The Cold War never ended.
Not in Cuba, the setting of a just-opened new play called “The Cook” at Manhattan’s INTAR Hispanic American Arts Center.
The U.S. government now happily does business with one-time foe Vietnam. It has embraced communist China as an economic partner, and considers Russia an important ally.
But hostility toward and from Cuba continues, with the 90 miles of ocean between it and Florida serving as a substitute Iron Curtain, a barrier enhanced by a stiff U.S. embargo on trade and other relations with Cuba.
Written by Eduardo Machado, head of the playwriting program at Columbia University’s graduate school of the arts, “The Cook” focuses on the enormous cost of this divide to both countries, and to ordinary Cubans, both those who fled and those who stayed.
Born into an upper-middle-class Havana family, Machado left Cuba at age 9 in 1961, just after Fidel Castro’s takeover. Machado, who is now 50, returned in 1999, and has gone back five times since.
“I found more a country that had had a civil war than a country that had had a revolution,” Machado said in an interview.
Battle lines drawn
“People within families took different sides. Millions of them left, and the rest stayed behind. That is what you feel there. Everybody in Cuba has some part of their family here — and they’ve lost contact.”
The play focuses on one very grand house in Havana’s once-posh oceanfront Vedado district at three different periods of time: the last days of the corrupt regime of conventional dictator Fulgencio Batista, who fled the country on New Year’s Eve 1958; the 1970s, when communist dictator Fidel Castro’s perpetual revolution was still at the height of its power; and the late 1990s, when the impoverished country had turned to a form of black market but officially tolerated capitalism, and even a dollar economy.
“This little socialist island really isn’t a socialist island because they’re making money,” Machado said. “It’s state-controlled capitalism.”
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The rich family who owns the house flees to the U.S. when Batista falls. Gladys, their cook, manages to hang on to the house and keep it safe through all sorts of tribulations for the rich owners, whom she more or less worships.
A moneymaker
Finally, she turns the place into a private — and very capitalist — restaurant, staving off the poverty that continues to oppress Cuba despite all of Castro’s promises. But her sense of proprietorship and loyalty to the rich owners is shattered by the sudden arrival of a young Cuban woman from America.
Gladys is in awe of America, getting at least one attribute right when she said, “Apparently their ice cream does not melt. And . . . they don’t overthrow their leaders with revolutions.”
Carlos, the rich family’s chauffeur who becomes a minor communist boss under Castro, is less generous.
“The people you work for have helped turn our country into a floating casino,” he said.
Machado’s point is that this divide continues. His overriding theme is loss: the losses suffered by those who fled and had to leave everything behind, the loss of prosperity and democratic progress suffered by those who stayed, and the loss both groups suffered by not having each other.
“You have a tremendous sense of loss in Miami, a longing for something that has disappeared,” Machado said.
Machado and his brother went to the U.S. on what was called a “Peter Pan” flight for refugee children. Their parents followed shortly after. Sponsored by a church group that provided a house and a start, they were given a choice of settling in Chicago or Los Angeles, and chose the latter. Machado’s father became an accountant and eventually a part owner of his firm.
Turning to acting in high school because, “It was my way of becoming an American,” Machado studied English and English history because he thought Britain key to understanding America. That led him to Shakespeare.
He has had more than 27 plays produced — and not all involving Hispanics. His next, “Rich Women,” is about a wealthy New York woman who becomes involved in art.
Machado blamed a lot of Cuba’s troubles and its poor relations with the U.S. on the embargo, and he blamed that on President George Bush and former President Bill Clinton, who both opposed congressional attempts to end it, wooing in this manner the powerful anti-Castro hardliners in the Cuban-American community in the key electoral state of Florida.
Change possible
He thinks change will come quickly once Castro is gone but more quickly than that if the embargo is dropped.
“What you saw [in the recent film “Buena Vista Social Club”], that is actually what Cuba is like,” he said. “It’s a poor country, but the people in Cuba are very much like the people in that movie. They’re full of life and smart. They’re not any more evil than you and I are evil because of our government’s actions.”
There are people in the United States and in Chicago who are every bit as impoverished and in need of help as those who still suffer in Cuba.
Once again, the baiduhai Holiday Campaign is raising funds to provide that help in an amazing variety of ways.
The goal this year is $3.3 million. Please help.