The Heart Was Their Guide, in Love and the Arts
By MICHELE WILLENS
HAVANA -- THEY are American-born women who fell in love with radical Latin American men. Each has lived close to four decades in Cuba, and while their husbands spent time in prison or in the mountains with Fidel Castro, they carved out distinctive artistic lives.
Lorna Burdsall, a charismatic white-haired figure, is now in her early 70's and the director of the modern dance company AsiSomos, which combines dance, image theater, poetry and music. Today she mostly performs in her home for visitors ("Where else do I get to hug my audience?"). But since arriving in Cuba in 1955, the wife of a revolutionary who went on to become a top intelligence official, she has held high positions in both Cuba's world of dance and its culture bureaucracy. Along the way, she was a pivotal figure in establishing modern dance in Cuba.
Estela Bravo, in her late 60's, has made 26 documentary films since arriving in 1966. Many are about Cuba, and all are about Latin America; one depicting North Americans living in Cuba included Ms. Burdsall. Her latest, "Fidel," was shown at the Latin American Film Festival in Havana in December. It was commissioned by Channel 4 in Britain and has been shown there as well as in Canada, Argentina and Chile. She is hoping to have it distributed in America.
Currently she is making "Operation Peter Pan," about the 14,000 Cuban children who were sent to the United States by their parents to escape the Cuban revolution.
Each of these women has a love story. Ms. Bravo, one of three sisters raised largely by union organizers (her mother died when she was 12), was a leader of Students for a Peaceful World at Brooklyn College when she attended a meeting of the Student Congress in Poland in 1953. There, she met Ernesto Bravo, a medical student and activist from Argentina who was receiving medical treatment after having been tortured and tried under Juan Perón on charges of organizing anti-government student activities.
The chemistry was instant, but he returned home to Argentina and she to Brooklyn. The next year she made a trip to Brazil for another student conference, this time as a reporter for the periodical Latin America Today. "I decided I should stop by Argentina and see Ernesto," she said. He was being hidden by anti-Perónists, but she managed to spend a week with him. "We decided then and there to get married," she said.
She eventually took a monthlong journey on a cargo boat from New York to Argentina, where the two were married in January 1956. Over the next eight years, they had two children (a third would come later) and Mr. Bravo became a professor of biochemistry. "One day," Ms. Bravo recalls, "he told me he'd been invited to Cuba to teach biochemistry in medical school and I said, 'Great, it's closer to the States.' I thought I'd be visiting my home country more, but little did I know that the move would turn out to be closer only geographically."
When Ms. Bravo arrived in Cuba, Ms. Burdsall was already well entrenched. Raised in New London, Conn., she had trained with Martha Graham and Anthony Tudor and was studying dance at the Juilliard School. In 1953 she went to a dance at the International House in Manhattan, where she noticed a young man doing the mambo. "He had the most intense eyes," she said. "I asked someone where he was from and was told Cuba."
Manuel Pineiro, the son of a Bacardi Rum executive, was studying business administration at Columbia University. The two were married in New York, but soon after, Mr. Pineiro, who was talking a lot of socialism and politics, said he needed to go back to Cuba for a vacation.
"I knew he was going to the mountains to fight with Fidel, but he never really said it to me," said Ms. Burdsall. "He kept saying he'd be back, but finally I got a call from him, while I was at a dance summer program in Michigan, and he said, 'Do you think you could come here instead?' I went straight from Detroit to Havana."
There, she raised a son -- now with a daughter of his own -- and saw her husband only intermittently until the revolution succeeded in 1959. Sometimes, they met under almost comically dire circumstances, as when she visited him secretly in the mountains.
"I wore this beautiful yellow dress," she recalled, "but as I was going up to the mountains, it started pouring and there was mud everywhere. By the time I got to his location, I was entirely filthy. Still, his comrades were in on the surprise and they told him, 'The commandant wants to see you.' And when he walked in, there I was. We got only an hour together before he was called into action. That night I slept on a pile of something very cold, which I later discovered was grenades and ammunition."
When Mr. Castro came into power, her husband -- known in the revolutionary world as Red Beard -- became Deputy Minister of the Interior, in charge of state security. After his death in a car crash in 1998, an obituary in The New York Times described him as the "ruthless but urbane spymaster who for more than 30 years led Cuba's intelligence apparatus and directed its efforts to export revolution to the third world."
In their marriage, serving Mr. Castro always came first. Fortunately for Ms. Burdsall, there was dance, and in 1959, she helped found the Compania Danza Contemporanea, for which she performed and choreographed for 15 years. In 1977 she became national director of dance and modern dance adviser to the Minister of Culture. Ms. Burdsall's marriage lasted 20 years before she decided she wanted her independence. She remained on good terms with her ex-husband, and is especially close to her granddaughter, Gabriela, 11. who often performs the witty and provocative dances her grandmother choreographs. "Gabriela is like my other self, a younger version," said Ms. Burdsall.
Ms. Bravo's marriage remains intact. Her husband is now a consulting professor on bioethics at the University of Havana. Both women live well by Cuban standards. The suggestion that such good fortune may have colored Ms. Bravo's recent documentary about Mr. Castro (it is generally flattering in tone) infuriates her.
"I'm very independent, and I think Castro has only recently seen it," she said. "I originally asked for his cooperation and got back the reply, 'Why don't you do it after I'm not here anymore?' I decided early on that this was to be a piece about the man himself, not his politics."
The film includes observations from people like the director Sydney Pollack, who made the film "Havana"; the author Alice Walker, who calls Mr. Castro "the great redwood"; and the writer Gabriel García Márquez, who tells of going fishing with Mr. Castro.
Ms. Burdsall's artistic impact has not been political. She brought in influences from Western dance that have since been taught to many young Cubans. "By mentoring and inspiring scores of careers, Lorna has opened Cuba to the world in a very special way and also brought the outside world somehow closer to Cuba," said Jon Lee Anderson, a New Yorker writer and author ("Che Guevara: A Revolutionary Life").
Ms. Burdsall explains: "As part of the choreographic process, I have always demanded active creative participation on the part of the dancers. It's important for me that they reveal their cultural identity through movements, gestures and sensations."
Although she cites Martha Graham and Doris Humphrey as her main creative influences, she said her greatest influence came from a more personal place: "The personality of my very creative and humorous mother influenced me the most in shaping my personal style." Ms. Burdsall has saved all the journals her mother (who died in 1978) wrote over 80 years. "She was a frustrated everything," she added. "All her life she was creative and had nowhere to put it."
While both Ms. Burdsall and Ms. Bravo have traveled back to the United States, they remain committed to Cuba. That commitment was tested during what the Cubans call the Special Period, in the early 90's, when the Soviets pulled out their support and left a shattered island economy behind.
"It was so terrible in the beginning," Ms. Bravo said. "There were no lights, no air-conditioning, no gasoline. I remember taking a walk by the sea with my husband and we asked ourselves, 'Should we leave?' Some of our friends had left. But we decided that we'd been here so long, we had roots. And things slowly got better. People don't talk enough about the sacrifices Cubans made then, how they bonded together." M S. BURDSALL said of the same period: "I remember looking out my window and seeing people leaving on rafts. I remember performing for a group from Canada in 1993, and there was no light on in the whole neighborhood. I greeted them with a flashlight and then made flashlights part of the performance.
"But you know, I came to Cuba for love and in a way I stayed for love -- this time for a country and the people, not one man."
Both Ms. Bravo and Ms. Burdsall say their art has had a far greater impact in Cuba than it probably would have had if they had not followed their men. "I have made 26 films and won many awards at film festivals around the world, but in America nobody knows who I am," said Ms. Bravo. Yet on a recent visit, her phone rang constantly with calls from people like her friend and fellow documentary maker Rory Kennedy. And the longtime documentary maker Sol Landau, while questioning her independence, nevertheless said: "I can't say anything bad about her. She does good work."
Ms. Bravo said: "If I'd stayed in New York, I may or may not have gone to film school and made films in a more formulaic way, one of so many. Here I learn by intuition, and I think the style is more raw, straightforward."
Ms. Burdsall found a similar freedom: "What would I have done if I'd been just another dancer in New York? I'd have gone to auditions with 900 other dancers and been forced to retire at 40. Here I've had so many opportunities and the audiences so appreciate my style of modern dance. I look at the dancers around the country and I think, 'They've almost all been my students at one time.' "
Last year, she attended her 50th high school reunion, making the trek back to Connecticut. "A lot of the people did not know what to make of me," Ms. Burdsall said, laughing. "But eventually they warmed up when I performed one of my dances. Most of them had stayed small, closer to home. We looked back over things we'd written when we were graduating and mine said I was going to travel, write a book and live in the country. Well, I didn't say what country!"
Michele Willens's most recent article for Arts & Leisure was about Academy Award nominations for supporting actors and actresses.
http://www.nytimes.com/yr/mo/day/artleisure/cuban-women.html