Books: From Venice to Havana: A review of Through the Wall: A Year in
Havana, written by Margot Pepper
Reviewed by Jim
Smith
If you were hanging out in Venice
back in the 80s, you may have noticed an attractive 20-something young women
usually garbed in Venetian attire (Hippie clothes, to some) who frequented the
Rose Cafe.
What made Margot Pepper stand out, in addition to
her thick Jewish afro which was often frizzed by the Pacific Ocean, was the
notebook in which she was constantly writing.
Margot was a worker-writer. Eight
hours a day was nothing to her. She started early in the morning and often went
on well past midnight.
Even though she
was in her early 20s, Margot had already experienced a full and adventurous
life. She had been born in Mexico City where her parents took refuge from the
McCarthyist repression of the 1950s.
Her father, George Pepper, had been a
Hollywood insider, known both for his screen plays and his left political views.
Several of his friends, later to become Margot’s friends, known as the
Hollywood 10 had gone to federal prison rather than rat on their friends in
front of the Grand Inquisitor, Senator Joe McCarthy. The Peppers fled to Mexico,
which in spite of the U.S. Bill of Rights, was a freer country at that time. Her
father made a living producing films for the great Spanish director Luis
Buñuel, himself a fugitive from fascism in his native
Spain.
Margot learned about oppression
- capitalist style - first hand, and at an early age. As she relates, “My
parents had to remain in exile so long, I was born and raised in Mexico City.
For over a decade the FBI actually did tap our phones, open our mail, tail us,
keep ridiculous accounts of our movements alleging that ball games and Sunday
breakfasts at our friends’ homes were Party cell meetings. They illegally
kidnapped colleagues in Mexico for extradition; seized royalty earnings of
directors and writers who, when the blacklist broke, won Oscars and apologies,
but no reparations.”
After the
thaw in the 60s, Margot and her mother returned to Southern California (her
father had died in Mexico). Margot became an accomplished surfer, studied to
become a school teacher and hung out with her father’s old friends, Dalton
Trumbo and John Howard Lawson, by now released from prison and writing screen
plays under assumed names.
In our
society, writing and the arts are not valued very highly. Margot had an
overwhelming need to write. Working a “straight job” got in the way.
And so, when she split up with her boyfriend, who had a real job, she moved into
a small room near Ocean Front Walk that was already occupied by fungi. Mushrooms
grew out of the cracks in the wall. After a while, even that room was a luxury
that Margot could not afford. She began sleeping in her car and writing
all-night in a diner called Cafe Santa Monica.
Given the level of crime in Venice
during the days of the Reagan regime, Margot was very lucky that she was
discovered sleeping in her car one night, not by a rapist, but by Bill Mitchell.
Bill had been a fixture in body
building, hippie and homeless circles in Venice since the 60s. He’s
probably best known for his daily political monologues standing on a Boardwalk
bench. Bill was a political Swami X. Saving a damsel in distress was all in a
day’s work for Bill. He gathered Margot up and took her to my house,
knowing that I had an empty
room.
Margot stayed in my back room for
a couple of years. She still made the daily trek to the Rose Cafe, which at the
time was the only coffee house in Venice. When it would close for the evening,
the book, the pen and Margot came home and she continued to write and write.
Eventually, Margot struck out for
Berkeley, San Francisco’s Mission District and other strange places in the
North. Although Venice was but one stop on her writer’s odyssey that
continues today, it played a significant role in her development. It was in
Venice, Margot says, that she decided that her calling was as a writer, not a
public school teacher. In Venice she resolved to dedicate herself to her muse,
no matter where it would take
her.
Eventually, the confluence of her
writing and the progressive politics to which she had been born, led her to
Cuba. Never a dilettante or a “looky-lou,” Margot committed herself
to spending a full year on the island. And, she did it during the most difficult
time in the Revolution’s history.
She arrived in 1991 when the impact of
the collapse of Cuba’s main trading partners, the Soviet Union and the
Eastern Bloc, was making daily life very difficult. In addition, Cubans endured
every kind of shortage - food, electricity, gasoline, medicine, shampoo,
cosmetics, you name it - because of the U.S. economic blockade that continues to
this day. Cuba has since recovered from the bad days of the early 90s - called
the “Special Period” - but it continues to haunt the memories of
those who lived through it.
In her
book, Through the Wall: A Year in Havana, Margot records her own reactions to
these hardships. She struggles to see with the eyes of a Cuban, not those of a
privileged North American. She writes down the reactions of ordinary Cubans -
both those enthused with revolutionary ardor, and those who would rather be in
Miami.
It would be difficult for a
lesser-skilled writer to recreate the sights and sounds of this world, so alien
to our world of consumer capitalism. Yet, she able to let us peak behind the
curtain and experience a daily life we will never know. The years of constant
writing in Venice and elsewhere gave Margot the ability to convey a
multi-layered tropical mosaic in one
book.
Alongside the clash of capitalism
and socialism, the book reveals the much older conflict and co-existence between
a man and a woman. Margot struggles to continue her romance with a Mexican poet,
Guillermo, who has joined her in Cuba. She finds that inter-personal relations
are much the same in Venice or
Havana.
Besides telling us much about
La Habaña and Cuban history, Margot describes the strengths, fears and
foibles of quite a few Cubans. Hovering above each page is Margot’s
unspoken (and occasionally, spoken) uncertainty as to whether the Revolution
will survive. She understands the excesses and horrors of capitalism back home,
but acknowledges the seductive power of advertising images and first-world
wealth and power to people in a third-world country. The book is a rare candid
look at daily life in Cuba, sans propaganda of the left or right. It ultimately
may be unsatisfying to those who would like a definitive answer to this debate,
but such is life.
If Small World Books
(399-2360) on Ocean Front Walk doesn’t have Through the Wall: A Year in
Havana, call 800-869-7553 or you can order online at
<www.freedomvoices.org>.
Posted: Mon - August 1, 2005 at 11:31 AM