Entre nosotras el mar

A love letter to Cuba and La Vigia

A poet and an artist walk into a bar.

No, this is not the beginning of a joke.

The setting is Cuba. The time is the late 1980s and early 1990s, during what Fidel Castro dubs “the Special Period in the Time of Peace.” 

The Iron Curtain is collapsing. Communism in the Soviet Union is being dismantled, piece by piece, like the Berlin Wall. And Cuba finds itself without the financial support they have depended on to survive the active hostility of their neighbor to the North.

I am told by Cuban friends who lived through the Special Period that electrical blackouts were a weekly, even daily, occurrence. Some were accidental; others were planned to conserve dwindling reserves of oil. Musicians scheduled recording sessions around them when they could. At the end of a long day, they might be preparing for bed when the lights unexpectedly came back on, no one knew for how long. So, they dressed quickly and worked in the studio through the night.

The shelves of local grocery stores were bare. Empty. For a celebration of Noche de Paz (Christmas Eve), one person brought an egg; another, a tomato. Others scrounged together whatever they could find, and with the jumble of ingredients, they made an omelet. They divided it equally between the people who were there. The portions were small, but no one complained. Sharing a meal together was the whole point. And afterwards, as always, they sang and danced.

So. Against this backdrop, let’s begin the story again.

A poet, Alfredo Zaldivar, and an artist, Rolando Estevez—living in Cuba during the Special Period when no one has enough of anything necessary to sustain either physical or artistic life—walk into a bar. 

Or maybe a coffee shop. 

Or, more likely, they meet at the house of a friend, where they drink cafe mezcla’o, coffee ground together with chicharo (beans)—which is the only coffee available to them during the Special Period.

The topic under discussion is finding a way that they and their friends can publish their poetry and art. 

Zaldivar and Estevez come up with an exciting new idea: What if they publish their own work? They don’t have a printing press, but they can borrow an old typewriter and a mimeograph machine. They can construct the books by hand, using whatever materials they can scrounge together— 

And Ediciones Vigia is born, in the city of Matanzas, Cuba.*

Matanzas is known as “the Athens of Cuba” because of the city’s contributions to Cuba’s artistic and intellectual achievements. The poets, artists, and musicians who come from Matanzas are fiercely proud of their hometown. There is a strong feeling of community among them. They refer to famous matanceros/as with proprietary familiarity.

Carilda Oliver Labra, for example. One of Cuba’s most celebrated poets, she lived in Matanzas until she died in 2018 at the age of 96. Chilean poet Gabriela Mistral called her “la mejor sonetista de América” (the best sonneteer of the Americas). But the artists of Matanzas call her, simply, Carilda.

Growing up in the United States in the 1960s, I was taught that Cuba was evil. Cuba was evil, because—well, because the Soviet Union was evil, and Cuba was an appendage of the USSR. That’s what we were taught.

In college, I read a different story, about a dictator, propped up by the U.S.A. and overthrown by idealistic Cuban revolutionaries. Overnight, my picture of the Cuban people flipped from two-dimensional demons to equally two-dimensional heroes.

But when I traveled to Cuba the first time, the Cubans I encountered were real people, not cardboard cut-outs. Living in a country caught between the egos of two superpowers, the folks I met had a sharp, lively sense of humor. They dealt with scarcity in creative ways that left my jaw scraping the floor. Materials might be limited, but their imaginations were as open as the sky.

That’s when I walked through the doors of La Vigia, in the city of Matanzas, for the first time.

On the Plaza de la Vigia, a row of buildings, painted turquoise and white, sits facing Matanzas Bay, linked by a shared portico. (On the other side of the plaza is the famous Teatro Sauto.) A squarish, golden yellow building sits at the end of the row, next to the Rio San Juan. This is the home of Ediciones Vigia.

My first visit to La Vigia was in 2003. I remember it so well, because this norteamericana was utterly unprepared for thatkind of heat in November. (Two showers per day became a necessary part of my routine.) 

The group I was with stepped out of the searing sun into the shade of the portico and from there, into a cool, tiled workshop. The first floor was cluttered with ancient cash registers, tables and chairs, and construction materials, more like a warehouse than a shop. 

The revelation was upstairs. 

On the second floor was a large room flooded with light. The shuttered doors were thrown open, and a few fans were going at high speed. The unfiltered sun made the room about ten degrees warmer than downstairs, but still no match for the heat in the streets. 

In the middle of the floor was a small square table, surrounded by women talking and laughing and wielding large pairs of scissors. Small cups of dark, sweet Cuban coffee—in 2003, cafe puro (unmixed) was available for a price—sat scattered on the table. In-between were mimeograph copies of hand-drawn images: faces, oil lamps, flowering plants. 

Some women were cutting out the images. Others were gluing them into a book. The words of poems were typed inside a hand-drawn, mimeographed border. 

Book covers were decorated with combinations of found objects and cut-outs, hand-colored and glued together. The covers were made to reflect the themes inside the book. 

Butcher block paper and newsprint. Cardboard and tissue paper. A short yellow pencil. A fragment of lace from a discarded tablecloth or curtain. The combination of materials was mind-blowing.

A suitcase decorated the cover of a book of poetry by Ruth Behar. Lying on a sandy shore, it was constructed out of cardstock and bound together with strips of cloth. The title was Everything I Kept/Todo lo que guarde. Behar’s themes were exile and longing, love and loss. In an inspired detail, the suitcase opened to reveal shells and sand, photos, and a tin-foil Star of David (Behar is Jewish).

The poems were in both Spanish and English, which is why I was able to share them with my mother.

Mom knew a thing or two about exile and loss. She knew what it was to fight to hold onto the things that were foundation stones to her memories: Grandma Denney’s rosary and prayerbook. Grandpa Bryant’s large oil lamp. Teacups collected over the generations from forgotten sets of wedding china. 

My mother grew up in southeastern Virginia, a block from the Chesapeake Bay. When our family moved far inland to Kentucky, she brought large peanut butter jars of ocean water and sand with her. She set them on a bookshelf in the living room. Every week she dusted them. They were her connection to home.

My mom turned the pages of Behar’s book in slow silence. She said something to me, I don’t recall what. The words were not the most important part, anyway. It was the sound of her voice. Low, reverent. Hushed, like the sound of ocean waves in a conch shell. 

Matanzas has a second nickname, “the City of Bridges.” I know that it refers to physical bridges that connect sections of the city over three rivers—but I can’t stop thinking about the bridge that poetry built that day between a Jewish Cuban American poet and a Baptist woman from southeastern Virginia.

We need more bridges like that one. 

I read this week that cafe mezcla’o is making a comeback, because supplies of cafe puro are low. The Cuban economy is devastated. Hurricanes made stronger by climate change have damaged homes and other structures, and there is no money to repair them. The electrical grid for the entire island has crashed more than once in the last few months. 

The United States is blocking much-needed Venezuelan oil from reaching Cuba. To the current occupant of the White House—I refuse to call him President—diplomacy is a game of “Let’s Make a Deal.” And while the people of Cuba suffer, unable to refrigerate their food, unable to travel, unable to cook, to light their homes, or to turn on fans to ease the heat, he gloats.

“I do believe I’ll be having the honor of taking Cuba,” he blurts. “I think I can do anything I want with it.”

Sitting here on the desk beside me is an anthology of poetry, published by Ediciones Vigia. It is entitled Entre Nosotras El Mar. 

Between Us, the Sea. 

I think about the narrow strip of water that separates Key West, Florida, from the beaches of Varadero, north of Matanzas. Only ninety-two miles wide, those treacherous waters have claimed the lives of untold numbers of Cubans who tried to cross it in rickety boats and makeshift rafts.

But the distance between Cuba and the U.S. isn’t measured only in miles. It can also be measured in the days and hours it takes to get there.

In 2005, travel to Cuba was forbidding, a two-day ordeal: flying to Miami and spending the night; going to the airport early in the morning; standing in one line after another, to get this letter approved or that document stamped; passing an entire day getting to the gate, and then waiting for hours for the charter flight to board. All those bureaucratic roadblocks, by the way, were put in place by the United States to discourage U.S. citizens from traveling to Cuba.

And after all that, the flight from Miami to Havana took only 45 minutes. I remember thinking, Wow, Cuba isn’t very far away at all.

Under President Obama, direct flights to Havana from various North American cities became available. We boarded a plane in Atlanta and landed in Havana two hours later, maybe less. The relationship with Cuba felt hopeful and full of promise. 

So far, the direct flights are still in place. But, as Jon Lee Anderson writes in The New Yorker (“Is Cuba Next?), the current U.S. administration has “declared Cuba a threat to ‘the national security and foreign policy of the United States.’” The United States vows “to cut the island off from oil imports” and warns “that any other nation that [seeks] to supply fuel [will] be punished.”

What happens next?

In the words of Alfredo Zaldivar:

Las tormentas a veces
llegan sin annunciarse.
Las tormentas se anuncian
y quizas nunca lleguen.

Todo camino es una ingenuidad.
Todo pronostico es solo otra parabola.

+ + +

Storms sometimes
arrive unannounced.
Storms are announced
and perhaps never arrive.

Every path is naive.
Every prediction is just another parable.

The symbol for Ediciones Vigia is a kerosene lamp. Rolando Estevez described it as “a bright light that is a humble light, an intimate and familiar light.” It is also a light that is not dependent on the functioning of far-reaching power grids.

La Vigia shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not been able to put it out. Art reminds us that the fickle sliver of ocean that divides us also connects us. And poetry is able to build a bridge that spans that distance and any other. It doesn’t require the permission of an autocrat or an executive order. It doesn’t need a passport or a plane ticket.

All poetry needs is a heart, a soul, and an eye: 

A heart, open to receive love letters from another heart. 

A soul, open to allow the longing of another to find an echo in its own. 

And an eye willing to gaze into the distance, until it catches a glimpse of lamplight on the southern horizon.

________________________________________

Many thanks to Lynn Farmer, poet, photographer, friend, for the use of her photos from Matanzas, Cuba, and Ediciones Vigia. Lynn, you are a lamp in the darkness, una vigia de verdad.

*More than twenty years ago, I heard the story of the founding of Ediciones Vigia. I am writing from memory. And—okay, I confess, I’m embellishing what little I know. For a more complete (and accurate!) history—accompanied by gorgeous photos of some of the over 500 books they have created—visit https://vigia.missouri.edu.