Cuban Rhapsody
Cuba is sexy and exotic. It’s the delicate whisper drifting from lip to lip: the fancy food and delicious cocktails, the Summit of the Americas, Spanish movie star Antonio Banderas as Che Guevara in a big-budget film, and Barack Obama facing the embargo. However, the more Cuba is drawn to the center of the stage, the louder one big, brassy collective voice becomes–that of the Cuban-Americans.
There is nervous anticipation in the Cuban communities of Florida and New Jersey. For the first time in 50 years, a glimmer of change seems possible in Cuba’s future. President Obama has fulfilled his campaign promise to lift old restrictions by allowing more money to be sent to Cuba while letting Cuban-Americans visit family on the island. In many eyes, this is seen as a move forward, because United States policy towards Cuba has only frozen the island in time for 50 years. That is, as Obama has said, since before he was born. Those who agree say these old restrictions haven’t worked and must be replaced by diplomatic relations. Others see the changes as a mere political gesture, a mirage rather than a glimmer, because the looser American restrictions won’t produce any real change on the island. It would be only placing new resources in the hands of tyrants. They think if Obama meets with the Castro brothers, he would be trusting the promises of a totalitarian regime that continually lies to and oppresses its people. They hope Obama doesn’t bend to the pressure of lifting the embargo.
The real point, the doubtful say, is not about the money or trade with Cuba. It’s about the trapped Cuban political prisoners and the sustained violations of human rights. If the embargo is lifted before the Cuban people are freed from the rule of the Castro brothers, they might always be trapped. It is the Cuban people and the country of Cuba that they have always been in love with, wanting both enough to leave after Fidel Castro took power in the 1950s and established a hardline communist government. My song, adding to the melancholy whispers of Cuba, is about the obsession a people can have for a place they’ve never seen. It’s a sudden awakening of the Cuban blood in your veins, richer and running deeper than you ever imagined. The food you eat and the accent on your tongue are privately, mysteriously shared by people scattered across this country and others. It’s the tale of every immigrant and all their children.
1. The Drama of Cuban Life
Carmen Pelaez’s Cuba smells like petroleum and cigars. Its grass grows vibrantly green from cracks in the pavement, and tall, regal palm trees shoot from the pebbly ground where rotting buildings have crumbled. Cuba tastes like rich, juicy vegetables grown without fertilizer and bland, government-issue rice littered with tiny rocks. A Mariah Carey or Toni Braxton CD plays as neighbors wait together in long lines for rationed bread.
This is the Cuba that Carmen Pelaez, a curvy, animated young woman with dark hair and long eyebrows, ready to perk up at any hint of sarcasm, found when she stepped out of a plane in Havana almost ten years ago.
A country falling to pieces, the homeland of her exiled parents, and the muse for her one-woman show. “It’s the body of a loved one, the most beautiful woman you’ve ever seen, decaying, but still breathing,” Pelaez said. “Which makes it terrible…but amazing. It’s a constant contradiction between beauty and ruin. It’s a two-sided coin.”
This conflict became the theme of her play, “Rum and Coke.” She started writing it before her initial visit, and over the next five years, during three more visits, she continued to craft the play. It consists of five monologues illustrating a young woman’s travels through Cuba–the people she meets, and what she learns.
Since 1998, Pelaez has been performing the play for a variety of audiences, from Los Angeles to New York. She said she loves performing for international communities because she wants her characters to show human experience first, but through a Cuban point of view.
“As an artist, people cannot wait to pigeonhole you,” Pelaez said. “I never thought I was writing a Cuban play. I was writing our story, my story, my family’s story. It just happened to be Cuban women that really impressed me.”
Pelaez’s own story starts in 1971 with her birth in a Jewish neighborhood in Miami. Her parents had left Cuba 12 years earlier because they were against Fidel Castro’s hard communist rule. She grew up with her sister, mother (now an import/export broker), and father, a pilot for Eastern Airlines. Like many immigrants, they created lives in America, with strong dreams of one day returning to their island. Pelaez was raised with this vision from her father, who was “always was very quick to point out that [she is] Cuban and not American.” Her father would only speak Spanish at home and insisted that each of his American daughters proudly state: “Yo soy Cubana.”
“Even though I didn’t feel like I stood out,” Pelaez said, “[America] didn’t feel like my country. It’s like how Americans feel when they go to Zimbabwe or Italy. Over [in Cuba] the stereotypes [on Latinas] don’t exist. You’re not fighting a pre-conception, you just are. And here if you’re not white, you need to be categorized.” In August 1993, the writer with a wide smile and inability to say more than five sentences without cracking a joke moved to New York to attend the Academy of the Dramatic Arts. There she worked as a temp for various publishing companies while writing “Rum and Coke.”
Now Pelaez is a full time actress and writer living in Cobble Hill, Brooklyn with her sister and two dogs. She’s adapting the play into a novel and screenplay. After leaving Miami for New York, Pelaez realized the rest of America wasn’t nearly as aware about Cuba’s struggles. The students at her school wearing Che Guevara shirts clearly didn’t understand the bloody force he and Fidel unleashed, first against the Batista dictatorship, then against the Cuban people. The wide-eyed students saying ‘Oh I love Cuba, I love Fidel” were blinded with naïveté, she said, and couldn’t see that people were starving and struggling to survive under the regime.
Left “dumbfounded by the ignorance” of the people around her, Pelaez questioned whether what her father taught her about Cuba was true. She needed to prove that he was right – or wrong. She decided to visit the island and see for herself. “I’ve never felt so right, than when I was in Cuba,” Pelaez said. “You’re not too loud, your lipstick’s not too red, you’re not the minority. It’s your people, there is an automatic understanding that’s really lovely. Then the reality of what the oppressive country is made me feel like I gotta get out of here.”
In Cuba, Pelaez met the inspirations for her characters: her grandmother, her deceased great aunt who was famous for her paintings, young Cuban prostitutes called jiniteras, and tourists cruising bars for women. Nanita, the grandmother she stayed with, helped guide Pelaez around Havana and showed her the beautiful paintings of Amelia Pelaez, Carmen’s great aunt, hanging on their crumbling walls. Amelia, often called the Picasso of Cuba, died in 1968. In the 1930s, she attended the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris, which claims such notable alumni as Claude Monet and Edgar Degas. Though it was inspiring to see the works of the great aunt who died before Carmen was born, which are kept exclusively in Cuba by law, the young prostitutes she met were the most heart-wrenching of her encounters.
