by Bill Bryson
I never fell in love with Cuba, not quite. My first visit, in 1991, was mercenary, a writer’s attempt to find a story no one else was seeing. The Cuban Revolution may have started with a giant party, but long before I arrived it became a dead hand on Cuban life, the easygoing, tropical version of a Warsaw Pact summer vacation. That first trip, I slept in a spartan “national” hotel in Havana that cost just $7 a night and came with a radio and an air conditioner labeled in Cyrillic. In 1993, in Cienfuegos, a once-elegant sugar port on the south coast, food was so scarce that I waited in line for an hour and was questioned by two plainclothes cops before I was allowed to eat a small dish of paella. Flavored with iron and diesel, it was unforgettably the worst meal of my life—and yet a privilege in a country that was starving. Back in Havana, I watched two dogs fight to the death for a tiny pile of garbage.
Those were the hunger years, but for two decades I came back, inspired and awed by the ability of Cubans to not just survive but adapt and even thrive. I chronicled the island’s weaknesses—that would be the commie dictatorship, the repression of human and political rights, the petty controls over every aspect of life. But I also found and described strengths. I wrote about the stunning oceans and untouched coastlines, benignly neglected for decades by a revolution that could provide no gasoline and whose fishing boats disappeared routinely to Key West. I once lived for a month in Havana on the average Cuban salary, which amounted to dimes a day—an exercise in hunger but also solidarity. Cubans gave me a lesson in survival and an answer to why the best people live in the worst places.
Two books emerged from my obsession—one on Che Guevara, another on Fidel. Cuba’s edge was darker than other places, if less sharp. The benefits of free education and health care, as well as a ruthless police state, drowned out all opposition, and Havana in the 1990s was a city of whispering and petty corruption, squalid deals and transparent jockeying for plates of chicken. Everyone lied every day. If you could swim in this queer pool, it was an unforgettable experience.
But was it authentic? No. Foreigners want a Cuba that doesn’t change, but Cubans want exactly that: change. “They want their iPhones,” says Alfredo Estrada, the Cuban American author of Havana: Autobiography of a City. “They’ve been living in a very unnatural state of isolation, and they want to join the global community,” to get “very modern very quickly.”
We want them to keep driving those cute old cars. We’re nostalgic for a Cuba that shouldn’t exist—constrained by our embargo and crippled by dictatorship. Estrada calls the desire to visit an unchanged Cuba patronizing, as if the island is a museum, not a nation entitled to a future.
That future, he says, should include the careful preservation of all that does make Cuba distinct. Some of the first towns built in the Americas are here, including Santiago de Cuba, now the island’s second-largest city, a charming Caribbean destination despite losing much of its early architecture in fires and earthquakes. Havana, once the New York City of Latin America, avoided wholesale redevelopment after 1959 in “a fortunate accident,” says Estrada. “So let’s prolong the accident, because that’s what’s going to draw people to Havana. Keep the beauty and it will bring a lot of prosperity to the people of Havana.”
Foreigners still can’t buy real estate, but someday hotel companies and investors will snatch up the properties now moldering in historic parts of Cuba, and choice Old Havana houses may be worth millions in ten years. The Cuban government has mostly protected ordinary residents from displacement, but that will probably change. “A lot of those people are going to get screwed,” Estrada says with a sigh, before adding, “Hopefully not.”
But Havana, along with Cuba as a whole, is deservedly ripe for improvements. Much of Old Havana has been without running water for decades. The famous Malecón seafront promenade is in desperate condition, even abandoned in parts. “You are going to have all the usual tourist crap,” Estrada acknowledged, “but with that will come economic development, growth, restaurants, vendors. And it’s not just the physical hotels—it’s the industry, the people, the systems.”
“Go,” Estrada tells people. “Go as soon as possible. Who knows what will happen in five or ten years, what kind of transition will occur? Go now.”
Simple advice. We should go to Havana, not before it changes but so that it does change. So that it can change. The most authentic Cuba is the one still to come.
My own Cuban fantasy isn’t the daiquiri mulata, made with crème de cacao, or an old Nash Rambler rumbling slowly through the rugged streets. There was always a time before we got there, but the past is easy in Cuba. What I want is the next chapter.
Once, a few years ago, I set off across Old Havana with Estrada’s history of the city in hand, reading as I walked, crossing from the founding stones at the Plaza de Armas to the extramural, literally the outside-the-walls development of the modern metropolis. This old colonial city, the largest remaining in the hemisphere, was belted with defensive walls in the late 17th century, some of which are still visible among the bars of Monserrate Street. Havana continued growing outward, an encyclopedia of architecture, often on the same block, with turn-of-the-century baroque and Catalan art nouveau, Mudéjar movie palaces from the early 20th century, and an ambitious blast of 1950s modernism, like the insanely atmospheric Riviera Hotel, a casino built by gangster Meyer Lansky far from the prying eyes of the FBI. This built history is the single most unshakable thing about Cuba, but the revolution added almost no gestures of its own to the city—the empty Plaza of the Revolution, the never-finished National Art School, and a few monuments to Che. The power elite preferred a modest setting like El Aljibe, a restaurant thatched like a peasant hut that still serves the best black beans and orange-marinated chicken in Cuba.
The pickled authenticity of Old Havana and a few magnets like Trinidad, a UNESCO World Heritage town to the southeast, will change quickly under the assault of decentralized tourism. But most of Cuba needs change. Continue just a mile or two from the gentrified zone along Obispo Street and you’ll find plenty of untouched, neglected authenticity, like El Cerro, where wrecked 19th-century mansions decorated with laundry spill down a long road, people living as if they have no holes in their roofs. Tourism has had little effect on such places. You can drink a thimble of sweet coffee from a street vendor and see no other foreigners, no matter how long you wait. Sometimes raw El Cerro feels more authentic than polished Old Havana.
Still, it can be hard to tell the real from the fake. Santeria, the Afro-Cuban religion, is packaged nightly for tourists in Nikon-friendly events. A Cuban devotee assured me that this was faux Santeria, not the true thing. Yet the chaotic, sweat-soaked home ceremonies I’d attended over the years were much the same: crowded initiation rites and birth celebrations that weren’t complete without rum, demonic possessions, and gifts of cash. What about the Riviera, for that matter? It was confiscated by the Castro government in 1959, but Lansky would be proud: it’s still a notorious hotel full of prostitutes, just like he always wanted.
Every walk around Havana unspools 500 complex years. In 15 minutes you pass from the stones laid by conquistadors to la esquina caliente, the “hot corner,” where men argue baseball all day. A few blocks and half a millennium later you’re in El Floridita, where they serve the Hemingway daiquiri, a double made with grapefruit juice and (gasp!) no sugar at all.
Hemingway spent decades on the island, and called himself a sato, a run-of-the-mill Cuban. But I don’t know what he was thinking. Why would you want Cuba without the sweet stuff?
JEFFREY TAYLER
Fyodor’s Guide
FROM The Atlantic
Tens of thousands of dragooned serfs perished while draining the swamps to lay the foundations of St. Petersburg, and residents like to remind visitors that their city, enchanting though it may be, “rests on bones.” Its charnel mansion has fed the imagination of some of Russia’s greatest writers, most notably Fyodor Dostoyevsky, whose works are lodged deep in mine: Crime and Punish
ment and Notes from Underground are two masterpieces of the many in Russian literature that inspired me to become a writer. I recently traveled to St. Petersburg to reconnect with him and his environs, hoping to rediscover something of the passion that drove me to move to Moscow 21 years ago—a passion dimmed by the return of the authoritarian state, with its soul-numbing gloom. An unlikely mission, I know, to seek uplift from the high priest of alienation.
I began my tour at the last of Dostoyevsky’s many apartments: in his 28 years in the city, the Moscow-born writer moved some 20 times, ending up in Kuznechny Lane 5/2, a stately fin-de-siècle building. The flat has been converted into the Dostoyevsky Literary-Memorial Museum. My spirits rose as I was warmly welcomed by a coterie of motherly, middle-aged women, who broke the long-standing tradition that museum employees in Russia must excel in gruffness to get their jobs.
Despite the grim oil paintings adorning the walls—one depicting the Last Supper (in the dining room, of course) and another, in the drawing room, showing the biblical Agony in the Garden—nothing suggests that Dostoyevsky, psychologist of tortured outcasts, was anything but a conscientious family man, born to the gentry class. His sanctum sanctorum was his study, a modest chamber with green-patterned wallpaper, a parquet floor, and a desk the size of a pool table, covered in green felt.
To the accompaniment of heavy tick-tocks—in the hush, the grandfather clock in the adjacent drawing room sounded loud—I stood perusing an explanatory placard, marveling that Dostoyevsky could have been quite so domestic, even if a night owl. “The least disorder would annoy father,” one of his daughters reported. Starting at 11:00 p.m., he wrote in candlelit solitude, tolerating no interruptions. Around dawn he would retire, burrowing into the bed in his study, with his overcoat laid on top of the sheets. He slept until noon. He adored super-strong tea, scalding coffee, Kiev jam, chocolate, and blue raisins, which he shopped for on nearby Nevsky Prospekt, to this day the most glamorous commercial avenue in St. Petersburg. He enjoyed reading his works in public, in his “high but piercing sharp voice.”
The kindly docent posted in the sedate drawing room sabotaged my calm, supplementing the homey scene with her own narrative. Emperor Nicholas I, unsettled by the revolutions of 1848 in Europe, began cracking down on subversives not long after Dostoyevsky started attending meetings of the Petrashevsky Circle—intelligentsia who gathered to read the forbidden works of European socialists. My guide spared no details of the special punishment the emperor had in store for Dostoyevsky and his fellow members. Arrested and ultimately thrown into the city’s hulking prison, they were first stripped to their underwear in minus-30-degree weather to face a firing squad, sacks over their heads. The drums rolled—and then, instead of gunshots, they heard a messenger galloping up to grant them commuted sentences. Dostoyevsky got four years in prison and exile in Siberia. He also got material for House of the Dead, one of the great prison novels of world literature.
Heading out into the wind-whipped streets, I went in search of 104 Griboyedov Canal Embankment, where, on the third floor, in apartment 74 of entryway No. 5, the troubled young antihero of Crime and Punishment, Rodion Raskolnikov, splits open the skull of a usurious old pawnbroker with an ax butt—a scene so graphic and disturbing that I suffered nightmares after first reading it three decades ago.
When I had last visited, in September 2000, I had opened the door to the entryway and climbed the stairs, inhaling a reek of mold and urine. Standing before the apartment, I had examined its door (covered by a layer of reddish leatherette, as I remember): here Raskolnikov had hesitated before he knocked, his ax concealed beneath the folds of his ratty coat. I had the feeling that nothing, not the decrepitude, the smells, or the sepulchral light, had changed since Dostoyevsky’s day.
This time, after entering the vast courtyard, I found the entryway secured by a code-locked steel door. Frustrated, I looked up: the courtyard’s walls, streaked with grime, seemed concave and irregular, as if drawing together toward the top. A feeling of claustrophobia seized me, as it had so many of Dostoyevsky’s heroes, trapped in rooms variously described as “closets,” “dog holes,” “cabins,” and “coffins.”
I was luckier, and took refuge in the Idiot Restaurant, a hangout of the city’s artsy intelligentsia. Soothed by plush blue carpeting, brocaded oaken sofas and easy chairs, spangled chandeliers, and flickering candles, patrons nursed mugs of beer and glasses of French wine, sprawled in a relaxed way unusual in Russia. I tossed back the complimentary shot of vodka and read the menu’s salute, in twisted English, to my hero. The probably apocryphal tale of Dostoyevsky’s fleeting ownership of the place—he was forced to sell it, the story goes, to pay gambling debts—inspired a tribute that was as close to a pick-me-up as I was going to get:
Human masses were puddying in mud and dust and misery in city districts roaming public and gambling establishments. He was young, slim, and poor, maybe not handsome, but energetic talented and hot-tempered, a gambler to the bone.
I wasn’t young or energetic, but a glass of red Bordeaux helped to rally the gambling spirit that has made me the expatriate I am. Ever more stifling though the Putin era gets—and I’m betting on worse to come—I’m sticking around to watch.
PAUL THEROUX
Return of the Mockingbird
FROM Smithsonian
The twiggy branches of the redbuds were in bloom, the shell-like magnolia petals had begun to twist open, the numerous flowering Bradford pear trees—more blossomy than cherries—were a froth of white, and yet this Sunday morning in March was unseasonably chilly in Monroeville, Alabama. A week before, I had arrived there on a country road. In the Deep South, and Alabama especially, all the back roads seem to lead into the bittersweet of the distant past.
Over on Golf Drive, once a white part of town, Nannie Ruth Williams had risen at 6:00 in the dim light of a late winter dawn to prepare lunch—to simmer the turnip greens, cook the yams and sweet potatoes, mix the mac and cheese, bake a dozen biscuits, braise the chicken parts and set them with vegetables in the slow cooker. Lunch was seven hours off, but Nannie Ruth’s rule was “No cooking after church.” The food had to be ready when she got home from the Sunday service with her husband, Homer Beecher Williams—“H. B.” to his friends—and anyone else they invited. I hadn’t met her, nor did she yet know that one of the diners that day would be me.
The sixth of 16 children, born on the W. J. Anderson plantation long ago, the daughter of sharecropper Charlie Madison (cotton, peanuts, sugarcane, hogs), Nannie Ruth had a big-family work ethic. She had heard that I was meeting H.B. that morning, but had no idea who I was, or why I was in Monroeville, yet in the southern way, she was prepared to be welcoming to a stranger, with plenty of food, hosting a meal that was a form of peacemaking and fellowship.
Monroeville styles itself “the Literary Capital of Alabama.” Though the town had once been segregated, with the usual suspicions and misunderstandings that arise from such forced separation, I found it to be a place of sunny streets and friendly people, and also—helpful to a visiting writer—a repository of long memories. The town boasts that it has produced two celebrated writers, who grew up as neighbors and friends, Truman Capote and Harper Lee. Their homes no longer stand, but other landmarks persist, those of Maycomb, the fictional setting of To Kill a Mockingbird. Still one of the novels most frequently taught in American high schools, Lee’s creation has sold more than 40 million copies and been translated into 40 languages.
Among the pamphlets and souvenirs sold at the grandly domed Old Courthouse Museum is Monroeville: The Search for Harper Lee’s Maycomb, an illustrated booklet that includes local history as well as images of the topography and architecture of the town that correspond to certain details in the novel. Harper Lee’s work, published when she was 34, is a mélange of personal reminiscence, fictional flourishes, and verifiable events. The book contains two contrasting plots, one a children’s story, the tomboy Scout, her older brother, Jem, and their friend Dill, distur
bed in their larks and pranks by an obscure housebound neighbor, Boo Radley; and in the more portentous story line, Scout’s father’s combative involvement in the defense of Tom Robinson, the decent black man, who has been accused of rape.
What I remembered of my long-ago reading of the novel was the gusto of the children and their outdoor world, and the indoor narrative, the courtroom drama of a trumped-up charge of rape, a hideous miscarriage of justice and a racial murder. Rereading the novel recently, I realized I had forgotten how odd the book is, the wobbly construction, the arch language and shifting point of view, how atonal and forced it is at times, a youthful directness and clarity in some of the writing mingled with adult perceptions and arcane language. For example, Scout is in a classroom with a new teacher from North Alabama. “The class murmured apprehensively,” Scout tells us, “should she prove to harbor her share of the peculiarities indigenous to that region.” This is a tangled way for a six-year-old to perceive a stranger, and this verbosity pervades the book.
I am now inclined to Flannery O’Connor’s view of it as “a child’s book,” but she meant it dismissively, while I tend to think that its appeal to youngsters (like that of Treasure Island and Tom Sawyer) may be its strength. A young reader easily identifies with the boisterous Scout and sees Atticus as the embodiment of paternal virtue. In spite of the lapses in narration, the book’s basic simplicity and moral certainties are perhaps the reason it has endured for more than 50 years as the tale of an injustice in a small southern town. That it appeared, like a revelation, at the very moment the civil rights movement was becoming news for a nation wishing to understand, was also part of its success.