How real Cubans, both rich and poor, live

Posted on Thu, Aug. 10, 2006

How real Cubans, both rich and poor, live
By ENRIQUE FERNANDEZ
efernandez@MiamiHerald.com

Coffee-table books on Cuban architecture are by now a minor industry,
easily dismissed as eye candy or, worse, falsehood. Yes, Cuba is full of
stunning buildings, far more serious and imposing than anything found in
the Caribbean. But, as any visitor to the island knows, it's not all a
pretty picture.

Havana, a city that was spared the devastation of the Cuban War of
Independence in the 19th century and where most of the island's grand
architecture is located, has long been a city in ruins, a city of ruins.
That some buildings have been restored -- and every single one
photographed for a coffee-table book -- does not reduce the abjectness
of a city that in its heyday, as those old enough remember, literally
glittered.

Inside Cuba (Taschen, $49.99) is more honest than most books of its ilk,
in that it shows dwellings where the grandeur has lost the war against
decay, where leather upholstery seems to have exploded and exposed a
lava-like outpouring of its insides, where makeshift wiring hangs
exposed. And it also shows the humble homes of Cuban peasants.

In short, this is a project that has photographed where real Cubans live.

Which doesn't mean there are no magnificent colonial palacios -- in
Havana, Santiago de Cuba, and the museum-city of Trinidad -- restored to
grandeur or never allowed to rot. But from the very first two-page
spread inside the cover, Inside Cuba promises to be a different kind of
Cuba book.

That spread -- reproduced inside the back cover -- is an album of one of
the curios of the Cuban Revolution: baseball-like cards that depict
vignettes from the struggle. Indeed, the book delivers a certain pop
edginess.

Alas, not enough.

Perhaps because it's hard to draw edginess out of the fine crystal and
marble statuary that adorn the palacios. Or simply because the
photography is just too damn pretty. Caught between grandeur and
hipness, Inside Cuba delivers a bit of both but not a satisfying amount
of either.

Still, it's nice, for a change, to see not just palacios but modernist
bourgeois buildings -- evidence that, as exiles have always claimed,
Cuba was not exactly Third World. And it's even nicer to go inside the
home of contemporary Cuban artists like José Rodríguez Fuster, and see
how they have transformed their living environments, as artists usually
do, into art forms.

Or the ultimate architectural pleasure: an architect's home. In this
case, it's a beach house built in 1958 with cheap materials and a
nautical motif -- a home that, like the ''sustainable'' projects in
vogue today, manages to be both rustic and radically modernist.

No book on anything Cuban can escape the vicissitudes of ideology and
this one is no exception. The text, written by Julio César Pérez
Hernández, is informative and clear, but its apparent objectivity is
subtly tinged.

''Havana,'' he writes, ''was spared the injurious urban renewal and
overdevelopment seen around the world during the second half of the 20th
century.'' Read: Socialism saved Havana from the ravages of capitalism.
And that is totally true.

'' . . . but is now,'' he continues, ``ready for a sensitive revival.''

Revival from what? The answer can be found in a Cuban film mentioned in
the book, Strawberry and Chocolate, where one of the protagonists, a
gifted gay intellectual estranged from the Revolution, shows his
protégé, a party militant, the ruins of Havana -- ''one of the most
beautiful cities in the world,'' he calls it -- and tells him ''they''
have let it fall apart. ''They'' are the leaders of the country, who
now, according to Inside Cuba, are ready to implement a sensitive
revival from their own willful neglect.

The text on the famous watering hole La Bodeguita del Medio offers a
recipe for the drink made famous there, the mojito. It also tells how
this former grocery store (true) became ''a center of bohemian life''
(also true) and is now ''jammed with foreign tourists'' (totally true).
However, the ''graffiti its walls treasure'' are of relatively recent
vintage -- a keen eye can see the work of the ballpoint and the magic
marker. The old graffiti -- by bohemians who may no longer be
politically correct in Cuba -- has been painted over. Oh, yes, besides
tourists, La Bodeguita is sometimes jammed with local hustlers.

And so it goes. But no one who might object to the subtly partisan text
should be deeply troubled. Due to a design oversight hard to explain in
such a lovingly done book, a lot of the text is printed over such dense
motifs that it's virtually unreadable.

No matter. It's a coffee-table book and as such it's published for pleasure.

http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/entertainment/books/15231107.htm