A playwright encumbers each character with an intention that shapes the plotline. In “The Cook,” Eduardo Machado tasks Gladys, the protagonist, with embodying the mood of the 1959 Cuban Revolution. Each major character, Carlos, the chauffeur, Adria, the dueña, Julio, the cousin, and Rosa, the daughter, is tethered to Gladys’ outlook as obstacles, challengers, or allies. But who is this Gladys, really? Why did Machado choose her, instead of participants in the revolution, as the metaphor for a Cuba we in the United States are prevented from seeing for ourselves?
Among the most authoritative exponents of revolution in modern times was Malcolm X, who, from his beginnings as an advocate of separatism was convinced by world events to instead champion an internationalist approach to the struggle for civil and human rights. Here’s what he had to say about class divisions under slavery in the United States:
“…So whenever that house Negro identified himself, he always identified himself in the same sense that his master identified himself. When his master said, “We have good food,” the house Negro would say, “Yes, we have plenty of good food.” “We” have plenty of good food. When the master said that “we have a fine home here,” the house Negro said, “Yes, we have a fine home here.”
… The field Negroes were the masses. They were in the majority…. If [the master’s] house caught on fire, they’d pray for a wind to come along and fan the breeze. If someone came to the house Negro and said, “Let’s go, let’s separate,” naturally that Uncle Tom would say, “Go where? What could I do without boss? Where would I live? How would I dress? Who would look out for me?” That’s the house Negro. But if you went to the field Negro and said, “Let’s go, let’s separate,” he wouldn’t even ask you where or how. He’d say, “Yes, let’s go.”
… A twentieth-century Uncle Tom [when you say] “your army,” he says, “our army.” He hasn’t got anybody to defend him, but anytime you say “we,” he says “we.” “Our president,” “our government,” “our Senate,” “our congressmen,” “our this and our that.” And he hasn’t even got a seat in that “our” even at the end of the line…You say “you,” the personal pronoun in the singular or in the plural, he uses it right along with you. When you say you’re in trouble, he says, “Yes, we’re in trouble.”But there’s another kind of Black man on the scene. If you say you’re in trouble, he says, “Yes, you’re in trouble.” [Laughter] He doesn’t identify himself with your plight whatsoever.
(Malcolm X on the difference between the “house Negro” and the “field Negro.”
Michigan State University, East Lansing, Michigan. 23 January 1963)
When you center a story on the “house Cuban” Gladys, whose virtues of loyalty, discipline, honor, and steadfastness credential her for the position, can you deny that she is a convenient sobremesa for serving up a tureenful of cold comfort? In “The Cook,” the revolution that succeeded in altering class relations for the first time in the Western Hemisphere is instead rustled up as a smorgasbord mashup of middle-class and woke-coddling platitudes.
“Our” Gladys is a cook in the colonial-era mansion. The mansion is the private property of a wealthy Cuban woman of Spanish extraction named Adria. Machado (no relation to the 1928-33 Cuban dictator of the same name) is telling us that it all boils down to a reduction of the 1959 Revolution that has as its base two metaphors: Gladys represents the Cuban population. The household abandoned by Adria in which the drama unfolds represents property that change hands under a workers’ regime.
Gladys suffers under the delusion that the señora Adria “to the manor born” is her friend, not her antagonist. When you are the house Cuban and refer to the household as “ours,” the possessive pronoun is not only everything Malcolm X describes, but its use can prompt us to ask Gladys,
“Has a delusion taken possession of you?” Is Gladys as dependable for the masses who made the revolution as she is a caretaker of pre-revolutionary abandoned property? It’s rare to feel set up by a playwright, but a gambit that has the veils falling from his protagonist’s eyes in the final 15 seconds of the performance can make you demand to know, “What took you so long?”
You leave the theater feeling you’ve been had: the field Cubans, who actually made the revolution, have no voice in the telling of their story. Theirs is the story of Cuban workers and small farmers who responded to the depredations of U.S. imperialism and the brutal Batista dictatorship, by mobilizing under the political leadership of Fidel Castro and Ernesto Che Guevara to assume state power in their own name.
Yesenia Iglesias plays Gladys, the cook. We meet her in the kitchen just hours before midnight, nervous, as she scurries to prepare tamales for a January 1, 1959 New Year’s Eve celebration. She hints that something disturbing is about to happen that she is not sure she will warm up to. Under the rubric of Gladys’ culinary litmus test, the play opens a back door onto her delusions of grandeur, while slamming the front door on a revolution against the class for which her boss is the repulsive exemplar, and yet, Adria the woman she considers a friend (a predictably haughty Gisela Chiple) abandons the household moments before the revolutionary army arrives in Havana. Wrapped in Chinchilla (costumes by Toni-Leslie James ), Adria hands over the keys to Gladys, along with a wad of bills, entrusting the care and feeding of her fiefdom to an astonished cook. That the evening’s dessert will be Baked Alaska is just one more metaphor redolent of the prediction that the revolutionary government is destined to collapse.
After Standard Oil and C&H Sugar were nationalized, the United States government responded by imposing what is today a 65-year-old trade and travel embargo. Nearly every president since its inception has tightened the blockade’s grip like a pliers-wielding dentist, determined to pull every last tooth. The embargo and military blockade’s stated goal is to muscle Cuba into overthrowing its revolution. The unstated goal is to introduce divisions that break down discipline, undermine solidarity, fracture family life, spur defections, and attack Cuban morale from every vantage point. The play presents the blockade as a pebble in the Cuban shoe. Glib dialog spools out the fanciful idea that the Revolution amounted to little more than a hare-brained scheme hatched by quixotic idealists hiding ambitions as future preening bureaucrats or tyrannical Batista knockoffs.
The unenviable task of selling Machado’s hackneyed schema falls to Gladys’ husband Carlos (Daniel Duque-Estrada). Carlos, household chauffeur before the revolution, has in the second act become Minister of Transportation. In that role, he juggles two conflicting intentions: 1) to leave the audience with the self-soothing assignment of drawing a prophetic equals sign between anyone designated a “dictator,” from capitalist tool to “communist” factotum, and 2) to give Gladys a platform from which to attack the Revolution by insinuating that Carlos’ blackened heart holds the key to all it embodies.
One could head home unaware that the Cuban Revolution produced revolutionaries of the caliber of Haydée Santamaria or her brother Abel. It was his eyeball that Batista’s thugs extracted and presented to Abel’s jailed sister before killing him in a failed effort to “make her talk.” After the revolution, Santamaria served on the Central Committee as the Council of State.
Absent from the cast are volunteers Cuba spirited to Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Guinea,to take on the Ebola epidemic; student volunteers who traveled to Cuba’s countryside and raised the literacy rate to 100 percent; scientists who discovered a cure for lung cancer, and advanced Alzheimer’s treatment. None of this would be possible if not for the social consciousness that fueled the freeing of Cuba from the yoke of its Yanqui exploiters and oppressors to the north. Machado’s play in its virtue-signaling bid for equanimity gives no inkling of what motivated masses of Cuban workers to put all their chips on one number: their collective capacity to determine their own destiny. Are we expecting too much? After all, this is the simple story of a cook who, once the appearance of canas conferred an soupçon of wisdom, realized that the dueña she had honored as a friend for three decades, had treated her dismissively!
Machado’s vision goes myopic when it comes to the advice “Show don’t tell.” Were the “barbudos” just playing cops-and-robbers with socialism, or was it the only road left open to defending the revolution? And if so, who was responsible for that? Could it have been the ones whose rapacious hunger for Cuba’s rich resources had impoverished the island—the same interests whose embargo impoverishes it today? To understand why revolutionary socialism is the order of the day, one need only scrutinize the opportunistic bids that fell short of revolution, leading to bloody defeats in Chile and Venezuela.
Reviewer Barry David Horwitz denominates “The Cook” as “the play of a lifetime.” Other reviewers have imbued it with a baptismal glory that left my husband (my companion for the evening) and I scratching our greying heads. We have each made several trips to Cuba: my husband with fellow Oil, Chemical, and Atomic Workers refinery operators in the mid-80s; I traveled there to author three books on Cuban ballet and contemporary dance, and to cover Cuban dance events for Dance Magazine, Dance Europe, and DanzaHoy.
Horowitz writes that, “The Revolution has not treated women and gay folks with dignity or respect.” In fact, Gladys is forced into a cruel choice about her gay cousin Julio (the magnificent Ashton Muñiz), who meets a terrible fate.” Horowitz cobbles together an amalgam of bi-partisan shibboliths, with what he pawns off (unsourced) as factual. Referencing events taking place half a century ago, he invents and then adduces an undignified, disrespected status for women and gays that he insists issues from the revolution.
I challenge Horowitz to cite any nation that 50 years ago or today could boast reproductive and equal rights for women, female leadership in politics, piloting, diplomacy, the professions, or the arts, and encouragement of young women to live independent lives, equal to or better than in post-1959 Cuba.
Machado offers the snarkiest version of praise. Rosa, Gladys’ step-daughter (a feisty Georgina Morillo) proclaims her virtue in having rejected an engineering career to follow in Gladys’ footsteps to become a cook. She rues that engineering competes with prostitution as an acceptable career choice. Only with the US embargo shrinking Cuba’s economy to its singular reliance on tourism, has prostitution slinked into the shadows, minus the mafia pimps of pre-1959 repute.
Not unlike every other nation, Cuba’s attitude toward homosexuality was backward in the 1960s and ‘70s. However, the camps for gay men referred to in “The Cook,” were Cuba’s response to the epidemic spread of the retrovirus HIV-AIDS that for two decades amounted to a death sentence. Fidel Castro appealed to Cuba’s Public Health Minister, Dr. Jorge Pérez Avíla, to reduce the number of deaths, and he proposed establishing the camps to expedite quarantine. The camps provided care and superior nutrition to patients, just as quarantine units in Cuba’s hospitals supplied during COVID. Cuba has managed to accomplish quarantine treatment more successfully than any other country, including when it took its peer-tested practices to Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Guinea, where Cuba was saluted by the British team as the most effective participant in the international effort there to combat Ebola. (cf. “The Red Zone” by Enrique Ubieta Gómez). While HIV-AIDS patients of that era were not always treated respectfully by hospitals the world over, in Cuba the government closed the camps when instances of abuse came to light.
Concerning Cuba’s approach to the civil rights of its gay and lesbian citizens, based on an experience during my last visit to Havana, I offer an illustration of how that approach rolled out in practice. In July of 2021, the Cuban National Ballet invited me to give a talk on the Spanish translation of my book, “Fernando Alonso, the Father of Cuban Ballet.” On the day after I arrived, three days before my talk, the company’s Media Director Raúl Abreu asked to meet with me. Why? Apologizing for the short notice, he said, “Your talk has to be tomorrow morning instead of Friday. On Friday, we vote on the Domestic Partnerships referendum that includes gay partners. Everyone wants to vote yes.” The book presentation and signing was moved to the following day. About 80 people arrived at 10:30 on a Wednesday morning. Dance Historian Miguel Cabrera chaired. I was joined on the platform by three generations of dance dignitaries: Laura Alonso, daughter of Alicia Alonso and Fernando Alonso; Dance teacher, Mercedes Beltrán; Aurora Bosch, former member of the company’s Four Jewels; Menia Martínez; former partner and close friend of Rudolf Nureyev; former Cuban National Ballet Principal, Felix Rodríguez, and then-current company Principal Dancers, Sadaise Arencibía and Grettel Morejón. I signed 40 books!rr
Among those in the audience was Cuba’s National Librarian and former board member of its Union of Artists and Writers, Omar Valiño, who then wrote an article for the national newspaper “Granma” about the book presentation and invited me to tour the National Library. The article appeared along with the good news that the Domestic Partnership law had passed with near-unanimous approval. Meanwhile, here in the U.S., gay-bashing was on the rise, as a bakery refused to bake cakes for gay weddings, a gay high schooler committed suicide, and preachers fulminated against gay marriage, which, let us remember, Democrat Barack Obama did not support either, when the issue went public during his first presidential campaign.
The play’s design elements (Tanya Orellana: Set Design; Mextly Couzin: Lighting; Mikaal Sulaiman: Sound and Music) surpassed even the highest marks Berkeley Rep prides itself in. The tiled kitchen’s tropical palette and “son” music put us right there, in Vedado. There were a few burdensome conceptual problems: The Roda is a theater-in-the-round. When actors were blocked with backs to the audience, lines arrived muffled. Choosing tamales for New Year’s Eve was an outlier. Yes, countries other than Mexico serve tamales during such festivities, but in Cuba, Lechón Asado is traditional for New Year’s Eve; tamales for New Year’s Day. Some actors’ Voice and diction proved hazardous to “creating the place.” (Adi Cabral: Voice and Dialect Coach) Use of a trendily affected sibilant “s” while not quite a lisp, creates an unnatural and ungainly distraction. It has no place in Cuban-accented English or Spanish. In fact, Cubans and Puerto Ricans frequently drop or diminish the “s.” Some of the female characters indulge in an unmodulated, tinny sing-song having nothing in common with the graceful, percussive, and deep-throated Cuban voice.
If Machado has convinced himself that Gladys ’grito for self-determination in a final “under-five” speech grants equal time to the revolution’s merits, he may want to ask himself whether this is the right moment to virtue signal? Maybe Gladys’ epiphany should open the show instead—the way a murder opens a TV procedural. Doing so would have forced him to interrogate the forensics that brought Gladys to her 15-second conversion, and dignify not only the house Cuban, but, accord the field Cubans the credit they deserve for having bitten the hand that underfed them, that for the past 65 years is also the hand that has pledged allegiance to starving them, even as they set records for achievements that put their detractors to shame.
NB: My brief here does not suggest that readers should not see “The Cook.” In fact, I would strongly recommend seeing it, but through the eyes of a field Cuban rather than a house Cuban. As my dear friend, the world class ballet artist and former partner to Alicia Alonso, my son’s esteemed ballet teacher, Jorge Esquivel, once said to me, “One can learn something of value from every camp.”
Toba Singer
