Afro-Cuban Religions & Culture
Havana Affair
By: Nathaniel Sutherland
Somehow, I found myself at the head of another line, the first of my party of ten Americans to cross the threshold into a new adventure. The gates separating the dusty Havana streets from the cobbled square, space of rhythm and magic littered with folding chairs and anticipatory faces, could have been at home on Bourbon Street, all wrought iron filigree and palm leaf greens, their rust-pocked elegance displaying a refined dignity at odds with the festive air already building to a boil within their guarded perimeter. Although we had arrived nearly a half an hour before the first sun-beaten note rang across the dancefloor, only a lucky few of us found seats in the blessed shade provided by too few lolling palms.
Sitting as far from the sun’s brutal afternoon violence as I could manage in the growing crowd, I felt my trepidation growing: between the budding realization that I might actually have to dance dance and the mounting exhaustion which gripped my increasingly travel-worn body, a sizable part of me wanted to be just about anywhere else. From the look of things, I wasn’t alone in that feeling: my roommates in Cuba, Brian and Gabe, both looked worse for wear. Earlier that day, Gabe had gone, along with most of the others in my party, to the beach, where he’d foregone sunscreen in favor of the Cuban sun and so returned to the hotel a solid four shades darker than when he’d left; Brian, on the other hand, was suffering through the agonizing early stages of a pilonidal cyst on his tailbone that prevented him from sitting, walking, or dancing comfortably.
Still, I was determined to experience the music and the show, a side of Cuba’s ‘traditional popular culture’ with which I was wholly unfamiliar. When the band finally took the stage at the head of the dancefloor and began to play, the drumbeat grabbed me somewhere below the navel and refused to let go; as the lead singer, a tall man with a face deeply creased by long hours in the blistering sun, sauntered up to the microphone with more swagger than Mick Jagger, sweat already pooling at the pits of his heavy blazer and below the brim of his neat trilby, the band shifted into a higher gear and the tempo rose. His mouth opened, displaying at once his gold teeth and his raspy angel’s voice, like pyrite cracked but shimmering with a sort of perfection nonetheless. The air was tense with expectation, with nerves, with the quotidian patter of children’s impatient complaints and their elders’ soothing condolences.
At once, the tension broke as a young man, bearded, dressed nearly all in white, took to the dancefloor as if he were alone at home, the curtains drawn, and threw his soul into the full body movements of rumba, his dance more a ritual expression of his unique humanity than a performance for the crowd. When he finished a few minutes later and rejoined the community at the sidelines, the applause that followed his routine came from the heart rather than from a sense of courtesy, encouraging a second man to take the stage. Before he had finished, a woman joined him, her sensuous gyrations and wildly whipping skirt elevating her sexuality to the fore. Sparing a sly sidelong glance toward Brian, I checked to see if my roommate was enjoying the show she was putting on for everyone; unfortunately, his expression evinced nothing more than his discomfort.
Leaning into the refreshing shade, I asked Brian if he was okay. “Man, I donno. I think I’ll make it through. My tailbone is giving me mad pain, though.” Handing me two CUCs, he asked if I could get him water from the bar. Seeing his downtrodden expression, I couldn’t refuse. Besides, I was ready for any excuse to get myself out of direct sunlight, and the bar seemed like a grand oasis compared to my unshaded seat.
The bar was packed with people desperate to quench their parched throats in the afternoon heat. The bartender, dressed professionally in a white button-down covered with a granite vest, moved at a frantic pace as she strove to fill her myriad orders. After an understandable but lengthy interval, she turned her attention to me. “Dos aguas, por favor,” I pleaded in my poor excuse for broken Spanish. Behind a barely concealed snicker, the bartender waved her finger and told me that she had no water to sell, indicating a display along the far side of the bar with beer, rum, and other liquors I didn’t bother to identify; before I could return my attention to the bartender, she had moved to another customer. Disgruntled but amused, I placed my elbows on the bar and waited for her to come back my way.
Reclining against the bar, I caught the eye of an older man, mid-fifties with ruffled salt-and-pepper hair not yet receding whose casual t-shirt-and-jeans, apparently uncaring appearance he’d obviously designed to conceal his age. Behind his sunglasses, he smiled and raised his rum, its plastic cup catching the light at its zenith. Pointing his index finger to his chest and dragging it back and forth across writing which, on his Cuban-flag bearing chest, did not exist, he called to me: “I like your shirt. Ramones are my band.” He gave me a raised thumb in a display of pleasure in our shared musical taste, and I returned the gesture along with some empty pleasantries; I’ve never been good at making small talk with strangers, and I was relieved when the bartender finally returned to me despite the possibility of a real conversation emerging between us about the shared experience of music, of punk rock’s uncanny ability to bring a group of otherwise outcast individuals together and forge them into a single, unbreakably strong community. Shrugging, a look of resigned dejection plastering my face, I asked her for “una cerveza” before returning to my seat without Brian’s water.
Giving Brian back his cash and fishing a warm water bottle from my backpack for him, I turned my attention once more to the dancefloor. By now, nobody hesitated from nerves; everyone, from the toddlers to the oldest of the square’s guests, had taken to the floor to become one with the rhythm and dance. The singer with the golden teeth and dark blazer approached me now, encouraging me in Spanish to dance; although I didn’t understand his words, his smile and his insistent motions towards the action told me exactly what he wanted. But I am not Cuban, and one beer was not enough to free me from my inhibitions. I refused firmly but politely; with a gesture meant to express that it was more my loss than his, the singer moved to the lady sitting next to me, who cracked more easily than I did and danced with him throughout the next song.
By the time I had returned to my seat with another beer, Gabe and Brian had left, taking a taxi back to the hotel in order to recover from their respective ailments away from the sun’s ceaseless fury. Without their familiar eyes – and with two beers fortifying me, providing an added layer of chemical courage strong enough to override my long-conditioned American reserve – I stashed my beers
along with the dozen or so other empty bottles littering the barren square of turf that once housed a tall and shade-providing palm and took to the dancefloor. My timing was opportune: Stevie, the group’s co-leader and a skilled photographer, was nowhere in sight, too busy negotiating a taxi for my roommates to capture my impossibly poor dancing on film.
I can’t say how long I danced: though it felt like mere moments, it could have lasted hours. I flailed, my arms and legs moving without reason, against the beat, my torso twisting in disquieting and unnatural fashion; two hundred sets of eyes glanced off of me, as if steel plates protected my being. And I did wear a sort of armor just then: muddled by two beers and surrounded by an air of acceptance and community rather than judgment and ironic mockery, I felt something of the division of public and private life begin to collapse under the heat of the Cuban sun. The music ended too soon, the band taking a momentary break between numbers to cool down, mop their sweating brows, enjoy a cool drink.
My heart racing with pleasant adrenaline, I hurried back to the bar myself for another beer, my last for the day only because the bartender would run out before I had a chance to return again, and met Stevie on the way. Outraged that she had missed seeing me dance, she explained to me that Gabe and Brian had called her from the hotel, where they had safely arrived, and asked me if I could watch her camera while she took to the floor. Having already danced more than I had intended, I happily obliged, and soon enough I found myself lording over bags belonging to several of my other party members as they dove into the ritual with the enthusiasm of children just experiencing the world for the first time.
When Yasmin and Valerie, two of my classmates, left the dancefloor, they reluctantly brought their partners with them: the white-clad dancer who had opened the day’s festivities and another man in a red t-shirt and a sporty beard. While we were all tired from the week of travel and classes we had attended prior to coming to rumba, these two insisted that the girls continue to dance with them, clinging to us like parasites despite their refusal. Before I knew what was happening, the red-shirt fellow was standing inches from my face, his hand on mine, asking me in English not much better than my Spanish if I would dance with him in the girls’ place. Not used to the attention and slightly taken aback given its unexpected source, I gaped at him, at a total loss for words. If they noticed, Yasmin and Valarie kindly pretended to ignore my discomfort; taking a more cynical view, perhaps they were simply glad that one of their hangers-on had shifted his attention away from them.
After a time just long enough for the pause to become awkward regardless of any linguistic or cultural gaps, I was saved from answering by the sudden reappearance of the man who had expressed comradery over our shared love of the Ramones. He grabbed my wrist and placed a plastic cup of rum – a large double shot – into my other hand. “I saw the trouble you were having, my friend,” he told me with a grin, “and I could not leave you to suffer that fate.” Pausing briefly and looking at me slightly askance, he added dubiously, “Just to be clear, I do not love you; I only love your shirt.”
Failing to stifle a laugh, I replied, “Well, that’s good! I, too, only love my shirt.”
The man’s demeanor relaxed then, and he raised his own rum in toast.
“To the Ramones!”
“To the Ramones.”
I took a long sip, feeling the soothing burn travel down my throat, calming even as it invigorated me.
“You know, the Ramones, they are my band. I have seen them, I think, 35 times in twenty years.”
“Jesus. I bet that was amazing. I never had the opportunity, myself.”
“I was young the first time I saw them, only 16 – young, like you. This was in ’77. Already they were playing the Leave Home album. But all of their early records are good.”
His gaze rose to the skyline, the smile threatening to split his face down the middle indicating his nostalgic pleasure as he began to list albums on his outstretched fingers: “Ramones – great. Leave Home – great. Rocket to Russia – great; those first three albums are the best. But even Road to Ruin,” he said, tapping off a fourth finger, “even Road to Ruin is a good, strong record. What do you say, eh?” The whole time, I had been nodding my agreement, and I affirmed that verbally at his query.
“When I was young like you, the Ramones and punk rock were the place,” he told me, his voice suddenly somber. “Now, this,” he swept his arms across the dancefloor, “rumba, it is the new punk rock. This is authentic. Like Joey said, punk is about standing up and shouting, ‘THIS IS ME’ – nowhere in the world can you do that like you can in Cuba at the rumba. Yes, rumba is the new punk rock.”
From there, our conversation drifted to the usual pleasantries – How do you like Cuba? How long are you visiting? Etc. – as we finished our rum. When Stevie appeared to tell me that my group was leaving, I shook his hand and thanked him for the drink and the conversation. As we ate dinner a few blocks away, I sat silently contemplating my new friend’s remarks about rumba being the new punk rock. Like punk rock at its finest, rumba offered a community, a space where disparate individuals from divergent backgrounds could come together while still remaining entirely true to themselves, free from the stigmas and taboos, the peer pressures and social constructs which so frequently act to ensure uniformity and compliance. Like punk rock, rumba allows dancers to act against the grain of society’s expectations and simply be themselves. Like punk rock, rumba represents freedom from oppression. And like punk rock, rumba is a way of life.
During the bumpy taxi ride back to Hotel Plaza near the heart of Old Havana, my head was spinning from more than the alcohol: I had made a connection, and I had glimpsed, briefly, behind the curtain of cultural dissonance onto the beauty of our universal humanity. If that’s not punk rock, nothing is.