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Monday, Nov 9, 2009
Flying in from the U.S., I joined the female "jockeys" who sold themselves to tourists for rum and money. But I did it to find my father. Part 1
May 20, 2003 | I feel his hand on my bare shoulder, and it's all over.
In the oppressive April afternoon, another's touch has the chilling effect of ice on a radiator. I've been sitting alone, in a cafe in Havana near the former Hilton hotel -- the one ransacked by communists and renamed Habana Libre. Free Havana.
The stacks of papers on my table are askew, some stained by the cafe con leche I chain-drink to keep my spirits up. He approaches me from behind. I look up, into a tanned face and silky blue eyes framed by deep lines. Late 50s, I guess, and not unattractive. He asks to sit. I shrug casually. He asks if I speak English. I nod. Then he asks for advice -- best bars, best beaches. My advice warrants a rum over ice, or so he measures, and he offers to buy me one.
I sigh. The papers are in a fantastic mess in front of me -- evidence of my baneful investigation -- and today has not been revealing the clues I'd hoped for. I pile the papers neatly. What the hell. A rum would be nice.
He smiles. I pretend, despite the mounting evidence to the contrary, that I'm a first-world girl in a first-world city being offered a friendly drink by an attractive man. That at the end of this exchange, we will trade business cards and a flirtatious smile and in a few days I'll find a message on my cellular and, who knows, there might be dinner and maybe a movie or a stroll and, you know, a date.
But I am not in the United States, my home, and he assumes he isn't sparring with an equal, a woman of his socioeconomic rank, give or take a few rungs in either direction. He rolls an ice cube on his tongue, momentarily losing himself to the pleasure of coolness amid the humid soup that is springtime Havana.
Another drink, then another. He talks only of himself in determined pontification, and asks no questions of me. It's how he signals he's expecting to pick up the tab. This one, and the next.
I ask where he's from. "America," he says with a mixture of pride and complicity, as do all Yankees who sneak into Cuba.
"It's Norte Americano," I say, playfully scolding. "We Cubans are offended that you claim the entire continent for yourselves." He isn't listening. Greedily, he takes in the size of my chest, the green jade of my eyes, the curve of one thigh crossed over the other.
"So," he says, leaning across the table. "I'm on the 11th floor of the Habana Libre." He looks at me expectantly, while holding the check in his hand. "What'll it be?"
I can't blame him necessarily for the blunder. The cafe's bathroom mirror is not kind in its judgment; cracked and faded, it reflects my freak-show appearance. These clothes, bought new in Miami nine months ago, are frayed from wear and harsh soap and sun. I carry my things in a plastic sack -- the Cuban girl's purse -- as my leather one had been stolen months before. My body, once a healthy Size 8, has shrunk to a gaunt Size 4. Hip bones jut out for the first time in my life. I am easily bruised. A Cuban diet does these things.
I am an American, in the sense that my passport says so, in that my university degree and professional stints and taxes paid cement my belonging to her. But I am Cuban. My first breath 25 years ago was Havana air, and my father -- as I recently discovered -- circulates the blood of Cuba in his veins.
I am Cuban-American. I noisily roll the moniker around in my head, like marbles in a tub: Cuban-American. The hyphen is the fulcrum, the teeter-totter that swings up and down. Some days I'm more heavily Cuban. On others, I weigh in more American.
But today, this day, as the man's condom-covered cock slides between my thighs and his chest spreads my breasts, as he heaves over me, pushing and pulling and pushing harder still, and as I run my nails hard down his spine, a painful reaction to the pleasure I didn't expect to feel, as his face crinkles and he collapses and rolls over and dresses and throws American scratch at my knees and as I gather the bills from the floor and tuck them into my bra -- isn't that what prostitutes do? -- and as I take the elevator 11 floors to the lobby and walk past the smirking guards, and as I pass through the doors into the cruel sun of the afternoon, it is then that I realize the teeter-totter has landed with a thud.
At that moment, I am only Cuban.
