Free Adventure Divas by Holly Morris Page B

talking a nine-inch deity. But she’s nothing short of the protectress of Cuba.
    The Black Madonna is housed in a fittingly tiny glass cage and swathed in a glittery gold embroidered robe. A sparkly gold halo and crown, ten times the size of her head, top her off. My experience with Catholic iconography is mostly limited to giant suburban churches with giant crucified Jesuses (a suffering presence I’ve often felt steals from the joyous wedding ritual at hand). I like this better.
    The church is dark and there is an entire
quinceañera
procession between the tiny Virgin and us. Paul has a challenge on his hands. “I cannot zoom in any closer,” he says, a bit too loudly, when I nudge him to move in.
     

    Black Madonna
    Legend has it that three young fishermen found the Black Madonna floating off Cuba’s northeast coast in the Bay of Nipe around 1612. The Madonna apparently had a sign around her neck that said Y O SOY LA V IRGEN DE LA C ARIDAD (“I am the Virgin of Charity”). There was a storm, the young men were about to capsize, they grabbed on to her (she was made of wood), and the rest is history.
    The Black Madonna represents the melding of Catholicism and Santería. She is Catholic Cuba’s patron saint of charity, and she parallels Santería’s deity Ochún, that vibrant goddess of sensuality I first saw represented in Gloria’s film. My eyes and mind linger on the small sparkling gold burst of energy that commands the room. This icon of faith, who is a draw and a comfort to so many, is complex and real: She is a vortex that represents the melding of Europe and Africa, lover and mother, saint and warrior. A powerful, biracial diva.
    Back outside,
Cheryl and I buy a Black Madonna tchotchke made out of scrap metal from a group of young entrepreneurs, and sit down across the street from a nearby schoolyard. The solace of church and a few ibuprofen have lifted my spirits considerably.
    I reach in my canvas shoulder bag and take out Sky Prancer, our own lucky, nine-inch deity given to me by my friend Inga. The doll is quickly becoming the show’s mascot and we hope to give her a cameo in every episode. Sky Prancer’s tutu is a bit wrinkled but her blue wings and blue hair and brown skin sparkle with vitality. Cheryl and I walk across the street to launch her with some girls playing hopscotch in the schoolyard. I demonstrate how to pull the string out of her base and send her shooting into the air, arm-wings a-twirl. Cheryl manages the difficult task of capturing on film the doll flying through the air, as well as the laughter of the girls who are setting her off into the bright blue equatorial sky.
    That evening,
back in Santiago, we walk into a dollars-only
paladar.
We find a family of four half-watching a tiny black-and-white TV flickering one of
el Jefe
’s fist-waving speeches. The mother, in green housedress, stands and takes us to a windowless back room with two tiny wooden tables covered with red-checkered tablecloths. Over six plates of crispy fried chicken, fluffy white rice, and what might be a kilo of beans, we bat around ideas about how the show, in theory, might end now that we don’t have the captain to sail off into the sunset. The magic and challenge of both travel and documentary is that neither can be scripted. The story is built from the nuggets—or, nutgrabs, as Jeannie would say—that are revealed along the way.
    I pass on the dessert of farm cheese and guava paste, excuse myself, and step outside to mull. I lean against a powder-blue cement wall. But an American can’t loiter around urban Cuba very long without getting chatted up, and within two minutes a man named Pablo has introduced himself, in near-perfect English.
    “We’re a film crew, with nobody to film,” I say, after the usual pleasantries. I tell him that our last contact has fallen through and that we’re scrambling. We need one more woman, I tell him, to help bring Cuba’s story to life. I jabber on about our visit to