Havana

by Mark Kurlansky

  The cuba libre was one of the first of the famous Cuban iced cocktails. American soldiers, the Rough Riders, brought Coca-Cola to Cuba and soon started spiking it with rum, often toasting to a “free Cuba,” the cause for which they claimed to be fighting. Soon the recipe became Habanero, with a splash of lime juice added and sometimes a splash of bitters, served in a tall glass of ice.

  Another famed Havana bar, El Floridita, was founded in 1912 by Constantino “Constante” Ribalaigua, a small man reputed to be a great bartender and to have perfected the daiquiri—in part by adding maraschino liqueur to the formula. Like the cuba libre, the daiquiri was invented in eastern Cuba, but improved upon in Havana. Daiquirí is the name of a mining town in eastern Cuba, and supposedly an American mining engineer named Jennings Cox concocted the original drink—essentially rum, lime juice, sugar, and ice—when he ran out of gin. Others say it was not Cox, but an American soldier, William Shafter, who invented the daiquiri in Santiago when he added ice to a local lime-and-rum drink. In either case, ice was the pivotal ingredient for an American cocktail.

  Originally, El Floridita had huge open doorways to let in air, and big, thumping ceiling fans. Its crowd spread out onto the street. Hemingway could leave his hotel, walk past the shops on Calle Obispo, catering mostly to Americans, then cool off with an iced drink at El Floridita. It was a good life.

  •

  A bodeguita is a small bodega, a little grocery store, usually equipped with a bar. Ángel Martínez started one in 1942. It was supposed to be named Casa Martínez, but everyone called it La Bodeguita del Medio—the little bodega halfway down the block. In 1951, he partnered with Sepy Dobronyi, a Hungarian who had been everything from a pilot to a jewelry designer to a painter, and La Bodeguita was reinvented as a bar and restaurant. The concept, perfect for Havana, was slum chic. Here movie stars such as Errol Flynn could drink and dine cheaply on peasant fare in a series of small rooms of tawdry charm while listening to well-played songs: boleros and the peasant songs known as guajiras. Customers were encouraged to cover the walls with their graffiti.

  Among the Cuban peasant dishes served in La Bodeguita was ajiaco. Though central to Havana cooking, it is of rural origin, from the sugar plantations, where root vegetables provided slaves with inexpensive nutrition. Alfonso Hernández Catá, Cuba’s first great short story writer, from the early twentieth century, wrote a story about a veteran telling his children a tale from the War of Independence. Before he tells it to them, he insists they eat ajiaco. It is a way to be in touch with cubanismo.

  Ajiaco is considered to be the quintessential Cuban dish because it includes indigenous roots such as yucca, known as cassava in English; boniato, a white sweet potato; and malanga, a root that is similar to taro. African products such as yams and plantains; and European meats. On one of the marked-up blue walls of La Bodeguita, someone has written: YO MI APETITO SOLO APLACA EN LA MESA EN QUE BRILLA UN BUEN AJIACO—My appetite is aroused only by a table that shines with a good ajiaco.

  This is La Bodeguita’s recipe:

  In a casserole dish, cover salt beef, strips of pork, beef, and bacon with water. Bring this to a boil and add two or three very ripe plátanos, boniato, malanga, cassava, chayote, eggplant, an ear of sweet corn, pumpkin squash, and, if you want, some potatoes too. Let it boil for an hour. Grind spices in a mortar, add some saffron, and mix with some of the stock from the casserole. Add to the casserole. Add a little bit of lime juice and boil for another fifteen minutes.

  The drink that La Bodeguita became famous for was the mojito. This cocktail, made popular by Ángel Martínez, is now associated with Havana, but its origin is uncertain and might trace back centuries. While daiquiris are poured into glasses filled with crushed ice, mojitos have only a few cubes, which suggests that it is an older drink.

  To me, the mojito is the taste of Havana. I arrive, I sip my first mojito, and I know I am in Havana. This is partly because it used to be that you found mojitos nowhere else. Now they are everywhere—in New York, Paris, and Tokyo. But none of these impostors taste like the true mojito, because their preparation involves a fatal mistake: the wrong kind of mint. A mojito has to be made with the tropical spearmint that grows in Cuba, which they call yerba buena. To be honest, my feeling for the drink may be excessive; at one point in the 1980s, the government official in charge of monitoring me actually nicknamed me “Mojito.”

  This is La Bodeguita’s recipe:

  Mix ½ tablespoon of sugar and the juice of half a lime in a highball glass. Add spearmint leaves and crush them to release the juice. Add two ice cubes and 1½ ounces of Havana Club Light Dry (rum). Fill to the top with soda water and stir.

  Although the above recipe calls for granulated sugar, I have noticed that at La Bodeguita they use cane syrup, which is a much better way to mix the drink. Some Havana bars also add a splash of angostura bitters, which is also a good idea.

  •

  When Batista came to power, first in 1940 and especially the second time, after a coup in 1952, he realized that the more and bigger the projects he was involved in, the more money was available for him to steal, and so he offered government money, tax breaks, and subsidies for construction projects, all of which attracted American investors. Some of these investors were organized crime figures such as Santo Trafficante and Meyer Lansky.

  In 1946, a kind of superpower summit of the underworld was convened at the Hotel Nacional. Lucky Luciano, the man credited with organizing crime in the United States, had been deported and was attempting to live in Havana. But he was about to be forced back to his native Sicily, and the purpose of the meeting was to appoint a boss to run the gambling syndicate that controlled many of Havana’s casinos. Numerous members of New York crime families were there, as well as Joe and Rocco Fischetti, from Al Capone’s Chicago organization, accompanied by singer Frank Sinatra. In the end it was Meyer Lansky, whom Luciano had known since childhood on the Lower East Side of New York, who was officially pronounced the boss of Cuban gambling.

  Both gambling and government payoffs from gambling are time-honored traditions in Havana. In Cecilia Valdés, Villaverde says that in the early nineteenth century, “gaming houses in Cuba paid a contribution to the government for supposedly charitable causes.”

  •

  In the 1950s, hundreds more bars and nightclubs opened near the Prado and Vedado around Calle 23, which is still a lively area; it’s called La Rampa because it is built on a slight hill. Nightclubs also started opening beyond Vedado. The Sans Souci, just outside of town, created the illusion of a country estate, with gardens to stroll through and open-air dancing to famous bands. International performers ranging from Edith Piaf to Harry Belafonte to Marlene Dietrich to Sarah Vaughn, as well as Cuban stars such as Benny Moré, the great bolero singer, performed there. Meyer Lansky operated the casino.

  Also in the suburbs just outside Marianao was the Tropicana, with its spectacular 1940s architecture, notably Max Borges’s Arcos de Cristal—huge concrete arches with glass walls. The Tropicana is the only one of the famous clubs from that era to survive and has been operated for all these years by the revolutionary government. It looks a little threadbare and is completely out of place in revolutionary Havana—Cubans don’t go there—but the architecture is still stunning, and, of course, despite the official position of the revolutionary government against the peddling of flesh, the women are still beautiful and nearly naked.

  Graham Greene, in describing his trips to Havana in his autobiography, Ways of Escape, may have expressed what other men thought, only with a great deal more candor:

  I enjoyed the louche atmosphere of Batista’s city and I never stayed long enough to become aware of the sad political background of arbitrary imprisonment and torture. I came there . . . for the sake of the Floridita restaurant (famous for daiquiris and Morro crabs), for the brothel life, the roulette in every hotel, the fruit machines spilling out jackpots of silver dollars, the Shanghai Theater where for one dollar and twenty-five cents on
e could see a nude cabaret of extreme obscenity with the bluest of blue films in the intervals.

  Backstage at the Tropicana, July 1982. Photograph by Maggie Steber.

  He described an evening with a friend at the Shanghai watching a character called Superman having sex with a mulata—but complained that Superman’s performance was as “uninspiring as a dutiful husband’s”—before going on to lose a little money at roulette, eat dinner at El Floridita, smoke a little marijuana, and see a lesbian show at the Blue Moon. All this was followed by their driver scoring them a little cocaine for an incredibly cheap price from a newsstand. The dealer turned out to be crooked, the cocaine just white powder. It was after such an evening that Greene was inspired to move his spy comedy, later to be titled Our Man in Havana, from Europe to Havana. “Suddenly it struck me that here in this extraordinary city, where every vice was permissible and every trade possible, lay the true background for my comedy.” For better or worse, probably both, all this ended with the revolution.

  In the late 1950s, Havana saw the beginning of what in other beachfront cities became a wall of high-rise concrete hotels. In 1955, Meyer Lansky began his dream of building the most luxurious beachfront hotel in the Caribbean—the Habana Riviera, in Vedado. Lansky built it with his own money, money from Las Vegas investors, and six million dollars in government loans from his friend Batista. It was a twenty-one-story hotel designed by Igor Polevitzky, who, with such buildings as the 1940 Shelborne Hotel, was a leading influence in Miami Beach’s high-rise beachfront. Among the prominent attractions of the Riviera was that it was the first building in Havana to have central air conditioning, still a rare feature in the city.

  The Havana Hilton, which opened in 1958, was a thirty-story building at the edge of La Rampa, in Vedado, and was visible from anywhere in the city, its owners boasted. It had 630 rooms, a large swimming pool, a casino, and a rooftop lounge, which, as the old joke goes, had the best view in Havana because you didn’t see the Hilton.

  Though it infuriates opponents of the revolution, the argument can be and often is made that the revolution saved Havana. It saved it from becoming Miami Beach or San Juan, Puerto Rico. It saved the Malecón from being sealed off from the rest of the city by high-rise hotels. And it saved Havana from Josep Lluís Sert and his Harvard-trained, Le Corbusier–influenced architects, who had submitted to the city a proposal to modernize Havana. The antique buildings of Habana Vieja were to be replaced by concrete and glass, the narrow streets widened and paved to be more suitable for car traffic, and the ancient Spanish plazas turned into parking lots. Sert was planning for a population of four million, twice the size of Havana today.

  Castro saw how other Latin American cities, such as Santo Domingo, Mexico City, and Caracas, were becoming overwhelmed by migrants from the countryside looking for opportunities that, in many cases, weren’t there. He instituted laws so that in revolutionary Cuba, a Cuban wishing to move to the capital has to apply and show a well-organized plan for a successful life there. Havana is not for all Cubans.

  EIGHT

  The Twenty-Six-Flavor Revolution

  Esta ciudad picante y loca . . .

  This city, piquant and crazy . . .

  — FEDERICO DE IBARZÁBAL, “Una Ciudad del Trópico” (1919)

  When I first got to Havana in the early 1980s, I stayed at the Havana Hilton, which by then was called the Habana Libre. I didn’t choose to stay there; it was where the Cuban government put American journalists. While I was appreciative of the air conditioning, and didn’t mind the lack of a casino, the place seemed antiseptic in a city that was just the opposite. Also, it was hard not to feel controlled. The phones were rumored to be tapped, and the government functionaries with whom journalists were in contact made it clear that they were aware of lunches and other plans that had been discussed over the phone. They seemed more interested in showing off their inside knowledge than in concealing their espionage.

  The huge lobby had a lot of bored men sitting around who looked like government agents—one of them always “coincidentally” getting up just as you were leaving. There were also women who appeared to be prostitutes but had some connection to the government agents. It was, after all, a nationalized economy.

  Some point out that the revolution started out bloody and ruthless, which is true. But it also started out idealistic and completely impractical. The government did not immediately realize that if you own a high-rise luxury hotel like the Habana Libre, something profitable ought to be done with it. And so the hotel was initially used for the party loyal, thousands of peasants, who were bused in to cheer Fidel at rallies. Housing peasants in the luxury hotel was ideologically pitch-perfect, although the peasants, not accustomed to luxury hotels and billeted several to a room, did not always leave the place in the best condition. In time, the new government realized that this was not a good use of one of its few luxury hotels.

  During one trip, after a week in the Habana Libre, I decided to drift on my own to a small hotel in Vedado. My room there was much smaller, and its air conditioner was a noisy box in the window, but there was no lobby for anyone to sleepily sit in.

  At the time, there were only two television channels in Cuba. One was a political channel with the official line on everything; it was somewhat helpful to journalists. The other was a cultural channel, and I found myself wanting to stay in some nights for the great Cuban movies on television.

  During that trip, I saw Memorias del Subdesarollo (Memories of Underdevelopment), Tomás Gutiérrez Alea’s classic 1968 black-and-white film of Edmundo Desnoes’s 1965 novel Inconsolable Memories—one of the first novels written about life in revolutionary Cuba—about a man lost in the revolution after everyone he knows has left for Miami. There were two other great Gutiérrez films: La Muerte de un Burócrata (Death of a Bureaucrat), a very dark and funny 1966 comedy about the bureaucracy of the revolution, and La Ultima Cena (The Last Supper), a spellbinding historical drama about an eighteenth-century planter who invites twelve of his slaves to a dinner to reenact the Last Supper.

  Night after night, my TV offered brilliant films I had never heard of—films criticizing the government and talking about sexism, racism, and materialism. It was, and is, an unresolvable contradiction that this police state manages social criticism so well. In 1993, Gutiérrez and Carlos Tabío made Fresa y Chocolate (Strawberry and Chocolate), criticizing the homophobia of the government. Most of the foreign press wrote about this film as though it had been made in courageous defiance of the government, but it was a government-sponsored film.

  Three facts: Cubans talk a lot, Cuban politicians talk even more, and Fidel Castro broke all records. One night in my small room with the noisy air conditioner, I decided to conscientiously listen to a speech being broadcast by Fidel Castro. He was said to have had a photographic memory, and that night he spoke extemporaneously for hours. I fell asleep. Suddenly there was an abrupt pounding on the door. I opened my eyes and stumbled over to open it. A man in a uniform handed me a notice on the low-quality paper the government always used. He was wearing the greenish uniform of MININT, the security service of the Ministry of the Interior.

  My first reaction was one of awe. How did they know I had fallen asleep on Fidel? The piece of paper ordered me, in extremely rude language—Cuban authorities are generally very polite to American journalists—to report to the ministry at ten the following morning. I quickly realized that this was not about falling asleep on Fidel, but I never found out what it was about. When I arrived at the ministry the next morning, a polite man in uniform asked to see my return ticket. As it happened, I was leaving the next day. He shook my hand warmly and wished me a good flight.

  •

  If I seemed paranoid, and if revolutionary Havana seems like a paranoid society, it was—and is—but not without reason. Assaults from the sea remain a fear in the culture, for after the pirates, the British, and the Spanish troops came and went, the Americans arrived—to take over “the independence.”
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  In 1961, the CIA and Cuban exiles tried to invade the island. The United States was feeling threatened by Cuba’s increasingly Communist revolutionary government, and the exiled anti-Castro Cubans had assured the CIA—erroneously, as it turned out—that the Cubans were ready to rise up and overthrow Castro. The main invading force landed at the Bay of Pigs, on the southern coast, coming ashore on a beautiful, isolated, rock-studded white-sand beach called Playa Girón. They were defeated in three days by the Cuban Revolutionary Army.

  Another confrontation between Cuba and the United States occurred the next year, when John F. Kennedy confronted the Soviet Union over missile deployment in Cuba. Havana and the rest of the island braced themselves for another invasion, but the crisis was averted and the invasion never happened.

  Thereafter, Havana—as well as the rest of the island—remained vigilant. Sandbags, antiaircraft guns, and militiamen filled the city’s waterfront, the Malecón. Even matchbooks, a state concession like almost everything else after the revolution, for decades had printed on them “Ciudad de La Habana listos para la defense”—“The city of Havana prepared for defense.”

  Desnoes, in the novel Inconsolable Memories, re-creates that time: Fidel had said, “Everybody, young and old, men and women, we are all one in this hour of danger!” But, far from being inspired, Desnoes’s character thinks, “We’re all one, I’ll die like everybody else. This island is a trap and the revolution is tragic because we’re too small to survive, to come through. Too poor and too few.”

  Cuba’s paranoia proved to be permanent, and was fueled, as it often is, by reality. The CIA, under Kennedy, launched Operation Mongoose, a program of dirty tricks that included assassination attempts as well as sabotage.