The present-day Cuban is rapidly becoming Americanized (americanizado). Thousands act, think, talk, and look like Americans; wear American clothes, ride in Amer. autos; use Amer. furniture and machinery; often time send their children to Amer. colleges; live for a time in the States themselves, or expect to, and eat much Amer. food.
Of course, there is an historical irony here. Terry was only talking about a certain class of Cubans, most from Havana. And after 1959, when Fidel Castro started trying to change this American-built, not to mention American-controlled, society, they were the ones with the most to lose, and the first to leave. By the mid-1970s there weren’t many Americanized Cubans left in Havana.
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To the Americans, Havana was just sitting there, waiting for them. As Trumbull White wrote in 1898, “The multiplication of Americans in the island will of itself correct that which has been its greatest disadvantage from our own point of view, the absence of a congenial American society.”
In 1900, private U.S. companies funded by the U.S. government began spending millions of dollars on major projects to make Havana more suitable for Americans. They paved and patched up streets, improved plumbing, introduced the first flush toilets, built new electric plants, wired homes for electricity, brought streetlights to more neighborhoods, and built walkways and fountains in city parks.
The Havana Electric Railway Company, headquartered in New York, built fifteen miles of electric trolley service connecting central Havana with what were then thought of as the suburbs but later became part of the city—Vedado to the west, Cerro and Jesús del Monte to the south of Vedado, and Guanabacoa, celebrated for its mineral springs and health baths, to the east.
More than anything else, it was this New York trolley company that changed the shape of Havana after the U.S. occupation began. Suddenly, the population of a large area had easy access to central Havana. Land was available, and homes could be built with yards and gardens, indoor toilets that flushed, hot and cold water, and electricity. Such homes were not even tremendously expensive, and for anyone with some money who was not a staunch traditionalist, the spacious outlying area had more to offer than Centro Habana and Habana Vieja.
The Americans also brought with them innovations in construction techniques, opening up the city to new architectural possibilities. By the beginning of the twentieth century, the ornate Beaux Arts design that was in vogue in Paris and New York started to appear, followed by art deco and other styles.
By the late twenties, the Almendares River was no longer the western limit of Havana. Across a new bridge—today it is a tunnel—there were the seaside communities of Miramar and Marianao, featuring a golf course, country club, racetrack, casino, and attractive beach. These communities became the favorite new neighborhoods of Americans and are still favorites with foreigners.
Tourism grew steadily in the first half of the twentieth century. In 1912, oil executive Henry Flagler extended his Florida East Coast Railway from Biscayne Bay to Key West. At the time, Key West was the most populous city in South Florida, but Flagler’s real interest was to establish a base for trade with nearby Cuba. Train service through Florida to Key West brought Cuba closer to the United States than it had ever been. Havana hosted conventions and was a popular destination for celebrities—as well as for sailors, thanks to the presence of the U.S. Navy at Guantánamo.
When the U.S. occupation began, there were two hundred registered brothels in Havana, and this long-standing Havana trade now grew dramatically. By the early 1930s, more than seven thousand prostitutes were working in the city. For many men, a visit to a prostitute was one of the celebrated features of a trip to Havana, along with music, rum, and cigars.
Innumerable new bars, cafés, and restaurants also sprang up. Havana had always been a town of bars, cafés, and restaurants, but these new establishments were specifically for Americans—Harry’s New York Bar, the Texas Bar, the Chicago Restaurant, the Manhattan Café. They would advertise “American cooking,” and sometimes “American service,” which probably meant fast service, as compared with the usual Cuban pace, which even Cubans sometimes found too slow. (Cubans aren’t slow anymore. One of the messages of the revolution is that hard work is a revolutionary act, and this message and the new status of service jobs in the tourist industry have led to industrious and efficient workers. If you look around Havana today, not a lot of loafing is seen among people on the job, despite the heat.)
Stores began to specialize in American food, medicine, soap, clothes, and other products. Cubans selling Cuban products also sometimes gave their stores American names. And even in Spanish, food stores became known as “groceries.” Careers were made by representing or distributing American goods or by serving as an attorney for U.S. companies.
Extraordinarily, in a country famous for its own tobacco products, American cigarettes became fashionable. American automobile companies, especially Ford, established local dealerships. Un Ford came to mean a taxi, though today a taxi is more commonly called un Chevy. By 1930 there were more cars per capita in Havana than in New York City.
Pets in Havana quite often had, and still have, American names, and they learn basic commands in English. Habaneros are animal lovers, and Havana is a city of cats and dogs, even though it is poor and has food shortages at times. It is easy to see by the way animals act here that they are rarely mistreated. The cats are lean but friendly, exactly like the people.
Christmas became completely Americanized and began to be celebrated on December 25 instead of January 6, the traditional Día de los Reyes. And Santa Claus arrived. Affluent families began celebrating on both the 25th and the 6th. In the past half-century, the revolution has been struggling to expel Santa Claus, but Habaneros still celebrate the American Christmas, along with such American holidays as Mother’s Day and Father’s Day.
In 1921, Havana became one of the first cities in the world to have an international airport. The first regular flights were from Key West, via Aeromarine Airways. Pan Am began flying to Havana in 1928, and by the 1930s numerous airlines offered flights to Havana from several American cities.
Also among the firsts that America brought to Havana were some of the world’s first theaters to play talkie movies. In 1950, Havana became the first Latin American country to have television, and in 1958, the first to have color TV. At the time of the 1959 revolution, 138 movie theaters were operating in Havana.
Numerous Havana companies did a brisk business in glossy black-and-white publicity photographs of Hollywood stars. Habaneros liked to place these in shops, restaurants, and private homes, and after the revolution they did the same with glossies of Fidel and Che—a tradition that continues today.
Habaneros have always loved movie stars, and it was not incidental to the popularity of the revolution that it was carried out by men who looked like movie stars. Havana literature makes constant references to Hollywood films. Nothing could be more Habanero than Leonardo Padura’s 2005 mystery novel Adiós Hemingway, which is centered around the fact—at least everyone in Havana says it is a fact—that Ava Gardner swam naked in Hemingway’s swimming pool. There is a murder involved, and naturally a key piece of evidence is the lace panties Ms. Gardner discarded before the plunge.
Along the Prado and Parque Central were elegant hotels such as the nineteenth-century Inglaterra and the 1908 Sevilla, built in Moorish Revival style with lacy white railings and fairy-tale turquoise archways. In 1924, when Havana was still a mostly two-story city, a ten-story modern wing was added to the hotel, with a rooftop ballroom built by the celebrated New York architectural firm Schultze and Weaver. After American organized crime started to take over Havana tourism in the 1950s, the Sevilla, by then the Sevilla Biltmore, was part-owned by the infamous Santo Trafficante Jr., who moved to Havana in 1950 to avoid prosecution in Florida.
As Havana expanded into Vedado in 1930, a leading hotel, Hotel Nacional, was built on the Vedado waterfront. It was designed by the New York firm McKim, Mead and Whit
e, known for its many celebrated buildings in New York City, such as the Columbia University campus, the original Pennsylvania Station, and the Morgan Library, as well as the Boston Public Library and the National Museum of Natural History, in Washington. For the Nacional, the firm turned to the Mediterranean Revival style that had become popular with the wealthy people brought to Florida by Flagler’s railroad. The new Vedado hotel resembled the already famous Breakers Hotel, in Palm Beach, which had been rebuilt in 1925 by Schultze and Weaver. The Nacional was Havana’s largest hotel, with five hundred rooms, and was the first to overlook the ocean.
The Americans were rebuilding Havana in their own image. And if American tastes leaned toward Jim Crow, so be it—anything to please Americans. Poet Nicolás Guillén wrote about watching a couple trying to check in at the Nacional. A white man accompanied by a young black woman was being told that there was absolutely no room available for them in the large hotel. It made no difference that the woman happened to be the celebrated entertainer Josephine Baker, in the city for a performance. They went to another hotel, smaller and less popular with Americans. Guillén wrote, “The Hotel Nacional is Yankee Territory. In Havana it stands for pieces of Virginia or Georgia, places where to be black is barely a humanized form of being a dog.” Then came the perfectly tuned Habanero sarcasm. “Having said that, let us be fair: it must be noted that at no time did Mrs. Baker run the risk of being lynched as she would have in Richmond or Atlanta. Is this not a clear sign of progress for which we Cubans should be proud of ourselves?”
Havana’s skyline was now marked not only by the Spanish Morro but by the twin towers of the Nacional and by one other facade, the large white dome of El Capitolio, the capitol, home of the legislature of the struggling Cuban republic. The building was completed in 1929 under Gerardo Machado, the democratically elected president, who, after a brief flirtation with democracy, decided that autocracy worked better; he was eventually violently overthrown. Though Machado did not leave democratic institutions in his wake, he did leave this very large legislative building—larger than the one in Washington, D.C., of which it appears to be a copy, despite official denials. The floor under the capitol dome is supposedly a diamond-encrusted rock, from which distances between the capital and all points in Cuba are measured. The estimated cost of the building was twenty million dollars, and it was said to have bankrupted the national treasury.
Like a French president, Machado was determined to leave his visual mark on the city, and in addition to El Capitolio he built the Malecón, a boulevard that runs along the Atlantic seawall in Vedado. For centuries, the seafront there had been a kind of no-man’s-land, with rogue waves unpredictably smashing into the rocks and splashing up onto the land. Parts of the waterfront had been a garbage dump during the last years of Spanish rule. But in 1902, during the U.S. occupation, General Wood had a seawall built, and later, when cars began appearing in significant numbers in Havana, a scenic drive was constructed alongside it. Under Machado in 1930, that drive was extended to run along the entire curved waterfront of Vedado—a seven-mile sweep from Habana Vieja to the Almendares River.
The Malecón completely changed Havana’s perspective. Until its construction, Havana was a city on the bay. Once the Malecón was built, Habaneros turned their heads from the bay to the ocean. Havana became a city on the sea, on the Atlantic, the Straits, facing the Gulf Stream—the city to which Hemingway was drawn. The Malecón is still a favorite spot—the place to go fishing, the place for lovers to walk along while listening to a rumbling sea or to embrace in the shadows, the place to pick out a tune on a guitar at night, the only place in Havana with Atlantic breezes on a relentlessly broiling day, the place to cool off at nighttime, the place to take refuge behind the endless columns of the buildings along the boulevard, the place to face the sea where the ocean runs a bit wild and whitecaps lap and splash over the edge of the road. It was thrilling to drive past the waves. As Cabrera Infante wrote in his novel Three Trapped Tigers, “I’m only saying for the benefit of those who have never traveled in a convertible along the Malecón between five and seven in the afternoon or rather evening on August 11, 1958, at sixty or eighty miles an hour: such privilege, such exaltation, such euphoria . . .”
For Havana children, there is no greater joy on a hot day, which is almost every day, than running in the waves that splash over the Malecón. Everyone who has grown up in Havana has childhood memories of the Malecón. Carlos Eire, the privileged son of a Batista-era judge, in his reminiscences of his childhood, Waiting for Snow in Havana, described persuading his father to drive through the waves along the Malecón when a storm came.
An entire volume could be collected of poetry about the Malecón—from Ibarzábal’s “Noche Habanero” to Bernard Jambrina’s “En el Malecón” to Agustín Acosta’s “En el Malecón” to Carpentier’s “Las Tardes del Malecón,” and many, many more.
Adding to the boulevard’s romance is a vague but titillating whiff of danger. The sea heaves, seems to show its muscles, and crashes against the wall, spraying the road. Then waves actually rise up over the wall and splash across the road, with foam marking the points of contact, sometimes even wrapping around the pillars of the buildings on the far side of the boulevard. This is when the thought intrudes, How serious could this get?
Very serious. The word “hurricane” comes from the Taino language, and the Tainos drew spirals to symbolize it. Havana is hurricane country. The most damaging hurricane ever recorded—there may well have been worse ones that were recorded only by those Taino spirals—was the Hurricane of Santa Teresa on October 15, 1768. There was no way to measure wind velocity back then, but entire blocks were torn to rubble, and the inner harbor, which was supposed to be safe, was invaded by a furious sea that, when it withdrew, carried away all the anchored ships. In 2005, another October storm, Hurricane Wilma, came in through the Malecón and immersed much of the city in three and four feet of seawater. Although 130,000 people were evacuated and large hunks of the Malecón ripped out and washed away, leaving the seaward side of the already half-ruined Vedado looking a little worse, there were no fatalities. The Malecón was easily repaired, and little permanent damage was done to the old, rickety city, perhaps because it was a wreck to begin with.
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Prohibition, the constitutional banning of alcoholic beverages in the United States between 1920 and 1933, offered a new opportunity for Havana. This was the original attraction of organized crime to Havana. Cuban establishments that catered to Americans could now offer them the drinks they couldn’t have at home. President Machado must have delighted in having a waiter bring Calvin Coolidge a daiquiri with the press watching during the U.S. president’s 1928 visit. The press, for its part, was impressed with how artfully Coolidge managed to have Machado’s attention drawn elsewhere while he evaded the waiter and the drink.
But most Americans not only didn’t decline the proffered libations—they came to Havana to drink. Even without organized crime, this was a great business for Havana bars. Probably the most famous, near the Sevilla Biltmore, was Sloppy Joe’s, housed in a large space with a long, dark mahogany bar and many tall, dark wooden tables and mirrors. It had as its slogan “First port of call, out where the wet begins.”
This is the bar where Carol Reed shot the scene in Our Man in Havana where the vacuum cleaner salesman is recruited by British intelligence. Such things may have happened there. It looked like it, anyway, in this large bar crowded almost entirely with foreigners.
A Spaniard, José Abeal y Otero, known to his American customers as Sloppy Joe, opened the bar when Prohibition started. According to Abeal, who circulated booklets with the bar’s story in the 1930s, it first opened for business inside a grocery store in 1918. Because of the store’s disheveled appearance, American customers started calling it “Sloppy Joe’s.” Another story is that the bar’s name came from a negative review.
Sloppy Joe’s specialized in a sandwich of the same name that was a perfect exp
ression of Havana at the time. It was the traditional Cuban dish picadillo, served on an American-style hamburger bun.
Below is the recipe as the bartender gave it to me, translated into English. But first you have to make a picadillo, so here is a recipe for picadillo given to me more than thirty years ago at an equally famous Havana bar, La Bodeguita del Medio:
Grind meat (beef) and marinate it with salt and lime juice, or vinegar. Make a sofrito with minced garlic and onion sautéd with the ground meat. This should be done slowly.
Now the Sloppy Joe:
Saute picadillo in oil: add black pepper, onion, garlic, cumin, bay leaf, and tomato sauce, and finish with demi-glace sauce. Add salt to taste and when it is cooked, add (green) olives. Keep on medium heat for 5 minutes to finish. Serve over a hamburger bun.
A “Sloppy Joe’s” was also a drink popular in the 1930s, served in a tall glass with crushed ice and a straw. The key to this drink is the high booze-to-fruit-juice ratio. The ingredients, according to the bar’s brochure:
2 ounces pineapple juice
1 ounce cognac
1 ounce port wine
¼ teaspoon orange curaçao
¼ teaspoon grenadine
Sloppy Joe’s was famous for cocktails, which were very much a Havana fashion. The bar boasted eighty cocktail recipes, including the American Girl and the Mary Pickford, the latter made of pineapple, rum, and grenadine, a kind of simplified Sloppy Joe’s.
Iced drinks were a Cuban specialty in the nineteenth century, when only a few warm places, notably Havana and New Orleans, had ample supplies of ice. The ice came from up north: blocks were harvested in Upstate New York and New England, stored in insulated icehouses, and then shipped from New York and Boston directly to Havana.
Havana first got ice in 1806, and in Cecilia Valdés, the white planter class sips away the hot afternoons with iced drinks. In 1871, Samuel Hazard was surprised at how readily available ice was in Havana. Street carts selling snow cones—shaved ice with a large choice of syrups—were common in Centro Habana from the nineteenth century until 1959, when the revolution abolished private business.
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