Bienvenida a la Habana!

I’ve only been here three days, so I’ll be very frank: this blog is the result of three fairly intense days processing life in my new home, and is really just a collection of first impressions which are by no means comprehensive, or indeed fixed. I offer them to you as they appeared to me, as I try to get my head around the fact that I now live in this extraordinary place.

One of the first things I noticed was that Cubans don’t say Havana, they say Habana. They say rebolucion, not revolucion (!hasta la Victoria siempre!). They don’t pronounce their s’s, so instead of Espana they say Epana, and instead of gracias it’s gracia, and instead of buenos dias there’s a slur of sounds that comes out as bomdia. They speak a languorous, almost voluptuous sort of Spanish. I wonder whether the heat and humidity has caused people to be economical when they talk, to slur and miss bits out and shorten because it’s just less effort. So from now on I too shall say Habana and hope that I don’t come across as a bit pretentious. After all, when in Rome…

Actually, speaking of heat, the second thing I noticed is that it’s not as hot I was expecting. It is humid for sure, so much so that at 10.00 a.m. my fifteen minute walk to the school from my new home left me distinctly damp, though by no means drowning in sweat. And it is extra-humid when you enter a place with no air-conditioning, and it’s worth bearing in mind that a/c is by no means a given in this country. For example, there was none at all in the arrivals hall at Jose Martin airport, meaning I waited half an hour for my bags in a dingy room with humidity levels like your average sauna. Many women carry around small fans with them, rather as women do in Regency-era plays; I now have a rather strikingly-painted white, blue and orange fan and was enthusiastically using it as I traipsed around Havana on my first foray into town (wish I’d had it at the airport). But it’s not as stinking hot as I imagined it would be. Maybe I’ve come here during a freakishly not-hot August, with daily temperatures somewhere around the 33˚C mark (not too bad); maybe it will get hotter as the month progresses; maybe the afternoon humidity and rain-storms will wear me down. But also, maybe five years of sweating in Tel Aviv in the summer and sitting in the Israeli sun has hardened me and conditioned me for this sort of weather. Either way, whilst I don’t exactly want to sit in the sun at 2.00 p.m. I’m not as overwhelmed by the heat as I thought I would be. However, I’m saying this on day three of my new life in Cuba, so give me a few weeks and I could be singing a different song.

The third thing you notice is that there really is music everywhere. Old men on the streets and in the squares with guitars and maracas and instruments I can’t name; small bands in bars with a singer and a few musicians, playing traditional son; loud-speakers dumped in parks or on the pavement by the Malecón, the mile-long road that runs along the sea front leading from the suburbs where I live to Vedado and Havana Centro; something I can’t identify blaring out of the speakers in the first supermarket I went to (of which more later – not going to lie, it was a shock) and which could be reggaeton which I’m told is a popular sound here. At risk of sounding overly poetic, Cubans seem to have music in their blood, flowing through their veins. Yaneisy, who is the Registrar at the school and who took me out for the day to Old Havana (Havana Vieja), says that everyone in Cuba is either a singer, a musician or a dancer (she’s a dancer). I’m not surprised.

The fourth thing is just how crazy beautiful much of Havana is, and how the parts that aren’t crazy beautiful are actually crazy ugly or simply crazy. Miramar, the area of the city I live in, is packed with beautiful old houses surrounded by lush gardens and enormous green trees. Those that have been restored or properly maintained are postcard worthy, almost every single one, as they are unique in their style and colour and size. The really big ones, a little further out in the area where the diplomats live, are like something out of a clichéd novel about the colonial Caribbean – massive, porticoed, elaborately decorated with rococo plasterwork. And yet scattered around the streets, tucked in next to these gorgeous houses, you find many others in quite a bad state of disrepair: flaking paint, windows boarded-up, sagging balconies. If they haven’t been preserved, the weather has got to them in quite a serious way – and it’s the heat and humidity that’ll do for houses here. Back in central Havana you get a higher dilapidated building to restored building ratio, with some apartments deemed too dangerous for habitation and others just in a state of total disrepair. The contrast is striking. (For the record, I’m living in a relatively new apartment block and not in a massive colonial pile.)

Here’s a few other, smaller things:

• There are two types of money, monedad nacionale or pesos, and pesos convertibles or CUCs. You use them for different things. Yes, it’s confusing. BUT they have three-CUC notes. So awesome!
• There’s a warmth to the people I’ve met so far that is really appealing.
• There really aren’t that many cars on the road. And yes, there are lots of cool old American cars but they’re mostly rented out to tourists; your average Cuban who actually owns a car may well be driving a 1980s Lada not a 1950s Chevy.
• Glorious, glorious sunsets and sunrises. Probably because of all the clouds.
• It’s hard to find decent vegetables. The agro-mercados (local markets selling fresh produce) have vegetables, but not a wide variety. Living next to the shuk in Jerusalem for five years has spoiled me; time to lower expectations. Cuba is definitely not a good place to be a vegetarian.
• Really, no internet. Even at school where there’s wifi, the connection is super-slow. If you’re reading this blog, you should be impressed that I managed to upload it. Seriously.
• There are no kettles. Apparently, people boil water in pots on the stove. That’s just weird.

I’m sure I’ll have much more to share over the next few weeks (one future blog topic may well involve my quest to find decent tomatoes somewhere in this city). But for now, those are the first impressions of Havana. I have to say, I feel pretty excited about the prospect of living here, even without 4G connectivity.