Waiting for Exile: Getting By and Getting Out of Cuba

Michael Eastman

“I think I know who can find you an apartment,” Lucía said. I was on her couch picking at its fraying white vinyl. My address book lay open on my knees. I’d moved to Cuba with two suitcases, a ten-month student visa, plans to take a weekly class on popular culture, and visions of a terrace, balustrades, maybe an apartment in Vedado, the downtown heart of Havana. But after two weeks, I’d found nowhere to live. A legal resident foreigner could rent only from an authorized casa particular or directly from the state—apartments that were usually bugged, priced for businesspeople and reporters on expat packages. I’d met a “real estate agent” with frosted pink lipstick who set foreigners up in long-term casas and took a cut, but she shook her head when I told her I hoped to pay less than $25 a night for a monthly rent. On a full apartment! She didn’t return my calls. Lucía, the most connected twenty-six-year-old I’d ever met in Havana or anywhere else, was my best hope to map out opportunities.

That weekend, the government tossed the city into a “national time of mourning” after Comandante Juan Almeida Bosque’s fatal heart attack a few days earlier. Concerts and parties in all state-owned venues were canceled for the forty-eight hours following his death. G Street, a downtown avenue where every weekend young people gathered to drink and gossip, would be buzzing nonetheless. There, Lucía said, she could introduce me to Carlos, a friend of hers whose mother rented out a small apartment.

That night the avenue’s broad, grassy median was so full with teenagers and young adults that people walked in the gutters, shuffling through discarded cigarette butts that the garbage collectors would sweep with thinning brooms around sunrise. Clouds of conversations bumped into one another, intertwined, getting lost among the mass. Discarded juice boxes of rum resembled leaves strewn along the road. One boisterous boy shoved another backward into one of the boxy topiary shrubs. It bounced him back to standing as if in slow motion, and he waved his arms in indignation, turned away, and disappeared into the crowd.

“We’re really sad tonight, can’t you tell?” Lucía shouted once I found her group on a bench. “You know, Almeida and all, generals dying, time of mourning. Vaya, vaya, vaya.”

“Dropping like flies,” said a tall guy with a pronounced pout as he angled his head toward us.

A cigarette dangled from Carlos’s long fingers. He reached back to flick the ash onto the sidewalk as he turned to look at me, leaning his cheek in for a greeting when Lucía introduced us. He was young, twenty-two. His eyes were thoughtful and calm, but the rest of him was brusque, agitated, exaggerated. The more he spoke, the faster his hands and his words flew. He and his friends, gay men who worked in theater and film, would linger on G Street until it was time to go to the weekly pop-up “Divino” LGBT party, the only activity that hadn’t been canceled in Almeida’s name. “The gays don’t respect anyone’s rules,” Lucía said, taking another swig of rum.

The apartment that his family rented was occupied, Carlos said, but his mother knew all about the apartments for rent in their neighborhood. If I called him in a day, two days, maybe three, he’d have a few names and numbers. He took my address book and wrote his phone number and name in wobbly capital letters, then pushed his black, deflated pompadour out of his face.

A few days later, at his home, after we’d walked through Vedado looking at apartments, Carlos opened the door onto a large living room decorated in jewel tones— magenta on the walls and lush emerald potted plants in one corner— with shiny marble floors and natural light ribboning in...