La Habana


Poems by Xavier Cavazos



 

La Habana



I want to encourage the Cuban people out of the country as well as on the Island to continue fighting for freedom...
Cuba will be free. I already am.
-Reinaldo Arenas


From the 
Boardwalk
in Havana.


You, the tourist, approach by air above the bay like a voyeuristic
angel & the Malecón & the buildings of El Centro 

Havana establish where you are; the rubble & ruin-
could be a beat up Atlantic City but it is not. 

You, the tourist, glide like a child's
paper plane, one foot above the bay & notice the 1559

Spanish fortress Castillo de la Real Fuerza, built to protect 
Spain's investment. This is where the reaping 

of humans & gold was stored before heading back across 
ocean. You smile as the waves lap 

& crack shore-rock then turn
in-on-each-other & flip around like a graceful Olympic

swimmer. Cool, says the wind as it exits left,
over the Malecón's edge & into the water where rock formations

look like broken dock-piers that once held boats closer than a tourist 
wallet. You settle in on a street corner in Centro Havana.  Some

one just needs two pesos to buy diapers. A woman	
wearing a light-blue wrap on her head crosses

your path from the right. You notice black & grey hair growing
on her chin, like miniature palm trees in the wind. One hair sways

& she smiles as she stares at something further than you can see.
You, the drained tourist, the babbling bleached body in the sun,

you go inside a corner store building. 
It is a little store that wants to sell you some flowering pussy, 

only, you don't want to buy any, so you tell the man no, but thank you
& in a really nice voice. He laughs when you tell him no. 

A group of young boys enter the store & ask you for money, you say no again. Their skin black & 
more beautiful than a shiny piece of tar heroin that entombs ten years worse than a slammed gavel. You, the converted socialist. You, the Che-Guevara-hat-wearing chummy-chum-chum & these kids want something from you, want something more than you can give. Don't be afraid to partake in the Santeria chop-a-head-off-a-chicken dinner, & the Rumba in the street goes boom, boom, boom. How about a nice heirloom for the kids? One boy asks for a peso; two girls ask for two. The sky, bluer than the '63 Chevy that just passed outside as you shout no, no, no & the jack hammer goes trr, trrr, trrrrr over the whistle of girls. Over the fifty-gallons of water for just one flush, over the collapse of the Soviet sickle crush & just when you are about to give up on this place, a giant & long palm tree of a silhouetted boy takes up the whole left side of the frame he entered from. He is taller than the Christ-by-the-bay Statue! He is blocking all of the sun & is darker than the asphalt of the People's Communist Square! He winks as his watch falls off his wrist as he runs past you into the street, crossing lanes of traffic like a kick-off return & you run after him, shouting, "Son, your watch, son, you dropped your watch." But you are too slow & the young man is getting away like a launched shuttle, like someone about to leave this earth. All you can do is think of the children swimming on the other side of the Malecón's edge this boy is running towards. The ones swimming in the dirty water below, the cement that looks like urban coral reefs that will crush him. You can't see any way he is going to make it over the crumbling mock pier and not crack open his head right in front of your eyes. But this boy is running with the speed. So fast the Pesos in his pocket start to spin & make a Mario Brothers ching, ching, ching, ching sound as he leaps off the top of the Malecón & out into the bay like a bomb exploding at the feet of a little girl. Like an equation on the board sparking chalk into dust & the boy does it, he clears the jump, clears everyone lying on the rocks below & the rocks themselves, staring up in awe as the boy Jesse Owens'd the leap. The leap exploding beyond all of this heat & humidity, beyond all of this fear, beyond everything Cold War & Revolutionary & you, the pot-bellied tourist do the only thing that is right, you open your wallet to him like a caught fish split up the belly, your heart & blood rushing out. Installation Possible Chances Rafael Domenech Cariillo There are eight red doors on the Malecón in Havana-eight red doors on the boardwalk. The Malecón is ninety miles away from Florida. Florida is a state in the United States of America. America is ninety miles away from Cuba. Each door of the installation is a different size than the others. Cuba and America are different sizes than each other. A person of any size, or any country, could find a door just right for their sized body and go through. The istallation is inclusive then-equal for all. A possible chance for all of us, I suppose. If a tourist were to walk through any of the doors, back and forth, fast or slow, on a Sunday or Monday, then that tourist could still leave Cuba, and the ocean that is the landscape of this island would not be a prison sentence. But for Nafal, a boy here on the Malecón, there is no chance of ever leaving, so he just laughs as I try to figure out the installation, going through the doors. Nafal is twelve years old. He looks up at me again and says, "The red on the doors of the installation is the blood of the people of Cuba, the blood of all the people who have lived and died here on this island." I look hard at Nafal, his black hair a silhouetted dot on the blue of ocean water and horizon sky. Street Baseball on San Rafael in Centro Havana. Six boys play baseball in the shade. The ball, a white bottle-top-cap. The bases, three puddles in the chipped-out road, and home plate, a banana peel. Even on run-down buildings there is elegant steel work on the cement windows outside. The spectators, the kids of the neighborhood. There is a European influence on every doorframe. Angels plastered above window frames like clouds. The exterior of most buildings crumbles out onto the curb- a Cuban's life here. The boys playing the baseball game have hand-eye-speed quicker than a burning fuse; they hit the cap like it was a beach ball, giant like this earth, and the tiny Christmas lights draped across the balcony look like stars above the faded sun. The baseball game goes on for hours, well past eleven at night, and there are cheers when someone finally wins, a team that is, another metaphor. I can still hear my fifth-grade baseball coach's mantra in my head: "No I in team. No I in team. No I." This morning A Young Boy is missing from the coast of Cardenas. The boy's mother, Elizabeth, was said to have bought her way onto a raft with her son, Elian. They were trying to reach Miami. Birds hover above the bay of Havana and small cirrus clouds make thin wisps in the sky. The wisps look like coffee plantation chains that strung slaves tighter than a stitched baseball glove in the eighteen hundreds- two countries' pastime. This boat and that boat, but what about all the trash-strung-together rafts that dared the water from Cuba to Miami. The broken heaps of family members the oars of the journey, this boat and that boat. Today a small boat from Haiti capsized in the Atlantic. The entire crew died and the crew were welcomed by the ghosts of all the slave brothers and sisters who reside at the bottom of the Atlantic. Scattered across the ocean with all the plastic and oil. A styrofoam Cup of Noodles holding up the entire continent. Today a boy has gone missing from Cuba, adrift somewhere in the Straits of Florida. Thanksgiving Day, 1999 Departing the Atlantic. In an inner tube, floating the Straits of Florida fishermen snagged you, alone, at sea, Elian. Just like the two fishermen and a slave boy who found The Statue of Virgin Mary drifting in 1608, holding a Christ child figure. They delivered him safely on a board across the water, The Virgin of Charity, Cuba's patron saint. Then, almost four-hundred years later, on the day of family, food and celebration, you, Elian, were pulled from the water. Dolphins protected you, circling your inner tube, and tiger sharks circling them. The news said you were adrift for three days. But the doctors said you had no signs of being submerged in water, no signs of heat or exhaustion, no signs of the sea. April 22, 2000, Elian, inside his uncle's house in Miami Hiding in a closet like something stolen. Outside the night sky lit by a small vigil of Cuban Americans and news reporters. The two countries' flags planted in the front yard of your uncle's house like two tropical trees reaching up to heaven. Then the raid, white vans rolling over the fence, immigrants crossing a border. I.N.S. agents in full riot gear and they are looking for you, Elian, the lost miracle boy who survived the sharks and ocean and heat of the sun. Whose mother lies at the bottom of the Atlantic. And they are coming for you, Elian, with a hunger stronger than an ocean current, with a speed faster than the wind that brought you here. One tiger shark to another Tiger Shark after Elian was held in Miami. The child belongs with the father Por supuesto But the father cannot have the child Lo siento The father loves the child And the child loves the father But the father is in Cuba And the child is in Miami The father must come to America Por supuesto The father must cross the ocean Like the son The water must welcome the father The water protected the son The son lived in the water The water lived in the son Hallelujah The moon will protect the child The moon will rise with a thousand hallelujahs Por supuesto The dolphins sang hallelujahs- all night and all day. Science of the Torus of an inner tube. Begin with a parametric equation defining relations. Let Y stand for Cuba, D = distance (X the number of Cuban refugees) already living in Little Havana. So Y+D (X) = "But the boy is ours!" Castro shouts in a dream or no dream. The tone of Castro's voice, dry as a drought. The position and velocity of his speech, abstract communist theory. But isn't this plea the sum total of a representation? Isn't a father's voice distinct as a mother's nipple? So.abstractly, this parametric, is a set of definitions & equations based solely on human science & not national surface tension. The science and policy of the ability to bend like the inner tube stretches & folds. The ability to inflate the way a tube does. The ability to roll, to float, to save. Painting Castigos a los esclaros (punishment of the slaves) Luis Guaz Artiles The plantation is lively this morning with foot-stomp and rain beating on the roof above cooling bread next to a wood fire. A station for working in the fields and beating slaves' laundry on a line. The smell of the chimney smoke burning through nostrils makes me think of the taste of sugar in my coffee. Two slaves are shackled by their necks to a piece of wood on the ground, their white pants shade their legs from the heat. A slave-master stands above the two slaves like God. Another slave master is dragging a human through the mud, he whips both the human and a horse. Twenty more slaves are waiting their turn. The sugarcane is sweet on the teeth and lip. How sweet a crop can become over time. Slaves push a wagon through the field.