Castro's Cuba crumbles
We arrived last night and only now get to see our Casa Particular in daylight. These are private houses which in 1997 the Cuban government first allowed to be used for bed and breakfast accommodation for tourists.
Our breakfast terrace has huge columns and pale blue walls with the window frames greying white. It is a theme echoed in most of the buildings visible down the street with a palate of similar tones in pink, yellow and what Georgie calls arsenic green. The shabby building opposite with gorgeous art nouveau windows has a healthy collection of ferns growing around the balcony that would befit a display garden at the Chelsea Flower Show.
Faded grandeur? That is not enough, more ubiquitous dilapidation. Everything has an unloved, seedy air about it. Buildings once elegant and beautiful now decaying and unkempt. The balustrades crumble, the paint peels, the door doesn’t shut, the rusty steel grill hangs off the wall at a perilous angle. Our casa was once was a grand house, as I suspect were most in this street, built in the twenties, when Cuba was indeed grand and arguably at its most functional. There is marble on the floors and the handrails of the narrow stairs to the first floor. Like most of the houses it seems that street level is merely for access, all the living accommodation is above with hugely high ceilings. We have chandeliers and a deep cornice in the salone. The décor is simple; once white emulsion now more Farrow and Ball on the cheap, and furniture best described as Havana Random. But Leonardo our host is attentive and helpful and does his best. He looks at me in a strange way when I ask if there is any jam for the breakfast roll. The look says you are lucky to have the roll, and as we will learn, he is right, (albeit that the bread is so appalling everywhere, it may be better luck for it to be absent). The remainder of the breakfast is sliced fruit (the omnipresent guava, pineapple and papaya) and coffee. Eggs are in short supply we are told, so is milk, which is often powdered, until that runs out too . . .
Our breakfast conversation is interrupted by the deafening exhaust note of a passing truck. I look over the parapet and find it isn’t a truck but a battered Lada circa 1980. Maintenance of exhaust systems mirrors the maintenance of most things here – there is no maintenance.
It is time to explore the enticing city beneath our balcony. The roads are swept by dismal men with brooms but are shambolic, and the litter collects faster than the sweeper can cope with it. We have just come from Indian cities where the streets thrum with swarms of waspish scooters and motorcycles, and a billion souls going somewhere. Here the traffic is occasional. A few scooters silently float past, silently because they are electric, the first of a thousand contradictions.
There are cars of course, cars that rumble past slowing for the potholes, at least half of which are the fifties classics that appear in all the photos of Havana. In the tourist brochures they gleam – and some do, like the one that will take us on a tour of the city – but most don’t, the electric colours are wonderful but are hand painted Dulux dulled by Cuban sun. When they pass the air is tainted by the pungent exhaust of poorly combusted fuel, the road pongs like an old-fashioned lawn mower on Luton airport’s flight path.
There are people here, beautiful people and lots of them. It is warm and the sun shines and nobody is wearing very much, and they are doing even less, but there is rhythm to the indolence. Indian cities surge and heave and bustle, these streets saunter, slouch, and strut. The clothing is bright and the lycra clings. Tight pants on slim limbs. Doorways are for small conversations – him and her linked by a finger, a time and a place perhaps, or just a promise – or for just sitting, looking out at the world from behind the everywhere steel grills. But there are also roly-poly folds too, still sprayed with lycra, and Marco and I suspect that some of this flesh is for sale. Why would it not be? Older women wait and watch, old men rue, everyone queues. A cool dude in white wellies interrupts his flirty nods to give me a cigar. Romeo y Julieta no doubt. We love it.
There are no conventional shop windows – nothing with glamour or glitz to entice – no pharmacies or electrical shops, no bright clothes or shiny things to buy, just mysterious doorways with queues outside. For what are they queuing? We try to fathom it out. Later we are told by our man Gregor that it might be that a necessity has finally arrived or maybe the news is out that something good is coming in . . . You don’t know what it will be but join the queue just in case. It maybe potatoes or perhaps washing machines. But there is also a perverse rule that limits the numbers in shops, so security men are employed at the door to limit the numbers inside. Nothing to buy, nor as we will learn, anything to buy it with. The average wage is less than $30 per month. One litre of petrol costs a buck. Last month inflation reached 44%.
As we approach the Old Town and Parque Centrale it all changes. The dome of the Capitolio – modelled on same in Washington – soars into the azure, its pristine marble and gilt ribs gleaming in the sun. Around it is a mix of smart buildings, some two-tone colonial with arches and pillars, others angular and contemporary, but not at all bad. And here there really are gleaming Cadillacs, and touts pulling the tourists into the bench seats for a tour of the city. If course, I want to do it, and we rumble off to get a better idea of how the place fits together. We visit Revolution Square and pay homage to Cubans founder Marti, along with Che and Fidel whose images adorn neighbouring buildings. We park next to a dozen other glorious 1950s American cars disgorging visitors to this brutalist space. I suspect that the irony of the arrival of visitors to this homage to revolutionary communism in the ultimate symbols of the excesses of US capitalism is lost on our young driver, but there is nothing to do here, so we move on. We view some pleasant places but the Malecon – the much-vaunted oceanside corniche – disappoints. Unfinished tower blocks and ruined buildings interspersed with modernist urban infrastructure speak more of lost opportunity than worthy civic pride.
Marco and Georgie are wonders. They never let us have a minute between sites and activities. The next two days we blast through the capital trying to savour its essence and see if can find its soul. I think we do, partly by going places but mostly by talking to taxi drivers and waitresses. We do so much, when we come to leave it feels like we’ve been here a week, even if half the State museums are closed.
The State still runs everything employing 73% of the population. Cubans are now allowed to start and own a business – only one mind – and can import products to support this. The bar at La Guajara (probably the best restaurant in the city) is as well stocked as any in Miami or Madrid, and the food excellent, but the lovely state-owned historic bar in the old town has shelves empty save for one bottle of white rum. All State-run institutions (virtually everything) don’t work; the trains are useless; the buses look flash but can’t be relied on by a tourist with a deadline. The reason for the lack of potatoes is that the state controls the price they will pay, and growers can’t survive on it, so grow nothing.
One evening we visit the swish part of town where the embassies and rich folk hang out and end up at a lush privately owned restaurant famed for its lobster. It was fine – not great, but fine. We must pay in dollars or euros, and it isn’t cheap at $30 a head. It is a world completely inaccessible to the Havanisti outside. Coming out we struggle to find a taxi and eventually hail a battered Lada. The confused driver speaks no English and doesn’t know the road where our Casa is, but after agreeing a $10 fare he is prepared to take us. First, we must get in . . . none of the doors seem to open or close. More to the point they don’t stay closed. When he turns on the ignition, we are blasted by electric Cuban rhythms from massive speakers behind us, which is the only part of the vehicle that functions properly. The dashboard is a Christmas tree of warning lights. None of the instruments work. The ride home is punctuated by him periodically leaning across to re-shut the various doors that fly open when we hit potholes. But we laugh and laugh. Georgie is convinced we are being kidnapped as we seem to be heading out of town and she wants to write a last message to her children . . . Marco says the reason is the music is so loud is so you can’t hear the grinding noises from the back axle only millimetres beneath his left buttock. But the music is fantastic, and we laugh lots more. Later we ascertain that a car like this is worth about $12000. How can a country work when an unroadworthy forty-year-old banger costs three times the average annual salary? And there is no petrol anyway. And you can’t buy a potato!!!
We have to find live music, (one of the reasons for coming here) and have been given various suggestions. Then on a traffic island in the centre of town Carolina starts chatting to lovely Maribel. After the ‘where you from?’ entrée, (yes, that old chestnut again) she happens to ask if we are going to the 50th anniversary concert of the Bona Vista Social Club that evening. What? How? Where? Can we get tickets? ‘Sure,’ she says I’ll take you to the venue. An hour later, after a Mojito or two we are ticketed up and the girls have made a lifelong friend. The concert is great, a parade of ancient and not quite so ancient musicians effortlessly doing what they have done for ever: light the fire of salsa. Age matters not a jot, we are near the green room and watch the frail octogenarian with the Cuban trilby cautiously pick his way to the stage, and then, with the first cord . . . he is transformed into a stylish crooner, with all the steps and panache of Rat Packer. They say about jazz that you either have it or you don’t, and perhaps it’s the same with salsa, but it sure seems you don’t lose it. It is a dazzling and memorable show performed in a small venue with only thirty odd tables and a seemingly unlimited supply of mojitos. There is dancing in the aisles from the first song, which doesn’t stop until the final curtain call.
We found music!
But now it’s time to head south to the city of Trinidad and see rural Cuba.
We love Havana. The Germans we meet later in a restaurant were surprised at this; ‘but it is so dirty, and nothing works properly.’ All true from a Germanic perspective, but the broken fabric has charm and character and oozes soul, and irrepressible Cuban spirit. More worryingly, the flashy good bits are priced at a level impossible to reconcile with the poverty round the corner.
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