After two days of roaming the crumbling streets of Havana I settled down on a patch of sand near the harbour entrance and reflected on my all-too-brief encounter with Cuba. For the previous two weeks I had travelled the length of the island, walked along miles of country trails, and talked to scores of people whose personal stories and opinions about Cuba’s place in the world were as varied as the landscape itself. But my first awareness of Cuba goes back to 1952, long before a young lawyer named Fidel Castro posed any threat to the iron-fisted dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista.
I was a young graduate student with a teaching fellowship at Princeton University and one of my geology students was Ruben Batista. I remember him as a good looking, intelligent, popular young man who wore the cloak of dictator’s son and heir-apparent with the class and panache of a court jester. A natural standup comic, he entertained by parading the stereotypical dictator, stiffly barking mock orders to his classmates or waving condescendingly to people we passed on field trips in the university bus.
As part of my course each student was asked to do a small research paper on some aspect of the geology where they spent their Christmas holiday. Ruben presented me with a bound and embossed treatise on Havana Beach Sand. It came complete with professionally-mounted microfossils identified with their scientific names and geological ages. When asked the obvious, he replied with a wink and a smile, a combination of charm and deceit, that dad had indeed put him in touch with some very helpful people.
I never saw Havana as Ruben knew it, the rollicking playground where sun, sand and sin could be found only a few hours south of Miami. Known as the "Monte Carlo of the Caribbean," Havana during the 1940’s and ’50s was dominated by U.S. interests. Its streets hummed with the latest American cars. American tourists flocked there to gamble and mingle with the gangsters and mafiosi who controlled most of the casinos, cabarets, and plush lounges where rum flowed like water. The grandiose villas and ostentatious colonial-style mansions in the Mirimar neighbourhood were home to the wealthy elite. But not far away, in the fetid streets and tin-roofed shanties of the barrios, thousands of other Cubans clung to a subsistence life of abject poverty.
I tossed a handful of sand back onto the beach and moved up to one of the parapets of Castillo del Moro where huge cast-iron cannons once helped protect the harbour from marauding pirates. From there I could watch the waves breaking across the Malecon where the battered seawall seemed to offer little more protection for the stately, columned buildings facing the ocean than the rusting cannon beside me. Forty-three years of neglect have left Havana in need of more than just a coat of paint.
Today the Miramar district, where the Batista family were celebrating when Castro rolled into Havana on that fateful New Year's eve in 1959, is still an upscale neighbourhood. Some of the rambling colonial-style homes, abandoned by wealthy Cubans who followed Batista into exile, are now occupied by high ranking officials of the regime. Others have been converted to embassies, restaurants, small hotels, and the offices of foreign companies. But many others are dilapidated relics of their former glory. Throughout Havana the odd juxtaposition of beautifully restored colonial buildings, standing side by side with the decaying shells of their neighbours, is a common sight.
But despite the neglect Havana remains a living museum with a rich architectural heritage spanning nearly four centuries of Spanish domination. Soon after Columbus blundered into the New World in 1492 the Port of Havana became a supply point for Spanish Galleons transporting their gold and silver loot from the colonies of South and Central America to Europe. Later, the "white gold" of sugar brought unprecedented wealth to the Cuban colony and African slaves were brought in to cut and crush the cane. Today the intertwined roots of Havana's African and Spanish heritage have produced a hybrid city that is uniquely Caribbean.
Wandering through Havana's historic Old Quarter, exploring large and tiny squares lined with Spanish Baroque stone houses, poking behind the columns of Creole patios where African Deities stare out at tiled roofs, its easy to get lost in both space and time.
The sky was already dark when we headed for La Cabana Fortress to watch the 9 p.m. cannon shoot. Entering the fortifications through a maze of stone tunnels we followed a line of empty shell cases filled with flaming oil to a parapet overlooking the harbour. In one of the oldest traditions of Havana the cannoneers, dressed in uniforms of the Spanish colonial army and accompanied by a drummer, marched to their gun. And at precisely nine o'clock the flash and roar of the old cannon announced that the doors of Havana were closed for the night.
We stayed at the Presidente Hotel, one of the oldest in the Vadado section of New Havana. The hotel has been renovated without destroying the feel of its opulent past. Its high vaulted vestibule, restaurant, and ceramic corridors display art objects from the 1930s. An ancient elevator, operated by a uniformed bellhop, wobbled up to the fourth floor where our spacious room with ornate marble and bronze fittings looked out across a small pool and garden to the tiled rooftops of Havana. This place, I thought, is a living relic of the Havana that captivated Ernest Hemingway more than 70 years ago.
It’s impossible to move around Havana without stumbling onto some memento of Papa Hemingway. At La Bodeguita del Medio, one of his favourite watering holes, we tossed back a Mojito cocktail before visiting the room in Ambos Mundos Hotel where his tiny portable typewriter still sits on a table beside his bed. At Cojimar, the small fishing village that inspired The Old Man and the Sea, we stopped for lunch at Las Terrazas, where the walls are covered with photographs of Hemingway on his boat, El Pilare.
At the National Capital a huge mural of Che Guevara stares across the great empty square of Plaza de le Revolution to the 450-foot obelisk and marble statue commemorating Jose Marti. But the monuments, manicured gardens, and meticulously restored buildings of Revolutionary Square are only part of Castro's legacy. The 1950s American cars and a few old Ladas share the streets with hundreds of Chinese-made bicycles, pedal carts, and horse-drawn carriages. Outside our comfortable tourist cocoon, everything is in short supply – fuel, food, housing, transport.
It's easy to blame Cuba's present problems on the misguided ideology of a socialist regime and to overlook the dramatic improvements in health, education, and housing that the revolution brought to thousands of Cubans who were living in abject poverty under Batista. Indeed that is what 10 successive U.S. administrations have done to justify their 43-year economic blockade. I make no pretense of being an expert on Cuban affairs but I am not alone in my conviction that the American blockade, not socialism, is Cuba's real problem.
According to Wayne Smith, a former U.S. diplomat in Cuba and now with the Center for International Policy in Washington: "The American people and more and more members of Congress want to see changes, but at the White House, the president’s gaze is on the votes of right-wing Cuban exiles living in Florida. The president, of course, wants to win Florida more decisively in 2004. So he wants to do nothing that would offend these right-wing voters. He's got these Neanderthals running our Latin policy, and they are moving in the direction of tightening the controls and cracking down rather than loosening up."
Anyone who watched G.W. Bush squeak through the voting debacle in Florida can appreciate the enormous political clout of militant Anti-Castro Cubans who now form the largest single voting block in that state. Under Secretary of State, John Bolton, accusing Cuba of trying to develop biological weapons, has added that country to Washington's Axis of Evil. I can only hope that this bellicose rhetoric is not designed to justify even more drastic U.S. intervention. But with its tenuous grasp on credibility linked to the ill-defined War on Terrorism the Bush Administration may be searching for an easy target.
Like the old man in Hemingway's classic tale of the sea, Castro may have won his personal battle against impossible odds only to have his vision of Cuba lost to the sharks of American foreign policy and the self-serving ambitions of a hawkish U.S. president.
