Fidel's reign is over, but his presence is palpable everywhere – from
the faded revolutionary slogans to the magnificent utopian failure of
the National School of Arts. Graham Boynton falls in love with a country
saved by its political isolation.
By Graham Boynton
Last Updated: 12:22PM BST 04 Sep 2008
It is Wednesday night in Havana's Floridita bar, and the place is
already heaving with tourists who seem perfectly happy to eat the
mediocre food and pay twice the going rate ($6) for a watery daiquiri
while listening to an average salsa band working its way through
"Guantanamera" for the zillionth time with a fixed grin on its
collective face.
At first glance, this could be any tourist bar anywhere in the world –
the long, worn oak bar lining one wall, the rickety tables and off-white
tablecloths – but this is Havana and the Floridita is no ordinary
tourist trap. This is the bar where Hemingway famously drank up to 12
Papa Dobles (giant daiquiris) a day while amusing visiting Hollywood
hotshots such as Spencer Tracy and Ava Gardner. Should you have any
doubts, there are photographs of him all over the walls and a life-sized
bronze statue by José Soberón in his favourite spot in the corner.
Because Havana has been caught in a socio-political time warp for a half
century since the Revolution, it is not difficult to imagine Hemingway
sitting right here, precisely where the bronze is positioned, then
raising up his large frame and shambling off down the Calle Obispo to
his room at the Ambos Mundos hotel. The same 1950s cars are still
wheezing along the streets, the same buildings stand (although, today,
in vastly increased states of decrepitude) and this bar is still serving
Papa Dobles well into the tropical night. Old Havana is like a living,
breathing movie set, a sound stage for a Spanish film noir.
Tonight, this particular movie's characters are an eclectic group of
drinkers. Leonardo Padura Fuentes, author of popular detective novels,
is locked in animated conversation with English academic Stephen
Wilkinson, an expert on contemporary Cuban culture. Then there is
Eliades Ochoa, stetson-wearing singer-guitarist of the Buena Vista
Social Club, with his spiritual successors, Israel Rojas and Yoel
Martinez, leaders of Buena Fé, a young music group, and Nick van
Gruisen, a British representative of the World Monuments Fund, talking
to David Soul, formerly of Starsky and Hutch and, more recently, the
West End musical, Jerry Springer – The Opera.
The conversation swoops and falls as Cristal beers and daiquiris flow.
Soul is planning a one-man show about Hemingway's last days in Cuba.
Padura's most recent novel, Adios Hemingway, concerns a murder in the
grounds of Finca Vigia, Hemingway's home of 30 years just outside
Havana. Van Gruisen, meanwhile, is lamenting his failed attempts to meet
up with Eusebio Leal, the man behind the city's architectural
restoration. You have it all here: art, music, literature,
architecture... and rum. Welcome to Havana.
The topic of conversation that surfaces often is, of course, Fidel
Castro (who, shortly before our arrival in Cuba, had announced that he
was stepping down after nearly 50 years of rule). The Comandante en Jefe
was one of modern politics' greatest survivors: he was 32 when he took
power and, at the time of our visit, is 81. During that time, 10 US
presidents have come and nine have gone, some of them instrumental in
ordering a number of the 600-odd assassination attempts that Fabian
Escalante, his former security chief, claims were made on Castro.
One would imagine that Fidel's announcement would reverberate through
the Cuban capital – but it doesn't. There are no big demonstrations, no
public displays, no sign of his internal enemies raising their heads
above the parapets to denounce him.
The reason, Wilkinson says, is that the post-Fidel era has already
begun. For the past few years, Cuba has been tiptoeing into its next
phase, planning radical agricultural reforms, engaging in joint
ventures, building tourism. It is difficult to obtain hard facts since
the governance is still in the hands of a tight inner circle, but
according to Wilkinson, much of the farmland is being turned over to
private use (if not outright ownership) and agricultural representatives
from 19 American states have visited the island.
There is a healthy flow of European Union delegations, too, and
architect Norman Foster and the French construction firm Bouygues are
said to be proposing significant developments. There also appear to be
Canadians everywhere, and there is a lot of talk about building golf
courses to lure upscale tourists – including Americans, whose numbers
have dropped by 80 per cent in the past decade to just 25,000
travellers. That is due partly to the hassle of having to connect
(illegally) through a neighbouring country to bypass US passport
controls, partly to the fact that (extremely inconveniently) Cuba
withdrew the US dollar from circulation in 2004.
Though we haven't exhausted the subject of Fidel (who here is like a
spectre in the background, seeming to provide a kind of ideological
comfort to older, more sentimental citizens, if not the 75 per cent of
Cubans born since 1959), the conversation in the Floridita inevitably
ends and we stumble out into the steamy night. Van Gruisen and I jump in
a cab and head to one of Havana's Casas de la Música, in the manicured
suburb of Miramar.
There is nothing manicured about this Casa. It is heaving with Havana
hookers, most hanging around the entrance, pawing and cajoling every
Western male who arrives, hoping to be escorted inside and paid in forex
for their services. We are asked by two muscle-bound bouncers if we want
girls and, before we can answer, two highly-perfumed hookers are at our
side, running their nails up and down our backs. We politely demur and
slip inside unscathed. The audience is split between locals and
foreigners and only half of the foreign men have brought hookers with
them. (It is reasonably safe to assume here that every lithe,
smouldering young woman in the company of a bald, middle-aged,
pasty-faced man with a paunch and a silly smile on his face is a hooker.)
The live band is coming on later; in the meantime, the crowd is moving
deliriously to Armando, a DJ who plays salsa, timba and Latinised hip
hop. The locals dance like wired Twyla Tharps, while the tourists move
like bank managers who have had too much to drink (which, of course,
many of them probably are and have).
After a couple of hours and a couple more daiquiris, Van Gruisen and I
decide that, if we are not going to dance (and we are white men who
really can't dance), we would like to try another brand of music – so we
head for La Zorra y el Cuervo, a basement jazz club near the Hotel
Nacional. It reminds me of the Manhattan joints of the Sixties and
Seventies, with earnest-looking people in black-rimmed glasses bopping
their heads to post-bebop free jazz with a Latin tinge. The band leader
is Yasek Manzano, a trumpet virtuoso and one of Cuba's hottest young
musicians, who provides a cerebral end to a hectic night in this vivid,
thrilling city.
I am here because I have fallen in love – head over heels, if I'm honest
- with Cuba and, more specifically, with Havana. This is my second visit
in three months and, halfway through that daiquiri-infused night at the
Floridita, I am already planning my third. Unlike Jack Nicholson, who
arrived here in 1998 proclaiming Cuba "a paradise" and Fidel Castro "a
genius", I see a place that possesses a magnificent legacy –
architecturally, culturally, spiritually – that has been suppressed and
held back by half a century of socialist torpor. Far from being a
genius, Castro was a political anachronism for decades before he
resigned, holding on to l'illusion lyrique (the early idealistic phase
of the revolution) far beyond its sell-by date and dragging his
talented, free-spirited people down with him.
There is nothing glamorous about Cuba's grinding poverty. The Habaneros
earn on average £8 a month (plus meagre state-financed rations) and
although most have enjoyed a good education and many are skilled, there
is little work for them outside tourism and a few service industries.
That is why so many of them – as we discovered on our city tour – have
turned into full-time hustlers.
Following a visit to the Partagas Cigar Factory, we were led by our
guide to a cloakroom and offered boxes of Cohiba VIs for £13: an offer
difficult to refuse. Later, we found similar cigars for a quarter of the
price. Cubans don't call this stealing; they use the words arreglar,
which literally translated means "to rearrange", or busqueda, which
means "a search".
That said, Cuba's isolation has bequeathed this island a fascinating
other-worldliness. Instead of corporate advertisements smeared across
the landscape, hoardings display revolutionary slogans – "Venceremos!"
("We will win!") and "Patria o Muerte!" ("Fatherland or Death!") – or
giant portraits of Che as sainted revolutionary and American presidents
as counter-revolutionary Satans. Tramps, beggars and hookers are
everywhere: an accepted part of society. And 49 years of stultifying
socialism have created such spectacular indifference to the concept of
service that you can almost see the steam rising from tourists waiting
for food or drink.
It is ironic, too, that the revolution's economic failures have saved
from demolition Habana Vieja, the crumbling old part of the city
declared a World Heritage site in the 1980s. In his last years of rule,
president Fulgencio Batista was planning to replace the buildings with
casinos, high-rise hotels and nightclubs. Today, international
organisations such as Unesco and the World Monuments Fund are working
with the Cuban government to preserve the place against the ravages of
the Caribbean climate.
Some 150 of Old Havana's buildings date back to the 16th and 17th
centuries, about 200 from the 18th and more than 450 from the 19th,
which makes Havana the best preserved colonial city in the Americas.
However, an estimated nine buildings a week are collapsing. A walk round
the old city provides evidence enough of its fragile beauty; starting in
the oldest square, the Plaza of Arms, within half an hour you will have
taken in the Governor's Palace, the city's finest example of baroque
architecture; the open-air Doric temple, El Templete , where the city
was founded in 1519; and the magnificent Cathedral of San Cristóbal,
described by the novelist Alejo Carpentier as "music turned to stone".
If you want to see Havana alive and vibrant, not simply as an
architectural showpiece, stroll along Paseo de Martí on a Sunday
afternoon. This marvellous thoroughfare, running for a mile from Parque
Central to the Malecón ocean boulevard, is a raised walkway of inlaid
marble lined with Spanish laurel trees, abuzz on Sundays with the
Habaneros strutting their stuff, dancing to boom boxes, playing
dominoes, engaged in heated debate.
In its people, in the sounds and smells of Havana, you sense the
intrigue, the mystery, the untrammelled exoticism of a city that has
moved to its own beat for centuries. Occasionally the stench of sewage
wafts by, reminding you that this really is a dilapidated third world
city, not a film set. The decrepitude of the buildings and piles of
rubble also provide vivid reminders, as does the corpse of a dog long
dead that we almost trip over at the junction with the Malecón.
My most profound contact with the emotional landscape of Cuba's
rough-and-tumble history came on a clandestine visit to the National
School of Arts. This is a place that sums up the contradictions – the
high aspirations, low achievements and broken dreams – of Castro's
Communist utopia.
It was here, on the site of the former Havana Country Club, that Fidel
and Che Guevara chose to locate the epicentre of artistic and cultural
excellence. In this cradle of Batista's capitalist decadence – 163 acres
of groomed lawns and lakes – the revolutionaries created a new arts
academy, home to drama, music, plastic arts, modern dance and ballet.
Because of restrictions on imported cement and steel, it was constructed
mainly from locally produced bricks and terracotta tiles.
By the mid 1960s, money had started to run out and the half-finished
project fell into disrepair, becoming a weedy refuge for goats and
chickens. Now, decades later, the project is being repaired piece by
piece. Getting in to see this magnificent place proved to be difficult
(a photography student eventually smuggled us through the gates in her
car). Once inside, the soaring ambition and the ultimate neglect of this
place hit me all at once and I found myself close to tears. This is not
something I experience frequently, much less confess to, but for some
reason, standing in the centre of the Centre for Plastic Arts quite
overwhelmed me – as if, for a brief, snatched moment, I had seen the
purity of the human spirit. It had been raining, so the terracotta tiles
glistened in the late-afternoon sunlight. Over in the corner, two young
students practised the trumpet and across the rolling lawns a pair of
dazzling dancers rehearsed under the gaze of an instructor. Apparently,
there are more than 1,000 students studying at the school, many of them
foreign and 100 or so American.
Van Gruisen would like the WMF to donate some money to the ongoing rehab
of the buildings – and, after we leave, he makes arrangements to meet up
with Lázaro Zamora Vargas , the school's director. Vargas later tells
him that the Cuban government is not looking for outside funding for
this project and has earmarked about £12 million, but we afterwards
learn that a considerable sum is coming from outside. Like so many
things in Cuba, the truth about the restoration of the School of Arts is
elusive.
To get a measure of what is happening elsewhere on the island, Van
Gruisen and I hire a driver-guide by the name of Oscar Otero , a young
English teacher who like so many smart, educated Cubans has abandoned
his chosen profession out of financial desperation. I met people like
him throughout Cuba – a hydraulics engineer working as a waiter, a
teacher cleaning tables in Havana, a doctor working as a ghillie – and
was constantly reminded of the folly of an education system without a
functioning economy to utilise skills.
We head east towards the old sugar towns of Cienfuegos and Trinidad on
the island's south coast. The autopista is in varying degrees of decay
and Oscar dodges giant potholes, trundling horse-drawn carts, huge
modern air-conditioned tourist buses and asthmatic old Ladas, sometimes
all at the same time. The journey is worth it: the two towns are a
revelation.
Cienfuegos is a symphony of classical Spanish architecture, with a
cathedral (dating from 1870) and the Teatro Tomas Terry (1889) which is,
rather amazingly, named after the sugar baron who made his fortune
nursing weak and sick slaves back to health and reselling them at a
profit. As with so many of Cuba's grand buildings, the theatre interior
is frayed and worn, but it is a beautiful creation made almost entirely
of Cuban hardwoods. We walk in on a rehearsal that could have been
taking place a century ago.
Trinidad, where we spend the night, is 20 miles along a winding coastal
road to the east of Cienfuegos, and is another stunning, slightly
dishevelled place of pleasure. Once the island's sugar capital – called
the Valle de los Ingenios ("Valley of the Sugar Mills") – the town is
now all sleepy, pastel-coloured buildings and cobblestone streets that
explode into life at 10pm when the Casa de la Música lights up: a swirl
of music and dance held in the town's small outdoor amphitheatre.
Tonight, there is an audience of about 250, including 50 or 60 tourists,
nearly everyone dancing as the 12-piece band plays salsa, salsa-rap,
reggae and hip hop.
All the joie de vivre of Cuba seems to be concentrated in this one
moonlit spot: the heady exuberance of the music, the heat, the
sensuality of the dancers, the uncomplicated friendliness of the people.
Unlike Havana, which like all capitals has an undercurrent of hustle and
sleaze, Trinidad is the epitome of innocent pleasure: people having a
good time – and welcoming visitors. But then this is what Cuba does to
me; it allows me to put aside my ingrained scepticism of homo sapiens
and indulge in uncomplicated pleasures.
The following morning we head back to Havana, winding our way up from
the south coast into the verdant hills called Alturas de Santa Clara ,
through small villages, past ox wagons pulling agricultural goods from
one small settlement to another and real gauchos on horseback riding
into the sunset. Oscar, our guide, opens up a bit and talks about life
in modern Cuba. His sister, he says, is an economist who earns £7 a
month, plus an annual bonus of £15. Although he admits it's a struggle,
I do not once hear him criticise Castro or the government directly in
the eight days we are together.
He prefers not to talk about politics, but when I mention names such as
Elizardo Sánchez , the anti-Castro activist, he immediately falls back
into Party speak, calling him a "notorious dissident, totally at the
disposal of the Americans". When he talks about the Sixties, he refers
to it as "the period when the revolution triumphed". And, as with so
many Cubans, Oscar's dislike of America is never far from the surface.
"We have the most powerful country in the world 80 miles off our shores
and they don't like us. We have lived under the threat of invasion from
the Americans all our lives," he says, with total conviction.
When I ask Oscar if he is keen to travel abroad, he replies: "It is not
important to me. I am studying tourism at the moment, and that is enough
for me..." and his voice trails off. I don't pursue the subject further:
Cubans have enough demons to wrestle without Westerners like me
badgering them into saying things they are likely to regret. According
to the Committee to Protect Journalists, Cuba is still one of the
world's most censored nations. The long-term impact of Raúl Castro's
sudden removal, earlier this year, of the ban on private citizens owning
computers and mobile phones remains to be seen.
We join the steady stream of tourist buses ferrying their cargo to one
of the largest resort developments in the Caribbean: Varadero, with more
than 50 hotels and 15,000 rooms, as well as dozens of charter flights
(more than 50 a week from Canada alone) that bring two million tourists
a year to this island. What they get are very cheap holidays on the most
pristine stretch of beach I have seen in the Caribbean – and the almost
complete absence of Cubans. Of course, there are Cubans working behind
the scenes, keeping the wheels of this gigantic resort turning, and
there are Cubans cleaning the rooms and waiting the tables, but until
Raúl Castro lifted restrictions in March, locals were not allowed to
holiday here, even if they could afford it. Very little has changed since.
Just how little becomes apparent when we are having lunch at Xanadu, a
lavish mansion in the Varadero area, built in the 1930s by the chemicals
magnate Alfred du Pont in a prime location overlooking the cobalt waters
of the Straits of Florida . At the lovely top-floor bar where we drink
the almost obligatory daiquiris, Oscar drops his bombshell. Having spent
his entire time with us quietly expressing his admiration for the
political status quo, he announces that he is planning to emigrate to
Canada.
He doesn't want to talk about it too much, but he hints that it is the
constant scramble to survive and the no-can-do society that is
contemporary Cuba (there is a saying that, in Cuba, if you have to ask,
the answer is no) that has made him decide... And he certainly doesn't
want to say any more about it.
Riding back to the airport in a 1956 Oldsmobile driven by a cheerful
fellow by the name of Jorge, we sail past other Fifties American limos,
like so many gaily painted ships in a sea of automotive nostalgia, and
feel well satisfied with our time in Cuba. From a distance, the Olds
look shiny and well-maintained, but close up you can see rust patches,
broken-off bits and rather tatty upholstery – a bit like Havana, really.
Jorge grins manically the whole way, repeating the words "1956
Oldsmobile" and, on flat roads, easing the stick shift into neutral to
save petrol.
A few weeks after arriving home, I discover that my credit cards have
been cloned and my bank account all but emptied. A quick study of the
various expenditures – Miami's Cubano Pizza and El Presidente Hotel both
feature prominently – confirms my suspicions that somewhere along the
road in Cuba, the hustlers got hold of my cards and copied them. But it
was probably more a case of arreglar or busqueda than outright theft.
And it won't stop me from going back.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/travel/ultratravel/2632389/Cuba-escaping-Castros-shadow.html
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