15th Feb 2012

the strange cas of the

By SWF in Latin America

Yoel picks me up at Miami airport. He says he thinks it’s a crime for me to be paying for the shoddy room at the Mermaid and insists I move to his house. “Man, ees jus an ole wooden hut, you see how ees fallin’ to pieces?

”Why you wanna pay for somefin das all improvise, when you can ha’ brand new, like the Hilton or Sheraton weed all dose waterfalls, sliding doors and elevators. Das nice. Seen enuff crumbling ole buildings in Havana, man.”

No matter how colourfully it is disguised, Yoel says, old is old. Old, like the chewing gum he had to put in the fridge every night in Cuba so that it lasted a week.

Yoel has lived his entire life improvising. Everything he had in Cuba was made from something else. A motorbike was a bicycle with an engine stuck on. A football was rags tied with string. Finally here in the US Yoel can have things that are built for their purpose. A car that is actually built in a factory, not some makeshift workshop that produces moving miracles from a scrap heap. A hotel that is actually built to be a hotel, not some converted home. Yoel’s cheap and clean two-bedroom bungalow near Calle Oche, five miles inland from the Beach where he lives with his parents and brother, could not be further from rustic.

There is no spare room ( I will sleep on the sofa) and I wonder how I am going to write my reports without getting in everyone’s way. But as the salsa song goes: “If the skies rain lemons, learn how to make lemonade.” My main problem is getting around since there are huge distances between everything, and public transport is considered a tool of Communist oppression around these parts, which is probably why the Cuban-American municipality has rendered buses obsolete.

Once, a half-hour car ride took me two hours by bus. The Beach, for all its faults, was the one place where everything you needed was within walking distance. Yoel promises to lend me a bicycle, a private vehicle so not subversive. I’ll across the motorway bridge in the heat with my computer on my back to the library, the pain-peeling public scurge of the beach. Yoel introduces me to his cousin Alex, a bulging biceped Miami cop and prison guard. They met for the first time a year ago, when Yoel arrived in Miami. Though both are Cuban born, they are worlds apart. Miami-bred Alex, just turned thirty, is a child of the anti-Castro generation. He has even acquired the American square-jaw and military style respectability - short hair, side parting, and a meticulously trimmed goatee – thanks to the South Florida Military Academy, a high school started by the first post-Cuban revolution exiles to train their children to fight Fidel.

We are in the pink shade of the club Mystique bar. Seized by the salsa rhythm, Alex shuffles in anxious excitement, as if something from his past is calling. Looking at me doubtfully, he asks “Do you dance?” After watching the Britney Spears fiasco last time, I understand the seriousness of this question from a born-again Cuban, but not wanting to miss the opportunity, I shrug. Alex puts me through a little test to see whether my feet will remain in the right place when he tries to move me, then he drags me to the dance floor.

As soon he begins to pull me in his firm embrace, I understand why Britney was so enthusiastic. There is something about having your will wrenched from you, being moulded into a dough of floppy limbs that is perversely alluring. And my partner’s particularly hard-line determination to impose his regime gives the experience an exciting edge. This is obviously what Britney craved, but it is not something a woman can seek of her own volition, just like you cannot be loved when and as you like.

We stay the night at Alex’s. He gives me his bed while the two cousins sleep in the living room. When I wake up the first thing I spot is a swastika on the sleeve of a leather jacket. “It’s from my rebellious days,” Alex admits laughing. As a teenager he had ran away to New York, where for three years he sported a silver studded dog collar, black drainpipe jeans, matching torn t-shirt and spiked hair. He squatted in crack houses, shot heroin and stormed the streets of Queens queer-bashing, all to vent the frustrations inherited from his authoritarian father who had never come to terms with starting life again as a pauper immigrant, after Fidel confiscated all his belongings, the foundation of a self-respecting bread winner.

“Yeh, I kinda did a 360,” says Alex of his conversion to the other side of the law. Perhaps he means that he now bashes inmates rather than queers.