Jake Arnott - The House of Rumour

We are the antisocial elements seeking our own Earthly Paradise, she announced, quoting a comment made by the Maximum Leader. I tried my best to be nonchalant, to assume the air of the bohemian artist. But I was short of breath; the party was crowded and hot. I found myself amid a group of men doing synchronised dance moves, a sign language incomprehensible to me. The atmosphere was intimate and suffocating. I left early and wandered down to the shore to feel the sea crash against the concrete and coral of Beach 16.

Lydia began hanging out with Nemo Carvajal once more. They listened to Sun Ra records together and composed samizdat leaflets for an anarchist organisation. Calling itself the Association of Autonomous Astronauts, it declared its intent of establishing a planetary network to end the monopoly of corporations, governments and the military over travel in space. They entered into a playful conspiracy that somewhat excluded me. I have always found it hard to understand humour, though people constantly seem to see elements of it in my work. I couldn’t help feeling that the laughter they shared so easily mocked me in some way. And I was so absorbed with my sculpture at this time, creating a number of intricately nested wooden cabinets sometimes referred to (incorrectly) as my Chinese Box series, that I didn’t see much of either of them for a while. I concluded that Lydia, like me, was finding consolation in the imagination and that this led her to engage with the insane fantasies of Nemo Carvajal. But any thoughts I might have had that she had lost her spirit for real adventure were to be proved quite wrong.

It was clear by the middle of 1994 that the Special Period had reached crisis point. As our economy collapsed in on itself and the US blockade was tightened, ordinary people in Cuba were driven to desperation. It was the summer of the balseros , the rafters who used makeshift vessels in an attempt to cross the perilous straits to Key West or Florida to claim asylum. It was hardly a new phenomenon, but the number of those willing to take the risk to get to America that year swelled to tens of thousands. Even I could not distance myself from a growing sense of panic and confusion in the air. Ferries and tugboats were regularly hijacked from Havana harbour, only to be recaptured or sunk by our National Coast Guard. In August there were riots on the streets; the Maximum Leader himself appeared at a disturbance on the Malecón to try to restore order. It was here that Fidel made his announcement, clearly to force the Americans to change their policy, which restricted official immigration while welcoming illegal refugees. He declared that those who wanted to leave could do so and commanded the Coast Guard to stand down. In these circumstances, he said with a brilliant and ruthless rhetoric, we can no longer continue to guard the borders of the United States.

The fact that rafts were now allowed to be launched openly, and the sure knowledge that this permission would not last forever, generated a clamour of activity. Crowds gathered to cheer on the balseros in an absurd carnival. Few could hope to survive a voyage across perilous and shark-infested waters and I was determined not to be witness to this cruel spectacle. Until I learnt that Lydia was one of the participants. I found her on Beach 16, already assembling her craft on one of the concrete walkways. I did all I could to try to persuade her not to go but Lydia was, as always, absolutely determined in her mission. She wavered for only a moment, when I asked her about Eva. She’s left me, she said, turning from her task to look at me with a terrible sadness in her eyes. I knew then that her heart had been broken too many times and that there was nothing I could do. She then quickly and very deliberately brightened her mood. Listen, she told me, when Valentina Tereshkova, the first woman cosmonaut, went up in Vostok 6, she travelled thousands of miles into space, orbiting the earth forty-eight times. Key West is only ninety miles away.

She had built a wooden frame with stabilisers made from plastic containers lashed around a huge Russian tractor inner tube and had improvised an outboard motor from a Ukrainian lawnmower engine. Good old Soviet technology, she commented wryly. I thought of what Nemo had said about Narcís Monturiol. Lydia certainly planned her journey carefully. She had rations of water, bread and salted coffee to restore lost sodium. Her vessel carried an extra tyre and a pump, a flashlight and a compass; there was a canopy to shield her from the sun and to collect rainwater. I couldn’t bring myself to help her but I found it intolerable simply to stand there and watch. Before I knew what I was doing, I had started to fashion something from odd bits of junk that were strewn everywhere from the preparations of the balseros . I think Lydia noticed before I did that I was making a model of her raft. She smiled and shook her head slowly.

When other rafters and their onlookers noticed what I was doing, several of them asked me if I could do the same for them. I obliged, knowing instinctively that these miniatures could somehow be endowed with the power of a fetish, to give a necessary sense of luck to their originals. Where I didn’t have time to create objects, I hastily drew sketches or made notes, with the urgency that there might be some spiritual record of this hapless armada. I was astonished by the creative ingenuity of the balseros with their constructions of rubber, plywood, plastic and aluminium. Many of the rafts had been given names: Yemayá , La Esperanza , Tio B , Santa Maria , and so on. Lydia named hers Vostok 94 in honour of Valentina Tereshkova, with the bitter irony that acknowledged this would be her own first journey into outer space. Nemesio Carvajal and I watched her launch on the following dawn, her little spacecraft cresting the waves as it headed towards another world.

The Maximum Leader’s gamble worked: the Yankees could not cope with an increasing flood of refugees. In a matter of weeks the American president ended the automatic right of entry for Cubans picked up at sea (they were taken instead to the US Navy base in Guantánamo) and an annual quota of twenty thousand visas was agreed for those who wished to apply for legal migration. Since a criterion for applications was unlikely ever to be agreed between the two countries, this was to be done by lottery. The Cuban Coast Guard went back on duty and the sad and euphoric farewell parties on the beaches came to an end. To this day no one knows how many thousands died that summer. And we had no idea whether Lydia had made it or not.

I gave away some of my models of the rafts, but more often than not people wanted me to keep them with the others I had made, as part of a collection. Everyone staggered back to some kind of stability with a sense that there had been a ritual release of discontent, and that maybe we had gone through the worst of the Special Period. But it was a topsy-turvy world compared to the one I had grown up in. People now relied on the black market, hard currency sent by families abroad and the now growing tourist industry. Those who had once held important jobs found that they could make more money doing the most menial tasks in hotels and restaurants where they might get dollar tips.

Nemo Carvajal told me a joke that autumn that I did understand. Two Cuban men are sitting on a porch. I hear your daughter is seeing a waiter, says one. I’m afraid he’s only a doctor, the other replies.

Even the Maximum Leader seemed cast adrift, lost in space. Before, we were described as a satellite of the Soviet Union, he declared at a press conference. Today we could be described as a solitary star, like the star of our own flag with its own light, but nobody could say we were a satellite. Now we could be told that we are nostalgic.