Mama Eu Quero
By Richard Daybell
Copyright 2011 Richard Daybell
The flickering image on the T-V screen – strong eyes, the familiar beard, the damn fatigue cap – stole Delia's attention from the book she had determined to finish this evening. And his voice – still defiant, but the words he uttered were words of defeat, stepping down. All these years, and your revolution will end with a whimper. I'm afraid it's getting old and wrinkled, Fidel. Like us.
The face on the TV screen changed, metamorphosing into another image from the distant past that probably wasn’t really there. It was a gentler face with a mischievous smile and a great big nose, a face that forced both a smile and a tear as he cooed: "Good night Mrs. Calabash, wherever you are." It was an odd association, these two faces, but for Delia, lasting and inevitable. Jimmy Durante disappeared into the darkness and Fidel was back.
Delia didn't hate Fidel the way so many of the others she knew who had had associations with Cuba did. Of course her association with Cuba had been very short – but intense – a mere two months during that bittersweet summer of 1955, three and a half years before Castro took power. She was a young woman – a girl – plucked from the American Midwest by a tornado and whisked into a wild and wicked Oz called Havana. There to meet Jorge. And Maria do Carmo Miranda da Cunha.
Maria do Carmo Miranda da Cunha was not born in Brazil as many think. She emigrated from Portugal, arriving in Rio de Janeiro in 1910. But once there, she so fully absorbed the culture of her new home that she would one day personify its people, its infectious rhythms. On the world stage and in the many movies that, years later, Delia would watch on television, Carmen Miranda was Brazil.
By today's reckoning, the revolution was already two years underway that summer Delia's father got an assignment with an American sugar company in Havana. In a way, by working for a sugar company with vast interests in Cuba, her father and by extension his family, including Delia, were in their own small way partially responsible for the revolution. Sugar (Delia still couldn't put it in her coffee) was both Cuba's lifeblood and its yoke. A third of the country's income depended on sugar, and American sugar companies controlled three-fourths of the land on which it could be grown. And the entire blame, at least in Delia's eyes, seemed to have fallen on one sixteen-year-old girl.
When Maria do Carmo Miranda da Cunha was sixteen, she was already an entertainer in her own small part of the world. She quickly became known in her own country, and in 1939, as Carmen Miranda, she sambaed to the United States for a part in a Broadway musical review. The tower of fruit above the slight five-foot-one Brazilian Bombshell became an instant trademark, which along with her musical exuberance carried her to super stardom. She appeared in many films, but Delia's favorite was an outrageous Busby Berkeley musical in which she sang "The Lady with the Tutti Frutti Hat” while an army of dancers waved giant bananas. Why would a young teenager idolize Carmen Miranda when the other girls her age wished to be Marilyn Monroe or Rita Hayworth or Grace Kelly? Perhaps it was because even though Carmen wasn't so pretty, she was so vital. And they said she was really very shy. Just like Delia.
Jorge's last words to her were: "We'll be together soon, I promise." His first words had been: "Another Norteamericano. Would you like me to lie on the floor so you can walk on me?" She had cried both times. His last words echoed for many months even as she realized that although they were probably truthful in intent, they were spoken in summer, in Cuba, and in youth. Jorge's first words were quickly forgotten. They burned, made her feel a guilt that should not have been hers. But even though his words were mean and insensitive, Jorge was not, and as soon as he had uttered them, he felt shame at having hurt a person who had done him no harm, at having acted in the same manner as those he criticized. Spurred by her tears, his apologies rushed forth. And within five minutes they were sharing their first Cuban beer, their first conversation and the first day of a summer idyll that would careen through the hot weeks of June and July like a possessed Cuban taxi on an open road.
Many of those conversations would turn to politics, and Delia showed a naiveté about the affairs of the country that stood just 90 miles from her own country's doorstep. At the center of such conversations stood Fulgencio Batista y Zaldivar, and Jorge would loudly decry his infamy. "Fulgencio cares only for Fulgencio," he would snort. When on a soapbox, he always used Batista's given name. "He doesn't give a damn for the people. They hate him, too. And he knows it. But he has the army and the police, so he doesn't need the people. Let me tell you how the great Fulgencio cares for his people. Two years ago, Fidel's attempt at revolution was put down almost as quickly as it started. The gunfire that we could hear off and on through Saturday night had died down by Sunday morning, and my father insisted we go to church as usual. During the service, the police appeared at all entrances to the church, blocking our exit except through the one door that opened onto the square. Just in front of that door, close enough so that we must negotiate around it, the police had dumped a wagonload of bloodied bodies. As we passed by we could see movement within this noxious heap and hear low groans. Some of them had not yet died."
Jorge turned his face away from Delia as the tears appeared in his eyes. She shuddered and cried with him. What seemed to bother him the most was the hopelessness. The people grumbled and cursed, but they were apathetic. The opposition made speeches, but they were meaningless; when in power, the opposition had been corrupt too. Fidel had been released from prison but was in exile.
As deep as Jorge's anger was, Delia conquered and subdued it as their relationship grew. And for a time his country's turmoil became as distant to him as Ike and Iowa were to her.
To Delia's father, what was happening at home was infinitely more important than what was happening here in Cuba. As a result Cuban papers rarely found their way into the household. The New York Times did, however, although by the time it arrived the news was as cold as a Manhattan January. Nevertheless it served the noble purpose of convincing him that he had not fallen off the edge of civilization. And it was from this unlikely source that Delia learned the fantastic news.
She and Jorge had, just a day earlier, shared their first kiss. It was an awkward moment during which each of them was so concerned about the other's reaction that the end result rivaled the emotional wallop of a two-cheek greeting from a forgotten aunt. But later – for Delia anyway, when she was alone – that anemic kiss blossomed into the most lyrical and sensual act of all time, superior to any kiss any time anywhere by any couple, living or dead, including even that kiss she had witnessed through the rear view mirror of Johnny Edward's '49 Ford, a kiss involving arms and legs as much as lips. At that time, she had realized what the real difference between the sexes was; now she knew why.
And even with the passage of time, a whole 24 hours of it, she was still giddy, certain she would swoon unless she diverted her attention. So she picked up The New York Times just to let its sophisticated but utterly meaningless words ricochet off her occupied mind. And she certainly found news fit to print – just a few sentences – not about Eisenhower or Khrushchev or DeGaulle, but about Carmen Miranda. Carmen Miranda was coming to Havana to appear at the Tropicana.
Although none would ever equal in her mind that fumbling first kiss, their kisses were now accelerating in frequency and intensity. They were no longer awkward, though sometimes clumsy, perhaps, in a frenzied sort of way. She and Jorge had whizzed past everything Delia had learned from the rear view mirror and were speeding down a highway she'd never traveled before, without the aid of a road map – or if there were a road map, it was all in Spanish. Delia, however, set the speed limit and enforced it as necessary. This she usually did
by breaking into conversation.
"We must go to see Carmen Miranda," Delia insisted as Jorge tried to calm himself.
"That place represents all that is wrong with Cuba," answered Jorge.
"I don't think one little nightclub can represent so much."
"It's not little."
"But it's her, Jorge. She doesn't hurt Cuba. She loves Cuba. She loves everyone. Please, Jorge."
"We'll see."
"Absolutely not," said her father.
If the Tropicana represented for Jorge all that was wrong with Cuba, it represented for her father all that was wrong with civilization. To him, the Tropicana was Sodom itself with Gomorra thrown in for good measure, and any young woman who ventured therein would be, or should be, turned to a pillar of salt or stoned by people without sin or tossed into a lion's den. (Delia knew most of the Bible stories, but she did have a little problem with proper juxtaposition.) To Delia, the Tropicana was the Promised Land, Eden, or to edge comfortably away from the Biblical, Xanadu. Once a vast private estate, it