Adventure Divas (7 page)

But I have been anxious for the show to depict another sort of revolutionary. I did stop pushing, but I never stopped expecting, and Jeannie and I were thrilled yesterday when Catherine told us she had received word that Shakur had agreed to an interview.

Formerly JoAnne Chesimard, Assata Shakur was among the Black Panthers who were hunted down by J. Edgar Hoover’s illegal COINTELPRO organization in the 1960s and ’70s. The Panthers, once a symbol of the 1960s Black Power, are now a scattered group, some dead, many in prison, others holding political office, and a few, apparently, living in Cuba. Assata Shakur was convicted of being an accomplice to murder and imprisoned in 1973 for her involvement in a New Jersey highway shootout that left a state patrolman and one of Shakur’s companions dead. The trial was highly controversial, with physical evidence supporting Assata’s claim of innocence. She escaped from prison in 1979, went underground, and then turned up in Cuba in 1984.

Castro has given asylum to Shakur and a handful of other Black Panther and Black Liberation Army members over the years. In a country refreshingly devoid of the culture of celebrity, except for the aura that cropped up around a few baseball players and heavily branded revolutionaries, Shakur has managed to become a star.

A high-ranking Panther, Assata was an activist for the rights of prisoners and welfare recipients. Since her arrest, she has become an icon, as highly regarded in certain circles as Malcolm X or Nelson Mandela.

I mull over whether fugitive status runs counter to diva status, but remain focused on Shakur’s long-documented humane approach to politics and social justice that initially drew me to her story. She wrote: “I believe that there needs to be a constant campaign to educate people, sensitize people and analyze racism. The fight against racism always has two levels: the level of politics and policy, but also the level of individual consciousness.”

Developing an inclusive awareness of the international community—thinking globally—is a key part of Assata’s revolution. “It was clear to me that without a truly internationalist component nationalism was reactionary. . . . To me, it was extremely important for all the descendants of Africans everywhere on this planet to reverse the political, economic, psychological, and social patterns created by slavery and imperialism.”

I nervously flip through my notebook while we wait, surrounded by lush tropical scenery, at an out-of-the-way, dollars-only black-market eatery called a
paladar.
Assata Shakur walks in, alone. She is striking. She is wearing a gold-patterned tunic over solid-gold-colored pants. An orange, black, and white African cloth rests across her shoulder. Long dreads and low dangly earrings frame a face not nearly revealing her fifty-plus years. She shakes all of our hands stiffly and says, “Hello, nice to meet you.” She sets down her purse and seems on edge. She agreed to meet us on Catherine’s endorsement, and because of my track record in socially conscious book publishing, but clearly she is ambivalent about exposure. Shakur has been deep underground and almost never grants interviews. We’re keenly aware of what a coup this is.

Of course the tabloid reader in me wants to ask what kind of divine Houdini-ism enabled her to bust out of the maximum-security wing of a New Jersey prison. But I’m resigned to the fact that she won’t rehash her political past with me.

Once I’ve explained the diva mission to her, Assata recalls for me her first impressions of Cuba. She seems to loosen up, now that she is sure that we are not here to attack.

“Everything was so green and alive,” she says of her initial days in Cuba, then goes on to laughingly admit, “And, before I came, I thought everyone in Cuba would look just like Fidel Castro. I was expecting a magic-wand revolution—a perfect society—and it wasn’t that. Women have made a lot of progress in Cuba and a lot of things that exist in the U.S.—battering and vicious attacks—you don’t see in Cuba. You don’t see that kind of violence and pain. But it’s still very much a macho society and I’ve come to understand that it’s a process. It’s going to be a long struggle to get rid of that baggage.”

I remember Lizette Vila talking about her struggle with machismo in the male-dominated TV industry. She used humor as an ally.

“How do you approach the struggle?” I ask.

“One of the things that has been especially good for me has been to broaden the idea of struggle. In the sixties there was this idea that we were supposed to be revolutionary—very serious,” she says, making a mock grimace. “You were supposed to just talk
at
people, not
to
people. You know, so many people that I met in the sixties who were locked into that style of struggle are looking and saying, first of all, it was
boring.
You know? And we do not have a right, in the name of social justice, to bore people to death.”

She pauses for a moment of consideration, then continues. “It’s not fair to ignore people and say that you’re struggling for people. We have a duty to make what we are doing a people activity, which means acting like people, which means being concerned about people, which means including children. I think that’s one of the more important lessons that I’ve learned in my life.”

I take from this that she means the Panthers’ extremist language alienated many of the people they were attempting to liberate. The fight for social justice in the post–civil rights era meant working to solve the problems caused by a system of racist oppression: poverty, violence, lack of access to education, and hunger, among other issues. There was a disconnect between the needs of the many thousands of African Americans who were suffering due to oppression, and the Panthers’ pumped-up rhetoric of radical nationalism and aggressive takeover.

“I’d come to see revolution as a process,” she states near the end of her book
Assata.
Writing about herself as a newly minted revolutionary in the late 1960s, she says, “Back then, people used the word ‘revolution’ just because it sounded hep. Half the time what they were really talking about was change or some kind of vague progress. But the reality of achieving it seemed a long way off.”

I ask Assata about fear. “I’ve only been here a week,” I say, “and fears, or shadowy commie stereotypes I didn’t even know I had, have completely fallen away.”

“I had fears too, at first. But with time I learned about the Cuban character, and fear,” Assata says. “In the United States there is a kind of reserve. People are isolated, separated, alienated. At first, I thought the Cubans were nosy—always asking if they could help and inviting me to this meal or that party. But then I realized they’re simply not afraid to talk to each other. I always believed in a ‘people society,’ but my imagination never conceived that a society could produce people so unafraid of other people.”

Fear keeps people in place, afraid of one another and afraid to connect. We all have fears but perhaps the trick is in what we (individuals, nations)
do
with that fear. Maybe the United States’ imperialist tendencies grow out of fear—fear of “other” and fear of losing what Americans have. In Cuba, where people have very little, they are not so afraid. Is this a coincidence?

I am pelted by a strong vibe from Catherine that says that our audience is up.

I throw out one more question.

“What happened with the Pope thing?” I ask tentatively, knowing that New Jersey officials had written to the Pope before his late-nineties visit to Cuba and urged him to press Castro for Shakur’s extradition. His Holiness declined.

“I guess he decided that God was not on the side of the New Jersey State Police.”

There was speculation that the Pope’s visit might have led to a thawing of U.S.-Cuba relations (making Cuba to Clinton what China was to Nixon). However, on the Pope’s first day in Cuba, all cameras and laptops fled north to D.C. as the story of our former president and his intern Ms. Lewinsky broke—trumping both God and Castro and featuring one naughty—and, ironically enough, Cuban—cigar.

No press coverage, no change.

Cheryl shoots a single still photo of Assata standing, looking straight down the lens, her earrings swaying ever so slightly in the Caribbean wind. After a gracious set of good-byes, she disappears around the corner of the stone fence that surrounds the
paladar.

“This is gonna be like no travel show I’ve ever seen,” Pam says, coiling up a power cord. She understands the political hurdles we may face if we include Assata in the show. To many Shakur is a visionary; to others, she’s a fugitive cop killer. The latter identity might rankle television executives.

“What do you think will happen to Shakur when Castro dies, or the embargo comes down?” I ask Pam, knowing those are the only two things that protect Shakur.

“I don’t know, but Castro will never give her up, embargo or not.”

Back on the road,
on our last leg to Santiago de Cuba, I can’t stop thinking about something Assata said to me right before she disappeared around that corner. She told me that although she has lived in Cuba for nearly twenty years, she still never feels completely at home. As she said to Christian Parenti in an interview in
Z Magazine,
“Adjusting to exile is coming to grips with the fact that you may never go back to where you come from. The way I dealt with that, psychologically, was thinking about slavery. You know, a slave had to come to grips with the fact that ‘I may never see Africa again . . . I’ll be separated from people I love.’ ”

I suppose that is the lot of the exile. The notion of exile must loom large for Assata, and for Cuba itself. There are Cuban exiles in the United States (such as Carilda Oliver’s family), and American exiles in Cuba (such as the Panthers). The ongoing repercussions of the slave trade and revolution-induced diasporas leave huge numbers of Cubans with the constant sense of being uprooted.

I can feel a new transitoriness growing within my own wandering soul, but my pilgrimage isn’t
exile.
It’s a choice. And therein lies the significant difference: A pilgrim travels by choice, with a specific quest for meaning, and an exile is pushed into motion by chance, disaster, crime, political upheaval, or the like. The voluntary voyage is about self-discovery and getting the prescription right on one’s glasses. But as Erik Leed says in
Mind of the Traveler,
“The forced departure initiates a journey that is suffering or penance rather than a campaign or a voyage. Often one-way or endless journeys, they muddle rather than define the persona of the traveler.”

In short, travelers can go home; exiles can’t.

Only two precious
days of shooting remain, so we bear down on Santiago de Cuba at seventy miles an hour—past sputtering scooters with live pigs strapped on back, past Soviet-built trucks loaded with canefield workers, and through the famous Sierra Maestra mountains, where Che and Fidel hid out and cultivated their revolution. We’ve been stopping periodically to hunt down phones to try to reach Cecelia Gomez, a ship’s captain and potential diva who is said to base in the harbor of Santiago de Cuba. Only feet fill my boots now, and we are down to two slim wads of cash, one in my hip pocket, one in Jeannie’s. Jeannie is chewing her nails. (Jeannie never chews her nails.) We’re short on material and desperately need one more interview—and so far the captain is eluding us. We’ll have to go down to the harbor and look for her in the morning. This late in the day, the docks would be deserted.

“Don’t worry,” Catherine says, as we’re slowed, nearly to a halt, by a herd of goats crossing the street. Catherine repeats her “never push, never care, and then it will happen” advice, which I’ve come to believe contradicts 98 percent of television production behavior, but I try to make like a Cuban and give destiny some breathing room.

As has happened so many times in Cuba, we hear our destination before we see it. We drive into Santiago on an audible red carpet of jubilance and drumming and follow our ears down a tree-lined cobblestone street to cruise into the main square in town, Parque Céspedes (where Castro officially declared the revolution won). We chase the wafting sound through the fancy lobby of the whitewashed Hotel Casa Grande and up a dark staircase onto the hotel’s rooftop. A half dozen shirtless men line one side of the rooftop, thumping the taut animal skin that stretches across the top of the three-foot-high
bata
drums. Women and men, in a series of advancing lines, their shoulders and bottoms moving in circles to the beat of the drums, are performing traditional Afro-Cuban dance in the balmy glow of a Caribbean dusk.

It turns out this is a rehearsal of Santiago’s leading folkloric dance troupe, Katumba, and they are exercising the traditions of this province, whose people have the highest percentage of African blood anywhere in the country, largely due to agricultural sugar workers who came here in the thirties from Haiti and Jamaica.

I get nearer to the line of drummers and am amazed at how one man, using a drumstick in his right hand and only his bare left hand, can create such intense sound. In the Afro-Cuban religion of Santería,
bata
drums and the accumulated power of the spoken word are believed to play a key role in communicating with the pantheon of orishas who represent, and rule, every force of nature and humanity. Song, rhythm, ritual, repeated verse, and trance possession are ways in which to tap into what is said to be a very interactive and reciprocal relationship between people and deities.

Gloria Rolando’s films featured the feverish dancing of possessed Santeros and Santeras, who are akin to priests and priestesses. But this performance makes me
feel
the presence of Santería in this culture, and lulls me into the incantatory power of drums and repeated verse. The sky over the roof deck is purple now, and the dancing slows along with the drumming. One by one, the women begin to fall out of line, and pull their sweats over their shorts. The men put on their shirts and the rehearsal is over.

We head downstairs for mojitos in the Casa Grande’s lobby. As in so many developing countries, catering to First World tourists is a growing component of the economy in Cuba. Tourism brings hard currency as well as painful new developments. Hotel lobbies are filled with young Cuban women and men looking for foreigner dates. They are called
jiniteras
or
jiniteros;
the colloquial, all-purpose word is usually translated as “hustler,” but literally means “jockey”—that is to say, a paid mount.