Tag: On the Road

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Havana: Life in the Open

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
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
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.

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The Other Cubans

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.  The ArtistI 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.”

Las Damas de BlancasThe 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, Tromboniststorms 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 CombatienteEl 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), Gimnasio de BoxeoFloyd 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.

Frank, Playa Setente IIThe 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 Angel the Campesinoplanted 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.”

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Coming of Age in Pablo’s Kingdom

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.

Escaleras

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.

Mural

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.”

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Eating the Dead, Dancing with the Living

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.

Cassiani and Alberto
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
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
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.

 

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Four Weeks in Bogotá (y Todovía Tengo mi Cabeza).

Bogotá sits on a high plain at 8,660 feet, her more than eight million inhabitants mashed up against the Eastern Cordillera of the Andes mountain range and sprawling west to the very limits of the Savannah of Bogotá.  The city is huge – one of the twenty-five biggest in the world and the fastest growing in Latin America – and I can see much of it from my fourth floor studio apartment in the Chapinero Alto neighborhood.  I have come here both to try to learn Spanish and to spend a few months transitioning from twenty-two years of government service into a new life in the civilian world; Bogotá serving as an air lock, keeping the figurative bad air from my past where it belongs and letting me breath something new and untainted.  Unfortunately, the literal air at more than a mile and half high is thin and, along Septima (7th Avenue), one of Bogotá’s main north-south arteries, throat-achingly dirty.  The city has a small army of exhaust-spewing buses and a huge one of tiny yellow Hyundai taxis that yield to no one, and they seem to be on the road twenty-four hours a day.

Every American guide book and website profess to Bogotá’s decreased crime rate since the 1990’s, but also warn of a continued reputation for violence. As such I’ve restricted my travel to the neighborhoods between la Candelaria – Bogotá’s original pueblo and city center – and the tower-apartmented neighborhoods of the north side of town, where the young and upwardly mobile reside.  Regardless, I came to Colombia prepared for the worst, and my threat mitigation involves carrying small amounts of cash; making little eye contact; growing an intimidating beard complete with a Louisiana-shaped bald spot; and adopting a feigned accent where I speak Spanish quickly, hoping to thwart would-be muggers by leading them to believe I am not a gringo but rather an immigrant from some far off land where the Spanish is so pure and golden it is spoken at a pace unintelligible to mere Colombianos.  I mentally prepare for my attackers both with imaginary action (where I swiftly disarm them, knocking them out with an elbow to the face and then gently lowering them to the ground, teaching them a lesson in both the power of violence and kindness) and imaginary words (“You want my wallet?  Well guess what.  I don’t carry a wallet.  I carry a money clip. So go fuck off”).  But the truth is that I have never felt threatened or uncomfortable, and Rollos (a native of Bogotá [i]) are disarmingly kind and patient.

I spend my first days in the Hotel B3 in the Virrey neighborhood, and over the weekend the neighboring eponymous park fills with runners, leashless dogs of all sizes, a small troupe of teenage acrobats treating a slack line like it’s a trampoline, athletes using the two or three open-air gyms, and the thick, sweet tinge of marijuana.  I have never smoked it, but even I can tell what the good stuff smells like.  I try to run the footpath, but the altitude sears my lungs, so I instead spend the mornings drinking coffee with the crowd and listening to a gypsy band compete for our attention with an impressively muscular and immaculately dressed transvestite playing a wicked Spanish guitar.

My home for the rest of the month is in the hilly, middle-class, bohemian and gay (both in emotion and sexual orientation) neighborhood of Chapinero Alto, a collection of older two-storey row houses and newer apartment buildings.  This city is crowded but peppered with parks, and every inch of space is used.  Two blocks from my apartment is Parque Portugal (which I quickly label “Parque Marijuana,” or, after my Spanish improves, “Parque Lleno de Mierda de Perro”) and it is never empty.  The benches along the solo winding path host musicians, beer-drinkers, and the ubiquitous necking college students intertwined so tightly they look like a Picasso.  A concrete court seems to be used for basketball only early on Sunday mornings; the remainder of the time it is used for fútbol sala by kids and dads; by grimy construction workers on lunch break, uniformly attired in boots, denim jeans and t-shirts, orange safety-helmets lined up neatly on a slope; or by a four-on-four night league where the shoe of choice is a dirty Chuck Taylor and the athletes are so skilled it seems to me that the small, deflated ball might be glued to their feet.  Colombianos might be Catholic but their religion is fútbol, and a Colombia national team jersey is the single most popular article of clothing, particularly on game days, when the city is riotous with the yellow uniform (and if fútbol is their religion, tejo is their vice, a Colobmian cultural version of bowling.  Except with gunpowder and far more beer and other drunk people standing near your target.  Did I mention gunpowder?).

Tejo Hall, Villa de Leyva
Tejo Hall, Villa de Leyva

 

On Sundays the main roads of Bogotá shut down to vehicle traffic for ciclovia, and hundreds of thousands of residents walk, run, and ride (relatively) smog-free.  It has been going on since 1974, started as a way to open more roads for pedestrians and bicyclists, and if you take Septima from north to south, you can end up downtown in a modern-day bazaar replete with carnival games, junk vendors, food stands, chalk artists, llama rides, jugglers, cuy races, and street performers with skill levels from drunk to painful to huckster to needs work to spectacularly talented.  Keep walking and end up in la Candelaria, home to the federal government, countless hostels, world-class graffiti, and the labyrinthine Botero Museum, a world so fat and joyous that even the graphic shooting of Pablo Escobar looks like it might have been kind of fun.

boteroEscobar-768x1024

Four weeks is not enough for Bogotá; I want to know the city.  After a lifetime of being a mere intruder into foreign territories, I want to feel like a local.  I want a bartender to know me by name, I want to give secret directions to cab drivers that show my local knowledge, I want to sing with the nonstop chants and pounding drumbeats at a Milenarios game; to know the feeling of joy when the streets erupt after Colombia scores against Peru.  I want to know the hangover cure for aguardiente, or where to find the best arepas for breakfast.  Nor is four weeks enough to learn Spanish, and I think the rotating Andres-Manuel-Rafael trio of security guards in my apartment building has learned more of my language than I of theirs.  I want to tell them how lovely are the days in Bogota, with their counterintuitive morning heat and afternoon chill.  I want to tell the taxi drivers that the music is actually Aerosmith, not Guns and Roses, and that regardless, neither are my compañeros.  I want to flesh out, in Spanish, this “American” thing, where apparently every Colombian calls themselves – nee, every resident of every country in North, Central and South America – an “American.”  Though I may be a North American, and “gringo”, when non-epithetical, is fine by me, I am certainly not a United Statesian, and after four weeks of struggling to read signs, patiently waiting for a turn at the gym, asking for directions and generally feeling like an immigrant where you don’t speak the language but learn enough to know that you sound like a child, which frustratingly compels you to speak even less; after all of this I feel confident that I can adequately express what it means to be American.

[i] As opposed to “Costeños” from Cartagena, or “Paisas” from Medellin.

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The Church Invisible (4 of 4)

A spring day in Tucson: the sun beats down, already, the heat magnified or diminished by the absence of humidity, I can never figure out which. On a mid-morning  run with a friend and the air hangs heavy, with heat, with smells of a morning-after detoxification, with my own history.  Biennial trips to this town are conducive to foolish sentimentalism, particularly if one already tends that direction, and much of me is here in Tucson.  Almost all of me is of the desert.[1]  Here for, some would say, an overdue wedding (though nothing good in the desert happens quickly), we run on a Mesquite and Willow Acacia-lined path along the Rillito, a sanded wash that lately, due to groundwater pumping and population and a depleted Tucson Basin aquifer, only very occasionally answers to River; scattering in front of us Harris’s Antelope squirrels and Lesser Earless lizards, brave until we are right on top them and then sprinting away, blindingly quick and beautiful in a devilish sort of way.  The desert, it seems to me, despite its desolation and acerbity and extortive leanings, is accommodative and prone to potential.

Example: the wash.  Heavily vegetated and waiting for liquid fulfillment, patiently, it bides its time as a temporary reprieve for anything with legs, or wings, non-discriminatory; and there, on the banks, the presently vacant City of Fun, Inc. carnival, octopus arms and mallet-ended fulcrums and tea-cupped turntables dormant but for one man hosing down a tractor-trailer; fleeting, precarious joy in abeyance only until the sun goes down when it will then come to life, iridescent with light, and the momentary absence of worry; with the sparkled pubescent longing to steal a moment alone, if for only a flash, at the top of the Ferris wheel or in the darkened back corner of the House of Horrors; here, continuing on the path, the Cactus Wrens and Vireos and Abert’s Towhees calling safely from the spiked confines of the ocotillo and acacia.  They can leave – they do have wings – but they do not.  Something keeps them here, something in this non-judgmental desert that lets you, if you can stand it, be who you are and stay as long as you want; it is addictive, it becomes home in a way that is either incapable of or beyond description – that somethingness Edward Abbey reduced to, well, “something”: there is something there which the mountains, no matter how grand and how beautiful, lack; which the sea, no matter how shining and vast and old, does not have.[2]

The desert, though it can be a trap, an inert ambush lying passively in wait, where it will, if you let it, consume you, leaving you parched and cracked-lipped if you are lucky, starched-white boned if you are not; is also a preservative, sanguinity and resilience rewarded by people or things (a fifty-year old truck) from the past, the discovery striking in you a flint of something, nostalgia or love or a rumination on destiny, if such a thing exists.  Surely this truck doesn’t have one, it has neither destiny nor free will, it has no choice in its fate but there is something, a sum of parts or energy or personality or history.  The arid, high desert has preserved the truck, and memory may preserve emotions, but there is always something more, something frequently both frustratingly and gloriously invisible and unexplainable in its potential.

This church invisible has converted me, and I have self-imposed a deadline of the first week of July to finish the truck.  I work relentlessly.  I have done all I can do with it in my own garage, and for the last several weeks it has occupied a spot in Anthony’s workshop, where I can use both his tools and his expertise.  I go there on weekends, a coffee in one hand and an offering in the other, a twelve-pack of lemonade or a bottle of Fast Orange hand cleaner, something to karmically defray both the kindness Anthony has shown me and the experience I am taking.  Today we remove the bed, crisscrossing nylon webbing from alternate corners of the truck and then raising it using Anthony’s homemade hydraulic lift, setting it back down on a wheeled-cart where Anthony will tend to it later. We set to work, Anthony surgeon to my lumberjack, he cuts, removes, copies, welds, grinds and paints the multiple rusted-out spots on the truck, leaving not a trace of his graft and simultaneously allowing me to keep my grandfather’s truck almost entirely in the original.[3]

I, alternatively, am the antithesis, methodically breaking rusty bolts, crudely spray painting smaller parts, oafishly grinding away at the frame with a steel wire wheel.  It is here, I decide, my grandfather’s truck becomes mine, decades of Nevada dirt and rust and mouse turds and Cottonwood leaves falling from places that haven’t seen the light of day in almost fifty years, my grandfather no doubt wondering what in the world it is I am doing expending so much time and energy scrubbing half-century old leaf springs.  He was a man who spent a life time making something, using his hands, concluding each day with a visual confirmation that his toil had amounted to something identifiable, even if it were grading a stretch of road or irrigating an alfalfa field or shoeing a horse or front-end loading buckets of dirt from one place to another, and I wonder if perhaps he, over his lifetime, had become desensitized to the emphatic corporeal nature of what I feel only after working on my truck; this thing I encounter after seeing my reflection in a hand-shined stainless steel grill, or in grinding away the rust from the frame to reveal a stamped FORD emblem, unchanged over the lifetime of the company; or in hearing the basso, diaphragmatic WHUMP of the laden door closing soundly against the metal cab.

There is a shameless self-satisfaction I find at the end of these days, a mute self-aggrandizing I proudly display in the grease and paint on my one pair of Carhartts; the dirt in my fingernails an unmistakable sign that I worked, the progress on the truck visible to anyone who looked at it in the morning and then again in the late afternoon.  I become obsessive, my need for organization and aggregation and order manifesting in the urge to remove one more bolt, or clean one more part, or paint one more piece, and I find myself unable to distinguish between a need to finish the truck or to extend my time restoring it.  The truck, the desert, the end of my time in Tennessee, the preparation for yet another move, this reconnection, albeit temporary, have all made me pensive and introspective.

But now the truck is finished, and it is beautiful.  The oxidized powder-blue has been replaced by the original, Baffin Blue, contrasted by a two-tone of Corinthian white on the hood, a band along the top of the bed, and in the interior.  All the rubber is new, the clouded stainless steel burnished, the bench seat reupholstered, gearshifts and heater box painted.  Anthony has patched the floor pans and corrected all the imperfections accumulated over a lifetime of camping, deer hunting, and pulling horse trailers through creosoted, dusty roads at the whims of a transplanted New Jersey Irishman and his brood.

Anthony assures me there is no other truck in existence like this one, and my instinct is to respond of course there isn’t, but then I realize he is speaking about its appearance, the fact it is four-wheel drive and has the original tailgate and an aftermarket diamond plate rear bumper and brush guard attached to the frame through a customized grill.  Because this thinly veiled posit that a 1962 Ford F100 is somehow metaphorical, well.  That’s just silly.

 

[1]Sand gets everywhere, even in veins.  Another blood line: Nicola Hage, a blue-eyed five foot ten inch Syrian, left modern-day Lebanon sometime in the early 1900’s with fifty dollars in his pocket, in search of a brother and the idea of America on his brain.  He made his way first to Turkey and then to Le Havre, France, where on November 12th 1910 the twenty-one year old paid second-class stowage on the S.S. Chicago to New York City, watched his name entered into the Ellis Island registry ten days later, and then headed west, eventually finding himself in el Triunfo, Baja California Sur, a silver mining boomtown 3,500 miles from New York and 9,000 from his home. What drives a man to go to such trouble, such great lengths, passing by so much opportunity and wonder and novelty existing between there and here? What continued to push him west? Was it a condemnation; a serial reminder of repeated failures, of loves lost or stabbing epithets or miscommunications? Was it simply a thirst for adventure? A woman? Or was it a collective; the potential only men like him could see in the precious metal nimbus setting daily behind mountains that seemed to only get bigger as he headed west, a beckoning Tantalus drawing in a man who chose only to follow the sun. I want my great-grandfather to have found his brother and whatever else he was looking for. I want to picture him in el Triunfo with silver in his pockets, a Mexican woman on his arm so achingly beautiful it made his heart clench, the grainy dirt under his leather boots familiar, assuaging whatever homesickness he had for the deserts of his middle-east, a nirvanic look on his face when he learned enough Spanish to translate the name of his new town, his face turning up to the warming sun as the word slipped quietly from his lips: “Triumph. Goddam right.”

[2] Or, “what is this life if full of care we have no time to stand and stare? Eh? Take off your shoes for a while, unzip your fly, piss hearty, dig your toes in the hot sand, feel that raw and rugged earth, split a couple of big toenails, draw blood! Why not?” Edward Abbey, Desert Solitaire (1968)

[3] Though I purchased a used hood and two fenders from a tooth-deficient man in southern Tennessee, Anthony used them only to patch the original parts, and the truck remains essentially 100% in the original.