Adventure Divas (3 page)

I try to lean out the window of the car for my first, forbidden glimpses of Havana, but I’m jabbed by the dozen wads of twenty-dollar bills that are strapped with duct tape all over my body. We are officially
not here,
so we can’t exactly write a traveler’s check or whip out a Gold Card. I look arthritic and feel like a coke dealer.

Twenty minutes later we are at the front desk of a modest deco hotel in La Habana Vieja. I pull two twenty-dollar bills from our finite cache, and hand them to the concierge. “Doesn’t feel like trading with the enemy,” I whisper to Jeannie, as he smiles warmly at me and hands over three skeleton keys attached to pieces of chestnut wood bearing numbers.

“No going back now,” she says. “This is it.”

Paul yawns big, and we can all relate to his exhaustion.

A rooster’s optimistic crow
quickly followed by a belligerent truck muffler rouse me at seven the next morning. I am fully clothed, spread-eagled on the center of a concave bed, my open mouth pressed flush against the pilled, off-white cotton bedspread. My feet and a thousand dollars in cash are in my still-laced Georgia boots.

I slowly roll over, torso followed by reluctant limbs. I open my eyes and see Jeannie, who is sitting cross-legged on the other bed, glasses perched on the end of her small nose, writing on a yellow legal pad with a black felt-tip pen. This
has
been a drastic career change, I think, anticipating a first day on the road with my mother, and for the first time
truly
panicking. I have been going through a rebellious “my mother, myself” phase and lately when I look down at my thighs, I see
her
thighs, and thus my future, and the whole thing creeps me out. Could I really
work
with my mother? I shook off the dust of my suburban youth at seventeen and never looked back. Is this foolish? Will I live to regret it? Will we fail? Will she tell me to comb my hair?

I take off my boots and begin peeling apart fermented twenties and eating chocolate-covered coffee beans brought from Seattle, while she fastidiously makes lists.

We are both exhausted and our duffles have exploded on the black-and-white tiled floor of our plain but spacious room. We are all doubled up in hotel rooms for the night to accommodate our shoestring budget. Nobody wanted to room with me and Jeannie because we are “production”—the people who troubleshoot, grovel, manipulate, take calls at all hours, and generally don’t sleep because if something goes wrong it’s
our
asses on the line. But in our case, it is not only our asses, but our funding, professional reputations, and thirty-year mother-daughter relationship. (As the youngest of her four kids, I feel both responsible for her happiness and unable to resist piercing it once in a while.) Mutual respect has meant that we have worked well together in recent months, but moments of free-floating
fray
do occur and our handling of boundary issues is spotty. Occasionally, we spiral.

“I can’t believe you let the film stock get X-rayed at the airport,” I say, slightly huffy, flopping onto the bed.

“Look, I had no choice,” she says. “At least it wasn’t one of the Soviet machines. They’re powerful, and we’d be in real trouble.”

“And what about the ship’s captain we want to interview in Santiago? We’ve got to confirm that. You were supposed to have confirmed that weeks ago,” I say, unleashing my anxieties on her in an adolescent tone that would be absent if we were not genetically bound.

But—

Uh—you said—

Ohhh, I can’t stand when you—

Hun-neee.

Mu-thurr!!

The conversation spins, down, down, down into a soupy X-chromosomal morass of guilt, confusion, blame—and ends with both of us in tears. Then, the final, devastating twist of the butter knife comes: “You may not realize this until I’m
dead,
” my mother says
sotto voce,
“but I love you.”

We both splash our faces with cold water. Mom hands me a towel. We leave our room to go meet the crew for breakfast. People often ask what it is like to work with one’s mother. I think of this moment before simply answering, “Really great.”

It is difficult to convey. The best thing about working with your mother is that you know, on a deep level, that someone always has your back. But you also feel, on an equally deep level, that someone is always
on
your back.

Cheryl and I
take off after breakfast to explore the neighborhood around our hotel while the others prepare the gear and make production arrangements. On last night’s drive to the hotel some “bad neighborhood” radar was going off, but in the light of a Caribbean morning Havana feels transformed. The crumbling Spanish colonial mansions are opulence in decay. We walk down narrow streets lined with stone buildings colored in a varied palette of chipped mustards, dusty corals, and chalky sea-foam green. My middle-class American brain thinks
Urban Outfitters wet dream
but knows the living conditions for most Cubans are anything but stylish. Music wafts out from behind clean, taut laundry that gently dances on drying lines strung between the wrought-iron balconies of La Habana Vieja.

Cheryl and I are the youngest of our crew, that is, the only ones who weren’t alive to hide under school desks during the Cuban Missile Crisis. We met last year covering a Snowboarding for Breast Cancer event in Lake Tahoe. Cheryl’s mission in Cuba is to capture “atmosphere,” the spaces between the words that often tell the real story. I watch her swing her hand-cranked Beaulieu camera with athleticism and grace, her celluloid soaking up the gritty textures of Havana. She shoots from the hip, literally, and ends up dancing with her subjects as often as filming them.

“Lots of arches, but none of them golden,” I say to Cheryl, noticing the Spanish architecture and the dearth of fast food. Seattle, with its social reserve and pandemic of Starbucks, feels like a stark contrast.

“Yeah, it’s weird,” she says. “Less than a hundred miles from the U.S. and no neon, no commercialism.”

Decades into the revolution and the U.S. economic embargo, Cuba is one of the few countries in the world not drowned in consumer culture or subject to the whims of international capital. Certainly the Cuban people are suffering from economic deprivation, and the middle-aged revolution is in need of more than retooling, but there is something unique, if not honorable, about a country that has never been pushed around by the IMF or given a high school contract to Coca-Cola in exchange for a blackboard.

Cheryl and I have wandered far from our hotel, lured along like Hansel and Gretel by a photogenic trail of political propaganda that is splashed along sides of buildings and across billboards, which effectively replaces advertising:
LA REVOLUCIóN! CHE VIVE!

“Let’s shoot that one,” I say to Cheryl, pointing at a giant billboard with a cartoon figure of a wizened Uncle Sam, in an oversized red, white, and blue top hat, being yelled at by cartoon Cuban revolutionaries from across a body of water:
MR. IMPERIALIST WE HAVE NO FEAR OF YOU!
the rebels proclaim in giant red letters.

Images of the dashing Argentine revolutionary Che Guevara gaze intently over public squares and he is lionized on every peso. He was intelligent, sensitive, literary—or so the legend goes.

“In an easier time, Che would have definitely been a fly fisher,” I say.

“Muy guapo,”
says Cheryl, panning slowly across a twelve-square-foot silhouette of his image painted on a cement wall.
Live
Che was pivotal in the revolution that freed Cuba from the grip of President Batista, “Mr. Imperialist’s” Cuban puppet of the 1950s.
Dead
Che’s martyr status (he was executed by U.S.-trained and -armed Bolivian counterinsurgency forces) has been leveraged for four decades by Fidel Castro in order to forward his own ideas, and to cement his power.

Fidel Castro’s own image is not prominently displayed, yet
el Jefe
is omnipresent, like oxygen: all around, influencing everything, but invisible (except when delivering one of his epic speeches on state television).

Castro has done many unforgivable things. His ongoing persecution of artists and political dissidents, internment of gays and lesbians, and failure to make good on his promise of many years ago to hold free elections are just a few among them. But part of me has to tip my hat to this rare political leader who can elude the CIA’s exploding cigars and poison pens (a couple of the Agency’s more entertaining assassination attempts) and flip the birdie at Uncle Sam for forty years and running.

Cheryl has her lens trained on a strong, curvy woman who is striding by in a red, white, and blue Lycra jumpsuit. “Women really
own
their butts here,” I observe as the woman turns down another street. Just then, a young man walks up to speak to us.

“De donde eres? Canadá? Inglaterra?”
he inquires.

“Los Estados Unidos,”
Cheryl responds cautiously. He is only mildly surprised, and is very friendly. “The bar where Hemingway drank mojitos every afternoon is right around the corner,” he says with a smile, switching to English.

Hemingway. Thus, the Fidel-Che-Ernest trio of Cuba’s male cultural icons is complete. But just as Libya is not “one man in a desert,” as the saying goes, Cuba is not three men and a cigar. We are more interested in finding our own brand of icon. “We want to interview women who are passionate, visionary, and independent—you know,
divas,
” I explain. The man backs away slowly, smiling kindly, and walks off.

On Day Three,
dawn cracks hazy over Havana’s Malecón waterfront and I no longer think I can see Florida.

“We’ve got to get something in the can,” says Jeannie, sipping a coffee, ever sensitive to our abbreviated schedule. She’s right: We have to make an hour-long documentary in nine days with a paltry ten hours of film (all we could afford). We lined up some interviews from the United States, but our production schedule isn’t complete and we’re prepared to lean on serendipity to fill in the gaps. That is why Cheryl and I hit the street and join in a local stickball game happening in a nearby vacant lot, where chunky remnants of a building from an era past mark the bases. Baseball is probably our respective countries’ most profound common love, and the easy way these boys are playing confirms that the sport is not a new love to this culture. While Cheryl bats a double, I chat up twelve-year-old Oscar. “What’s happening around Havana?
¿Hay música? ¿Fiestas?
” Oscar bunts at a rock with his bat, sending the stone zinging into what was once a load-bearing wall. He says his cousin said he knows someone who knows someone who said that there’s a girl rap group called Instinto performing in a “basement” near Revolution Square in a little while. “Basement” doesn’t sound promising but “girl” and “rap” and “revolution” do.

“Yeah, I know of Instinto,” says Catherine, when I ask her. “Definitely worth checking out. They’re one of only a few female rap groups in Cuba.”

We grab our gear, pile into a ’57 Bel Air hardtop taxi (or so says Paul, breathlessly), and are unloaded twenty minutes later near a massive statue of José Martí. Revolution Square is home to a slew of ministry buildings in all shades of gray, the requisite Che mural, the Comite Central of the Communist Party, and all the offices where Fidel and his ministers work. In short, we are inside the Beltway, madly running toward a basement full of rappers.

The basement is in fact an underground club (my bad translation) called Café Cantante, which is underneath the National Theatre. In the afternoons it opens to alternative youth bands. We pay our five pesos and descend into the darkness. We are immediately enveloped in a womb pulsing with teenagers and twentysomethings, showing considerable skin. The place is absolutely in blossom—pheromones zinging between people and off walls with an abandon that only takes place below the Tropic of Cancer. The fourteen-year-old girl in her first tube top, working the brand-new goods, epitomizes the high-pitched atmosphere. It is dark, which sucks for filming purposes and sends Paul into a funk. Yet when Instinto takes the stage they light up the dingy space. Talent. Voice. Belly. Booty. Confidence. In a word, divas.

Each member of the trio takes turns rapping front and center while the other two support. The skinny lead singer wears flowing loose cream pants and a snug-fitting halter top. The muscular girl with the black cap has on a brown silk collared shirt with a single critical button done under her strong, round breasts. The third performer, in tight jeans, a tan T-shirt, and sneakers, moves like magic under a jubilant cascade of long corn-rowed hair. But what they wear is quickly eclipsed by their more forceful elements of style.

Come on, get closer

I don’t want to shock you

I want to rap you close

There is no wizard here

What I do is art

(It works much better in Spanish, when it all rhymes and there’s lots of body language involved.)

After ninety sweaty minutes, Instinto climbs off stage and Catherine and I walk up to their lead singer, Iramis. “We’d love to arrange an interview and performance somewhere with better light. Are you interested?”

“Sin problema. Estaremos encantados. Pues, ¿de donde son ustedes? Yo tengo un primo en Miami,”
Iramis responds, looking at me. (“No problem. We’d be delighted. Hey, where are you from? I have a cousin in Miami.”)

Two hours later, Janet, Iramis, and Dori meet us at a cobblestone square and, with three unified claps of their hands, begin an a cappella street performance that would have MTV execs drooling.

Instinto creates its beat, covers ground, and conveys a message, with a groove so deep it looks accidental. They glide across the square, taking turns sidling up to the lens, delivering a booty politic, and backing one another up.

Mid-performance, a nearby grammar school lets out, and little girls and boys in red school outfits organically merge into the scene. We keep shooting. Instinto’s
oomph
washes over the kids, who start doing their best to emulate them. Now, smooth, grown-up hips move in fluid rotation, next to tiny bodies that throw their whole selves into the effort.