I was talked into sharing a taxi to Havana with two Russians. The drive, from the beach town of Varadero, took two hours; the Afro-Cuban driver never spoke, except to sing softly along with the booming reggaeton on the stereo, or to exchange a shouted ‘¡Buena’!’ with a colleague. We travelled along the diamond sea, and through the island’s sun-baked interior, which resembles Italy: hills and sweeping valleys, strewn with shrubs and browned by the sun.
Havana announced itself with a revolutionary mural surely not long for this world (‘We Will Never Let Our Guard Down!’). We entered a tunnel, and emerged to a burst of colour; the Spanish houses and the 50s cars glowed bright red, lime green, pastel blue, pink, orange in the sun. The driver dropped the Russians on a street which was essentially a pothole, and then took me to the cheap hostel I had booked.
This was far from central Havana. The streets were dusty and broken, the brightly-coloured houses faded and mouldering. A man saw me wandering in the grimy corridor and showed me in. I had made the reservation on an obscure website, as Cuba is not covered by Hostelworld or other mainstream portals. They had no record of my reservation or deposit. There was not so much as a plug in the room, and I was the only guest. Quietly I resolved to get out of here and find somewhere better as soon as possible.
I stepped out and walked up a main road, thick with traffic and people driven outside by the heat, sprawling outside grimy shops and workshops and rickshaw parks with broken gates. Once or twice someone approached me, the only foreigner, with those awful words, ‘hello my fren! Where you are from?’ I looked in vain for somewhere to sit down and eat, and found only grubby places where people ate standing. Eventually, the white cupola of the iconic Capitolio heralded my arrival in Habana Vieja. I slumped among busts of revolutionary heroes in the shade of a sun-scorched park, and then kept walking until I found a good cafe: the mercifully cool, Tripadvisor-recommended Art Pub, where I stopped to eat and rest.
In the evening, concerned at the rate at which my laboriously acquired ‘Cooks’ (Cuban Convertible Pesos, the tourist currency tied to the US dollar) were disappearing, I thought I would try to walk back to the hostel rather than spend money on a cab, even though I didn’t know the way exactly. Thus I struck out into the gathering darkness, and, inevitably, I was soon lost in the murky, menacing, broken streets. I had to walk all the way back to the Capitolio to get a taxi. The two Afro-Cuban drivers didn’t know where my street was. Thus we ended up circling a huge, backlit portrait of Che Guevara, stopping everywhere to ask for directions and communicating with difficulty, I speaking terrible Castilian and they strange Cuban Spanish, swallowing the s.
When I finally got back, I found two other guests had arrived. They offered me rum and a puff on a Cuban cigar. I asked the receptionist if there was any tea in the building. He sent his irritating colleague, who spoke only rapid, thickly-accented Spanish, out to look for some.
‘He’s English! He drinks tea every day at home!’
‘He’s not at home, he should learn to go without...’, I heard.
A bag of green tea was eventually acquired, and prepared in a chipped mug. After the day I had had, it tasted like manna from heaven.
I spent the following three days wandering around the city. I would wake up early, sticky in that airless room, sometimes woken by the receptionist turning on the light with an unwelcome ‘¡Hola!’, and step out.
My abiding memory is the heat – the pounding, tropical heat. A hot sewer wind blew down the mouldering streets and recalled Marseille. I had to mop my brow every minute; I could never walk far before I had to collapse under a tree and rest. I learned my way around; I learned to save money by going to backstreet places – cramped, humid caverns where Cubans ate and drank – and paying in moneda nacional, the local currency,instead of Cooks.
I walked. Under the shade of colonnades, where there was any, along the Havana streets – usually cracked, often piled with rubble, sometimes with refuse. Past the grand, mould-blackened windows and cornices of the colonial houses, past the ruins. Havana is a white-hot, elegant snake-pit, a colourful wreck.
I found a Russian church with golden onion domes, a Chinese archway with a flared roof and hanzi calligraphy, and a sculpture of two men embracing, one in a long robe and headdress: a ‘Monument to the Arab Immigrants’ who 'sowed their dreams and hopes into the soil of the Nation and helped to forge a free, independent, and sovereign Homeland’.
I found a book market, much of which was taken up by the works of Fidel and Che. A man showed me a history of Cuba. I opened it at random and read ‘during the eleven months of English occupation from March 1762 to February 1763, Havana became a thriving mercantile centre as the island was opened to the trade of North America and the West Indies. Thousands of slaves were brought by the English from West Africa to develop the sugar plantations...’ The booksellers fought over me to sell a bootlegged copy of Graham Greene’s Our Man in Havana, full of printing errors and with a discoloured, photocopied front cover. On the back I read the words, ‘...he worked for four years as sub-editor on The Times... He undertook work for the Foreign Office and was stationed in Sierra Leone...’ , like just-discernible snatches of a familiar song in a strange place.
I walked on. Fidel and Che still stare fixedly out at Cuba, from revolutionary murals to which no-one pays the slightest attention (‘¡Hasta la victoria siempre!’, ‘Che, we are loyal to your courage and your ideas!’, ‘My dreams know no borders!’), from the walls of government buildings where men in green uniforms slumped idly with the doors thrown open in the heat, and – supreme, cruel irony of Cuba – from the banknotes clutched by beggars, often legless Afro-Cubans who, perhaps, left their limbs in Angola for the Struggle.
Practically, travelling here is difficult. Cash machines are few and far between. To exchange or withdraw money I had to join the long queue outside the CADECA, the bureau de change, and once had to wait more than an hour as they shut for lunch just as I was getting close to the front of the line. To get internet access I had to go into one of the upmarket hotels – all marble and vast staircases – and pay six Cooks for an hour's connection.
I kept walking. I found the port, built to resemble Cadiz, and walked along it to the lighthouse and the harbour mouth. On the other side of the bay were the blazing chimneys of a factory, and a stark Spanish fortress. I found the Museum of the Revolution, and outside it, the tank from which Castro had fired on the American ships at the Bay of Pigs.
I took a taxi to Old Havana in the evenings. With the window down, coasting the Malecón - the famous promenade – and the glittering blue sea, I felt good. Sometimes the driver would point out the landmarks – the grand old Hotel Naciónal, and Hemingway’s old haunt, the Floridita – and often would offer me a prostitute. Old Havana in the evening glows many colours in the waning sun; dimly lit, still hot, and bumping with the music of a hundred bars.
The people sprawl under the Spanish colonnades, do backflips off cars, dive into the glaring sea from the Malecón. They wear t-shirts picked up from God knows where, with incongruous slogans: ‘Kalifornia’, ‘UK Soccer Aid. Inspire™’, ‘I fancy a latte’, ‘Bitch Please’. I glimpsed into the tiny, blackened stairwells of their apartment blocks, overheard snatches of their talk:
‘¡Mamí!’
‘¡¿Quééééée?!’
To me, as to Greene’s Wormold, they called out ‘Taxi’ on every corner. They heard my high-school Castilian and took me for Spanish: ‘¡Viva España!’one man cried when I lisped the c in gracias. As I walked down the Malecón a man offered me a swig from his bottle of rum. Girls called out ‘¡Amigo!’ and made kissing noises. One followed me and asked me to her house for a drink. Another stretched out her legs beside me where I sat looking out to sea, and asked forthrightly ‘¿desidiera’ una chica?’
Walking near the port I fell into conversation with two middle-aged Afro-Cubans, John and Marcel. John spoke good English, which he had learned from his brother – one of a group of Cuban and Nicaraguan students who, under Thatcher, were sent to Nottingham on scholarships. He painted a bleak picture of Cuba between puffs on a cigar. He was a physics teacher, and had to work two jobs to make ends meet. He’d never left Cuba, never even left Havana; hotels and transport were too expensive. No-one believed in the revolution today. Forget the propaganda, Cuba was racist; if I saw an Afro-Cuban with a good job it was only because he had connections. I was surprised. Weren’t there some benefits to the regime though, I asked? Free education, free healthcare?
He laughed mirthlessly: ‘William! Don’t talk about things you don’t know.’ Yes healthcare was free, but half of Havana only ate once a day. Yes, university was free, but only the rich went; the poor had to work and support their families. He gestured to some teenagers nearby. Half the boys, he said, would be skipping school to scrounge plastic bottles and sell them to the government, half the girls selling themselves to tourists. He hoped the blockade would be lifted as soon as possible. ‘Cubans need money’, he said bluntly. ‘Castro opened one door, he needs to open the other’. As for the regime, he was unequivocal: ‘Cuba is a jail’.
Of course he asked me for money (‘for my children?’), and I couldn’t refuse him. Marcel, a sculptor, gave me a chip of black African wood, which he said would bring me good luck.
On my last night in Havana, I walked back along the Malecón in the merciful breeze from the cool, silver sea, past ‘the pockmarked, eroded Spanish buildings’. The sky over the Straits of Florida was clouded; there were flashes of lightning and a few flecks of rain. There was no relief, though, from the paralysing heat. The deluge did not come. Not yet.
