by Elizabeth Hanly.
‘Volume One’: that’s what the first generation of visual artists to grow up with Fidel’s revolution was called. I was writing about them and had been invited to a party.
To arrive there, one needed to climb four flights of stairs, go out a window and up a ladder on a side of a building. Several ‘Volume One’ artists, taking housing shortages in stride, had built themselves variously designed illegal rooftop homes.
My host had a refrigerator painted in stripes like an old-time Coke machine. “I like the rhythm,” he told me, referring to the stripes.
There was plenty of home-made rum at the party; everybody was getting drunk, everybody except a man called Omar — Omar BenAmi, who was not a visual artist, but a maker of drums. Sometimes, he told me, he worked with wood that was nearly blue. It came from the other end of the island.
Omar was in his mid‑forties, I guessed. He was slight of build; he sat very still with his periscope eyes. There was something old‑fashioned about him, something of an elderly gentleman’s elegance to his manners and the cadence of his speech.
“There’s good wood for drums even close to Havana,” he went on. “Out past Cubanacan, near the old country club where Fidel and the diplomats live.”
Apparently Omar liked it out there. He liked to go alone. Sometimes he’d run into old men teaching children about the drumming as they sat under certain trees. Omar would head out past Cubanacan to look for wood for his sacred drums. “Sacred drums?” I asked. It hadn’t occurred to me that sacred rhythms would need sacred drums.
“Yes, most of the drums I make are sacred. The sacred drums, the batá, come in threes,” he said. “A mother drum and two children make up a family, and each family must come from the wood of a single tree.”
“How do you know which tree to choose?” I inquired.
“I ask the trees, of course,” he replied. “Would a tree like to be sanctified? And if the tree tells me no, I make a conga instead.”
One afternoon a few days later when I returned to the hotel, the receptionist called me over. She had something for me, she said with a smirk. She brought out a great burlap bag of oranges and pointed around the corner to the ‘gentleman’ who brought them.
Omar was waiting in the lobby. He’d managed to get in. God knows how. At the time, security police made it their business to keep foreigners and Cubans as far away from each other as possible; the purity of revolutionary society was at stake. So was preventing crime directed against an increasing essential tourist trade. Omar’s skin was ebony-colored: ‘the color of telephones,’ they say in Cuba; ‘the color of delinquents,’ allegedly race-blind revolutionary Cubans also say. Omar’s entry was a virtual coup.
Not only was he in the lobby, he was sitting there smiling happily, sitting, in fact, in the fine copy of the Louis XIV chair where Hector, the revolutionary bureaucrat assigned to watch over me, would often sit in wait.
Omar and I shared an orange, and then he asked me to go for a walk.
That afternoon, we passed an ice‑cream parlor that looked like a large UFO. We passed empty stores with very large mermaids conversing in their windows.
Omar pointed across the bay to a great statue of the Christ, not unlike the one so famous in Ipanema, except this one had no head. “It happened during the early days of the revolution,” Omar said, recounting one storm or another. “Christ losing his head with the revolution always worried the Santeros,” he told me, referring to the Afro-Cuban priests.
We walked on. After a time, Omar announced that we would be stopping to visit his elderly neighbor, a woman named Pura, for it was Sunday, and he always looked in on Pura on Sunday.
We opened a gate and walked along a narrow passageway with more than its share of chickens and goats, all of them illegal, of course. The last doorway in the alley was Pura’s.
“Today’s Carnival is shit,” she said when Omar told her I had asked about the upcoming celebration. “Just about everything today is shit. Fidel says he made the revolution for people like us. What he made is shit.”
Our visit was brief. Omar said we must leave before she would apologize for having no coffee to offer us.
Pura took my hand, as she accompanied us to the street. “Ay m’hijita, there is a man in the town where you live. You two have made a promise to accompany one another throughout this life.”
“Does he know that?” I wanted to ask.
Omar and I had walked several blocks when I turned back. Pura was there; she was waving still.
We walked some more until we arrived at a home for the elderly in Central Havana. Apparently Omar also stopped in here on Sundays to visit any number of folks.
“Why do young people in today’s Havana today dance so fast?” an elderly singer named Tito asked me. “It is a tragedy,” he said. “It is the saddest thing I know, sadder even than history. What can their love-making be like, if they dance that fast?”
We were received in a room full of fluorescent light and couches covered in cheap plastic, but Tito wore a cravat with his jacket.
“Even after all these years, my voice remains exactamente igual,” he said. “I have lost nothing with time. Nothing,” he smiled.
Tito went on about the places where he had sung. “Never the dives, although they were, of course, enchanting. Never ‘los lugares de mala muerte’ along the beach in Marianao. Never even in the grand social centers. Only in the very best clubs: San Souci, Montmartre, the Tropicana, the Casino de la Playa.
“’Ay, mulata don’t dance like that,’” he sang for me. “’If you dance like that, I’m going to lose my way.’
“At any gathering of importance, there would be a jazz band,” he explained, “and also a full orchestra with a Cuban swing. I mostly sang love songs with the orchestra. I fell in love easily in those days.”
A nursing attendant had entered the room with sundry pills.
The crooner tried to ignore her and went on about the boat races at the Lancha, the best of the clubs in Miramar. In a particular slap to the ancien regime, the revolution had given the Lancha to Havana’s hard-hats, the state’s construction union. Once upon a time the Lancha “had the swankiest Carnival balls and the darkest bars of all the clubs. But if you were looking for darkness, there were the Spanish social centers too, Centro Gallego and Centro Asturiano. ”
He was referring to dances held in two buildings across from Havana’s 19th century Gran Teatro de la Habana, buildings that were no less baroque. “I went there,” he reminded me, “to dance rather than to sing. There was different music coming from each floor,” he sighed. “The best floor, in my opinion, was the ground floor. Jazz was played there in the dark. Mothers didn’t want their daughters to linger on the ground floor. Not even for a minute. No, no, no.
“There were the boat races,” he went on, “and there were the horse races.
“Havana’s hippodrome had whole walls made of stained glass images of Osiris and Isis. There were extensive rose gardens.
“Mi cielo, sit closer.” He leaned towards me. “I am a gambler,” he murmured in my ear, “and I have known wonders.
“One night there was a man from the States…”
The medicine was beginning to kick in. Tito rambled a bit. About how fair this Yankee was, how mulatas love to touch skin so white.
“The Yankee won a fortune, and he gave it away to a girl who was singing. None of us even knew her name. He went to sleep. Not one of us could believe he went to sleep.
“There were night when I too won fortunes, but I didn’t go home to sleep. These were nights of such sweetness: They are too painful to remember. Still I remember.
Our next stop: the home of Richard Egües, a flutist with the Orquesta Aragón, one of Cuba’s most popular orchestras in the 1940s and ’50s. Egües may not have invented cachacha, but he and his flute had gone a long way towards bringing it into its own. Now Egües was sick. He needed milk and couldn’t find any. Omar was bringing him some.
Omar was also preparing some goo that Egües would later pour over some stones that he kept in a Limoges tureen high up on a shelf in the corner of his ‘50s middle- class home. Egües spoke about keeping those stones close always; they had even traveled with him to see the pyramids when the orchestra had played in Cairo. Now they would return him to health.
We said goodbye to Egües and waited for a bus, and then another.
We waited, and we saw several pick-up trucks filled with families speeding along. “Volunteers,” Omar explained. “Who knows what nonsense someone has planned for them today?
“No,” he said, anticipating my question. “It wasn’t always like this. Once our revolution was a beautiful dream. I was going to learn French. Imagine. Then trucks came and began to collect the saints.”
“The saints?” I asked.
“Yes, the trucks came, and they dumped out the saints like bits of broken garbage.”
“The statues?” I asked.
“No,” he insisted, “the saints.”
Slums/solares don’t exist in Fidel’s Cuba, but Omar’s mom lived in one. We were going to an address where perhaps seventy families lived. They had sheets rather than doors on their cubicles. On an upper floor, down a narrow rotting plank of a walkway, a dozen people were milling around the cubicle farthest from the stairs. This was where we were headed. Before I met his mom, Omar was hoping I’d want to meet the priest of his faith whom he trusted above all others, the one who had been there when he was born, or as Omar put it, “when first I opened my eyes.”
Two very old men dressed in white—the priest and his younger brother– were sitting on mats on the floor, grinding some plants to powder, and then drawing designs with it on round wooden tablets. Their hands moved so quickly, there was a kind of whir in the room. The powder was to be given to one of those present, a man whose wife was critically ill. She had been hospitalized; doctors were working with her too; one of them was here. Omar said her husband would leave the powder at a crossroads for Eleggua, lord of the crossroads, messenger between the gods and mankind. Then, Omar explained, Eleggua would carry it to the heavens and lay it at the feet of Olofi, the creator.
Even with Omar at my side, the older of the priests had looked at me hard before he told me I was welcome.
“Like Eleggua, you travel close to death,” he said when I was seated on a mat front of him. Apparently there wasn’t going to be much small talk. “You drive roads that are dangerous. You dream of strange things. But you understand little of all this.
“Eleggua is your father,” he continued. “Many of the gods are close to you, but it is to Eleggua that you belong. Eleggua travels endlessly between heaven and earth, the living and the dead. It is he who connects the two worlds.
“You suffer most acutely because you don’t affirm your vocation,” he said next. “Think how much Agatha Christie has meant to the people. So you too must tell stories.
“Ay, but chica, you must become better organized.
“Eleggua will help you,” the priest continued, “but you must ask him. Open your door when you go home to your city, call to the children playing in the streets, give them caramels.
“Eleggua is a child himself,” the priest continued. “Eleggua loves caramels; Eleggua will help you if you give caramels to the children.”
I wondered how long I could stand on the street in New York offering caramels to children before somebody called the cops.
The priest had more to say: “There is a child, not your own, who needs you.”
Roosters and chickens were walking all about. There was that whir and cigar smoke and the sticky smell of rum and was it blood?
“I am less lost,” the priest said finally, “knowing that you will find your way.” Others were waiting and he turned now to them.
A moment later he called me back. “You must remember your father. You must arrange a Mass for the soul of your father and every morning you must put out a purple blossom for him.”
There was something about the priest’s eyes then.
“It is the dead who lead the way into the mysteries,” he told me. “You in the States, for all your sophistication, understand nothing of the dead.”
By then Omar had gone to find his mom. She wasn’t in her room but further down the hall. Dressed in immaculate white, she had been scrubbing the walls of the building’s only latrine. “Oh, what a child of Eleggua you are,” she said, as she greeted me.
She brought us into her space and served us coffee. “I would have sent all my children away,” she said, “if I had understood at the beginning of the revolution where this was heading. Ah, Eleggua,”she said, smiling at me. “Eleggua, lord of all thresholds: of beginnings and endings.”
Half of her children were gone; four had fled from Cuba. She knew she’d never see them again. “Dance for Eleggua,” she told me.
Days passed. I spoke with artists and studied their work. Omar would come to take me for walks.
Hector, my keeper, would turn up too. He took me for marches. One morning we joined the throngs celebrating something revolutionary at the Plaza de la Revolución. Tanks rolled on, so did Fidel. Everybody liked the free beer.
That same morning, Omar was waiting back in the hotel. I had been dreading this collision, but as it turned out, I had underestimated them both. “I have great respect for your cult,” Hector told him. “As I have for yours,” Omar replied.
It was his mom’s words that Omar respected. I mustn’t leave Cuba without some encounter with Eleggua. That was clear. And so Omar presented me to one Rogelio Martínez Furé, a dancer and anthropologist who had founded Conjunto Folklórico, the Havana-based dance company devoted to Afro-Cuban ‘folklore.’ Omar sometimes made drums for him.
Conjunto headquarters are in what had been a ‘palacio,’ as these baroque mansions from the sugar boom era are called. We watched at the doorway of a practice studio as Martínez Furé put dancers and drummers through their paces.
“Spanish dance has always been too angry,” Martínez Furé told me later as we sat in his upstairs office. “African dance is too nervous. But look how they came together in Cuba.”
Soon the conversation changed its course. “Those in the first world,” he said, “those who prize ‘understanding’ so much, have lost the use of gesture. Cubans suffer from the opposite predicament. Cubans often make a gesture without understanding its meaning. Ah but, the ancients knew gesture alone could be magic.”
Martínez Furé said enough conversation. He brought Omar and me back to the practice room.
“You must dance for Ochún,” he told me. I recognized the rhythms of the drumming from a night-time performance in the streets a few weeks earlier.; they were the rhythms that belonged to the sacred whore.
“You must dance Ochún because you are in Cuba,” Martínez Fure’ was saying. “Every woman in Cuba wants to be Ochún. I can show you the statistics on this.” The revolution had done such studies; later he would show me the papers to prove it.
“But we must begin with Eleggua.”
Finally with this, Omar relaxed. He may have even sat down.
Martínez Furé took me to a corner away from the other dancers and began working with me and that one basic step.
“Eleggua is the great bridge between humanity and the gods. The dances for all of the saints come out of these steps.
“Besides, since Eleggua is the bridge; he must be honored before all other saints.”
It wasn’t all that different from a speeded up chachachá. Broaden the steps into great traveling ones, like the ones we used to jump over puddles as kids. Airborne forever, then smack back down. Again and again. I didn’t want to stop, but Martínez Furé was eager to turn to Ochún.
The rhythms of the drummers were shifting; Martínez Furé was settling me deeper into my torso. “We carry the orishas in our bodies,” he instructed me. “The mysteries of the orishas reside in the bodies of those who dance.” Martinez Fure’ was insisting: “They cannot come to you until you lose the shame in your body.”
I needed to empty myself; when I did I could feel some crazy beat, one or two amidst the rest; following them, I was filled by all the rest.
But the polyrhythms were demanding more: various counterpoints of movements in the pelvis, arms, shoulders, neck. Martínez Furé was pushing at my knee, opening the curve of my arm.
Every time I became lost, he brought me back to that one step, Eleggua’s step.
Again and again he said it: “You must lose all shame as you dance. The orisha can’t come to you until you lose your shame.”
This much I learned that afternoon. I danced a broken Ochún. I managed only a little of her intricate footwork and small spins. It was enough to find myself wet with honey.
Had it all come from inside or outside my body?
And just how far does all this go?
“Let me watch you,” my lover back in New York would say as he touched me. “You must always let me watch you.”