Dancing with Cuba by Alma Guillermoprieto

Author:Alma Guillermoprieto
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction
ISBN: 9780307425447
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2007-12-18T00:00:00+00:00

SIX

Tourism and My Conscience

It was July, the holy month at the heart of the Cuban Revolution. Thanks to Fidel, history had begun anew one July 26, almost twenty years earlier, with an attack by a group of young visionaries on the dictator Batista’s second most important barracks. As the anniversary of that date drew near, the entire island was mobilized again, not to cut cane but to commemorate the founding moment. TODOS A LA PLAZA CON FIDEL—Everyone to the plaza with Fidel—was the slogan we read in Granma, on the walls, and on the billboards where it replaced the now outdated 1970: YEAR OF THE TEN MILLION! In offices, on guaguas, in the line at Coppelia, and in my studio in Cubanacán a change was in the air like the coming of the rains. In the aftermath of its great failure, the militant nation was injured, covered with bruises and on the verge of tears: now the day of communion was approaching, I was told, when the Comandante’s words would allow us to understand what had happened and to become conscious of our mistakes, raising our spirits so we could go on with the struggle no one wanted to abandon. How could we, when the future of the world depended on the Cuban people and those of us who were there with them? With Fidel. Onward to victory forever. Patria o Muerte. Venceremos. To repeat those words sincerely was to unfurl a sail in your chest and navigate by the great winds of history.

Fidel was Urakán, I thought: the Caribbean god of tumultuous air who moves the world to a different place and turns life on its head. One day he uprooted the whole island and sent it out to cut cane. The next day everyone was standing in line to send their blood by plane to a distant country. Who else had his energy or his colossal power? Yesterday we were all sad; today we were cheerful and effervescent as we prepared for July 26 and the anniversary of the beginning of Cuba’s liberation. To go to the plaza and see Fidel! I heard about the citywide rumba that would break out afterward in the avenues—the entire end of July was a carnival, with people parading around in costumes, live music everywhere, and rivers of cheap beer—and the thrill of being in the plaza with the Horse, El Caballo himself, everyone together, listening to his thoughts. It was a fervor that came to find me as I trotted through my daily itinerary from the dormitory to the dining room, from the dining room to the dance studio, and from the studio back to the dormitory, deeply immersed in my ongoing arguments for and against myself and my life. I was trying to work out what my—or any human being’s—responsibility was in the face of horror; the validity of art as an end in itself; the pity and repulsion I’d felt toward Mario Hidalgo; the way socialism offended my exalted notion of the individual.

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