The Maids of Havana (review)

The Maids of Havana is a novel that tells the story of generations of women who are part of a diaspora within a diaspora: the Afro-Cuban diaspora moving between Cuba and the United States over a period of fifty years, within a larger black Atlantic diaspora of Africans transported to Cuba, where they migrate from the sugarcane plantations to the capital city and from there to Miami; Washington, D.C., and New York—with some of the slaves' descendents crossing back over the Atlantic two hundred years later. The Maids of Havana is less specific than the title suggests: we are taken on a tour of prerevolutionary Cuba and through the Cuban Revolution from the perspective of the least privileged, who find themselves caught up in events the significance and context of which some of them barely grasp. We are presented with a snapshot of the everyday life of provincial Santa Clara and on to Havana, where we can view the rich through the eyes of the poor as the protagonist, Marta, moves between her tenement rooms and the mansions and smart apartments where she works as a maid. Marta is tough, smart, enterprising, and dignified—granddaughter of a slave child brought from Africa—and poverty drives her to leave her small children in Santa Clara to seek work in the capital. This is in part the story of the recognition, and finally of the elevation, of black Cuba, the rural and urban underclass, whose spirit and resourcefulness take them from near destitution in the 1940s and 1950s to a better life in the 1990s through industriousness, endurance, and wit— with the revolution playing a supporting role. Marta uses her power as (excellent) cook and housekeeper (on whose services the white bourgeoisie depends for its survival) to dominate all those who come into her orbit, cowing her weak and vacuous employers into submission through devastating one-liners. In one episode, an employer forbids her maids to answer the telephone when they have a cold, for fear they will transmit their germs to her by touching the receiver; the tables are turned when Marta refuses to answer the phone when her employer has a cold, for fear of catching it.

The mostly white bourgeoisie are vain, hopeless, and degenerate, some bankrupting themselves in attempting to pay for their daughters' fifteenth birthday parties; in needing to be seen and to impress in elegant outfits at smart social events; and in living in fear of their servants and of the barbudos, the bearded ones, who are on their way down from the mountains to end tyranny, injustice, and racial inequality. When her employers ask her whether she knows Fidel, Marta replies, "I've told you already, that I'm not with any Fidel, and I don't understand politics, but I do have a niece who once told me that all these abuses will stop when the barbudos come down from the hills." What is made clear through the text, however, is that Marta's revolution is within her soul in her sense of injustice at inequality based on skin color: the revolution reinforces what she already feels.

The Maids of Havana addresses the interwoven complexities of race, class, and gender in prerevolutionary and revolutionary Cuba in a study that is anthropological, political, horticultural, and culinary, leaving no herb, root, fruit, or Yoruba ritual unexplored, nor the subtleties of skin-color hierarchy in Santa Clara in the period before the Cuban Revolution of 1959, when town life was carefully segregated into white, colored, and black communities who compete to give the coolest parties that attract the most popular musicians. The novel is packed with carefully researched and remembered historical detail while maintaining a strong narrative line that engages the reader with the panoply of comic characters, such as members of the white middle class of Vedado and Miramar who chaotically make their way to Miami as the revolution approaches, leaving their precious Tiffany lamps and other treasures to be sold at bargain-basement prices to canny Russian foreign technicians who...