By Sam Leith
Published: September 12 2009 02:34
When Anthony Trollope visited Havana at the end of the 1850s, he
reported that "all Cuba was of course full of the late message from the
President of the United States", which, according to Trollope's
paraphrase, was that "circumstances and destiny absolutely require that
the US should be the masters of that island". In light of this he
foresaw that, liberated from Spanish rule, "Havana will soon become as
much American as New Orleans".
A century and a half later, when I visited the city with my fiancée
Alice in April this year, Cuba was also full of a recent message from
the President of the US. At the Summit of the Americas in Trinidad that
same month, Barack Obama announced he wanted a "new beginning" with Cuba.
This is a culture in which its more powerful neighbour is a perpetual
presence: something the island looks towards – if only to define itself
against it. Old Cadillacs and Buicks with the guts of Soviet Volgas
growl through the streets; the national sport is baseball; the dollar is
the shadow currency; the central prop of its ragged economy is a tourist
mythos with Ernest Hemingway at the centre of it; and if you want to
take a boat out on so much as a fishing trip you need to satisfy the
coastguard that you're not planning to bolt for Miami.
But, unlike America, and almost anywhere else in the world, there are no
advertisements. No neon, no branding, no billboards – only painted
images of Che and Fidel, and exhortations to keep the revolution alive.
"Venceremos," reads one blue encouragement painted on a wall, more in
hope than in expectation.
Fidel Castro and Che Guevara march with their comrades in Cuba in 1960
Fidel Castro (left) and Che Guevara (third left) in 1960
Old Havana is something like a living fossil. Or, rather, a nested
series of fossils. Here is the town-planning of old Spain; the art deco
of 1930s hotels and office buildings; the wallowing American cars of the
1950s. They survive in a regime that is itself a historical curiosity.
It has a compelling, ruined grandeur. The people seem not to belong to
the architectural spaces they've inherited, but to live in them like
hermit crabs. A row of old warehouses on the east side of the old town
stands empty, windows gaping and glassless. A man-high stencil of Che's
face has been sprayed on to the opposite ground floor like a graffito.
On the floor above, in one of the full-depth arched windows, a young man
in a baseball cap lolls, smoking. Behind him, his friend sits on a
beaten-up sofa.
The dun-coloured paint is peeling. The paint is one of the things you
notice in Havana. Fresh paint and peeled paint: blues and greens,
terracottas and yellows. Even the city's showcase cigar factory – where
a guided tour feels somewhat like a visit to an aquarium in that none of
the workers patiently rolling and racking cigars in wooden presses
acknowledges your existence – has its tone set not by its broad,
decrepit marble staircase but by its institutional walls in brown and
sea-green. It is a fascinating, melancholy place to be.
From the roof terrace of the Ambos Mundos hotel we can see Havana's
sedimentary history. An old terracotta roof; a prettily repainted wall;
the dome of a church. Then gutted buildings and poured concrete
carbuncles. In one direction are old colonial buildings like ruined
teeth; in another, Soviet-style tower-blocks. Two inches of the view is
Siena; two inches is Moscow.
Walking the streets is the best of it. We pass an empty and dilapidated
building, its balcony propped up with a rickety timber scaffold. Right
next door is a red-and-yellow high-windowed house with skinny pot-plants
growing out through the ironwork at the windows. A woman's arm pops
through with a brush and sweeps dust from the sill into the street.
Here, a manky stray cat camps out in the shade of the offside bumper of
a powder-blue 1950s Chevrolet; there, an old woman sits on her step
smoking a cigar the size of a baseball bat; there again, two
five-year-olds play in the street with a baseball bat the size of a
cigar. The old woman with her stogie and her splendidly wrinkled face,
it occurs to me, couldn't possibly afford to smoke that sort of cigar –
she's there, surely, to be photographed by tourists for a convertible
peso or two a shot: smoking is her job.
For respite from the heat, and a rest for the legs, we stopped at the
Chocolate Museum; more a café than a museum, where a few pesos buys a
tall glass of cool, freshly made chocolate milk, and the chance to watch
the chocolatier at work in front of an ancient, jiggling machine.
Later, in the warm night, couples sit crammed all along the low sea wall
on the Malecón promenade, which sweeps round Old Havana. We walked out
for a nightcap at El Patio, a restaurant and bar in three stories of an
18th-century building, with outside tables spreading across the cobbles
of Cathedral Square.
It was the eve of Easter Sunday, and the big doors of the cathedral were
open, with sonorous choral singing drifting out from inside. From the
mouth of a narrow street running north-west from the flank of the
cathedral, there came the clashing sound of a salsa band at full
throttle. In an open courtyard 40ft down, a guy in a vest top and
porkpie hat fronted a five-piece, amplified just to the edge of distortion.
Across the narrow street from the courtyard's closed iron gates is La
Bodeguita del Medio, the bar where Hemingway drank his mojitos, and
outside it a dozen people with bottled beers were dancing in the street;
tipsy tourist girls with Cuban hustlers.
Just before midnight, the priests from the church processed into the
square with a tall candle and stood praying in the centre. The salsa
didn't stop. We drank rum at outside tables. After 20 minutes or so the
priests returned with the congregation into the church, and then a
power-cut put the square into darkness. All the stray dogs started
barking at once.
Alice and I hired a car and drove the four or five hours from Havana to
Cienfuegos. Driving in Cuba is not a simple proposition. Jorge the
hire-car man – settling behind his desk in an air-conditioned cabin –
chewed a fat stogie beneath his fat moustache. He gave off a sense of
dry mirth, becoming serious only when explaining the arrangements for
refuelling. There are three grades of petrol available, he said. "The
hire car must be filled with "especial" gas. Not ordinary gas. And not
under any circumstances" – here the look of a man staring into a
precipice came over his face – "the other sort."
"Don't drive on the autopista at night," he added, "or an animal will
come in the road and provoke a dramatic accident. Have you driven in
Cuba before?"
No, we said. He smiled wanly at us, and made the sign of the cross in
the air.
I think Jorge was teasing; but there were challenges. No doubt to thwart
the Yankee imperialists in case of an invasion, Cuba is notably light on
road signs. After you dip through the tunnel that takes you under the
canal from Old Havana, you join an orbital road that sweeps round the
city from noon to seven o'clock.
One of the spokes that comes off it is Cuba's main motorway, the A1 –
heading south-west towards Cienfuegos in a more or less straight line.
But figuring out which junction puts you on it requires shrewd
guesswork. (A sign that appeared to promise Camilo and Cienfuegos turned
out to be pointing us to an entirely different town, called Camilo
Cienfuegos, 40km due east.) Finally, we found the junction by counting
the number of railway lines we'd crossed.
It is worth the effort to find yourself down a broad and often empty
highway. The countryside is level and green to either side. You pass the
odd cow, banana palms, great black john-crows wheeling on the thermals,
occasional flashes of small-scale industrial activity. You get tall
palms, too – spindly-stemmed and with their leaves swept
calligraphically to one side.
We used La Union – a boutique hotel in pretty old colonial Cienfuegos –
as a jumping-off point for the coast road, day trips to the plantation
town of Trinidad and ascents to the spectacular viewpoints into the
Valle de Los Ingenios to its north.
A couple of days later, having negotiated donkey-carts, cobblestones and
mountain ascents, we drove back to Havana. Jorge was back behind his
moustache.
"No problems?"
"No."
"Good," said Jorge, taking the keys. Back at our room in the Hotel
Nacional we turned on CNN. The screen showed Obama shaking hands with
Hugo Chávez at the summit and the news ticker below it read: "PRES TO
CUBA: LET'S TALK."
FT.com / Travel - Old Havana's peeling paint (12 September 2009)
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/a5c44462-9e61-11de-b0aa-00144feabdc0.html
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