Revolutionary Neighbor

Our Revolutionary Neighbor drove past the house in his rusting blue four-wheel drive Ford, peeling out on the muddy path to his shack, but we did not meet until a few months later, although we would wave at each other when he visited his grandmother who lived next door. He was also 2nd or 3rd cousins to the three sisters who lived across the street from his grandmother. 

RN was about 15 years older than me. He sported a red beard, and he was a thin man, with the appearance of someone who did not eat well, or with a frame of a long distance runner who wore off every bit of fat from his body. Inside his vehicle he appeared larger as he drove around and behind the property to access the shack in the back of his grandmother's estate. Perhaps one of the first times I heard him speak, he hollered at me from his balcony, ¡viva la revolución!, jokingly perhaps, while tapping an electric bass on his wooden porch.  I didn't know how to respond, but not because I was shy. I wanted to counter with que viva rock an roll, but instead I waved and laughed. With that I would have proved immune to the surrounding Roman Catholic conventions of the island, with its local politics immersed in the vitriolic fear of thinking out loud or too much for one selves. If they espoused politics like they did Christianity, many families often declared themselves estadistas or populares, with only few daring to speak out loudly as independentistas (at least in mixed company, unless you had a Ph.D).  Even less, would they dare announcing themselves as nacionalistas or socialistas, never mind being a communista.

RN hosted a variety of visiting friends, girlfriends, artists, musicians and left-wing independentistas. It was with this experience of difference, variety and openness that I gathered in post-adolescence in Puerto Rico, juxtaposed with what I would go through a few years later in a south Florida college, with shock. Listening to a privileged (white) Guatemalan college student at the cafeteria lunch table label Amerindians from his country as "filthy communist scum", while his Cuban exile roommate nodded, made me realize that there were hateful morons everywhere. A similar shock would zap me several years later in Cape Town listening to drunk white South Africans lament the passing of their Apartheid-era army years where they had fun "shooting kaffirs", in the name of anti-communism. 

I wandered near the shack and RN asked if I was into music.  Of course. The cocktail at the time: mixing acid rock with 70's heavy metal, Beatles, Stones and some Punk and New Wave. I was also a recent convert to reggae and African music. His music collection included rock and roll, salsa and jazz albums that I had never heard of, and  music from South America, the Caribbean and Europe, especially acoustic guitar and folk music from the protest era, La Nueva Canción. 


RN declared himself a Communist shortly after meeting, as if he wanted to impress or shock. I was not shocked, although it was a breath of fresh air. Stifled conversation at my high school invited only talk about whether you were "for" or "against" the British in the Falklands War, or what your position was on the status of the island, or if Cerro Maravilla was a coup of police ingenuity stamping out terrorism or sheer police brutality. There was little talk about what had transcended nationally or internationally in terms of Watergate, Vietnam, the overthrow of Allende in Chile, or the brewing civil conflicts in Latin America or the Middle East. In school we barely even discussed nuclear weapons; we were in our teens and cared more about Playboy, Penthouse and Hustler magazines, in the order of soft to hard. The discussion on politics rarely went that far with my peers. Listening to RN was like hearing the Hustler version of politics, intriguing, and like a Hustler magazine, once it had its effects, I tossed it into a hidden place until the next impetus.

Posters of Fidel Castro and Che Guevara draped RN's living room. His shack reminded me of my grandmother's house, Abuela, where my mother grew up in, in Lares, a symbolic hometown to patriotism and independence on the island, although my mother's family never espoused such convictions, the exception being a distant cousin who lived in Cuba and married an American who grew up in China with missionaries (it turns out RN knew my cousin's husband, a vocal professor). 

I would notice when he had friends over. Many times people would be in his without his presence. Some of them were carry overs from the 60's; many with long hair and beards. The massacre of two university students by police at a radio tower in Cerro Maravilla had occurred that year and was a topic of conversation everywhere and was hard to escape. By the time I had been to his shack a half dozen times, I assumed their independentista beliefs were a given.

Sometimes I went on road trips with RN, although for the first couple of years of our friendship I was too young for my parents to let me go. My parents did not disapprove of him; they seemed to like him compared to some of my other unsavory friends and acquaintances I had made. And since he was older, he might have seemed more responsible. He didn't drink and drive, in fact he didn't drink very much, just a little beer, although he liked weed. He believed alcohol, along with religion, were the "opiate of the masses", which was how imperialist countries like the United States kept control of Puerto Rico and Latin America, and it was how the local politicians in Puerto Rico kept the populace from voting for the PSP, or even the PIP, and also kept the true Partido Nacionalista Puertorriqueño of Pedro Albizu Campos illegal. It had been stated - half-jokingly - perhaps by the comedian Jacobo Morales, that the liquor stores were kept shut during local elections on the island, because if too many people got drunk and emotional, they might end up voting for independence. This seemingly contradicts RN's (and perhaps other Marxist) theories about alcohol being used a weapon against the people. It would seem like alcohol would be the Socialist revolution's best friend. Perhaps I got that wrong.

Some of the road trips I took with RN were into smaller towns and villages in the hills that I barely knew existed. His comrades might initially look at me with some suspicion. However it was not at all uncommon for some of these revolutionary friends to have a mixed family background as I did. Roy Brown, a darling local Bob Dylan for La Nueva Trova or La Nueva Cancion, who teamed up with Cubans Silvio Rodriguez and Pablo Milanes, also was a bit gringo. Quite a few of the independence advocates came from a more than white or more than European or American background. Sometimes RN would tell his comrades that my dad was a liberal gringo professor who always voted for independence. I never told him that. Maybe it was his way of keeping me safe or acceptable. PC. 

I read Solzhenitsyn and cut out newspaper photos of Solidarity demonstrating in Poland. My cousin returned from the paradise of Castro's Cuba lamenting the mistreatment of marielitos as the government emptied its jails and mixed criminals with people wishing to emigrate from the island. These topics would come up with RN in discussions that would turn into arguments in which neither one of us backed down, although he would inevitably blame the United States, capitalism and imperialism for starting the whole problem in the first place. I would add Hitler and Stalin, and he would agree with the Hitler part, and then make excuses for Stalin, and eventually admit the USSR was just as imperialist for invading Afghanistan, but that the real heroes, like Ch Guevara and Salvador Allende were victims to imperialist aggression. I teased him about Jesus Christ and El Che's similarities and he would take me seriously, admitting there was room for liberation theologists in the Christian faith.

It is possible that some of the women I met through RN, many quite a few years older than me, were intrigued because I still showed some sun streaked light brown hair from my adolescence, perhaps some hope and candor, and I had white skin, an English name, a different background from most people, and enough education to recognize many of the musicians, artists, writers, historians, philosophers and other names that were dropped during parties and discussions. Or maybe they wanted an experience with a younger or different guy. Or to piss off their ex-boyfriend still in the crowd. I had some short lived and exciting adventures with a few of these women. I had no idea if my neighbor had previously engaged in these activities with these same women, many who were divorced or had pseudo-open relationships. Some of the parties swayed me to dance or do things I didn't usually do, like jumping into nearby creeks or waterfalls with them, but I was unafraid of the ocean when we were on the beach. 

Many of RN's friends had nicknames. Sietecurvas was a friend of his from  San German and Lajas who it was said, still had enough Taíno in him that it showed in his face. His reputation for being a drunken womanizer at the time was thrilling, as was the authenticity of a surviving native aligned with the revolutionary left. One time we went to a friend of a friend of a friend of Siete's, where we got loaded with pitorro and weed, and one of the guys tried to talk me into driving some Dominican girls, who were illegally "in the US", from San Juan to a safe house elsewhere. There would be money in it for me, and perhaps the girls would put out too, he said. The thinking was that a cop wouldn't stop me because of my gringo complexion. I laughed and made up an excuse. RN also spoke out against letting me do this. Later I wondered how this activity fit in with the revolutionary agenda. I would understand when I overheard conversations - more like lying and bragging - of revolutionary wanna-bees trying to sell guns and drugs. RN later made a comment about how these activities were counter-revolutionary but sometimes they had to use them for the movement. I never felt like I got close to anyone dangerous, but who knows. Sometime during these years, someone blew up a bunch of National Guard jets sitting on the tarmac. 


For a short while I had a girlfriend that I met through RN. He was trying to spend time with a girl who lived in Lajas, and she had a striking friend of Virgin Islander background. A stark, dark beauty, I was stunned with attraction. We saw each other as a group for a few weeks, and she and I were glued to each other. Our moment ended soon though, when the four of us canoed to a mangrove isle at moonlight. I had looked forward to the moment, and remember thinking how awesome it was to go to this shack with this girl and how we were paddling through the water to get there. But when I looked at her, she was full of fright. I cannot remember what I said, it was a mumble and not a response to her wanting to turn back, but she started yelling, "fuck me? fuck you!". I tried to calm her down but instead I lost my temper. I felt like she was stupid. She sensed it. Then we didn't speak to each other on the mangrove island and I didn't try to make up. We dropped them off in the town at the friend's house and I never saw her again.


RN introduced me a few times to a biology professor friend who I had looked upon as a bit of a mentor, and stayed in touch with him while I was in school and later during one of my first jobs, where I helped some geologists with coral reef research in Culebra. A powerful wave thrust him into the large rock in Jobos Beach a year later while trying to save his student from drowning. He hit his head against the rocks and then drowned. He was a national hero and given a revolutionary funeral. I was in Florida and did not attend, in fact I heard about his death a few months later from an American scientist who often worked with Carlos. I often wondered how his family fared.