con la tropa

ten days in havana

“If you were a Cuban woman,” Nando says, “I’d kiss you right now.” I stare at him, long dark hair, kind eyes, inexplicable Santa hat and all. I feel his breath on my cheek, his shoulder against mine on the ratty blue couch. Part of me cheers yes, and I don’t feel guilty. For the first time in four years, I’m single.

“Why if I were Cuban?” I ask. Just hours after our New Years’ Eve flight from Orlando, I watch Anne laugh with Diego’s tropa of college-aged friends and two strangers we met at the airport.

“Because,” said Nando, pausing to take another drag through his cigarette. His accent is slowly and heavy. “No point wasting this conversation. There is too much to learn about the world from you.”

I don’t know what to say, so I hand him a Heineken. The beers are our contribution to the party, expensive compared to their rum. Jesús, Anne’s heavily tattooed past fling, flicks cigarette smoke over the edge of his balcony. Beside him are squat Nicolas, dark-skinned Paolo, dubbed “Mr. Wifi” for his internet card peddling, and Mateo, whose American-accented English comes straight from YouTube.

“How long have you all been friends?” I ask. Nando looks back at me and shrugs.

“Forever.”

None of them have left Havana, let alone Cuba. They hear occasionally from family members who have shipped away to Miami.

At 11:59, the room erupts into happy shouts, embraces, swigs from the rum bottle. When we tire of dancing to the middle-school hip-hop on Anne’s iPhone, we walk to the Malecon and stare into the black sea. Paolo puts his head in my lap and everyone’s eyes are on me. Nicolas squeezes closer and asks if I want to learn Spanish. Suddenly, four members of the tropa are around me, a disorienting mix of flirty Spanglish and laughter.

—

Anne and I wake up in her step-aunt Camila’s decrepit teal studio, where we will spend the next ten nights. The seventy-year-old dining furniture smells like old lace and cigarettes. The side table displays a few kitschy ornaments. On one wall hangs a pastel portrait of a beautiful woman.

The door handles are broken and the windows held together by duct tape and rope. Cockroaches skitter around the kitchen shelves and bathroom floor. Camila is unfazed. She walks through the room with a booming laugh, a cigarette, and three espressos. She asks if I can recognize the portrait on the wall, and I realize it is her, many years younger.

My parents later tell me that Havana reminds them of the India of their childhood, old cars on dusty roads, fenced-in pastel houses with peeling paint. We do little here but exist. Diego returns from his government job after an hour or two every morning, smoking shirtless in his abeula Camila’s dining room as we take turns warming hot water to bathe with. I make an effort to speak to him in Spanish and he catches me writing verb endings in my notebook. “Very nice, girl,” he says, and winks.

Almost every day, we drink a coffee at the American-run bookstore down the street under a nude portrait of Donald Trump labeled Joder. At El Garage Café, the neighboring street food joint, I learn to pick out the stray jamon in my vegetarian egg sandwiches without second thought. I climb Banyan trees and watch entrails from Santeria chicken sacrifices float down the streams in the Parque Almendares, Havana’s urban forest where the vegetation forms swaths of green curtains. We ride to Playa on a bus moist with perspiration and swim on a cold, rocky beach with Anne’s most recent lover Alejandro.

On Anne’s instruction, I only wear strappy tanks and crop-tops. “If you wear anything flowy, they’ll just think you’re pregnant,” she says. It’s the right call. Women walk around in tight shirts and leggings, red lips and nails that pop. I initially mistake ever-present cat-calls — sharp hisses, tsk tsk — as insect sounds.

There are other small, persistent signs that this is no Caribbean vacation island. Gardeners water red poppies outside the unassuming North Korean embassy. Raul Castro salutes thousands of Cubans in a celebratory dawn march that we join at 4 A.M., bleary-eyed. The news channel sings odes to Fidel and Camila’s eyes widen with pride, contentment resting easy on her skin.

—

“Te ves Cubana,” laughs Camila. “Solo no abras la boca.” You look Cuban — just don’t open your mouth. I resemble Diego more than tall, blonde-haired Anne does, but my Spanish is only a few days old. They’ve all seen Bollywood films on state-sponsored T.V., but I am the first Indian they’ve met.

Each evening, we gather the tropa, buy everyone Coke and juice-box rum, and find a place to dance. The first night, I walk past the guard at Café Cantante in a black crop top, paying the Cuban fee with a smile. Later, in a rooftop bar, I ask Diego why his girlfriend Isabel never comes out with us. He asks me if I want to dance. We salsa, Cuban-style, until he presses his body against mine in a familiar and insistent gesture. I break away and order a mojito.

Many drinks later, a fight starts and we need to leave. We run into a downpour, where seven of us crowd into a machina meant for four.

—

Infidelity feels complicated and ubiquitous here. On Camila’s request, Anne and I chaperone her seven-year-old granddaughter Maria on a visit to her maternal grandma. Anne tells me that Maria’s maternal grandma is verbally abusive. Maria’s mother is dead. Her father — Diego’s father, Camila’s son — moved to Miami before she was born. Lorenzo is a security guard; he never calls or sends money home. Camila spends two hours showing us pictures of the time he visited six years ago, never breaking her smile.

The next day, we are about to leave the apartment to visit Pocitos, the slum where Anne runs a community art project. Camila’s friend comes in with dried tears on her face, her alcoholic husband yelling to her from the street. Camila crushes a cockroach underfoot and fiddles with her tap handle, tells her we’re going to Pocitos where ay dios mio, you cannot imagine the poverty. She smiles and tells us not to miss our bus.

On the way home, we visit Diego’s mother in a nearby neighborhood. She is young and beautiful. Her large Husky puppy runs into our arms, its blue eyes and mane of white fur unusual in these hot, sticky streets. She tells us that it was a gift from Lorenzo and his new girlfriend who visited Havana last year, that they all had a lot of fun together.

“Diego’s father, like her ex-husband?” I clarify later. Anne nods. We don’t understand it.

Children grow up quickly in Havana. I mention it to Diego at home. He asks what I mean.

“When did you first have sex?” I ask him. “When did you start smoking?”

“When I was twelve,” he says. “You?”

—

The phone rings and Anne answers.

“Hola, Isabel,” she says. “Que? Diego?”

Diego runs into the room gesturing no, no, he is not here.

“No lo se,” Anne says with a frown. “Lo siento.”

—

On my last day in Cuba, we decide to visit Havana Vieja — Old Havana. After a week in Vedado, Playa, and Pocitios, it seems like an amusement park, carefully constructed to fit a European piazza aesthetic. We walk on cobblestones past a hotel where Alejandro tells us Beyonce stayed. Musicians play near fountains, surrounded by pigeons and white people in straw hats. We have dinner and daquiris at Floriditas, a bar Hemingway frequented. After a week of eggs on bread, my body welcomes the stray vegetables in my small crepe.

Soon after dinner, Anne and I dance in the street and two men start following us. We look them in the eye and stick our fingers into our noses until they turn away. I realize I have started to feel strangely unnoticed whenever the hissing cat-calls dissipate.

We end the evening as illegal trespassers. My college friend Max told me to visit his old apartment building on the corner of 13 and G. “Walk in like you live there,” he said. “If you speak English they won’t question you.” We find the place and go straight into the elevator, nodding at the guards. I press the button for the top floor and the doors open into someone’s library.

“Let’s go,” I say, and run through the room until I find a staircase that leads further up. A few flights up, we find a door and push through to the roof. The sun is setting. Pastel buildings plaster into one another and plunge eventually into the grey sea.

“Diego and Camila have never seen their city like this,” Anne says. I worry that they never will.

I stand there staring until she forces us to leave, nervous about getting caught. We walk back through the top floor apartment and catch the confused owners on our way out, blurting out a quick hola before jumping into the elevator and running home. I try to memorize the view, but I don’t need to. I see it again hours later on my flight back to New York.