Carlos Eire on Cuba Nostalgia 2011: Toma chocolate, paga lo que debes

Our good friend Carlos Eire has written an essay on his experience at Cuba Nostalgia 2011:

Toma chocolate, paga lo que debes

By Carlos Eire:

Cuba Nostalgia. I was there for the first time, and I hadn’t seen that many Cubans gathered in the same spot since I left Cuba in 1962, so it was all new to me: just the opposite of nostalgia. I live up North, and seeing more than three Cubans in the same room is a shock to the system. Yes, connecting with the past was part of the experience, but what I encountered most intensely was not the past or what was lost, but rather the present and the future.

Yes, I met a man born in 1910, a living relic. He had attended one of the La Salle schools in Havana, just as I did, and his memory seemed sharper than mine. Yes, I saw many images of Cuba when it was vibrant and on the cutting edge rather than a labyrinth of ruins: the Cuba in which I was born, the Cuba that ceased to be. Photographs, paintings, all focused on what had become extinct. And, yes, I met many kindred souls who shared the same history, the same loss, the same gain: from one man who left on the same night as President Batista, New Year’s eve, 1959, to a young balsera who had arrived in Miami recently, in a homemade raft that amazed the U.S. Coast Guard as a sheer impossibility, perhaps a miraculous vessel.

Yes, I also heard heavenly music from a distant past, reinterpreted in many ways. Some bands were better than others, but many of them seemed to love the same mystic refrain from the song “El Bodeguero,” which I kept trying to decode: “Toma chocolate, paga lo que debes.”

Drink chocolate, pay what you owe. It seemed an encoded message of sorts, a summation of the the karmic debt that brought all of us Cuban exiles together in this extreme corner of Miami, so close to the Everglades, so far from our past.
“Bodeguero.” This word conjured up all that we lost. “Bodegas” were stores that sold all sorts of goods. They weren’t supermarkets: you had to ask the storekeeper, the bodeguero, for the items you needed. Most bodegas were on busy street corners. They had slow-moving ceiling fans and a radio or jukebox, and music was part of the ambiance. Some had bars, and all of them seemed to be owned and run by some neighbor, often a “Gallego” or a “Chino.”
The song “El Bodeguero” celebrates the effervescence of that Cuba killed by the Castro mafia, a prosperous Cuba where goods were readily available in an atmosphere unlike any other in the world, where neighbors dealt with each other as kin, and mere buying and selling could turn into a party.

el bodeguero vailando va,
y en la bodega se baila asi,
entre frijoles papa y aji.

Fidel confiscated all the bodegas, handed out ration books to everyone, turned off the music and also transformed the chocolate, potatoes, peppers, and beans into inaccessible luxuries for most Cubans.

I found no chocolate to drink at Cuba Nostalgia. But even if I’d found some, I’d have passed it up. I needed something stronger and colder, something that would steady my gait in this torrential confluence of past and present, which was overwhelming.

Face it, I told myself, this is not just about the past: this is a celebration of the present and future too. We’re all thumbing our noses at Fidel, expressing ourselves freely, testifying with our very presence here that we will not forget our homeland, and, most importantly, that we have the wherewithal to resurrect it.

As a comparsa streamed past the Babalu booth, exuding nothing but cheer, I saw the future rather than the past. Volveremos, I realized.. We shall return. We owe it to ourselves and to our homeland. We had to flee, but we have proven that we could not be defeated. We’ve learned to become Americans and have excelled at achieving the American dream, not because we had to change identities, but precisely because we are Cubans and always will be. We carry within ourselves the best of our past along with the seeds of the future.

The giant map put it all into perspective for me.

The Babalú booth offered a great view of the oversize map of Cuba, which seemed to act like a magnet for pilgrims. I lost count of the number of people who stood on the map, or walked it from one end to the other. All of them, young and old, showed the same reverence for it as for a sacred shrine, but in a very Cuban way, not moping, but rejoicing and joking, even dancing. Some fell to their knees and kissed their home towns. One man caught my eye. One could say he was an old man, a viejuco, though not all that much older than me. He knelt on some spot in the province of Oriente, on the south coast, trembling, shouting, asking his relatives to take his picture. And he kissed the map passionately. It was impossible to tell whether he was joking around or had simply been overcome with emotion.

That summed it up for me. This is what Cuba Nostalgia is all about. His kneeling, his kissing the map, his fervid gesturing. It was not so much a celebration of the past and what has been lost – an immersion in nostalgia – but rather an affirmation of what is still ours and someday will be again.

This viejuco brought me to the edge of tears, not out of grief, and much less out of nostalgia, but rather out of hope for the future. I was witnessing this in Miami, and in the unlikely here and now, in a place so different from Castro’s Cuba, so close and yet so far. And so thoroughly Cuban.

We are the real Cuba. Forget the nightmare slave plantation created by Fidel and his cronies. The real Cuba, the Cuba that never died and never will, lives in exile, and within the bruised bodies of those still on the island who oppose the Castro regime. Whether we are in Havana, or Miami, or Connecticut, or Paris, or Cairo, or Buenos Aires, or Hong Kong, or Sydney, those of us who refused to be enslaved are still around, and most of us are willing and ready to transform Cuba when the time comes, as it surely will.

Fidel has lost, despite all his slogans, despite all the adulation from those foolish or depraved enough to admire him, despite the colostomy that saved his sorry ass and ensures his corpse-like presence at public events. His “Revolution” is a disaster, and will surely be recognized as a Dark Age by historians in the future. Forget Raul: he will always be a footnote, and a very pathetic one, at that.

When the time comes — tick tock, prepárate, it’s fast approaching – Fidel and Raul will croak. And when they do, their house of cards will collapse and those of us living in exile or those resisting within the homeland will truly prevail. We’ll not only bring back the corner bodega, its sweet chocolate and its music, but improved versions. It won’t be easy. All of us know this. But it is certainly more than possible: it is inevitable.

And our children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren, and all their progeny, along with those of the Cubans who are still enslaved today, will thank us for kissing the map, keeping the music alive, and never accepting a madman’s pathetic vision of the future as our own.

Thanks, Val. Thanks, Alberto. Thanks, George. Thanks, Ziva. Thanks, Henry. Thanks to all who were at the Babalú booth, and at Cuba Nostalgia. Mil gracias.

You brought me down from the cold gray North to revel with my kin. Now I know for sure who I am, and the bright future in which all of us cubiches belong. It was more than marvelous, this trip, which made me feel so much at home and has left me with a heavenly refrain to ponder:

Toma chocolate, paga lo que debes.