Since those days in Old Havana, and as was already under way behind the scenes but has now become visible, a few local potentates with requisite ties both to the Cuban state and to foreign cash have worked out how to capitalize on their district’s UNESCO status. They’ve turned many of its squares into alfresco shopping malls accepting foreign cash and, less regrettably, restored many more of its stunning old buildings. In 2002, there were already a few must-avoid bars pitching expensive drinks to cigar-chomping yumas in thrall to stories about how Papa Hemingway used to down a dozen daiquiris on one of their stools after a day of marlin hunting in the Florida Current. This foreign-celebrity-got-drunk-here-and-you-should-too trait of the tourist trade has now gotten out of hand. But in those days it was possible to head down Obispo to the elegant Hotel Ambos Mundos near the water, where Hemingway lived before buying his finca across the bay, and to take the old iron elevator up to its then-secret roof. The little bar there, fifteen years later, is mobbed at all times with tourists. In 2002, after reaching the end of a long walk from Carlos and Dagdelay’s in Vedado, I rarely found more than one or two other guests atop the Ambos Mundos. Sipping a Hatuey beer, I gazed over to where the bay’s narrow neck spread into a broad expanse of calm water—now crossed by a rusty little ferry heading to Regla but once filled with up to three hundred galleons bobbing in the waves. I didn’t find it hard to understand why the Spanish set up shop here or why this place was of enduring allure.
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THAT HAVANA WAS EXPLORABLE in this way to my twenty-two-year-old self—that it felt so uniquely open to the open-minded visitor—was, of course, due to its rather unique political economic station. Cuban communism had by the turn of this century proved itself to be as uniquely bad at wealth creation and feeding the full range of its citizens’ ambitions as communism anywhere. But it had also managed, through its uncommon attention to the common good—along with its success at keeping this town, with its strict laws and cops on every other corner, almost completely free of guns and drugs harder than rum—to create in Havana what surely remains the most peaceful big city in the hemisphere. That peace came at a psychic cost. All the forms of ennui and longing endemic to actually-existing-socialism were only exacerbated by the fact, then, that the government still refused to grant exit visas to most everyone who wanted them. But the inhabitants of an island where time and nice weather were the only things in big supply were also blessed to live in a place whose climate and calm allowed them to spend much of their lives outdoors and to feel safe even when walking home, anywhere, at 2 a.m. Homes that would have been sequestered behind concertina wire and Rottweilers in Rio or Kingston here snoozed calmly behind nothing but ferns.
With its dearth of cars and big highways and other high-modern infrastructure tearing at its urban fabric, Havana remains a city whose organic development—the ways in which one neighborhood relates to the next, how one historical layer suffuses what follows—is visible to the sensitive looker. A city whose harmful holding in place is also its beauty, and its lesson. Even Old Havana’s annuated charms are owed, in a sidelong way, to the revolution. In the late 1950s a group of Harvard-trained local architects led by a man named José Luis Sert, and evidently in thrall to a dastardly mix of Robert Moses’s and Le Corbusier’s worst ideas, proposed a new master plan for Havana’s core that would have razed colonial blocks to put in highways and turned its plazas into parking lots. Those plans were put paid by the rise of a state economy whose scant cement and scanter construction budget has for forty years left only a marginal impact on its capital’s physical plant—and then only on a few stadiums and Soviet-style apartment blocks on its outskirts. Havana is a heaven for the urbanist and the walker—a city where getting around on foot, as in all the great walking places, can yield the sensation of walking around in your own mind. A city, also, where there’s a reason one of its finest writers, Alejo Carpentier, described its aspect as “a marketplace of columns, a jungle of columns, an infinity of columns.”4
Ionic or fluted or Tuscan or Doric or plain—Havana’s columns render the city a mezquita-like forest of plaster and stone. Holding up porches or roofs or nothing at all, they also support one feature of this cityscape that must be Havana’s signal contribution to a certain ideal of urban design in the tropics: the great porticoes that don’t just front many houses here but also line public byways on main drags from Infanta in Centro to Agramonte by Old Havana’s edge to long stretches of those blocks facing the Malecon. The porticoes mimic Bologna’s arcades but also provide shade, which in summer is much less a luxury than a necessity. Around the garden at the Hotel Nacional, over the wicker couches where I loved to go sit, the porticoed patio can strike one as merely a grand riff on Old World Luxury, of the sort such grand New World structures always contain. But it also reminds you, after you’ve spent some time in Havana, of the sidewalk chess players sheltering on the porticoes off Infanta or the pregones and piropos that bounce off roofed columns by the Prado and off their round-hipped targets as well. The prevalence of Havana’s porticoes may be as contingent or random as any other of its features. But they have a way, like much here, of feeling inevitable to the way people live—as if they fit, in ways one can only grasp at, into some larger way of being that the city’s form both reflects and shapes.
Life that happens out of doors, open windows and carless streets, the outsized characters of its people—the sheer exultant immodesty of it all, only expanded by the lack of privacy at home, meant that much making out and music making took place in public. It meant also that the music pouring from open windows, angular and buoyant, clung to poor people who didn’t so much walk as prance down their blocks, and always found a way, when it was someone’s birthday, to do so while carrying a big frilly cake—it meant that all this together amounted to the cubanidad with which Cuban partisans and intellectuals from José Martí on have been obsessed. How did this all come to be; how had it changed or not since 1959? How did a New World city built with an idea of its own magnificence, and in love with its own urbanity, come to shape a public culture of the street that was above all, as Fernando Ortiz described it, “creative, dynamic, and social”? How did cubanidad—the very stuff that predated the revolution, and will outlive it—inform the political climate?
The Cuban revolution, before it was Marxist or socialist or anything else, was nationalist. It was devoted to a belief in cubanidad that’s shared by Castro’s foes in Miami (even if they don’t always agree on its contents). What I came to understand while living in Havana that first year was the intractability of cubanidad across the political spectrum, even though I could not yet fully articulate what it was.
CHAPTER 5
CUBAN COUNTERPOINTS
THE TERM CUBANIDAD IS generally credited to José Antonio Saco, a prominent white criollo nationalist of the mid-nineteenth century. It gained a new currency when the island’s blacks—notably the freed slaves who made up a large part of the army that launched Cuba’s long series of wars against Spanish rule in 1868—embraced their leader Antonio Maceo’s call to “ask for nothing as a black and everything as a Cuban.”1 To conceive of being sovereign, all worldly countries must first conceive of themselves as nations. And cubanidad, as such,