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Farah's story was published in El Estornudo , an independent narrative journalism magazine, "made from inside Cuba, from outside Cuba and, incidentally, about Cuba"

By Jorge Carrasco Photos: JC, Almudena Toral and Farah's album The Sneeze Magazine Since Farah likes bad boys, it will surprise no one to learn that both her husbands were released from Combinado del Este prison on the same day. Under the pardon granted by the Cuban government to more than 3,500 prisoners for Pope Francis's visit to Cuba in September 2015, Amed Negro Trujillo and Andrés Bravo Cardenal were acquitted. A few hours after their husbands—as most Cuban trans women tend to call their partners in an emancipatory gesture—were acquitted, Andrés showed up at the San Leopoldo compound where Farah lives. Farah the incontinent, Farah the sex addict. Farah, who is anything but a woman of romanticism and tender fidelity, lay enraptured in the arms of Minguito, one of her passing lovers. Andrés broke down the door. He beat her and he beat Minguito. –They both got tangled up with me, and I ran to the police station shouting “Help!” and “Help!” The people from the neighborhood were shouting at me, “Farah! Stay strong! Keep them both: one for a little while and the other for a little while!”

***

Long before she owned sixty wigs, before she became prison fodder, before the man who made her happiest had a knife plunged into her groin, long before she was called Lulu and Farah María, Raúl Pulido Peñalver was born in San Antonio de los Baños—a municipality in what is now Artemisa province—on August 24, 1965. His mother, a beautiful mulatto woman named Ana Julia Peñalver, died of leukemia when Raúl was six. He and his nine-year-old brother, Efrén, were then taken in by their father, Rubén Pulido. A man who was too strict but had flexible morals, he was already carrying on a love affair in Havana while his wife was on her deathbed. When Raúl's mother died, there were no longer any obstacles preventing Rubén Pulido from moving to the capital with his lover, Haydée. He took Raúl with him. Efrén was raised by his maternal grandparents in San Antonio. In the new house – an apartment located on the fifth floor of a building on San Nicolás Street, Old Havana – Raúl grew up like a outsiderHaydée, his stepmother, had three children with Rubén Pulido: Isabel, Iván, and Alexis, all contemporaries of Raúl, whose existence constantly reminded Haydée of the bitter time she had been the second wife of the man she loved. “Sometimes I would take out photos of my mother to remember her, and that woman would have a breakdown.” In second grade, Raúl Pulido received a scholarship to a special education primary school for children with behavioral disorders, where social cases abounded, mostly children orphaned of both parents. The school was located on the outskirts of the city, near Lenin Park, remote enough for Haydée and her family to remain unaffected by the troubled boy's problems. He was only allowed out on weekends. His father didn't pick him up most of the time, and often a teacher would take pity on him and take Raúl home. Other times he would run away to the woods with the boys they also didn't come to pick up, and he'd spend the weekend messing around in the fields on the outskirts of town. Although his grades were excellent, the teachers emphasized certain gestures, certain inflections in his voice, certain worrying traits in a young boy. In a school where every student was special, Raúl Pulido was already the center of gravity of his little world. The school, you could say, orbited around him, and in the middle of it all was him, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven years old, a boy who danced femininely, who was a show-off, who gestured everything a little boy wasn't supposed to gesture. "The teachers would scold me, and I'd tell them, 'Don't tell me not to gesture anymore. I'm nine years old, but I'm already gay. And I'm going to be gay until the last day of my life.'" On weekends when Raúl was brought over, Haydée, a sort of building manager, received constant complaints from the neighbors, who hung their sheets and towels out to dry on the roof. White sheets and towels. Clean sheets and towels that the mischievous Raúl Pulido would take down from the clotheslines to wear as dresses, to invent wigs, and to parade provocatively on the same roof, leaning out over the street to blow kisses and wave to his imaginary audience, a group of neighbors below who, scandalized and red with fury, watched their belongings flapping in the air. Raúl Pulido finished elementary school amidst the stains on his record—where wise teachers wrote altruistic and admonitory paragraphs that future teachers would read about the wayward boy's twisted behavior—and the beatings from his father, who could no longer tolerate the rebellion of his son, who was beginning to tarnish his family's image. “My dad used to beat me so much for those pranks that one day I climbed onto the roof of the building and almost jumped. The police came, everyone came, and I was screaming that I was going to jump. My brother Iván was the one who managed to get me down.” At twelve years old, when Raúl Pulido started high school at a vocational school on Manrique Street in Old Havana, his situation at home had become intolerable for Rubén and Haydée. In addition to his pranks in the building, Raúl began dancing in the street to the latest songs, running errands for neighbors, and cleaning houses to earn his own money. He slept away from home regularly, started hanging out with other gay men, and—most seriously—one day he showed up at high school in a girl's uniform. A classmate lent him a skirt and a blouse. Raúl parted his hair into two daring bobs and showed up like that for the morning assembly. “Imagine,” he said, “me in the girls' line and everything.” A huge rumor and scandal erupted. They took me to the principal's office and sent for my father. Not only my childhood, but also my adolescence, were spent away from home, going from one reform school to another. Since insubordination has never been rewarded with applause, from the age of twelve, Raúl never slept inside the house again. The "venting room" was the most drastic punishment. More drastic than the beatings with the slipper and the belt, because those blows hurt, but they didn't last long. In the hallway, next to the apartment where the family still lived, Raúl Pulido, the wayward puppy, was locked in at night. Inside there was a sofa, a sink, a toilet, and a shower that he used to bathe. He began to suffer asthma attacks because of the dampness of the place, and some concerned neighbors advised Rubén and Haydée to take the boy out of there.   Isabel Pulido, Raúl's only sister, is 52 years old. In the house in San Nicolás, where she currently cares for their father, she quietly closes the door and goes outside. Inside, Raúl's name cannot be mentioned. On the balcony, Isabel recalls that time: "He started sleeping in the bathroom because of all the problems. Now homosexuality is fashionable, but back then you didn't know if it carried syphilis or some other disease. He slept perfectly well there because it was so clean. Raúl only came inside to watch television. His father even forbade him from being given food if he didn't change his behavior. Secretly, Haydée or Isabel would sometimes bring him a plate to the little room. A short time later, the father's strictness finally wore on Raúl's brothers, who left home as soon as they could. Isabel came and went, depending on which boyfriend she had at the time. At twelve years old, Raúl Pulido was whimpering in a doorway. He had had a fight with his father." A fight that ended in court. –One day, in the middle of a beating from my dad, I turned on him. There was one of those big glass bottles in the house. I grabbed it and smashed it over his head. And from there we went to the police. With a chilling coldness, Isabel Pulido recalls: –A deceased neighbor from the building got involved in the fight and accused my dad. But my dad won, because nobody can interfere between a father and son, and a father can do whatever he wants to his son. In that doorway, before the police, before the trial, Raúl Pulido, a beautiful boy according to those who knew him and according to himself, wept inconsolably. That day he met Jorge González Mesa, alias “La Reglana,” and poured out his sorrows to him.

***

Jorge “La Reglana” was a fat, Black man with a glass eye and a dreadful reputation. Homosexual. Santero. Son of Yemayá. Addicted to drugs like Dexactedron and Parkinsonil, Jorge “La Reglana” crossed paths with Raúl Pulido at a critical moment. He dried his tears, and the rest happened quickly: Jorge, who had no children and lived alone on Lagunas Street, just six blocks from the Pulidos, agreed to take custody of Raúl if his father allowed it. The father said yes, of course. He removed him from the ration book and felt relieved. Haydée would die a couple of years later. Jorge was like water in the desert. He gave Raúl a roof over his head. He tried, unsuccessfully, to change his last name. He called him “son,” just as Raúl called him “father.” But Jorge didn't work; he lived off his business, selling hallucinogenic pills to the desperate souls of Central Havana, and Raúl had to start dancing in the streets again, cleaning houses, running errands for the neighbors in the new neighborhood. "Was Jorge good to you?" "So-so." "Why?" "Because he was a very strong homosexual." "Did he hit you?" "He only slapped me once, because I disrespected him. I was very outspoken. He didn't hit me, but he was a very strong man, and he didn't like me doing bad things. He was good and he was bad. Sometimes he kicked me out of the house, and I had to go out on my own. Then he'd take me back." Teresa, a neighbor who has lived for more than ten years upstairs in the house at "La Reglana," Raúl's new home, remembers: "Jorge wouldn't move from his chair, and yet he never lacked food or cigarettes." When the boy didn't bring money or things home, he mistreated him quite badly. He used him, as many still do. But he was the one who raised him, who took him in when he was rejected at home. Around that time, the late seventies, Raúl Pulido left the house for the first time completely dressed as a woman. "I went out onto the streets in a quinceañera dress someone had lent me. People were scandalized. You know how people were back then." After that step, there was no reason for Raúl to continue using his real name. He thought it was better to forget his own name, to wall up that part of the dark pit that was his short past, and start over. When the streets of Central Havana began to feel too small for him, people started calling him Farah María, after a Cuban singer who became popular for her flirtatious verse, "I don't swim in the Malecón, because there's a shark in the water." Singing that little song earned Raúl a few pesos on the streets of Havana, and one day he decided he had to get rid of Raúl. Farah, on the other hand, was a divine name.

***

Farah, in a treacherous whisper. In a voluptuous brush of upper teeth against lower lip. FARAH—with its sophisticated H at the end—was the very name of success. Nothing bad could happen to someone named Farah.

***

Years passed. And Farah began paying her first fines for wearing makeup and dressing as a woman. Occasionally, she appeared in public trials alongside her transvestite friends. These public trials, in cases of homosexual conduct, were ceremonies intended to redeem the gay man through the shock therapy of public shame. On other occasions, she was taken to the nearest police station and made to clean the premises as a rare form of punishment. A few hours later, she was released. Black, homosexual and poor, Farah met all the conditions to be a social outcast in the new Cuba that was being built. A country built on the mirage of inclusive promises sworn by the strongmen, the rural men who made the Revolution, and under whose acquiescence homophobia was gradually institutionalized on the island. By the turn of the 1980s, the revolutionary government had “cleansed” the country of hundreds of homosexuals who had escaped Cuba during the Mariel boatlift. The Cuban Penal Code stipulated the punishment of any behavior that could be considered too extravagant under the crime of public indecency, for which one could serve three to nine months in prison. In 1982, Farah began a Dantean odyssey through Cuban prisons. She doesn't even remember the precise dates herself. Her personal chronology is so chaotic, so full of milestones, behavioral schools, husbands, stabbings, and trials, that any date could change. In 1982, however, she is certain that she set foot in a prison for the first time. She was sixteen years old. “I was at Guanabo beach with a group of gay men. We left the house unattended, and when we returned, we'd been robbed. So we went to the police station to file a report. Instead of looking for the thieves, they arrested us.” At Combinado del Este, the largest prison in the country, Farah and her friends would serve nine months. “How was it there?” “Fabulous. I was the queen of the prison. I was in a wing with about three hundred gay men. I loved it. I did whatever I wanted. I dressed as a woman in dresses made of sheets, wigs made of strips of burlap. I used toothpaste to put makeup on my eyelids and painted my lips with red paint.” Her first name in prison was Lulu, after a cartoon character who was always sucking on lollipops. Farah was fond of sucking her thumb. During the nine months she was imprisoned, only Jorge and his brother Efrén visited her. With the other family members—especially with her father—an irreparable rift had developed. Even in their own home in San Nicolás, his name was spoken in hushed tones. Isabel Pulido says, “He was imprisoned because as soon as he physically matured, he started hanging out with ‘elements,’ with people he shouldn’t have been associating with. And my father buried him. He knew very well that our father worked for State Security and was very strict, that when he said something, it had to be done.” A week after being released, Farah was arrested again. This time, it was deliberate. She and Katia, another trans woman who had also spent a few wonderful months at the Combinado del Este prison, started committing crimes so they would be captured again. They had both left husbands in prison; now it was time to go back to prison. Behind bars (a strange paradox) some had more freedom than on the street. The first thing they thought of was to go and eat until they were stuffed at Las Bulerías, a luxurious restaurant in Vedado, knowing full well they didn't have a penny to pay the bill. Unfortunately for them, all they got was a beating and a fifty-peso fine. Days later, Farah and Katia grabbed a piece of iron and smashed one of the display cases at the La Sortija store. While the employees called the police and passersby enjoyed the spectacle, Farah and Katia climbed inside the shelves, stripped the mannequins of their dresses and wigs, and put them on, posing motionless like graceful figurines inside the shattered display cases. "At the trial, they asked for a year in Combinado del Este prison. We ended up in the same wing where we had been before. She served her sentence. She got out." She warmed up her engines on the streets, and almost two years later, she was imprisoned again for stealing, along with three other accomplices, women's clothing hanging on a clothesline in the municipality of Guanabacoa. "They caught us because, in the middle of the night, a child started crying and woke everyone in the building. The stolen goods were valued at about eighty-eight pesos. I'll never forget it. That time they asked for eleven years in prison. Eleven years, of which I would barely serve four." Along with a review of her case that resulted in her acquittal in 1988, one of the many prisoners to whom Farah had sworn eternal love caught her with another of the many prisoners to whom Farah had sworn eternal love. In some places, infidelity is punishable by death. And this resentful man, whose name Farah no longer remembers, picked her up and threw her from the fourth floor. "The only thing I remember is waking up in the Carlos III emergency room." A fractured skull, temporary paralysis, and almost total loss of teeth. Farah was alive by sheer miracle. In 1992, the Valle Grande prison opened in the municipality of La Lisa, on the outskirts of Havana. From then on, imprisonment became a temporary measure, almost always for offenses of public disturbance or pre-criminal dangerousness. Pre-criminal dangerousness, defined in Law 62 of 1987 in the Cuban Penal Code, considers the proclivity of certain individuals to commit crimes a dangerous and punishable condition. Farah's antisocial behavior, her lack of a stable job, and the fact that she had spent the last years of her life in prison made her a potentially harmful member of society.

***

In the mid-2000s his record Her criminal record was clean. As far as possible, Farah was happy. She had gone almost ten years without being arrested. The police no longer worried about her as they once had. Eusebio Leal, the Historian of Havana and something of a lenient guardian of the city's historic center, issued a document around 2005 prohibiting the authorities from arresting Farah for dancing publicly and flaunting her homosexuality in the city's tourist district. Eusebio Leal made her untouchable. In the document, he calls her a "local character." Farah had transitioned, through constant taxation, from social pariah to picturesque character with legal safe passage. People in the streets were beginning to recognize her as the mother of Cuban transvestitesThe pioneer. In tourist spots in the historic center (the brewery in Plaza Vieja, for example), she was allowed to dance with the passing band and flirt with the public, who could leave her up to fifteen dollars in tips on her luckiest days. The mega-popular Cuban orchestra Van Van immortalized her in their song “El travesti” (Arrasando, 2000), where, after mentioning several famous Havana drag queens, they sing: “(…) And what can I say about Farah María, Hail Mary, for God’s sake!” Farah had met Santiago Sánchez López, a young man of barely twenty, with whom Jorge allowed her to live in the house. Santiago had come to satisfy a great hunger for affection. “Of all my husbands, he was the one who loved me the most, and the one I loved the most.” With Santiago, Farah obtained some of the few state jobs that her ninth-grade diploma allowed her. At the nursing home on Reina Street, for example, they worked together assisting the elderly. As you can imagine, Farah poured her heart and soul into a grim place that smelled of stale urine. “The elderly are very sensitive people, and they loved me dearly. I told them stories, sang them children's songs, celebrated their birthdays.” With Santiago, she went to clean the floors of the Calixto García Hospital in 2008 to earn a little more than she did at the nursing home. A faithful guardian, Santiago never took his eyes off her. Teresa, the neighbor, recalls: “Santiago was obsessed with her. If she went out, he went out. If she went in, he went in. And since she was very tall and he was very short, he looked like Farah's purse.” The young man's father wanted to get them another apartment so they could leave Jorge's house, which was always full of gay men having sex. But Farah refused. “For that kind of people, that room is too sweet.”

***

On December 29, 2008, as dusk fell and Farah was out hustling for money on the streets of Havana, Santiago was cooking a pot of black beans. Sandro, Jorge's partner at the time, added a ladleful to the pot, which Santiago didn't like. Santiago and Sandro came to blows, and in a matter of seconds, Sandro had plunged a knife into his opponent's groin. Teresa heard Jorge shouting, "You killed him! You killed him!" The whole neighborhood erupted in the brawl. Minutes later, Farah arrived home from the street, made up and happy about the good day she'd had.

***

Five years of relationship cut short in one fell swoop. The end of Santiago Sánchez López. The end of the story.

***

Two years later, in 2010, Jorge died from cirrhosis of the liver due to the abuse of the medications he was taking. “I took care of him until the end. After dancing in the street and hustling for money, I would buy food, cook it, and take it to him at the hospital. The day he died, I was at home resting. I had just finished bathing him at the hospital. Three days before he died, we talked, and I forgave him for all the hardship he had inflicted on me. Alone again. I rarely saw his father, and when they did cross paths in the neighborhood, each acted as if the other wasn't there. I hardly ever saw his brothers. Iván had been in prison for some time in Orlando, Florida, for drug trafficking. He sent me two hundred dollars once. The house had been reduced to a small room for rent, after Jorge gradually subdivided it into smaller rooms that he sold to immigrants and other marginalized people.” “I became very depressed after Santiago and Jorge died, and I started to avoid the room. I began spending more time on the street looking for a partner.” Elio Medina is a gay Santería priest who lives in another neighborhood a couple of blocks from Farah. He met her when Jorge was still alive, grew fond of her, and became a kind of friend and spiritual guide. Elio recounts: “She’s very kind and trusting. She’ll walk down any street corner, meet any young man, and take him to live at her house. Once I even managed to get seventeen people out of there. I went to see her and they were sleeping on the floor. She hadn’t eaten in days. After Santiago, a whole town has passed through Farah’s house. Lazy young men under thirty. None of them Black, because she doesn’t like Black people. No one close to Farah has ever known a partner of hers who didn’t abuse her trust or beat her up when she couldn’t afford the luxuries those guys aspire to.”

***

From Santiago Sánchez López to the present day, several pimps have vied for custody of Farah, a kind of golden goose. Consumed by her need for affection and her low self-esteem, Farah is capable of enduring almost anything—from humiliation to beatings—just to avoid spending the night alone. As you might expect, anyone who wants something from her—a roof over their head for the night or for a while, a plate of food—only needs to be moderately cunning to tell her what she wants to hear. Farah turns a blind eye, deceives herself, and tries to deceive the few who care about her, claiming that at fifty years old she has young men eating out of her hand, until the lies come to light and the relationships—if we can call them that—become untenable. The most significant of the last ten years, in particular, began with Vladimir, nicknamed "Death," a fumigator by trade. "Why did they call him Death?" "Kid, because he was a gorgeous little white boy with blue eyes. The best." But as beautiful as he was, he was poison inside. He was like Chucky, the killer doll. Farah went to live with Vladimir “La Muerte” in a makeshift room they rented on the outskirts of San Miguel del Padrón. She adapted to the isolation of the periphery. She quickly became the place's servant. She scrubbed, cleaned, tidied, and danced in the neighborhood to earn money to buy food. “Everything was rosy until he started stealing my money. When I tried to leave him, he would beat me and threaten me.” To get away from Vladimir “La Muerte,” Farah found another pimp. She would be with Amed Negro Trujillo for five years. They met one night in Fraternity Park. Amed asked her if she was Farah, the famous one. She said yes. That day, after playing hard to get—she claims—they went together to the room in San Leopoldo. “I made him a ‘whore's meal’: plantains, tomatoes, rice, and a fried egg. We had sex.” We got along well, and so on and so forth. Amed was epileptic and a pill addict. When the two were on, Farah had to run far away, because a beating was guaranteed. He was arrested several times for hitting his adoptive grandmother, for disorderly conduct, and for threatening with a knife. Farah herself would sometimes report him for theft or physical assault, only to withdraw the complaint a few hours later. Every time Amed was arrested, Farah would go—sparkly heels, a gaudy dress, scooters—laden with bags of food, to see her husband in prison. When Amed was released on furlough, he stayed at her house. And she provided for him. On one of her visits to Amed, another prisoner started keeping tabs on her. Andrés Bravo Cardenal, alias “El Diente” (The Tooth), who was in jail for robbery, was released on furlough one day and bumped into Farah at a fried food stand. “It was cold.” I was eating a sandwich and he asked me to buy him one. I did. We started talking and I told him I was tired of Amed, that he beat me a lot. He wanted to walk me back to the neighborhood, he was going to drop me off at the corner, because Amed was at my house, also on a day pass. The end of the story is that Andrés ended up coming into the house. I said he was my cousin. And Amed said, "What cousin? He's in prison with me!" So I declared, "Well, from now on he's my husband." Man, it was five in the morning and they started fighting over me. The police had to come. Farah fell in love quickly, the way she does when someone shows her even the slightest bit of affection. She had Andrés Bravo Cardenal's initials tattooed on her back: "ABC," written in a rough, bluish ink. He, in turn, had "Farah" tattooed on his forearm. He even wrote her a couple of letters from prison. In a notebook where Farah jots down phone numbers and other important things, she keeps this passage, for reasons unknown: "(...) it's good that you go out to the disco every now and then so you can have some fun, because you deserve so much, but also remember that the streets are really rough, and you can't get home late. I love you so much, Farah. With love, Andrés." The prison visits and the bags of food were now for Andrés "El Diente" (The Tooth), a young man who on the street seemed closed off, cold, hard, and impenetrable. But within the four narrow walls of the San Leopoldo prison cell, what he asked of Farah was to penetrate him. That's how they copulated most of the time. "I got hooked on him because he played me right. When we were making out, we were like Shakira and Beyoncé. Oh my! Bitch! Tough! Andrés was a real firecracker in bed." When he was released and spent full time in Farah's cell, the beatings started again. "He was very materialistic. At first, I gave him gold teeth, which cost me sixty dollars each. I finished paying for a chain and then a watch in installments. But when he didn't have money, he'd get upset." During one of the worst beatings Andrés gave Farah, Teresa had to lean out onto the balcony with a stick in her hand: "I threatened to beat him senseless if he kept abusing her. Everyone here loves Farah." He told me she was just giving him a quickie. I told him that if she was just giving him a quickie, he should pack his things and leave. If he wanted to buy shoes or whatever, he should get a job. Farah is very defenseless. She's nothing special. She's always dressed up, goes out, and comes back with her few pesos. She is the queen of Old HavanaBut she doesn't listen to advice. Elio Medina, her godfather, once witnessed a similar scene at his house. "She came to visit me one day with Andrés, and he insulted her in front of me, he humiliated her. I grabbed him by the neck and threw him out of my house." Farah isn't very bright, and when she's insulted and she's lucid, she takes a long time to respond. In early 2016, after almost three years of enduring beatings, dancing in the street to support him, she changed the locks on the door and got rid of Andrés.

***

“I’m the kind of gay man who likes to attract attention. The more extravagantly I dress, the more confident I am. When people shout ‘Farah, bitch, tough, diva, you’re the one!’ at me in the street, I feel fulfilled. A magazine said I had real balls for going out into the streets dressed as a woman without a care in the world. When I was young, I was a gorgeous gay man. Look, I’m fifty years old now, and I still look stunning.” I've owned sixty wigs, and when they get worn out, I give them away or throw them out. When I dance at the beer hall, anyone who wants to give me money has to put it inside my blouse. I tell everyone that the money is for getting silicone breast implants. That's what I'd like. Changing my sex, no. I've taken birth control pills and hormones, and my breasts grew, but I stopped taking them because they make me nauseous and dizzy. I'm a Virgo. Virgos are cheerful, we're lucky with money. We're very well-liked. Simple, down-to-earth people. I'm so famous that when Beyoncé came to Havana, she went to the beer hall to meet me. I was so nervous I ran away and hid in the bathroom. In the end, she asked me to dance something. I had the orchestra play "El Cuarto de Tula." Beyoncé gave me five hundred dollars and a dress. Everyone knows that. With the money I went to Varadero and took six "pepillos" and two of my transvestite friends. I was the powerful one. The "pepillos" were raining down on me and I had my pick.

***

In March 2016, Farah's home is the same four-by-four-meter box she inherited from Jorge "La Reglana" in the San Leopoldo neighborhood. The smell, as soon as you cross the threshold, connects you to the misery and marginalization in which her life unfolds. The nauseating stench of a poorly ventilated place that is cleaned infrequently and with little care. Like the typical shared rooms in the overcrowded and dilapidated Central Havana, Farah's room is also divided into a ground floor and an upper floor, separated by a wooden partition called a "barbacoa." Upstairs, the bedroom, with a small bed with threadbare sheets and an old display cabinet. Bruised women's shoes on the wooden floorboards. Garbage-colored old clothes that people give her. A few clay figurines and an archaic standing fan. Two posters On the walls: one of Shakira (opposite the bed) and one of nude men and women (at the head of the bed). Downstairs, a combined living-dining-bathroom-kitchen area. The small bathroom has no door. In the cramped space, overlooking the white toilet, are two pieces of furniture upholstered in a grimy, wine-red plush. Farah's belongings are few. If she has ever owned anything of value, her husband has stolen it. She has never had, for example, a refrigerator. The few foods she buys she cooks during the day. When she doesn't feel like turning on the stove (most of the time), she takes a plastic bowl to the soup kitchen for the elderly and homeless on Perseverancia Street, and they give her something there. Attached to the wall of the small living room is an elaborate wooden shelf with several compartments crammed with photos and trinkets like small ceramic figurines and artificial flowers. A Havana Water bill, cigarette butts, an empty cigarette box CreoleOn the rest of the walls, a collage of male nudes that were torn from some erotic magazine, and a large poster advertising the perfume. Le Maleby Jean Paul Gaultier, where an imposing blond man shows off his abs. On another rickety wooden shelf, there's an old stereo and a large collection of dusty records. By Rocío Dúrcal and Rocío Jurado, A luxurious head-to-head; by Madonna, You can danceThe Nuestra Belleza Latina show, Donna Summer in concert, the Mexican telenovela Love foreverA collection of Discovery Channel documentaries featuring the programs High-tech weapons, World War II Allies, Man-eaters, High-speed trains and others. Several VHS cassettes with films such as Hercules and The black maskCompleting the collection is a pornographic video whose cover features small photos of two bald men having sex by a pool. "I'm a sex addict. I really enjoy sex." In 2012, Farah was invited by some Greek tourists to the Habana Libre Hotel to film a pornographic movie that would later be distributed online. During three days of filming, Farah visited the hotel in the early morning hours to penetrate six men and six women, all together in the same room. Farah isn't very good with details, and you have to ask her thirty times before she finishes telling a story. Her coherence exists only within her own fantasy. It's difficult to get precise information, exact dates, or strictly reliable anecdotes out of her. It's as if her life were a crazy fable, and it didn't really matter when this or that happened, or as if it were too excessive to have occurred in real life. "They asked me to give them all oral sex, and one of the filming days we made a pyramid, some of us on top of each other." I didn't do it for prostitution. I don't prostitute myself like the rest of the transvestites. The eccentric Greeks, however, paid her around two hundred dollars. On another occasion, they took her to the Sierra Maestra—the scene of the armed struggle against Batista before 1959—to film another pornographic movie with three girls and two men. "I entered the orgy dressed as a cabaret dancer." Otherwise (and as always when she recounts something), there are few details. In short: she neither kept nor ever saw any of those films. They may or may not have happened. In theory, they are all available on the internet, and you have to pay to see them. Farah's most prized possessions are her wigs, her old dresses, and her own photographs: the documentary record of her career, left by foreign photographers and journalists over the years. Farah stopping public transportation, in a rare kind of glamour. Farah perched on a fence. Farah giving a statement to a Telesur microphone. Farah greeting her fans at the Havana carnivals, which aren't carnivals until she arrives. Farah holding hands with Mariela Castro, director of CENESEX and daughter of the president, during the first Day Against Homophobia in Cuba, in May 2008. –Mariela Castro waited for me to arrive to start the gay pride march. She told me: “Go ahead so you can march next to me.” Very divine and fabulous. When the march was over, she gave me a little package with one hundred dollars and said: “Here's your gift.”

***

Elio Medina has an interesting theory. And according to this theory, Farah is protected by something supernatural. –It's not normal that she's still alive with everything that's happened to her"She says. In matters of faith, Farah follows the pattern of convenience. If Jehovah's Witnesses are making donations, she becomes a follower of Jehovah's Witnesses. If Seventh-day Adventists give her a pamphlet explaining the historical evidence that Jesus existed, she might become one of them. If she's in dire straits, she asks Elio to intercede for her with Oggún or Elegguá, and then entrusts herself to the deities of the Yoruba religion. In the same year, she was stabbed twice (it was in the 2000s, but she doesn't remember the exact date, and neither does anyone close to her). The first time was during a fight in a bar on Águila Street, from which she emerged with an awl stuck in her stomach. Surgeons had to cut her open like a pig to make sure the weapon hadn't damaged any organs. There are several versions of the second stabbing." According to Farah, it was an accidental cut, sustained in another fight between homophobic youths who had attacked gay men gathered in Fraternity Park with knives. According to Elio Medina, she was in Chinatown and was cut for intervening in a fight. According to Isabel Pulido, the cut was inflicted by a man with whom she had made unwanted advances. Whatever the true story, all versions end with the same scene: Farah, with the edge of a machete embedded in her neck. Farah's body, locked away in the morgue of the Carlos III emergency hospital.

***

They presumed her dead. At the funeral home on Zanja Street, her neighbors and friends (never her family) awaited the body, the place filled with wreaths made of cloying gladioli, wrapped in paper bands that read things like “Rest in peace, Farah.” Upon arriving at the hospital with her throat slashed, Farah suffered catalepsy (a condition that would accompany her for the rest of her life), which consists of the temporary loss of vital signs, to such an extent that doctors assume the patient is dead. Scientific investigations such as the one published in the British Journal of Medicine In 1876, catalepsy was defined as a “neurological episode associated with patients suffering from schizophrenia, hysteria, and even melancholy.” Edgar Allan Poe's story Premature burial (The Premature Burial), reviews apparent cases of catalepsy in people who were buried alive. Locked away in the morgue, Farah lay with a tag tied to her big toe. The tag read Raúl Pulido PeñalverSince Farah's sanity exists primarily within her own imagination, stories like this need to be corroborated. Elio Medina confirms his friend's account: "The funeral home was packed. She showed up with a bandage around her neck, an IV in her hand, and wearing a hospital gown. When she arrived, people started screaming and fainting." She tells it much better: "The cold air from the refrigerators woke me up. I made such a racket that they came to drag me out. There was a huge commotion. They told me that the funeral home in Zanja was waiting for my body. I threw a rag over my head and escaped. I ran out into the street, and a young man took me to the funeral home in a bicycle taxi. I arrived and started screaming, 'I'm not dead. What is this?!' I ripped the wreaths off the walls and threw them on the floor. Then they took me back to the hospital." Some claim that the doctor who removed her from the morgue had been under psychiatric treatment for several years.

***

Someone who hasn't lived in Havana might think that the neighborhood has accepted Farah naturally, that the neighbors are friendly, that everyone loves her, and certainly Farah does nothing but leave the tenement and everyone who crosses paths with her shouts phrases that she greatly appreciates, such as: "You're the only one!", "You look splendid today!", etc., etc. On the other hand, someone who has even a basic understanding of how things work in these neighborhoods knows that Farah is loved, but from a distance, from across the street, from up there on the balcony. Like lepers are loved, with that indulgent affection. That repugnant hypocrisy.The closest neighbors, however, forgive her excesses and help her as much as possible, for people who already have enough to bear with the weight of their own miseries.

***

The last time Farah saw her father, she had gone to the building on San Nicolás Street to visit some neighbors. “He said to me, ‘What are you doing here?’ I told him he wasn’t the owner of the building. It was awful. Now he’s sick with blood pressure or heart problems. I don’t know. I walk past him and it’s like he doesn’t exist. Legally, I have a right to that house, but I don’t want anything to do with it.” “What would you do if your father needed you someday?” Farah shakes her head to say NO, without having to open her mouth. “When I was stabbed and almost died, he never came to see me. I have no feelings for him.”

***

On Tuesday, March 1st, at noon, Teresa's phone rang on Lagunas Street in the San Leopoldo neighborhood. Someone answered. "Hello Teresa, Farah gave me this number in case I needed to reach her. Would it be possible to speak with her?" "Farah has been hospitalized since January 12th at the AIDS Sanatorium in Santiago de las Vegas."

***

Tuesday, March 1, 2016. First visit. Farah wants to take her own life. She promises that tonight they'll find her dead, with a cocktail of pills in her stomach. "Listen to what I'm telling you. It's not going to happen today." A nurse (with that condescending tone they learn to develop in a place where patients are marked by irreversible fatality) tells Farah, in a self-indulgent joke, not to commit suicide today, that it's her shift and she doesn't want any complications. Since being diagnosed HIV-positive in 2009, she's never needed more than a couple of daily doses of Nevirapine, Lamivudine, and Tenofovir to keep dancing in the street and struggling to make ends meet. The epidemiologist who has treated her for eight years, Dr. Rolando Valdez Cruz, is impressed by how few relapses his patient has had compared to the life she leads, and the life someone with a chronic retroviral infection should be leading. “She’s been stable for years, and yet her daily routines and eating habits are inadequate. She goes out and skips breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Patients with this condition should have at least six meals a day and not stay up late, because all of this can weaken their immune system.” Teresa, who has been looking out from her balcony for over ten years to check if Farah has anything to eat, says, “Sometimes she starts crying. She says she’s sick, that she feels weak. But it turns out she’s gone the whole day without breakfast, lunch, or an afternoon snack. The money she earns isn’t spent on food. She spends it on clothes, a wig. On frivolous things.” Elio Medina explains, “With HIV, she doesn’t take care of herself. She doesn’t take her medication on time, she doesn’t eat properly. She’s happy with a box of food from a cafeteria.” Farah avoids talking about it. For her, the less she thinks about it, the better. In 2009, he underwent tests after a long period of weight loss, suffering from frequent vomiting, fevers, and diarrhea. Since his diagnosis, many have accused him of indifference to his illness. Only someone who is sick knows how much their suffering hurts. Farah's first time at the Los Cocos Sanatorium coincided with a period of scarcity, when food rations were far too meager for patients requiring fortified nutrition, and when internal management and administration were failing in their essential duties. "I arrived here with twelve CUCs from my hard-earned money, but I don't have a single kilo left. The food is just stew, and I've had to spend it all on bread and soda at a private cafeteria out there. I can't stay here long because my life is about other things. This has nothing to do with me, and I need to go out and earn my money." Farah's prolonged stay at the Sanatorium, however, was due more to his poor judgment than to his health condition. She voluntarily admitted herself for a more or less routine checkup. They placed her in a shared room with a twenty-six-year-old patient riddled with Norwegian scabies and nearly forty dilutions (dil) of syphilis. Farah fell in love with the patient, became involved with him, and contracted syphilis. What could have been a routine doctor's visit turned into a nearly three-month stay under observation and receiving penicillin injections. "I started having a very high fever and convulsions. I knew something wasn't right. Thank goodness they started the treatment quickly. He wasn't very clear with me. But what goes around comes around, right?" "And you broke up with him?" "No. We stayed together. Yesterday they took him to an isolation ward, and since they wouldn't let me see him, I stood up to the doctors. I went to visit him, and do you know what he told me? 'I like you a lot, but I'm not in love with you yet.'" Farah looks more disheveled than ever. She doesn't wear makeup. Except when she talks about the boy, she appears listless and cornered, her face constantly etched with skepticism. In the room where she's been placed, she spends her days looking at her own photographs, which she brought from home and hung on the walls. The rest of the time she spends talking with other patients or watching a Mexican telenovela on a small television. Barriers to LoveCurrently in Cuba there are more than 20,000 living patients diagnosed with HIV, and more than 3,000 deaths. At the Santiago de las Vegas Sanatorium, the largest of the three remaining on the island (the other two are located in the provinces of Sancti Spíritus and Holguín), almost all the patients are receiving treatments they cannot get in regular hospitals, or they have become lethargic there due to a lack of a home to return to or family members willing to care for them. Farah does not have a family to take care of herShe's been hospitalized for over two months, and none of her siblings have made a single phone call. But Farah does have a home. More than a home, she has a career. She didn't come this far in life to end up in such a forgotten hospital. She's an artist, and she has an audience, and that audience is out there. That audience must miss her.

***

Friday, March 11, 2016. Second visit. Farah received a call from Teresa and had to leave the previous weekend, from Saturday to Tuesday. Amed, one of her exes, kept the key to the house and, upon learning that she was in the Sanatorium, took the liberty of renting it to a group of gay men who caused a stir in the neighborhood for a few days. “When I arrived at the house, it was a brothel. Amed had a bunch of gay men crammed in there, having sex all day long and shouting. A neighbor went to tell them off, and they threatened to throw boiling water on him. In the end, we called the police and were able to get them out.” Farah packed up her few belongings and stored them with the neighbors because Amed, lacking anything valuable to steal, had sold her two mannequins she kept as decorations in the living room. After putting a padlock on the door and barricading it with a couple of wooden slats, she checked back into the Sanatorium on Tuesday the 8th. Back in prison, depression set in. While on leave, she met another young man in Old Havana. “I have great luck with men. I was on a roll this weekend. I ran into this gorgeous mulatto, and he asked for my address. I told him I was in jail and had just been released. ‘I’m in jail because I assaulted a guy and stabbed him,’ I told him. ‘You know I’m quick-witted.’” During a short walk through the Sanatorium, she tells several patients she’s connected with who came to see her from the streets, “What’s tough is tough.”

***

Tuesday, March 15, 2016. Third visit. Fed up again. She insists her life is on the street, dancing. That she's had enough, that they've finished the penicillin and the syphilis has cleared up. "I packed two suitcases with all my things and I'm leaving tonight. I'm taking my partner home with me. We're leaving this horrible place together."

***

A week after having him live in the house, the twenty-something who infected her with syphilis at the Sanatorium began to reject Farah's caresses. At this point in her life, so tired of begging for affection, she didn't insist. She was fed up with him, packed up his belongings, and threw him out onto the street. "After all, I can afford to choose, because I'm the artist." In March 2016, Farah's main phobias continued to be heights and loneliness. She had a dog named Miseria, a loyal dog who died under the wheels of some truck. Miseria was replaced by Canelo, just as emaciated, because Farah wanted them for company but rarely gave them a plate of food. "They have to learn to fight on the streets. If I do it, how can they not?" In March 2016, Farah weighed fifty kilos distributed across a body that stood over six feet tall. Thin and long like a broomstick. Arachnid. A fake mole tattooed between her eyebrows. In her mouth, only two teeth are hers: two half-closed hooves clinging to her lower jaw. On top, the aligned, fake pieces of a prosthesis. In her fantasy of glamour and stardom, a diva with only two teeth is still a diva. [READ MORE: Being trans and living on the street: Yhajaira's story]