Читать книгу Havana without Makeup - Herman Portocarero - Страница 21

14.¡TREMENDA MARICONADA!

On weekends, people flock to the Malecón wall for the weekly botellón. Botellón, or “big bottle,” became a popular tradition in Spain because of the economic crisis that began in 2008. Young people gather in public spaces to share drinks straight from the bottle, since it’s much cheaper than going to bars and clubs. No traces of prohibition there or here to inhibit this.

Now everyone sitting on the Malecón wall turns to the city. The sea has nothing to offer at night, except for santeras discreetly doing their devotions to the ocean spirit Yemaya on the sharp-edged coral rock – diente de perro, dog’s tooth – below the wall. Maybe a rusty freighter or container ship will be passing, but without messages for or against a great escape. Back in 1994, thousands of balseros (boat people) threw themselves upon the mercy of the sea and the U.S. Coast Guard from beneath this wall. Legend has it that for every Cuban who made it to Florida, three perished at sea.

The symbol of this wall as the last stand against the other side, or the ultimate frontier, is always present, but frankly, on Saturday nights we choose to ignore it. So we turn to the city and just have a good time. Modest street vendors push improvised carts peddling snacks, balloons, plastic flowers, toys, and cuddly stuffed animals. In all their modesty, in their clean clothes and worn shoes, but already with a sense of initiative and competition, they are pioneers and prominent operators of the new economy, the tolerated private sector, or rather, as the jargon still has it, el sector no estatal (the non-state sector).

The section of the wall in front of the Hotel Nacional belongs to an exuberant gay, lesbian, transgender, and transvestite gathering that gets more and more Felliniesque as the night progresses. Tall and exquisitely feminine cross-dressers flaunt their charms and desires. This rough street version of the famous Tropicana show has its own stars draped in improvised glitter, presenting their sidewalk catwalk routines with swaying hips on impossibly high heels to an appreciative audience sitting on the wall. The main star for a number of nights some years ago was known as La Hurona, after a large, weasel-like rodent. But the turnover of such stars was fast, as I often noticed a suicidal streak in their exuberance, a forward flight putting them way out of the reach of social activism, even when sex-change operations became available.

Young policemen, mostly from Oriente, visibly embarrassed in their provincial innocence by such scenes from a perverse Havana purgatory, neutrally keep the peace but have clearly been instructed to tolerate these extravagances that fall well beyond their personal comprehension.

The stars of the show appear tireless. One feels their pent-up energies from an entire week of posing as what they are not, liberating themselves in these few hours of baroque extravaganza. But too-wide feet are swelling in the sequined shoes, make-up melts under the humid heat, and stubble penetrates the rouge. The defiance in their eyes now also contains despair.

When finally at around three a.m. the jealousies and competition degenerate into drunken rows, the battered gray police van quickly turns up, and an entire improvised open-air ballroom of glitter and revealing half-torn gowns is arrested under loud protests and giggling by the hugely relieved cops, who are finally allowed to restore morality, while the arrested birds of paradise throw kisses through the bars of the jail van. They will be released a few hours later with a warning about drunkenness in public, not about the improvised burlesque show.