Greetings everybody,
If you had told me a couple of months ago that I'd end up in Havana in early June, I would've said that I didn't think urinating in public was a deportable offense. It's not… my lawyer assured me… so let's say that it started with an email, which is how pretty much everything starts nowadays, whose subject line simply read "Cuba." Next thing I know, I'm on a flight from LA to Cancun to meet up with Jimmy W and Jeremy DP. We don't really call him that but I'll use any excuse to work DP into a story. Anyhow, when three guys are single, have disposable income, a "why not" attitude, and honestly nothing else going on, that's how things happen. We were set to spend four days in Havana, who the veteran Jeremy assured me would be plenty of time. Let's say that, theoretically, you hadn't held a real job for about four years. A four day trip to a foreign country would seem really short, right? Not that I know anybody like that, but work with me.
We had to spend one night in Cancun because our flight to Havana didn't leave until the next day. I won't go into much detail about Cancun, other than to say it made me think of Las Vegas on the beach, and I don't mean that in a good kind of way, I mean that in a culturally vacuous kind of way. Nothing but giant resort hotels and chain restaurants as far as the eye could see. Being stuck on a one-hour shuttle bus ride with six rednecks talking about how they can't wait to party at Senor Frog's will sour you on a place fairly quickly. Let's move along.
Our flight to Havana the next day was delayed by six hours, which they didn't tell us until we'd already checked in. Cubana airlines… bringing all the efficiency of Communism to the skies! We ended up spending some quality time in the lovely Cancun airport where we met an Australian couple, Glen and Margo, who were also on their way to Havana and a Cuban woman named Sobe who lives in Scranton and carries around pictures of herself and her husband from the society pages of the local newspaper. The highlight of the day was the flight itself, a one-hour test of faith on a Russian YAK-42 (no joke). Some of the features of this engineering marvel included free-floating seat backs and seat bottoms (because you don't want those pesky seats locking in place… who knows what could happen?), airline peanuts that expired in 2004 (which I didn't notice until after I ate them), an ice-cold substance akin to liquid nitrogen blasting underneath all the seats, and a lovely gasoline smell permeating the entire cabin shortly after takeoff. I must've looked concerned because the guy sitting next to me felt the need to reassure me with the comforting words "Es normal." Ah yes, thanks for that. This began a conversation that was to be like many of the conversations I had in Cuba, where people thought I could understand everything they were saying just because I was attempting to speak Spanish. I managed to piece together that he was the trumpet player in a salsa band called Charanga Habanera that tours all over the world. Here's a clip: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3eip9hWMFGQ
The flight itself was mercifully only an hour long, after which I proceeded to get stopped four times by Cuban passport control/immigration/customs. Wait a minute… you're supposed to get harassed on your way out of Cuba, not on the way in. I couldn't figure it out... I even had a sweet Fidel-like beard going. How the hell did Jeremy, who was dressed like a cross between a 1950's CIA operative and a German tourist, not even get asked one question? He even came and stood right next to me while I was being questioned by the cops and they completely ignored him. Then I was taken to a corner where the guy opened up my bag, rifled through my stuff, and said to me "Solo ropa?" What's he expect me to say at that point? No officer, there's a kilo of heroin in there somewhere, keep looking. Yeah "solo ropa."
We were greeted at the airport by Jeremy's Cuban contact Felix, an auto mechanic with a ferocious porn mustache, who had arranged for us to stay at a casa particular, which is the term for a house that's licensed by the government to take in boarders. We had to catch a cab into town because apparently Felix had gotten in trouble last time Jeremy came to Cuba for giving him a ride to the airport and ended up spending a night in jail. So we got a ride from Ricardo, a cabbie whose mother was an English teacher, who, with a laugh, promised to take us to drink "the warmest beer in Havana." It was at a roadside stand where Jeremy proceeded to introduce Jimmy and I to Cristal, one of two beers tourists can buy in Cuba for 1.15 CUC each. This is probably a good time to explain how currency works in Cuba. There are two different types of money: Cuban Convertibles (CUC) that are supposed to be for tourists and roughly the equivalent of a U.S. Dollar, and Cuban pesos which are the currency for the locals and equivalent to about 4 cents each. That's the theory anyway, but CUC have become so pervasive that there's basically a mixed dual economy going on. Felix is an auto mechanic for the government telecommunications company and he explained that he's paid in both currencies, although it's only 28 CUC and 600 pesos per month. Basically, we just spent approximately one day of Felix's salary for a beer. Of course, if Felix wants to buy beer, he can choose from another selection of beers that he can pay for in pesos rather than CUC, but they're for Cubans only.
Driving through Havana by night is a little bit eerie. We weren't staying in a tourist area, Cerro is a residential neighborhood, and no one was either walking or driving along the streets. The only things you can focus on are the buildings as you drive by, and that's when you really start to notice the beautiful architecture of the city itself. I'd read that Cuba has been heavily influenced not only by Spain but by France as well, and it's easy to see parallels to Madrid and Paris in construction all around the city. By the time we reached our host Elizabeth's house, I think Jimmy had already taken a hundred pictures. Elizabeth runs a casa particular which by the looks of it means she kicks her two daughters out of their rooms whenever she can find boarders to stay at her house. We each paid 30 CUC per night, which when you add it all up equals Felix's yearly salary for just four days of hosting three goofy Americans. That's a pretty sweet deal even when you factor in the cost of fumigating Jeremy's room. It also explains how she can afford a satellite dish that is tuned in to Telemundo 24x7.
Our first day we decided to head out and explore on foot, which took us through Cerro north toward the water to Vedado and eventually to the more touristy Havana Vieja. Seeing Cerro in daylight definitely gave a different impression than the previous night's drive-through. I don't think dilapidation is the right word, but I'm not sure how else to describe the state of most of the buildings as you walk through this part of Havana. I can't speak for the interiors, maybe they're all like Elizabeth's house where it's beaten up on the outside but hooked up with new tile floors and paint inside, but all you can see from the exterior is this incredible architecture that looks as if it hasn't been maintained for the last 50 years. That's the feel the entire city gives you as you stroll through it, with the old Chevrolets and boxy Russian Lada cars zooming around and these beautiful buildings covered in cracks and peeling paint. It's as if at one point they decided "okay, that's it" and stopped taking care of things. The people themselves just seem to go on about their business, or lack of business. The sidewalks are filled with people hanging around, talking with friends, or leisurely walking from one place to another. Don't get me wrong, there are people working in Havana, but it's also obvious that there are a lot of people not doing much of anything.
We visited the Jose Marti memorial, a tribute to one of the first Cuban revolutionaries and its chief national hero. He was also a writer, poet, translator, diplomat, journalist and painter. He died tragically, shot in the ass by his own troops. Look it up. Okay, not really, but he is dead, otherwise he'd be about 170 years old, which would be a pretty good advertisement for the revolutionary lifestyle. Anyhow, the monument is situated next to the Plaza de la Revolucion where all the big May Day festivities are held every year and across the street from the Ministry of the Interior building that has a giant portrait of Che Guevara on its facade. That's one of the first things you notice in Havana… the billboards that you would normally expect to be selling you an iPod or some other crap you don't need are instead covered with propaganda, from quotes by Che and Fidel to pleas to free the Cuban Five. There are no chain stores of any kind, only small corner shops or larger nameless storefronts. Combined with the worn-down buildings it served to give the city a heavy, gray feel, which is one of the main reasons that Havana is so photographically fascinating.
Our first conversation of any significance with a local came after a tropical rainstorm later that afternoon when we managed to find a courtyard near the Malecon (the waterfront) that served ice-cold Cristals and Bucaneros. We sat next to a table of three young Cuban guys, one of whom started talking to us in broken English and introduced himself as Fish, or as he pronounced it, Feesh. Fish and his two buddies were enjoying small boxes of something called Planchao, which looks like a juice drink you'd put in your kid's lunch, but is actually rum that tastes like something you'd use to light a barbecue. Fish and his friends asked if they could join us at our table because they didn't want the police to see them talking to tourists from another table for some reason and Jeremy bought a round of Planchao for everyone... they only cost 1 CUC each and as such are cheaper than beer. At this point Fish started asking us questions about where we're from, why we're in Havana, and, of course, how we like the Cuban women. This was his launching point for a Shakespearian soliloquy whereby he explained how if you want the "fucky fucky" from the Cuban ladies, you've got to have some spending cash. I think the best way to explain the course of the conversation is to watch a bit of magic that Jimmy managed to capture in this exchange between Fish and Jeremy.
feesch!
Next thing we know, three of Fish's lady friends appeared out of nowhere and sat down one-by-one next to Jeremy, Jimmy, and me. This was the "check please" moment of the conversation. On the way out a couple of the enterprising young ladies followed us, but neither one was willing to meet Jeremy's asking price of 100 CUC so we went on our way.
Later that night Felix took us to the baseball stadium to watch Cuba's Red team play against Puerto Rico in a tournament of Caribbean countries. Felix paid for our tickets which cost him 3 pesos, or about 12 cents U.S each. The stadium was practically empty; there were more security officers than fans; so we sat in the front row box seats/metal lawn chairs down the right field line near the visiting team's dugout. We enjoyed typical Cuban ballgame fare such as pork sandwiches with vinegar, salted popcorn, and, for some reason, a bag of nearly indestructible rock candy. After a couple of innings, one of us recognized that a coach on Puerto Rico's team was Juan Gonzalez, who used to play professionally in the U.S., won the MVP award twice, and turned down a 140 million dollar deal with the Detroit Tigers back in 2001. He was never known as the smartest ballplayer in the world… his nickname is Igor. Anyhow, we might not have noticed Juan except for the fact that, from the field, he was flirting with one of the security officers, a girl who was about 50 feet up in the stands dressed in the classic Castro olive drab military uniform. He kept looking over at her and trying to get her attention with some kind of weird clicking sound, like he was calling over a cat. Maybe that's how the magic happens in Puerto Rico. Or maybe when you're a ballplayer worth millions of dollars you just stop giving a shit, I dunno. They're yelling things at each other in Spanish and she comes down to talk to him for a couple of minutes, so we tell Felix that this dude is Juan Gonzalez and he made millions of dollars in the big leagues. Felix laughs and calls over one of the security guys and proceeds to tell him what we just said, and next thing you know, chaos ensues. About five or six different people, security guards and whatnot, descend right in front of where we're sitting, call over Juan Gonzalez, and start giving him all sorts of shit. This is all going on in Spanish so I'm only picking up about a quarter of what they're saying, but I did manage to hear the security guy asking Juan if he made all that money why doesn't he just buy Puerto Rico. After a couple of minutes it's obvious that Juan is getting more and more annoyed, and he's standing about five feet away from us, and we know that he knows that we are the guys who called him out. I'd like to point out for the record that Juan is about 6'5" and weighs about 250 pounds, not to mention that it looked like the entire Puerto Rican team had been dipped in a vat of steroids. I don't know exactly what happened next because this really fat chick decided to lean over the railing directly in front of me to talk to the right fielder for the Puerto Rican team, and when I tried to video this whole scene I got caught by the security girl who thought that I was trying to video the fat chick's ass. So Juan is arguing with a couple of security guards while the fat chick is chatting up the right fielder and I'm trying to convince the security girl that I wasn't taking pictures of anybody's ass. It was total chaos. They eased up on Juan after a few minutes and he even gave an autographed baseball to the security girl, whom I got to sit with the three of us and take a picture. A few minutes later she came back over to us and asked if we could delete her picture because she didn't want to get in trouble if some officials looked at the pictures as we were leaving the country, so I did. A couple of innings later, Juan was back at it with this new move where he played with his lower lip and making some sort of baby sound... it was a weird scene. Apparently, it takes more than that to knock Juan off his game... he's a pro. Oh yeah, Cuba won the game in extra innings on a walk-off home run.
The next day we took a cab ride directly to downtown Havana and walked to the Floridita, the bar where the Daiquiri was invented and one of Hemingway's favorite hangouts. There's some sort of cult of Hemingway in Cuba, not so much because the Cubans themselves think he's special, but more because they realize that tourists do. If Hemingway ducked into a place once to take a dump it'll be advertised as one of his "haunts." I tried to order the Papa Doble, which is a daiquiri with a double shot of rum named for Hemingway because he supposedly drank 13 of them in one sitting, but the bartender wouldn't have it. He simply said "Daiquiri" and looked at me with glazed-over eyes that said "If I hear the name Hemingway once more I swear I'm going to come in here with an AK-47 and murder everyone at this bar." So I ordered a round of daiquiris. Three rounds later, we were well on our way to our longest day in Havana.
We spent most of the day walking around Havana Vieja, which, due to its popularity with tourists, has been the beneficiary of a directed effort by the Cuban government to restore many of its historic buildings. Calling it the tourist area doesn't ring right when you've seen the likes of Khao San Road in Bangkok or Thamel in Kathmandu or even Fisherman's Wharf in San Francisco. I mean, it's the area where most tourists end up at some point or another because of the beautiful buildings and its relative concentration of hotels and restaurants, but it is nowhere near the chaotic scene of your typical tourist area. As I mentioned earlier, there are no chain stores or shopping malls, only a series of small stores and outdoor boutiques along some of the more popular walking streets. There are quite a few museums and plenty of restaurants, such as the one we ducked into during another rainstorm where an acoustic guitar quartet played Cuban music while we sipped mojitos and ate Moros y Cristianos (black beans and rice).
Later that night we made our way over to the Malecon, which seems to be the place where the locals hang out at night. The waterfront was filled with people sitting on the sea wall, drinking beers and rum, dancing salsa, and propositioning the tourists (i.e. us). Contrary to popular belief, I don't spend a lot of time thinking about hookers so I'm not quite sure how to explain the relationship between some of the local women and male tourists... maybe Fish was right in how he explained it. I don't know if I'd classify these women as straight-up hookers, although you do get directly propositioned, but it seems like most of them are hookers of convenience. What I mean is that they see a tourist and think it's an easy way to make a few CUC, or they'd sleep with you and then ask you for money afterward. Maybe that's a subtlety that doesn't make any sense to anybody except me, but I'm not sure how else to explain it. To be fair, after talking to some of the locals they explained that some women are just looking for guys to take them out to clubs where they don't allow Cubans unless they're accompanied by tourists. All in all, the best strategy is to simply be careful or stay away altogether.
We stopped and sat along the Malecon for a while drinking Cristal and Bucanero and observing instead of being observed. As a tourist in Havana you sometimes feel as if you're either being ignored or being hustled so it was nice to sit back and watch for a while. We (meaning me, the official translator) ended up talking with a couple of university kids who are the only people we met in our time there that said anything negative about the Castro government. After a couple of hours on the Malecon we left these future poster boys for Amnesty International, jumped in a cab, and someone (me) said to the cabbie "24 hora cerveza!"
Where we ended up next I can't exactly say… I didn't exactly give specific directions. It was somewhere along the water but maybe three or four miles up the road in the middle of nowhere. There was what looked like an outdoor bar and when I looked at the cab driver he said "aqui" so we paid and got out. The bar turned out to be closed, so our only other option was a small, well lit shack that had a sign declaring "Pollo Ditu." We'd seen a few of these around town and it's the closest thing Havana has to a fast-food chain. Lucky for us, they served beer and some sort of deep fried chicken nuggets/parts that are purple on the inside. If you were ever curious about the type of people that hang out at a 24-hour chicken pit in Havana, wonder no more. We met Gaston, the English-speaking Pollo Ditu employee whose wife is an opera singer, Ariel the security guard who for some reason works a 12-hour shift guarding a pollo pit, and a couple of young ladies who told us their names were Doris and "Mylove." Under normal circumstances we probably would've been a bit wary of hanging out with a girl named Doris who assured us more than once that her boobs are real and another girl who called herself Mylove with a tattoo of the Playboy bunny right above her butt, but Pollo Ditu at 4 am with Bucanero and Planchao is not what I would consider normal circumstances. Besides, there was nothing in the Lonely Planet specifically warning us against Playboy tattoos. So we stayed out all night drinking beers at a chicken pit in the middle of nowhere with the two girls, the chicken guys and a security guard, with me acting as the translator for all conversations. Again, I'd like to point out that my Spanish is fantastic… I mastered the art of verbally putting question marks and exclamation points in front of my sentences. It was daybreak when we decided we should probably head back to our casa, and before leaving Ariel gave us his phone number and said we should come to stay with him and his family next time we're in Havana. My Spanish is better than I thought, although if it was really good I wouldn't have ended up with a male security guard's digits.
As you can imagine, we didn't do much on our last day that didn't involve sleeping, although we did get a farewell dinner feast cooked by Elizabeth. My main disappointment was that we never got to go salsa dancing, but I can't say that we didn't have an eventful four days. I'm not going to make any extensive pronouncements on the good or evil of communism... I was only there for four days, so what can you really deduce about a place in that amount of time? Some people were afraid to talk to us and others had no problems with it. A security officer didn't want her picture to be recorded with tourists. Felix got thrown in jail for giving tourists a ride to the airport. So in that sense, the government is very restrictive about tourist/local interaction. Economically, no one in the city seems particularly well-off, in fact I'd say that most people are poor, although it seems as though everyone is at the same level of poor. I saw much fewer homeless people in Havana than I would on a typical afternoon in San Francisco. On the other hand, I was propositioned for sex a lot more than I would be on a typical afternoon in San Francisco (unfortunately), which shows a certain level of desperation. Not that they'd have to be desperate to proposition me. Wouldn't hurt though. Anyhow, the city itself is gorgeous in such a unique way that I think it needs to be seen to be appreciated. On the other hand, as I mentioned earlier, the beauty of the city has not been maintained at all and most of what you see can best be described as worn or faded which, honestly, weighs on you emotionally after a while, especially if you think of how beautiful it could be. Not everyone sees it the same way as I do... we met an old chain-smoking Italian man named Franco at the airport that said he'd traveled all his life working in the textile business and has never seen a place as beautiful as Havana.
Havana's not going to stay closed for long, though. They're opening up a Benetton store in Havana Vieja. We went to the Bodeguita del Medio in Playa del Carmen which is absolutely nothing like the original in Havana. It has its own merchandise store where they sell items like "I heart Che" coffee mugs. Can you imagine Che Guevara walking into a place where they sell "I heart Che" coffee mugs? His head would probably explode. But it's only a matter of time before they open one up next to the original.
If you've made it this far, you have my congratulations and my condolences. I didn't think I could write this much about only four days, but Havana gives you a lot of subject matter to work with. If you want to check out the accompanying pictures, here's the link:
https://photos.app.goo.gl/jfDhZRBh7BThuNcN9
Any pictures that are visually interesting in any way whatsoever were stolen from Jimmy.
Take 'er easy,
Dave
If you had told me a couple of months ago that I'd end up in Havana in early June, I would've said that I didn't think urinating in public was a deportable offense. It's not… my lawyer assured me… so let's say that it started with an email, which is how pretty much everything starts nowadays, whose subject line simply read "Cuba." Next thing I know, I'm on a flight from LA to Cancun to meet up with Jimmy W and Jeremy DP. We don't really call him that but I'll use any excuse to work DP into a story. Anyhow, when three guys are single, have disposable income, a "why not" attitude, and honestly nothing else going on, that's how things happen. We were set to spend four days in Havana, who the veteran Jeremy assured me would be plenty of time. Let's say that, theoretically, you hadn't held a real job for about four years. A four day trip to a foreign country would seem really short, right? Not that I know anybody like that, but work with me.
We had to spend one night in Cancun because our flight to Havana didn't leave until the next day. I won't go into much detail about Cancun, other than to say it made me think of Las Vegas on the beach, and I don't mean that in a good kind of way, I mean that in a culturally vacuous kind of way. Nothing but giant resort hotels and chain restaurants as far as the eye could see. Being stuck on a one-hour shuttle bus ride with six rednecks talking about how they can't wait to party at Senor Frog's will sour you on a place fairly quickly. Let's move along.
Our flight to Havana the next day was delayed by six hours, which they didn't tell us until we'd already checked in. Cubana airlines… bringing all the efficiency of Communism to the skies! We ended up spending some quality time in the lovely Cancun airport where we met an Australian couple, Glen and Margo, who were also on their way to Havana and a Cuban woman named Sobe who lives in Scranton and carries around pictures of herself and her husband from the society pages of the local newspaper. The highlight of the day was the flight itself, a one-hour test of faith on a Russian YAK-42 (no joke). Some of the features of this engineering marvel included free-floating seat backs and seat bottoms (because you don't want those pesky seats locking in place… who knows what could happen?), airline peanuts that expired in 2004 (which I didn't notice until after I ate them), an ice-cold substance akin to liquid nitrogen blasting underneath all the seats, and a lovely gasoline smell permeating the entire cabin shortly after takeoff. I must've looked concerned because the guy sitting next to me felt the need to reassure me with the comforting words "Es normal." Ah yes, thanks for that. This began a conversation that was to be like many of the conversations I had in Cuba, where people thought I could understand everything they were saying just because I was attempting to speak Spanish. I managed to piece together that he was the trumpet player in a salsa band called Charanga Habanera that tours all over the world. Here's a clip: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3eip9hWMFGQ
The flight itself was mercifully only an hour long, after which I proceeded to get stopped four times by Cuban passport control/immigration/customs. Wait a minute… you're supposed to get harassed on your way out of Cuba, not on the way in. I couldn't figure it out... I even had a sweet Fidel-like beard going. How the hell did Jeremy, who was dressed like a cross between a 1950's CIA operative and a German tourist, not even get asked one question? He even came and stood right next to me while I was being questioned by the cops and they completely ignored him. Then I was taken to a corner where the guy opened up my bag, rifled through my stuff, and said to me "Solo ropa?" What's he expect me to say at that point? No officer, there's a kilo of heroin in there somewhere, keep looking. Yeah "solo ropa."
We were greeted at the airport by Jeremy's Cuban contact Felix, an auto mechanic with a ferocious porn mustache, who had arranged for us to stay at a casa particular, which is the term for a house that's licensed by the government to take in boarders. We had to catch a cab into town because apparently Felix had gotten in trouble last time Jeremy came to Cuba for giving him a ride to the airport and ended up spending a night in jail. So we got a ride from Ricardo, a cabbie whose mother was an English teacher, who, with a laugh, promised to take us to drink "the warmest beer in Havana." It was at a roadside stand where Jeremy proceeded to introduce Jimmy and I to Cristal, one of two beers tourists can buy in Cuba for 1.15 CUC each. This is probably a good time to explain how currency works in Cuba. There are two different types of money: Cuban Convertibles (CUC) that are supposed to be for tourists and roughly the equivalent of a U.S. Dollar, and Cuban pesos which are the currency for the locals and equivalent to about 4 cents each. That's the theory anyway, but CUC have become so pervasive that there's basically a mixed dual economy going on. Felix is an auto mechanic for the government telecommunications company and he explained that he's paid in both currencies, although it's only 28 CUC and 600 pesos per month. Basically, we just spent approximately one day of Felix's salary for a beer. Of course, if Felix wants to buy beer, he can choose from another selection of beers that he can pay for in pesos rather than CUC, but they're for Cubans only.
Driving through Havana by night is a little bit eerie. We weren't staying in a tourist area, Cerro is a residential neighborhood, and no one was either walking or driving along the streets. The only things you can focus on are the buildings as you drive by, and that's when you really start to notice the beautiful architecture of the city itself. I'd read that Cuba has been heavily influenced not only by Spain but by France as well, and it's easy to see parallels to Madrid and Paris in construction all around the city. By the time we reached our host Elizabeth's house, I think Jimmy had already taken a hundred pictures. Elizabeth runs a casa particular which by the looks of it means she kicks her two daughters out of their rooms whenever she can find boarders to stay at her house. We each paid 30 CUC per night, which when you add it all up equals Felix's yearly salary for just four days of hosting three goofy Americans. That's a pretty sweet deal even when you factor in the cost of fumigating Jeremy's room. It also explains how she can afford a satellite dish that is tuned in to Telemundo 24x7.
Our first day we decided to head out and explore on foot, which took us through Cerro north toward the water to Vedado and eventually to the more touristy Havana Vieja. Seeing Cerro in daylight definitely gave a different impression than the previous night's drive-through. I don't think dilapidation is the right word, but I'm not sure how else to describe the state of most of the buildings as you walk through this part of Havana. I can't speak for the interiors, maybe they're all like Elizabeth's house where it's beaten up on the outside but hooked up with new tile floors and paint inside, but all you can see from the exterior is this incredible architecture that looks as if it hasn't been maintained for the last 50 years. That's the feel the entire city gives you as you stroll through it, with the old Chevrolets and boxy Russian Lada cars zooming around and these beautiful buildings covered in cracks and peeling paint. It's as if at one point they decided "okay, that's it" and stopped taking care of things. The people themselves just seem to go on about their business, or lack of business. The sidewalks are filled with people hanging around, talking with friends, or leisurely walking from one place to another. Don't get me wrong, there are people working in Havana, but it's also obvious that there are a lot of people not doing much of anything.
We visited the Jose Marti memorial, a tribute to one of the first Cuban revolutionaries and its chief national hero. He was also a writer, poet, translator, diplomat, journalist and painter. He died tragically, shot in the ass by his own troops. Look it up. Okay, not really, but he is dead, otherwise he'd be about 170 years old, which would be a pretty good advertisement for the revolutionary lifestyle. Anyhow, the monument is situated next to the Plaza de la Revolucion where all the big May Day festivities are held every year and across the street from the Ministry of the Interior building that has a giant portrait of Che Guevara on its facade. That's one of the first things you notice in Havana… the billboards that you would normally expect to be selling you an iPod or some other crap you don't need are instead covered with propaganda, from quotes by Che and Fidel to pleas to free the Cuban Five. There are no chain stores of any kind, only small corner shops or larger nameless storefronts. Combined with the worn-down buildings it served to give the city a heavy, gray feel, which is one of the main reasons that Havana is so photographically fascinating.
Our first conversation of any significance with a local came after a tropical rainstorm later that afternoon when we managed to find a courtyard near the Malecon (the waterfront) that served ice-cold Cristals and Bucaneros. We sat next to a table of three young Cuban guys, one of whom started talking to us in broken English and introduced himself as Fish, or as he pronounced it, Feesh. Fish and his two buddies were enjoying small boxes of something called Planchao, which looks like a juice drink you'd put in your kid's lunch, but is actually rum that tastes like something you'd use to light a barbecue. Fish and his friends asked if they could join us at our table because they didn't want the police to see them talking to tourists from another table for some reason and Jeremy bought a round of Planchao for everyone... they only cost 1 CUC each and as such are cheaper than beer. At this point Fish started asking us questions about where we're from, why we're in Havana, and, of course, how we like the Cuban women. This was his launching point for a Shakespearian soliloquy whereby he explained how if you want the "fucky fucky" from the Cuban ladies, you've got to have some spending cash. I think the best way to explain the course of the conversation is to watch a bit of magic that Jimmy managed to capture in this exchange between Fish and Jeremy.
feesch!
Next thing we know, three of Fish's lady friends appeared out of nowhere and sat down one-by-one next to Jeremy, Jimmy, and me. This was the "check please" moment of the conversation. On the way out a couple of the enterprising young ladies followed us, but neither one was willing to meet Jeremy's asking price of 100 CUC so we went on our way.
Later that night Felix took us to the baseball stadium to watch Cuba's Red team play against Puerto Rico in a tournament of Caribbean countries. Felix paid for our tickets which cost him 3 pesos, or about 12 cents U.S each. The stadium was practically empty; there were more security officers than fans; so we sat in the front row box seats/metal lawn chairs down the right field line near the visiting team's dugout. We enjoyed typical Cuban ballgame fare such as pork sandwiches with vinegar, salted popcorn, and, for some reason, a bag of nearly indestructible rock candy. After a couple of innings, one of us recognized that a coach on Puerto Rico's team was Juan Gonzalez, who used to play professionally in the U.S., won the MVP award twice, and turned down a 140 million dollar deal with the Detroit Tigers back in 2001. He was never known as the smartest ballplayer in the world… his nickname is Igor. Anyhow, we might not have noticed Juan except for the fact that, from the field, he was flirting with one of the security officers, a girl who was about 50 feet up in the stands dressed in the classic Castro olive drab military uniform. He kept looking over at her and trying to get her attention with some kind of weird clicking sound, like he was calling over a cat. Maybe that's how the magic happens in Puerto Rico. Or maybe when you're a ballplayer worth millions of dollars you just stop giving a shit, I dunno. They're yelling things at each other in Spanish and she comes down to talk to him for a couple of minutes, so we tell Felix that this dude is Juan Gonzalez and he made millions of dollars in the big leagues. Felix laughs and calls over one of the security guys and proceeds to tell him what we just said, and next thing you know, chaos ensues. About five or six different people, security guards and whatnot, descend right in front of where we're sitting, call over Juan Gonzalez, and start giving him all sorts of shit. This is all going on in Spanish so I'm only picking up about a quarter of what they're saying, but I did manage to hear the security guy asking Juan if he made all that money why doesn't he just buy Puerto Rico. After a couple of minutes it's obvious that Juan is getting more and more annoyed, and he's standing about five feet away from us, and we know that he knows that we are the guys who called him out. I'd like to point out for the record that Juan is about 6'5" and weighs about 250 pounds, not to mention that it looked like the entire Puerto Rican team had been dipped in a vat of steroids. I don't know exactly what happened next because this really fat chick decided to lean over the railing directly in front of me to talk to the right fielder for the Puerto Rican team, and when I tried to video this whole scene I got caught by the security girl who thought that I was trying to video the fat chick's ass. So Juan is arguing with a couple of security guards while the fat chick is chatting up the right fielder and I'm trying to convince the security girl that I wasn't taking pictures of anybody's ass. It was total chaos. They eased up on Juan after a few minutes and he even gave an autographed baseball to the security girl, whom I got to sit with the three of us and take a picture. A few minutes later she came back over to us and asked if we could delete her picture because she didn't want to get in trouble if some officials looked at the pictures as we were leaving the country, so I did. A couple of innings later, Juan was back at it with this new move where he played with his lower lip and making some sort of baby sound... it was a weird scene. Apparently, it takes more than that to knock Juan off his game... he's a pro. Oh yeah, Cuba won the game in extra innings on a walk-off home run.
The next day we took a cab ride directly to downtown Havana and walked to the Floridita, the bar where the Daiquiri was invented and one of Hemingway's favorite hangouts. There's some sort of cult of Hemingway in Cuba, not so much because the Cubans themselves think he's special, but more because they realize that tourists do. If Hemingway ducked into a place once to take a dump it'll be advertised as one of his "haunts." I tried to order the Papa Doble, which is a daiquiri with a double shot of rum named for Hemingway because he supposedly drank 13 of them in one sitting, but the bartender wouldn't have it. He simply said "Daiquiri" and looked at me with glazed-over eyes that said "If I hear the name Hemingway once more I swear I'm going to come in here with an AK-47 and murder everyone at this bar." So I ordered a round of daiquiris. Three rounds later, we were well on our way to our longest day in Havana.
We spent most of the day walking around Havana Vieja, which, due to its popularity with tourists, has been the beneficiary of a directed effort by the Cuban government to restore many of its historic buildings. Calling it the tourist area doesn't ring right when you've seen the likes of Khao San Road in Bangkok or Thamel in Kathmandu or even Fisherman's Wharf in San Francisco. I mean, it's the area where most tourists end up at some point or another because of the beautiful buildings and its relative concentration of hotels and restaurants, but it is nowhere near the chaotic scene of your typical tourist area. As I mentioned earlier, there are no chain stores or shopping malls, only a series of small stores and outdoor boutiques along some of the more popular walking streets. There are quite a few museums and plenty of restaurants, such as the one we ducked into during another rainstorm where an acoustic guitar quartet played Cuban music while we sipped mojitos and ate Moros y Cristianos (black beans and rice).
Later that night we made our way over to the Malecon, which seems to be the place where the locals hang out at night. The waterfront was filled with people sitting on the sea wall, drinking beers and rum, dancing salsa, and propositioning the tourists (i.e. us). Contrary to popular belief, I don't spend a lot of time thinking about hookers so I'm not quite sure how to explain the relationship between some of the local women and male tourists... maybe Fish was right in how he explained it. I don't know if I'd classify these women as straight-up hookers, although you do get directly propositioned, but it seems like most of them are hookers of convenience. What I mean is that they see a tourist and think it's an easy way to make a few CUC, or they'd sleep with you and then ask you for money afterward. Maybe that's a subtlety that doesn't make any sense to anybody except me, but I'm not sure how else to explain it. To be fair, after talking to some of the locals they explained that some women are just looking for guys to take them out to clubs where they don't allow Cubans unless they're accompanied by tourists. All in all, the best strategy is to simply be careful or stay away altogether.
We stopped and sat along the Malecon for a while drinking Cristal and Bucanero and observing instead of being observed. As a tourist in Havana you sometimes feel as if you're either being ignored or being hustled so it was nice to sit back and watch for a while. We (meaning me, the official translator) ended up talking with a couple of university kids who are the only people we met in our time there that said anything negative about the Castro government. After a couple of hours on the Malecon we left these future poster boys for Amnesty International, jumped in a cab, and someone (me) said to the cabbie "24 hora cerveza!"
Where we ended up next I can't exactly say… I didn't exactly give specific directions. It was somewhere along the water but maybe three or four miles up the road in the middle of nowhere. There was what looked like an outdoor bar and when I looked at the cab driver he said "aqui" so we paid and got out. The bar turned out to be closed, so our only other option was a small, well lit shack that had a sign declaring "Pollo Ditu." We'd seen a few of these around town and it's the closest thing Havana has to a fast-food chain. Lucky for us, they served beer and some sort of deep fried chicken nuggets/parts that are purple on the inside. If you were ever curious about the type of people that hang out at a 24-hour chicken pit in Havana, wonder no more. We met Gaston, the English-speaking Pollo Ditu employee whose wife is an opera singer, Ariel the security guard who for some reason works a 12-hour shift guarding a pollo pit, and a couple of young ladies who told us their names were Doris and "Mylove." Under normal circumstances we probably would've been a bit wary of hanging out with a girl named Doris who assured us more than once that her boobs are real and another girl who called herself Mylove with a tattoo of the Playboy bunny right above her butt, but Pollo Ditu at 4 am with Bucanero and Planchao is not what I would consider normal circumstances. Besides, there was nothing in the Lonely Planet specifically warning us against Playboy tattoos. So we stayed out all night drinking beers at a chicken pit in the middle of nowhere with the two girls, the chicken guys and a security guard, with me acting as the translator for all conversations. Again, I'd like to point out that my Spanish is fantastic… I mastered the art of verbally putting question marks and exclamation points in front of my sentences. It was daybreak when we decided we should probably head back to our casa, and before leaving Ariel gave us his phone number and said we should come to stay with him and his family next time we're in Havana. My Spanish is better than I thought, although if it was really good I wouldn't have ended up with a male security guard's digits.
As you can imagine, we didn't do much on our last day that didn't involve sleeping, although we did get a farewell dinner feast cooked by Elizabeth. My main disappointment was that we never got to go salsa dancing, but I can't say that we didn't have an eventful four days. I'm not going to make any extensive pronouncements on the good or evil of communism... I was only there for four days, so what can you really deduce about a place in that amount of time? Some people were afraid to talk to us and others had no problems with it. A security officer didn't want her picture to be recorded with tourists. Felix got thrown in jail for giving tourists a ride to the airport. So in that sense, the government is very restrictive about tourist/local interaction. Economically, no one in the city seems particularly well-off, in fact I'd say that most people are poor, although it seems as though everyone is at the same level of poor. I saw much fewer homeless people in Havana than I would on a typical afternoon in San Francisco. On the other hand, I was propositioned for sex a lot more than I would be on a typical afternoon in San Francisco (unfortunately), which shows a certain level of desperation. Not that they'd have to be desperate to proposition me. Wouldn't hurt though. Anyhow, the city itself is gorgeous in such a unique way that I think it needs to be seen to be appreciated. On the other hand, as I mentioned earlier, the beauty of the city has not been maintained at all and most of what you see can best be described as worn or faded which, honestly, weighs on you emotionally after a while, especially if you think of how beautiful it could be. Not everyone sees it the same way as I do... we met an old chain-smoking Italian man named Franco at the airport that said he'd traveled all his life working in the textile business and has never seen a place as beautiful as Havana.
Havana's not going to stay closed for long, though. They're opening up a Benetton store in Havana Vieja. We went to the Bodeguita del Medio in Playa del Carmen which is absolutely nothing like the original in Havana. It has its own merchandise store where they sell items like "I heart Che" coffee mugs. Can you imagine Che Guevara walking into a place where they sell "I heart Che" coffee mugs? His head would probably explode. But it's only a matter of time before they open one up next to the original.
If you've made it this far, you have my congratulations and my condolences. I didn't think I could write this much about only four days, but Havana gives you a lot of subject matter to work with. If you want to check out the accompanying pictures, here's the link:
https://photos.app.goo.gl/jfDhZRBh7BThuNcN9
Any pictures that are visually interesting in any way whatsoever were stolen from Jimmy.
Take 'er easy,
Dave
