Chango's Little White Horse

I believe it was true that he loved Cuba, all of Cuba. In the complex Havana of the nineties, he drove around in a black 1957 Chrysler, almost offensive in its majesty, cruising through a landscape of piles of garbage and urban decay, with a prostitute at his side, or a cultural functionary, or a queer, or a writer.

He liked black women with names of flowers or countries or continents. I know several of his "Black girls, my little Black girls," as he used to say.

Jazmín, Rosa, Miosotis, Argentina, Africa and America, Camelia and Azucena, all mulattas, all tall, all religious, and part-time dancers or "language students studying on their own."

In Havana, he tried to open a center for studies of contemporary European poetry. This kept him in contact with the professionally upbeat cultural functionaries, with journalists alert for a story, and the plague of young poets (jineteros liricos) hunting phantasmagoric foreign fellowships in order to take a vacation from the Special Period for awhile.

He made a habit of renting private homes in Vedado, which was centrally located, still almost clean, with the best hotels near at hand and also near the cultural centers. But he liked the action in Centro Habana, where he would hang out at night in the bars drinking cheap rationed peleón rum, listening to a guaguancó beat played on a leather stool and a rumba and some boleros, and where the people didn't use his complicated name full of consonants, but Juanito the sssmooth one, Juanito the sssweet one, or Chango's little white horse.

He started coming to Cuba in the seventies, met everyone, became a saint, and Chango always protected him on his tragic pilgrimages to Los Hoyos in Santiago, on his wanderings through Bayamo and Ciego de ¡vila, on his medical trips to Brazil and Santo Domingo, and even in the snow and cold of his homeland, where our saints have to pass themselves off as domestic animals or doves. Where the god Eleggua needs more rum and more tobacco and there is a shortage of coconut candy, and remedies are more difficult to obtain because the deities of the tropics don't know where evil comes from in winter.

I am sure that María Elena Cruz [a dissident journalist] remembers him. She remembers him as being magnificent and generous in my home in Centro Habana at the party to celebrate her release from jail. She remembers him standing in front of a battery of bottles on my glass table, while she sang of treachery and desire with her sad almond and melon voice.

Many writers in trouble remember him. They remember him apologizing for bringing them a small gift, something for the day or the week, something to ease the severity of the blockade. What blockade? "Are the piglets coming from Europe? Is taro root being sown in Boston? Have the little chickens departed for Miami? Have those cows of yours committed suicide? Take that spaghetti and that cheese and a bottle of Rhine wine."

Here he always presented himself as what he was, a man from another place, an intellectual who joined in affectionately, interested in the life and the culture of a country.

No politics, keeping himself always at that middle distance said to be ideal in boxing. This is how he is known on this now unlucky Island, where he has had free entry to bars and hangouts, homes and institutions, where he has been loved, this Gentleman from Europe good at rum, poetry, friends, and "Black girls," very much the gentleman (caballero), Chango's little white gentleman/horse (caballito).

For Juanito the Smooth Guy, before the sweet guy, my house is in the same place, not a house he saw collapse from age and neglect in neighborhoods like Oquendo and Neptuno, in Cayo Hueso, but one nearer, where, bitter and gloomy, sad for him and sad for me and Cuba...