Ay, Cuba!: A Socio-Erotic Journey by Andrei Codrescu, David Graham (Photographer)

From the Publisher

Sensuous, exotic, gritty, contradictory -- Cuba in all its glory

In Ay,Cuba!, Andrei Codrescu and David Graham seek the heart and soul of this island ninety miles off the Florida coast and yet a world away. Carousing with Cuban prostitutes, intellectuals, hustlers, and laborers, Codrescu and Graham combine edgy narratives with stunning color photography to create a daring and compelling travelogue. Exploring the architecture, the bizarre two-tier economy of peso and dollar, revivals of both Catholicism and the Afro-Cuban religion of santeria, and the sexual and social mores of a post-cold war communist society, Ay,Cuba! uncovers the maddening and seductive complexities of this fiercely proud yet deeply divided society. This is a provocative look behind the headlines at a world both familiar and exotic.

Publishers Weekly

National Public Radio commentator and house cynic Codrescu escaped communist Romania at age 19 and has had few kind words for the Soviet system since. Who better, then, to suss out the condition of the great bearded Red and his country? "I wanted to go to Cuba," writes Codrescu, "because I wanted to see for myself a decomposing ideology." The book takes the form of an ironic travelogue-cum-report from the front. Cuba--still embargoed by the United States but bereft of its former benefactor, the Soviet Union--has been forced to transform its entire economy into a black-market haven for Western tourists. Fidel Castro turns a blind eye to all the Yanquis in his midst, maintaining his revolutionary fervor while his people starve, flee or hustle a buck. Codrescu and his gang--a photographer, an NPR producer and a former Nicaraguan revolutionary--encounter street hustlers, prostitutes, visionary bureaucrats, Santeria practitioners, good and bad food, plenty of cigars and lots of rum as they peel away the Travel & Leisure veneer to discover the real Cuba. Each chapter is prefaced with an "exquisite corpse," a surreal group poem, composed by the members of the party; these, along with the photographs, and the stories of the many Cuban women he encounters, particularly a doctor whom he romances for a day (hence the subtitle), add considerable immediacy to the story (which was originally reported on NPR). Codrescu turns out to be more sympathetic, although no less cutting, than one might expect. He admits that "I still have an irrational nostalgia for Stalinism," which he describes as "a puppy-warm lie spread over everything like a perfumed shroud over a maggoty corpse." B&w and color photos. (Mar.)

Library Journal

The once idyllic island of Cuba stands as the world's last true stronghold of communism. On the eve of Pope John Paul II's visit in January 1998, Codrescu--poet, novelist, essayist, Louisiana State University English professor, and National Public Radio commentator--spent 12 days with a team from NPR interviewing and photographing Cubans from all walks of life, from artists and administrators to hustlers and working people. The result is a lively, tragicomic look at Cuba, enriched by insights gleaned from Codrescu's own experience with communism in his native Romania. Although the book starts slowly, its view of contemporary Cuba is important, especially in light of President Clinton's early 1999 decision to increase contact with the Cuban people. The photographs are too often posed but do provide vivid visual representation of Cuba's poverty. Nowhere is Cuba's plight more aptly stated than in Codrescu's own description of the nation, "poised precariously between the lost utopia and the unpolished hustle." Recommended for public and academic libraries.--Boyd Childress, Auburn Univ. Lib., AL

The New York Times Book Review - Henry Shukman

A likable romp....the picaresque cast is well drawn....it is refreshing to read a Cuban account where the human takes such firm precedence over the political.

Kirkus Reviews

Codrescu (English/Louisiana State Univ.), prolific author and NPR journalist, treats us to a 12-day idiosyncratic vacation 90 miles and a world apart from the US.

The pope's visit to Cuba early last year was the provocation. Not to be influenced by the papal presence, Codrescu (Hail, Babylon: In Search of the American City at the End of the Millennium, 1998. etc.), with his NPR team, beat His Holiness by several days to the "laboratory of pre-post-communism." Our man in Havana found the capital to be in physical decay and the population largely intriguing and warm, from the spellbinding, soothsaying Babalaos to the street-smart teenage hustlers. From the cafes in Havana to the mysterious lairs of Santiago de Cuba, he can report that reverence for the Maximum Leader is less than sweeping. The "Querido Commandante Che Guuevara" song, however, is quite prevalent. Afro-Cuban religiosity, rum and dollars are more popular than socialism, and venery apparently tops all the charts. Codrescu, of course, comes by his dubiety of things Marxist quite naturally, having spent his tender years in the Romania of Ceausescu. Also natural to him is a felicitous style. There's the distinct aroma of gonzo mixed with dialectics and a pinch of Swiss Family Perelman, but it's all Codrescu. People take precedence over plot. (A set-up about trouble with a picture album never pays off). The author and his crew meet a variety of folk whom he invests with appeal. The octogenarian comic Al Lewis and the great El Duque Hernandez bracket snapshots of boys selling Cohibas and girls selling pleasant tarriance.

The text is punctuated by photos by David Graham and poetry composed collectively by Codrescu's pilgrims. As with the best of the travel genre, the tour is personal and selective. It's often engaging and enlightening, too. A natural-born journalist provides an entertaining, under-the-covers tour.

Product Details

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Table of Contents

Read a Sample Chapter

CUBA ON MY MIND

There are no frontiers in this struggle to the death. We cannot remain indifferent in the face of what occurs in any part of the world. A victory for any country against imperialism is our victory, just as any country's defeat is a defeat for us all.

— Che Guevara in 1965,
addressing delegates from the Third World in Havana

On the first school day after New Year's, 1959, Comrade Papadopolou, our "discipline teacher" and chief communist ideologue at the Gheorghe Lazar Lyceum in Sibiu, Transylvania, came to class exultant, flushed like a long-distance runner and beaming with the good news that another country had joined the glorious socialist camp. Comrade Papadopolou, who wore the first miniskirt in Europe, was the progeny of Greek Communists exiled to Moscow. She had been educated there and sent to Romania to teach and to dazzle my young mind with the curvaceous length of her bare legs. She had been up all night, she told us, listening to the radio report of Fidel Castro's march on Havana. I celebrated with her, expressing my ardent enthusiasm for the Cuban revolution in a manner guaranteed, I hoped, to draw her attention to the fact that I was thirteen and capable already of glorious erections.

    Two years later, in 1962, my erections had found several objects of requited interest, but I was still in love with my discipline teacher, and was not surprised when she called on me to be platoon leader for a series of militaristic exercises that involved my class. We were given wooden rifles with attached wooden bayonets and marched to a field outside of town, where we rushed some straw figures that had crudely lettered signs around their necks proclaiming them to be "Yankee Bandits." While the comrade explained that the Cuban Revolution and Cuba's workingpeople were under attack from American imperialism, an attack that might lead to world war, we dutifully plunged our teenage bayonets into the Yankee Bandits. When the crisis — which, unbeknownst to us, was called the Cuban missile crisis — was over, we were commended for our defense of socialism. Comrade Papadopolou even took the extra step of congratulating me in person when she asked me to stay after class. She sat next to me, the fleshy pulp of her naked thigh touching my trembling uniformed leg, and asked me if I had a girlfriend. I was so moved, I could barely shake my head no — which was a lie — and then mumbled that I had only done my duty. Her revolution was mine.

    Many years later, in Detroit, Michigan, in 1966, I was newly arrived in the United States, living in an apartment building on the edge of the Wayne State University campus, trying to lead an exciting hippie life of drugs and sex in the midst of revolution. All my neighbors were radical protesters against the Vietnam War. The Fifth Estate, still the only continuously published anarchist newspaper in the United States, had its offices around the corner. So did a bloodthirsty literary-political journal called Guerrilla, which featured Che Guevara's face regularly on the cover. The editor of this journal talked me into driving with him from Detroit to New York in a "driveaway" Cadillac to distribute the newest issue at some radical festival in Central Park. A "driveaway" was a car belonging to a transferred executive who paid an agency to drive his car to his new residence. These agencies hired hippies to drive, knowing full well that only about half the cars would make it to their destination without dents, spills, or joint burns. Even so, it must have been worth it. Our Cadillac was jammed full of the journal depicting an angry Che Guevara with his fist raised in the air and a four-inch headline that screamed: "VIVA LA REVOLUCIÓN!" In Albany, New York, we ran out of gas, and realized that we had less than two dollars between us. Albany, the seat of the New York state government, was a hilly podunk town full of short-haired people who looked at us with undisguised hatred. We left the Caddy in front of an ominous-looking official building and went in search of countercultural types willing to buy a few newspapers. After some oblique inquiries we came up to a suburban garage where, behind the closed door, Albany's entire counterculture was jamming. The homelike feeling of electric guitar noise and pot smoke was comforting. We went in, showed our goods, and explained our predicament. Suddenly, a hirsute giant tried to bring a cheap guitar down over my head. I ducked just in time, but the editor wasn't so lucky. Another longhair got him in the shoulder with a baseball bat, crying all the while: "Fucking commies!" We got out of there in a hurry, chased by these strangely reactionary counterculturists. We would have never gotten out of Albany if one of the garage denizens, a closet radical, hadn't followed us, pressed five dollars into our hands, and whispered, "Get out of Albany. Che Guevara is the devil here."

    A year later, on New York's Lower East Side, at the corner of Second Avenue and St. Mark's Place, I saw this young man again, panhandling. He had a red-starred beret on his head, and he looked for all the world like Che. Thousands, maybe tens of thousands of young men of the late sixties, early seventies, took on the Christ-like starved look of the romantic hero. Only the loss of their tresses in the next decade caused them to abandon their ideal. Certainly they didn't drop it because of the knowledge, current for two decades now, that Che Guevara had been an insane ideological maniac who fervently wished for a nuclear war during the Cuban missile crisis. In his biography of Che, Jon Lee Anderson writes:

    At the moment of maximum tension — after a Russian SAM (surface-to-air missile) brought down an American U-2 spyplane, killing its pilot — Fidel cabled Khrushchev, telling him he expected Moscow to launch its missiles first in the event of an American ground invasion; he and the Cuban people, he assured him, were ready to die fighting. Only a day later, Fidel learned that Khrushchev had made a deal with JFK behind his back — offering to pull the missiles in exchange for a promise not to invade Cuba and a withdrawal of U.S. Jupiter missiles from Turkey. Fidel was incredulous and furious that the deal was made behind his back, and reportedly smashed a mirror with his fist when he was told. Che tersely ordered his troops to sever his command post's communications line with the adjacent Soviet missile base, and raced off to Havana to see Fidel.... In an interview with Che a few weeks after the crisis, Sam Russell, a British correspondent for the socialist Daily Worker, found Guevara still fuming over the Soviet betrayal. Alternately puffing a cigar and taking blasts on his asthma inhaler, Guevara told Russell that if the missiles had been under Cuban control, they would have fired them off.

    This was the guy my erstwhile red-star-bereted contemporaries held up as a saint. I knew as little about Che as they did, but the few quotes I'd read sounded identical to the hogwash that had been poured in vast quantities over my adolescence by Communist Party fanatics.

    My driveaway pal and I made it to the radical fest in Central Park and dumped a few thousand Guerrillas on the crowd. We were even greeted officially by some Black Panthers, who ran the show wearing Che berets and rifles. I felt extremely fortunate to make it back to Detroit (by Greyhound) without further revolutionary episodes. My true intentions were, as I've said, far from revolutionary and I was amused, when I wasn't sickened, by the Leninist rhetoric of all the white middle-class Americans pretending otherwise. Even the Black Panthers, who may have had better reasons for playing revolutionary, had no idea what life was like in a commie paradise.

    There were others, for whom the Revolution and Cuba were a full-time business. The most mysterious of these people was my upstairs neighbor, a statuesque, Indian-featured Peruvian woman who was rumored to be "a true Revolutionary," on an important mission. One day, while I was smoking a quiet joint with an overweight student named Millie whom I hoped to bed, a gunshot rang out and the ceiling over the bed started pouring down on us. I rushed up the stairs. The door flew open, and standing there in all her statuesque glory was Esmeralda Hernández Dawson, entirely naked, her nipples erect and angry. She explained that she had been cleaning her weapon when it went off by mistake, and invited me in for tea. Forgetting all about Millie, I sat down cross-legged on Esmeralda's floor while she brewed the tea. When she returned, still as naked as before, she put the teapot down on the floor — furniture was pretty counterrevolutionary back then — and, towering above me, she asked: "Can you help me look for crabs?" Her pubic hair was a luxuriant mass of black curls. It had been invaded by these sexually transmitted creatures, abundant then in our milieu, creatures she called "jewels on Venus." She explained, while I parted each strand and pulled off the many-legged "jewels," that the reason why they were thus called was that they caused a constant itch which, being scratched, gave rise to pleasure. Such pleasure-causing agents, while bothersome, were actually a gift of love, hence "jewels." I was less enthralled by her explanation than caught in the quandary of what to do with my mindless erection. Esmeralda solved this problem for me by asking me to massage her clitoris while she masturbated me. She talked the whole time, delivering herself of a political lecture on the Cuban Revolution. She had been to Cuba, she told me, where she had found an extraordinary people ready to die for socialism and Fidel. She had met Che Guevara and had shaken his hand. She gave me to believe that she had received her important mission from Che himself. I climaxed in her hand, the same one presumably shaken by Che, and the same one that had held the gun which had accidentally discharged. My encounter with Cuba and the Cuban Revolution seemed fated to a sexual context.

    Esmeralda Hernández Dawson was a Revolutionary. Many years later, in 1977, under different circumstances, I found out that she was a major cocaine trafficker who bought weapons for the Peruvian guerrilla army Sendero Luminoso, a.k.a. the Shining Path. Whether she had received her mission from Che or not, she was an important link in the Cuban export of revolution. I discovered also that Esmeralda, dedicated to the Revolution though she was, had used a small part of her profits to acquire an apartment in Rome as retirement insurance. I don't know whether she ever got to use it, because she disappeared from my life that year. She may have gone to the mountains to fight with her comrades, been busted by the feds, or transferred to the Italian Red Brigades. Being a revolutionary was an international business for two decades, a mix of drug-dealing idealism, terrorism, and romance. The Cuban inspiration for this business continued long after some of the "liberation struggles" either degenerated into drug mafias or went off the ideological radar. The Shining Path, for instance, evolved into a bloodthirsty gang of fanatics who decapitated Indian peasants in front of their families.

    Cuba, then, in my milieu of the late sixties until the mid-seventies, stood for everything good in the fight against Amerikan imperialism. There was no possibility of reasonable conversation on the subject. You were either for or against Cuba. The poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti, who committed some kind of lèse-majesté with a mild criticism of Cuba, ended up reviled as far as the bathroom walls at the Vesuvio Café in San Francisco, where a graffito proclaimed grimly: "Cuba sí Ferlinghetti no." Some of my radical contemporaries managed to visit the mother ship itself, with the Venceremos Brigade or as part of delegations of American youth to Havana. In Cuba they often met Fidel Castro, who exhorted them to fight before sending them into the fields to cut sugarcane. Some of them experienced the discomfort and indoctrination they received there with revolutionary stoicism and returned ever more determined to fight "the capitalist hydra," and ever more contemptuous of hedonist anarchist-liberals such as myself.

    Having experienced firsthand the infinite boredom and constant low-grade terror of a post-Stalinist regime, I didn't shy away from disputing my revolutionary acquaintances' store of clichés, but to little effect. Yet, by virtue of many other generational interests, I found myself politically and socially on their side more often than not. I was against the war in Vietnam, because I did not see that particular war — as, in the end, most Americans did not — as a life-and-death contest between heathen communism and God-is-on-our-side democracy. We may look back on this era with superior hindsight, but there was a true radical spirit loose in the country because there were a lot of things wrong with this country. The Vietnam War, above all, filled us with despair. The assassinations of the Kennedy brothers, Martin Luther King, Jr., Black Panther activists, and others made us feel bereft. For some, the easy palliatives of communist ideology rushed in to fill the craters left behind by this despair. Our government, frozen in the cold war, waged an unrelenting war on the young for their opinions.

    Margaret Randall, a young poet and activist, took up residence in Cuba in 1970, and filed dispatches like this one: "The Rampa is alive with Lenin ... his presence in image and word, and the dictums are particularly apt for the daily struggle in Cuba now: that need for constant heroism in everyday work." This sort of rhetoric was understood by most of us as simply that, rhetoric, but the specter of Leninism was a serious threat to the inevitably serious policing branches of our government. Such rhetoric was, in fact, a relief to the establishment, because its terms were familiar. The predominant tone of generational opposition outside such rhetoric was camp, clowning, and disrespect for hallowed symbols. The FBI would much rather deal with Marxism than with Groucho Marxism. And so would the Cubans, who, in 1967, expelled the poet Allen Ginsberg for chanting "Hare Krishna" in a Havana park and announcing loudly that Raúl Castro, Fidel's brother, was queer. Allen Ginsberg was infinitely more representative of the spirit of the youth revolt than the humorless likes of Margaret Randall.

    Randall herself changed her mind very little. Eighteen years later, after returning to the United States from Cuba, a year after East European socialism went kerplunk, she wrote: "Cuba was essential; today it is chic to espouse long-distance views on that country's successes and failures, but it would be impossible here to overemphasize the impact made by the Cuban revolution on the lives of the generations of Latin Americans. Quite simply, David re-enacted his struggle with Goliath. A tiny island nation had shown the world that it was possible to stand up to the United States, reclaiming its identity and dignity."

    There is no arguing that Cuba did indeed reenact the struggle of David and Goliath at various times in its history, but 1990 was a far remove from 1962. We now knew that Castro's Russian bosses had kept the Cuban economy afloat with sugar subsidies; that the human rights situation on the island was deplorable; that Castro was a caudillo who maintained his grip on power with the aid of a vast security apparatus; that many supporters of the Revolution had fled the country; that writers and artists who criticized the government were imprisoned; and that the romantic Che Guevara had nearly plunged the world into nuclear war with his "revolutionary intransigence." When David was David one could view him as heroic, but when he became infatuated with Goliathism, insanity possessed him. Nonetheless, Randall's firmly set blinders are typical of many unrepentant left-wingers' views of Cuba. Just as many American Communists refused to see anything wrong with Stalin, so the Castrophiles ignore the evidence.

    Ideology has an amazing way of warping the mind. In 1970, eleven Cuban fishermen disappeared — "kidnapped," Castro proclaimed, "by the CIA." When the fishermen returned, there was a huge demonstration in Havana to welcome them back. In the course of his hours-long speech condemning U.S. imperialism, Fidel admitted that the "ten-million-ton sugar harvest," for which Cubans had been drafted and worked half to death, had failed. Here are two descriptions of the same situation by two people on different sides of the fence:

Out to the airport — Rancho Boyeros, outside Havana — the streets were already thick with people.... I've never seen so many people, but more impressive and harder to describe than the numbers I've never seen such people: the qualities of dignity, authenticity, and consciousness came through again and again like waves.... People who remembered it said, "This is second only to Fidel coming into Havana in January 1959!" ... And then Fidel moved to the mike ... spoke of responsibility and of international strategy ... detailed the battle won by the Cuban people; their self-discipline, their courage, and their enormous will.... But he didn't leave it at that ... and there was something else he had to tell the Cuban people: the ten million tons of sugar, which is the current superhuman struggle of a whole nation and an absolute challenge inside and outside Cuba, will not be achieved. [Margaret Randall, Part of the Solution: Portrait of a Revolutionary.]

The country had been devastated, thousands upon thousands of fruit trees and royal palms, even forests, had been felled in an attempt to produce those ten million tons of sugar.... The whole nation, completely ruined, was now the poorest province of the Soviet Union.... Of course, as usual, Castro refused to admit his error, and tried to deflect attention from the failure of the sugar crop to other areas, such as his hatred of the United States, on which he placed the blame. A story was concocted about a group of fishermen kidnapped by CIA agents on some Caribbean island, and suddenly, the millions of people who had been cutting sugarcane for a year had to reassemble in Revolutionary Square or in front of what used to be the U.S. embassy in Havana, to protest the alleged kidnapping of the fishermen. It was grotesque to see those young men marching and yelling epithets at the United States. [Reinaldo Arenas, Before Night Falls.]

    The difference, of course, is that while Margaret Randall was an American, a touring Revolutionary who'd swallowed hook-line-and-sinker the mind-numbing sloganeering of the regime, Reinaldo Arenas felt its effects on his own skin, a Cuban skin.

    The passing of time has certainly let much of the hot air out of the inflated rhetoric of sixties radicals, but many Americans who came of age then still have a soft spot for Cuba. For all the hard evidence, there is no arguing with sentiment. Despite what I now know about the fifties in Romania, I still have an irrational nostalgia for Stalinism, a time when nothing bad happened to children, no bad news was ever broadcast, and a puppy-warm lie spread over everything like a perfumed shroud over a maggoty corpse.