In the Hype

After much inaugural hoohah at New York's Tribeca Film Festival, "In the Heights", a musical about Gotham Latinos,ellicited a monumental yawn in the provinces. Opening day revenues were flat in the rest of the US. New York critics and media were stunned, the way most elites are stunned by any serious questioning of their criteria. What happened? Everyone can see that the photography unfolds as gorgeous, love-letter views of Manhattan, the score is rousing, rollicking salsa, the voices are thrilling, soaring, melodic, the dancing kicks butt. Oh, and "In the Heights" can also tug at your heartstrings with the sweet longing and tenderness that imbue its narrative. SO WHAT HAPPENED? Huh. Maybe we should ask: why should the rest of the country be interested in a movie about an ethnic subgroup in New York City? More specifically, we're at a moment where white nativist ideas struggle for dominance everywhere between the coasts. So why would nativist types watch a musical about brown people's struggles and aspirations? Other issues hinder "In the Heights'" national debut. Through the movie runs a subtext that few have cared to note. It's the threat of Washington Heights, an old Latino neighborhood in Manhattan,succumbing to gentrification, to affluent whites moving in, driving up rents, and obliterating local color. It's a protest against encroaching white influence--against the same yuppies and hipsters and tourists who flocked to Tribeca to see the movie and came back with breathless reviews. This particular set of New York whites has overlooked the movie's subtle indictment of their kind, but I'll bet that whites elsewhere get the message and they reject it. Anything else? Well, yes. "In the Heights" details the trials and triumphs of two young urban couples-- and ALL of their family, neighbors and friends. It's a cluttered story line. Even so, it almost disappears within a maelstrom of noise, color and movement, a gaudy song-and-dance marathon assault on the senses. Singers and dancers perform in cinematic mobs worthy of DeMille. Worse, you're expected to countenance over two hours of this manic-operatic display, which manages to be exhausting, boring and enervating at once. I hear that Latinos haven't taken to "In the Heights", and I can guess at a few more reasons why. The two male leads are slight of frame and mild of manner, not believable as the red-blooded macho love interests they're supposed to be. The two female leads are skinny, pale and flat, not the lush Latina babes one would expect. Both couples' frantic musical cavorting evidences no sexual attraction. (Surprised?) Also,I suspect that the movie's portrayal of Hispanics as ghetto dwellers who like to squawk, shake their asses and wear tacky rags hasn't gone over well with real Hispanics. A local Puerto Rican wunderkind is being hailed as the thing's "creator" by New York critics (who no doubt had some nudging from his well - connected daddy, a veteran public relations operative.) And the young "creator" DID create the music and lyrics and what he calls the"concept", whatever that means. But let's not dwell on him ad nauseam,the way half of New York has done. If you ask me, he's already taken too much credit for this enterprise--virtually pushing aside the woman who wrote the book. Who knows? Maybe some day, she'll thank him.

Dancers go in through the back

When he worked for El Mundo newspaper,my great uncle Victor Munoz popularized the idea of Mother's Day in Cuba in the 1920's. I know very little about the guy, except that he was my great grandmother's brother, that he managed to get his face on a Cuban

postage stamp, that he was a lector (reader) in the legendary cigar factories of Key West when they were hotbeds of revolution against colonial Spain,and that he enjoyed a considerable measure of popularity and influence in his Havana days. He died 99 years ago in New York. Unfortunately, sportswriters seldom make a lasting dent in the annals of literature and much of Uncle Victor's legacy seems to have dissipated within the mists of time. But he's still the Founder of Cuban Mother's Day,still my maternal kin's biggest claim to fame and was definitely a point of pride for me when I decided to become a journalist.

Needless to say, our careers were to follow very different paths. I first broke into writing at Cosmopolitan in Spanish, as "La Chica Cosmo", with a piece about what it's like to be a professional escort. But I chickened out of going on real "dates" and quit, two days after being hired by some pimp with a jewfro. Instead, I spoke to several male friends who had used escorts, and I wrote the piece based on their input. (So there,my first published article was a fake.You read it here first.)

My editor, a corpulent fairy, loved it,and I doubt he would've cared that I made it all up. Subsequent endeavors at Cosmo would be legitimate, mostly interviews with Latin American singers. I arrived at empty theaters before showtime, carrying my little tape recorder, and invariably, security guards blocked me, saying: "Excuse me, miss, but dancers go in through the back." And I had to explain that I wasn't a dancer, but a JOURNALIST, thank you. It annoyed me; I felt demeaned. That was, of course, many years and many pounds ago, and I was too young and full of myself to realize that I was being paid the best kind of compliment: an unwitting one. Nobody mistakes me for a dancer now, nobody would hire me as an escort, but that's okay. I'm still a woman. Una mujer completa, as we say-- I even gave birth and get congratulated on it at least once a year. So from myself and Uncle Victor, wherever he may be, Feliz Día de las Madres to you all.

Mami, dearest

In my earliest memories from Cuba, my mother appears like something from a Bryce Echenique novel: enveloped in clouds of perfume and organza, sweeping up the stairs to kiss me before disappearing into the night on my father's arm. Until the next festive evening, when she would put in another cameo, and again, leave me questioning the point of the whole exercise. No words were ever exchanged,no affectionate delays tolerated. She was always in a hurry. But why? Don't worry, she'll be back tomorrow,offered my nanny Victoria, left to fill in as best as she could. Maybe my mother thought she was performing an important maternal duty;the cliche of upper crust kids being raised by servants happens to be true. Victoria, a modest spinster from a Cuban country town, was my real mother almost from my birth until I turned 15, when she died of cancer in Miami. In between, there were some rough times. When we moved to Florida, Victoria stayed behind in Cuba for a few years. My parents,my two brothers and I crammed into a tiny garage apartment in Coral Gables until my father got back on his feet.

My mother had to learn how to cook; clean and do laundry. She was already 40 and had a tough time adjusting to the lack of servants, the vanishing of an ecosystem that catered to her every whim. She reacted by lashing out at those around her; she turned into an emotional wreck--or was she always? Maybe. I really don't know, she'd always been a stranger. At age 11, for the first time ever, I made my mother's acquaintance with no cooks or nannies--or anybody else--to mediate. It was a rude awakening; gone was the seductive creature out of a Peruvian novelist's fantasies, replaced by someone given to temper tantrums and cruel remarks. My brothers and father practically stopped coming home. The boys moved out and dad spent much more time with a longtime mistress who was like a second wife and, I suspect, his refuge from the first one, his way of avoiding divorce. In reality, he was using her. Only now do I understand that this woman inadvertently saved us from a childhood of divorce-induced poverty, and I sincerely hope that stolen moments with a man she could never truly have were enough for her in the end. It's an old story in our culture. As Hispanic males, my father and brothers got away with doing whatever they wanted, but girls were kept on a much shorter leash, so I stayed home and became the sole recipient of mami's regular outbursts of rage, frustration and vitriol. She wasn't just ornery; I could have handled THAT, but it was much worse. My father stopped taking us on family nights at nice restaurants because she'd get drunk and cause scenes. On these occasions, she could not be controlled. No amount of discreet begging, pleading or reprimanding worked; she just became wilder, more violent, louder in her defiance. Whenever this turbulence turned on me,it had overtones of spite and jealousy too ugly to expand on here. Suffice it to say she viewed me as a competitor, not a daughter. She punished me physically until my late teens, she insulted me, she'd humiliate me by grounding me on the spot at the last minute, when my friends came to pick me up for an outing. I stopped having other kids over. Sometimes she gave me presents, but took them back if I didn't do her immediate bidding, so I learned not to accept gifts from my own mother--how fucked up is that? She ruined my early youth, I really had no life until I moved out at age 24. Back then, nice Cuban girls didn't leave home unless they were married, so I made a disastrous marriage with an unlikely groom, and 3 months later, I was divorced and living by myself. My father, alone with my mother for the first time in years, begged me to come back, to continue serving as a human lightning rod for him. I refused; she was no longer my problem and anyway, he had never intervened on my behalf whenever she abused me. He'd just step aside, probably relieved that for the moment, someone else was the target of her rage. Well, I was done with all that-- and surprised that only now did he realize what I'd been saving him from, albeit against my will. Five years after I moved out, he was dead of a heart attack. She didn't attend his funeral or his burial ceremony. I've always thought she helped kill him; I'd seen him clutch his chest after blowouts with her. Despite all this, I spent most of mom's life attempting to develop our relationship, only to get pushed away whenever I came close. I'd keep trying mostly because I'd always wanted a mother,but also because I realized that maternal estrangement equals social blasphemy. Officially, mothers represent everything good and noble, generous and loving, and if you have a horrid mother, you'd better keep it to yourself or risk being reviled by the world. Almost everyone I know would rather ignore that toxic mothers exist (though headlines trumpet the horrors of children abandoned, starved, abused, beaten, or dumped in trashcans at birth). But the "mami dearest" syndrome may even be a generational thing. Too many Cubans of my age and social class were raised by women trained to be decorative objects, women who had kids and then dropped them off with the help until Fidel Castro forced a change of plans. Of course,some ladies took better than others to their new, scaled-down lives in the USA. My aunts, for example, became terrific mothers. My mother became an alcoholic. I believe that alcohol doesn't defile character, it brings out its true nature. Yes, I should be more compassionate, but it's hard to feel compassion towards a tormentor. And yes, the 60's Cuban diaspora and its accompanying changes of status were traumatic for her and for many others, but people ADAPTED. Suffering makes some better;it made my mother worse. To my credit, it weighs upon my conscience that I've had such a hard time forgiving her, even though she's been gone for a long time now, and even though

I now partially understand what made her the person I had the misfortune to know.

Infrastructure good. GOP bad.

For those of you who have been living in a closet, Joe Biden is working on a bill that would renovate this country's crumbling bridges, roads, water works,power grids, public buildings, etc. while creating the millions of jobs required for the task. Who'll pay for all this? Why, taxes on the rich, of course. This is something very similar to FDR's New Deal,which created jobs for millions of Americans and pulled the US out of the Great Depression. It worked back then and it'll work now. In fact, it makes perfect sense. So why don't Republican legislators like it? First, because it wasn't their idea. Second, because there's nothing in it for THEM. Republican legislators' version of infrastructure is: they would allow the individual state governments to handle it (a piecemeal approach and a recipe for disaster: how many corporations would be involved in renovating highways that cross several states?). Middle income taxpayers like you and me would foot the bill and the rich would get off the hook. As usual, private companies would bid on government contracts for these projects--which would run a bigger risk than usual of NOT being awarded on merit.Because companies offering GOP politicians the biggest bribes and kickbacks would be the ones winning the contracts. Unregulated, they would pay their workers poverty wages and use procedural shortcuts and shoddy construction materials to save money, thereby endangering the public. THAT is infrastructure, GOP style. Support the Biden bill.

KIDS IN CAGES

TOP PHOTO,FROM LEFT: My brother Alfredo, me, and my cousin Teresita, in Cuba. Back in 1960's Cuba, a rumor began to ciculate that the Castro government planned to turn all kids over 3 into wards of the state.The Cuban middle classes reacted by launching Operación Pedro Pan (Operation Peter Pan), in collaboration with the Catholic Church and the US government. Over 14,000 unaccompanied minors were sent from Cuba to the US, to live in orphanages,convents, group homes or these rural "camps" in the middle of nowhere, until their parents could join them in exile. About half of them had no friends or relatives on arrival and horror stories of abusive teachers and foster parents abound. By the time these kids were reunited with their families in near-adulthood, they had become strangers.Add to this the resentment many felt at what they saw as being abandoned to their fates by selfish parents, and you could say that Operación Pedro Pan destroyed families. My folks did it in reverse. They moved to the States and left my younger brother and I with relatives, until they could send for us.That was unpleasant enough;we were treated like orphans by dismissive adults and my uncle, a drunkard, once pinned me to a wall because I'd gotten into a fight with my cousin.I never forgave him.My aunt tried to "console" me by explaining that my uncle was like Fidel Castro, he had a quick temper but his heart was kind. Even as a child, I didn't understand how that was supposed to make me feel better. So, if THAT situation was bad, I can only imagine what it's like for children who are being sent into the desert alone, to become another country's problem. That is morally wrong and it constitutes political and public relations blackmail. People send their babies into the desert and then try to tug at American heartstrings to bypass immigration laws. Same with the famous DACA "dreamers";they were encouraged to step forward as illegals, no guarantees,then they were threatened with deportation. Then the American public was flooded with all these sob stories about why they should stay, because after all, it wasn't their fault that their parents had brought them here illegally. Well, let them go prove their elegibility and get their green cards. Get in line, like everyone else, go through the process. We who came before you did just that. My parents did everything right.They moved here, waited their turn to become, first residents, and then citizens,they paid taxes, bought a little house,sent their kids to college. Nobody gave them anything. Nobody gave ME anything. It annoys me when strangers think they're entitled to shortcuts, based on the tragedies they have created by themselves. If you can't care for your kids;don't have them. And if you do have them, keep them by your side at all costs.

Retirement II—a Parting Shot (by Juana Bimba)

Our comrade, who was lying, mortally ill with COVID, in a hospital ICU, has died.It's been a shock on many levels. But now that I am retired and can express myself more freely, if I may somehow speak out to help put an end to the kind of management abuse that can lead to the illness and death of my former coworkers, I will.

I decided to retire when I realized that my fate was exclusively at the mercy of an inept, whimsical supervisor, who gave me an assignment that could jeopardize my health.She forced me to report to the building where our operations are located, when my work could be performed virtually just as well, and most of our department was working virtually, anyway. People in other departments had contracted the virus at the work site already; several had died. These are not the poor, illiterate, huddled masses yearning to breathe free at some chicken-plucking factory and being abused because they don't know their rights. These are middle managers with college degrees, and they still have to toe a murderous line or face losing their jobs. I was being punished for a minor transgression--more of a mixup--caused by a connectivity problem that I was able to resolve on the spot. In reassigning me,my supervisor did not take my age or underlying conditions into account. She did not listen to those who tried to intercede for me, including the president of our labor union. I had no recourse of appeal; HER supervisors favored her, she was practically bulletproof (the HR Department dictated that you couldn't refuse an on-site assignment just for fear of getting sick). She finally pulled me out of that risky assignment in her own good time, when she felt that her point, whatever it was, had been made. Towards my retirement date, she assigned me once more to work in person and I had to use my remaining free time to stay home and avoid the risk of getting sick during my final days on the payroll. During the same time period, she had sent my aforementioned colleague to work on site--he was a union guy and she didn't like him--and he dutifully went. When he arrived,a manager told him his physical presence wasn't needed.He could've filled in virtually. A few days later, he was dead. It's hard to determine when and where he contracted the virus or whose fault it was; you just look at the timeline and draw your own conclusions. I feel as though I dodged a major bullet by retiring when I did. Making people report to work when they can do their jobs virtually and when working in person isn't really needed (as it wasn't in my case, or that our deceased coworker) shouldn't be allowed. By law.

Update:The offices at the State Ministry of Circumlocution, where I labored for years until fear of COVID drove me to retire last January, are fully open. Everyone is now posted on the premises--no more working virtually, from the prophylactic safety of home. The Ministry is a place with constant walk-in traffic from all levels of society, so even if all Ministry workers get vaccinated, there's that. But, besides wrapping a handful of its key bureaucrats in clear plastic barriers, the Ministry hasn't set up discernible safety protocols for anyone else. Needless to say,employees are freaking out. I sense panic and confusion in the voices of former colleagues, whenever they call. The ground has shifted under their feet. Again. There was a time, for about 5 minutes, when we all thought things were about to improve.But now there's a new Covid variant,there's an upsurge in cases, now even the vaccinated are getting sick--and still, on some fronts, health precautions are being rolled back, "celebrations" are being held, as if the virus were retreating instead of advancing. It's a dangerous kind of collective wishful thinking, it bodes ill. Me,I had planned to look for a little retirement gig, now I'm not so sure about the safety of working outside my apartment. I hope that smart, compassionate administrators and capitalists will let their staff return to the virtual workplace, at least for the time being.

Retirement (by Juana Bimba)

Friday was my last day of work, and I'm happy. Work is highly overrated. To paraphrase King James:at work, the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, nor yet favor to men of skill, but time and chance happens to us all. I say, forget time and chance: evil assholes happen to us all. At work, you'll always have to suffer someone who has their foot up your ass, just because they can put it there. It doesn't matter if you're good at what you do, in fact, it's worse, because the more competent you are, the more of a threat you'll be to some insecure wretch.If you work in government, being college-educated will be held against you, because government jobs are the passageway to middle classdom for all the unwashed masses of mouth breathers.Ethnicity doesn't matter; you'll encounter trash of every color in government work. Worse, people there generally get promoted on the basis of race, so you might find yourself working for someone who dislikes you just because your skin color doesn't match theirs. And so, the whole work system encourages mediocrity--why bother to stand out, when your best efforts will only bring you more grief? Better to call in sick. You'll only get ahead if you're willing to practice the most abject of sycophancies--God forbid you should have a spine, or some measure of dignity, that just won't do; you'll become a target. Throwing people under the bus, not letting them solve their own work-related problems or stepping aside to let them be gored by some random injustice are common practices among managers, and union bosses can't be bothered to defend union members against the nasty whims of management, who happens to pay the salaries and stipends of union bosses.The two routes of escape from all this misery are to run your own business (and most people aren't comfortable with that level of insecurity) or to love what you do so much, that the work will be its own reward. (It happens. I was once there, when I worked for a major daily newspaper and didn't really care whether I got paid.) But now I'm finally retiring and I'm happy, even if I'll no longer have money to throw around, and even if it's only for a few years before I plotz. I'm now free and at liberty to say/write whatever I want, whenever I want. I'm only sorry that my poor son still has to go through a lifetime of that shit.Now, after venting, I must mentearion at least two good things about working (in this order):1.You make money 2.You make friends.This Friday, I'll be leaving behind the most charming bunch of people I ever met under one roof and I will truly miss them. Too bad they're supervised by two worthless shitheads.