As I walk into the airport lobby I spot Isgrat, the son of the owner of the Casa Particular in Habana where I’ve arranged to stay, holding a sign with my name on it. This is a first for me. I usually hop on a bus, or take a cab if I’ve got the coin, but with so little info available online about public transportation into the city I paid $30 in advance for a ride from my host. I wave at him as I approach and am greeted with a big smile.
After introducing myself to Isgrat, a young man in his mid 30’s with short hair thinning in the middle, light-brown skin and a boyish smile, I exchange my Mexican pesos at a small currency exchange booth. The exchange leaves me with 843 CUC for my 8 nights and 9 days in Cuba (1 CUC is equal to $1). This should suffice, I think, though I had hoped for more from the exchange. This has to suffice, I remember. American ATM cards are worthless in Cuba, and I have no other means of getting money. Besides, there are only two people in the world–my dad and ex-girlfriend–who even know I’m here.
We walk outside to the parking lot where a rose-red 1959 Chevy Bel Air with a white convertible top is basking in a bright sun.
“That’s your car? That’s my ride into town?” I ask.
Soon we’re cruising down country roads, the fumes from old cars and buses mixing with a cool spring-like air. We pass a soccer game. Then a baseball game. Kids of all sizes and complexions playing in open fields with serious intensity, like the way we played pick-up basketball where I grew up in New Jersey–unorganized, without teams, uniforms or referees–but with fierce determination.
An old abandoned hospital to my left and a mule drawn carriage crawling up the side of the road, another baseball game, and another, soon too many to count, all the while Isgrat leaning back over the seat talking rapidly in Spanish in a thick Cuban accent hard to grasp over the soft deep hum of the Chevy Classic. I digest a few broken bones of what he says as I watch a tractor pass in the opposite direction pulling a wooden carriage full of workers. Then the face of Che Guevara and his iconic cigar floats by on a billboard—the caption reads “Gracias Che por tu ejemplo.” Thank you Che, for your example.
We pass the Plaza de la Revolucion, which is not grand and majestic like I imagined, but hauntingly dignified, like a wise man laid in a coffin—the dark distinguished outline of Che with his guerilla beret, his iconic handsome warrior face stamped onto the city’s imagination.
And then suddenly we’re in Habana and it’s everything I imagined but more. The colonial and baroque facades, the back alleys, people everywhere in the streets, crisscrossing, congregating, carrying groceries. People loitering and talking, listening to music in doorways, playing handball, lowering baskets from balconies, sitting four to a group on the sidewalk over wooden makeshift tables arranged with dominoes. People everywhere. A mad cacophony of people like I’ve never seen. But not New York people, all in a hurry to get somewhere. More like New Orleans people, Caribbean people, island people—arms and shins and knees exposed, young girls abloom strutting in front of cars in short shorts, their movement inviting lustful glances, stares, whispers, and whistles from men and boys on the street. All sorts of people going about their afternoon–and they all look like someone I could’ve gone to high school with or grown up next to.
We pull up outside a two-story, cream colored townhouse where I’ll be staying the next few nights. I’m introduced to Isgrat’s mother, the owner of the house, and she welcomes me and shows me my room.
I set my bags down, grab a few CUC’s and head back out onto the street, walking two blocks to the Malecón, the famous seawall and road and that peers out towards the Florida Straits.
I’m hungry, and I quickly spot a restaurant that looks a little touristy, but quiet and easy—a good place for a first meal. A sign advertises fish dishes for 6 CUC. I can swing that, no problem. I enter through an open-air door and sit down at an outdoor patio that opens towards the Malecón.
Along the wall young lovers embrace and shield each other from the unpredictable sea spray that rains soft onto the sidewalk. A waiter brings me the menu and the first dish I see is called “Suspiro de un poeta” (“Sigh of a poet).” It turns out I’m at café Neruda.
Pablo Neruda’s 20 Poems of Love and a Song of Despair is one of the few books I’m traveling with. Behind me on the
restaurant wall some of Neruda’s quotes are memorialized. I remember the last line of Poem #14 from my book:
I want/ to do with you what spring does with cherry trees.
The fish arrives. It is grilled and bland. Perhaps it should be renamed “to make a poet sigh.”
MORNING
The lovers embraced along the Malecón last night have not made it ‘til morning to see the sunrise–all lust and no love–or perhaps they know the sun comes up over the eastern end of the island from behind the city-scape, not over the shark invested waters that stretch 90 miles to Florida.
I sit on the wall and city-watch as the moon continues its fight for light at my back and the ocean rests, flat and calm as a bay. Its edges barely whiten as wimpy waves caress the rocks—large, slimy and tougher than wrought iron—anchored in front of the wall. The sparsely placed and sometimes flickering streetlights fade the facades of lost wealth with their crumbling balconies, archways and columns, into orange sepia tones. But soon the sun is up and everything is soft pastel, pleasant shades of beige, whitewashed creams, greens and pinks, and behind me the waking sea.
To the west, the city is built up along the Malecón. Apartments and Soviet-era high-rises shape the city’s skyline. To the east, a jetty reaches into the ocean like a curled thumb fingernailed only by an old lighthouse flashing a silver jewel—to whom?
There are no boats, except one, distant and small, almost like a kayak or paddle boat it seems, going towards the lighthouse. From what I can see there are two heads–but no, it is nothing at all, driftwood, a shadow on a clean glass table.
The city is already coming alive as I walk back to my Casa Particular. It can’t be later than 7 a.m. but one glance down the arching streets reveals a plethora of silhouettes going, coming, and standing around under the orange light.
A dog sniffs at garbage in the gutter. A man walks by carrying a box of Havana Club over his shoulder. Another man leans against a wall doing nothing, watching as I pass.
When I return from my walk, breakfast has been laid out on a round wooden table covered with a modest table cloth stitched with golden flowers.
I have paid $5 in advance for breakfast and am more than satisfied: strong Cuban coffee, papaya juice, buttered rolls, an omelet, and a full plate of fruit—pineapple, papaya, guava, and banana.
Isgrat is awake and going about the house making preparations and doing 100 little chores I can only wonder at, and another guest in his late 30’s is already taking his breakfast at the table. I introduce myself, and like I will get many times throughout this trip, in fact, every time I meet someone new and tell them where I’m from—
American?
Always pronounced with a tone of surprise, confusion, and befuddlement, but also—and this is one thing I begin to enjoy about being an American in Cuba—intrigue.
“So how did you get here?”
Michael is a Swiss banker. No, that doesn’t sound right. He is from Switzerland, and he says he has spent the past few years working in a bank, but he hates the bank and has recently quit and it seems like all he really wants to do is hang out in Cuba. This is his 25th trip to the island, he says. He’s been coming for 18 years now and claims he has over 500 friends here. He likes it, no doubt. But when I ask him the obvious— “so you like Cuba?”—he cannot fully commit. There are things that make him sad too; his eyes become distant for a moment. He must have been here in the 90’s after the Soviet Union fell and necessities like sugar and milk were nearly impossible to come by. He must have seen some things, things to give him pause—things I may not see on this trip in 2013.
But now, spread out in front of me for five bucks a plate is everything I want for breakfast, and the apartment, which costs $25 a night for a private room and bathroom, is pristine. The living room has 18-foot-high ceilings, three couches with decorative throws and pillows arranged around a tall mahogany cabinet that holds a small collection of books—English learner, Cuban history, Che Guevara and Fidel bios, and also many CDs. And instead of a TV dead-dumb in the middle, two shiny-black African-style figurines, their body’s limbless torsos, stand proudly, shaped by the sharp curves of dance and passion.
To the left of the cabinet a wooden table holds a lamp and a glass ashtray, and to the right a smaller wooden liquor cabinet supports etched glasses and jars on top, small tazas and glass goblets in the middle, and Cuban rum on the bottom. To enter this living room space from where Michael and I are sitting now, you must walk between two well-washed marble columns that rise 15 feet to join a cross beam before the ceiling. If you turn left before sitting on the couch, wooden French doors open to a narrow balcony with the ubiquitous wrought-iron railing and a view of the Habana street.
Isgrat’s apartment is one of the many Casa Particulares operating in Cuba today. In 1997, in an effort by the Cuban government to increase tourism and experiment with private enterprise, locals were given the right to run their own bed and breakfasts. Though I imagine taxes are quite high and government oversight is ever-present, this is one of the few private enterprises in Cuba.
I’m a cheap traveler so this might not be saying much, but Isgrat’s Casa particular is undoubtedly one of the nicest hotels/ bed and breakfasts I’ve stayed in… Anywhere. Ever.
Even the outside of the building is well maintained. And when I leave the house after breakfast to explore the city I notice that the apartment distinguishes itself on the block by being one of the few places that is freshly painted. By fresh I do not mean it was painted yesterday, but rather, that it still retains its full color. It is the color of papaya outlined with a cream trim, a truly Caribbean color I have seen adorning walls from the humble adobe homes of Puerto Limon, Costa Rica to the uptown mansions and Marigny shotguns of New Orleans.
Almond milk sunsets. Orange sorbet with hints of pink strawberry dust. Flushed cheeks and tangerines
Now strolling through Centro Havana—man’s work deteriorating into dust and sand, on every block an apartment or two freshly painted with Caribbean pastels, like the French Quarter but taller, grander, more impressive, and all the old stones decaying but at the same time being marvelously maintained, an old person with a broom on every corner, a mop, a duster. And through each doorway something hidden—half-melted candles, shrines to Santeria gods, an old lady listening to the radio rocking on an antique chair, the sound of baseball on the television.
People drinking cafecitos from tiny hallway cafes, buying platanos and little onions and cloves of garlic from street carts with big wooden wheels, waiting in line for rations of bistec and lomo, the meat tepid and moist under the butcher’s knife—city of sun-dust, gravel and stone, with its sidewalk holes and craters that only New Orleans could have prepared me for, with its loud-mouth construction hammered out on the street, entire pipelines being dug up from their slumber leaving long narrow trenches in the street that pedestrians skip over, as if they are jumping from stone to stone to cross a shallow creek—
Cars pass like afterthoughts and no one talks to me, bothers me, or tries to sell me something.
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