Lisa Wixon - Dirty Blonde and Half-Cuban

I felt his handon my bare shoulder, and it was all over.

In the oppressive August afternoon, the heat from another’s touch had the chilling effect of ice on a radiator. I’d been sitting alone, in a café in Havana near the former Hilton hotel—the one ransacked by Communists and renamed Habana Libre.

Free Havana.

The stacks of papers on my table were askew, some stained by the café con lecheI chain-drink to keep my spirits up. He came at me from behind. I looked up into a tanned face and silky blue eyes framed by deep lines. Late fifties, I guessed, and not unattractive. He asked to sit. I shrugged casually. He asked if I spoke English. I nodded. Then he asked for advice—best bars, best beaches. My advice warranted a rum over ice, or so he measured, and he offered to buy me one.

I sighed. The papers were in a fantastic mess in front of me—evidence of my bootless investigation—and, today, had not been revealing the clues I’d hoped for. I piled them neatly. What the hell. A rum would be nice.

He smiles. I pretend, despite the mounting evidence to the contrary, that I’m a First World girl in a First World city, being offered a friendly drink by an attractive man. That at the end of this exchange, we will trade business cards and a flirtatious smile, and in a few days I’ll find a message on my cell phone and, who knows, there might be dinner and maybe a movie or a stroll and, you know, a date.

But I am not in the United States, my home, and he assumes he’s not sparring with an equal, a woman of his socioeconomic rank; give or take a few rungs in either direction.

He rolls an ice cube on his tongue, momentarily losing himself to the pleasure of coolness amid the humid soup that is summertime Havana. Another drink, then another. He talks only of himself in determined pontification, and asks no questions of me. It’s how he signals he’s expecting to pick up the tab. This one, and the next.

I ask where he’s from. “America,” he says with a mixture of pride and complicity, as do all Yankees who sneak into Cuba.

“It’s norteamericano,” I say, playfully scolding. “We Cubans are offended that you claim the entire continent for yourselves.” He’s not listening. Greedily, he takes in the size of my chest, the green jade of my eyes, the curve of one thigh crossed over the other.

“So,” he says, leaning across the table. “I’m on the eleventh floor of the Habana Libre.” He looks at me expectantly, while holding the check in his hand. “What’ll it be?”

I CAN’T BLAME him necessarily for the blunder. The café’s bathroom mirror is not kind in its judgment; cracked and faded, it reflects my freak-show appearance. These clothes, bought new in Washington, D.C., three months ago, are frayed from wear and harsh soap and sun. I carry my things in a plastic sack—the Cuban girl’s purse—as my leather one had been stolen months before. My body, once a healthy size eight, has shrunk to a gaunt size four. Hipbones jut out for the first time in my life. I am easily bruised. A Cuban diet does these things.

I am an American, in the sense that my passport says so, in that my university degrees and professional stints and taxes paid cement my belonging to her.

But I am Cuban. My first breath was Havana air, and my father—as I recently discovered—circulates the blood of Cuba in his veins. I am a Cuban-American. Like marbles in a tub, I noisily roll the moniker around in my head: Cuban-American. The hyphen is the fulcrum, the teeter-totter that swings up and down. Some days I’m more heavily Cuban. On others, I weigh in more American.

But today, this day, as the man’s condom-covered cock slid between my thighs and his chest spread my breasts, as he heaved over me, pushing and pulling and pushing hard still, and as I ran my nails hard down his spine, a painful reaction to the pleasure I didn’t expect to feel, as his face crinkled and he collapsed and rolled over and dressed and threw American scratch at my knees, and as I gathered the bills from the floor and tucked them into my bra—isn’t that what prostitutes do?—and as I took the elevator eleven floors to the lobby and walked past the smirking guards, and as I passed through the doors into the cruel sun of the afternoon, I realized that the teeter-totter had landed with a thud.

At that moment, I was only Cuban.

T he lever onthe 1970s Russian pay phone was stuck. Jiggle. Jiggle.

Twenty centavos more did the trick.

“Camila!” I said, finally getting through the hospital switchboard. “I slept with someone.”

“Finally, Alysia!” she said with her tinkling laugh.

“It’s not like that. I—” Looking around, I lowered my voice. “I got paid.”

She laughed harder. “You’re a Cuban girl now,” said my best friend here, a respected Havana heart surgeon nearly a decade my senior. “Tell me.”

Talking faster than a wet parrot, I relayed the details of the afternoon into her sympathetic ear. Camila’s morality is shared by the majority of Cubans: sleeping with foreign men and getting paid—usually in the form of clothes and perfume and money for family emergencies (for one always comes up when a love-struck foreigner is around)—isn’t actual prostitution.

There is a word, in fact, for women seeking out a rich boyfriend, either for marriage or regular remittances, and that word is jinetera.Spanish for jockey. Jockeying boys and girls are the hopeful light of their supportive families. To jockey is to dream of a successful future, to dream in a country that feels so free of hope, of promising careers, of stable relationships. It’s also the only way for many to make dollars in a country where lawyers earn $18 a month and a meal in a decent restaurant costs twice as much.

“What did he pay?”

I had no idea, so I rooted around in my bra for the money. “Two hundred,” I said, a bit surprised.

“ Dios mío.You’re going to put us all to shame,” Camila said, laughing again. “You rubias”—blondes—“are always worth more…When do you see him again?”

“Never,” I stammered. “I’m never going to do this again!”

“Right,” she said knowingly. “Next time, mi vida,don’t ask for money so fast.”

“I didn’t,” I said, feeling I’d let her down. “I refused to see him again, so he made some snide comment about how if I wanted to be a good capitalist, I’d better learn to set a price up front.”

Camila sighed. “You weren’t being a bad capitalist, you were being a bad cubana.These men here aren’t looking for a one-night stand, they want a Cuban girlfriend while on holiday.” Then, wistfully, her voice trailing off, she said: “If he gave you two hundred dollars for an hour, imagine a whole week…”

Camila is thirty-three and one of the sexiest women in a country of sexy women. Her hair is cropped short to showcase a graceful neck and a dancer’s erect body. The $32 monthly surgeon’s salary doesn’t pay for much, so Camila’s acquired a handful of foreign boyfriends who deposit money into her account each month. When they arrive in town a few times a year, she dutifully attends to them.

“I’m not going to be anyone’s girlfriend,” I said. “I’ve got more important things to do.”

“Any news on your father?”