|
|
|
 |
Dreaming in Cuban Fidel's realm holds enduring appeal to "yuman" beings. By Tom Miller Editor's note: Fresh out from the publisher Travelers' Tales is a volume of "true stories" about Cuba, assembled by widely traveled Tucson writer and literary man-about-the-border Tom Miller. "The writers swoon, argue, get frustrated and fall in love," Miller writes of the contributors he has rounded up. "They are innocents, sophisticates, naïfs and spirited participants. They're bewildered, up-ended, challenged, disillusioned and hopeful. Some are gullible, others suspicious. None are passive, and each has a good story to tell." That's just the writers; Cuba's own rich contradictions go beyond even that, as you might perceive from Miller's introduction to Travelers' Tales: Cuba.
When the United States government broadened the definition of who can legally travel to Cuba in the late 1990s, an overflow of applications came gushing in. While the number of American tourists ignoring U.S. strictures on travel to the island continued to increase, a whole new breed of "study groups" started to appear. My favorite was a flock of undergraduate English students from an upper Midwest frostbelt college who came to the sunny Caribbean in the dead of winter. They were the usual bunch--unfailingly polite, hair predominantly adolescent orange, and they spoke almost no Spanish. They were in Cuba, they averred, to learn about Hemingway in Havana. And this is how these American college students studied Hemingway in Havana: Every morning after finishing breakfast at their hotel's buffet, they returned to their rooms and changed into their swim suits, picked up a towel and a Hemingway paperback or two, descended to the pool, and lay down in a lounge chair to study Hemingway in Havana.
It's surprisingly easy to sidestep the well-marked tourist trail, to get under Cuba's skin. Spend a peso to ride a city bus. Pass an afternoon walking the streets of La Lisa or La Víbora, two neighborhoods that seldom see foreigners. Late at night drop in at the Cabaret Las Vegas, a decidedly second-rate but wonderful nightclub, and watch musicians, dancers, rappers, magicians, comics and crooners take the stage in rapid succession in an all-night variety show. Most recently, the Las Vegas has appeared in Pedro Juan Gutiérrez's fiction, Dirty Havana Trilogy, but if you stay long enough you may feel like a character in Three Trapped Tigers, Guillermo Cabrera Infante's masterly and bawdy 1960s novel set in Havana's decadent pre-Castro years. The book's narrator, who wears many hats but sometimes little else, hangs out at the Las Vegas, where a wide variety of fleshy entertainers whisper bad puns in his ear. Listen closely to what people on the street call norteamericanos. If it sounds like "yuma," you've got good ears. In Cuban street slang, yuma means a foreigner, more specifically, someone from a non-Spanish speaking European or North American country, and most particularly, from the United States. When someone asks my brother-in-law where his sister went, he might say, "Se fue pa' la yuma." She went to the United States. Or an American tourist strolling down Havana's Prado might hear, "¡Oye, yuma! ¡Ven acá!" Hey 'merican, com'ere! Yuma is a word unknown in Mexico or any other Spanish-speaking country that I know of. Cubans have always liked our Westerns going back deep into the Batista years, including the Glenn Ford classic, 3:10 to Yuma. The movie, popular in theaters and on Cuban television, was quintessentially American. Based on a 1953 Elmore Leonard short story, it portrayed the nuance of cowboy honor and obligation. In the quirky way that one language absorbs the sounds and images of another, Cuba, which has embraced so many American totems, has taken Yuma if not to its heart, at least to its tongue. The Cuban street-slang yuma derives directly from the film 3:10 to Yuma.
I brought along a bottle of rum--de rigueur for a foreigner visiting a Cuban for the first time--and with some ice cubes Carr retrieved from a neighbor's refrigerator, we climbed a ladder to his building's rooftop. There we sipped Havana Club as my host pointed out landmarks on the Havana skyline: nearby, the old American-owned telephone company; farther away the cluster of buildings at the Plaza de la Revolución where Pope John Paul II--himself a yuma--celebrated mass in 1998. I pointed waaay off to the north and a little west, and said, "La yuma, ¿verdad?" The United States, right? Carr nodded, agreeing that indeed the word likely came from 3:10 to Yuma. Moreover, he thought it was reinforced by the similarity between the first syllables of Yew-ma and Yew-nited States. Next time I see Carr I'll present him with Cubana Be/Cubana Bop, eight syllables that ought to keep the linguist busy for a while.
With his cane he pointed back down the road I'd just come to town on. "You must have that German map," he said with a chuckle. "Every few days someone comes here looking for a road that doesn't exist, and every one of you has that German map." I looked at the fine print in the corner, and indeed the map was produced in Germany. We lost travelers were the fellow's only source of entertainment, and he invited me to sit a spell and chat. He was known as El Blanco--Whitey--he said, but there were fewer and fewer villagers left to call him that. The town had no industry and farm labor opportunities were shrinking. Many of his neighbors had gone to Havana to try their luck. Officials in Havana, alarmed that their overcrowded city was growing yet further, began checking ID cards and sending easterners back home. It became the buzz of the street, just below the surface, but Los Van Van, the best dance band north of the South Pole, gave the anguish high profile with their song, "La Habana no aguanta más," Havana just can't take any more. Another of their uptempo songs popular in Havana's overrun barrios tells of the magical carpenters who manage to create yet more space out of already cramped living quarters. "Artesanos del espacio," it's called, Artisans of Space. Los Van Van give sassy voice to those who have the least. To many travelers, Whitey in the countryside and Los Van Van's audience in the big city have a certain incorruptible integrity. It stems not from what they have but from what they don't: McDonald's, and the worldwide consumerism it symbolizes. With the foreboding that such businesses may well come ashore in the early post-Castro era, and ignoring that many Cubans would welcome such flamboyant and homogenized offerings, most travelers marvel at the opportunity to visit a land in its pre-golden arches era. The U.S. embargo, nasty and reprehensible as it is, has helped isolate Cuban culture from the commercial excesses of our own. After the embargo melts, well, we can all meet to discuss this further at Six Flags Over Cuba.
Tom Miller is the editor of Travelers' Tales: Cuba, from which the above has been excerpted, and the author of Trading with the Enemy: A Yankee Travels through Castro's Cuba (Basic Books). His most recent book, Jack Ruby's Kitchen Sink: Offbeat Travels Through America's Southwest (National Geographic Adventure Press) recently won the Lowell Thomas Award for Best Travel Book of the Year, and an earlier work, The Panama Hat Trail, will be have its 15th anniversary edition published this fall. Miller will participate with Greg McNamee, Edie Jarolim, Rob Rachowiecki and Doris Evans in a travel-writer signing event Saturday, July 14 from 2 to 4 p.m. at Reader's Oasis, 3400 E. Speedway Blvd.
|
 |
Home | Currents | City Week | Music | Review | Books | Cinema | Back Page | Archives
|
 |
© 1995-2001 Tucson Weekly . Info Booth |
|
