Читать книгу Island People - Joshua Jelly-Schapiro - Страница 17

CHAPTER 4

CUBA SÍ

PLUNKED ON AN IMPOSING BLUFF by the sea, Cuba’s Hotel Nacional remains Havana’s best place for gazing over its seawall and pondering the city’s present and past. First opened in 1930, the stately cream-colored hotel was built to house Prohibition-era American tourists, who came to quaff rum cocktails invented by the hotel’s bartenders to separate yanquis from their dollars. Since that time, the Nacional’s rooms have hosted even more stars and statesmen than evidenced by the hundreds of cracked photos watching over the lobby, which is as dusty as you’d expect of a once-luxe place that’s been managed for decades by the Cuban Communist Party. But with its patio still stalked by emerald peacocks and waiters in faded black-and-whites, the grounds are lovely. And it’s not hard, sipping a mojito in a wicker chair here, to imagine the scene on a fateful day in December 1946, when the Nacional was closed for a private meeting.

On that afternoon a few days before Christmas, a group of distinguished foreign visitors tucked into a feast of ersatz local delicacies. There were crab and queen conch enchiladas from the southern archipelago, swordfish and oysters from the nearby village of Cojímar, roast breast of flamingo and tortoise stew and grilled manatee, all washed down with añejo rum. It is unknown whether the attendees—whose number included about twenty of North America’s most notorious gangsters—ended their meal with a cake like the one served at their feast’s fictional rendering in The Godfather: Part II. But as in the film, the purpose of the gathering was clear: to divvy up shares in the empire of vice they were busy establishing in Havana.

During the next decade, the Mafia built a seaside gambling resort, which soon rivaled, in profits and glamour, its sister project in dusty Las Vegas. Under the canny direction of Meyer Lansky, the Jewish don who’d risen from the streets of New York’s Lower East Side, members of the Havana mob became fabulously wealthy. So too did Cuba’s U.S.-backed dictator, Fulgencio Batista, whose stake in the mob’s affairs exceeded the sacks of cash delivered weekly to the presidential palace. With Lansky and fellow mobsters like Santo Trafficante employed as “tourism experts” in his government, Batista eliminated taxes on the tourism industry, guaranteed public financing for hotel construction, and even granted responsibility for Cuba’s infrastructure development to a new mob-controlled bank, Bandes. In December 1957 the opening of the Riviera, a $14 million Mafia show palace just down the seawall from the Nacional, was celebrated by a special episode of The Steve Allen Show on U.S. television and a gala in Havana featuring Ginger Rogers. Three months later, the twenty-five-story Havana Hilton—mortgage holder: Bandes—became Cuba’s biggest hotel yet.

The party ended on New Year’s Day 1959. Fidel Castro’s barbudos had built support for their cause, in Cuba’s countryside, by decrying the capital’s occupation by mobsters. Now they advanced on Havana. Batista fled the island, and Castro’s bearded rebels established their headquarters in the Havana Hilton. They loosed a truckload of pigs on the sleek lobby of the Riviera. Castro announced the “socialist nature” of his revolution. Nikita Khrushchev sent Soviet missiles. President John F. Kennedy—who, during a visit to Havana the previous year as a senator, had spent an afternoon with three mob-supplied prostitutes under the gaze, from behind a two-way hotel room mirror, of Santo Trafficante—instituted the embargo which would for decades define U.S.-Cuba relations. And Cuba, once coveted by Thomas Jefferson as “the most interesting addition which could ever be made to our system of states,” became an enduring thorn in that system’s heel.¹

When I first stepped into the garden at the Nacional, I was an American student chuffed to be visiting a place that in the late 1990s my government would rather I didn’t. Since then, the sharpness of Cuba’s thorn—blunted first by the fall of the Soviet Union and then by the senescence of Havana’s leaders—has now also been softened by the warming waters issued from a new American president in Washington. Barack Obama’s restoration of Washington’s formal diplomatic ties with Havana, just before Christmas in 2014, also included a partial end to the ban on U.S. travelers coming here, if not an actual tearing up of the decades-old embargo that was still described, on a billboard I passed a year after the announcement, as “El Genocidio Mas Largo En La Historia”: the longest genocide in history.

Such state-sponsored propaganda messages, which supplanted old placards for Coca-Cola and Esso Gas at the start of the embargo, have long dominated Cuba’s visual landscape. Artifacts of blunt lefty moralizing, if not of Cold War kitsch, they were once manna to those “internationalist” visitors who came here to cut sugarcane and do volunteer work in solidarity with this anti-capitalist wonderland whose billboards didn’t tell people that they were ugly or that they should buy Crest toothpaste to be happy. Instead, these signs proclaimed Cuba’s devotion to the cause of Nelson Mandela or to proudly touting a society in which “no Cuban child sleeps in the streets.” That claim can remarkably still be made, in a country with huge problems but also a functioning social safety net.

What kept a rusty state-run economy afloat for the decades after the revolution here was never the volunteer work of crusty Bolivians or Berkeley-ites. It was the patronage of the Soviets. When that patronage ended after the fall of the USSR, Cuba lost 90 percent of its revenue. But Cuban officials determined to keep their social safety net working and the state vaguely solvent. They realized that the funds had to come from somewhere—and so they came from European and Canadian tourists. Attracting tourists’ dollars became official policy.

The fantasies that foreigners now come here to fulfill with those dollars, especially now that the foreigners’ numbers are set to include more Americans, are usually a lot less noble than those carried by old members of the Venceremos Brigade. They include both the dodgy visions of sex tourists who’ve always found exploitative joy here and of befuddled beret-sporting admirers of Che Guevara’s legend. They include the pretensions of NPR-listening parents and their German peers, who turned Buena Vista Social Club into not merely the best-selling record in the history of “world music”; played by monied northerners to warm their wine parties, the Buena Vista record comprised a kind of greatest-hits reel from the mob-run heyday of Havana’s dance-band peak in the 1950s. Its cuts were performed by survivors of that era who were no more or less charming, in their perky pageboy caps, than most older citizens of an extroverted nation where it’s not just performers who perform, and the job of sexiness is never left solely to the young. The album conjured a world, especially for U.S. listeners, sundered from them by politics and time. It furnished the perfect aural accompaniment to a certain image of Havana that need never be sullied for the sort of visitor here who rolls around town in a convertible cab, treating a city that’s home to two million actual humans as a kind of sepia set. For such visitors, Havana’s art deco lines and old autos, if not those cars’ actual riders, feed an especially unearned form of nostalgia.

What’s wrong with that particular form of nostalgia, when projected onto today’s Cuba from outside, is obvious. The charm of a ’55 DeSoto, if you’re its owner, dwindles fast when it’s breaking down every few blocks, or if it catches fire because it’s been refitted to run on propane. A crumbling tenement’s faded pastel hue, won by being blasted by salt air and unmaintained for five decades, isn’t as cute when its roof caves in (as occurs to an average of three buildings a day in Havana, says an oft-quoted statistic here). But what’s more knottily interesting about nostalgia here is its larger role in Cuban life, both on the island and abroad. For particular kinds of longing on which fierce nostalgia feeds have found in Cuba a plenipotent source at least since the November week in 1492 when Columbus poked around its northern shore and promptly began eulogizing “the most beautiful land that human eyes have ever seen.”

For some decades now similar sentiments have been especially audible among Cubans who take their morning café not in Havana’s Vedado but in Styrofoam cups outside the Versailles Restaurant in Miami. The nostalgia of Florida Cubans who after the Castros’ revolution left behind memories or gorgeous palm-fringed homes is easy to explain. But it’s not just the Cubans who’ve left who speak like this. If one ever needs affirmation that this emotion’s targets aren’t limited solely to the past—that one can also be nostalgic for the present and for the future, or simply for life while you’re alive—Cuba is the place to learn. Perhaps Columbus sensed a love for superlatives, by means of some mysterious Genoese intuition, in this island’s very soil. Whatever the source, his first effusive appraisal clocked the abiding tone of much conversation in a country that remains in love with over-the-top endearments, and with diminutive ones, too. Here where the woman at the lunch counter will address you as “mi vida” (my life’s devotion), and apologize for running out of cheese sandwiches by sighing, “Disculpe, mi amor” (I’m sorry, my love), every Pedro’s a Pedrito and every Ana an Anita. Here where every drama contains hints of melodrama, the unbearable—the too much or too little; the too beautiful, the too painful, the too sweet—is to be cherished too, at least in its retelling. There’s a reason Cuba is the home of the bolero: one of many Cuban song forms to conquer the Americas in the twentieth century, it’s a form of ballad devoted not merely to rending the heart but to making it bleed, as well. And it fits. Whether you’re from here, or were from here once, or would like to be again. The island as obsession, the island as wound—it’s a not-uncommon way, for all those who touch Cuba, to engage it.

Meyer Lansky was once asked why he remained fixated on Cuba during the decades between his first visit here, in the 1920s, and when he opened the Riviera in 1957. He replied with a gangster’s concision: “I couldn’t get that little island off my mind.”² Neither has any Cuban who’s ever been here and then left, or has parents who’ve done the same. With its balmy breezes and sherbet sunsets and tres leches ice cream and rumba to kill, there’s a lot for which to build affection, and upon which to base one’s own understanding—whether personal or received—of what’s known here as cubanidad: Cuban-ness. Only people from nations with a healthy sum of self-regard see fit to devote blood and thought to the idea not merely that they possess an ineffable nation-ness, but that their country’s essence has contours that are discoverable—and that those contours’ essence is something for which one can, and maybe should, really suffer. But Cuba is one of those nations: it’s not just the intellectuals who stake hopes and careers, here, on arguing about the meaning and contents of cubanidad.

Of course, part of Cuba’s outsized self-regard, pace Meyer Lansky, is that it’s not a little island at all: at fully eight hundred miles from tip to tail, it’s huge. Its claims to kingliness are based firstly on amplitude. But being the greatest of the Greater Antilles does not a major player in world power make. This big island is also a small country that wants to be a macho-sized nation. That desire—linked always to the aim of not having its big, looming neighbor flick it about—has molded Cuba’s story from Jefferson’s age through the Castros’. And it has led, at moments like the crisis that ensued after Khrushchev sent his missiles, to some tricky spots. Tricky spots will happen, as Quixote learned, when tilting at windmills or superpowers.

For a brief time in the 1960s and after, and whatever one felt for its bearded leaders’ revolution, those barbudos’ egos and aims gave Cuba a seriously macho profile on the world stage. In an era when dozens of ex-colonial states joined the United Nations, but also in the context of the Cold War whose contending powers forced them to choose sides, Castro’s Cuba became a chief source of inspiration, if not of actual power, for the quixotic dreams of the Nonaligned Third World. That era and Cuba’s role in it were bound to be short-lived. But if politics are momentary, culture is forever. And Cuba’s self-regard, like Cubans’ general pride in their cubanidad, has never derived as much from its politicians’ rhetoric as from daily life—from the cultural fruits and quirks of quotidian streets whose collective ethos, wrote their first determined scholarly excavator, Fernando Ortiz, has always been “creative, dynamic, and social.”³ And from their justified pride, too, in cubanidad’s impacts not merely on their own lives but on others’ lives, too, in the audible impress that its rhythms have long had on the soundscape of the wider world.

For far beyond the sunsets and ice cream and royal palms, the inevitable core of cubanidad has been this: how it sounds. And it’s been this, too: how its sounds have spread. Long before an aging LA guitarist met Ibrahim Ferrer and heard about a defunct social club in the Havana suburb of Buena Vista, it was here in Cuba’s capital that a series of dynamic idioms and patterns took root and were then shipped, north and south and east and west, to vibrate the globe. In Cuba, this was thanks as well to down-island Afro tributaries in places like Matanzas and Santiago de Cuba, the southeastern seat of island soul. But from the “Spanish tinge” that made the syncopation of New Orleans jazz, to the “clave” rhythmic core of salsa, from Caracas to Manhattan, to the cha-cha-cha figure upon which “Louie, Louie” and other early rock ’n’ roll was built—it was here in the Antilles’ great beachhead, the meeting ground for the lifeways of Congo and Yoruba-land and Andalucía, that the sounds of “Latin America,” and of the Afro-Americas at large, took perhaps their most potent shape.

For well over two centuries, beginning in the mid-1500s, it was here in Havana that the great treasure fleet of Spain gathered to transport gold and silver from Mexico and from Potosí back across the Atlantic to Seville. Cuba’s role in Spain’s empire was fixed less as a center of production than as the key way station and gathering point for the New World’s riches. It was inscribed in Madrid’s empire, and the larger Atlantic world that empire helped create, as a great port, rich in the kinds of interchange upon which culture’s evolution thrives—and whose riches in that regard only increased after Havana was opened to traders from all nations in 1790. For it was in the decades after that event, as free trade first brought an abundance of African slaves here, and then later saw them freed, that Havana also became the great metropolis of manumitted blacks who rolled their drums and families into Cuba’s capital from its fields to give Havana its lasting stature as the great Caribbean city.

And the great Caribbean city, make no mistake, is what it remains. Because what you learn, over repeated visits and in absorbing its history, is this: if in 1820 Havana was the most intriguing and beautiful and rhythmic city in the New World, which is to say in the world, it was also those things in 1920—and it remains so, beneath the crust of decay and of politics, as we near 2020, as well.

Havana, like the island it incarnates, will break your heart.

* * *

IT DID MINE, from the moment I alighted here for my first unhurried stay. I was twenty-two and had just sprung from a college apartment with a Che photo on the wall and a worn CD of Cachao’s Descargas on the hi-fi, but with just one previous visit to Cuba under my belt. I’d come down, during college, in one of the few legal ways one then could: with a delegation led by lefty Jesuits who were sympathetic to Cuba’s ruling party because they were lefties but kosher to the U.S. because they were Christian. Our officially sanctioned itinerary, organized by our very nomenclatura Cuban hosts, included visits to places like a model psychiatric hospital with a sign over its playing field, out front, that read “Sports: For a Healthy Mind,” and a little museum area, as we entered, on whose walls were hung big photos depicting “the era of capitalist psychiatry”—people chained to beds, abused kids, lobotomized patients, that sort of thing. This exhibition led onto the gracious grounds of a place where the mentally compromised, treated not with capitalist brutalism but with socialist care, were encouraged to paint pictures and to dance ballet and to belong to bands like the rock ensemble, with its earnest savant belting off-key opera out front, whom we watched to affirm with our applause these good works, anyway, of Cuban communism. This appealing place, our humorless guide intoned to drive the point home, had all been made possible by the revolution—that mythic event, in 1959, that had occurred in the past but was also still going on in a country where every neighborhood still had a Committee for the Defense of the Revolution. Near the Museum of the Revolution, which Fidel’s government built into the old dictator’s palace to commemorate this triumph, a big sign proclaimed, “We Have and We Will Have Revolution.”

But that was then. And this, now, was me returning to Havana for a year’s stay aimed not at touring the revolution’s official showpieces but at living its daily life. I’d won a fellowship to study language and culture and also to forge “people to people” ties, however I might, by researching and perhaps helping out with a number of what were here called “popular education” projects—sundry community development efforts, run not by the state but by private citizens with initiative. Aimed, for example, at helping older people to read more or young people to make art, they were led by people I’d met through the lefty priests.

Less grandly, I wanted to live in Havana to see what it was like. My first brief visit had included, alongside the official hospital tours, enough long walks through the city—one—to convince me that walking around Havana, tuning my ear to its Spanish and its ways, was about my favorite thing to do in the world. That visit had also included a brief stroll by the grand main campus of the University of Havana, a neoclassical Parthenon set atop a low hill dividing the pleasantly noisy streets of Centro Habana, the city’s treeless but jangling core, from the leafier district of El Vedado—once Havana’s first suburb, now an urban zone of mossy mansions and elegant apartment houses that since the 1930s had hosted most of the city’s cinemas and jazz and modern hopes. It was in this area that I had decided, or fantasized, that I’d like to live. In returning to Havana now, it was to the university and a contact in its school of architecture that I went to see if I could.

The University of Havana was founded in 1728 and moved to its current location in 1901; it’s an institution through which very many of Cuba’s historical notables have passed. Like many landmarks here, though, even and especially the older ones, its resonance in the cityscape has a way of according with its role in the revolution—or with moments in Fidel’s younger life, more specifically, to which it played host. There’s a reason that, when climbing its great granite steps, you may call to mind the young Fidel, back when he was a prolix law student here in the 1940s, haranguing his peers about one or another constitutional abuse by some corrupt senator. Once the strapping first son of a rich landowner from the countryside, the onetime law student now ran a country that’s full of billboards praising his revolution but whose only piece of lasting graffiti—at least that I’ve ever seen—is a red scrawl on a wall across from the university steps. The graffiti, in a city where such spontaneous expressions from the young aren’t much tolerated, is carefully preserved from the era of Fidel’s own youthful rebellions. It reads “Batista Asesino”—Batista is a killer.

What Batista’s deposing by kids like Fidel, back in the ’50s, had now led to was a society with its own contradictions. But among the most vexing when I arrived in the fall of 2002, not too long after the end of what Castro had dubbed the “Special Period in Peace Time”—the lean season of scarcity after the fall of the USSR—was a whole set of problems arising from allowing U.S. dollars into the Cuban economy. Fidel’s government, needful of cash and having to pursue it from foreign sources, had recently made it legal for Cubans—people whom they directed to hate the United States and its capitalism with a passion—to possess and use U.S. dollars themselves. What this policy had meant, in the few years since they took this astonishing step, was the emergence of a bipartite economy. While state salaries were paid in Cuban pesos—a currency still usable here for unpackaged staples like rice and eggs and Chinese bike parts—the packaged goods and bottled sodas and TVs that everyone really wanted, so that they might live like their cousins in Miami, required dollars. (A few years later, the U.S. dollar would again be outlawed and replaced with something pegged to it but called the “convertible peso”; the dual economy remained.) What it also meant was that people like the gray-haired architecture professor whom I went to see at the university, a man with an advanced degree and an air of authority befitting his station at the nation’s top institution, was earning a state salary worth the equivalent of maybe twenty dollars a month. But when I asked him if he knew anyone with a room to rent, he didn’t pause; he scrawled an address on a torn edge of that day’s Granma, the official communist daily that was many Cubans’ best source for scrap paper. He sent me, a ready source of dollars, to an old student of his who he thought could use them.

Address of former architecture student in hand, I walked past the Habana Libre and the great Coppelia ice cream park, where many Cubans had spent much of the 1990s queuing up to consume the cheap calories, four and five bowls at a sitting, of state-funded sweets. Continuing down 23rd Street into Vedado, I passed its iron statue of Don Quixote, and turned off 23rd onto F. I found the address in my hand and called up to a third-floor balcony until my soon-to-be host, Carlos, leaned over its rail. His third-floor flat had high ceilings and chipped-tile floors and a terrace with a view over terra-cotta roofs, downhill. Carlos was a gentle round-faced man with gold-brown skin; he may have earned a degree in architecture, but his worn-in flip-flops and shirtlessness indicated a fellow who’d realized, like many Cubans by then in a broken economy, the rather large disincentives to holding an actual job. He welcomed me to his home and accepted his old mentor’s regards just as his wife, a determined-looking woman with freckles and bright blue eyes, cut in to betray her glee at having an unexpected yuma—the Cuban slang term for Americans (perhaps deriving from the popularity here of the old Western 3:10 to Yuma)—land at their door. “You can pay for a room?” she asked before saying hello.

“Dagdelay,” he said, “es muy capitalista.” Carlos apologized by way also of introducing a woman whose typically unpronounceable Cuban name took me weeks to learn. Dagdelay, I’d later learn, was from way out in Villa Clara Province—Cuba’s Kansas. She came from a farming family whose roots, like many of those in the Cuban campo, were in the Canary Islands; she couldn’t pronounce my name, either (it came out sounding like “Jax”). But the price she quoted was more than fair—$10 a night, for a comfy bedroom in the back of their flat along with hot milk and bread in the morning and rice and rich beans at night, often supplemented with a fried egg or tomato from the farmers’ market down the block. And the months I spent with them there (especially after I seized on the necessity, during a quick trip to Mexico to renew my Cuban visa, of bringing back a bottle of hot sauce to liven the bland Cuban palate) were almost euphorically happy.

Apart from their yuma boarder—to whom it was made plain straightaway that, if any nosy parties wanted to know, I was Dagdelay’s cousin visiting from the Canarys—their household included their demonic little son, Carlitos, and Carlos’s aging mother, who suffered from dementia and shuffled from her room only at mealtimes. Some nights Carlos’s brother Gustavo, a charming malandro who usually lived with his girlfriend across town, would bunk here too: on nights when the girlfriend kicked him out or he came this way looking for other action, in scenarios that perhaps weren’t unrelated, he would crash here solo or with some stiletto-wearing conquest, in the spare room off the balcony.

The only member of the household with a job was Dagdelay. She did regular shifts in a state-owned cigar factory whose primary utility for her, to judge by the raw brown tobacco leaves she brought home and stacked in boxes by a table in the living room, was to furnish the material she’d use to roll her own cigars, sometimes in the shape of baseball bats, to sell to tourists. Dagdelay was a hustler to her core, a capitalista indeed—a striving provincial who’d come to the city with the hope not merely of making it in the capital, but also of getting out of Cuba. Carlos was different; he’d grown up playing baseball on Vedado’s peaceful blocks. He loved both his neighborhood and reminiscing about the good old days of his youth, in the ’80s, when there was a Russian-bought chicken in every pot. Now his passive role in their home economy was to put on a shirt, sometime past midmorning, and wander out in his flip-flops to buscar el pan (look for bread) at the state-run shop-cum-supply-depot down the street. Here payment was made by getting a little check in your libreta ration book, and here he’d also use the passive phrasing of communists everywhere—“Hay huevos?” (Are there eggs?)—to ask whether the rusted works of Cuban communism had managed, this day, to get any foodstuffs, beyond the cooking oil and sugar one could always count on, to this corner of the realm. Carlos was no party-line naïf. He just traversed both the mellow indignities and the small benefits of his country’s system with a wry sense for humor: raising his fist with a wink, as he passed by a billboard bearing a familiar bereted figure and the slogan “We Will Be Like Che!,” he would pick up Carlitos at his kindergarten. The school, a state-run place called the Heroic Vietnam School, was housed in a mansion abandoned by this area’s old overclass, whose porch was now hung with a sign depicting not Mickey Mouse or Elmo but a little cartoon member of the Viet Cong in a pointy hat. Back home, Carlos and Dagdelay spoiled Carlitos, a catty little boy who liked sitting in the middle of the living room floor crashing toy cars into each other, within an inch of his life, and then would complain with a sigh, on the rare occasions when they asked him to do something, that he was “un poquito malcreado” (a little badly made). I loved them dearly, and they stayed in my life for years.

But if the homey feel of sharing Carlos and Dagdelay’s Vedado days was one happiness of life at 19 y F—19th Street and F—what also made life there a joy was the ideal base it made for exploring the city on foot.

* * *

HAVANA WAS BUILT by the narrow entrance to the sheltered bay that was long its lifeblood. It’s a maritime town whose historic core is built onto a musty bulkhead guarding the harbor’s gate. Each evening at 9:00 Old Havana still pauses at attention, as cannons are fired from near the base of its Morro lighthouse, marking the old hour of its closing to new boats wishing to enter from the sea. Along the water, old forts guard the cobbled streets and shaded plazas fronted by old churches built from coral by Spanish monks and by the great storehouses made from stone by old hidalgos to keep the gold and other treasure, plundered or mined from across the Indies, that was gathered here to ship home. Havana was the port through which all people and goods bound for the Spanish Americas, or returning from Spain’s colonies to Europe, had to pass until the era of the U.S. revolution.

But as the empire declined, Havana’s island began to produce wealth itself—first from cultivating tobacco in the eighteenth century, and then from sugar’s brutal trade in the nineteenth—and Havana expanded west and south from the old port. Gobbling up land along the great Male-con seawall over which gray waves now crash during winter storms, Havana grew clear to the mouth of the Almendares River—five miles distant—and then crossed the river, to colonize its newer suburbs of Miramar and Cubanacan and to fill in the humbler zones, tucked in behind, of Marianao and La Lisa. With strong ties to its vast hinterland having emerged during that period of rapid expansion, it grew as linked to Cuban towns like Santiago and Camagüey as it had long been to Cartagena, Cádiz, and the Bight of Benin. But like a devoted servant of Yemaya, the Yoruba goddess of waters, whom women here praise at dusk by the Malecon with beads and songs, it remains a city preternaturally focused on the sea: a place built to overlook the great invisible current coursing just a mile or so offshore, into which Spanish sea captains angled their convoys to slingshot out through the Bahamas and then to catch the mighty Gulf Stream that sped them home to Seville.

Nowadays the closest that many of Havana’s two million inhabitants get to boarding a seagoing vessel may be hopping a raft for Florida. But with Havana’s brisa blowing off the water to salt the air and buff its homes’ pigments into that mottled pastel so loved by cameras, this is still a sea-loving place whose inhabitants, on hot summer nights, empty onto its seawall to flirt or fight or ponder or make love. An atavistic attachment to the sea, however, isn’t the sole reason people here hang out on the Malecon. Havana’s a warm-weather city where many kids live for decades in their parents’ homes, and where no one has any money to hang out except in the street. And as I settled into life at Carlos and Dagdelay’s, waking to her bread and hot milk and looking forward to enjoyable classes or visits to community projects to occupy my days, I made it my business to learn as much of the city’s squiggly grid as I could.

Changing my U.S. dollars into Cuban pesos to explore Havana allowed me to see what was still possible to do with the island’s currency—which was, it turned out, quite a lot. It was from Havana’s peso economy that I developed, with the help of vendors selling small cups of thick and sweet café from their stoops for one peso (about four cents), my first taste for coffee. I learned, too, to lunch most days on pan con tortilla, the basic but filling egg sandwich those same vendors laid on for about thirty cents (and occasionally the less desirable pan con jamon—bread and ham, served dry with no fixings of any kind—that they also peddled, in a country mad for pig meat in all its forms). If ever I was stranded across town or in need of getting someplace more quickly than my feet or a bus allowed, all I needed to do was to hold up a hand along a main boulevard and flag down one of the big lumbering maquinas—old American cars that trundled down set routes on main drags, their old engines replaced with newer Korean numbers or burping motors borrowed from tractors. I’d then hand the driver ten pesos (about forty cents), and sink into a cavernous backseat with an old abuela or a pair of young lovers or whoever else was going the same way. Maquinas, though, were only for when I was in a rush. And I was rarely in a rush. So usually I walked.

Vedado was a world in itself. Its sloping grid of fern-lined streets reached down to the sea. The once-exclusive bastion of Havana’s sugar rich was laid out in the late 1800s as an urban garden whose every par-terre between curb and sidewalk had by law to contain a green strip of grass or shrub, and whose every intersection was inlaid with a little granite pyramid, as if in advance readiness for the monumental memories these streets’ denizens would form around the fragrant corner of 17 y F or 21 y C. Built by Cuba’s rich, Vedado was given over, after the revolution, to the ideas of its Communist Party and the fierce will of tropical nature. Many of its sidewalks were now a treacherous tangle of concrete slabs, pushed up and askew by the surging roots of its banyan trees. With no funds in the public budget to repair the sidewalks, it was often better to walk instead down side streets that, given the general paucity of cars beyond the city’s main drags, were blessedly free of both traffic and noise beyond the happy cries of playing kids and chatting mothers and the groups of men in flip-flops who crowded around rickety tables to slap down dominoes and talk jovial shit in the shaded yards of crumbling mansions. Many of the grander homes, abandoned by their owners or seized by the state after 1959, were converted into multi-family dwellings. Other of the more baroque examples were taken over by the state or leased to foreign powers for their embassies.

Two of these in easy range of Carlos and Dagdelay’s apartment were the North Korean embassy, by whose vaulted gate a glass-encased billboard featured photos of Kim Jong Il “greeting his people,” and the magnificent gabled mansion, a few blocks down 17th, that since 1959 has housed the headquarters of UNEAC, the national union of writers and artists. In that lush tiled garden, old party-line poets in berets gathered in the afternoons to sing along to old boleros. (The menu pointedly did not include discussing the rather more trenchant work of nonunion writers like Pedro Juan Gutiérrez, whose Dirty Havana Trilogy had recently exposed for the world the seamy underside of Special Period life.)

Another porticoed palace nearby had a front hall hung with a big portrait of Fidel. Its porch welcomed patients to a cardiovascular hospital, the best one in the country. Years later, I was walking home from a night out with a friend who’d recently had heart surgery and wasn’t feeling well, and we stopped in to rouse the sleeping guard. We were swiftly ushered in, at 1 a.m., to see an impressive young doctor. He checked my friend’s vitals and gave him a thorough checkup, with no fuss and no demand for pay, before sending us home with a smile. Maintaining sidewalks had never been a priority for the revolution. But expending resources on its vaunted system of socialized medicine still was. That system had its problems—round-the-clock checkups are one thing; actually having medicine to prescribe is another. But it was still cherished by Cubans like Carlos, who looked deeply confused whenever I tried to explain to him that no, Americans couldn’t just wander into a free clinic, like the one he frequented down the block, whenever they had a headache.

That was Vedado. But at least a couple of days a week, I made sure to head down to the university, onto San Lázaro and past the bit of anti-Batista graffiti at its great steps’ base, to take the two-mile walk down through Centro Habana to where the city began.

In Centro, buildings crept right up to the street, their fronts studded with ladders of balconies. Women in tank tops lowered old buckets on frayed ropes, raising bread or plantains from friends or vendors below and hanging laundry from their edges. Their habit of dumping their washbasins’ gray-water contents off their balcones meant the sidewalks were best avoided. Luckily, most cars and buses in Centro Habana were limited to a few main drags too. I shared its streets’ middles with sweaty onion vendors pushing wooden carts and with women sauntering to market toting little plastic sacks and dressed in bright Lycra bodysuits. The latter outfit, a look indicative less of ostentation than informality, was only in keeping with the deeply undemure norms of self-presentation in this country. Here, uniformed customs agents at the airport welcome you to Cuba in clingy skirts and, no matter their age or shape, black fishnet stockings. Here, where the general rule for female evening wear has long been the higher the hemline and the higher the heel, the better, the modern Cuban love affair with spandex crosses genders: rare is the younger man who doesn’t wear his T-shirts sleeveless and as tight as possible (or who, for that matter, doesn’t also sport eyebrows as carefully tweezed as any young woman’s). Here, comfort in one’s skin and with one’s looks is less a tactic for social advancement than a necessity. In a place where every skinny boy is called flaco by strangers and every fat woman is fondly dubbed gorda to her face, many forms of body shame and attendant politesse familiar to the neurotic North feel entirely absent.

The vendors pushing their carts cried out as they went, with full-throated pregones, to hawk their pork rinds or peanuts (“Maniiiii!” the peanut vendor said). It was the cry of el manisero, the peanut seller, that inspired the Jazz Age composer Moisés Simons to pen the eponymous tune that became, after the era’s great singer Rita Montaner brought it to New York, both one of Cuba’s best-loved songs and one of the most-recorded melodies of the twentieth century. Watchful bystanders, usually male and often sitting on a wooden box or car bumper and utterly unconvinced of the foreign custom that says staring is rude, offered more spontaneous cries. The speech act that’s known here as a piropo is prompted by its speakers’ admiration for the curved waist or sway-hipped strut of some passing muchacha. The customary response to piropos, bouncing off their ever-dignified objects like flies and carrying little of the implied violence of northern “harassment,” is the same as with a pregón: they’re ignored—until some lout crosses a line that his piropo’s target will signal by letting fly a withering volley of insults to undress her accoster, in front of his fellows, shrink his manhood, and make plain that his prowess could never match hers.

As a male person of evidently foreign hue, I was largely spared the necessity of building up my piropo defenses (unless you count the lewd propositioning that invariably follows foreign men, especially, from the jinetera hookers down Dragones as dusk nears). But on a Cuban street, no one is free of the need to hone both one’s body language (to convey ease) and one’s verbal defenses in those situations—and there are many—where there’s nowhere to hide. I learned how to deal with annoying touts who’d made being a jinetero—literally, a jockey—a new form of Cuban street hustle. The jinetero, whose aim is to attach himself to a wandering tourist and not let go, commonly begins by approaching the unwary foreigner and making some busted-up reference to the Buena Vista Social Club or calling out, “My friend! Where do you from?” The reply I learned to give, to start another kind of conversation, was to say in jesting Spanish that I was from Bauta or Diez de Octubre or some other provincial town on Havana’s outskirts where no tourist ever treads.

Growing fully attuned to Cuban Spanish—a variant of Castilian marked by extreme volume and speed—I picked up idiosyncracies pertaining, for example, to the varied meanings one can attach here to the word for “penis.” In a country whose phallocentrism goes far beyond the great granite pillar of the monument by the Plaza de la Revolución (dedicated to nineteenth-century Cuba’s greatest mustachioed espouser of cubanidad, José Martí, but from whose base Fidel used to harangue his people for hours), it’s not uncommon to hear a person or song or thing described as de pinga (of the penis). The crux is in how it’s said: ¡de pinga! means something’s awful; de pinga, said without the exclamation mark and with a warmer timbre, means it’s great. In Centro Habana neighborhoods like Cayo Hueso, there was never any shortage of sights or sounds or smells that one could reasonably describe as de pinga in either sense. The warm scents of frying garlic and cumin mixed with rum and diesel fumes and rotting fruit and cheap shampoo. Many blocks also bore the unmistakable scent, from behind some door or down an alley, of dead cat.

Wandering through Cayo Hueso, which allegedly won its name from the surfeit of migrants from Key West who once settled here, I continued down San Lázaro and into the barrio called Colón. There I often stopped by a historic recording studio where some rumberos I knew banged out astonishing polyrhythms on their tumbadoras and cajón box drums. Melding Congo figures with accents of Yoruba and Calabar into only-in-Cuba patterns, they painted astonishing figure-eights in sound, far deeper in complexity and spirit and drive than any other rhythm-based music I’d ever heard. The studio where they played had moldy egg-cartoned walls and was named for Ignacio Piñeiro: a local sonic pioneer who incorporated Afro-Cuban accents—notably songs from the Calabar-derived secret society known here as Abakuá—into his dance band’s repertoire in the 1920s. Adding a singing trumpet to the traditional “son cubano” lineup in that same era, it was Piñeiro who evolved the basic sound with which the outside world grew smitten, after Buena Vista’s release, seven decades later.

I passed under the ornate paifang arch guarding what’s here called Havana’s barrio chino to find blocks that now boasted far more Chinese restaurants than Chinese people, but that once hosted (thanks to the workers who came in the 1830s to build Cuba a railroad before Spain had one) the Americas’ largest Chinatown. I walked into the historic barrio Jesús María, abutting Old Havana’s southern edge and the train station where many of this zone’s Afro-Cuban residents arrived by train a century ago, from the sugar fields around the old slave port of Matanzas, where the rumba took root. Through a friend I met a santera, a priestess in the syncretic Yoruba faith that’s the closest thing Cuba has to a national religion. She took me to her home, which was decked with yellow and green beads and bells for the orisha who was her spirit mother, Oshun, and invited me to attend the initiation of one of her goddaughters into the path: a last day of drumming and drinking and convivial time that also marked the culmination, for the shy young woman at its center, of having spent a year dressed like one of the many people—black or olive-skinned and all the browns in between—who walk Havana’s streets dressed in white from their shoes to their umbrellas. Proving their devotion and their capacity to live in purity for a year, they are readying to accept Oshun or Changó or Elegba less as their personal savior than as a kind of guiding ally whose aché, or force, along with that of all the orishas, they may have use for in facing obstacles attending both this and the spirit world.

North from the train station and past the Parque de la Fraternidad’s waterless fountains, I passed Cuba’s immense but mothballed Capitolio—built here to resemble the U.S. Capitol in the 1920s but where no legislators have met since 1959. Beyond the Capitolio, I skirted the rococo edifice of Cuba’s opera house, the gleaming Gran Teatro that was the hemisphere’s biggest theater when it opened in 1838; Caruso sang, and Alicia Alonso, the half-blind grand dame of Cuban ballet, danced here. By the hedge-lined benches of the Parque Central, men played chess and talked more shit. I paused for coffee or to read Granma on the broad terrace of the elegant Hotel Inglaterra and ambled onto the grand Prado Boulevard’s promenade, guarded by a pair of cast iron lions. It was down that median’s marble tiles that haute Habaneros paraded in the nineteenth century to court new mates or gossip in muslin frocks or cravats.

The Prado and its surrounds are artifacts of bourgeois Cuba’s obsession in the 1800s, shared with most of Latin America, with Italian opera and belle epoque Paris. But the narrower streets of the old city, running off the boulevard to its east, bespeak a different era and nation. Their more medieval widths funnel pedestrians down toward the bay and to the old plazas whose coral churches were built by Galician friars but which also still ring with the ghostly echoes of the slaves who were always allowed, under Spain’s more liberal if hardly more humane slave regime, to do two things that England’s slaves never were: to keep their drums, and to play them in public on Sundays. That first winter in Havana, on the Twelfth Day of Christmas, which was as big a deal here as la navidad itself, I joined a comparsa troupe from Jesús María on their traditional walk into the old town’s heart. Its members played drums and cornets and walked on stilts or dressed in the hooded leopard-skin garb of the Abakuá, to tout their gods and their blocks in the same way their ancestors have done here on January 6 since the 1700s (except when banned from doing so, as they periodically have been, in a country whose leaders’ attitude to its blacks has often been deeply schizophrenic—and whose most recent revolution’s attitudes toward Christmas, for its first several decades, were just plain negative).

Old Havana’s streets and squares were recognized by UNESCO, in 1982, as a world heritage site. Its buildings’ piecemeal restoration commenced soon after. But with Cuba’s government lacking anything like the cash or the will to be able to shore up all the bones and facades corroded by the brisa, most of this sprawling zone’s blocks remained every bit as decrepit—and as communist—as any blocks in the city. Along the main shopping street, Obispo, a few new places had popped up to sell Ray-Bans and way-too-pricy souvenirs. But these stood right next to local offices of the Committee for the Defense of the Revolution and peso places whose vendors slung four-cent cafecitos and odd soft-serve ice cream, dispensed from rusty machines, with a slightly medicinal taste. New dollar establishments nearby sold nice plates of chicken or lobster to tourists, for a hundred times the price of a common pan con jamon. A cafeteria listing prices in pesos tried to acknowledge the disjuncture but likely made it worse: in its window over the racks of stale ham-and-bread sandwiches on a dirty tray, it menacingly promised “Ofertas y Servicios de Excelencia en Moneda Nacional”—offerings and services of excellence, that is, in Cuban pesos.

Since those days in Old Havana, and as was already under way behind the scenes but has now become visible, a few local potentates with requisite ties both to the Cuban state and to foreign cash have worked out how to capitalize on their district’s UNESCO status. They’ve turned many of its squares into alfresco shopping malls accepting foreign cash and, less regrettably, restored many more of its stunning old buildings. In 2002, there were already a few must-avoid bars pitching expensive drinks to cigar-chomping yumas in thrall to stories about how Papa Hemingway used to down a dozen daiquiris on one of their stools after a day of marlin hunting in the Florida Current. This foreign-celebrity-got-drunk-here-and-you-should-too trait of the tourist trade has now gotten out of hand. But in those days it was possible to head down Obispo to the elegant Hotel Ambos Mundos near the water, where Hemingway lived before buying his finca across the bay, and to take the old iron elevator up to its then-secret roof. The little bar there, fifteen years later, is mobbed at all times with tourists. In 2002, after reaching the end of a long walk from Carlos and Dagdelay’s in Vedado, I rarely found more than one or two other guests atop the Ambos Mundos. Sipping a Hatuey beer, I gazed over to where the bay’s narrow neck spread into a broad expanse of calm water—now crossed by a rusty little ferry heading to Regla but once filled with up to three hundred galleons bobbing in the waves. I didn’t find it hard to understand why the Spanish set up shop here or why this place was of enduring allure.

* * *

THAT HAVANA WAS EXPLORABLE in this way to my twenty-two-year-old self—that it felt so uniquely open to the open-minded visitor—was, of course, due to its rather unique political economic station. Cuban communism had by the turn of this century proved itself to be as uniquely bad at wealth creation and feeding the full range of its citizens’ ambitions as communism anywhere. But it had also managed, through its uncommon attention to the common good—along with its success at keeping this town, with its strict laws and cops on every other corner, almost completely free of guns and drugs harder than rum—to create in Havana what surely remains the most peaceful big city in the hemisphere. That peace came at a psychic cost. All the forms of ennui and longing endemic to actually-existing-socialism were only exacerbated by the fact, then, that the government still refused to grant exit visas to most everyone who wanted them. But the inhabitants of an island where time and nice weather were the only things in big supply were also blessed to live in a place whose climate and calm allowed them to spend much of their lives outdoors and to feel safe even when walking home, anywhere, at 2 a.m. Homes that would have been sequestered behind concertina wire and Rottweilers in Rio or Kingston here snoozed calmly behind nothing but ferns.

With its dearth of cars and big highways and other high-modern infrastructure tearing at its urban fabric, Havana remains a city whose organic development—the ways in which one neighborhood relates to the next, how one historical layer suffuses what follows—is visible to the sensitive looker. A city whose harmful holding in place is also its beauty, and its lesson. Even Old Havana’s annuated charms are owed, in a sidelong way, to the revolution. In the late 1950s a group of Harvard-trained local architects led by a man named José Luis Sert, and evidently in thrall to a dastardly mix of Robert Moses’s and Le Corbusier’s worst ideas, proposed a new master plan for Havana’s core that would have razed colonial blocks to put in highways and turned its plazas into parking lots. Those plans were put paid by the rise of a state economy whose scant cement and scanter construction budget has for forty years left only a marginal impact on its capital’s physical plant—and then only on a few stadiums and Soviet-style apartment blocks on its outskirts. Havana is a heaven for the urbanist and the walker—a city where getting around on foot, as in all the great walking places, can yield the sensation of walking around in your own mind. A city, also, where there’s a reason one of its finest writers, Alejo Carpentier, described its aspect as “a marketplace of columns, a jungle of columns, an infinity of columns.”⁴

Ionic or fluted or Tuscan or Doric or plain—Havana’s columns render the city a mezquita-like forest of plaster and stone. Holding up porches or roofs or nothing at all, they also support one feature of this cityscape that must be Havana’s signal contribution to a certain ideal of urban design in the tropics: the great porticoes that don’t just front many houses here but also line public byways on main drags from Infanta in Centro to Agramonte by Old Havana’s edge to long stretches of those blocks facing the Malecon. The porticoes mimic Bologna’s arcades but also provide shade, which in summer is much less a luxury than a necessity. Around the garden at the Hotel Nacional, over the wicker couches where I loved to go sit, the porticoed patio can strike one as merely a grand riff on Old World Luxury, of the sort such grand New World structures always contain. But it also reminds you, after you’ve spent some time in Havana, of the sidewalk chess players sheltering on the porticoes off Infanta or the pregones and piropos that bounce off roofed columns by the Prado and off their round-hipped targets as well. The prevalence of Havana’s porticoes may be as contingent or random as any other of its features. But they have a way, like much here, of feeling inevitable to the way people live—as if they fit, in ways one can only grasp at, into some larger way of being that the city’s form both reflects and shapes.

Life that happens out of doors, open windows and carless streets, the outsized characters of its people—the sheer exultant immodesty of it all, only expanded by the lack of privacy at home, meant that much making out and music making took place in public. It meant also that the music pouring from open windows, angular and buoyant, clung to poor people who didn’t so much walk as prance down their blocks, and always found a way, when it was someone’s birthday, to do so while carrying a big frilly cake—it meant that all this together amounted to the cubanidad with which Cuban partisans and intellectuals from José Martí on have been obsessed. How did this all come to be; how had it changed or not since 1959? How did a New World city built with an idea of its own magnificence, and in love with its own urbanity, come to shape a public culture of the street that was above all, as Fernando Ortiz described it, “creative, dynamic, and social”? How did cubanidad—the very stuff that predated the revolution, and will outlive it—inform the political climate?

The Cuban revolution, before it was Marxist or socialist or anything else, was nationalist. It was devoted to a belief in cubanidad that’s shared by Castro’s foes in Miami (even if they don’t always agree on its contents). What I came to understand while living in Havana that first year was the intractability of cubanidad across the political spectrum, even though I could not yet fully articulate what it was.