Photo by David Schuster
Cuba Libre
Poems
By David Schuster
I - In the Copa Room
In the crush
of the velvet muscatel
at the Copa Club
in the pale green Riviera Hotel, New Havana
the young hookers take your hand
They ask if you have ever been with a Cuban woman they touch the inside of your thigh
and in their wide beaded eyes – adoration
such adoration to make you warm
Amazing
you only met seconds ago, yet
they adore
they twitter and caw
Thhaank yoo ba-aby
And you whisper
the few words you know
Tu eres muy bonita
Her hips on the dance floor
way faster than double time
whiplash nostrils, an integer
you are certain is indivisible
Her palm against your chest
to back lead the step
You hear the rhythm talk –
Stupid Americans
Grubby Russians
Eurotrash
Oh, Americans again
and you still confuse
desperation for adoration
Thhaank yoo ba-aby
She places her red fingernail against your lips
and pops it
just inside
Enough for you to taste a place
you awaken to without desire
but of which you are now irrevocably bound
in rhythm and sway
If you said
you paid her five pesos for a dance
then left
I would not believe you
II – The Question
Old Havana, 2:00 a.m.
The Question
hangs over this island
The Question
batters me like a storm front
When Castro dies will this
place dissolve into a commercial?
We whisper
through cobblestone alleys
pick our way over dog shit
rotting plantains...Living rooms
spill light into the street
Iron balconies fly overhead
Someone says, “Right now Cuban art
is an incubator, but when Castro dies art will go like everything else:
sugar cane
Che T-shirts
revolution.”
The Question?
No one seems too worried
The artists have put Castro
in his place, beard flowing
into abstraction
III – Propaganda
In the square
beside the concrete US Mission
138 black flags
flap like crows
against electronic signs
in the dark American windows
A Free Country Would Let you Travel
Each flag contains a white star
For Those Killed by US Sponsored Terrorism
A Cuban airliner was bombed
I vow to research this
when I get home
The flags flap like my mouth
like the mouth of Castro
like the mouth of Bush
real and fake at the same time
I am sick of leaders
Where all else is crumbling
Castro had the flags go up overnight
The most
post-modern thing
on this island
As I look up
to the black and whiteness
I imagine Matthew Barney
climbing each and every flagpole
The guards shoo me away
like a pigeon
IV – Salada Beach
on a deserted beach
with René
my chest flutters
that question of safety
common rules?
he doesn’t even know my words –
rock fish? grouper? moray eel?
the edge
of a shell-filled blue Cuban
horizon, my naked toes
yes, our common rules:
never stop breathing
rise as fast as the bubbles
René flips on his scuba tank
backwards in one easy motion
that tells me
no more talking safety
or how to be safe
or what it means to be safe
get underwater
I kick to the bottom
claw at the current
...drift toward the surface
why can’t I submerge?
René signs OK
scoops a large rock
and stuffs it in my vest
I tense panic
try to break free
then muscles give way
more weight
more weight
here, that is safety
buoyancy leaves me
I signal OK
V – Context and Conceptualization
Toirac has been censored
exiled to his second floor studio
for painting leaders of the revolution fading
into the canvas, a succession
of ghosts
He shows his new video –
black screen, Castro’s voice,
bold white digits flash
5 minutes of excerpts from
a 4-hour speech
pockmarked with statistics
5 minutes of number after number
recited by the leader
Oh I get it, clever
But to the side of me
a rumble from our guide Giovanni
first chuckling softly
then laughing out loud
as each statistic rolls off Castro’s mouth
Giovanni laughs and laughs
until tears flow
and he bursts like a thunderstorm:
“Genius! Genius!
This artist’s a genius!
All my life those long speeches!”
On our way down
the narrow stairs
I finger
brown twine strung
along the wall
Wonderful
Giovanni pays it no mind
but as I stare out loud
he explains:
One pull from even the top
will undo the front latch, see?
Click.
VI – La Cabaña
The Fort of San Carlos de la Cabaña is on its best behavior
walls and walls of best behavior Paintings for the Biennial
hide the iron bars
The art lovers laugh
Do they know?
Prisoners of the Revolution were kept here
The shadow of Ché
passes to my left pushing a mop – mumbles something like
‘To send men to the firing squad judicial proof is unnecessary’
Oh be quiet, Ché, and look The floors, the walls spattered with blood
Is this how history punishes?
Primum Non Nocere First, do no harm
Second
level the paintings
they have tilted off center
Third
the floors please someone may slip
Fourth,
go to the gift shop
and buy a t-shirt
the black one, Ché
the one with your name Stare at it
like a complete man
until you understand
how They
market a Revolution
until you can answer
Is this how history punishes?
VII – The Cigar
Laborio says
The true measure of a man
is if he can smoke a Cohiba
and live
He used to ride motorcycles across the countryside
taking pictures for the newspaper
I light up
and stare at his photographs –
slicked back hair, nightclub trumpets
combat fatigues –
all of Cuba
through a smoky haze
When visitors arrive
with young models on their arms
Laborio leans forward and whispers
Those girls you know
like Cuban motorcycles, big tanks
and lots of mileage under their seats
I should know, I’m 72
No, 74, his wife corrects
No, 72
I puff on his words
try not to inhale
yet am overtaken, sucked in
like this cigar
I weave back and forth between
this life and the next –
tobacco leaves on virgin thighs
Cuba Libre, conga drums...and
cannot must not slip but I do
in this Cuban history
this Cohiba manhood
and faint dead away
When I awake
Laborio leans down
and hands me
a glass of sugar water
Am I alive or dead, I croak
I hope so Señor
I hope so
VIII – Kcho
I walk through the door
of a mansion given by Fidel
to his favorite artist
And brace for socialist realism:
steroid-pumped campañeros
giant red scythes, proud sugar harvest
Instead I fall into a swimming pool filled not with water
but with tires
A whirling dearth of water spills over the eaves
and Kcho paints with it
The absence of water flows
uphill from the beach
depositing its jetsam:
Fractured oars, plastic bottles geometric fish swimming
at impossible angles
Leftovers become
something else
but just as important
Like this island filled
with landlocked
empty swimming pools
An island
a step removed
from what it was
IX- Havana Mogadishu
The boys on the tour bus
are from LA
they boast
about a place in Havana
they name Mogadishu
a place where the B-girls
take them
Somewhere deep they know
this is not Somalia
nor Black Hawk Down
but knowledge of the ground
is not important, not here
not in the crawl of Hollywood eyes Bollywood sighs
and oh god
I want to be like them
I want to be like them
so I can say this place is fucked up
but in a good way, so I can play baseball with kids in the street and believe it is more than baseball in the street, so I can ask
our guide why everybody stays
So I can see
through my own Hollywood eyes
hear my own Bollywood sighs
and believe I am a prince
of Mogadishu
X – The Paladar
Paladar: Family-run restaurant in a Cuban home;
illegal, but unofficially tolerated.
Come into the paladar make yourself at home
we ran out of food
but it doesn’t matter
rice beans and fish
pile high in our heads
Party members, police?
oh, don’t worry
they eat here too on
our green Formica
and bright orange chairs
sit with us, talk
see the Cuba in you
Plates in the sink
let us wash them
the musician engineer
will dry, a taxi-driving doctor
will stack – clink clank
hear that?
(See the Cuba in you
bangs in my head, asking
for a piece of my flesh)
Come let us walk
find hidden beats
the gentle weave of the crowds
the narrow streets
the flood of water crashing
down the Malecon
wearing it impossibly smooth
Goodbye for now, but promise
promise you won’t forget
the swish of a yellow washcloth
on a table that has served more
guests than we have memory
(See the Cuba in you
nudges pushes
piercing my flesh)
David Schuster, pictured here in Cuba in 2006, is a writer and a physician who teaches at Emory University. He is the author of the novel See The Thread Drop. Please visit http://www.dmsbooks.net