Havana

by Mark Kurlansky

  He had originally set his story in 1938 Estonia but realized that the Nazi occupation there was perhaps too dark a setting for an espionage comedy. He later decided that in “fantastic Havana,” a comedy could be set in the midst of “the absurdities of the cold war.” He reasoned, “For who can accept the survival of Western capitalism as a great cause?” But as Castro pointed out, if you were Cuban, Batista’s dictatorship wasn’t very funny. A murderous kleptocracy in close partnership with American organized crime, it was marked by both wretched poverty and glittering wealth. Foreigners remember the Havana of that time as a kind of romantic brothel where beautiful people dressed elegantly and listened to great music in famous nightclubs. But Habaneros remember it as a place of terror where innocent, even heroic, people were beaten, dragged through the streets, and murdered in daylight and at night.

  In truth, Havana, a city long famous for “fun,” is laced with reminders of a tragic and impassioned history. On the city streets in various neighborhoods are plaques marking spots where Batista’s victims were cut down. There are the places that used to have barracoons, where slaves were warehoused and put on display for the amusement of the rich as late as the 1870s. One barracoon stood on the edge of Habana Vieja, and another on what was once the western edge of town but is now the central neighborhood of Vedado. By the picturesque stoneworks near the mouth of the port once stood military-run centers where owners could take their slaves to be beaten or mutilated by experts while unfazed passersby heard them scream. Near the western barracoon, a plaque marks the quarry where in 1869 José Martí, the central hero of Cuban history, labored on a chain gang as a teenage Spanish political prisoner. Released to exile in Spain, he wrote in a letter to the Spanish people: “Infinite pain: for the pain of imprisonment is the harshest, most devastating pain, murdering the mind, searing the soul, leaving marks that will never be erased.”

  A chain gang on the Plaza de la Catedral in the epoch of Martí’s servitude. Harper’s Weekly, December 3, 1871.

  Below the Morro are the sixteenth-century fortifications of La Cabaña, a favorite tourist spot, where Che Guevara—a man with the looks of a cinema hero—held his tribunals and executed so many people by firing squad that Castro removed him from his post and made him the country’s bank president instead. On the other side of the harbor opening stands La Punta, where in 1852 the rebel Narciso López was publicly garroted.

  In Havana every splash of light has its dark spot.

  •

  Havana is hot, and dealing with heat is a central part of living there. “The heat is a malign plague invading everything,” wrote Leonardo Padura Fuentes in the opening of his contemporary murder mystery Máscaras (titled Havana Red in English). “The heat descends like a tight, stretchy cloak of red silk, wrapping itself around bodies, trees and things, to inject there the dark poison of despair and a slower, certain death.” The book’s central character, the police lieutenant Mario Conde, asks, “¿Pero cómo puede hacer tanto calor, coño?” It is the eternal Havana question: How can it be so fucking hot?

  In December, cooler air comes in by sea from Florida, kicking up the surf and making it foam across the Malecón. In January and February the temperature drops to a very pleasant seventy-five degrees, and some think that this is the best time to visit. But if you are not experiencing heat, you are not really experiencing Havana.

  Habaneros have developed an expertise about which streets to walk on and stick to the ones that line up with the coast to afford a sea breeze. Shade is found everywhere; Habaneros are never seen sunning themselves if they can help it. They glisten with sweat, which is why they are also known for frequent bathing.

  Havana is not a city for people who are squeamish about sweat. Sweat is one of the many defining smells in redolent Havana and is a leitmotif in almost all Havana literature. They sweat in all of Padura’s mystery novels. They sweat in Cirilo Villaverde’s great nineteenth-century classic novel Cecilia Valdés.

  Sweat was a precept of classlessness in a city heavily demarcated by classes—everybody sweats. In The Chase, where sweat is almost one of the central characters, Carpentier described wealthy well-dressed women at a theater: “The furs they wore in spite of the heat made moisture collect on their necks and bosoms.” Rich people just sweat in better clothes.

  •

  Most of the central figures of Havana culture have experienced either forced or self-imposed exile at some time in their lives. And the Habaneros who leave rarely lose an excruciating nostalgia for their city, because it is not like any other place.

  People seem to irrecoverably fall under Havana’s spell. No one visits the city—let alone lives there—and forgets it. Cuba has a history that is unlike any other country’s, certainly unlike any other Spanish colony’s, and Havana’s history and culture stand apart from the rest of Cuba’s.

  People in Havana find it difficult to imagine the rest of the island, let alone the rest of the world—an attitude most New Yorkers and Parisians can understand. Life is not real outside the city.

  Though Cuba is an island, people in Havana tend to see their city as an island within the island. And actually, it almost was. Until the nineteenth century, Havana was a walled city on the tip of a seaside peninsula that juts into Havana Bay with water on three sides and a nearly straight wall on the fourth. The wall ran from the opening of the harbor straight along the western edge of the old city to the bay on the other side. The walled side was the only land connection, and in the seventeenth century the colonial government proposed digging a moat along the wall, which would have made Havana literally an island.

  But it wasn’t necessary. Starting in the eighteenth century, at nine o’clock at night at the fortifications of La Cabaña, a cannon was fired and the gates were closed. You could stay out all night in Havana. Many did. But once the cannon fired, no one could enter or leave the city until morning. Today there is no more wall, no more gates, but the cannon at the harbor entrance is still fired at nine o’clock every night by a contingent of soldiers in eighteenth-century uniforms, accompanied by a drum roll, to remind people of how insular life in the capital still is.

  Havana’s isolation was seldom viewed as something positive. For Dulce María Loynaz, a leading twentieth-century Havana poet, isla was always a word that implied loneliness:

  Surrounded everywhere by the sea

  I am an island clinging to the wind’s stem.

  It doesn’t matter if I scream or pray,

  Nobody hears me.

  “Nadie escucha mi voz si rezo o grito.” Nobody hears my voice whether I scream or pray. Perhaps this is why, throughout their tortured history, Habaneros have always screamed and prayed so loudly. On an island on an island, it takes a lot to be heard.

  And yet—and perhaps with the same perversity with which moviegoers find film noir romantic, even though they are sad stories of luckless people—Havana, for all its smells, sweat, crumbling walls, isolation, and difficult history, is the most romantic city in the world. Endless love songs have been written about it. The city always beguiles.

  ONE

  Change

  Todo el mundo tiene una ciudad distinta en la cabeza.

  Everybody has a different city in his head.

  — EDMUNDO DESNOES ON HAVANA, in Inconsolable Memories, 1965

  There is a great deal of disagreement about Havana, partly because in Havana disagreeing is a way of life. But most everyone agrees that it is like no other city on earth. How did Havana become so different (though not as different as Columbus thought when he reported that there was a place called Avan, where “the inhabitants are born with tails”)?

  Historians point to one uprising or another revolt that shaped the city but in truth it is change itself that has given Havana its character. It has had a history of upheaval and change like no other place. Change is one of the fundamental conditions here.

  To start with, Havana was founded three times in three different places.

  After Christophe
r Columbus in 1492 declared the island of Cuba “the most beautiful that eyes have ever seen,” he sent an emissary to talk to the locals, who he thought were Chinese. Columbus didn’t have anyone with him who actually spoke Chinese, so he sent someone who spoke Arabic, reasoning that he was at least some kind of Asianist. There is some evidence that Columbus knew that he was not in Asia but it is not clear why he thought an Arab speaker might be helpful.

  Not much is known of the original inhabitants of the area, the Tainos. Once Columbus acknowledged that they weren’t Chinese, he noted in his diary that they seemed to be “good people” and would make excellent servants. He kidnapped a few to bring back to his sponsors in Spain.

  In 1511, the Spanish sent Diego Velázquez de Cuéllar to Cuba with three hundred men for what the Spanish called conquest and what today is called genocide. Few Tainos survived. According to legend, the Taino leader, Hatuey, later honored in Havana by a popular brand of beer, was strapped to a pole on a pile of wood for burning. Threatened with painful death, he refused to reveal where the island’s gold was, most probably because there was none. Then the Spanish offered him a cross and told him that if he accepted the Christian God, he would go to heaven. According to the story, Hatuey asked if Christians went to heaven and the Spanish assured him that they did. Hatuey’s last words before they lit the fire were “If Christians go to heaven, I do not want to go.”

  One reason for speculation that this often-repeated story is not true is that it so clearly resembles Habanero humor. Habaneros love stories that are told at the expense of people in charge, always starting with a soft, anecdotal setup and ending with a biting short punch line. The Hatuey story is like the popular “Pepito” jokes of Cuba today, which are usually about Fidel Castro, commonly referred to as “Fidel.” Indeed, the story may be the founding Pepito joke. A more recent example:

  When Castro was trying to prevent Havana from becoming overcrowded, he proposed moving new arrivals from Oriente Province back to where they had come from. Pepito suggested to him that they provide three hundred buses and a Mercedes.

  “What is the Mercedes for?” Castro asked.

  “You, Comandante.” (Castro himself was from Oriente.)

  On July 25, 1514, Velázquez sent forth one of his lieutenants, Pánfilo de Narváez, to found a town to be called San Cristóbal, since they were setting out on San Cristóbal Day. According to Bartolomé de Las Casas (remembered today as the conquistador who documented the genocide of the Tainos), Pánfilo was a very large, redheaded man who was not only exceptionally brutal, even for that crowd, but also unusually stupid. So the evidence is that Havana was founded by a moronic thug.

  Pánfilo chose to build the town on a western inlet on the island’s southern (Caribbean) coast. He was apparently not a good enough sailor—he was eventually lost at sea on an expedition to Florida—to realize that the more desirable location was the northern coast on the Atlantic. He named the settlement San Cristóbal de la Habana, and no one seems to know where the “Habana” came from. It is thought that the Taino chief of the region was named Habaguanex, but why would Pánfilo name a new town after the chief of the people he was killing? Some believe the place he chose was the spot that Columbus called Avan, but only because of the vague similarity in names and the fact that Columbus said Avan was located in the western part of the island. Today the port there is called Batabonó, and it is a small village of little distinction aside from being where Hernán Cortés outfitted his original expedition to Mexico.

  Not only was San Cristóbal de la Habana founded on the wrong coast, but it was also situated near an unbearable mosquito-infested, disease-plagued swamp. Settlers endured a harsh existence there for a few years and then moved directly north some thirty miles across what was by chance the narrowest part of the island—to the right coast, where they found another buggy area. There they founded the new San Cristóbal de la Habana at the mouth of a river that the Tainos called Casiguagua but that today is known as the Almendares. The river runs through residential sections of present-day Havana, dividing the once-fashionable neighborhood of Vedado from the newer, also once-fashionable neighborhood of Miramar. The river had good freshwater and has long served as a water supply for Havana, but aside from that it is unclear why the settlers chose this spot, since it was only a short distance from a superbly sheltered bay with more comfortable and defensible high ground. That spot was known as the Puerto de Carenas because it was used for careening, the term for hauling ships onto dry dock and caulking their hulls with pitch, which was found along the rocky shore.

  In San Cristóbal de la Habana II, the settlers were again plagued by insects and disease, and finally in 1519 they relocated to the hill overlooking the bay at Puerto de Carenas, on the spot that is currently the Plaza de Armas, Havana’s oldest square. They had finally learned that if you live by the water, you will live a lot better on high ground than low ground. The official founding date of San Cristóbal de la Habana III is November 16, 1519, not because anything in particular happened on that day, but because the pope had switched San Cristóbal Day from July 25 to November 16. According to legend, the colonists observed a mass under a large ceiba, or silk-cotton tree. Then they dropped the saint from the name.

  •

  The first houses in this third Havana were temporary mud-walled, thatch-roofed, dirt-floored huts facing the sea. The bay was soon filled with galleons loaded with booty brought in from Mexico and the Americas, to be shipped to Spain. For all the wealth passing through it, however, Havana was not a town of luxuries. There were so many tortoises and crabs crawling through the young town that after dark a tremendous racket of clawing and shuffling was reportedly heard, a gnawing noise that was the sound of Havana at night. In 1655, an English pirate ship sent a raiding party into town, but upon hearing in the dark what sounded like the scuffling of a huge army, they retreated to their ship. They had been pushed back by an army of tortoises.

  The early Habaneros killed the tortoises, cut them into strips, and dried them into tasajo, by all accounts an unappealing dish, which could be reconstituted in boiling water for sailors on voyages back to Spain. Apparently, too, drying tortoise has an unpleasant smell, or perhaps the rotting leftover parts do, because eventually, due to the odor, the town government banned tasajo making within the town limits.

  But that was an early Havana. There have been many since.

  TWO

  The Hated Sea

  Odio el mar, sólo hermoso cuando gime.

  I hate the sea, beautiful only when it howls.

  — JOSÉ MARTÍ, “Odio el Mar” (1882)

  To the visitor, one of the great charms of Havana has always been that it is a strip of city facing a sparkling tropical sea, with the dark stripe of the Gulf Stream against the horizon. Hemingway was not the only foreigner for whom the sea was Havana’s central attraction. But the people of Havana have not always felt that way.

  To the east of the city is Varadero, one of the most beautiful beaches in the Americas. With more than fifty hotels, it is said to be the largest beach resort in the Caribbean. When I went to Cuba as a reporter in the 1980s and ’90s, the Cuban official who took charge of my program, commonly referred to as a “handler,” would always try to convince me to spend a few days of my brief working trip at Varadero. I went for a quick look, but never stayed, because there were no Cubans there. It was a place for Canadians and—depending on the epoch—either Eastern Europeans or Western Europeans. The Lonely Planet guidebook calls Varadero “the vanguard of Cuba’s most important industry—tourism.”

  But Varadero holds little fascination for Habaneros. Aside from the few elite who used to vacation on the beach in what is now the western neighborhood of Miramar, beyond the Almendares River, the people of Havana have little affection for the sea.

  Contemporary novelist Abilio Estévez wrote, “In Havana, I was always afraid of the sea. And since all roads in Havana lead to the sea, almost every road led me to fear.”

  Heber
to Padilla, known for his 1984 autobiographical novel Heroes Are Grazing in My Garden, wrote:

  If there is a landscape that truly repels me, it is the one on the cover of the first Spanish edition of Heroes Are Grazing in My Garden—you see a dreamy beach with palm trees and a deluxe sun, a scene from a tourist’s postcard to be sent back home, stimulation directed at an attraction felt by Northerners, which I cannot bear.

  And an aversion to the sea is not new for Habaneros. In “Odio el Mar” (“I Hate the Sea”), the great nineteenth-century poet José Martí wrote, “I hate the sea, enormous corpse, sad corpse where hateful creatures dwell.”

  Martí was born to poor Spanish immigrants living in a small house on the edge of Habana Vieja. Though always an Habanero in his heart and mind, he only lived the first sixteen years of his life there. A child prodigy who took up painting and writing at an early age, he was a published and known poet by the age of sixteen. He was also a passionate supporter of the movement to free Cuba from Spanish control, and at age sixteen he started publishing a newspaper called La Patria Libre dedicated to the cause of Cuban independence, for which he was arrested and eventually exiled.

  Martí, like many Habaneros before and after him, was a wistful exile. To Habaneros, the struggle has always been to stay home. Not going into exile, not leaving, remaining in this special place is a triumph—albeit a triumph tinged with sorrow. Every day, Habaneros pass the deserted rooms, apartments, and houses of friends and loved ones who have gone across the sea, “and you are left lonelier and more lost than a shipwreck in the middle of the Gulf Stream,” as Pedro Juan Gutiérrez, the chronicler of contemporary Havana, wrote. And so, even proud Habaneros stare across the sea, thinking of someone who crossed it.