The Cat King of Havana Read online

  Juanita smiled faintly. “Oh, yes. Las hermanas Gutiérrez. We ran the neighborhood. We played the best pranks. We got the cutest boys. And the way we danced? Pa’ acabar.”

  “You danced?” Ana asked.

  “Who didn’t? But we were something else. All the guys would ask us. If we didn’t think they were good enough, we’d just dance ourselves, sister with sister. People would stop and watch and yell agua!” Juanita crunched wistfully on a banana chip. “We had some good times.”

  “Why did she leave?” I blurted out. “I mean, why did she leave and you stay?”

  Juanita stared at me. A banana chip remained suspended in her fingers, halfway to her lips.

  It was Yolanda who spoke, surprising me. “It’s a personal decision, to leave or to stay. A decision everyone has to make for themselves.”

  Just like that, my question floated off like it had never been. It occurred to me that in this way Juanita was like her sister. They both wanted to forget the past.

  And something else. For all her stories of Mom’s youth here in Havana, Juanita hadn’t asked me a single thing about Mom’s life. Not how she lived. Not how she died.

  “Tell me,” Benny said, looking at Ana. “What’s it like, living in New York?”

  “It depends,” Ana said. “Are you the son of an investment banker? The daughter of Puerto Rican immigrants? Rich and white? Poor and brown? Rich and black?” She shrugged. “New York is a very different place, depending on who you are.”

  “Just like Havana, then,” Yolanda said. “It all depends. If you’re the daughter of a Party functionary or if your family’s got a private business, or else if you’re a black kid growing up in a solar somewhere.”

  “I thought that didn’t matter so much in Cuba,” Ana said.

  Yolanda just stared at her.

  “Benny grew up in a solar and he made it,” Juanita said. “Free school, free university, free rent, do you get that in New York?”

  “All my childhood friends are still in the solar,” Benny said softly. “Worrying the roof might cave in on them while they sleep.”

  “It’s all great on paper,” Yolanda said. “There’s no racism in Cuba, no sexism, and prosperity for all. But how many black faces do you see in the Politburo? How many women?”

  “Maybe if there was no bloqueo—” Benny began.

  Juanita slapped the table, a short, sharp sound. “Basta ya! Rick and Ana didn’t come to Cuba to talk politics.”

  For a moment there was a silence. No one looked at anyone. Then Ana said, “But really, New York is great. Nowhere like it. There’s skyscrapers and Central Park, and if you ever visit we’ll take you to Coney Island. . . .”

  After dinner, I handed out the gifts I’d brought. For Yosvany I had sunglasses and a Yankees hat. For Yolanda, a few CDs and makeup (selected by Ana).

  For Juanita I had a hand cream and a couple of books. She caressed the cover of Margaret Atwood’s latest story collection as if it were bound in fine leather. The other book I gave her was Mirta Ojito’s Finding Mañana: A Memoir of a Cuban Exodus. It had been Mom’s, a gift from Dad complete with the inscription For María. And it told the story of the Mariel boatlift during which Mom had left Cuba.

  I’d taken it along on an impulse, thinking Juanita might find it interesting. But her eyes scanned the title and she nodded and put the book aside as if it didn’t catch her attention.

  Before we left for the Milocho, Yosvany put on the Yankees cap and tucked the sunglasses into the V of his shirt, even though it was twilight. Once on the street, he tugged at his cap occasionally and walked down the middle of the road like he owned it. Though maybe that was to avoid the precarious-looking balconies overhead.

  “Tonight we party,” he promised.

  “Where’s the club?” Ana looked uneasily at the empty street around us, held her camera bag close to her chest. “Do we take a taxi?”

  “Not a taxi,” Yosvany said. “They’re a tourist rip-off. We’ll take a máquina.”

  “A what?” I asked.

  “A colectivo,” he said. “An almendrón.”

  Once we got to Neptuno, the main Centro Habana drag, Yosvany showed us what he meant. Here the street was clogged with traffic, one American jalopy after another. “See how the cars are round like almonds?” He stepped into the street, stuck out his arm. “Pretend you’re not tourists.”

  Ana and I exchanged a look. “How?”

  “Don’t talk,” Yosvany said.

  We didn’t talk.

  A portly older woman strode up to us. “Hi! Where are you from? Taxi? Cigars?”

  Yosvany waved her off. “Try not to look so yuma,” he said to us without much hope.

  A car pulled up. Yosvany leaned in the window. “Línea?”

  “Veintitré’,” the driver responded—muttered fast, before he floored it and was off.

  “You’ve got to know the route names,” Yosvany said as he flagged down the next one.

  The rattling car that pulled up—a Plymouth Fury, some corner of my mind recognized—was going the right way. An amorous couple perfumed like a Chanel factory crowded the front by the driver. We got the back to ourselves, a long, flat, unbroken leather seat. I piled in last and slammed the rusted door, which earned me a scowl from the driver.

  “Suave con la puerta! Softly!”

  The engine rumbled mournfully. We rattled up Neptuno for a long while, then past the grand steps of the University of Havana and into Vedado. An ugly, blockish skyscraper hotel swam past on our right—Habana Libre read a giant glowing sign up high.

  Every once in a while the car stopped to let someone out or to pick up another passenger. The road was a river of light and traffic in the midst of low houses and dark streets. At last, when I could see a tunnel up ahead, Yosvany told the driver to stop. I fished about in my pockets for CUCs, but he gestured for me to stay still and handed the driver some bills. We got out.

  “Give me thirty pesos nacional,” Yosvany told me as we walked down a quiet, dark side street. “If you’d started waving around CUCs like a tourist, he would have taken five times that.”

  The side street ended in another major thoroughfare. A cool breeze ruffled our clothes. To our left, a second tunnel disappeared into darkness. But to our right . . .

  To our right stretched Havana’s seawall—the Malecón.

  It ran four miles along the city coast, a concrete parapet that shattered waves into white foam and spray. People strolled down a wide promenade overlooking the water, couples and groups of friends, even here so far from the city center. Next to the promenade curved a motorway—the whole coast a golden scimitar of streetlights.

  Inside the road rose the city itself, aglow against the night sky. The Hotel Nacional on its rocky hill, bathed in sharp lights. Residential areas half hidden in shadow. At the far end of the bay, the lighthouse of the Morro, the light pulsing periodically.

  We crossed the road and approached a walled-off compound on the edge of the water. The left side of the compound was dominated by an imposing mansion with large red digits 1830 painted on its yellow facade. The rest of the place, what we could see through the gate, was a spacious outdoor patio brimming with people. A cheerful timba track played over booming speakers, “La Boda en Bicicleta” by Elio Revé Y Su Charangon. I shifted restlessly, surprised to notice how eager I was to dance.

  Yosvany clasped hands with the heavyset bouncer at the ticket booth. He pointed at us and explained something. The bouncer nodded.

  “It’s two CUC each,” Yosvany said. “My friend Carlos got you a discount.”

  We paid. A sign on the wall said entrance was three CUC. Which made me reevaluate my initial assumption—that Yosvany wanted us to pay his way.

  The core of the Milocho was a round stone dance floor open to the sky. Right beyond it the water began, so you could stand at a low railing and look across a little bay that opened to the Florida Straits. Clumps of white plastic tables surrounded the dance floor, stretching aw
ay into a dimly lit garden. I made out some kind of decorative bridge and play castle in the distance.

  The floor churned, a mass of couples dancing salsa, surrounded by a crowd of onlookers. About half seemed tourists, the rest Cubans. The locals here dressed well, in stylish, colorful outfits. The guys in particular stood out, some in tight red jeans, others with shaved eyebrows or elaborate punk-style hairdos.

  We found an empty table near the back and sat down. Yosvany gestured at me surreptitiously.

  “What?” Ana asked.

  Yosvany glanced at her, then at me, and tossed his head toward the dance floor.

  Oh. I turned to Ana. “You want to dance?”

  She rolled her eyes. “I’m right here, guys.”

  But she gave her camera bag to Yosvany and took my hand.

  I realized she was trembling a little. So was I.

  We were about to dance casino in Cuba.

  The song switched and half the people in the club got up to dance. We claimed a spot on the edge of the floor barely big enough to stand on, hemmed in by moving bodies—an airless box, suffocating, hot. Moisture covered our faces, and we hadn’t even started dancing.

  We didn’t care. Like fools we grinned at each other and joined hands, and rocked the basic step, forward and back. Ana’s hips moved with a life of their own, mesmerizing. I turned her in an enchufla. We did some simple figures—a sombrero, then a setenta-y-dos, turning round and round, tight against each other, my elbows hooked over hers. A heat suffused my chest, a frantic energy. I wanted to go on and on and on, dancing with Ana like this for—

  But the song ended. Ana grinned and hugged me, and we headed back to our table.

  Some Cuban girl had sat down with Yosvany and seemed to be having an intimate conversation with him, their heads so close they almost touched. A petite, athletic-looking white girl, she wore bright green slacks and a halter top.

  Yosvany waved us over.

  “Guys, this is Ingrid.” He nodded at the girl. “Ingrid, this is my cousin Rick from New York”—for the city name he switched to exaggerated English, nyuu-york—“and his friend Ana.”

  “What’s up.” Ingrid turned back to Yosvany, her entire body toward him, leaning forward. “What do you say, titi? Let’s go?”

  Yosvany seemed not to hear. “So you dance,” he said to me as we sat down.

  I nodded.

  “We’ll get you a good teacher,” he said.

  I choked on thin air. Ana chuckled.

  Yosvany grinned. “Hey, you’re okay for a yuma. Your friend, though . . .” He nodded at Ana. “Candela!” He offered her his hand. “Shall we?”

  As a wingman, Yosvany left much to be desired.

  Ingrid didn’t seem pleased to see them go either.

  “So . . . ,” I began. “How’s it going?”

  She got up. “I’m gonna go talk to some friends.”

  I’m a real charmer.

  I shrunk back into my seat and watched the floor.

  The music was Maykel Blanco’s “El Bembé.” Few couples could handle the song’s complex mix of salsa and rumba, driven by sophisticated Afro-Cuban percussion. Ana and Yosvany had the middle of the floor to themselves. And they made use of it.

  I’d seen YouTube clips of rumba—the Cuban street dance called guaguancó. A sexual pantomime where the guy imitated impregnating the girl and the girl evaded his advances, the dance had seemed crude to me, two hunched-over dancers circling each other and gyrating their body parts.

  I’d had no idea.

  Yosvany moved like a whip in the moment of unfurling, tense yet loose. His feet skipped lightly across the ground, kicking, pointing, stabbing heel down, a pattern too intricate to follow. His knees bent and swayed, elastic, human shock absorbers. His shoulders twisted and rolled and shimmied, now fast and sharp, now snapping into slow motion, like the abrupt slowdown of a John Woo movie. His arms . . .

  But that makes Yosvany sound like some twitchy, uncoordinated marionette. He was the opposite. His shoulders and arms and hips and knees and feet, they moved independently and yet to one purpose, in counterpoint to each other, harmony emerging from chaos. His body an expression of playful challenge.

  Even when he turned away from Ana. Even when he shimmied his shoulders bent low to the ground, a self-absorbed flourish. His every motion reflected her presence, like there was an elastic cord between them driving his movement. That cord stretched and stretched and stretched, and then he tossed his head at her or kicked out, or thrust forward his hips—and it snapped.

  Ana danced simply, a side-to-side basic step that had her hips swaying to the beat of the music. Perhaps that was all she knew of rumba. But the grin on her face told me that she’d soon know a lot more.

  When the song entered its salsa section, the two of them came together and lit up the floor. But I hardly even saw that part. My brain replayed the last minute in sharp, saturated color.

  A tremendous envy came over me. Not the sticky, unpleasant kind that makes you resent people better than you. The kind that fills you up with a boiling impatience, a single desire—I want to be as good as that!

  Yosvany and Ana returned, breathing hard and laughing. “You were right,” Ana said. “Coming to Cuba was just what I needed.”

  “Ingrid left,” I said to Yosvany.

  He looked around for a moment. “There she is.” Ingrid was at the other end of the garden, at a table with a bunch of ripped-looking guys in stylish clothes, chatting and smoking a cigarette. “Ingrid’s good to hang out with. Her grandpa’s in the Politburo, so she lives the good life. Parties, concerts, farandulera 24-7.”

  “Looks like she gave up on you, though,” I said.

  Yosvany snorted. “Watch.”

  He sauntered over to the other table. He said nothing to Ingrid, but clasped hands with the guys, clapped backs, gestured colorfully. Seconds later he was sitting down and deep in conversation. Ingrid sat off to the side, puffing on her cigarette, looking annoyed.

  “Your cousin’s a player, huh,” Ana said. I couldn’t tell if that was a criticism.

  “I guess.”

  The music faded and the floor emptied. An emcee got on stage and invited couples up for the nightly salsa competition. A silence fell on the crowd, all eyes watching to see who’d dare take the floor.

  I shivered involuntarily. They’d have to hold me at gunpoint.

  Ana looked about openly. Searching for Yosvany, I realized, hoping to dance with him. But sometime in the past minute he’d disappeared, along with Ingrid.

  Ana didn’t look my way.

  I was totally going to dance in that competition before we left Cuba.

  (Yeah, I changed my mind. I’m complex like that.)

  In the end five couples competed, and Ana filmed them. There were some good dancers, Cubans with nice body motion, and a European couple that blended hip-hop into their salsa.

  I didn’t see Yosvany again until the contest had ended. Ana had left to dance with some Cuban guy. Yosvany was coming from the back of the garden, where the decorative bridge and play castle loomed. Ingrid trailed a few steps behind him, color in her cheeks. Near our table they parted ways as if they hadn’t been together at all.

  Yosvany sank into his chair with a theatrical sigh. “See? That’s how it’s done.”

  “You went for a walk?”

  He grinned. “Me la tiré.”

  “What? Already?” I flushed. “I mean, there, in the castle?”

  “It’s a great spot,” Yosvany said. “No one goes there. And there’s a nice bench. Tell you what—I’ve got an idea. Take Ana there. Dance with her, tell her how special she is, how she makes you feel like no one in the world—”

  “I told you we have different styles.”

  “You don’t have to have sex with her,” Yosvany said. “Just kiss her.”

  I would have told him about the agreement Ana and I had, that I wouldn’t try to get into her pants. But then she came back to the table. And Yosvany said,
“Hey, Ana. Rick’s got a cool spot to show you.”

  She studied me. “As long as it’s somewhere with a breeze.”

  I licked my lips, my mouth dry. Was I doing this?

  What, exactly, was I doing?

  We wound our way through the tables, to the back of the garden. Down a dim paved path, across the decorative stone bridge, leaving the crowd and the lights behind. What had looked like a castle from the distance was more like a waterside fortification, a stretch of faux-Oriental stone wall with walkways and a little tower, something out of a theme park playground. We made out the shapes of a couple standing atop the wall, so we descended instead, entering an opening in the wall that ran down into darkness.

  Ana used her cell phone as a light, illuminating a narrow, rough-walled corridor. “You better not be an ax murderer,” she muttered, switching to English now that we were alone.

  “I’m out of axes,” I said. “Blame the bloqueo.”

  We came out in a small grotto, an artificial cave walled in by jagged rocks on every side except one. We looked out across a small bay and to the Florida Straits beyond. Immediately below us, water lapped. If you craned your head to the right, you could see the edge of the Milocho’s garden, and the lights of the Malecón stretching out beyond.

  “This really is nice.” Ana leaned out over the water. “I wonder if we’d get in trouble for swimming.”

  I looked down. The wall below us was craggy, and there was a wide ledge right by the water, room enough to leave clothes.

  I kicked off my shoes, all nonchalance. I put one leg over the edge, searched for grip with my toes.

  Ana started. “We’re doing this?”

  I didn’t say a thing, only swung the other leg over. I could be cool too, once in a while.

  My foot slipped. I gasped, clutched at the wall. Stayed on somehow. Scrambled down to the ledge.

  “I have a bad feeling about this,” Ana said. But she followed me down, quick and sure on the wall.

  There we were, in the dark. Two shadows on the ledge, the water lapping at our feet. Looking at each other.

  Ana stuck out her foot, dipped her toes in the water. “Not bad.”