An ode to La Habana

I’ll be totally honest here: I didn't hate living in Cuba, but neither did I love it with an overwhelming passion. I was there for four years and they were four long, hard years, personally and professionally. Daily life in Cuba is hard for a multitude of reasons that I won’t go into here (we could start with the US embargo but we certainly wouldn’t stop there, plenty of Cuba’s problems are internally derived and perpetuated). And while I absolutely loved my job and the little school at which I worked, there were times when that was pretty hard too. There were days when I didn’t want to be there, when I longed to get out and live somewhere that was just easier. But – and this is a proper but – there were plenty of other days when living in Havana (La Habana, properly) was magical and head-spinning and marvellous. I spent a solid two hours trawling through my photo album deleting things yesterday and as I did so, plenty of good memories came flooding back alongside the less good ones. So, this blog post is an ode to La Habana: the city as seen through my foreign, western, capitalist eyes, in the words of one traveller a ‘festering treasure chest’*, the beautiful and the ugly as closely intertwined as the liana vines that drape the jagüey trees and buildings all over the city. 

 

Richard Sykes, HM Ambassador to the Republic of Cuba in 1970, wrote a description on arriving that I think worth sharing here as, despite being 50 years old, some of it remains accurate. “The visual impact of the city on a new arrival is essentially one of seediness – of shabby gentility and of having come down in the world… In its corrupt and capitalist heyday Havana must have been beautiful. But now every building badly needs paint… There are pot-holes in every side street (and many main ones) which never seem to be filled in…” Havana is still – I think – very beautiful, but yes, every building badly needs paint (except those fancy new hotels) and yes, there are pot-holes everywhere. In many ways, the city really hasn’t moved on much from the 1970s, or indeed the 1950s. Havana is a city trapped in a time warp, like a fly caught in amber. That’s how it’s marketed to tourists: come for the fabulous old buildings, for the vintage 50s cars (held together with tape, spit and a prayer), for the beauty of a city that is 500 years old and relatively untouched by ‘modern’ developments – no skyscrapers, few buildings made of gleaming glass (only the newer, fancier hotels), uncommercialized. A city where salsa and reggaeton blare from street corners next to the carts loaded with fruit and vegetables (in season); where the faded glamour of hotels that in the 50s played host to mobsters and millionaires sits alongside the vanity projects of Spanish colonial rule. Step back in time to a world without ATMs, McDonald’s or air-conditioning, where the brutal summer heat and humidity drives people out of their houses as the sun sets and down to the Malecón, the famous road that stretches along the seafront, to catch the evening breeze. 

 

Old Havana in particular is a strange mix of pre and post revolution and the choice of what to preserve and what to let crumble is both baffling and an insight into what the government feels is and is not worthy of preserving. In the Museo de la Revolución, the old Presidential Palace, the regime has lovingly curated the bullet holes in the walls from the ultimately futile assassination attempt in 1957 on Fulgencio Batista, the last President of Cuba antes de la revolución gloriosa, while the imitation Hall of Mirrors, modelled on the one in the palace at Versailles, is covered with dust and not accessible to museum visitors. Less than half a mile away, the Gran Teatro Alicia Alonso, named after Cuba’s prima ballerina of the 20^th century, is all marble staircases, high ceilings and plush red seats; exit the theatre, turn right and walk to the end of the block and whatever was there before is both falling down and sprouting trees from its empty windows. The Sunday morning antiques market in the leafy Plaza de Armas and the wooden cobbles of the palace of the Spanish Governor General retain a colonial charm; two streets away, rubbish from an open dumpster lends the streets the fragrance of rotting food mingled with open sewers. Havana is a city of extreme contrasts.

 

Secondly, it’s worth bearing in mind that Havana is, like every other city in the world, made up of different neighbourhoods with their own distinct character and look. It sits sprawled along the Atlantic coast, surprisingly small when you fly over it, and it is the sea that is responsible for its crumbling appearance, with years of salt spray taking its toll on the houses nearest the Malecon. Old Havana, or Habana Vieja, is the picture-postcard place, where most tourists go, where most photos are taken, where old ladies dressed in Santeria costumes and smoking cigars try to read your fortune and hustle whatever they can (a large part of the local economy revolves around hustling in one form or another and hustlers are known locally as jineteros or jineteras; I’ll save that for another blog). 

 

Walking down the streets of Habana Vieja is endlessly intriguing, and I found myself constantly amazed by the strange mix of beauty and decay. Pushing past the crowds of tourists and jineteros on Obispo and meandering between plazas, you realise that this is a city where tourists and locals are cheek-by-jowl, mostly because everyone is cheek-by-jowl. If you’re looking for privacy, Havana is not your place. In high summer, in a place where no one has a/c, doors are flung open (though the entrances usually barred) and you catch a snapshot of a Habanero’s home. Havana is a dark city, with limited street lighting, and you see a similar aversion to lighting inside people’s houses where single bulbs lit up sparsely-furnished rooms, usually aided by a flickering box television. In some houses, icons can be glimpsed on the walls, as communist Cuba was once deeply Catholic; in others, you might catch traces of the orishas, the gods of Santería, Cuba’s syncretic, polytheistic, Afro-Cuban Catholic/Yoruba blended religion. From the balconies and windows hang drifts of laundry baking dry and as well as the street sellers yelling ‘biscocho’, ‘pasteles’ and ‘gelado gelado’ with strange intonations, you will see the old practice of a bucket being used to pass something bought at street level to the balconies above. There was a brief flurry of renovation and building in towards the end of the Obama years, and some of the streets were smartened up prior to last year’s celebration of the city’s 500^th anniversary. For the most part, many buildings remain in various states of crumbling decrepitude and Habaneros tend to live half inside and half outside. People sit gathered around tables in the street, playing dominos; children play on doorsteps or kick a football around; in the days before mobile data arrived in Cuba people congregated around wifi hotspots like moths to a flame. 

 

Habano Centro is the next neighbourhood along to the west, where people spill out of yet more crumbling buildings onto streets that wake up as the sun goes down and remain clamorous and noisy until the early hours of the morning. Few of these buildings are newly built and most are home to generations of families, who live their lives in the calle and on top of each other. Go further west yet and you reach Vedado, an entirely different place of wide, tree-lined avenues and grand (if still somewhat decrepit) mansions. At the top of Vedado is the magnificent, empty Plaza de la Revolución, only used for parades and tourists taking photos of the iconic, thirty-foot-high image of Che Guevara plastered on a building. Other than taking visitors there for the obligatory photo shoot, I only once saw the Plaza actually full, after the death of Fidel Castro in 2016, when mourners by their thousands, of all ages, thronged the streets, waving the Cuban flag and huge photos of the Comandante on poles. 

 

Creep south and west from the Plaza (though it always felt like I was driving north) into Nuevo Vedado and you’ll see the old Chinese gate, remants of Cuba’s Chinatown, though its inhabitants are now largely gone and its mark only left on the faces of those Cubans who tend to be referred to, in a crashingly non-pc manner, as ‘Chinos’. Near this rather sad little monument, you will find the immense Cementerio de Colón, built in 1876 and one of the largest cemeteries in the world, 150 acres rammed with more than 500 mausoleums, chapels and family vaults. Deep in the middle of the Cementerio is a lone monument to Allied fighters, at which an extremely quiet and unobtrusive ceremony is held each year on Remembrance Day. The year I went to the ceremony, I managed to pass out from dehydration and nearly split my head open on one of those magnificent headstones, had I not been rescued by a parent from the school who noticed me toppling forward. 

 

Further west from Vedado, cross under the Río Almendares, through the tunnel that flooded after Hurricane Irma raged through Cuba and brought the sea crashing over the Malecón and up Paseo, and you hit Miramar, now known as the diplomatic suburb where the embassies (and staff) are located – except the ambassadors, all in Siboney another five kilometres up Avenida Quinta – and once home to Havana’s wealthiest citizens, who fled Cuba after the revolution. It’s now home to some of the more high-end hotels, as well as the school where I worked, and its many mansions are a mix of lovingly-converted homes and multiple-family-squatter residences. From my balcony on Calle 42, I could see west to those hotels and the hideously ugly Russian embassy, built during the glory days of the Soviet Union to look like a sword planted in the ground and, after dark, bearing a startling resemblance to a Transformer. I could also see north to the sea, just two blocks away off the edge of Avenida Primera; a favourite haunt was a paladar (private restaurant) right on the water, an oasis of calm right next to a popular and not-maintained-at-all bathing spot and opposite a government-run bar that was in no way calm or an oasis. Despite being the more well-heeled, up-market part of town, you’d find strange marks of Santería (neither well-heeld nor up-market, as religions go) in unexpected places: headless chicken carcasses in the street on Sunday mornings following Saturday night rituals; a decomposing chicken foot in a pot by the door of the man selling ice, and certainly not put there for decoration. Keep driving down Quinta and you hit Cubanacán and Siboney, formerly known as Havana’s Beverly Hills as its wide, quiet streets play host to huge mansions now home to foreign diplomats and business staff, Cuban celebrities and government elite. I got to go to a few of these, as our school served the diplomatic community and we were lucky enough to get invited to various functions. My particular favourite was the home of the German ambassador, modelled on Tara from Gone With The Wind. Not only was it the location for the best diplo party of the year, Reunification Day, where the bratwurst and bier was shipped in from Germany to the great joy of the diplo crowd, the then-ambassador (whose daughter was at the school) was an immensely generous and cultured man, so I was privileged to be invited, on occasion, to the mansion to hear magical jazz and classical recitals. Needless to say, this is not my life anymore.

 

Just a little further on from Siboney, hitting the western edge of the city, is Club Havana, formerly Havana golf club and now expat haunt with a members-only beach that I went to all the time despite not being a member, to my shame. It's not the only beach in Havana, though you have to schlep a little (ay mi madre!) for your beach day. Turn the other direction from Habana Vieja, through the tunnel, past the Morro castle and out to the east you find more recently-built suburbs, Alamar and Cojimar, a dystopian, Soviet-era nightmare of hideous concrete blocks interspersed, randomly, with excellent small organic farms. Keep driving past them and you will reach the playas del este, the Caribbean beaches of your dreams – pure white sand, turquoise sea, and in the summer absolutely rammed with Cubans trying to stay cool in the (bath-water temperature) ocean. There is more of Havana to the south, too; as it is when you live in any city, there were neighbourhoods I didn’t visit at all, or just drove through on the way to somewhere else. Few tourists make it as far as Regla or La Lisa, for example, to the south and east of the port; run-down neighbourhoods, with poor-quality housing and appalling roads even for Cuba. I only made it to La Lisa once, on a school trip where we were working with a local group to bring food and clothing to communities that had been devastated by a tornado in early 2019. Likewise I spent little to no time in the south of the city, though I would drive through it to get to the autopista going south to Trinida or Playa Giron (the Bay of Pigs) and would sometimes give a lift to colleagues who lived in Ciudad Deportiva or out past the Plaza de la Revolución, as transport in Havana is notoriously unreliable and slow, especially during the frequent tropical rainstorms of the rainy season. 

 

Despite my previously-expressed lack of enthusiasm, I do regret I didn’t make more of the time I had living there to explore. As one does, when one lives in a place, you put it off and off until you get to the end of your time and then bloody Covid-19 hit and all my fabulous plans – a week exploring with Ronnie, who was coming to visit; nights out on the town with Morag; a proper walk round the Cementerio; more salsa please – went out of the window. Yet I have some fabulous memories. Watching extraordinary modern Cuban dance from Acosta Danza at the Teatro Nacional and a rigidly classical Giselle at the Gran Teatro. Drinking cocktails with Georgie and Berrin in different rooftop bars – at El Frente on O’Reilly, at El Cocinero in Vedado – as the sun set and the noise level grew. Walking the sweltering streets in mid-August when I had been in the country less than a week and dashing gratefully into the gloom and relative cool of the Basílica Menor in the Plaza San Fancisco de Asis to discover a beautiful old colonial Catholic sanctuary. Finding a dingy shop on Obispo with Tamar, where old revolutionary posters were on sale for a song next to a poster advertising the 2016 concert given by the Rolling Stones. Running through the rain with my boss to a diplomatic function at the Palacio de los Capitanes Generales, realising my pretty dress was soaked through and so hiding behind a plant, gawping at the colonial arches and intricate columns. Dancing salsa in the rain at Club 1830 and not really caring at all that my clothes were soaked. Lying on the beach at Club Havana on Sunday mornings listening to the waves. So I return to the idea, so eloquently expressed by someone else, of Havana as a festering treasure chest. So much ugliness alongside so much beauty. That is my ode to La Habana. 

 

PS. There are some photos below to give a bit of a flavour. If you want to dig a little deeper into the real Havana, I recently read my way through the Havana Quartet, the Mario Conde detective stories written by Leonardo Padura, one of Cuba’s best-known writers and, for me, someone who captures Havana beautifully. If you can track down the Netflix series Four Seasons in Havana, then do – they likewise capture Havana beautifully and are great adaptations of the novels. 

 

  

 

*Brin-Jonathan Butler - always cite your sources...