My excitement over finally going to Cuba did not divert my interest from the new dream I was having of my father. Each night it came: him at the side of a Georgia highway, large eyes full of--what? Me moving farther and farther away.
I thought of my father's face as I boarded a Cubana airplane in Mexico City, and again when I was escorted off the unmoved plane and it and my luggage were thoroughly searched by Cuban flight personnel. Three weeks before my trip, a Cuban airliner carrying seventy-three passengers had been blown up over the Caribbean--the CIA held responsible by the Cubans, who believed this barbaric act was the United States's response to the Cuban military presence in Angola. Was the fear I felt suddenly surfacing the reason I dreamed of my father? Was he trying to tell me now, as he often had in life, that my curiosity about other people and places could endanger my life?
But the flight, four hours behind schedule, finally lifted us to Havana. And there, waiting for me on the patio of a lovely old mansion liberated from someone who had to have been shamelessly rich, was my father.
The same dark, coffee-colored skin, the same large nose, the same vibrant and intelligent eyes.
My father's name in Havana was Pablo Diaz, and he spoke in Spanish, which I do not understand. His resemblance to my father--even the timbre of his voice--was so striking, however, that when he opened his mouth and Spanish came out, I glanced about me to locate the source of the trick.
Before the Cuban Revolution, Pablo Diaz had been, like my father, a man who might have belonged to any country, or to none, so poor was he. So unlikely it would have been for anyone in the government to wonder or care what he wanted of life, what he thought, what he observed. He had cut cane, done the "Hey, boy!" jobs of the big cities (Havana and New York), and had joined the revolution early--an option my father never had. From the anonymity he shared with my father, Pablo Diaz had fought his way to the other side of existence; and it is from his lips that many visitors to Cuba learn the history of the Cuban struggle.
As an official spokesperson for the Cuban Institute for Friendship Among Peoples (ICAP), this black man, telling the Cuban story to whoever comes, increases my respect for the Cuban Revolution. Senor Diaz talked to us about the revolution for three hours, his cadence as steady as a griot's; every turning in his people's progress he knew by heart.
He spoke of the black mambises of the 1800s; of Jose Marti, the "father" of Cuba; of Antonio Maceo, "the bronze titan"; of the attack in 1953 on the Moncada Barracks; the exile in Mexico of the revolutionists; the fighting in the Sierra Maestra; the abdication of the tyrant Batista; the triumph of the revolution; and of Che, Camilo, and Fidel.
Helping to throw off his own oppressors obviously had given him a pride in himself that nothing else could, and, as he talked, I saw in his eyes a quality my own father's eyes had sometimes lacked: the absolute assurance that he was a man whose words--because he had helped destroy a way of life he despised--would always be heard, with respect, by his children.
There is no story, beyond this, of Pablo Diaz. I saw him twice during my two weeks in Cuba. I told him he reminded me of my father. He replied: "You honor me." In a photograph I have of us posing with our Cuban/African-American group, I see that his hand is resting on my shoulder, and I am easy under it, and smiling.
The hotel was still in deep silence; it seemed that nobody had waked up. The only sounds came from two maids who were cleaning near the kitchen, but they must have been shouting to each other because I could hear everything they said. One told the other that she had a very beautiful poem. Or rather that she had two. And one of them she had sent to her mamma on Mother's Day. The other maid talked about her classes in the hotel and that she was taking down a dictation on the United States. They said something about their Ancient History class, and that they were taking a "History of Cuba up to '57." One of them said the arithmetic and algebra classes were the dullest ones, but the other said she liked them. I watched them go off with their pails leaving the red terrace floor shining with water.
--Ernesto Cardenal, In Cuba
The transformation of Pablo Diaz from peasant to official historian deeply impressed me. I envied his children, all the children of Cuba, whose parents are encouraged and permitted to continue to grow, to develop, to change, to "keep up with" their children. To become companeros as well as parents. A society in which there is respectful communication between generations is not likely, easily, to fail. Considering these thoughts, I recalled the incident that is the source of the dream I was having about my father. It is a story about economics, about politics, about class. Still, it is a very simple story, and happens somewhere in the world every day.
When I left my hometown in Georgia at seventeen and went off to college, it was virtually the end of my always tenuous relationship with my father. This brilliant man--great at mathematics, unbeatable at storytelling, but unschooled beyond the primary grades--found the manners of his suddenly middle-class (by virtue of being at a college) daughter a barrier to easy contact, if not actually frightening. I found it painful to expose my thoughts in language that to him obscured more than it revealed. This separation, which neither of us wanted, is what poverty engenders. It is what injustice means.
My father stood outside the bus that day, his hat--an old gray fedora--in his hands; helpless as I left the only world he would ever know. Unlike Pablo Diaz, there was no metamorphosis possible for him. So we never spoke of this parting, or of the pain in his beautiful eyes as the bus left him there by the side of that lonely Georgia highway, and I moved--blinded by tears of guilt and relief--ever farther and farther away; until, by the time of his death, all I understood, truly, of my father's life, was how few of its possibilities he had realized, how relatively little of its probable grandeur I had known.
With a bleeding human eye in his hand, a sergeant and several other men went to the cell where our comrades Melba Hernandez and Haydee Santamaria were held. Addressing the latter and showing her the eye, they said: "This eye belonged to your brother. If you will not testify what he refused to testify, we will tear out the other." She, who loved her valiant brother [Abel Santamaria] above all things, replied, full of dignity: "If you tore out an eye and he did not testify falsely, much less will I."
Later they came back and burned her arms with lit cigarettes until at last, full of disrespect, they told her: "You no longer have a fiance because we have killed him too." But, still imperturbable, she answered: "He is not dead, because to die for one's country is to live forever."
--Fidel Castro, History Will Absolve Me
Since my return from Cuba, I have been asked about my sense of Cuban women. Generally speaking, women appear to be well integrated into Cuba's revolutionary society. There are women doctors, laborers, heads of publishing companies, and so on, as well as teachers, nurses, and directors of child-care centers. With Fidel Castro frequently verbalizing the conviction that the revolution cannot be called complete until women share full opportunities and responsibilities, Cubans--both male and female--actively combat centuries of Spanish/African machismo. The equality of men and women is stressed throughout the Cuban Family Code, which contains the laws that regulate family life. The following articles are from Section I of the Code, listed under "Relations Between Husband and Wife".
Article 24. Marriage is established with equal rights and duties for both parties.
Article 25. Spouses must live together, be loyal, considerate, respectful, and mutually helpful to each other.
The rights and duties that this code establishes for the couple will remain in effect as long as the marriage is not legally ended, even if the parties do not live together for any well-founded reason.
Article 26. Both parties must care for the family they have created and each must cooperate with the other in the education, upbringing, and guidance of the children according to the principles of socialist morality. They must participate, to the extent of their capacity or possibilities, in the running of the home and cooperate so that
it will develop in the best possible way.
Article 27. The parties must help meet the needs of the family they have created with their marriage, each according to his or her ability and financial status. However, if one of them only contributes by working at home and caring for the children, the other must contribute to this support alone, without prejudice to his duty of cooperating in the above-mentioned work and care.
Article 28. Both parties have the right to practice their profession or skill, and it is their duty to help each other and to cooperate in this direction and to study or improve their knowledge. However, they must always see to it that home life is organized in such a way that these activities are coordinated with the fulfillment of the obligations posed by this code.
Cuban women with whom I had personal contact were, in almost every instance, like women I already knew at home, so that by the time I left Cuba, it seemed entirely natural to be happy to see them each morning, and to be pleased that they appeared to feel the same. One of these women who, in her patience and gentleness, was an inspiration to our group was Magalys, a young woman in her twenties who acted as our interpreter. What I managed to learn about Magalys is not, I think, unique to her: she is married, her husband works as an adjuster of salaries all over the island and is, therefore, frequently away from home for long periods. This does not appear to bother Magalys: she accepts these separations as part of marriage in a revolutionary country and is busy studying, taking exams in mathematics (presumably for a different kind of occupation than the one she now has as interpreter and guide for English-speaking groups). A lovely, delicately made woman of brown skin and warm brown eyes, she is from time to time distressed because we black North Americans want to claim her as one of us, exclusively, whereas she has been brought up to believe she belongs to the world.
On a different (possibly irrelevant) level altogether, I was disturbed by the Cuban use of make-up (the first heavily made-up woman I noticed was a curvaceous young soldier in army fatigues who also had her hair in curlers) and have still to resolve my own feelings about, for example, a revolutionary woman who dyes her hair blond--as Haydee Santamaria (who was with the rebels at the Moncada Barracks as well as in the Sierra Maestra) did for several years--or who otherwise (through hair straighteners and whatnot) endeavors to look like someone other than herself.
At first glance, it is actually cheering to see that women revolutionaries also paint their faces and process their hair, but then one wonders: if a revolution fails to make one comfortable with what one is (Fidel, one notices, has not tampered with his looks or his style of dress, and has, since the revolution began, even ceased to shave), can one assume that, on a personal level, it is a success at all?
On the other hand, it is possible that a revolution frees women who are part of it to do with themselves whatever they like. Presumably, now that everyone can afford make-up, everyone may wear it. This interpretation appeals to me, probably because I sometimes paint my face, and I would not like to endure a speech about why I do it. But does this apply to Cuban women who pattern themselves--in dress and make-up--on European models almost exclusively? In a country with such a large black and brown and gold population, this is a question that at some point the revolution might address: can equality be said to be realized if a gorgeous black woman still aspires to lighter skin and straight hair, or if a luscious white woman who is brunette longs for blond hair, blue eyes, and a skinny figure? A Cuban film we were shown exemplifies, to me, the danger of perpetuating stereotypic models of beauty. In this film, The New School, now being shown in the United States, hundreds of students are on display. It is hard to tell, after the first several frames, that one is looking at youngsters in a Caribbean country: they seem almost entirely Nordic. If this is the image of itself that Cuba is sending out to the rest of the world, one can only wonder what is the true if subconscious ideal image Cubans have of themselves. (Fortunately, most Cuban films do not have this problem, and are excellent examples of how a richly multiracial, multicultural society can be reflected unselfconsciously in popular art.)
We all had strict instructions to be, above all, humane in the struggle. Never was a group of armed men more generous to the adversary. From the very first, we took numerous prisoners--eventually nearly 20--and there was one moment when three of our men--Ramiro Valdes, Jose Suarez, and Jesus Montane--managed to enter a barrack and hold nearly 50 soldiers prisoners for a short time. Those soldiers have testified before the court, and all without exception have acknowledged that we treated them with absolute respect, without even offending them by the use of an unpleasant word. Apropos of this, I want to give the prosecutor my heartfelt thanks for one thing in the trial of my comrades: when he made his report he was fair enough to acknowledge as an incontestable fact that we maintained a high spirit of chivalry throughout the struggle
--Fidel Castro, History Will Absolve Me
I have also been asked about Cuba's political prisoners, none of whom I was privileged to see, though no one that we asked in Cuba denied their existence. I cannot believe, as my gay and lesbian friends fear, that the man who wrote History Will Absolve Me, one of the great human-rights documents of our century, orders homosexuals tortured or shot, or that he jails all the people who disagree with his politics. The people's love of Fidel seems genuine and nearly universal. In any case, I cannot, furthermore, take comfort in the fact that the United States tortures and destroys political prisoners, for to do so would be to evade the question of whether imprisonment of politicals is right.
The Cubans seem to feel that the imprisonment of certain people is justified because of their activity against the revolution. They point out also that many of the imprisoned stole food and housing and education from the people, or murdered and terrorized the people under the Batista regime. Since I do not know the facts, I can only recount their presentation of them.
My own bias, when considering a country like Cuba, is to think almost entirely of the gains of the formerly dispossessed. I can be brought to tears by the sight of braces on the teeth of formerly poor children who, through bad diet and no dental care before the revolution, might have been robbed forever of the careless pleasure of smiling. Seeing healthy bodies at play or hearing the intelligent voices of well-educated human beings--whose parents and grandparents languished for centuries in poverty and ignorance--can nearly wipe out my powers of serious scrutiny beyond these facts. To criticize anything at all seems presumptuous, even absurd.
Perhaps it is because Cuba has struggled so persistently to alleviate the burdens of the dispossessed that I believe Cubans will become ever more sensitive to those in their society who are dispossessed now in the revolution: homosexuals, Jehovah's Witnesses, women as we really are, political prisoners who are perhaps innocent of everything but "wrong" thought. After all, it is but a short distance from understanding that, just as a life of mere survival is insufficient for the flourishing of the spirit, the spirit is an insufficient support for human life if it lacks a full expression of its essence.
Finally, I believe in the combination of compassion, intelligence, and work that characterizes the Cuban people. In spite of everything that threatens to make them less than free to be themselves, I believe, with them, that they will continue to win.
1977
RECORDING THE SEASONS
Here we have watched
a thousand seasons
come and go.
And unmarked graves atangled
in the brush
turn our own legs to trees
vertical forever between earth
and sun.
Here we are not quick to disavow
the pull of field and wood
and stream;
we are not quick to turn
upon our dreams
I WAS WRITING about Mississippi, the whole South. Yet, on the morning we left our home there for good I was so tired of it that, at the end of our street, when the car stopped for a final farewell, I could not,
would not, look back. I did not expect ever to set foot in Mississippi again.
But it was not Mississippi's fault that I was exhausted by it. I had come there in the first place to "tirelessly observe it," as I wrote in my journal in 1966. To kill the fear it engendered in my imagination as a place where black life was terrifyingly hard, pitifully cheap. Mississippi had simply continued its evolution into newer versions of itself long after my eyes had begun to close.
I wrote to an old friend who had partially financed my earlier trip to Mississippi that I was going to live there for a while because "the stories are knee-deep." And it was true. The first two years passed in a fever to get everything down--in poems, stories, the novel I was writing, essays--that I observed. It was a period of constant revelation, when mysteries not understood during my Southern childhood came naked to me to be embraced. I grew to adulthood in Mississippi.
And yet, the cost was not minor. Always a rather moody, periodically depressed person, after two years in Mississippi I became--as I had occasionally been as a young adult--suicidal. I also found motherhood onerous, a threat to my writing. The habits of a lifetime--of easy mobility, of wandering and daydreams--must be, if not abandoned, at least drastically rearranged. And all the while there was the fear that my young husband would not return from one of his trips to visit his clients in the Mississippi backwoods.
It was the last of our seven years in Mississippi that made me wish never to see it again. For in that year the threat of self-destruction plagued me as it never had before. I no longer feared for my husband's safety. In fact, such is American media curiosity, he had become a celebrity to the same extent that he had earlier been "an outside agitator" and a pariah. Since the Jackson school-desegregation cases were his, our daughter and I could watch him at least once or twice a week being interviewed on TV. Nor did I fear any longer for my own safety with or without my husband's company. In the beginning, going to the movies was agony for us. For several years we were the only interracial, married, home-owning couple in Mississippi. Our presence at the ticket booth caused an angry silence. But even this had ceased to be true that last year. More than any other place in this country, the large cities, at least in Mississippi, learned how not to misbehave in public. And the young are everywhere interested in their own pleasures, and those pleasures, in Mississippi, have become less and less attached to the humiliation of other people.