Close to the Edge Read online

  Magia had written a song, “La llaman puta” (They call her whore), and she asked me to do the vocals on it. Over several weeks in June we rehearsed the song for an upcoming concert featuring Obsesión at the Cine Riviera. The concert was to be a prelude to the annual rap festival held out at Alamar. A few days before the event, we did a final run-through of the show in the apartment that Magia and Alexey shared with his parents in the small peninsula town of Regla.

  In lieu of a prerecorded beat for her song, Magia decided to bring in Banderas, a student of slight build from the Instituto Superior, to play percussion. Banderas opened up, keeping time with the shaking of a caxixi, a woven basket rattle. Someone else picked up a cowbell known as a campana and struck it on the last two beats of the bar. “They call her puta / For most that’s not more than a slut, making use of / The fact of her beauty.” Magia began her rap over the sparse instrumentation.

  Banderas passed on the caxixi to someone else and switched to the batá. The three instruments together created a deep polyrhythmic pulse. The pace of Magia’s rap quickened, evoking a sense of frenzy. “Crazy / Flesh that invites, that excites, provokes…”

  “She hurries the movements of her hips because outside waits another client,” Magia continued the rap. “It could be a drunk, it could be a lunatic An elegant type, or an assassin Who comes hidden in a masculine body / How many go down this path, and then they call her puta”

  I sang the chorus, a Yoruba chant: “Maripu yeye, eruwe, eruwe, eruwe. Maripu yeye, Amala, amala, amala.” “Yelode,” cried Magia at the end of each phrase. She rapped,

  They call her whore, society rejects her

  Prostitute: she who sells herself for money is not discussed

  Every day the same thing, with the fear gathered between her legs

  Every man is a test of her love for her family

  Every man distances her more from men

  Men, two points of shit!

  This is the conclusion of her life…

  Imagine that everyone turns against you, woman

  There’s no money

  It’s not that the little you have doesn’t stretch

  It’s that you’re broke

  You’re outta luck, but this time more than usual

  Your head is splitting, looking for solutions

  The father of your child, don’t even mention him

  You’re scrambling around for any work you can find,

  Desperate, but the game is tight

  You go once and a million times, but nothing

  Even in your dreams you hear the sound of doors slamming in your face.

  All of us, including me, had heard the song countless times yet were struck by the darkness of the lyrics. This was no light-hearted skit like “Run for the City.”

  “Coñyyoooo,” Alexey exhaled. We all sat silently.

  “Do you think things are so bad as that here?” I asked Magia.

  “Well, you know, I’m not talking about Cuba in the song,” she responded, a little defensively. “I’m talking about capitalist societies, where women are forced into prostitution. The jineteras here just want pretty things, makeup, a new television set.”

  “I don’t agree with that, chica,” said Yelandy, the manager of Obsesión. “It’s true that the revolution takes care of us all, but things have changed. It’s not so easy to make your paycheck cover your expenses.”

  “But I can see Magia’s point,” I chimed in. “In the United States, the majority of people don’t have adequate health coverage and housing. And education, which you need to get a decent job, is more the privilege of an elite than a right. At least here Cubans have their basic needs taken care of by the government.” I could hear the preachiness in my voice, could sense the others tuning out, thinking, We’ve only heard this a million times before. But I went on with my lecture. “Most of the jineteros that I see seem to be after foreigners to have a good time or to get nice stuff”

  “That’s not true,” responded Yelandy. “Not everybody is doing it to get a new Gucci handbag or a video player from Carlos Tercera. Some people do it to support their families and to meet their basic necessities.”

  “Well, what about people who aren’t doing it to support their families?” I responded. “Some people have enough breadwinners in their family to cover all their basic expenses, but they only go after foreigners. They want to go to the fancy clubs and on vacations and have nice things. That’s not about necessity.”

  “Maybe it’s not about necessity for certain people,” Yelandy conceded. “But sometimes we want to have choices. Most of us have to live with our parents, even after we get married and have kids of our own. We do the same old job, day in and day out, and that’s not even to earn enough to go on a vacation or buy a computer. In your country you can move away from home and rent an apartment, and you can earn money and travel around the world. Why shouldn’t Cubans have the right to do that, too? Doesn’t everyone want a different life, to have adventures?”

  Yelandy was right. I imagined myself back in the same house in Sydney where I had grown up, twenty-seven years old, living with my parents, still waitressing at Barbara’s Bar and Café. I saw myself making café lattes for the rest of my life, and I shuddered at the thought.

  “I’m not saying that things are easy.” Magia broke my reverie. “But still, I don’t want people to get the wrong impression. The manager of the Cine Riviera is already worried about some of our other songs that are not even so fuerte as this one. You have to understand, it was tough even convincing him to let us do a rap concert in his theater.”

  It struck me that Magia did intend the song to have a local resonance. She was claiming that it was a song about capitalist countries. But Magia had never seen a capitalist country. She had never even left Cuba. Just as Titon and Giral had defended their films by saying that they took place in a prerevolutionary past, so Magia was preparing her defense. And this defense would allow her to use the platform of the high-profile Cine Riviera to provoke conversations about a reality that she did know very well—that of the poor black women who worked the streets in neighborhoods like Central Havana, where she had grown up.

  So what was I defending?

  Rap music may have carried a negative stigma with theater managers and event promoters, but salseros were the center-piece of Cuba’s emerging tourist culture. A few weeks later I went with Randy’s mother, Lily, to an afternoon show at the Casa de la Música (House of Music) in Miramar. The neighborhood had been upscale in prerevolutionary times but was now populated by tourist hotels and the small-scale mansions of foreign embassies; the elegant former homes of upper-class exiles were occupied by multiple working-class Cuban families. The Casa de la Música used to be a popular venue for local Cubans, who would go there on weekends to dance, drink rum, and listen to salsa. It used to cost five pesos for an afternoon show and ten pesos for an evening show. But by the 1990s the Casa de la Música could no longer finance its operations. It began charging forty pesos for afternoon shows and ten dollars at night. With an afternoon show costing more than half their weekly salary, Cubans stopped coming to shows. It was now tourists, accompanied by jineteros, who danced, drank rum, and enjoyed the salsa bands.

  The cabaret-like atmosphere of the Casa de la Musica, with its dimmed lights, round tables with white tablecloths, and neatly attired waiters, contrasted with the bright Caribbean midafternoon sunlight outside. As Lily and I entered the place, we squinted as our eyes slowly adjusted to the darkness. The tableau that materialized before us was strangely reminiscent of a Batista-era nightclub, except that the North American steam-ship owners and businessmen had been replaced by Canadian joint venture executives, pink-faced German tourists, and aging British matrons. A Cuban woman in a tight fluorescent-pink dress fawned over an obese white man in a flower print shirt to our left. In front of us two Cuban youths in guayabera shirts competed with each other for the attention of a tourist.

  The feature band for the afternoon was
Dan Den, a salsa dance band founded by Juan Carlos Alfonso. After a few upbeat dance numbers Dan Den switched into the song “Atrevido” (Daring) by the Spanish-based Cuban rap group Orishas. The rap song was about a couple who move from the provinces to Havana and swindle tourists as a way of bringing themselves out of rural poverty.

  The lead singer of Dan Den chanted from the chorus to the Orishas’ song: “Everything that she asked for.”

  The Cubans in the audience shouted back, “El punto se la gastaba!” (The idiot paid out.)

  “A pretty room in the Cohiba,” the singer intoned.

  “The idiot paid out!”

  “A dress for her, and a shirt for me.”

  “The idiot paid out!”

  “If she wanted to go to the beach.”

  “The idiot paid out!”

  “He was running out of money, but…”

  “The idiot paid out!”

  “To dance at a concert with Orishas.”

  “The idiot paid out!”

  The call-and-response went on for the whole chorus. The Cubans were dancing and singing along, especially the jineteros who were there with foreigners. They punctuated their line with emphatic glee, all the while smiling and flirting with their foreigners, who were blissfully unaware of what was going on—even if they spoke Spanish, most of the gringos couldn’t understand the context or the slang of the song.

  Maybe Yelandy was right about jineterismo’s being a source of empowerment rather than the selling of sex for consumer items. Wasn’t this what the Cuban state itself was doing, jineteando on a global market, financing itself by selling images of white sandy beaches and decaying colonial houses to tourists? Perhaps this was what the ideal of revolution had become—just another Che Guevara ashtray or t-shirt peddled to those of us who came looking for it. Or was there some way that rappers could rework the vision of revolution to advance their own agenda?

  As I danced along to the song that day in the Casa de la Música, I was in on the joke. I smiled smugly to myself that these other foreigners were truly being ridiculed and taken for a ride. But when I turned to share a knowing smile with Lily, I saw that she was also singing along loudly to the song, clapping her hands, and letting out whoops of joy. Hold on—what did that make me? “The idiot paid out!” I panicked momentarily as I mentally calculated the bus fares, price of entry, drinks. As I had rationalized, an outing with a Cuban friend meant that you offered to pay for everything. That was the only way you could be out together. And most of the time my friends insisted on paying for at least one drink—as Lily also had this afternoon—so that they didn’t feel like this was a lopsided affair. But I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was no different than these other foreigners, all projecting our fantasies onto Cuba and secretly being laughed at.

  About six miles east of Havana, just beyond the aquamarine blue of the Caribbean Sea and the low-density shrubs of the flat plains, stand the tall rectangular buildings of the Alamar housing projects. The cement constructions are covered in chalky white paint that is peeling and eaten away in patches by the salty ocean air. Some individual blocks are painted in pink, murky green, or faded red. Here and there is a palm tree or a children’s swing set. Apartments are connected by sets of diagonal stair-ways that begin from the ground up. The design is angular and solid. It is no-frills, functional proletarian housing. On the tops of the buildings spidery homemade antennas reach for the sky.

  The five-and six-story buildings were designed by Soviet architects and built by microbrigades, or ordinary people organized into work teams, as a solution to housing shortages in Havana in the 1970s. Slum clearance programs relocated black communities to Alamar from shantytowns such as Llega y Pon, Las Yaguas, and Palo Cagao. The 1970s were a grim era of Cuban history, known euphemistically as the quinquenio gris (gray five years—that actually lasted closer to fifteen years), when the orthodoxy of Soviet socialism overshadowed cultural and social life on the island. The heavy and somber buildings—nicknamed “Siberia” by their residents—immortalized the essence of those years. With a population of 300,000 in more than two thousand buildings, Alamar is the largest housing project in the world. Each prefabricated building bears a stenciled number—D 42, Zona 2—the impersonal stamp of the assembly line.

  Alamar

  If Havana was hard hit by the crisis of the Special Period, Alamar was even more so. The gasoline shortages meant transportation into the city was less frequently available, and there were longer waits, making it difficult for people to get to work. There were no tourists around to hustle dollars from. And the contained nature of the apartments made it harder for residents to start up small businesses—like the bodegas cropping up around Central Havana—with people selling ice cream, pastries, or pizza from the front windows of their homes. ere were frequent blackouts, water problems, and shortages of cooking gas. And for the young people of the projects, there was nothing to do. It’s no wonder that Alamar, often compared with the South Bronx, has been seen as the capital of rap in Cuba.

  Havana was fast becoming a tourist mecca. But I imagined that Alamar might be the source of a more potent and revolutionary hip hop culture, because its rappers were not tempted by the lure of record deals or subject to the watchful eye of cultural officials. It was here in Alamar that American rappers were brought by the Black August Hip Hop Project to perform before large crowds of Cuban youth at the annual state-sponsored hip hop festival. What brought American rappers to this place— other than tours organized by the Communist Youth League? Could they reach out to Cuban youth with their language of black power? And why would the Cuban state sponsor this gathering of revolutionary black artists? Citing the “divisive effects” of race-based politics, Cuban officials had long been suspicious of visiting black nationalists, with their dashikis and Afros.

  In late June I decided to visit Alamar for a prefestival rap concert at the Alamar amphitheater. To get there I had to take a bus that left from the stop at 29 and the Avenida de los Presidentes, a few blocks from where I was staying in El Vedado. As I approached the bus stop, I saw long lines of people just waiting—a familiar enough sight in Cuba; they were spread out along the walls and clumped under the shade of citrus trees.

  “¿El ultimo?” I called out as I walked to the end of the waiting masses, per the convention at all places where Cubans queued for services—train stations, fish shops, panaderias, government offices, and the famous state-run ice cream parlor, Coppelia. “Who is last?” A young woman in a green lycra tank top and striped leggings signaled me. “OK, I’m behind you,” I told her, and she nodded listlessly.

  After about twenty minutes a camello bus wheezed its way to the stop, belching black smoke and diesel fumes. Camellos were bulky pink steel vehicles dubbed camels because of their humps in the back and front. They were constructed out of eighteen-wheeler semis and were yet another solution to the transportation crisis. Instead of all rushing for the bus, the waiting people recalled who they were behind and entered the bus in an orderly fashion. In this way another two buses filled up, and finally—about one hundred people and two hours later—I paid my twenty centavos and was on my way to Alamar.

  At the concert in Alamar I met Julio Cardenas, aka El Hip-Hop Kid. He was a tall guy with a short afro and an earnest expression. Julio was raised by his mother in the neighboring sector of Guanabacoa. As a kid he would come rushing home from school to watch the b-boys retandose and retarse— battling—and tirando cartones, laying out the cardboard strip, on the back patio of his building. He and his friends watched Beat Street, Fast Forward, and Breakin’ and copied the moves. Julio moved to Alamar when he was fifteen, and he became caught up in the hip hop movement that was taking Alamar by storm. He would go to the moños, or block parties, where people rapped and deejayed.

  After Julio finished school, he went on to technical college to do a degree in civil construction. But he graduated at the height of the Special Period, when there were no jobs. So he went to work with his grandfather
in a nearby fishery, for some cash to help out his mother and to get the local authorities off his back. Eventually, he found a job as a bridge operator, raising and lowering the bridge that connected Alamar and Cojimar, to allow the ships to pass through. The job was a no-brainer. At 7 a.m. Julio would raise the bridge. By early afternoon, when all the boats had gone through, he would sit back with his friends and exchange news about who had the latest rap magazine from the States, whether they’d heard this song from Pharcyde or EPMD.

  In 1996 Julio formed the group Raperos Crazy de Alamar (RCA) with Carlito “Melito,” a carpenter, and Yoan. They started out just to amuse themselves, without ambitions of being serious artists. “That moment we were living was so critical, so boring,” related Julio. “Everything was closed off and censured. We, the youth, were doing hip hop just to do something, looking for a way of having fun.”

  I was reminded of the young people I knew back in Sydney who had also looked to hip hop as a way out of the boredom. It wasn’t the same boredom of kids in the suburbs who wanted reprieve from their sheltered existence. It was the boredom of low-paying menial jobs and truncated opportunities. The rap scholar Tricia Rose identified this need to break the cycle of boredom and alienation as one of the factors that underlay the rise of hip hop in its birthplace, the Bronx.2 While Cuba presented quite specific conditions of economic crisis, combined with political restrictions, I realized that this void wasn’t something peculiar to Cuba. And hip hop wasn’t just a distraction from the void. It was a way of recreating a sense of community and finding spaces of pleasure in the face of atomization, isolation, and the regimentation of life.

  Julio and his friends listened to American rap, but they didn’t understand the lyrics, and they had no clue how to write their own songs. One day Julio was at Pablo’s house listening to his latest CDs. He heard the song “Boricuas on Da Set,” by Fat Joe, featured on a compilation album. Hearing the song was a turning point in his life. “‘Coñyyyyoooo,‘ta buena,’ I said, when I heard it,” Julio related. “It was a moment that touched my heart and opened my mind. I was hearing a lot of music from Miami radio, LL Cool J, 2 Live Crew, Queen Latifah, Monie Love, but that song inspired me. I thought it could really be the Latino-American-Cuban connection.”