“Those bearded bastards are pointing the goddam things straight at us.”
I pressed my ear to my parents’ closed bedroom door, trying to understand my father’s words. He wanted my mother to pack up our station wagon and take us far away from Florida, to my grandmother’s house in Ohio. At six years old, I was as frightened by
For two weeks in October of 1962, reruns of I Love Lucy were interrupted, Ricky Ricardo cut
Cuba was right next to us on the globe, a small, green island in an ocean of blue. It
My father blamed the bearded, dark-haired men in army fatigues, fat cigars between their lips, whose faces leered from the newspapers lining my parakeet’s cage. I didn’t understand then that his fury was rooted in fear. He could not protect his family from the missiles in this island neighbor’s backyard.
For me, the missile crisis was the first crack in the smooth confidence of childhood, pricking that bubble of egotistical innocence in which I floated, supremely ignorant of the complexity of the world. For the first time, I understood that the world beyond our home could enter our lives, and
Fifty-five years later, I peer out the window at off-white strips of land framed by foaming
When I deplane in Havana, I cannot find the words to communicate with the driver who has met me at the airport, holding a handwritten sign with the single word: Goddard, my name. I interpret the sign to mean, Welcome. You’re here at last, a guest, a visitor, an invader, a stranger to this land.
Not a stranger. I know this place by the sky. It is a pale, pale blue, bleached by the sun. I rode my bike beneath this sky, a heat-white blue —a blistered blue. It is Florida’s sky, almost white, as if the sea has sucked out the color, as though the heat has stolen the incentive to blueness.
“Blank, blanco, white,” I try to explain the sky to the driver.
“Claro,” he answers, which translates as “white,” “clear,” “bright,” or “of course.”
Is he supplying the word my rusty Spanish is reaching for? Or is he saying, Yes, of course, it is the sky? The driver doesn’t understand about the sky because to know this sky you must leave it. Only when you’ve lived under another sky for many years can you perceive this one.
In Havana, our small contingent of writers has a guide for the week. Yoli interprets not just the language, but her culture for us, everything from the economics of Cuba to the prevalence of the color red.
She interprets when Alfredo, a middle-aged Cuban whose features and manner reveal a deep
weariness, unravels history from his side of the Florida Straits. He leans forward intently, his elbows on the red and white checked cloth covering the table of the casa particular—part boarding house, part B&B—where we are staying, and speaks of the Special Period, after the fall of the Soviet Union and the withdrawal of Russian trade, when the Cuban populace rode bikes for lack of oil, and grew thin for lack of food.
My last night in Havana, I sit in La Taberna, a club in Habana Vieja, as performers swirl and spin, shake and shimmy in Latin rhythms we all think we know.
The spectacle is colored by our guide’s cynicism. She has told us that the music that emanates from the bars and restaurants all over Havana is not an expression of Cuba’s culture. It’s all about money, she says. Fidel pulled the people out of the depths of the Special Period by adding English, music and art to the country’s curriculum to appeal to the world’s tourists.
The hands of a master guitarist, ancient and weathered, move with blurring speed, the music an incantation, aching and calling, falling, faster, merging with the fluttering breath of the flautist and the ninety-year-old vocalist holding us rapt as his voice soars, powerful, enthralling. We, the audience, tourists, are caught in the net of his solo, not breathing until the singer releases us with
Early the next morning, I am traveling in the front seat of a broken-springed taxi on the way to Matanza, ninety miles from Havana. If the recovery from the Special Period means the flourishing of art and music, literature and culture, then I, too, am part of the recovery, following the guides through the literary past and present in Matanza, where Cuban theater was born.
There Ediciones Vigeles publishes books glued together by hand, collages of words and art, repurposed pieces, the collaboration of artists and writers.
Those same words shot back and forth between my parents in 1962. Revolution, reds, missiles, nuclear war circled our dining table and plummeted to the cold terrazzo floor, shattering, the broken mirror of a neighbor no one understood, its sharp-edged shards reflecting the pale, pale sky.
I imagine the child I was slipping from her seat to clean up the jagged shards of understanding before her sisters’ bare feet are slashed. I see the blood bead red on my fingertips as I attempt to assemble a mosaic from the splinters of socialism, communism, blockades, art, and music. It took fifty-five years and the traversing of that ninety-mile stretch of open water to do so.
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