Though officially frowned upon, Cuba's gays moving more freely

Though officially frowned upon, Cuba's gays moving more freely
By Manuel Roig-Franzia
Copyright © 2007, Chicago Tribune and The Washington Post
Published January 8, 2007

HAVANA -- There was a commotion behind the smoked-glass door. Giggles. Squeals. Salsa music pulsing.

No one could hear the squat man outside. He stood there pouting, holding a makeup bag in his left hand, slapping delicately at the door with his open right hand.

"Ladies, please," the man screamed. "Let me in. Hurrrrrrry."

More men crammed into the foyer with him, each pouting. It was 8:30 p.m. in Lawton, a dimly lighted neighborhood far from the center of Havana, and it was time for Nayla to come to life.

By day, the impatient man is a waiter at a state-owned cafe. His name is Jose, and he is a nobody. But in this room, a beauty salon with a torn red-leather chair and a cracked mirror, he becomes a star. He becomes Nayla, one of Havana's favorite cross-dressing performers, a marquee fixture of the underground transvestite scene.

Finally, the door swung open.

"Ay, mommy," said a tall man wearing a foot-high pile of curly wig. "Come in. Come in."



`Aren't I pretty?'

The men burst into the room, transforming it into a swirl of hugs and "oh-my-are-you-pretty" exclamations. And joy -- pure joy. Jose began unpacking.

By 8:45, Jose was almost gone, disappearing under a thick glaze of rouge, and Nayla was taking shape. A heavy stripe of purple eye shadow finished it. Nayla had arrived.

She -- the pronoun Nayla prefers at this point in the transformation -- stepped back and smiled.

"Aren't I pretty?" she said.

By 9 p.m., the audience was filling the showroom upstairs. Waiters in tuxedos led the men to their places, situating them around splintering picnic tables and bare metal chairs. They are the scavenged relics of a country where there is seldom money to buy anything, and when there is money, there is seldom anything to buy.

The cabaret they'd come to see has been an on-and-off affair for years. The haunts of Cuba's gay, lesbian and transgender communities were often shut down in the bad old days of the 1980s and 1990s, when discrimination was rampant and arrests -- often for no other cause than sexual orientation -- were too.

But things have been improving lately, especially since earlier this year when Mariela Castro, the niece of ailing Cuban President Fidel Castro, took up the cause of gay, lesbian and transgender rights. The men in the audience -- mostly gay -- are feeling bolder. The show they had come to see is still not legal, but it is tolerated by the authorities.

At 9:30, a 76-year-old man named Gilberto found a spot on a park bench by the sound system. He is the kind of calm, wise soul who draws a crowd without saying a word. Soon, young men were drifting over to listen as Gilberto talked of long-ago loves with a twentysomething hunk in tight black jeans and no shirt.

Gilberto tried New York for a while in the 1960s, he told his friends, but he came back to Cuba. He missed his lover, a man who married a woman to avoid persecution.

"I missed the heat," he said with a wry smile.

His friends chuckled at the double meaning.

A waiter whipped past at 10, scrambling down the frayed blue carpeting on the narrow stairway to get more beer. He hit the landing just as a rattly, Soviet-era Lada pulled up.

The lady of Cuba's gays

Through some act of contortion, a 250-plus-pound performer squeezed out of the tiny car's back seat. A man in the foyer jumped in place and clapped his hands in front of his chest in quick strokes.

"Maridalia!" he shouted.

Maridalia was resplendent, a vision of grace in an ankle-length brocade gown and red, spiked hair. She smiled and sauntered into the beauty shop, every bit a star.

"She's very temperamental," said Rafael Sanchez, a Cuban painter who came by for the show. "Everybody loves her passion onstage."

At 10:15, as Maridalia applied a few last touches of makeup, the stereo upstairs began to pound out the opening bars to a song of unrequited love by Rocio Durcal, the late Spanish diva. Rogelio, an off-duty performer who came to check out the competition, smiled. Durcal is his muse, the artist he most often channels when he sings at another secret Cuban cabaret.

A man with a skintight T-shirt jumped from his chair at a nearby table. He started to walk over.

"Oh, here comes `the Auntie,'" Sanchez said to Rogelio.

The Auntie runs his own cabaret. He's a big talker and a big spender -- showing up at performances with a fanny pack full of Cuban pesos to dole out.

"Sing, sing, sing" the Auntie implored Rogelio.

Rogelio blushed. "You're such a sweetie," he said. "Not tonight."

A half-hour later, at 10:45, the lights dimmed and Maridalia came onstage. She flung out her arms and let loose in a deep, window-rattling vibrato.

"Learn to walk in complete darkness," she moaned, rousing the crowd with a Venezuelan tear-jerker.

The Auntie couldn't contain himself. He raced onto the stage and stuffed bills in Maridalia's brassiere. She smiled, glowing in the spotlight, and called back to him, "I am the lady of Cuba's gays!"