Читать книгу Havana without Makeup - Herman Portocarero - Страница 29

22.EL CAÑONAZO

After a long day of standing in line, it’s with a sigh of relief that Havana hears the daily cañonazo.

At nine p.m. sharp, every day, after an elaborate ceremony carried out by soldiers in eighteenth-century uniforms, the cannon called El Capitalino fires a loud blank over the port channel, from the ramparts of the Cabaña fortress, to signify the closing of the city gates. It’s a loud boom! heard all over, sometimes even as far as the western suburbs, depending on how the wind blows.

These days the announcement is purely symbolic, of course. Havana was a walled city until the mid-nineteenth century. The tumbling of the walls in 1863 was a symbol of progress and the city breaking out of its colonial straightjacket. It was celebrated as a major public event. The independence struggle against Spain was slowly building up, and many in the crowds who heard the speeches and witnessed the music and patriotic flag-waving must have hoped in silence that the end of all the colonial shackles would soon follow.

The present trajectory of Prado is where the wall stood on the west side of town. All of what is now Centro Habana was extra-muros, and the elegant Vedado (“Forbidden”) neighborhood was once, as its name indicates, a dangerous no-go area. To the east, a remnant of the wall and a bronze map of its outline are preserved just next to the railway station – another beautiful relic of former elegance, waiting for Cuba’s extensive railway history and network to be restored. In the meantime, this is a zone with rather rough vibes, even by Old Havana standards, although the train station itself is now being restored.

The port area begins just east of that section of the wall. Up to the nineteenth century, this was a zone of stinking mangroves and badlands, the original turf of los negros curros (the black gangs), and another no-go area for the upright citizen. The gradual disaffection of the old port has again given it a somewhat forbidden atmosphere. The gangs roaming here in the old days had their distinctive flamboyant garb, preserved for us in paintings of the so-called costumbrista (“traditionalist”) artists such as Federico Mialhe and Patrizio Landaluze. Like the bandits in Andalucía, the black gangs of Havana signified a kind of social revolt and resistance, including against slavery. The distinctive dress code of the men and their girlfriends alike, as captured in paintings to be seen today at the Museo de Bellas Artes, illustrated their fearlessness. Their clothing looks surprisingly like sixties hippy outfits, with bell-bottoms, colorful bandanas, loud polka-dot blouses, and long embroidered skirts. They also had peculiar hairstyles, their own slang (unintelligible to outsiders), their own signature swagger, and many filed their teeth to look more menacing. The way Fernando Ortiz described them, based on his older sources, they were a perfect mixture of the Andalusian gypsy underworld (the bell-bottoms were known as a flamenco style) and African traditions (especially the filing of the teeth).

The neighborhoods forming the forbidding Manglar and the other ganglands back then have kept their original names: Barrio Jesús María, Los Sitios. The port area remained very much the domain of Afro-Cubans up to the Revolution. Santería practices were concentrated there, and the powerful communist longshoremen’s union ruled the neighborhood, led by the charismatic Aracelio Iglesias, who was murdered in 1948 and was later sanctified as an early precursor of the Revolution. But the Havana bourgeoisie defamed the union and the area by describing them as the hideouts for dark sorcery and male prostitution. The fabled negros curros del Manglar now became the despised negros bugarrones del muelle (the vulgar reference to “buggery” is intentional).

The curfew shot and the closing of the gates meant, among other things, that slaves had to be in their quarters. Immediately after the cañonazo, night watchmen or serenos began patrolling the streets of the city, chanting reassuring ditties on their rounds, to induce the honest citizen to sleep undisturbed.

But knowing Havana, one must think of what really happened while the innocent enjoyed their rest. The serenos chanted while all the forbidden night-life came crawling out from the deep shadows of the streets and from under the porticos of the palaces and the mansions: the fast-whispered passing of contraband by the side of a ship along the Muelle San Franciso; the deserter and the stowaway coming out of the hold of another ship at anchor, and disappearing to an uncertain fate in the muddy streets; sons of the well-to-do escaping from the back door of the family house to meet a forbidden brown or black lover; the flashing smile of the young prostitute; the deadly glint of long navaja sevillana knives for the settling of accounts in a passing beam of moonlight.

Sometimes it feels as if these two Havanas – the one constantly watched by serenos with reassuring words, and the other one crawling underneath – have never disappeared.

Havana by night was always untamable. The decrees of the Captains-General between 1770 and 1820 are an endless illustration of colorful anarchy, dancing criminality, interracial sex gone wild, and gambling all over, including in the convents. The law categorized all the vices it pretended in vain to eradicate. In fact, the city council itself was so corrupt that it lived mostly off the kickbacks of forbidden activities such as cockfights and the clandestine street lottery (which is still in existence in Havana today). Gambling, especially the card game monte, was strictly prohibited, and in fact the aldermen of the city charged a tax of an ounce of gold per day for each monte table. Slaves benefitted hugely from these situations because the gambling money helped them to buy their freedom faster. Unable to resist, the authorities finally created an official lottery in 1812.

When I think of this past of Havana by night, it often strikes me that we live yet again in similar ambiguities between taboo and tolerance; and it becomes ever clearer to me that Fernando Ortiz, who did his painstaking research on these themes, became ever more intrigued by the naughtiness he was supposedly criticizing.

During the first half of the twentieth century, Havana tried very hard to reform herself, with clean new neighborhoods full of impeccably designed and maintained architecture. We can still see them in luminous black and white pictures, on streets so empty that they seemed to exist in a permanent Sunday morning. It was as if Havana wanted to deny all of the dirt and stickiness of the past two hundred years.

But the exodus of the middle class after 1960 and the ensuing neglect sent Havana back to her original roughness, and not just in the port area or the former Manglar, but now all over the city. It was as if she developed in reverse. From seemingly well behaved and disciplined, she went back to being the wild quayside child she had always wanted to be, deep down.

The Revolution, too, tried very hard to chant reality into reassuring ideas with its endlessly repeated edifying slogans. Maybe this worked sometimes and for some. But in real life, night and the city will continue to follow their own rules and rhymes.