Lisa Wixon - Dirty Blonde and Half-Cuban

If you read the brochures.

“IT’S LIKE COLONIALISM all over again,” Camila had said on the phone after my marathon with Reinaldo. “Except this Spaniard is conquering Cuba one chiquitaat a time.”

Whenever I study a new language, I first must relearn the rules of my native English. In fact, it’s only when studying another tongue that I’ve come to understand the fundamentals of my own. And so it’s in learning to reside in Cuba, this conglomerate of socialism and dictatorship, that I grasp what it truly means to have lived under the banner of capitalism. I left America for the construct of Cuban Communism and found myself in the most materialistic, possession-obsessed land in the hemisphere, and the scene at El Aljibe astounds me.

As I’m thinking of Havana, my city that dangles off the Tropic of Cancer, I stare at the vulgar display at our table and notice the whole room is fixated on our four chairs. On Camila and her date and Reinaldo and me. But somewhere, I sense a dangerous set of eyes probing me, and with the practiced affections of a jinetera(mouth slightly parted and chin held high), I turn casually to the left, and then to the right. But I smell her before I see her. Nose the scent of Jean-Paul Gaultier on the woman he adorns: Modesta.

Modesta is known as la superturistica,as she’s notorious for her many foreign lovers, and Camila had warned me to stay far from her.

Instinctively, I crouch as she nears.

Modesta comes replete with her own lore—one that serves to intimidate me even further. Like many girls whose dinner plates were empty each night during the periodo especialin the mid-1990s, Modesta headed to the beach resorts to join those selling themselves nightly to tourists. Bartering their flanks for a string of beads.

Modesta was arrested at fifteen after having solicited an undercover cop in the heavily guarded tourist fortress of Varadero, a miles-long strip of sand and all-inclusive hotels. Modesta spent four months in a women’s reeducation camp outside Havana before crafting her escape.

Reeducation camps for prostitutes and jineterasare whispered about in the Havana underground. Cuba certainly doesn’t have a monopoly on punishing sexually active teenagers. When I hear of the reeducation camps, I’m reminded of the nun-administered, hard-labor camps in twentieth-century Ireland, for pregnant and promiscuous teen girls. Punishment of a young woman’s sexuality is common throughout histories and across international borders, and yet, somehow, Cuba’s publicizing its young beauties as a tourist attraction counters its harsh way of dealing with those suspected of delivering the goods.

The story goes that at around four in the afternoon, when the girls were ending their punishing day of cutting sugar cane, Modesta stripped herself of the prison uniform, rolled her body in mud, and slithered her way through damp fields. She was barefoot, as prisoners weren’t allowed shoes, to reduce their chances of escape through the harsh, rural landscape.

When dawn broke, she’d progressed to a Havana suburb, her feet raw, the mud—dried, and hardened, and then cracked—flaking off like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle.

People watched in shock as the nude girl, with bloodied feet and curves worthy of a verse by José Marti, made her way down the streets as if on a directive from the saints themselves. Likely, a few dozen people viewed the spectacle, but, in the years after the incident, it became seminal. The sworn witnesses grew to a couple hundred, then several hundred, then thousands—the Cuban Woodstock. It seems nearly every male in Havana, when asked, will take off his cap, place it on his heart, and stare into the horizon, whispering the name of Modesta, the jineterawho walked into Havana that day the same way she came into the world.

It’s her mythical status that frightens me most. I want to hide, I want to keep my nose to the ground and sniff the trail of my father without interference. Judging from the expression on Camila’s face as Modesta approaches, I know my wish won’t be granted. I look up. Neither Modesta’s eyes nor mouth are smiling, and hatred courses through the air. Modesta leads the jinete.Modesta is an expert marksman with a lance and bow.

“Stay away from Rafael,” she whispers in my ear, “jinetera norteamericana.”

IN CUBA, THE cockroaches are big enough to saddle and ride.

I’m watching one of Germanic strain skirr across the hardwood floor in the mansion home of our host, an oversize man in a cream suit and hat who’s taking his stylistic cues from Havana’s 1950s gangsters.

Borrowing also the thug mentality, he has transformed his rooms into hourly rentals used by some of the loveliest jineteras,all of whom will cut him in on the action.

It’s the first time in my nine months in Cuba I’ve seen anything like it, like a brothel. Before the revolution, brothels were rumored to number in the hundreds. But those houses of ill repute were eradicated when the new guns tramped into town in 1959.

Sex in Cuba, until the crackdown, has been anything but organized, and bordellos have been out of fashion for forty years. In a snap, the crackdown changes this—maybe for a day, maybe for longer. It’s ironic that the policed streets are less safe, subjecting women to brokerage through boyfriends and pimps. In a society desperate for money, and an ingenious population hell-bent on surviving, it’s no surprise.

When a car’s radiator cracks, a real Cuban knows to pour table pepper down the pipe. Pepper withstands heat. It settles into the fissures, melding the damage together until the next crack appears.

Whatever happens, Cubans find a way.

WHEN I WAKE up on the couch a while later, Reinaldo’s fellow oil big shots are laughing over Cuba libres and lines of cocaine. Our host fingers the pharmaceutical-quality powder and places it inside his eyelid.

There’s a Dutchman at my side, or maybe he’s from Belgium, I can’t remember, though I’m trying to keep it straight now that in the wake of the Iraq war the division of European states seems more distilled—France is good, as they refuse to join, and Spain, Reinaldo’s homeland, is not. Except for Reinaldo, allies of the distant war in Iraq won’t get my time or attention. Which is fine, because many Europeans have no interest in my skin tone. They want their beauties dark, with pronounced African features.

Frustrated middle-class tourists from places like Holland and Italy and England come to Cuba not just for sex, but for sex with black women, with beguiling negritas,to restore some idea in their minds of the way things should be, that females must be cleaning, doting, sucking, submitting, and that had colonialism not gone awry, the darker-skinned would be in their place, as their inferiors, as their toys of pleasure and capitulation.

My skin is light, and so I attract a less audacious man. Or so I thought.

When Modesta enters the room in her saffron ruffled Christian Dior dress, she stares at Reinaldo until his eyes find hers, and she discharges a devastating version of The Look. I tug at his arm and suggest we leave, but he’s not listening. My chest heaves with anxiety. Camila promised that Reinaldo would be my biggest source of income, and I can’t afford to lose him. To lose Reinaldo means to lose time.

But to keep him may mean losing other things, far more important.

Modesta’s feet cross symmetrically in front of each other as she oozes toward my prize. Reinaldo is entranced and ignores my pleas to leave, and nothing short of physically hurtling myself between the two will break his concentration, and even when I attempt this, it comes out as an awkward maneuver, calculated and ineffective, as Modesta steps around me and behind Reinaldo and drags her long fingernails down his neck.