After the Revolution:

Time in Havana moves slowly—when it moves at all—very, very slowly.

A week might take a solid month, it seems, on our second day of stormy weather, huge waves crashing onto the Malecón, delicious green of that water, solid as lava surging up and over the old walls and across the pocked and buckled pavement. A guy is filming a rap video of his buddy, wrapped in a Cuban flag; two lovers hold hands beneath an umbrella.

Middle of October and still no end to summer.

In Vedado, rain falls in buckets outside the farmers’ market; flies on the goat heads, the ribs and haunches; neat stacks of green onions and malanga and guava on the tables, bunches of scraggly orange carrots; eggs stacked three-feet high in pyramids behind the counter and rice spilled around the old red scale used to weigh it out from huge sacks into ordinary plastic bags.

An hour might last all day and fifty years, the last fifty—what sign of their passage?

This market is part of the semi-liberalized economy, the consumer sector, so there’s more here than in government stores, but it doesn’t amount to much.

Eggs and carrots, cautious smiles, bucketing rain.

For poets there is always pleasure in visiting those esoteric places where rhetoric is still publicly glorified, where words and power hold hands. Politics, that vampire, is unavoidable here, stenciled on the walls and framed behind the counter, shouting its putative triumphs from the rooftops.

Zanahorria: how the word befits those truculent roots, goblin fingers yanked from the underworld, so much better than our colorless label, carrot.

From the flower vendor Elizabeth buys a handful of mariposas, the national flower, a cascading white ginger that smells as sweet as gardenia—stuck in a chopped-off water bottle, they will perfume our hotel room all week.

The cityscape is what feels similar, its well-grooved urban geography, the smell of salt and rot, rather than the people, who are universally courteous and kind. Havana’s material collapse is hardly a moral failing of the Cuban people, industrious and improvisational as they are—open a couple of Home Depots and they’d fix the place up in no time—but it is a dazzling failure nonetheless. Certainly, the poison of Cuban poverty is distinct from the poison of Western plenty—in Naples or Barcelona you can hardly walk three blocks without getting your pocket picked, to say nothing of what might befall the unwary in Miami—and you see little of our familiar degradations here, the occasional beggar is greeted with disdain by even the poorest Habanero, angry that foreigners should witness such a disgrace: this is not who we are.

Who are you? Who were you? Who will you become?

* * *

One day we take the ferry across the bay to Régla, to visit the home of some cultural activists who are also well-known local hiphop musicians. I find myself on the rooftop overlooking the harbor, talking with their young associate, Orly, an awesome dude literally bursting with ideas, notions, rants, and talking points in his downhome, colloquial Americanized English: about the people and the neighborhood, about being coopted by the state, about selling out, about resistance. He can’t believe that facile party music has stolen their audience, that bootie-call reggaeton has supplanted their socially-conscious old school positivism, that Pitbull has replaced Q Tip, that people would rather dance all night than work together to solve the problems of society.

“We’ve got to provide a model for the young people, we’ve got to represent!”

“You’ve obviously lived in the States,” I say, but Orly says no, he taught himself English by reading bilingual hiphop magazines. And when that wasn’t enough, he taught himself to speak Spanish with an American accent—so as to understand its intimacies. And when that wasn’t enough, he resorted to creative mimicry, rapping along with Eminem CDs hour after hour, watching himself in the mirror to learn the shapes his mouth needed to make in order to match every nuance of phrase and inflection.

* * *

One day we travel out to the ruined fishing village of Cojímar, huge black vultures riding storm winds above a decrepit harbor that holds scant memory of the Old Man and the Sea. Why does Hemingway loom so large in local legend? The big three—Fidel, Che and Camillo Cienfuegos are everywhere—and busts of Jose Marti, oddly reminiscent of Edgar Allen Poe, pop up like mushrooms. But Hemingway, the macho Americano, what cultural syncretism can account for his continued idolization? Later in the afternoon we visit Hemingway’s old finca, a great breezy house on a hilltop with big game trophies on the walls. They’ve carefully preserved the penciled numbers on the lintel where Papa recorded his weight every morning. 202. 201. 202 ½. The water in the pool is green with algae but the ghost of Ava Gardner still appears each morning to swim her designated laps, naked as the day she was born.

* * *

One day we visit the Museo de la Revolucíon, which has fallen into a dramatic and peculiar state of ruin. It occupies the old Presidential Palace—a nice irony—yes, the oligarchs are gone, their marble stairs and golden Capitoline dome should not have been maintained in bourgeois glory, and yes, bullet holes in the walls speak expressively of the Revolution’s ardor, but the broken windows, the rain pooling across floors of the ballrooms and the old Presidential office, what lessons does the Party believe these deliver beyond carelessness, disintegration, neglect? Even such ignominies might be construed as social commentary—let the old bastards rot, let their palaces return to mud—until you enter the strange rooms of artifacts intended to document and glorify the Revolution itself, curios tossed haphazardly in poorly-lit vitrines with a variety of child-like dioramas and sun-faded information peeling from the walls.

Fidel’s sunglasses, Che’s beret, Camillo’s dirty uniform.

Yes, there is something charming about the lack of pretention, the absence of Soviet bluster or Maoist hagiography, but the overall effect is of a Junior High School social studies project—"I’ll cover Peru, you do Cuba, ok?“ Surely, even amidst so much hardship, so much that has collapsed, the Revolution’s monument to itself should be preserved? Surely there is room, even in the most beleaguered budget, for masking tape and a box of thumbtacks?

* * *

Our last night in town we slip away from the group, eat dinner in a so-so cafe, and find a little bar with a hip, ex-pat clientele, a framed article from the Miami Herald about the “new Cuban economy,” awesome drinks with ornately-curled ginger, carved fruits and cubed sugar cane. We sit over tapas talking with the nice bartender and watch the people come and go—not quite Brooklyn or Berlin, but not far off, a city getting ready for its moment. Elizabeth has been taking photos of everything, even the old bookkeeper working with hand-written ledgers and some kind of enormous, hand-cranked adding machine, when the bartender, suddenly frowning, catches my eye, and leans in close.

“Why is she taking pictures of our financial records?”

I raise my eyebrows. Records? No, no—it’s just an interesting photograph, the old machine there, the whole composition. Elizabeth is still taking pictures with her iPhone, oblivious, I nudge her. There’s some concern with your photographs of the old woman—the accounts she is working on. Those are their financial records, apparently.

“Oh, my goodness, I’m so sorry—how intrusive of me!” Habitually attuned to sensitivities, Elizabeth is upset with herself for missing this one. “I was just drawn to the way she was working, the whole sense of it….”

“La composicion, si, claro. Pero….” The bartender, distraught, seems near to panic. “Show me, por favor, these photos.”

Elizabeth thumbs the photos across the iPhone, and they reveal nothing sinister, no numbers are visible on the distant ledgers, just the woman, her posture, the alcove papered with calendar cut-outs, the crazy adding machine. The bartenders nods, calms, but not until Elizabeth deletes them all, apologizing once again, does he relax. Whether his concern is thoroughly justified or slightly paranoid we are in no position to judge, but we regret, however unintended, over-stepping the limits of local hospitality.

Good rum, beautifully curled orange peels, cautious smiles, palpable fear.

* * *

Who are you, who were you, who will you become?

What will happen to Cuba when the walls come down? Is there a path forward that preserves the people’s rights and dignity, or will it be the old gold rush mentality, sharks in the water smelling blood?

What will Havana look like ten years from now, or thirty, or fifty?

Will the Twentieth Century ever end in this crumbling and mercurial city?

Will the Cold War find its peace—that grand, mislabeled contest of markets and values, individuals and collectives— though even its conclusion would not end what it birthed, another century of conflict and hypocrisy, a cargo of shame and good intentions and heroic inaction.

If ideology itself is the enemy of human freedom, should we care which version triumphs?

Does it matter who makes the decisions if it will all be reclaimed by the Atlantic?

There’s a story you read in the news every few years, about a dentist in Kansas or a plastic surgeon in California, who, once he has sedated and restrained a patient, proceeds to molest them. Sometimes it is little more than titillation, provocative photos, and sometimes it is rampant sexual abuse, all documented, of course, evidence is vital, because power and control are the point of the game and—here’s what always gets me—the patient is aware, at some level, of exactly what is happening, the patient is looped on laughing gas or Percocet, deep in a happy-happy dream but still conscious of their plight, and that patient, I have come to realize, is me and you, helpless in our stupor to resist the systematized indignities to which we are subjected by hegemonic corporations, global finance, brokerage bros and crypto pioneers and everyday Wall Street predators, by lobbyists and lawyers with their non-disclosure agreements, the craven piranha we elect to represent us, oligarchs, greed-merchants, entitled buffoons— and afterwards, when the anesthetic wears off, raw and woozy from it, we are too ashamed to say anything, too shocked to complain, humiliated as we are, and beginning to wonder if perhaps it was nothing more than a dream, questioning ourselves and at the same time scared to push too hard for answers, intimidated by the smiling man with his white coat and bleached smile and professional demeanor, his aura of power and certainty, becoming more doubtful, minute by minute, that there could be any possible recourse in such a situation, anything we might do to claw back a measure of self-respect, even if we dared attempt it, because who would ever take our word over his?

We might, if we believed in such things, hope to start a revolution, imagining that in its wake justice would be served, that we could watch as the man in the white coat is exposed, disgraced, carted off to jail— or perhaps, the nature of revolution being what it is, blindfolded and stood against a wall.

Ready….aim…

But even as we savor that moment of triumph another man enters the picture, a man with a rifle and a uniform and a slogan, he has a few questions for you, this will only take a moment, he says, thanking you with great courtesy as you enter the interrogation room, and the door swings closed behind you, and the lock clicks shut with a sigh.

* * *

Song for the Cuban People

It is no longer enough to set sail,   now we must navigate. It is no longer enough to worship,   now we must testify.

Now that the ruins of the Victory of Socialism have come to resemble the ruins of Colonial Exploitation which in turn resemble the ruins of Corporate Triumphalism, ruins among which liberation and enslavement twine like vines of rust-colored flowers smelling of perfume and wind-blown salt,

now we must build a common altar from baseballs lost in cane fields and stray blues notes on the ferry to Régla and the shards of a million Coca-cola bottles heaped at the feet of plaster saints.

It is no longer enough to legislate,   now we must sing. It is no longer enough to resist,   now we must propagate. It is no longer enough to declare,   now we must remember.

No more exile, no more refuge, no more sorrowful passages or mistranslated verse, no more furious love songs censored by the moon.

It is no longer enough to survive—   now we must live.