many things: tells truth, creates and praises beauty, contributes to the intellectual pleasure, allows us to unite with all humankind as it denounces injustice and captures the essence of life.”

“What are you going to read us?” I ask Carilda, as we set up our cameras to film her recitation of something I hope will be erotic. I despise how older women are always depicted as asexual, and this could be an opportunity to transmit a new image. Carilda slowly leans back into her antique wooden chair, crosses one bare calf over the other, and tells me, in a voice that galavants between lilt and husk, “When my grandmother came from Spain, married with her three little children, one of which was my mother, she brought a little bit of Spanish soil in a bag. Once in a while, I would see my grandmother taking the little bag that contained the soil and smelling it, thinking ‘Ay, my Spanish land, I will never go back to Spain,’ with such nostalgia and sadness. Then, when my mother went into exile, I remember that she searched for a little bag and filled it with Cuban soil. When I visited her for the first time in the United States, she said to me, ‘Didn’t you bring a little bit of soil?’ I said, ‘But you already have a little bit of soil.’ She said, ‘Yes, but it has lost the scent of Cuba.’

“My mother never could come back to Cuba and that is why this poem was born,” she tells me as she settles even farther into the leather and begins to recite.