To be Salao

by

Nicki Leone

There is a line at the beginning of Ernest Hemingway’s novel The Old Man and the Sea that goes “. . . after forty days without a fish the boy’s parents had told him that the old man was now definitely and finally salao, which is the worst form of unlucky . . .”

Most of the friends who sit in the humid Havana evenings playing dominos with him think Usnavy Martín Leyva is salao. He is poor. His wife is not exactly simpatico. His teenage daughter is, well, a teenage girl. His apartment is crumbling under the weight of years of neglect and some illegal, ill-advised construction by the people who live above him. Really, it’s just a matter of time until the building is in ruins. His life is teetering on the brink of ruin itself.

Ruins is the title of this beautiful and surprisingly delicate novel by Cuban-born author Achy Obejas. Set in Havana in 1994, the story is centered around Usnavy, an old man contending with the disintegration of his entire world. It was in 1994 that the Cuban government announced a “Special Period” and turned a blind eye to anyone attempting to leave the island in a raft. Tens of thousands of people (later estimates by US officials would put the figure at 38,000) flocked to the beaches to build makeshift rafts and patched-up skiffs in a bid to cross the ninety nautical miles of ocean between Cuban and the US island of Key West. It precipitated a political crisis in the United States—government officials accused Fidel Castro of purging his country, in the midst of economic collapse, of its disaffected and poverty-stricken, in effect foisting the responsibility of their care onto the US welfare system.

Usnavy does not build a raft, much to the disappointment of his wife and daughter, and the contempt of his friends. Usnavy, against all odds, believes in the ideals of the Cuban Revolution. And although his to his family and friends he wears salao about him like a cape or a curse, Usnavy sees things differently. Yes, he is very poor. He does not have the money his friends earn under the table in their small black-market deals, or their ambitions as they scrounge for wood, oil drums and rope to build rafts that will take them toward richer shores. But he has faith in what he believes is right. And he is capable of seeing that what he fought for in the Cuban Revolution is still right, even when reality falls short of ideals: “Usnavy stared at those leaving in disbelief. He wanted to tell them that fate was not in a shoreline or a flag, but in a person’s character.” The Revolution, he thinks, has allowed him to live as a person of character. What are Ford Escorts and American dollars compared to that?

We are used to reading literature about communist countries that portray them as broken, oppressive and bureaucratic regimes that crush and suppress individuality, creativity, expression and humanity. There is an agenda there—to forever portray the courage of the individual even when faced with an unjust (we’re not above calling it “evil”) government. But Obejas’s novel is a different animal. It is the story of a man who is a believer but not a fanatic, who is trying to live a life of “character” despite the many pressures and pitfalls arrayed against him.

And the pressures are not usually from the Cuban government, despite one unfortunate incident when he tries to replace his daughter’s identification card (a scene that will resonate with anyone who has ever spent any time at the DMV).  Rather, they are most often born of the demands of friends and family who have long ago lost their faith in Revolution, and are now fixated on better living through money, cars, or at least new shoes.

A man’s search for personal integrity? His struggle to be true to what he believes, who he is on the inside? Against all expectations Obejas has written a nonpolitical story set in the midst of a political crisis. Whatever the background of the massive exodus from Cuba in 1994, whatever Castro’s intentions or the United States’ interpretations, Ruins is really a story about a man trying to do the right thing, if he could just figure out what that should be.

The language of the book is often painfully beautiful, even perhaps even more so because the setting is so gritty and squalid:

After the morning shift, when the sun was hottest and heaviest, Usnavy would shuffle back home to his family’s Old Havana apartment on Tejadillo street, a windowless high-ceilinged room, no bigger than one of those bloated American cars. Concrete on all six sides, Usnavy’s room in the tenement distorted daylight and time but remained relatively cool throughout the worst of days.

Usnavy (who was named by his mother for the lettering she saw on the ships in Guantanamo Bay on the eve of the Second World War) is a sensitive and intelligent man, but not an aggressive one. Aside from his wife and daughter, the most beautiful thing in his life is a Tiffany lamp that is the last vestige of a family inheritance and hangs in incongruous splendor in his damp one-room apartment, lighting up the single bed and shelf of moldy books with inappropriate splendor:

Made of multicolored stained glass and shaped like an oversized dome, the lamp was wild. Almost two meters across, the cupola dropped down with a mild green vine-and-leaf motif that flowered into luminous yellow and red blossoms, then became a crimson jungle with huge feline eyes. (In truth they were peacock feathers, but Usnavy had never seen or dreamt of peacocks, so he imagined them as lions or, at least, cats.)

Usnavy likes to look at its African-inspired patterns of cats and jungle-creatures and dream. Lidia, his wife, thinks that selling it would buy shoes and a new bicycle for their daughter. The daughter, Nena, once liked to sit with him under the lamp and tell stories about the shapes she saw in it. But now she is a teenager, so she scoffs at the world and gets into trouble with her friends. But Usnavy insists on holding on to the lamp—because it is beautiful, it belonged to his mother, and allows him to dream. (Dreaming, contrary to popular American opinion, was never forbidden by the Revolution).

Thanks to the great exodus of rafters, Usnavy’s small world is changing dramatically. Families who had lived in the neighborhood for years are suddenly gone overnight, replaced by strangers from other parts of the island who are also on their way to the beaches and eventually across the waters. A community which had been stable is now fluid and unsettled. People who could be relied upon are suddenly gone, or (worse) unreliable. Everyone but Usnavy seems to have their sights fixed on the distant, but attainable American shores.

And although Usnavy himself has no intention of migrating, he does find himself pressured by friends to help in their escape from poverty, if not quite persecution.  The freedom of speech, it turns out, is not as much a motivation to leave as the freedom to own a new car. It begins with one good friend’s appeal for Usnavy to steal him some rope. Usnavy works at a government distribution center. He hands out food and blankets and other supplies—not because people are needy (although they are)—but because they are entitled. They are citizens. As citizens, they get blankets and food. As a citizen, Usnavy is proud to be part of the distribution of wealth.

Stealing rope, then, is a violation of everything he believes in. Usnavy is not completely naïve. He understands that there are people who are greedy and can be bribed to “distribute the wealth” unfairly. Who steal from the people and sell on the black market to line their own pockets. He even understands that the first-come, first-serve policy of the distribution center would leave elderly and infirm with less than their fair share, so Usnavy is in the habit of setting aside cornmeal and rice for the ancient ones and young single mothers who cannot be at the door first thing to claim their share (and there is never really enough to go around).  But he has never stolen anything for mere personal profit, or a friend’s personal profit. Never violated his personal sense of what is right. So when he takes the rope, and a bit of powdered milk for his friend’s baby to have during their forthcoming precarious voyage, Usnavy is conscious that he has taken his first step as a counter-revolutionary.

It is the beginning of a downward spiral for him. He starts to scavenge among fallen buildings for scrap and sells it. He actually starts to make money, make his life more comfortable, his wife happier. His friends start to respect him more, in their eyes he is no longer salao. But in his own, Usnavy is more and more salao with every passing hour. Entangled with the black market, illegal antiquing foreigners, scavengers of dead buildings, money-changers and smugglers, the cloak of salao he never used to feel now hangs on Usnavy’s shoulders as if it were made of lead. And when those same racketeers get a glimpse of his own gorgeous Tiffany lamp and set their sights on it, Usnavy realizes that he is looking at the utter ruins—not of his building or his community or his country, but of his character.

Books mentioned in this column:
The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway (Scribner, 1995)
Ruins by Achy Obejas (Akashic Books, 2009)

Nicki Leone showed her proclivities early when as a young child she asked her parents if she could exchange the jewelry a well-meaning relative had given her for Christmas for a dictionary instead. She supported her college career with a part-time job in a bookstore, or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that her college career and attending scholarships and financial aid loans supported her predilection for working as a bookseller. She has been in the book business for over twenty years. Currently she works for the Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance, developing marketing and outreach programs for independent bookstores. Nicki has been a book reviewer for several magazines, her local public radio station and local television stations. She was one of the founders of The Cape Fear Crime Festival, currently serves as President of the Board of Trustees of the North Carolina Writers Network, and as Managing Editor of BiblioBuffet. Plus, she blogs at Will Read for Food. She manages all this by the grace of a very patient partner and the loving support of varying numbers of dogs and cats. Contact Nicki.