Lisa Wixon - Dirty Blonde and Half-Cuban

My mother remembers hearing Spanish spoken for the first time that afternoon, and could never forget the way it sounded like a baroque symphony, the way it made her blush.

The first boy from Havana arrived a year later, in the autumn of 1958, followed by several others, all sent in anticipation of a bloody revolution brewing in their homeland.

Alejandro, she remembers, was shipped to Mississippi precisely because his family feared he would join the rebels in the mountains.

Alejandro taught her many things. He taught her about José Martí, a bard whose verses were written in blood. About the dignities of social equality, and a people’s pride in governing themselves. He spoke of atrocities in his city, of a Havana where death and penury held court. Where outsiders reigned, and natives served.

Alejandro took her to a ballroom dance. Then he took her outside, on the dewy grass under a magnolia tree, and taught her to move like a Cuban, to dance charanga,to feel the clave rhythm of a music only he could hear.

Alejandro possessed a sense of entitlement that frightened her.

Alejandro believed in a tierra libre.

Alejandro left for the Cuban mountains in 1958 and never returned. On the first day of 1959, my mother awoke to a New Year’s headline. Revolutionaries had made a triumphant march through Havana.

My mother read the news and dreamed. She dreamed of a hillside held by romantic and erudite rebels. Of the dead poet who foretold a reckoning. She dreamed of an island so green and lush it called men from the sea.

She dreamed.

T he jockey hasan outfit. A whip. Riding boots. Jodhpurs, the breeches with reinforced patches at the knee and thigh, where the rider’s legs grip the beast.

“You know this dress is like eight hundred bucks,” I tell Camila as she rolls my hair around empty beer cans and secures them atop my head with three-gauge wire, a lo cubano.I fiddle with the label. “Marc Jacobs.”

She pulls my hair up so tight, my eyes slant like a cat’s.

“Ouch!” And then, blithely, I say: “Anyway, whoever gave this to you was supernice.”

“Alysia, my favorite Yankee. Before you go out singandowith the lifeguard, you and I need to have a little chat.”

I smile to myself. I want to hear it directly from her.

I wiggle into Camila’s Marc Jacobs dress for the second time that day, and, without anesthesia, surrender myself to hair and makeup as administered by a surgeon’s hand, and listen as she speaks.

About a jineterawho, in her teens and early twenties, entertained foreign dignitaries at the behest of her government. And who, as a reward for her success and beauty and brilliance, and upon finishing medical school, was granted the prestigious position as head of the renowned heart institute. And with it, continued access to foreign men.

Camila talks about a jineterawho receives regular remittances from sometimes handsome—but always wealthy—suitors abroad. About the countless marriage proposals she’s turned down to stay in her country, with her family. To continue la lucha.The struggle.

Camila graduated top of her class. She speaks five languages. Dignitaries from Mexico and South America and the Middle East subject their hearts to her expertise—in medical matters and those of love.

The jineteratells me about her counterparts in ancient Greece, the hetaerae, who were talented in the sexual and conversational arts. The hetaerae studied dance and theater and gallivanted with powerful men while their wives toiled in domesticity, bearing children and keeping house.

The hetaerae, Camila says, were not confused with simple prostitutes, and never placed a day rate on their affections. Her ancient counterparts accepted gifts of jewelry and property from lovers and companions. The hetaerae were prosperous and esteemed and wore beautiful things. Bracelets and anklets, necklaces and thigh bands. Transparent, clingy gowns.

I play with the fringe on Camila’s sheer dress.

The modern-day courtesans in Cuba, and most particularly in Havana, speak foreign tongues and hold respected degrees. In a society that praises a woman’s sexual talents and beauty, and makes no judgment on the trading of those for money, the Cuban courtesan—the jinetera—lures the most discriminating men in the world.

With precise fingers, Camila drapes gold chains around my neck and ankle and belly.

“Prostitutes accept pay for one night,” she says with a dismissive wave. “ Jineterasuse their education and skills to weave fantasies of love.” Our eyes meet in the reflection of the mirror. “Never forget that distinction.”

I would never forget that distinction.

Camila unwinds my sun-streaked hair and flutters her nimble fingers through my beer-can curls. She tells me of the etymology of the Cuban jinetera.That in Arabia, the jinetewas a cavalry of pint-size horsemen with bows and marksmen’s pulls. And that Cuba’s modern-day jineteis a brigade of provocatively suited lancers with the aim of Eros.

She stands me in front of her mirror, and I barely recognize my eyes in thick liner or my body in heavy gold. Approving of her own work, Camila kisses my cheeks, and tells me the night is mine, and sends me off into it.

M ario has exchangedhis wife-beater for a prodigious safari shirt and white socks tucked into sandals. I tell him he’s gone overboard in the costume department, but he just grins and spit-wipes the lens on his touristy camera. I adjust, for the hundredth time, my décolletage.

“ Coño,you look fine, now just move,” says Mario, swatting my rear. “Don’t fuck it up this time.”

The two of us separate into the flow of Las Vegas, a former cabaret near long-shuttered American Mafia casinos, and now a sleazy after-hours joint. The walls in Las Vegas are plastered with maroon drapes, suggesting a faux glamour of the club’s namesake. An elderly gent in a shabby tuxedo oversees the lone pool table, its green felt patched with duct tape.

Girls of the night parade past, frenetically touching their nostrils and smoothing their skirts. Las Vegas at four A.M. is the discount aisle in a supermarket that slashes prices on perishable goods. And shopping for deals are men from Italy, Canada, Argentina, and Spain.

Mario signals for me to follow him around the corner and into the disco. A trio of sexy mulatasingers work the mikes in tight, tattered sequins and wigs.

Daytime Cuba may live in the province of the 1950s, but nighttime Havana belongs squarely in the 1970s. Men in wide lapels and women in halter dresses and corkscrew heels practice not the four-four lockstep of disco, but the three-two clave of salsa. Musky cocaine flake—an uncut delicacy, as in Cuba fillers are more expensive than the drug—fuels the vibe, one bereft of worldliness and full of an innocence only an island experiment can preserve.

Loose confederations of young Cuban hustlers—ranging in shades from blancoto negro,faces and bodies culled from the best of human genetics—mark their territorial corners, backs to the wall, eyeing one another for the external signs of jineterismosuccess.

Rafael the lifeguard chuloholds court in a favored corner and is flanked by leggy brunettes. He’s tall and broad, with a square jaw and a tousle of clove-colored hair and eyes. His smooth, dulce de lecheskin stretches over naturally carved, abundant muscles. Sitting next to him, I notice, is Modesta, the scary, dark-haired woman from Nick’s patio. Her wrist hangs off his shoulder. I turn around and walk out.

“I can’t do this,” I say to Mario as he follows me back to the bar. “That guy is so guapo”—hot—“I can’t do this.” My hands are flapping by my face. “Plus he’s sitting with like freakin’ supermodels.”