The Supervised Party

1

I would like to tell the story of how money and parties—fiestas—reappeared in Havana. To do this, it would be necessary to talk about the blackouts, because money and parties spring out of the dark, since it is in the dark that certain things can best be seen.

There would be, then, a dark city, with power shortages. A dead city or one awaiting more bombardments. Deserted, with no cars driving around, no public transportation. And here and there, by virtue of the foreign tourists who come to visit, spots of light from the hotels, bright fishbowls in the night.

It would be in these hotels where, at first, money and parties were concentrated. And those who were determined not to do without them would go there. They would be known by their style of dress, a uniform: close-fitting clothes, the women's legs and navel and the men's arms exposed. The navel serves to signify in a not very concealed way what is hollow, and the legs promise a firm grip on whoever enters that hollowness. And the bare arms of the men allude, as do the women's legs, to penetration and, on a secondary level, to the penis.

Black clothes preferably: camouflage in the dark zones between one hotel and the next. Sober, priestly, and, ideally, expensive. Shoes that increase height and improve posture. High heels for the women and buckled boots with shiny metal pieces for the men. The female vampire and the urban cowboy, more or less. Jineteros (prostitutes) they would be called or they would call themselves.

With nightfall and no electricity in their homes, they would go out to prostitute themselves in the war zones around the hotels, lit up in spite of the danger in which the city was immersed. They would be content to spend hours over a drink or seated in a brightly lit lobby, not too concerned (at least not visibly so) with the pace of business.

To be inside the hotels meant something as miraculous as the flow of electricity. It meant being free of police vigilance, entering a world bent on putting into motion waiters to please the guests, facilitating their trade in contraband goods and black market deals. A beer, a comfortable sofa, the movement of people, would be enough to justify going out. And, meeting the foreign clients, no unnecessary agitation, on the way to their hotel rooms. Instead, sinuosity, a meandering prostitution. Something like high-class prostitution or call girls. (The country's president, who had abolished prostitution decades before, would have to recognize publicly that it had returned. And before the television cameras he would take pride in the fact that the country boasted the most sophisticated prostitution in the world.)

Indeed, the old trade had returned. But some part of it, of its mechanisms, seemed to have been lost along the way. Because, applying the concept of efficiency to the total effort of getting oneself up, avoiding the police, and paying for a drink in order perhaps to get nothing in return from the night, that prostitution proved as inefficient as the economic enterprises of the country.

Even easygoing pimps would have disqualified the work of such pupils. What were they doing wasting time in lobbies and long preambles, delaying the moment when they would take one of the elevators? In a country devastated by war and the expectation of still more war, they inevitably confused needs with desires. A beer, that cold bitterness: They could prostitute themselves in their slow, inefficient manner for as little as a beer. They would have discovered some new sentimentality, a form of affection exacerbated by items found only in hotels, paid for in foreign currency.

And in the same way in which they simulated pleasure in order to give it—the necessary condition of all forms of prostitution—they were capable of feigning affection and a quite secondary interest in money. They surprised their foreign clients with...