Lisa Wixon - Dirty Blonde and Half-Cuban

It always takes time. It took two trips to Cuba to find Victor, to find someone with both access and willingness to disclose information. In the eight weeks since I’ve moved to Cuba, he is the only person I believe to have legitimate connections. Using the same bills from the afternoon encounter, I pay Victor his bribe and kiss his cheek. It’s the first concrete confirmation of my mother’s account, and I’m both encouraged and daunted by the news.

Encouraged because I believe in my heart that I may find José Antonio. But daunted as it becomes clear what I must do to fuel the search, and to afford to scrape by for the next ten months. That what I thought was a mistake—this afternoon’s fling with a tourist in his hotel, my first ever with a stranger—was now obviously the only way I could make $200 appear in the tuck of my bra.

At ten P.M., Camila rings the doorbell as I’m touching up the dark on my lashes. We’re bound for Macumba, a trendy club packed with the richest tourist men. I look at myself in the mirror, a strange confidence reflecting back at me. I’ve made up my mind. With my money stolen and with no legitimate way to make a living, I’ve reluctantly joined the ranks of the Cuban demimonde. Educated. Professional. Hopeful. And part-time hookers.

I’m American, but I’m also Cuban. And to live on my island home, the place I was born, the land where my family surely resides, I’ve little choice.

So I jockey. I ride the beast. I control the beast.

The beast is the tourist man.

Three

M y mother venturedas far as her family permitted, to Nashville, Tennessee, where she studied history and Spanish at Vanderbilt. On the 1959 campus, women still garnered curious stares.

John’s gaze lingered the longest. She remembered him a dashing senior from Georgetown breezing through the Southern states with his debate team. He was tall and elegant and pursued her with a relentlessness she couldn’t defy.

John spoke of a purposeful career in foreign service, and in following in his father’s political footsteps. He promised her a life of travel, of stimulating discussion and intrigue, of nights spent staying up late and pondering the wonder of whatever culture they were experiencing. John promised they would be happy. That they’d have a large family and raise their children to be aware of the wider world.

My mother believed he was the answer to her prayers.

John believed my mother’s insouciance, enfolded in a genteel graciousness, was her real beauty—more so than the gleam of her cactus-green eyes and piles of long, blonde curls.

My mother promised to be faithful.

John promised to never leave her.

They married in 1962, just before the Cuban missile crisis played out on the world stage; when youngsters dove under desktops in nuclear drills, and the planet anxiously watched defiant Soviet tankers carry warheads to Cuban shores.

My mother didn’t sleep during those fretful days, thinking of the Cuban friends she’d made in Natchez. She pictured their proud faces and wondered how a people so intrinsically linked to hers could be engaged in the scariest conflict the world had ever seen.

When John told her about his disdain for Cuba, and his desire to exact change in the Communist land, my mother kept quiet, knowing he could never understand. She thought of the poet José Martí, and the Cubans’ innate desire for self-determination.

John swore to one day serve in the diplomatic corps in Havana, so he could execute his ideals. My mother remembered touching his hand and telling him Havana was her dream as well.

Fifteen years and five continents later—their marital promises all but broken—a plane carrying the first U.S. diplomatic corps in Havana in nearly twenty years touched down at José Martí International.

A perfumed gust flooded the tarmac. My mother never felt anything more liberating on her skin, and knew those winds hinted at much more than the scent of mariposa.

A t the dollarshoe-store in the Habana Libre I’m standing like a stork in front of the foot mirror, wobbling on a new pair of four-inch heels and looking every bit the Cuban equestrian.

My young companion, Dayanara, is pacing.

“Calm down,” I scold as I pull out my new dress and smooth it over my frame, shoes and heels a perfect match. Skin spills out of every stitch, but I still cover more than your average cubanabehind a mop and broom.

“Mira!We have to hurry,” whines Dayanara. “I have to practice.”

I motion for the cashier to box the shoes. She glares at us. For we’re Cuban girls and we have dollars to spend, and unless we have family in Miami, that likely means one thing: we’re engaged in the oldest profession.

Dayanara—Daya—is a guajira,a country girl who moved to big-city Havana to strike gold. It’s barely noon, yet she wears a minidress and leopard-skin heels that lace up midthigh. Coppery glitter shimmers on each centimeter of her skin.

I’d met her over dinner with her fifty-seven-year-old British boyfriend, Richard, who offered to pay me to translate their conversations of love. I’ll never forget first laying eyes on her, and how I realized my breezy gig would entail much more than translating. I would also be enabling Humbert’s latinafantasy. I slugged three rums neat before I had the courage to ask the age of his Lolita—fifteen—and by the fourth rum, and upon her beaming mother’s arrival, I realized I was the only one who had taken any pause.

In the two months I’ve now known Richard, and on her mother’s insistence, I’ve begrudgingly agreed to oversee the transformation of his girlfriend from intractable guajirainto urbane moll.

Today, I hurry Daya past my landlady, who’s gossiping with the neighbors, and I ignore her furious gaze. I’d promised to keep a low profile. This teen is anything but.

Daya lifts the flap off the DHL box that has arrived at my house, a gift from Richard. For the third time that day, out comes the box of Tampax. She pulls one from the delicate wrapping and follows me around the house, holding it like a tube of arsenic. Richard has sent them in advance, along with clothes, makeup, and strict instructions that I’m to oversee their tasteful assembly.

“Teach me, please,” she says, stomping her feet. I can tell she’s scared—tampons are virtually unheard of in Cuba, and aren’t sold anywhere but at tourist hotels. “My period arrived today and”—she gestures at the box—“ hearrives tomorrow.”

I sigh. Once she uses the tampons, the messy alternatives Cuban women employ will seem intolerable. But, because they’re about $2 a tube, regular Tampax usage is a luxury, the way Harry Winston baubles are back home.

Daya falls listlessly onto my bed and watches every move as I adjust my dress in the mirror.

“Do your schoolwork,” I say, plopping down her books. “I’ll return in two hours.”

My landlady is back in her underwear, sipping aguardiente—firewater—and fanning herself in the heat. She acknowledges my wave with a blank stare.

More than anything, I want to find my father, to meet the Cuban family I’ve never known. Each day I get closer still, and Camila tells me to be patient, that in Cuba, time means little and information is slow to turn up. Knowing I’m in for the long haul, I take a deep breath and head over to the hotel.

I try to ignore Walrus, who is leaning against his Lada, smoking a puro.

Wobbling on high heels, I trip in the street and skin my knee. Walrus smirks.

A graceful jockey I am not.

DOUGHY AND SOFT, Terence is an amateur sculptor of hard bodies. He’s in love with Communism, and is convinced Cuba is a place where it’s practiced. Normally, I’d debate the merits of Marx, and the misapplication of his theories in my homeland, but my job is to be sweet and pretty.