I am flying through the night to Cuba. It has been 44 years since my last trip. I went that time to do a picture story on Havana with the author of Latins Are Lousy Lov-ers, Helen Lawrenson. The working title of the piece: “Havana, the Sexiest City in the World.” As we land, memories fall into place: our futile search for the crystal-chandeliered houses of prostitution (they had been closed down); the curfew, ordered by Batista, which held the city in its nightly grip; the tanks that patrolled the streets; Helen’s surreal talk about the “ambiente,” the soft breeze. All this made a mockery of our assignment.
I no longer remember how we stitched the story together, but I do remember getting a cable from Magnum Photos, the cooperative of which I am a member, asking me to find a child who lived a life of dolce far niente for a series on children around the world.
It seemed a daunting task, but finding the right child turned out to be easy. Helen introduced me to her “lousy lover,” a Señor Sánchez, who owned the fishing rights to Cayo Carenero, an unprepossessing, mile-long narrow cay in the Gulf of Mexico, due east of Havana. Señor Sánchez gallantly offered to take me there in his single-engine plane.
We landed, and a gaggle of children ran at me. Nine-year-old Juana María Chambrot led the pack. She stopped suddenly, climbed a palm tree, and threw down a coconut. Someone slit the top and gave the coconut to me to drink.
As I remember it, I had at my disposal an interpreter and a boat (on which I stayed), and for three weeks I lived Juana Chambrot’s life. She was a photographer’s delight, as were her family and neighbors. (Eleven fishermen’s families lived on the island.) Their hospitality and the simplicity of their lives were almost biblical. Living conditions were fairly primitive: The people had to row to the next cay every day for fresh water, and they had no electricity—they used kerosene lamps. But the sky was blue, the Gulf of Mexico was aquamarine, and the sun shone. The children attended a school their parents had built, and a teacher came by boat every Monday.
One day Juana’s father, Alberto, told me a rhyme that I have never forgotten:
“Comer no comemos mucho,
Pero reír nos reímos mucho.”
“We do not eat very well,
But we can laugh, laugh like hell.”
Quickly, my time on the island grew short, and as I was preparing to leave, Juana’s parents and I talked about their child and what her adult life would be like. If she stayed on the cay, they said, she would live a life of poverty. If she went to Havana, the chances were good that she would become a prostitute. Then, in an oblique way, they indicated that I might adopt her, take her with me.
The idea was unthinkable. I was just beginning my photographic work, I had a six-year-old son, and I had no money. We dropped the subject.
But in the years that followed, thoughts of Juana niggled at me, worried me. Why hadn’t I kept in touch? Now, as I arrive in Havana more than four decades later, I think of the vibrant 9-year-old child I once photographed and wonder about the 53-year-old woman I’m to meet tomorrow. She lives just 200 yards from our original meeting place on Cayo Carenero—and a lifetime and a Revolution away from the child I knew.
The cay has changed dramatically since my 1954 visit. A causeway now connects the island with the mainland, so we drive there. And a village of cement houses has replaced the thatched, warped wooden hovels I recall. Waiting on the porches of the houses are Juana, her parents, Alberto and Berena, two of her children, her 18 grandchildren, her sister and brother, and numerous other relations and neighbors.
My anxiety about whether Juana would remember me disappears. There are hugs and kisses—and tears. Apparently, I have been a shadow in their lives just as they have been in mine. Gradually over the days I spend with Juana and her family and neighbors, her story unfolds. Everyone has a sentence or a paragraph to add. Who would have guessed, when we parted in 1954, that in five years Castro would come down from the hills like Caesar returning to Rome?
“When we heard it on the radio,” Juana tells me, “we danced. All over Cuba, people rushed out into the streets, dancing. Many had died under Batista, and with Castro, things started changing and people were hopeful.”
Those were heady times for Juana. She was 14 years old and had just left school. At 15 she married Alfredo Conde, whom she had known from childhood. Hers is a good marriage, she tells me, but she is lonely. Alfredo runs a fishing boat out of Havana and comes home infrequently. Of the eight children she bore, two have died—one by drowning, the other of meningitis. “I still feel it in my heart,” she says.
As for politics, she says the revolution improved her life. “From 1962 to 1989 [when the former Soviet Union supported Cuba] things got better—radically,” Juana says. “We had rice, oil, and chicken. We lived like kings. With the American blockade, things are bad again. We refer to the way things are now as the ‘Special Period.’ ”
Cayo Carenero’s water plant has been shut down because there are no parts for repair. Water is trucked in, and the people have to manage with meager provisions. Kerosene is in short supply.
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