I am not a Nobody Now

Almost every adult I knew when I was living in Cuba had at least two sources of income: their “official” job with office/factory hours and accompanying personnel ID and salary, and their unofficial job, which kept them busy at home in the evenings and weekends, away from the prying eyes of the state. Of the two jobs, it was the unofficial one which very often brought in the larger portion of their earnings. For example, countless clinicians worked as tutors, helping younger people to succeed in their studies and exams. Many teachers, scientists and researchers also had second jobs working as taxi drivers, builders, electricians, cobblers, and photographers. Those fortunate enough to live in nice houses, decommissioned from the wealthy at the time of the revolution in 1959, would hire rooms out to other Cubans who wished to celebrate weddings and parties in beautiful surroundings. One resident even hired out his gym in the backyard at an hourly rate to whoever wanted to use it. 

Repair work was also an important source of income and there were workshops in almost every street, catering for mechanical breakdowns, IT problems, renting videos, offering spectacles/glasses repairs, as well as patisseries that specialised in a (narrow) range of cakes and buns. Pork is a delicacy in Cuba and in cities, during the times of the economic crisis at the start of the 1990s, it was not unknown for pigs to be reared in the bathtub. The inconvenience paid off when the time came to butcher the animal and sell the pork.

I’d only been in Havana for a few months when Beatriz and I became friends and I was invited to dinner at her home in the Cerro neighbourhood. This was when I learned about her other source of income: dressmaking. Ironically, it was dressmaking that earned her more money than her job as a print engineer. She was very talented in both professions, but it was her ability to size up, copy and reproduce garments she had seen in a magazine that made the strongest impression on me. All I had to do was show my friend a picture or draw one myself and within a week I would have my dream come true in a well-tailored dress or top.

The difficult part was the process of looking for and finding fabric that was suitable for the garment I had in mind. “Look for,” or buscar was probably one of the most used phrases in Cuban Spanish. I noticed this when I first arrived on the island. There were many significant differences between peninsular Spanish (mainland Spain) and Cuban Spanish, both in vocabulary and in grammar. It struck me almost immediately, for example, that people seldom said, “I’m going to buy some fabric; they would use the verbs “search for” or “look for” instead of “buy” and in this way semantics perfectly encapsulate the day to day reality of life in Cuba for the vast majority of the population. Anyway, the upshot of all of this is that in daily life it was a struggle for most people to find what they needed and to pay the price the vendor was asking.

This was where the mensajero, the messenger came in. The messenger would be “employed” by about 6 to 10 families and their job was to go to the state grocery store (la bodega) and purchase whatever items were available from the subsidised food list for that week. These could range from milk to potatoes, chicken, coffee, salt, sugar, cigarettes, soap and so on. Supplies were sporadic and the amount sold by the bodega could dwindle rapidly; this was a significant handicap especially for full-time workers. By the time they’d finished their shift, supplies would be exhausted. Contracting a messenger was the principal way of avoiding this, this huge drawback. Beatriz did not have a messenger because she felt unable to pay the modest commission they asked, and this was why I saw her sometimes rushing down the corridor in work in a sweat, heading for the exit. Someone had got the word to her that milk, rice, or chicken, or whatever, had arrived in the bodega and it was now or never… before supplies ran out. Of course, employees were not authorised to drop their work and race over to one of the bodegas, but managers understood the hardships of daily life and mostly turned a blind eye.

An event in 2004 threatened to upset this delicate balance within the economy.  In that year there was a countrywide referendum held in Cuba in relation to what was known as the Varela Project. Put simply, this was a demand for constitutional change and for (greater) privatisation of the economy coming chiefly from forces outside of Cuba that was put to the vote. Former US president, Jimmy Carter, raised the issue in a televised speech he gave in the University of Havana, in the presence of Fidel Castro and other high-ranking members of government. From a personal perspective, there was no ill will I harboured toward either of these men, indeed, I admired both of them. Nevertheless, as I watched Carter give his speech, the parts that conveyed criticism of the Cuban government made me squirm with embarrassment. Here we were (again) the coloniser lecturing the colonised for standing up for themselves, for refusing to yield. Remarkably, no emotion showed on President Castro’s features for the duration of the speech.

In response, to these pleas/demands the Cuban government decided to hold a referendum for constitutional change that addressed elements of the Varela Project. In the days and weeks prior to the vote, there was ongoing debate throughout the country. My friend Daniel and his wife Natasha, refused to side with the dissidents to vote against the government motion. When I inquired about this, they reminded me that they had a son in his final years of university and they most certainly wanted him to graduate. When I looked puzzled, Daniel reminded me that everyone was expected to vote using their official ID card and numbers were ticked off by officials in the polling stations. So, while Daniel and Natasha felt somewhat coerced into supporting the government, Beatriz had no issues at all. She was grateful to be given the chance to support the Revolution and all it represented. That was when she reminded me that she was a poor black woman from the east of Cuba; in any other country of the world, it would be nigh impossible for her to study at an overseas university for free and have a career as a professional. Astonishingly, she studied for six years in Russia in the Russian language. I’m not a nobody, now. I am somebody who is respected thanks to my achievements in a socialist country.

As I was leaving, Beatriz’s house, I noticed that the pig I’d often seen there was absent, not snuffling her way around the courtyard, as usual. Beatriz said she had been butchered the previous Saturday; but the tragedy was they’d done it in front of the little dog that was in love with her. “Do you not remember how he used to follow the pig around the courtyard and try to mount her while she snuffled? But mostly they played together… Look at him. He’s over in that corner and he hasn’t moved from there since…not even to eat. They shouldn’t have done it like that, not in his face.”

Beatriz was more sensitive toward animals that many other Cubans. She kept a tortoise in her home because the girls wanted a pet to play with. No other animal would adapt to their tiny home, but the tortoise did the rounds of that room for seven years and probably would have continued for many more years, except for an uninvited guest: a rat. By the time Beatriz looked up from her sewing machine, the rat had bitten the tortoise’s head off and raced out of the door. “I can’t tell my girls the truth. They would be heartbroken, so I told them that the tortoise had escaped…

So much time, nearly 25 years, has passed since Beatriz told me the story of the tortoise and the rat. I still have that first dress that she made me, albeit faded a bit due to the unrelenting Caribbean sun. But my memories haven’t faded at all, in spite of the time lapse. How could I forget Beatriz’s resilience, determination to survive and make a life for herself and two daughters? Even now, with a failing heart, she is reaching out to me in the search for vital medication that could prolong her life. She, like thousands of other Cubans, is being punished for failing to yield to the coloniser, to the demands the US places on Cuba. Sixty-five years is a very harsh punishment for any nation to be subjected to. Will it ever end?