First meeting with Magda

The first meeting with my tutor yesterday was amazing! Magda Gómez Grau is a screenwriter, director, and dramaturge that works mostly in TV doing soap operas, dubbing, and fiction films, and also teaches at the Institute for Radio, TV, and Broadcasting. She’s such a dynamic and engaged person, and is very interested and supportive of my project. I was concerned that she would try to steer me away from writing a play about people who work in informal tourist economies, either because such a project felt unfeasible or unsafe or both. But on the contrary, she said she loved the topic and that she was particularly excited about it because there hasn’t been much written about it yet. She said I had arrived at a really key moment in Cuban history to do such work, because tourism has only recently become a huge source of income here for the first time since the Revolution, and it’s only been in the past two years that the state has stopped being the country’s primary employer. These two factors combined have created all sorts of new jobs and avenues through which to make a living. The paladares (comedores or cheap eateries) that I see all over the place, for instance, have apparently just cropped up within the past few years.

Magda says that now you see all sorts of informal business and people hawking wares on the street that you never used to see before. This I have yet to see for myself, since I still have not left Vedado, which is the nice, middle-class neighborhood we Hampshire kids are living in and not a particularly tourist-y area. Luckily, though, Magda is shooting a film in Old Havana and plans to use the characters that hang around tourists (habaneras, card-readers, etc) as the extras, and invited me along so that I can interview them during the shoot. She is so incredibly sharp and helpful! As soon as she came over, Magda jumped right in and began asking me really key questions to tease out exactly what I’m doing- How do I plan to go about my research? What is the thread that ties together the story I’m trying to tell?- and then immediately began suggesting ways in which she could be helpful. She has several films she wants to show me, plays she’s going to take me to, neighborhoods she wants to explore with me, and directors she wants me to talk to. I’m particularly excited about one in particular, whose name escapes me, because he directed an adaptation of a famous story about a pimp during the revolution set in present-day times, and conducted interviews with sex workers to write the mockumentary-style interviews he used in his film. This the closest kind of work to documentary theater that I’ve heard of people using so far in Havana, but then again, I’ve only been here two days.

Magda also seemed interested in digging around for sociologists and institutions that are working with sex workers so that I can get a better “in,” so to speak, and a more in-depth understanding of what that work looks like here. I was so pleased at how supportive and matter-of-fact she is about me wanting to include sex workers in my play, since it is contrary to the horrified and concerned reactions I was led to expect from my tutor in Havana. Magda is committed to this project being done well, and in her words, not superficially, which puts us both on the same page in that respect. However, her concern comes from a feeling that such tragic stories deserve to be told completely, and though I agree, I am very hesitant to use the word tragic. I came here interested in talking to sex workers because of the friendships I have in the States with people who are sex workers or have done sex work in the past. It is work they have chosen to engage in willingly and does not at all reflect the dominant narrative about the wayward, desperate youth who fall into desperation and amorality. I understand that Cubans are living in very different socioeconomic times, and that being a poor, brown girl from the country offering her services to middle-aged German tourists in Havana means totally different things than living independently as sex worker in the States, but I really don’t want to take agency away from the men and women in the sex tourism industry here by calling their stories “tragic” without talking to them first. I want to talk more with Magda about why selling stolen tobacco on the streets is a hard fact of life but why women and men choosing to approach tourists for money in exchange for their bodies is a tragedy. How do they think of their services? How do they conceive of how they market their bodies?

We didn’t have any time for such a conversation today, though. I visited Magda at work this afternoon while she directed voice actresses dubbing over a 2008 documentary about antiwar activists in the U.S. into Spanish. The space was kind of incredible- all analog sound mixers from the 80s and the documentary itself was being played back on Bit K, which I am way too young to even know about. They look like heftier VHS tapes. The doc is being dubbed to be broadcast over an Iranian satellite TV station, so I wonder how they communicate with their clients and how the material eventually gets beamed through a satellite. Does it stay in Bit K? Anyway, all the people behind the scenes- director, mixer, sound technician- were women, which was really impressive to me. By and large, men dominate the shit out of the technical parts of media-making in the U.S., so it was kind of lovely getting Magda to laugh when I pointed this out and having her reply, “Well, yes, we’re well trained for this kind of thing.” The material itself that was being produced was fantastic, regardless of the old, and by our standards outdated, technology used to make it. The actresses, though most had never done voiceovers, were wonderful, and Magda is a fabulous director- patient, encouraging, but also precise and demanding with her directions. I’m really looking forward to working with her.