Varadero

In Cuba, the revolution is written onto every wall, but the only signs in the Varadero hotel are the Ché shirts in the gift shop. Varadero is a peninsular resort city in the province of Matanzas, an hour or two east of La Habana. Here is the highest concentration of hotels on the island: space dedicated to transient housing. The people who work here live in small neighborhoods of tightly packed houses and apartment buildings that we saw driving in. Around the bottled neighborhoods, empty land scattered with trees and trash heaps.

But the hotel we are staying in reminds me of a Jean Baudrillard playground, all simulation and hyper-reality. This hotel was built in the 1950s, before the revolution, and it looks like an exact replica of a pre-revolutionary hotel built the 1950s. And here, I also live as a simulation. We are ostensibly students on a field trip to understand tourist development in Cuba. Even as a student, though, the island has a way of forcing tourism under your skin and into your eyes. It is like this: imagine sitting in the hotel lobby, talking about some banal subject that isn’t related to doing ethnography in Cuba, something like Lady Gaga’s music videos or what is he wearing or what you “want to do after you graduate.” Then a Celine Dion song starts playing from outside, which is just fundamentally weird considering the geographic and temporal context of 2010 Cuba. So we head to the patio, and it is as if we had walked into something we should not have been seeing, like discovering a collection of porn magazines under your brother’s bed and then looking at them cover to cover. But somehow this felt dirtier.

On the patio, a scene repeats nightly, and time folds in on itself. Single men with mottled gray hair smoking Cuban cigars. When they exhale, the smoke becomes opaque sheets in the light of the low-hanging lamps. Behind the smoke sheets, the men are faceless, anonymous sexual potentialities whose arousal stains the thick air of their all-inclusive weekend. Not included: the Cabaret. For twenty-five convertible pesos, women will dance in feathered unison. Those unwilling to pay are here, along with those who unwittingly wandered out. Anachronistic pop music is the only hinge that blurs the territory of time that the hotel tries to draw itself into.

In front of a backdrop of a bohio painted for a middle-school play, colonial desires reproduce themselves in gazes on black bodies. Unlined tight mesh wraps the dancers’ breasts and their nipple targets are hit with perfect aim along the white crowd’s line of sight. Bands of black fabric slip around their thighs, suspending transparent parodies of pants. The songs alternate between chaste North American stage classics and eroticized Latin numbers, but the footsteps of the dancers remain consistently outside any pattern of synchronicity. Song change: the women emerge from behind the set in black dresses. A woman in the audience gestures at her lap to her frozen husband, “Cut up to here.” Through the crotch-high split, mismatched pairs of underwear slip out in little cries of abuse. Male dancers saunter through the crowd in childhood imitations of machismo and oversized white jackets. When they reach the lit stage carved into the patio, they lift the women onto their shoulders and bite into their stomachs as they spin. Song change: the theme from Beauty and the Beast. Man in a beast mask pursues delicately dressed female dancer, every history of racist representation converges into this moment. Colonial time, confluences of modernity and revolution are subsumed into the show as smoke eats into the night.

That’s how it was. Or that’s how I saw it. How I looked at it. I don’t know if I was a student watching the show, or a tourist watching the show, or a student disguised as a tourist analyzing the show, or a tourist disguised as a student disguised as a tourist getting unethical laughs out of pretending to analyze the show through a lens of cultural criticism. If I could pick one of these identities, the two and a half months that I have left in Cuba would make sense. But they keep shifting back and forth: student, tourist? Do I want to watch or do I want to understand? The longer I am here, the more the state of understanding feels further and further from my nail-bitten fingertips.