Jinetera es la primera novela de la escritora cubana Yousi Mazpule, residente en Estados Unidos. Acaba de ser publicada en la editorial Eriginal Books, que la destaca entre otros libros de su catálogo por una razón muy especial: ha sido escrita en inglés.
“Hay más de 50 millones de latinos en Estados Unidos, en su mayoría de origen mexicano, puertorriqueño y cubano, aunque hay representación de casi todas las nacionalidades de habla hispana. Sin embargo, los latinos de segunda generación hablan y escriben en inglés como primera lengua. Mi hija, por ejemplo (aunque no vive en Estados Unidos), lee a Shakespeare y a Cervantes en inglés. Por esa razón, Eriginal Books publica también libros en inglés de temas hispanos, no por satisfacer a mi hija, sino a los miles de latinos que quieren seguir de cerca sus culturas y explorar sus raíces, pero la lectura en español se les hace difícil”, dicen los editores de Eriginal Books
OtroLunes se complace también de ofrecer a nuestros lectores un fragmento de esta novela.
Before my mother tried crossing the Florida Straits on a raft made out of inner tubes, she and I slept on the twenty-year-old velvet mustard couch that was the only piece of furniture left in the house. The air from the two fans, the only electrical appliances left, was thick and humid. I could barely breathe and tossed and turned until dawn, when I finally fell into a light sleep for about an hour before waking up to the smell of warm milk and coffee that my mother always circled near my nose.
“Milena here’s your café con leche, mi hija,” she whispered.
I, not wanting to wake up to the last day I’d spend with my mother, feigned sleep.
“I know we won’t see each other for a while,” she started after a deep breath, “but we’ll be together in a big house in Miami sooner than you think.” The sun was just beginning to show its face on the new day.
“I’m almost seventeen, mami, why can’t I just come with you?” I said getting up to take my café con leche.
“I’m not going to put my only daughter in danger, I’ve told you that. You have to stay, finish your school, and in less than six months you’ll be in Miami with me.”
“I don’t want to stay in Cuba by myself.”
“You won’t be by yourself. You have your tia, your cousins…”
“She doesn’t even like me,” I said, and took a long sip.
“She loves you, she’s just not good at showing her feelings…” she said getting up. As she sieved the coffee grounds through the men’s sock that was our coffeemaker, I thought about the last two years; how she had tried to leave the country by different venues. None worked. Because she was a professional dancer, she could take a plane to any Latin American country with the dance company, but the government wouldn’t let her take me.
“I don’t want to live with Tia Susi, mami; I want to be with you.”
“I know, mi amor, but I’ll send her dollars from the U.S. so she could take care of you. And things will be easier here with dollars.”
She reassured me things would be fine in less than six months, and that that was all the time she needed to reunite me with her. Three months before, during an extensive investigation in Costa Rica on what she was doing at the American embassy when she was supposed to have met Cuban officials at Juan Santamaria Airport and taken a plane back to Cuba shortly after, I had stayed with my aunt Susi.
“Tia Susi thinks I steal her food. She’s paranoid.”
“Milena everybody lives like that on this island!”
“I want to go with you. Please take me with you,” I said crying and running to hug her backside. She let go of the coffee in the sink, turned and hugged me tight. We both tried to hold back the tears the entire morning.
But at noon, when it was time for her to get on the bus that would take her to the bay where she would wait until the sun went down to get on the raft, she got on her knees in front of the door, crossed herself crying, and said a quick prayer. She signaled for me to do the same. Besides the Holy Father, which was the only prayer we knew, I didn’t know how else to ask for my mother not to leave. So I didn’t; I stood there, looking at her on her knees, hair pulled back into her traditional ballerina bun, her spine straight like the palm trees that populated the city. I cried in silence knowing that if I let go of the composure she had begged me to keep three nights before when I had thrown myself on the floor bawling like a five year old in a fit of rage, she wouldn’t go anywhere. I knew she needed to go.
The early nineties were deemed a “special period” by the regime and life had become twice as difficult for us since my mother’s attempt to defect in San Jose. Food was difficult to get without dollars, and because she was now on the list of anti-revolutionaries, she had been dismissed from her job. The bodeguero assigned to the distributing center we got our meager portions from had usually been willing to give her a few dollars for any jewelry or double the amount of chavitos–the new currency the government had invented–she gave him. But he told her he was a member of the committee for the defense of the Revolution, and could no longer risk his position to help her. And our neighbors had been kind to us until a month ago when a sign was posted on our door that announced we had been re-assigned to another section of town; a section my mother said she’d rather die than live in.
The raft never made it. They found pieces of it in Palm Beach. There had been six people on that raft. No bodies were found. Two months before I turned seventeen, I went from the town of Regla to a tenement in La Habana Vieja to live with my mother’s half-sister. Tia Susi made it clear from the beginning that I had to somehow earn my keep. Times were hard and she couldn’t provide for me and her two small children.
“I can offer you a roof to sleep under,” she said when I arrived at her house. “But when the meat and milk comes once a month, I have to give that to my kids. You need to find a way to make dollars to help me out with the household expenses.”
The distribution of food corresponding to each month was twenty ounces of red or black beans, half a liter of oil, one pound of a meat/soy mixture, one pound of texturized ground meat, two pounds of rice, one liter of milk per child under the age of seven, and occasionally one full chicken was given to the most revolutionary family on the block. The rest had to be bought in what according to the government, was a non-existent black market.
Tia Susi was an unhappy woman in her mid-forties who had had kids late in life. She was the product of my maternal grandfather’s first wife and had not been close to my mother at all until their father had died two years ago. My mother had tried to foster a relationship with her big sister, but it was strained, and one sided. My tia had not been too enthused about having to share the scarce personal belongings her father had left her with a half-sister her mother had taught her to hate.
The solar she lived in was in the corner of Montes and Cienfuegos avenues, an area known for drugs and street prostitutes that were not just for tourists as in other parts of La Habana. The apartments, most of them originally of two and three bedrooms with living and dining room areas, had been reduced to just one or two rooms that became the bedrooms at night and the living spaces during the day.
Two families of four could live in one of the apartments all sharing the bathroom and the kitchen. Luckily, Tia Susi had two rooms just for her and the kids, and while we still had to share the bathroom with other families, the sleeping arrangements were not so bad considering what the other families had.
I slept in a cot in one of the rooms with the kids while my aunt slept in the other room with whoever the boyfriend was for the night. Through the windows, I could hear people outside smoking, drinking, arguing. The kids would wake up, look out from under the sheet that covered the window, and stare for hours at the goings-on outside.
“Niños, let’s go to sleep,” I’d say to them. “You two shouldn’t be looking at all that.” But they’d say, “Our mother lets us, so who are you to tell us not to.” I’d just cover my head with the thin sheet and try to sleep.
The solares were the ghettos of La Habana. Beautiful apartment buildings in Batista’s time, now all that was left were trash covered courtyards with doors to the apartments that had no handles, no locks, no paint on them. The windows were covered with aluminum foil or sheets, curtains or shades were a luxury few could afford. The smells of the solares were a mixture of years of water damage that had seeped into the walls mixed with overused frying oils, human waste and sweat. And because they were severely overcrowded, there was no telling from which unit the smells came; it was the overall smell of La Habana condensed within a few decaying walls.
By the time rations came, I had not eaten a piece of meat in over a month. The two pounds of meat per family were supposed to be delivered to the bodegas on a monthly basis. Sometimes meat didn’t come for two or three months, and when it did, only families with children could claim the rations first. I had no nucleus, meaning parent and offspring, to claim as a family anymore. And my libreta-the ration booklet that needed to be stamped in order to receive the goods-had disappeared with the rest of my mother’s valuable things.
My mother left me her two gold rings and a pair of pearl earrings, $400 dollars she had saved, and the libreta. But I was a minor, and only an adult could claim the food rations. The jewelry and the money, no one had seen since the day after she left when the Defense Committee of the Revolution came into our tiny apartment and asked me to collect my things, the state was claiming all of my mother’s property. Tia Susi said all of my mother’s things were probably at the bottom of the ocean along with her bones.
My cousins were five and seven, the boy and the girl respectively, and the two gallons of milk that was distributed went in less than two weeks. One of the many chores I had to do to “earn my keep” was to make their café con leche in the mornings and take them to school while my tia slept. One morning, the boy cried for more leche with his café. I told him there was none and he ran to his mother to complain.
“Did you drink the milk?” My aunt asked accusingly, though barely awake.
“No, I don’t really like milk.”
“But you like café con leche.”
“Yes, but I have it with evaporated milk. I would never drink their milk.”
“Umph,” she scoffed. “If I find that you drank the milk, you’re gonna be out of here before you can even say your full name.”
I was already getting used to her accusing me of anything that went wrong in the house. The rice and malanga she bought with dollars was also gone by the end of the week. I ate old stale bread and drank faucet water for days.
On a warm early August evening, my aunt’s friend came over with rabo, oxtail cooked in tomato sauce. Tia Susi felt sorry for me and gave me some of the leftover sauce to scrape with some bread. There was a piece of fried steak in the fridge she had been saving for the kids, and she threw it in the saucer with the tomato sauce. I cleaned the bottom of the pan with some more bread. It had been nearly a week since I had had a decent bite to eat.
The steak had sat in the fridge for too long, and given the daily scheduled power outages that lasted no less than two hours, had begun to rot. I spent the entire night throwing up and running to the toilet with diarrhea. In the morning, I was dehydrated and couldn’t get up from bed. My aunt’s friend took me to the hospital where I sat in a dilapidated room with three other women–one of them in labor–for four hours before anyone called my name.
After some blood work, it was determined I had bacterial poisoning from the steak. I spent the night in the hospital. The woman who had been in labor shared the room with me. I watched her watch her baby’s peaceful sleep the entire night.
I could not fall asleep. My stomach turned into painful knots. I got up at least five times to run to the toilet. The nurse had left a bucket at my bedside and instructed me to ring the bell behind me if I needed her. I rang and rang. She never came. When the doctor came into the room at almost noon the next day, he checked the new mom first. She had low blood sugar and blood pressure, and had to stay at least one more day. I was still somewhat dehydrated, although my strength was coming back slowly. The doctor, who had a balding head and thick spectacles, asked me if I felt strong enough to go home.
“Is anyone here to pick me up?” I asked.
“No,” the nurse answered.
I didn’t have any money for a taxi, and the idea of catching a bus stuffed with sweaty people didn’t seem appealing at the moment.
“I really don’t feel strong enough to leave.”
“I’ll come back tomorrow to see how you’re doing,” the doctor said, signaling for the nurse to change my IV.
When she was done, I looked over at the girl with the new baby. I said hello and told her my name. She said hers was Kassandra.
“With a K,” she said. “My mother thought that was how the Russians spelled it.”
“Is it?”
“I don’t know. If that was how the Yankis spelled it, then it would matter,” she answered.