He sits on a metal folding chair, half-dressed in pants and a t-shirt. This is his room, a modified shipping container, his home for the previous three months as well as for the next nine. The exterior is steel, the roof protected by a layer of filled sandbags, the interior lined with plywood, bulky two-by-four shelves pushed up against one wall, his bed against another. There are no windows. The lights are off. His personal belongings are all around him: a DVD player and pirated discs, a computer to screen the movies. The hard drive holds pictures of his children, pictures of his life as a soldier. It holds financial information, rows and columns a living record of gains and, mostly, losses. His life, reduced to things invisible. Digitized, stored inside miniature manila file folders. Things so big made so small. He is an Army sergeant, aggressive and motivated. Mature. Battle-tested. The type of leader his bosses admire. He has responsibilities. Even as he sits, there are soldiers all around him, eighteen young men, some literally half his age. Flesh and blood. Life-sized. He is responsible for their health and welfare, for their training, for their lives. Two of them, on guard duty on top of the operations center a few buildings over, look out into the dark Kandahar desert night. Looking for things they’ll never see, but things he sees. Dangerous things. A few of the other men, sergeants like he is, are close by. They are in their own rooms, their own modified shipping containers. The remainder, all junior soldiers, sleep in their barracks just twenty meters away.
He looks at his government-issued belongings, spread around him on the floor. Disarray. Protective gear, a night vision device, maps and alcohol pens, packaged military rations, dirty uniforms and socks and t-shirts. Fragments of war. Weapons too, and ammunition. Small things that produce big results. On the floor next to his bed are his boots. One upright, the other on its side. There is a pistol there, next to a boot, a lace casually touching the barrel. An American flag in the background and it would look just like those romanticized, self-indulgent paintings he sees in the kiosks at the base department store back home, the prints with romanticized, self-indulgent titles. Like Casualty of War. Or Freedom Isn’t Free. There is a mostly empty plastic container on the table next to him, a remaining few drinks of whiskey mixed with Coke, sent to him in a Dasani water bottle from someone at home. Maybe a friend. Probably his wife. A peace offering, trying to make up for spending so much of their money – of his money – trying to make up for overdrawn checking accounts. His eyes are closed, the back of his head resting against the wall behind him. Or maybe his head is hung forward. Low. Chin on chest, elbows on knees, fingers interlocked behind his head. His hands pulling down, his neck pushing back. A stalemate. Tension permeates through his body, envelops him. He is thinking: About money, about finances, about his two homes. About mortgages he can’t afford, about bankruptcy. He thinks about his career, how it is stalling, how he is not getting promoted fast enough. He thinks about war. How this one is not pursued aggressively enough, how anyone not wearing a US military uniform is the enemy, how they are all around him. He thinks about his wife. About happiness. He thinks about envy and regret. Mostly he thinks about the one thing he believes he has earned, he knows he has earned, the one thing that should not be taken from him, that should, rather, be granted him: Mostly, he thinks about respect.
Here is how I imagine him.
Midnight.
He breathes in deeply. Holds the air, squeezes his lungs. He flexes. His neck, his face, his jaw. Every muscle clenching, every tendon expanding, every artery, every vein, every capillary constricting. Every electron circling, faster and faster, in tighter and tighter circles. Spiraling. Like a tornado reaching for ground, like his deepest center is a black hole, sucking every part of him into it.
He breathes out. He opens his eyes. And then he stands up.
Between 2010 and 2011, I was the Staff Judge Advocate at Fort Campbell, Kentucky. The base’s legal headquarters was located on Forrest Road, named after famed Confederate general Nathan Bedford Forrest. This, to understate it, rubbed me the wrong way. I attempted to change the road’s name, and was unsuccessful. My successor, one of my best friends and a black man, attempted to change the road’s name as well. I thought, shamelessly, there’s no way he will be denied. He too was unsuccessful. America, over the last few years, has dealt with our adulation of Confederate leaders, something that has always been an incongruity to me. How did we not see the dissonance in minority service members walking on parade fields, driving on roads, sleeping in barracks, and serving on bases named after men who would have them enslaved? The removal, tearing down, and defacing of Confederate statues was polarizing. Some saw it as long-overdue; some saw it as “woke” culture gone too far. That the latter would rarely seek to understand how these base names and statues came to be in the first place was, for me, frustratingly ignorant: Their construction rarely had to do with culture, heritage, or history. Rather, they were built and named in an attempt to pander to the Southern population and its politicians – most of the statues glorifying confederate leaders, or bases named to honor them, were in backlash to the Jim Crow era of segregation; in response to the Civil Rights movement; a barter to get cheap land for new military bases or more recruits from Southern states in the time period around our two world wars. History is not a monolith but a shapeshifter, and its true form often reveals itself simply when asked.
Two days ago, the Department of Defense released a list of more than 750 names at US installations around the world, all of which memorialized the Confederacy in some way, and all of which are under consideration for renaming or removal. Among them: Forrest Road at Fort Campbell Kentucky.
The below essay was originally posted February 1, 2010. It is reposted today in edited form.
Waking the Grand Wizard (Part I)
One hundred and ninety years ago, in a battered shack in a central Tennessee basin splotched by canebrake and bluestemmed barrens and teeming with dogwood, red oak, and poplar-treed expanses, young Marian, wife to blacksmith and subsistence farmer William Forrest, gave birth to twins. The couple named the second of the two children Fanny. The first, a boy, they called Nathan. Ten more offspring would follow, with an equal amount of tragedy not far behind.
William was unsuited for working both metal and earth. After spoiling his own father’s riches, William took his young flock to Mississippi to be closer to family, trying to alchemist his way from poor son to prodigal. He did not succeed. Nathan, now a thirteen-year-old, quickly found himself paterfamilias, his father dead from the residual effects of tuberculosis or scarlet fever. Or maybe the yellow kind. The color of one’s demon doesn’t matter much when everyone nearby is dying. Nathan contracted the disease as well, but survived. Five of his eleven siblings, his twin sister Fanny included, would not be so lucky. Possessing only a rudimentary education but already a sturdy lad, Nathan quit school and went to work to support his winnowed family.
Nathan was a resourceful, aggressive kid. At six feet two inches and a lean one hundred eighty pounds, he was also big for the times. A target, perhaps. At twenty he laid foundation for his future fable when he shot and killed two men and injured two others, all the brothers Matlock. Word spread that Nathan killed two of the brothers with a single bullet each from his two-shot pistol; he injured the other two after a bystander tossed him a knife. Apocryphal or not, Nathan was quite obviously a man of action. He took over his uncle’s livery and livestock business, married, moved to Memphis, and built an empire through dealing cotton, livestock, real estate, and slaves. By 1859, Nathan was retired and had in his possession well over one million dollars. Using the Consumer Price Index, that’s twenty-seven million dollars in 2010 money. Under the more bourgeois “Relative Share of Gross Domestic Product” scale, Mr. Forrest was worth a cool three billion, putting him just south of Misters Gates and Buffett on the Forbes list of the world’s richest men.
In November of 1860, America elected Abraham Lincoln its sixteenth president. Barely a month and a half later South Carolina, fearing the abolition of slavery, seceded from the Union. Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, and Texas quickly followed, and by April 12, 1861, relations between the Union and the seven Confederate states had degenerated to an armed stand-off at Charleston. Mr. Edmund Ruffin, a scholarly 67-year-old farmer from Virginia, attempted to speed things along by pulling a lanyard that lit a fuse which then lobbed a mortar round from Fort Johnson, over Charleston Harbor, and into the Union-occupied Fort Sumter. The stalemate thus resolved, the Civil War began.
Between April 17 and May 20, Virginia, Arkansas, and North Carolina seceded. On June 8, 1861, Tennesseans voted 2-to-1 to join suit. By mid-July, billionaire Nathan Forrest enlisted as a private in the Tennessee Mounted Rifles. Four years later he was a three-star general, had been directly engaged with and fired upon by enemy forces almost one hundred and eighty times, taken over 31,000 prisoners, cemented his status as World’s Greatest Cavalryman, ordered or condoned the wholesale slaughter of surrendering and defenseless black Union soldiers at Fort Pillow, Tennessee, and uttered the timeless adage “war means killing, and the way to kill is to get there first with the most men.” Lesser known, but of great importance to this story, are his post-Civil War activities: Nathan Bedford Forrest was the first Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan.
Here is how I begin each morning in this, the autumn of 2010: I leave my house in Tennessee at 5:30 am, enter Interstate 24 at Exit 1, ensuring I stay left to avoid the tractor-trailers parked overnight in the narrow shoulder. I head west to Exit 86, now crossing into Kentucky, then drive south on Highway 41A amidst the closest thing we have to rush hour traffic as soldiers old and young hurry to morning formation at Fort Campbell, Kentucky. Across the street from Jenna’s Toy Box, recently placed on the off-limits list by the Commanding General not for their extensive porn-and-bong collection, but rather for their equally extensive synthetic marijuana offerings, I make a right through Gate 5 and onto the army base. I’m allowed through only after showing my identification card to, more often than not, the contracted security guard and advice-dispensing Mr. Williams (staples: “Stay dry now!”, or “Keep smilin’, you almost made it to Friday!”). From beginning to end, the road at Gate 5 – Forrest Road – is just nine-tenths of a mile.
The nine-tenths is inconsequential. What is deeply troubling is that my office is here, on Forrest Road. The Office of the Staff Judge Advocate, the base’s legal heartbeat, its moral compass, the place where I spend at least sixty hours a week doing my best to lead, guide, and mentor fairness, integrity, and, hopefully, justice. I do so from my desk at about the half-way point of Forrest Road, named after a man who achieved vast wealth on the backs of enslaved black men, women, and children; dedicated four years of his life fighting against America; then headed up a new organization that would spend the next century and a half inciting violence against just about anyone who wasn’t white and Christian.
Aside from this short, nondescript road at Fort Campbell, Nathan Bedford Forrest is memorialized by, at a minimum, a town in Arkansas; a county in Mississippi; high schools in Tennessee and Florida; a park; a university building; monuments in Nashville; Selma, Alabama; and Rome, Georgia; over thirty historical markers throughout the state of Tennessee; and at least one figure in pop culture (run, Forrest). He is a favored Son of Tennessee and of the South, and is remembered accordingly.
What he does not have is any connection to Fort Campbell, nor to any unit ever garrisoned here. The famed Screaming Eagles of the 101st Airborne Division owe their lineage to, of all things, a Union unit from Wisconsin. No part of Forrest Road touches Tennessee earth. Nathan Bedford Forrest has no connection to the United States Army, even, other than taking up arms against it.
I want the road name changed. It is an affront, a blaspheme, a slur. A defile. A desecration. Sacrilege. Mumbai was once Bombay; Volgograd Stalingrad; Istanbul Constantinople. Kirk Douglas was Issur Danielovitch; Miley Cyrus, Destiny Hope; Russell Jones (RIP) Ol’ Dirty Bastard, Dirt McGirt, Big Baby Jesus, Joe Bananas, and, fleetingly, the Old Dirty Chinese Restaurant. Entire cities and flesh-and-blood human beings change their names; it should be a minor inconvenience to rename a mile-long stretch of asphalt on an American army base.
I try. I marshal support, rally the troops, compose brilliant, concise, persuasive, outrage-barely-bridled emails. Like I’m a posh Brit: The condescension is there, but no one can specifically pinpoint it. I compose a list of people and places who might better represent our values and the 101st Airborne’s history. Colin Powell Road, Bagram Airfield Road, General Maxwell Taylor Road. I demur in my official memos, writing not what I think – Forrest was a murderer and slave-trading fuck and we should be ashamed we have a road named after him – but rather what I think will work: “The means by which Lieutenant General Forrest accumulated his great wealth is incongruous with the values and moral code of today’s Army.”
I’m told I need the support of the base historian. My previous experience with this gentleman was during a private tour of the museum, where he relayed to our group that the museum’s non-profit foundation used “wives of Special Forces soldiers as models for the female soldier mannequins because we couldn’t find any women heroes”. I present my case to him in his office, his troll cave, his shame attic. When I am finished he all but calls me a commie feminist liberal homosexual. Yesss, I whisper in my head, I am whatever fulfills your repressed, innermost Freudian dreams. Just support this name change. He does not.
I am unsuccessful in changing the road’s name. I submitted an official request. There was a vote, a four-to-four tie, and the garrison commander – the tie-breaking vote, a man who had previously assured me that he supported my efforts – voted against the name change. Forrest Road becomes my white whale. One wit in my office has hung a portrait of the man himself above my desk. Forrest’s goateed chin stares down at me for days before I notice him. I try not to hate him, to find common ground. I try to see him as someone else, someone other than who he was. He is reputation not reality; he is a caricature; he is simply someone fully human. I Hollywoodize him, seeing Billy Connolly from Boondock Saints, Michael O’Keefe from Caddyshack, Michael Keaton with a goatee. Any Michael, really, anyone other than this traitorous racist twit on whose eponymously named road my mail is addressed.
Ukraine sits atop the Black Sea, a ragged-edged landmass cut in half by the Dnieper River running north to south; the Carpathian Mountains of the northwest slowly ceding elevation to the Great Steppe of the east. It shares half of its border with Russia, the other half split amongst six other nations, and though Ukraine is in Europe, it is also something akin to Oklahoma: bordered by Russia to the east and Europe to its west, it shares Oklahoma’s cultural and geographical androgyny of being something (Midwestern or Southern? Great Plains?), both, or nothing at all. Ukraine (European or Russian?), despite occupying roughly the same longitudinal space as Turkey, has the additional slight of being deprived Turkey’s celebrated transcontinentalism as the cultural and historical bridge between Europe and Asia; even in the midst of political upheaval and an oppressive government, Ukraine received more U.S. airtime debating whether Ukraine properly has a “The” in front of its name (it doesn’t).
Before the dissolution of the United Soviet Socialist Republic in 1991, Ukraine was more likely known to contemporary Americans as “the breadbasket of Europe,” an otherwise anonymous nation in the Soviet empire, along with Moldova and Belarus and Uzbekistan, popular only with anti-communists and geography nerds. The anonymity has only been slightly alleviated by Ukraine’s recent interactions with Russia. Like every other country between the Bay of Bengal and the Irish Sea, Ukraine has a history of conflict, and its own past shows that it has been populated and ruled at various times by seemingly every letter of the alphabet (Austro-Hungarians, Bulgars, Cossacks, Goths, Huns, Khazars…), but conflict persists even today. In March of 2014, Russian forces first occupied and then annexed the Crimean Peninsula in the south of Ukraine; shortly thereafter they supported pro-Russian separatists in the Donbass region in the east. After nearly three years and thousands of casualties, a sort of status-quo has emerged, with Russian-backed separatists controlling two Oblasts (essentially states) on the east side of a borderline, and Ukrainian forces the west.
Russia’s occupation of Ukraine may have originated as a response to “Euromaidan,” a November 2013 student movement in Kiev’s Independence Square that sparked a revolution, since memorialized in the 2015 documentary Winter on Fire. Equally celebrated for its raw footage as it is maligned for the conspicuous absence of inconvenient details, there is a scene in Winter on Fire that demands our attention, a display of courage and grit and inspiration that Americans typically pretend is reserved for the fabric of our own national history and ours alone: a crowd of tens of thousands, listening to yet another opportunistic politician – this one Vitaly Kiltschko, a 6’ 7” two hundred fifty pound former world heavyweight boxing champion – attempting to hijack their movement with false promises and pleas of compromise, upstaged by a young rebel, a mid-twenties man who snatches both stage and microphone from Klitschko and, spewing frustration and spit and determination, says, essentially, enough. My brother died here on these streets yesterday, and if something doesn’t change, I am prepared to die here tomorrow. It is an emotional moment in an emotional film, and whether it depicts sentiment, truth, or truth as we want to see it – a condition we are coming to know in our own country – is irrelevant. It worked: the sitting president fled the country for Russia, the students of Maidan become national heroes, the riot police disbanded, memorials were erected. Life goes on.
Things change, of course – they always do – but a presidential exit and a new government is not always the remedy we think it will be. Ukraine remains a nation in some turmoil, but that is in the east. Today, Kiev’s Independence Square is empty of protestors, and my only struggle is in refusing the surprisingly persistent advances of a man dressed in a bear costume asking would you like to take a phony picture. His Ukrainian accent makes “funny” sound like “phony,” and he has plenty of competition in Kiev, where potential abounds for pictures funny, phony, or otherwise: a woman with a hat matching the feathered heads of her pigeons, Roberto and Julian; a man with his own karaoke machine singing 70’s and 80’s American standards, panhandling for money not to allow you the opportunity to humiliate yourself on the crowded sidewalks of Khreschatyk Street, but for him to continue; brilliant, lonely violinists in the Kiev underground, including one in full camouflage; an interpreter uttering the incongruent yet ambitious sentence I will never stop listening to the Cocteau Twins. In my hotel lobby I see and overhear two Americans discuss, without apparent irony, the thankful end the new American administration will bring to illegal immigration, all while awaiting an introduction to their potential new Ukrainian bride (username “weeege” gave the same hotel a poor rating on Trip Advisor for allowing the girls at the “strip bar” upstairs to surreptitiously entice him with overpriced cocktails; the hotel – a stickler for detail – accurately pointed out that the business was neither a nightclub nor a strip bar, but rather a “cabaret”).
The love connections occurring in my hotel lobby aside, the best draw in Kiev are the orthodox churches, and none are more remarkable than Kiev-Pechersk Lavra. The tombs of this cave monastery sit under snow-covered hills on the west bank of the Dnieper River, just south of the Ukrainian Genocide Memorial and further south of the Undying Glory Memorial at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, an eighty-five foot obelisk that today overlooks an idyllic, post-communist, Grant Woodsian scene of sleds and snowboards. A blue sky backdrops a single smokestack, dominant alongside rows of residential apartment buildings designed in an architectural style best described as “ugly.”
St. Michael, down with the mudras.
To be unknown is surely the safest path to undying glory, and time helps. The caves under Pechersk Lavra hold the preserved, mummified remains of more than one hundred monks, or “incorruptible relics”, men who spent the brunt of their lives underground in seclusion and are thusly relegated to it in the afterlife. I hope they enjoy(ed) satire, because for those who sought salvation through solitude, they are now objects of relentless adulation. The active monastery is the most visited site in Kiev, and neither snow nor sub-freezing temperatures deter tourist or penitent. There are twelve churches, some golden-domed, some ornate, and three underground; all trace their ancestry to Antoniy, an ascetic monk who, upon returning as a missionary to his native Kiev after living in a mountaintop cave in Greece, found his new digs to be a bit too elaborate. Antoniy moved into a four-by-four yard cave originally dug and occupied by Hilarion, another devout anti-socialist, and I cannot but picture a crusty old wild-eyed Antoniy as hermit crab, his unkempt beard indistinguishable from soiled robe, giant rose-colored claws protruding from gaping sleeves, patiently hiding amongst the trees until Hilarion, grown fat from years of eating defenseless grub worms and inattentive squirrels who happened by, vacates his earthly shell and scurries off for more comfortable surroundings to accommodate his growing backside.
Somehow this lifestyle below ground was attractive. Despite (or, perhaps, precisely because of) the cave, a diet of rye bread every other day, and only water to drink, Antoniy drew a crowd. Locals assuredly came first to stare, but then they came for blessings and advice, and his fame soon spread. Then the acolytes arrived. First Nikon, then Theodosius of Kiev (just one?), and in 1051, a church was built and the Monastery was born (the curmudgeonly Antoniy spent little time above ground: he quickly dug himself another hole, farther from the church).
The caves today have stuccoed walls, tunnels large enough for one to walk and two, just, to pass, but there is still no electricity. Instead, light is provided by weak flames from gaunt candles, some sconced on the walls, others held nakedly in the hands of the living. As directed by a picture pasted to the wall before we enter the cave, I hold mine with my palm up and the candle between my middle and ring finger as I follow my guide, who smells slightly of horse blankets and speaks to me in heavily accented English, down into the caves. She is informative and speaks without break, but when she answers my first question by simply pretending I didn’t ask it, I suspect she has memorized the entire pitch in English. Her devotion is not limited to delivering a quality, if not rote, tour: after ritually kissing the first three of what she says are one hundred twenty coffins, she tells me that I can make a prayer. I waste it praying that she doesn’t kiss every coffin.
The relics are incorruptible, the guide tells me, because the ambient condition in the caves is scientifically proven to be adverse to mummification, yet here they are, one hundred twenty men and boys, perfectly preserved, if one could only see them beneath their silkened, gold-threaded, ostentatious hats, headscarves, and robes, resplendent in purple and teal and aqua, a veritable-but-dead Prince Army. My grandmother would have called them “snazzy,” which, though ostensibly a merger of “snappy” and “jazzy” (and implying that not only did something exist so glorious that neither snappy nor jazzy sufficiently described it, but also that the word’s inventor was prescient enough to not suggest “jappy”), I am more concerned by the contrast of these luxurious fabrics with the sartorial choices of their ultimate icon. Jesus, I think, would not be impressed.
Several of the coffins contain two monks, and my guide says that they are brothers. Not brothers “from zuh same mudder and fadder” but “spiritual bruzzas,” which sounds to me like something else entirely, and suddenly the caves reek of illicit love.
This would not be unheard of. Though homosexuality in the middle ages was strongly discouraged (and it remains taboo in Ukraine today), that a monk might find love in the tonsured arms of another is hardly news. Ukraine has its own historical drama, in fact, in the 13th-century love affair of Evagrius and Tit (I am not making that up), a deacon and a priest who were joined in a same-sex union, had a falling out, an attempted reconciliation, and then a tragic death. At their wedding, the officiating priest said that God had “willed to bind” them as brothers by both nature and spirit, and that God should “bless your Servants united also that, not bound by nature, they be joined with bonds of love.” In short, if Evagrius and Tit couldn’t consecrate their marriage with a baby, let it be consecrated with love.
Were the “spiritual brothers” of Pechersk Lavra shown the same decency and tenderness as that shown to Evagrius and Tit? Or were they relegated to knowing glances, passing fingertip brushes in dark hallways, stolen kisses in underground caves? Immaterial. They are now bonded for eternity and share the twin bed of a glass-topped coffin, the lips of a million worshippers pressed upon their caskets amid the muted glow of tallow candles.
The cry of a baby, the gunfire rattle of a metal whisk stirring in a metal bowl, the repeated gargly “ur ur urrr!” of a street rooster, the skilled pull of a bow across the strings of a violin, a vendor’s cry of aguacate, aguacate, AAGWAAACAATAAAY: This is a moment in time in la Habana, a life lived in the open, unsanitized, raw, smelly, loud, and beautiful. Maybe.
There are two Havanas – the one the tourists see, with five-star hotels and personalized, top-down city tours in beautiful pink and green and candy apple red Buicks, Chevys and Fords; thirty-dollar meals in swanky hotel restaurants (cheap to the Westerners who patronize them, more than a month’s wages to those who work at them) teed up with live Afro-Cuban music at your feet; a good night’s sleep in a room with the luxury of glass windows.
San Miguel Street, Havana
And there is the other Havana, the city of two million people densely packed into every available space, building codes non-existent (or ignored, or simply unenforced); where clothes seem to exist only on bodies and balcony clotheslines; where the throaty rumbles of sixty-year-old American cars, held together with the Cuban equivalent of baling wire and duct tape, ply the streets in a non-stop parade of ingenuity and the failings of communism; where everyone is poor but no one starves, plentifully fed on not-again black beans and rice. The inhabitants of this five-hundred-year-old city live life in the streets and without windows, the life private impossible, nixed by a condescending, paranoid government and a collapsing infrastructure that keeps the vibrant life outside rather than in, the discussion of whether this is a good thing or not moot, as that is a debate for the wealthy, people rich in resources or time or options.
Havana is unlike anywhere else, a city that was once among the most affluent in the world, first as a stopover for the riches of the plundered goldfields of South America on their way to Spain; then as an international commercial port connecting the Old World and the New; then as a strategic pawn in the United States’ quest for superpowerdom; and now the second-to-last vestige of a system that simply doesn’t work (congratulations North Korea, you win). The tourist neighborhood of la Habana Vieja still exudes magnetism, but the remainder of the once-grand city invokes not the Fall of Rome, but Angkor Wat in the early days, every block littered with the viscera of colonial and baroque architectural treasures, many breathtaking both for their former grandeur as well as for their current distress. Some sprout decades-old trees literally growing from their walls and roofs, yet all but the most decrepit still provide housing for the city’s residents.
To be a Habanero is to be communal, to have limited choices, to be resourceful, and to be really, really patient, because in Havana you wait. You wait at a government exchange center to convert money (but not in line – a spoken “quien es el ultimo” to any gaggle and you instantly find your place in the queue); outside upscale restaurants for a wireless signal; for the hardware store to stock the part you need to fix your shower (mas tarde – “later” – always mas tarde); and, inexplicably, for ice cream, on the sidewalk with hundreds of others at the corner of L and 23rd. The ice cream at Coppelia might be good, but the reality is that, like many other things in Cuba, it is good simply because it is the only thing Cubans know – the nearly sixty years of isolation, despite being just a one-hour flight to Miami and with many Cubans having relatives in the U.S., has taken a heavy toll.
It has only been a year since President Obama eased the economic embargo and restored diplomatic ties with Cuba, and just over seven since Fidel (“the bearded one,” or, if you’d rather not say the name, a simple stroking of the chin will suffice) handed over power to his brother Raúl, and the Cuban government still keeps a tight control on the reins. But things are changing, albeit slowly. Twenty years ago Cubans could not rent out rooms in their homes to tourists; today casa particulares are the best and most common places to stay in Havana.Eight years ago locals could not patronize the very hotels that employed them, today they can. Four years ago Cubans could not buy and sell property, but today they go for outrageous sums that only ex-patriots can afford. Six months ago, the town of Viñales, the third-most visited place in Cuba, did not have access to the internet; today the citizens wait in line at the government communications store to buy two-dollar an hour scratch cards they can use only in the wifi-zone of the village square. And this in a country where the average monthly salary is just fifteen dollars, the equivalent of an American paying $490 for an hour of internet access. The rest of the economy here is just as illogical: seventy per cent of the work force is employed by the government; cab drivers make as much money in a day as do doctors in a month; men surreptitiously sell coveted potatoes with a no-eye contact, whispered papas like they’re slinging crack on a street corner. State-owned stores have limited selection, are poorly stocked even in those few things they are ostensibly supposed to have (get your bread at the state-owned bread store; your expensive powdered milk at the powdered milk and cheese store; your booze at the booze store), and have remarkably, though understandably, poor customer service.
Liquor Store
At a liquor store I ask the clerk seated behind the counter if the sodas are cold. She has options to inform her response, and could a) stand up and open the cooler door to touch the cans of soda; b) keep one butt cheek on her stool and stretch her arm the approximately two feet to open the cooler door to touch the cans of soda; or c) yell out for someone else in the back room, whose job is apparently to check for cold cans of soda. She predictably chooses option “c”, though she does take my money and put it in the cash register. At a convenience store (the irony), there are no five- or ten-peso pieces to give me my full change. The clerk gives me a handful of coins and, after I point out that I am shorted, an indifferent shoulder-shrug. Oh well. Such is life in Havana.
If it sounds like I’m down on Havana, it is because I am. Perhaps my opinion is unfairly shaped by my experiences:
A brief deviation, or, “That Time I was Detained by the Cuban Secret Police. Twice.”
On a Sunday in the park across the street from the Santa Rita de Casia church in the residential Miramar neighborhood of Havana, Berta Soler and her Damas de Blancas sit idly on concrete benches waiting for mass to release. They are dressed all in white, some two-dozen women, some holding small Cuban flags or umbrellas for sunshade; most carrying black or red purses and cradling a stem of flowers; each with a satin scarf of blue and white draped over their shoulders like priestly vestments.In 2003, seventy-five journalists, artists, community organizers and the husbands of these women were arrested and jailed for anti-government activities; in 2009 sixty-four were released on condition that they immediately leave the country. The remaining eleven refused to abandon Cuba, and though they too were eventually set free, Berta and her damas continue their protest. They meet here every Sunday – have met here for the last thirty-three Sundays – where many of the women, hustling from mass services across the street, join Berta and the others in their circuit: up Quinta Avenida, east towards Havana to the clock tower at Calle 10 and then back again, where they sing a few songs and give a few speeches and then walk the three blocks towards the beach and into the waiting crowd of what they say are government employees ordered to confront and beat them.
I sit on the steps of the rotunda here, in Parque Miramar, as two men sitting next to me methodically fold and shred some papers into Chiclet-sized pieces and then toss them to the wet ground; a young boy plays with yards of Mylar tape discarded from an old VHS cassette, pausing only to take a piss on the steps next to me, the two of us making brief eye contact over a short wall that saves me from being splashed by his urine. I wander the square searching for someone who looks like they might speak English, and find Antonio and Eduardo, who tell me the story of the damas. I take a few pictures of the women, and then make my own way towards the beach, past a few parked busses and through two intersections hosting an abnormally large group of men and women sitting in lawn chairs, leaning up against fences, or standing around, as if in wait for something or someone. At the corner of Calle 26 and Avenida 1a I wait, camera in hand, for a gap in the traffic to cross when a white Soviet-made Lada comes to an abrupt halt next to me, blocking my way only slightly but clearly indicating it is here with a purpose. Two men casually dressed step from the car and walk, aggressively, towards me; one significantly larger than the other has his wallet cupped in one hand, thumbing out just enough of a cheap, laminated identification card that I can read the letters: DSE. Departamento de Seguiridad del Estado – the Department of State Security, or the Cuban secret police. He asks in Spanish for identification; I give it and tell him my far and away most commonly repeated Spanish sentence: lo siento, mi Español es muy malo. He says reporter?, I say no; he looks at my Virginia driver’s license and says American? and I say yes. I am a tourist and have I done something wrong?
I once read that when someone responds to official questioning with “have I done something wrong” you can be assured that he probably has, and probably knows it, and here I am now: I want to make fun of his trinkety government ID and his shitty car, but I know exactly why I was stopped, know exactly who he is calling on that ridiculous, dated push-button cell phone, and the fact is that I am significantly nervous. A night or two in a Cuban jail would have no doubt been, in hindsight, a story of which I would regularly brag, but in foresight a night or two in a Cuban jail sounds less than appealing. He tells me to wait, and then a similar white Lada pulls up, an immagracíon sticker on the door, and the big undercover DSE guy points at me melodramatically, as if there is a possibility that there is a second shooter, some unidentified man on the grassy knoll who got away, but here!, this guy!, the one in the blue t-shirt and blue suede Pumas, we almost lost him but for the shoes, that pair of analog LoJacks on his feet, here is your guy. The immigration officer, who speaks decent English, takes my ID card and then we begin a brief Q&A:
What’s your name?
Jay Morse.
You are a journalist?
No.
What are you doing here in Cuba?
I’m just traveling.
Can I see your passport?
I don’t have it, I only have a picture of it on my phone.
You are staying at a hotel?
No.
Where are you staying?
With a friend. Actually, a friend of a friend. Actually, a family friend.
What is the address?
I don’t know it.
What is the phone number?
I don’t know it.
Do you have a business card?
No.
Do you have a visa?
No.
What is the address?
I told you, I don’t know it. I only know it when I see it.
Where is it?
The intersection of 60 and 19.
Let me see your passport.
Again, I only have a picture of it, but here it is. Can you tell me why you stopped me?
The question seems to have tested the limit of his English, because here is where we revert to purely the Español and where I have also regained my confidence, because he doesn’t understand the address, writes down my passport number incorrectly, and doesn’t seem to care where I am staying or who I am. My increased agitation is met with bored, blank stares, and with the two undercover agents having driven away and this man’s partner back in the car, waiting, we have reached an awkward impasse. The Cuban government accounts for about 70 per cent of employment here, and Cubans generally get paid very little; in exchange, they work very little (a Cuban friend told me of a saying: “they pretend to pay us and we pretend to work”) and even breaking contact with me seems to be too much of a chore.
But the interaction has done its job. I don’t dare wait around to see if there is a violent confrontation with the damas (I find out later there is one), and I curse my stupidity in taking too many pictures, in talking to one of the organizers, in wearing blue suede shoes, in sweating so profusely even in the cool Cuban December weather that I could be tailed simply by following the water spots dripping from the back of my neck. I am hyper-vigilant, and I take a long way home, stopping every few blocks to look around to see if I’m being followed. I walk beyond where I’m staying and around the block again, just to be sure, wondering the entire time how this must compare to living here every day, because I start looking at everyone with suspicion, the young men across the street from my house who don’t seem to do anything but sit; the old woman on her second-floor balcony I pass by on my way to the third floor gym; the shirtless guy at the liquor store who, it seems, I now see every other time I leave my house. Perhaps this is part of it, keeping the ignorant masses ignorant and the apathetic masses apathetic, this notion that you can never be sure who you can trust, or be confident to whom you can safely vent, even in just a moment of weakness, about some frustrating aspect of the system under which you live.
Two weeks later I am again detained, this time at the airport when I am trying to leave, and spend forty-five minutes in a dimly-lit back room with one man who asks me a series of stupid questions, prepared in ink, and then records my stupid answers also in ink. He too asks if I am a reporter, this time I tell him “no” but that Cuba is making me want to be one. Later, another man lazily goes through all of my belongings while five others, and a dog, look on; I ask one agent, who speaks English, why I am being detained. “It is normal procedure,” he says, “just a random inspection.”
“Bullshit,” I answer, “I have watched an hour’s worth of people walk through customs without incident. I’ve been to a lot of countries and I’ve never been treated like this. So why am I being detained?” And now he is resigned, and beleaguered, and seems almost apologetic. “You’re right,” he says, “it’s not random. But I have no idea why. Where did you go while you were here? Did you talk to anyone? See anyone unusual?”
**********************
Everyone in Havana I speak to, or at least those with whom I feel comfortable asking pointed questions about life in Cuba, tells me to just not talk about the government. Don’t ask questions, and don’t criticize. I tell one man about my interactions with the DSE near the park, he tells me “it’s no big deal. It happens to everyone.” But it seems to me to be a really big deal, because even with my view of Havana tainted by a giant undercover agent snatching from my face any rose-colored glasses I may have worn and stomping them into the eroding sidewalk at my feet, the city just seems sad, a façade of what once was. Havana’s storied almendrones (because they are shaped, apparently, like almonds), the legions of vintage American cars Cubans use as taxis, are spectacular at first blush, but in reality they are the exoskeletons of ghosts, a conflation of American bodies supplemented by Bondo and spray paint and powered by French and Russian diesel engines, running on Chinese tires and controlled by German steering wheels with street-fabricated parts and accessories holding it all together. They are appropriately tank-like, because but for a few of the major thoroughfares, Havana’s city streets are comprehensively pot-holed, an urban floor-is-lava playing field: touch intact asphalt to stay alive. Giant grey dumpsters occupy some street-corners, though they are in the middle of the road more than they are not; where there is no dumpster, people just drop their trash. On one street corner both the road and much of the sidewalk are simply missing, the telltale mark of a backhoe that simply scooped up a pile of accumulated garbage, sidewalk, road, and all. They pretend to pay us, we pretend to work.
I experience little of the stereotypical, though often validated, joy and vibrancy or love of life that one finds in other Latin American or even West African countries. And where a traveler may often experience internal conflict in wanting a country to remain the same – the absence of technology and brazen consumerism is refreshing, but a rickshaw is charming only for the man in the back – I find myself wishing Cuba would change. Quickly.
The Artist: The century-old brick and plaster house is both drunk with her art and testimonial to her resourcefulness; old keys for branches and buttons for windows and screws and stamps and hasps and beans and a surfboard tip for a mountain and driftwood machetes and the metal handles from black binder clips depicting what is unmistakably Mary cradling baby Jesus. Her canvas is never canvas – too hard to come by – and she instead uses wood and cardboard and old skateboard decks and the reverse of old posters, anything that will hold paint and ink and glue. I watch as she quickly cranks out three cityscapes, each with a brightly colored Cuban flag, buildings in varying stages of disrepair, and a more subtly drawn slogan, propaganda either for or against, the choice in the eye of the beholder. She wants everyone to know that the beautiful buildings in Old Havana – her inspiration – are falling down, but she feels stagnated by the times, and everything looks today like it did yesterday like it did fifty years ago. “Nothing is new,” she says. “I think the muse is on vacation.”
The Marcher: In 2003 seventy-five artists, journalists, community organizers and husbands were arrested and jailed for their anti-government activities; sixty-four were released in 2009 on condition that they immediately leave the country. The eleven remaining refused to abandon Cuba, and though they too were eventually released, their struggle continues. For the last thirty-three Sundays, Berta Soler and her Damas de Blancas have met here, outside the Santa Rita de Casia church, where they protest their husband’s imprisonment by making one circuit up la Quinta Avenida to 16th Street and back again, then walk the three blocks to the beach where they are met, violently, by what they say are government employees ordered to confront and beat them. And next Sunday? “We do it again.”
The Musician: The Malecón is a ten kilometer stretch of seaside road from Castillo de San Salvador de la Punta west to the Rio Almendares; dilapidated and ever-deteriorating buildings to the south and black coral rock breakers and a concrete wall to the north, storms above the Straits of Florida occasionally bringing waves so violent they smash against the seawall, flood the road, and drench the buildings beyond it. Upon the wall sits a lonely, solitary figure with not a tourist in sight; a Miami Heat hat on his head and a trombone pressed so tightly against his lips his knuckles turn white. Armando is a professional, he says, but lost several of his teeth to disease – he shows me his dentures – and now is practicing just to get back to where he used to be. He plays three songs, All of Me, Memories, and the last, as I’m walking away, Yesterday, the significance of the last amplified by the supporting band of crashing waves, old cars, and history.
El Combatiente: On December 2, 1956, a twenty-nine year old Fidel Castro and eighty-one other men crash-landed the yacht Granma at Playa las Coloradas and changed Cuba forever. Francisco was eventually there too, a young man tired of Ferdinand Batista’s thuggery and wanting change. Of the twenty-four men in his small unit, twenty are still alive today, on the 59th Anniversary of Castro’s landing. Now Francisco sits on the sidewalk outside his house in the Miramar neighborhood of Havana, where he meticulously scrawls out orders for his wife’s pan con perro, pan con mayonesa, and pan con croquetas and unsuccessfully cajoles her, twenty-five years his junior, into posing for a photograph. ¡Vive Cuba!
The Boxer: In Barcelona in 1992 Héctor Vinent Cháron won an Olympic gold medal in the light welterweight division; he did it again in Atlanta in 1996. He boxed at the same Olympics as Oscar De La Hoya (reported net worth of more than $700 million), Floyd Mayweather ($500 million), Antonio Tarver ($10 million), David Reid, and Eric Griffin; and beat Sugar Shane Mosley ($10 million), David Diaz ($15 million) Stevie Johnston, and Fernando Vargas. Ring Magazine lists Héctor as the fifth best Olympic boxer of all time; today he sits on crumbling steps in an empty doorway across the street from the Rafael Trejo gym in old Havana, a stopwatch and whistle hanging around his neck. He trains a few locals, his son, and the occasional drop-in tourist, and keeps ready a dog-eared folder full of pictures – him with Sugar Shane Mosley, him carrying Teófilo Stevenson’s casket, him fighting in Biloxi, Mississippi – and old computer printouts showing the brackets from his Olympic and World Championships. He shows me a picture of his dresser at his mom’s house, stacked with trophies surrounded by medals; in one corner, an Olympic gold.
The Surfer: The surf along Playa Setenta is frequent and breaks both ways, but one man is selective. He catches waves half as often as everyone around him but rides them twice as long. He’s a dolphin trainer, tall-building painter, window-washer, rock climber, skate-boarder, champion BMXer, and part-time model, but the waves are what he lives for. He is, surely, the best body-boarder, stand-up paddler, and surfer on the island, and though his uniform of board shorts, flip-flops, tank top and knock-off Wayfarers would place him anonymously on any surf spot in the world, Cuba is where he will stay. For now.
The Campesino: All seventy-eight years of Angel’s life have been on this small plot of land adjacent to the Valle de Viñales National Park, where the campesino grows sweet potatoes, zucchini, avocados, corn, and coffee planted so sparsely and randomly intermixed with the lush, natural vegetation that he has to hold the plants in his hands before I can see them. An “hola” and a smile turns into a forty-five minute discussion on family, farming, hurricanes, coffee (Brazilian is the best but he’s willing to change his mind), tourists, sons and pants – the former of which he has three; the latter, one. “Farming is hard and I wish I had more money. But I have this view every day.”
I spent the most important summers of my youth almost exclusively outdoors, in the days before the internet and cell phones and when video games existed largely as upright, quarter-gobbling monoliths. This, along with the bucolic pace of my rural town, ensured that I counted the days and hours with friends, playing baseball in the streets or endless games of basketball at the elementary school hoops, with their seven-foot tall rims and chain-link nets, the temperature and aridity of the high desert air causing our finger tips to crack and split with every dribble of a dirt-covered basketball; calling out Marco/Polo at the municipal swimming pool; or playing tennis with girlfriends at the weedy, faded-green tennis courts, trading kisses and serves equally errant. Few of us were rich by even the most generous definitions; almost all of us had working mothers and more than a few had absent dads and it seems to me, in hindsight, that we spent a lot of time unknowingly teaching each other how to negotiate life as young men.
Later, in high school and with the responsibilities of a job and a rusted-floor truck, carefree life in small-town Nevada diminished but never really ceased. On summer nights our doors remained not only unlocked but wide open to allow through the cool desert air. I had no curfew to speak of, and my life in rewind, were one to look for those moments where I could have strayed down a road less paved, could be safely boiled down to lying to Mr. Crow about the ownership of a mechanical pencil, playing cards while smoking Swisher Sweets, and one regrettable night with a bottle of Southern Comfort.
I was a freshman in high school in 1985; that year Medellin, Colombia, was well on its way to earning, and deserving, a reputation as the most dangerous city in the world, a title it wouldn´t relinquish until the nineties were well over. By comparison, today’s murder capital is San Pedro Sula, Honduras, with a rate of 171 homicides per 100,000 people – Medellin in 1991 had a murder rate more than double that. And it was essentially the work of one man, Pablo Escobar.
It is hard to tell the story of Medellin without mentioning Escobar, but Hernán Echevarria, who also grew up in the 1980’s, refuses to say his name, and calls him only “the famous criminal.” As a child, Hernán lived in Campo Valdez, a poor-but-not-the-poorest barrio of Medellin where his father moved as a young man, uneducated but dedicated, working twelve hours a day, seven days a week at a juice cart, showing Hernán by deed and word that hard work and education was the only true way out of Campo Valdez and into better worlds. “It was safe when I was a kid,” said Hernán, but the neighborhood grew worse as he grew older. Hernán had a bomb go off near him one day when walking to high school, and the driver of the motorcycle responsible for assassinating Luis Carlos Galán, a presidential candidate in 1989, was a childhood friend. “It was a poor area, and there were few opportunities to work, so being part of the narco culture was attractive.” It was ostensibly easy money, though mysteriously gained, and some started calling these kids “los magicos” because they could make money appear. For Hernán, a man who clearly loves his city, the change in ethic was palpable, and he fears that it still exists, albeit manifested in a slightly different way. “Have you seen the mannequins?”, Hernán asks me (I have; there is no way to not see the mannequins, they are cartoonishly and anti-gravitationally well endowed and lined up outside storefronts beckoning you in). “You can sit in the café and watch the street and play the game of ‘real or not’ as the women walk by.” Hernán is adamant that this is not a show of wealth and prosperity, but something more insidious. “It is the descendant of the narco culture, about a perception of what it means to be beautiful and glamorous, and it’s not just for the women. It used to be okay that men could be ugly,” he continued. “We have a saying that means ‘men are like bears, the uglier the tastier,’ but I don’t think this is true anymore.”
Regardless of whether it is narco culture or just newly found materialism, being Colombian, and in particular a Paisa – someone from Medellin and the surrounding area – means interminably and frustratingly answering for the Escobar years, something they see as akin to asking a German to explain Hitler or a Russian to explain Stalin, as if it is their fault for producing such a monster and their duty to explain why and how it happened. For Diego (last name withheld), the questions are a bit more difficult to answer. The second youngest of thirteen children, he was close to his younger sister but a small child when his older brothers were in their late teens and early twenties; when Diego was playing a version of freeze tag in the streets, his brothers – at least one and as many as four – were forming the gang that would become Pablo Escobar’s most feared and prolific assassins. Diego’s last name is Italian and unusual in Colombia, and when the police started referring to the gang simply by his last name, life became, to say the least, difficult.
“My last year of high school was awful,” Diego says. “When a teacher would call out my last name, the entire room would go quiet. When grades were posted, my name would always be circled or underlined with some comment written next to it.” Diego was regularly followed (he believes it was usually the police), and one day, tired of seeing the same car tailing him for weeks, he dropped his books in the street and, crying uncontrollably, faced the car with his arms spread wide. “Kill me now!” he shouted. “If you’re going to kill me, do it now! I am just a student so leave me alone!”
The tailings stopped, but not the violence. Diego heard explosions around the city seemingly daily, and came home from school one day to see the windows of nearly every house on his block shattered, the effects of the bombing of a business near the family home. He saw a young man murdered literally in front of his eyes, and believes he lost at least ten friends to the violence, some of them personally involved and some of them not. “The police were powerless,” Diego says, “either from corruption or out of fear. Escobar put a price on every police officer’s head. At stop signs, other cars would stop a hundred feet away from the cops in case a bomb went off or if the gangs started shooting at them.”
The misery, of course, was particularly personal to Diego. One brother was murdered in Bogota in the late 80’s; another died in 1991, along with sixteen other people, in the bombing of the Macarena bullfighting stadium in Medellin. A third brother committed suicide, and two others were killed, probably by police, in targeted raids on the same day in different parts of the city. “My father died of a heart attack,” he says, “but I am convinced my mother died of a broken heart.” After the death of a husband and five sons, Diego says his mother essentially shut-down. “My best memories of my mother are of her singing and cooking. Her voice was my alarm clock, and she never let any of us, no matter how early, leave the house without making breakfast.” But she quit cooking, then quit singing, then seeing – Diego says she closed her eyes one day and refused to open them – and then, finally, quit talking. The last words Diego heard his mother say was in response to his asking why she couldn’t, or wouldn’t, open her eyes: I don’t want to see the world.
I asked Diego if he, or his parents, knew what his brothers were doing. “I knew when I was older, and was able to read and understand more, and I think my parents knew. We just never talked about it.” Sometimes we don’t ask the questions to which we don’t want to hear the answers.
But for as much as Diego and Medellin would like to leave all that nonsense behind, those who came of age in Pablo’s kingdom are generationally intertwined with cartels, cocaine, political terrorism, murderers, and, perhaps most importantly, helping the rest of the world to see Medellin’s citizenry for who they are – generous, optimistic, and kind, with an acknowledged but well-intentioned self-importance and sense of pride in belonging to something bigger than themselves. Which are all things not Pablo.
Perhaps. To a small extent, I can sympathize with Hernán’s plight. Being a Nevadan means having to regularly explain that the state is more than just Las Vegas, more than just gambling and legal prostitution (we have more mountain ranges than any other state save Alaska, damn it). Humans are naturally inclined to embrace the good while deflecting the bad when pride is at stake, but this seems a bit disingenuous. Maybe we do have to account for where we’re from. Because for all the demurring of narco culture and Pablo Escobar, Hernán also shares a telling Colombian proverb, one he says everyone knows and labels the “eleventh and twelfth commandments”: The first (or eleventh) is that “when someone offers papaya, take it.” Easy to mistake this sentiment as something similar to “never look a gift horse in the mouth” or the more pedestrian “don’t pass up an opportunity,” until you hear the twelfth amendment: Never offer papaya. Essentially, don’t present me with an opportunity – even one at your expense – because if you do, I’m going to pounce on it. This might be the culture of industriousness and optimism, but it also contributes to a culture of conflict and a history of violence that has played out, ironically, almost entirely within Colombia’s own borders.
Hernán tells another story, his recollection of an uninformed childhood discussion over the reasoning behind Escobar’s declared war against the government. Escobar was angry at Colombia’s extradition policy with the United States, which aimed to prosecute the drug cartel’s leadership in the U.S. judicial system. Escobar said “a grave in Colombia is better than prison in the U.S.,” and one of Hernán’s friends said that his father supported Pablo, likening the extradition policy to a bad kid getting disciplined not by his own father, but by his neighbor’s. “I can understand this,” says Hernán. “But I don’t think we were very good fathers.” And here is an element both Hernán and Diego raise, the importance of not forgetting. Both say the current generation, who embrace narco culture but do not fully understand the havoc Escobar and his cronies wreaked upon lives in this city, run the risk of living through the same hell through which Diego and Hernán lived.
So how do you do this? How do you simultaneously ask the rest of the world to stop picking at the scab that is cocaine and Pablo Escobar and see instead the beauty that is Colombia and Medellin? How do you convince people to move on, but to not forget? This is the same message the city is trying to share through social urbanism or, as Hernán calls it, “democratic architecture.” Medellin installed a grand public library, a beautiful cubist building, on the top of the hill in a dangerous neighborhood, and outdoor escalators grace the steep hillside in the depressingly named “District 13” where, before the escalators, residents had to walk up and down more than 300 steps to get to the city center and home again. The idea is not only to make life easier for the city’s most destitute, but to let them know that the government cares about them and that they should care about themselves as well. Whether the projects have improved the quality of life of the residents isn’t clear – we saw the escalators used only by a jubilant dog and a smiling little girl taking out the trash – but that the residents take pride in their community is: both neighborhoods are clean and active and colorful, District 13 particularly so. Locally-painted murals grace the walls of the homes that press in around the stairs, and house plants are in abundance.
Medellin is also mall-crazy, and has a smoothly running metro system that is the pride of the city. There is not a piece of garbage or stain of graffiti to be found in any station or on any train. The city turned the dirtiest, druggiest, prostitutiest area of downtown into a public library with a neighboring bamboo garden and monumental park of towering lights; there is free Wi-Fi in every public space; and favorite son Fernando Botero donated a new sculpture of his peace dove to sit next to – but not replace (move on but don’t forget) – the original Pajaro de Paz that was blown up in 1995. This is not reinvention necessarily, but reinforcing pride and focusing the positive. And maybe it works. Medellin, once the murder capital of the world, was named 2015’s “City of Innovation.”
Diego today is single and lives with two of his sisters in Laureles, an upscale area of Medellin. For a living he teaches Spanish and English to businesses around the city, and a few days a week he volunteers in the Ocho de Marzo barrio, where he gives free Portuguese lessons to children who live in one of the most dangerous neighborhoods in Medellin, one where you can be killed for wandering across the “invisible frontier” and into the territory of the la Sierra barrio. People ask Diego why Portuguese, why not English, but for him it doesn’t matter what he teaches. “It’s the message that is important,” he says. “I’m telling them they don’t have to be what other people expect them to be. They can be something different and better. They can be someone.”
Cassiani de Cassiani’s face is beaded with sweat but his smile remains steady through the regular wipings of his forehead. Whichever of Colombia’s 314 ecosystems we presently occupy on this dirt road sixty kilometers south of Cartagena is tyrannical. We are standing on the main street of San Basilio de Palenque, the first freed-slave city in the Americas and the last one still in existence, and my shirt is soaked. The heat and humidity is causing me to hallucinate. A man limps towards us, alone, a dwarf and a cripple wearing a cocked baseball hat and a basketball jersey and his face smeared white, the constant base beats of Palenque music coming from the gathering of local men sitting on a porch down the road behind him seemingly urging him forward. He pays us no mind, slurring loudly but in an unrecognizable language as he walks past. This village has done its best to resist outside influences for the last four hundred years, and today will be no different.
Benkos, Cassiani and Alberto
Most of the following is probably true: Sometime in the late 1500’s, Benkos Biohó, an African island king, was seized by a Portuguese slave dealer off the coast of Guinea-Bissau, sold to a middle-man with the last name of Palacios, then deposited on the fortified walls of Cartagena and sold to a Spaniard. Benkos quickly decided to forge his own path, organizing an escape with ten other slaves and making his way to the swamps and low mountains west of the Magdalena River and south of Cartagena. He founded the Village of the Cimmarróns, organized an army, helped to free other slaves, and repelled the forces of the King of Spain, making the Hollywood transition from a minor island monarch to a major pain in the ass for the Spanish one. But the best tales of heroism end with martyrdom, and Benkos Biohó, liberator of slaves, King of Handguns, and idol for generations, was duped into peace by the governor of Cartagena. In 1621, after walking ignorantly carefree through the city streets, Benkos was caught, hung and quartered. Today his statue stands in the San Basilio de Palenque main square, his back to Cartagena and his unshackled arms stretching out towards the west coast of Africa.
But his memory is strong, and San Basilio today is an economically depressed but culturally enriched town of about 3,000, most of them direct descendants of slaves brought to Colombia from Angola and Congo. Benkos selected the area for its defensibility and others found it by following maps woven into women’s hair; we drive the sixty kilometers in a rental car, stopping for two legitimate toll booths and, after an unplanned diversion into a roadside village, three illegitimate ones, set up by entrepreneurial youths stringing ribbon across the road. Eventually a large brown sign on the side of the highway directs travelers to San Basilio, along a long dirt road that ends in the village itself. We park in the main square and next to a church with a stained glass window depicting not only a historically inaccurate and ironically white Jesus, but one who looks as if he’s been conjured up by Trey Parker and Matt Stone. Of two men lounging under a gazebo and out of the sun, Cassiani de Cassiani is the quicker to his feet and far more amiable, and though he speaks only Spanish and Palenquero (a Creole mix of Bantu, Spanish, and maybe some Portuguese), he assures us he has an English-speaking friend. We hire Cassiani as our guide for the day, and after picking up Alberto, whose “English” consists of a few recognizable words ineffectually mixed in with other sounds, Cassiani takes us on a walking tour and oral history of San Basilio.
South Park Jesus
Aside from the aforementioned Benkos Biohó and the foundations of the Palenque, Cassiani shows us the creek where the women still wash clothes and talk; shares that polygamy is practiced and that he has three wives; tells us of the importance of music in both current affairs (he is dancing or singing more often than he is not) and the role it played in defending the city in the early years; and describes the intense and lengthy funeral ritual of the Palenque. The women play an elaborate role in the ceremony, called Lumbalú, to include mandatory crying, singing, and – here’s where the translation gets tricky – eating. Of the dead. Though this generally isn’t much of a shock for me – I have long been attracted to the sky burial practices of some Tibetan Buddhists and my recent discovery of the Zoroastrian’s Tower of Silence (#161 of 422 things to do in Mumbai!) has only added to my long list of places to see – the casual nature with which Cassiani and Alberto assert that they may have dined on their gammy is a bit disconcerting.
“Do you mean cannibalism?,” I ask.
“No, (something in Spanish and/or Palenquero).” Both Cassiani and Alberto are animated in their denial that they are cannibals, and I quickly realize that this might be an awfully inconsiderate accusation to make towards someone you’ve just met, in their own homes, who are being so kind as to show you around their village. I try to clarify.
“Tu comes los muertos, o tu comes con los meurtos?”
I will admit my Spanish is, to be overly generous, flawed, but we leave our initial meeting with Cassiani under the distinct impression that, at one time at least, eating mami- and papi-bits was a way to both honor and communicate with dead family members. Internet research does not support that the Palenque are cannibals or ever adopted the practice, but nor does it say they are not cannibals. And though “cannibal” seems a bit harsh, the word itself actually comes from the Spanish word caribal, in that the Spanish believed that the Caribs of the West Indies perhaps, occasionally, ate one another.
The Famous Cassiani and his Marimbula
We make our last stop of the day at the home of Rafael Cassiani Cassiani, just on the east side of a barrio-dividing line none of us can see and at the site of the future police station (San Basilio does not now nor has it ever had a police force, and disputes are resolved by village elders). Rafael Cassiani Cassiani, master of the tabla, apparent novice on the marimbula, and Palenque goodwill ambassador, sits in his back yard, shirtless but with an impressive silver award hanging around his neck and a smile as bright. He lists the countries he’s been to, all of which invited him to play and to sing, and then does the same for us. It is mesmerizing, in part because we are witnessing something so foreign, in part because we have been rewarded for taking a chance without preparation, and in part, no doubt, simply because we are here.
I watch as she quickly cranks out three cityscapes, each with a brightly colored Cuban flag, buildings in varying stages of disrepair, and a more subtly drawn slogan, propaganda either for or against, the choice in the eye of the beholder. She wants everyone to know that the beautiful buildings in Old Havana – her inspiration – are falling down, but she feels stagnated by the times, and everything looks today like it did yesterday like it did fifty years ago. “Nothing is new,” she says. “I think the muse is on vacation.”
The Marcher: In 2003 seventy-five artists, journalists, community organizers and husbands were arrested and jailed for their anti-government activities; sixty-four were released in 2009 on condition that they immediately leave the country. The eleven remaining refused to abandon Cuba, and though they too were eventually released, their struggle continues. For the last thirty-three Sundays, Berta Soler and her Damas de Blancas have met here, outside the Santa Rita de Casia church, where they protest their husband’s imprisonment by making one circuit up la Quinta Avenida to 16th Street and back again, then walk the three blocks to the beach where they are met, violently, by what they say are government employees ordered to confront and beat them. And next Sunday? “We do it again.”
storms above the Straits of Florida occasionally bringing waves so violent they smash against the seawall, flood the road, and drench the buildings beyond it. Upon the wall sits a lonely, solitary figure with not a tourist in sight; a Miami Heat hat on his head and a trombone pressed so tightly against his lips his knuckles turn white. Armando is a professional, he says, but lost several of his teeth to disease – he shows me his dentures – and now is practicing just to get back to where he used to be. He plays three songs, All of Me, Memories, and the last, as I’m walking away, Yesterday, the significance of the last amplified by the supporting band of crashing waves, old cars, and history.
El Combatiente: On December 2, 1956, a twenty-nine year old Fidel Castro and eighty-one other men crash-landed the yacht Granma at Playa las Coloradas and changed Cuba forever. Francisco was eventually there too, a young man tired of Ferdinand Batista’s thuggery and wanting change. Of the twenty-four men in his small unit, twenty are still alive today, on the 59th Anniversary of Castro’s landing. Now Francisco sits on the sidewalk outside his house in the Miramar neighborhood of Havana, where he meticulously scrawls out orders for his wife’s pan con perro, pan con mayonesa, and pan con croquetas and unsuccessfully cajoles her, twenty-five years his junior, into posing for a photograph. ¡Vive Cuba!
planted so sparsely and randomly intermixed with the lush, natural vegetation that he has to hold the plants in his hands before I can see them. An “hola” and a smile turns into a forty-five minute discussion on family, farming, hurricanes, coffee (Brazilian is the best but he’s willing to change his mind), tourists, sons and pants – the former of which he has three; the latter, one. “Farming is hard and I wish I had more money. But I have this view every day.”
