Zulueta
[Editor’s Note: in 1995, Enrique traveled to his father’s rural hometown of Zulueta, Cuba, for the 100th anniversary of the town’s annual “parranda”, or Carnival. The article he wrote for Smithsonian Magazine about this magical journey back to his childhood has been out of print for decades. We are thrilled we were able to find it and bring it to you again. ]
MY FAMILY MOVED TO THE UNITED STATES WHEN I WAS THIRTEEN, and like most Cuban-Americans, they never went back. Raised in Havana, I had been a city boy, used to apartment buildings, buses, trolleys and the general bustle of the metropolis. But at least once a year, we piled into the car and drove to Zulueta, where there were far more horses than cars, where the houses had wooden portals in front and mango and avocado trees out back, and where the men were mustachioed peasants who wore wide-brimmed straw hats and riding boots, and had sharp machetes slung from their waists. I played with my country cousins on the porch of my great-aunt's spacious house and watched the horsemen leave their mounts tied outside my great-uncle's country store next door, to step in for a drink of rum.
Now, finally, I am returning to my father's dreamscape. I have chosen the end of the year, the time when, traditionally, Zulueta's errant children return for the parrandas, or parties, wild year-end revels that are exactly one century old. Visiting Zulueta will also afford me a chance to see what I like to think of as the real Cuba, the backwater Cuba, the Cuba that is not the subject of constant journalistic exposure and political analysis. Mostly, though, I want to see for myself if the town's romance is overblown by nostalgia—my father's and my own. I want to walk into the storybook and either feel its pages crumble when reality hits or get lost between its covers
I remember the parrandas well from my childhood. Celebrating the New Year, the townsfolk divide into two historic camps, vying against each other to see who can produce the best parade float and the most spectacular fireworks for New Year's Eve. Excitement builds during the preceding week, as each neighborhood stages impromptu parades and minor displays of fireworks, all to the accompaniment of beating drums, singing, and dancing. Dawn on December 31 is ushered in with a conga line that weaves through town; later in the day, final touches are put on the floats, and the fireworks are set up.
Come nightfall, the wild heart of the parrandas is unleashed, as the two neighborhoods take turns parading their floats—immense, fanciful contraptions meant to go only up and down the main drag—and setting off massive fireworks displays. From then on, all through the night, there will be more fireworks: no one sleeps and the rum flows. In the morning, the winning neighborhood dances through the streets again in a triumphal march.
Arriving in Zulueta one night in late December, I head for the house belonging to Mercedes Garit, the sister-in-law of a friend of my family's, who has kindly agreed to put me up. Located on Parque Armona, the town's main square, her home is a perfect spot to catch the festivities. As soon as I have unpacked, Mercedes' thirteen-year-old daughter, Yesi, and her friends escort me around the town. The preparations for the parrandas are feverishly going on; we poke into warehouses and homes where floats are being built, costumes are being sewn, and fireworks have been stored.
Considering that the Cuban economy is in the worst sIump in its history, it's a miracle that something as festive and impractical as the parrandas is going on. By my calculation, the hundred-year mark of the celebration means that the annual festival has survived the Spanish colonization, a shaky republic, two right-wing dictators and decades of Communism. Zulueta prospered as a sugar mill center until early in this century, when the Carretera Central, a two-lane highway that ran the full length of the island, bypassed the town. Isolation set in, turning the town into a microeconomy with limited opportunities for its native children, such as my grandfather, a small entrepreneur who was forced to migrate to Havana in the 1940s. Isolation meant that the same families would often intermarry, so that by the time of my childhood everyone there was my "cousin." And isolation also shaped Zulueta into a magical, eccentric world...
During the parrandas, politics takes a backseat, and even though the celebration date coincides with the anniversary of the Cuban Revolution—on January 1, 1959, Batista fled Cuba and the revolutionaries took over—it is scarcely mentioned. In this town around New Year's, whose side you are on has little to do with ideology and everything to do with whether your heart belongs to La Loma or to Guanijibes, the rival neighborhood teams.
For nothing it seems, can stop the zulueteños' passion for partying, pyrotechnics, and friendly, if intense, competition between the uphill and downhill neighborhoods. Indeed, as I tour the town with Yesi and her friends, fierce-looking men block my way when I try to cross into either of the competing sides—only to allow me in and invite me to join them in a drink after I explain that I'm an impartial journalist.
Later that evening, my teenage guides and I walk back to Parque Armona, in the center of the La Loma neighborhood. Like any typical, small-town Latin American plaza, it is ringed by important buildings, such as the church, the movie theater, the police headquarters, the home of the town's most distinguished citizen—a doctor—and the assembly hall where, in my father's time, Zulueta's "society” events were held. After describing some of my family's houses to my young friends and being told they are around the corner from the church, I set out on my own, telling them, "I'm off in search of my childhood."
Back then, my family would stay with my grandmother's sister, América, who had married a prosperous merchant and lived in a spacious house next to my great-uncle's store. Under the starlight, I recognize the store. The house next to it looks somewhat run down, but I figure this must be it. When I knock, a sliver of an old man answers, and I tell him I'm looking for Rosa, América's daughter.
“We knew a grandson of Concha [my paternal grandmother] was coming to write a story”, says an old woman I instantly recognize although the last time we met she could not have been thirty. "I knew it had to be you."
The house has weathered inside as well as outside, quite different from the days when my great-aunt América kept it shining and full of the porcelain figurines both she and my grandmother loved. But its spaces are still big and noble, and its ceiling, like those of other old Zulueta houses, is incredibly high. “Enriquito don’t you know who I am?" a voice behind me asks, using the diminutive of my childhood. I turn to see a stocky man about my age in jeans and a baseball cap. "It's me. Julito."
Julio, Rosa's son and my playmate during my Zulueta sojourns, is now a sugar mill technician during the sugar season and a soccer trainer the rest of the year. Later, we rejoined by another cousin, “Tin Tin," who arrives from the provincial capital of Santa Clara where he lives today. Tin Tin is really named José Agustín, after his grandfather, but since the latter’s nickname was “Tin" the grandson's was doubled; I remember him as a skinny kid always riding a borrowed horse. Neither of them has changed much since we were children, and they become my companions during my days in Zulueta—the country cousins and the city cousin reunited as playmates once more.
The week of festive preparation doesn't prepare me for the hectic sweep of events when the parrandas finally hit. Well before dawn on the morning of New Year's Eve, I am awakened by the conga line snaking through town to officially start the festivities. Led by musicians playing conga drums and cowbells, it stops at the houses where homecoming zulueteños are staying, inviting them to join the dance. As I shuffle gracelessly to the drumbeat, trying to wake up and not stumble in the dark, a lithe black man scolds me, "You haven't danced a step. Enjoy yourself, sonny boy. Life is short. Ha!” He’s right. Surrounded by hypnotic rhythm and euphoric people, I effortlessly lose myself.
After a couple of hours, I hear the beat of the music change to a rumba. The drummers have stopped leading the conga line and are now sitting on a stoop on the town's main street, the Calle Real. Merging with the growing crowd, now moving in unison to the rumba beat, I see the drummers for the first time. They are all black; in Zulueta, as in the rest of Cuba, the African heritage is strong. Excitement mounts as La Loma and Guanijibes rivals set off fireworks and yell out for their neighborhoods: “Viva La Loma!' /Viva Guanijibes!" Then, huge banners for each neighborhood are waved on the street, each swing of the colors equally met by cheers and shouts of derision.
Suddenly, the La Loma standard-bearer climbs to a second-story rooftop above the drummers, triumphantly waving his neighborhood's red flag. He is a white guajiro, as Cuban peasants are called, with a big mustache and dreamy eyes. Judging by the effort it costs him to climb up and wave the heavy banner, it's obvious that he's had too much rum.
The black-skinned Guanijibes flag-bearer, the muscles of his bare torso gleaming, climbs after his rival with the agility of a circus acrobat. To the joy of his supporters, he reaches a rooftop above his adversary and waves his blue flag even higher than La Loma's, a broad grin on his face. Flustered, the lomero scampers on the rooftops with an unsure step to an even higher spot, carrying the big, heavy flagpole and the La Loma flag. He is waving it there when someone next to me, putting rivalry aside, says, "I just hope he doesn't fall and hurt himself. It's happened before."...
The Parque Armona is ringed twice by sawhorses studded with fireworks, with more fireworks-laden sawhorses stretching for one full block at each of its four corners. Down in Guanijibes, another park is similarly armed. That doesn't include the countless hand-held fireworks. Nor the "mortars," cannon loaded with fireworks that produce a double explosion, one when the explosive is fired and another when it bursts in the air.
We're talking sheer firepower here. It's not the elegance of the display that will win points for the competing neighborhoods, but the relentlessness and volume of the bombast. Zuluetenos are hooked on it. My cousin Tin Tin has been saying all week, "I can't wait for the fireworks to start." And my old aunt Rosa, who has a broken hip, floods with tears whenever she thinks about not being right in the middle of the fireworks this year. A tough, muscular guajiro, whose soiled t-shirt and work pants are the result of his round-the-clock hard labor building his neighborhood's float, takes me aside to tell me that the authorities have set a limit on the fireworks each side can set off. "When you go back," he confides, "tell my people that I would die for my neighborhood, and that if these policemen don't let us use all we have, I don't know what I'm going to do. I don't know." And he breaks into tears.
As the night of December 31 falls, the town of Zulueta is literally ready to go off. The La Loma float begins its stately descent down the main street. Its theme is an elaborate Russian fairy tale--Slavic folklore has slipped into Cuba via the Soviet influence--about beautiful princesses, gallant princes, evil wizards, and the metamorphosis of magic animals into people and vice versa. It has all been elaborately staged, with papier-maché elephants, dances,and acted-out dramatic sequences that follow a narration underscored by a musical track....
The Guanijibes float is no less elaborate, though its theme, "triumphant backdrops," is not as exotic. On the platforms of various heights there are characters who recall the themes of floats that have won previous parrandas competitions: Helen of Troy, Swan Lake, the Emperor and the Nightingale, Romeo and Juliet. This one is a crowd-pleaser, more successful than the dense narrative of the La Loma float. When it reaches the crossroads, a trapdoor opens and a figure all in white (representing the African goddess Obatala, it is later explained) rises from the depths of the float. She is merely a mannequin, but veiled in smoke and darkness she is enlivened by a huge fireworks display—beautiful lights, not just bomb blasts—released in perfect timing so as to rise behind the float like a heavenly crown.
"Tasteful," everyone agrees when the cheering subsides. After the flag incident and the clear advantage of the Guanijibes float, the guanijiberos seem to have the edge. But the fireworks display is yet to come. And it does come. For the next several hours--all through the night, in fact—the exhilarating explosions never cease. The sawhorses that ring the Parque Armona are refilled no fewer than three times. My clothes are impregnated with the smell of gunpowder,and for the next couple of days the whole town reeks of it…
Who wins the 100th Zulueta parrandas? As always, it's popular sentiment that decides. If the elegance of the floats and costumes were the true criterion, Guanijibes would be the winner this year. But, agree the zulueteños (the lomeros loudly, in public; the guanijiberos quietly, in private), La Loma out-boomed Guanijibes. The following day, in a gesture of friendship and sibling solidarity, both neighborhoods dance through the town in a joint victory parade, and both flags are raised in triumph. On this, the centennial year, the winner is not a neighborhood but, instead, the spirit of unbridled imagination.
And, in a way, those of us who have come back to Zulueta are winners, too. The parrandas are the public celebration I have come here to witness. But I also came for something else, something locked in my father's dreams and my own memories. On the night I arrived, I was struck by the beauty of the town; the starry night served as a backdrop to Zulueta's modest one-and-two-story houses, its portals, its impossibly high ceilings, its old cobbled streets, its tropical fruit trees silhouetted against the black sky....
Perhaps Zulueta's isolation has been a blessing in disguise. Regardless of what change is coming to this country—or even what lack of change—the native children of this town will always know who they are: zulueteños all year round, but guanijiberos and lomeros at year's end. Having come back here after so many years, some of that ease has rubbed off on me, and at least part of me also knows now with great certainty who I am. I have found my childhood. I have come home.
