The Body and Its Politics in Cuba of the Nineties

The Body Was a Festival

There was a time when Cuba was a festival and the Cuban body proclaimed itself socialist. At that time I was thirteen. Fidel and his young bearded troops crossed the island in caravans from the mountains of the east to the other side and entered Havana triumphantly. Dazzled peasants, heroes and heroines of the sierra, poured into the city. The main headquarters of the dictatorship was converted into a school and called Ciudad Libertad (Freedom City). A white dove rested on the shoulder of the leader. Soon the people (workers, intellectuals, peasants, students, housewives) wore army fatigues. In long early mornings, girls and boys stood guard, with old Mauser rifles on our shoulders, over the sites conquered by the Revolution.

Then there was an invasion in reverse: Leaving the city for the countryside were tens of thousands of young literacy teachers who climbed mountains and hiked over fields instructing those who didn't know how to read and write; but at the same time, they also learned and were transformed by their passage into unknown territory. The neighbors didn't recognize them when, a year later, they returned to their homes, thin and muscular, their uniforms reddened by the earth, garlands of seeds around their necks, and with an air of confidence mixed with sadness. Enormous and varied cultural crossings engendered in the Cuba of the sixties a democratic, egalitarian, dignified, and communal body. To march to the Plaza of the Revolution was another festival. Those millions of us who spoke there with our leaders created a stage on which it seemed that history was being made for all time. City people learned to work the land and to recognize trees, animals, and strange customs. Sunday after Sunday, sweating and crushed together in precarious forms of transportation, on the verge of asphyxiation, we left the city to cut sugarcane and weed fields. I was scrawny, sixteen years old, and middle class, and with my new friends, the happy knights of the people. We were stevedores in the ports and bricklayers in the new schools, built, as the poet said, "by the same hands that caress you." And the stevedores, the bricklayers, the peasants, and the guerrilla fighters soon installed themselves at the desks of the university. We threw everyone in our world into reverse gear: We the "educated" were thick-headed, and the "humble" moved about like kings.

At the end of those years, Che was killed, and then Allende, and three generations of Cubans cried without being able to hide our tears. In a brutal way, a part of us was lost that has been missing since then: the body of a fighter that we pictured torn apart by bullets, raped, or violated, its gaze perhaps suspended and helplessly exhausted.

And it was thus that the socialist body was set up; in this friction and disorder of diverse identities, in conflict and understanding, in tensions between diverse classes, races, ages, and sexes who, for the most part, shared the same project. In the deep memory of our culture there remains, I believe, the treasure of the ductile body, expert in risk, given to solidarity, blessed with Mackandal's gift of metamorphosis, and crazy enough to take deep breaths in a truck with no windows, the Sunday truck, or on a milk train or an overloaded cart, which taught us what every good actor and dancer knows: that the organic performance, the one that produces real action (and is not necessarily realist), arises when the most difficult path is chosen; that profound coherence, which is truth in the act, touches chaos at one of its extremes.

But time passed, and some part of that ductile socialist body with the stability/instability of a loose cord, of fear and joy commingled, froze. We were taught to sacrifice invention for the sake of a myth called "unity," or, rather, "ideological firmness." From the mid-sixties...