Havana

by Mark Kurlansky

  •

  Since Communism espouses state ownership, it can be seen as an experiment in the limits of government. Whether in Russia, Hungary, China, or Cuba, it was always evident that the government was good at providing education and health care and very bad at running restaurants.

  In Havana after the revolution, the state started some new restaurants, including a Bulgarian and a Russian one. It also tried to keep open some iconic places, including the Tropicana nightclub, Sloppy Joe’s, El Floridita, and La Bodeguita del Medio. Sloppy Joe’s was lost in 1965—because of a fire, according to some, or because of the bureaucracy of the nationalization program, according to others. El Floridita remained open except for a brief period of renovation, and La Bodeguita never closed.

  Sloppy Joe’s was reopened in 2013 by a Cuban government agency that has been restoring the historic houses in nearby Habana Vieja. This was an unusual experiment in socialist restaurateurship. They researched the site with old photographs and interviews and the same care with which they restored the Catedral de la Virgen María and historic mansions and government buildings. The restaurant was faithfully re-created, down to its menu and drinks, and now looks exactly as it did in the Carol Reed film—sleek and far from sloppy. It also once again serves its famous Sloppy Joes—the sandwich and the drink.

  •

  Sloppy Joe’s, EL Floridita, and La Bodeguita were all known as Hemingway haunts, and that may explain their survival. Havana never passes up the opportunity for a Hemingway site.

  Hemingway is remembered wherever he spent time—Oak Park (Illinois), Paris, Madrid, Key West, and Ketchum (Idaho)—but in Havana he is remembered with an obsession that borders on fetish. Only here do you learn that he wore no underwear and farted constantly. When Habaneros see any American of reasonable size with a white beard, they call out “Papa” to him. This has happened to me more than once.

  Cubans who knew Hemingway made a living the rest of their lives selling interviews. Only a few elderly Cubans with connections to Hemingway too vague to charge money for are left. Still, they are hauled out to display to visiting scholars and tourists, like artifacts of a bygone era. In Cojímar there is Ova, Osvaldo Carnero, who went with Hemingway to Peru to shoot the film versim of The Old Man and the Sea and caught a 1,539-pound marlin in a struggle that was filmed for the movie. He is brought out for group visits to Cojímar, along with a younger man who as a boy witnessed the shooting of the film and says he saw Hemingway on the set. And Cayuco, a small, wiry elderly man, whose real name is Oscar Blas Fernández, is available to visiting groups in Havana. He grew up near Hemingway’s house and played baseball with his sons. Hemingway, he says, called him Cayuco Jonronero—the home run hitter. “Why?” I asked. “Did you hit a lot of home runs?”

  “No,” he answered, with a sheepish grin. “Only once.”

  Books about Hemingway are constantly released in Havana and are always top sellers, despite the fact that, due to a copyright dispute, Hemingway’s works are generally not available in Cuba and few Cubans have read them.

  Hemingway lived in Havana for three decades, longer than anywhere else, although he was constantly traveling and wrote very little about the city. His well-preserved home on a suburban hill has almost nothing of Cuba in it.

  His house has become a museum and is one of Havana’s most popular tourist sites. In 2015, the director of that museum, Ada Rosa Alfonso Rosales, told me, “Here in Cuba the word ‘Hemingway’ is magical. If I need anything from anyone, I say I am the director of the Museo Hemingway, and as soon as I say ‘Hemingway,’ the door is open.”

  The story of that museum sheds light on the Cuban Revolution. According to Rene Villarreal, the neighborhood kid who became the head of the household staff at the author’s home, Castro unexpectedly showed up at the house after Hemingway killed himself in Ketchum, Idaho, in the summer of 1961. Castro, like most Cubans, was a Hemingway fan. A famous photo shows the two men at a Hemingway-sponsored fishing tournament in Cuba in May 1960, which Castro won. In addition to displaying the most ego ever squeezed into a single picture frame, the young Castro reveals by the look in his eyes that he is thrilled to be in the presence of the aging writer. That was the first and last time they met.

  When the Comandante visited the house, Villarreal seemed so unimpressed by his presence that Castro smiled and asked, “You know who I am?” The young man, who by then was accustomed to dealing with celebrities, did of course know. Castro told Villarreal that he wanted him to stay in charge of the house, to keep everything the way it was and to give tours.

  But the revolution was young and in the process of creating a bureaucracy, and soon Villarreal was complaining of government officials and military personnel changing things and destroying the house. They did not trust this man who had not been part of the revolution, was not a member of the Communist Party, and seemed to have little interest in the new order. Before long he was working on a sugar plantation, which the government required him to do before granting him an exit visa. Villarreal lived the rest of his life in New Jersey. After he died, in 2014, the Cuban state, through the Museo Hemingway, paid tribute to him.

  In Habana Vieja, room 511 on the fifth floor of the Hotel Ambos Mundos is never rented. A guide waits there to take your two pesos and show you around the tiny room. When Hemingway first stayed there, in 1928, the hotel was new and had a handsome, high-ceilinged lobby with, of course, a fine long bar.

  The walls of the lobby are now covered with Hemingway photos. Oddly, most are not from Cuba, and none are from the hotel. One is a blown-up photograph of Hemingway’s signature, hung on the wall as if he signed the Ambos Mundos.

  The hotel’s original, somewhat scary cage elevator is still operated by a staff elevator man, who takes visitors up to room 511, located down a hall. It has a single bed in a narrow alcove. Hemingway always asked for this room except when he was with his wife, Pauline Pfeiffer, because, despite its small size, it had the best view in the hotel, looking out on Havana Harbor. No matter where in the world he was—the Gritti Palace in Venice, the Ritz in Paris, the Sun Valley Lodge in Ketchum—Hemingway always got the best room.

  The view today is not as good as it used to be, because Batista—who would have ruined the city had he stayed in power—tore down a low-lying seventeenth-century stone monastery in front of the hotel and replaced it with a three-story steel-and-glass building, one of the ugliest in Habana Vieja, blocking the view. That building was just one more reason for Hemingway to hate the dictator whose men had beaten his dog to death, not to mention several of his friends. But of course, by the time Batista constructed the building, in the 1950s, Hemingway was already living in his house on the hill.

  Not everyone in Havana is enthralled with the Hem­ingway legacy. The sentiment of the restaurant owner in Madrid who put up a sign reading, AQUÍ NUNCA COMIÓ hemingway—“Hemingway never ate here”—is sometimes found in Havana as well. In one of the best scenes in Desnoes’s Inconsolable Memories, the central character takes his girlfriend to the Hemingway house. When she spies Hemingway’s enormous shoes, he explains knowingly, “Americans have huge feet. I’ve always noticed it, even the most beautiful women.” This is a reference to another example of Habanero slang: foreigners—first the Spanish and then the Americans—are sometimes called patones, because they supposedly have big patas, or feet.

  Leonardo Padura once confessed to harboring “a fierce love-hate relationship for years” with the deceased author. He described the museum that was Hemingway’s house as “a stage-set devised in life to commemorate death.” Novelist Abilio Estévez, whose family went to the house several times a year when he was a child, said that it had the “funereal feel” of all museums.

  I find visiting there just the opposite: voyeuristic. You prowl around a man’s house while he is away, as though he might be coming back. Havana tries to perpetuate this sense that Hemingway is still alive. In 2015, I overheard Italian tourists ask the guide in room 511 where the author was. Th
ey seemed very upset to learn of his death.

  •

  By Soviet times, El Floridita was a state-run restaurant. No longer open to the street, it was sealed off with noisy, cold air conditioning pumped along the bar, even though energy was scarce. By then, too, it was no longer crowded.

  When I visited El Floridita in the 1980s, there were still some bartenders who remembered serving Hemingway his sugarless daiquiris, which they offered as “a Papa.” They had plenty of time to chat with me, because there were few customers. One bartender, Antonio Meilan, remembered the author as “a kind and affectionate man” who always ordered a double daiquiri with no sugar and only drank and never ate in the restaurant. But despite Meilan’s memory, a number of Hemingway biographers do have the author hosting dinners in the back room.

  At the time of my visit, the curved back dining room specialized in serving lobster, but rarely had guests. The lobster, langosta, a very large, clawless tropical shrimp caught off Cuba’s southern coast, was a luxury, viewed by the government as a hard currency earner and thus strictly for foreigners. Restaurants for locals were not allowed to serve lobster. At El Floridita, the lobsters were served by waiters in tuxedoes, the last vestige of a different era.

  At La Bodeguita del Medio, deeper into Habana Vieja, there were neither lobsters nor tuxedoes. Like El Floridita, La Bodeguita was supposed to be a Hemingway site, but by the time the writer was frequenting Havana, his taste ran more to the tuxedo crowd (though he was often slovenly dressed in a dirty guayabera and shorts), and it is questionable how much time he really spent here.

  Amid all the messages written on the wall of La Bodeguita is a framed note in Hemingway’s careful handwriting:

  My mojito in La Bodeguita

  My daiquiri in El Floridita.

  — Ernest Hemingway

  How drunk was he when he wrote that? Did he ever write it? The handwriting seems a little too perfect. When I first started going to La Bodeguita, even though it was by then a state-owned restaurant, Ángel Martínez, elderly and nearly blind, was still overseeing his old bodega. We never talked about the authenticity of the Hemingway note, but we did talk about Hemingway. Martínez was a Hemingway fan; he was, after all, a Cuban. He especially liked the author’s Cuban novel, The Old Man and the Sea.

  Martínez could quote whole passages of the book in Spanish. But about Hemingway at La Bodeguita he said, “I think he only came here three or four times. He went more to the Floridita. He came here, had a mojito, had a photo taken, and went to the Floridita to have more photos taken.”

  Hemingway didn’t like mojitos because he didn’t like sugar. At El Floridita he could get his daiquiris without sugar. This upsets Cubans, who think everything should have lots of sugar. Many have concluded that he must have been diabetic, but he was very open about his many ailments and never mentioned diabetes. He just didn’t like sugar.

  If you ask for a drink without sugar in Havana, the bartender will usually say, “It’s not going to taste good.” But thanks to Hemingway, no one objects to a sugarless daiquiri at El Floridita.

  At La Bodeguita there is one celebrity endorsement on the wall that is probably authentic. Errol Flynn scribbled, best place to get drunk. It’s true.

  •

  Government-sponsored dining and good eating perfectly intersected at one point: ice cream. Fidel Castro loved ice cream. He was famous for interrupting long interviews and work sessions for “an ice cream break,” and novelist Gabriel García Márquez wrote that he once “finished off a good-sized lunch with 18 scoops of ice-cream.” And if the Cuban Revolution was providing the Cuban people with health care, literacy, education, and food rations, wasn’t there also an obligation in this hot, muggy tropical city to provide the people with ice cream?

  Castro delegated the project to Celia Sánchez, an early revolutionary in Oriente Province, where the uprising began. The first woman to organize a combat unit, she had chosen the landing site for Fidel’s invasion and, after the leading cigar makers went into exile, created the Cohiba cigar that Fidel famously and stylishly smoked until 1985, when his doctors told him to quit. Always a close associate of Castro, it has frequently been suggested—this being Cuba—that they were lovers.

  Sánchez was also a fan of ballet. She named the proposed ice cream shop Coppelia, after her favorite ballet. The logo is a pair of chubby legs in a tutu and pointe shoes. That’s what happens to ballerinas who eat too much ice cream.

  Coppelia was built on a prime Vedado spot in La Rampa, on a lot where a nineteenth-century hospital had been torn down under Batista in 1954 in order to build a modern fifty-story tower. The revolution scrapped that and many similar plans for Havana. Instead, the space became a public park. But by 1966 it was a very run-down place with a few dilapidated stalls in what was supposed to be a beer garden.

  Castro wanted Coppelia built in time for an international conference, which meant it had to be completed in six months. The site was favored because important delegations to the conference, especially the Soviet delegation, were to be staying at the nearby Habana Libre.

  For better or worse, most of the island’s leading architects had gone into exile by then. The leaders of the revolution and the young architects they’d chosen were drawn to fifties modernism, an aesthetic that favored circles over boxes.

  Architect Mario Girona designed a structure suited to Cuba’s unique situation and Havana’s tradition. Central to the design were columns—prefabricated columns that could be brought in and installed on the site—supporting a circular structure inevitably referred to as a “flying saucer.” The building was entirely Cuban-made.

  According to legend, Fidel Castro was in possession of excellent recipes for thirty-six flavors of ice cream. Some versions of the story have him with more and some with less. It is not known where these recipes came from, but given the times, it is usually assumed that they were confiscated. He sent technicians to Canada to learn how to make the flavors and bought top-of-the-line machines from Sweden and the Netherlands. He wanted to build the world’s largest ice cream parlor with the world’s best ice cream for “the world’s best people.”

  Girona did build the world’s largest ice cream parlor. Much of its thousand-person capacity is in seating under banyan trees along pathways leading to the building. The capacity is not excessive if you believed Coppelia’s claims to serve 4,250 gallons of ice cream to 35,000 people a day.

  The wait in line was between one and two hours, occasionally longer. That no one seemed to mind is an insight into Habanero character. Standing in line at Coppelia became one of the rites of Havana living. You could go with a group of friends or meet people while waiting. For foreigners it was a way to meet locals, and for locals it was a way to meet foreigners. Once you reached the head of the line, the wait was worth it.

  Opened in 1966, Coppelia was built for the same reason that Tropi-Cola was developed: to replace something lost by the embargo. Before the revolution, ice cream in Cuba had been imported from large American companies. Castro’s goal was to locally produce better ice cream in a greater variety of flavors than any American company.

  The original 1966 menu listed twenty-six flavors, all of which were usually available. They are worth mentioning:

  Almond, coconut, chocolate, walnut, peach, tutti-frutti, coffee, coconut with almonds, caramel, orange pineapple, pineapple glace, dairy ice cream, strawberry, strawberry and assorted fruits, banana, guava, vanilla, chocolate and assorted nuts, chocolate walnut, mint chocolate, malt chocolate, vanilla and chocolate chip, mint and chocolate chip, muscatel, malted cream, crème de vie.

  Crème de vie is an eggnog-type drink served in Havana at Christmastime. Have the exiles who say that the revolution is drab ever tasted crème de vie ice cream?

  NINE

  The Mulata Returns

  Nowadays, no one ever imitates the Russians in Cuba; we have the right to make our own mistakes now.

  — EDMUNDO DESNOES, “Donde me pongo” (1967)

>   In Havana, Oyá, Santería’s African spirit of change and new beginnings, continued to rule. In August 1990, Castro made a speech in which he said that the Soviet Union might be dissolving and that this would mean tremendous hardships, even hunger, for Cuba. But, he said, Cuba would remain true to its ideals and get through what he labeled “a special period in time of peace.” In a democracy, few leaders would have dared to be this candid about impending hard times, but Castro decided to give people bad news in advance.

  Castro had offered the worst-case scenario, but he had not exaggerated. The Soviet Union, which had been spending about six billion dollars every year subsidizing the Cuban economy, did collapse. Within a very short period, Cuba lost most of its imports and most of its export earnings. The gross national product declined by more than a third. The island lost most of its energy supply, which had come from Soviet oil. The lack of fuel was particularly critical in Havana, where droughts are compensated for by the costly pumping of underground water. Cars disappeared from the streets; there was nothing for the Chevys and Ladas to run on.

  But, like a gift from Oyá, inexpensive Chinese bicycles started appearing all over Havana. And some entrepreneurs built carts—wagons filled with seats—to trail behind the bicycles and transport tourists. These long-railed bicycle rickshaws now filling the narrow streets of Habana Vieja resembled the old-time volantes.

  There was also a lack of pharmaceuticals, which had come primarily from East Germany, and, as Castro predicted, there were food shortages. Food rations—a hallmark of revolutionary Cuba—were increased, but even so, the average person in Havana had a diminishing diet. Interestingly, like another gift from Oyá to this very medically conscious society, there was also a noticeable decline in heart attacks and diabetes.