Havana

by Mark Kurlansky

  Castro did not want the revolutionary government to favor Cuba’s capital city in its budget allocations, and it is obvious that it didn’t. The government openly accepts blame for the state of Havana. The capital was never its priority, and, as with all difficulties and failings in Cuba, there is also the embargo to blame. In 1990, Raida Mara Suárez Portal, an historic preservationist for the city of Havana, complained to me, “There is no paint in Cuba.” Paint is among the foreign products that are difficult to obtain.

  But if old photos are examined, such as those of Centro Habana taken by Walker Evans in the early 1930s, it is clear that the city was in bad repair in earlier eras as well. In 1939, Alejo Carpentier wrote, “Havana is a city of unfinished works, of the feeble, the asymmetrical, and the abandoned.”

  Walker Evans, 1932–33. Plaza de Vapor, a market area in Centro Habana since the nineteenth century, known for everything from chickens in the 1880s to prostitutes in the 1950s. Evans’s photos show that even in the 1930s Havana was a crumbling old city. © Walker Evans Archive, the Metropolitan Museum of Art

  Similar observations were also made long before the thirties. In 1859, Trollope wrote of Havana:

  The streets are narrow, dirty, and foul. In this respect there is certainly much difference between those within and without the wall. The latter are wider, more airy, and less vile. But even in them there is nothing to justify the praises with which the Havana is generally mentioned in the West Indies.

  Alexander von Humboldt, the early-nineteenth-century Prussian visitor, did not like Havana any better than Trollope did. He described it as muddy, filthy, and evil-smelling. One of the problems at that time was that two thousand horses and mules were living within the city.

  In truth, the foreigner who admires Havana has generally been an inveterate slummer such as Graham Greene.

  Havana today is a city of dilapidated, formerly state-of-the-art buildings, erected to a large degree at the whimsy of the wealthy—from the ornate mansions they built within the city walls, and then abandoned, to the newer homes they moved into on the Prado and in Centro Habana, and in turn abandoned, to the even newer homes in Vedado and Miramar, which they also fled—along with their country—after the revolution. There are now no more rich people to take over these homes. But this differs little from the situation in the past: always, when the rich have moved on, there has subsequently been no market for their old homes, as they were deserting a neighborhood nobody with money wanted to live in anymore.

  After the rich left, the state redistributed their cars, homes, and valuables to “worthy revolutionaries.” Though it has never been documented, this must have been an ideal opportunity for corruption. In Paisaje de Otoño (titled Havana Black in English), Leonardo Padura wrote of a corrupt official expropriator:

  One could imagine that a part of those recycled riches, minimal no doubt but very valuable (say a Degas that never reappeared, a Greek amphora lost to an oblivious Mediterranean, a Roman bust lost to memory, or collection of Byzantine coins never again exchanged by merchant owners of every temple there ever was?), passed through his hands with the promise of a revolutionary redistribution that never happened . . .

  Writer Reinaldo Arenas, best known for his book Before Night Falls, told the story of an aunt, considered a good revolutionary, who was awarded a house in Miramar. There were many abandoned luxury houses in the neighborhood, which had officially been declared “frozen,” meaning nothing was to be touched until appropriate new owners could be found. But it was difficult to qualify for one of these homes, and so the neighborhood remained largely abandoned, and every night the aunt would raid the empty houses and steal whatever she liked.

  The revolution intended to solve the Habaneros’ housing problem, but for most people, wherever you happened to be living on January 1, 1959, was your new affordable home forever. The state took over the buildings and the rent became extremely low. If you happened to be renting a small room in someone’s house, you now had a very inexpensive room, and if you were living in a house or a large apartment, you now had an inexpensive house or large apartment. People did not move. Without new construction, there was nowhere to move to, and their current homes cost them almost nothing. There was, and still is, also nowhere for children to move once they grow up, and so today, even married couples live with their parents.

  In 2012, I accompanied Mariano Guas, the son of Batista’s vice president, back to Havana for the first time since he was a schoolboy in 1960. He found everyone living exactly where he had left them. We visited his former home, a ground-floor apartment in Miramar. The same family still lived in the apartment above. We went to his family’s vacation home on the coast of Pinar del Río, and the neighbors were still the same. A few houses had been replaced by a military base, which he could not enter, but an officer told him that down at the base was a plaque commemorating the fact that Comandante Fidel Castro had landed there in 1960.

  Mariano knew that. His family had spent the summer of 1960 at their summer home, because there were too many political fights going on among friends at the Havana Yacht Club. Mariano fell out of a tree and broke his arm, so he could not go swimming with the other children. He spent his time wandering along the shoreline. One day a launch pulled up and a bearded giant of a man came ashore. It was Fidel Castro. Though there was no one else greeting him, he walked right past Mariano without saying a word. That was the commemorated landing.

  •

  Though many of Havana’s oldest homes are now in extreme disrepair, other old buildings are being preserved. Since the revolution, the government has taken to restoring historic buildings. They began slowly, with Habana Vieja’s Plaza de Armas in 1964. Then, in 1982, UNESCO designated Habana Vieja and its fortresses a World Heritage site and provided small amounts of money to help with the restoration of the Catedral, the Plaza de Armas, and some other historic sites. As tourism revenue in the city increases, however, it can afford more restoration projects—and has a financial incentive to do so. Still, most of Habana Vieja, the only neighborhood in Havana that has been restored, remains dilapidated, with many homes even lacking running water.

  It also does not take long for new rot to set into a restored building. Even the cherished Hemingway house has peeling patches and rotten corners. The truth is that it is almost impossible to maintain a city in a tropical climate, which relentlessly composts everything and eats all human endeavor.

  In 1984, the government declared that rent money could go toward the purchase price of a home; in time, everyone could own their own home. This led to efforts by some tenants, now prospective owners, to fix up their buildings. One neighborhood where this famously occurred was Cayo Hueso, the traditionally black neighborhood of Centro Habana, giving rise to the phrase “Cayo Hueso intervention.” Castro, who had been hoping that such initiatives would occur, suggested that other neighborhoods take on a Cayo Hueso intervention. But once the tenants restored their buildings, they had to take responsibility for their maintenance, and they had no better ideas than the government about how to do so.

  By the twenty-first century, many Habaneros had paid enough rent to own their homes, and FOR SALE signs went up. But there were rarely any buyers, and when there were, there were few places for the sellers to move to. So neighborhoods are still, in the language of the revolution, frozen.

  TWELVE

  Sunny Side Up

  Puede ansiosa

  La Muerte, pues, de pie en las hojas secas,

  Esperarme a mi umbral con cada turbia

  Tarde de otoño, y silenciosa puede

  Irme tejiendo con helados copos

  Mi manto funeral.

  Death then,

  Standing among the withered leaves,

  Can eagerly await me at my doorway

  Every murky autumn evening, and silently

  Approach me, weaving with frozen flaxen threads

  My funeral cloak.

  — JOSÉ MARTÍ, “Canto de Otoño” (1882)

&n
bsp; José Martí is everywhere in Havana. Actually he is everywhere in Cuba, if you count all the small white plaster busts at schools and public buildings. Most Cuban heroes get only one statue; Martí has many.

  Sculptors have improved on his appearance—being attractive is important in Havana. It is, in the words of author Hernández Roberto Uría, “a vain city that bewitches.” Everyone is expected to be good-looking. The police are good-looking; even the drug-sniffing police dogs at the airport—well-groomed spaniels—are good-looking. The revolution was started by Hollywood-gorgeous men, starring the tall and broad-shouldered warrior Fidel, with Camilo Cienfuegos in the warm and lovable role usually reserved in Hollywood for Eddie Albert: “the best friend.” Ernesto “Che” Guevara, the violent revolutionary, looked too exquisite to be anything but a movie star. Allen Ginsberg, a famous American poet who supported the revolution, was deported in 1965 for too much talk about drugs and homosexuality; the final blow was when he said what a lot of men and women were probably thinking: that he would like to have sex with Che.

  But Martí, always the central character in the Habanero drama, was problematic. “The Apostle” was a frail, five-foot-tall man with a few thin strands desperately hanging on atop his receding hairline. Had he lived past age forty-two, those strands probably would have fallen out, too.

  Writers and historians have gone to great lengths to assure Cuba that despite Martí’s unimpressive appearance, women found him irresistible. It is often suggested that it was his poetry that did it. María Granados, the daughter of the ex-president of Guatemala, fell in love with him when he was in Guatemala in 1877, but he was already engaged to a Cuban, Carmen Zayas-Bazán, and married his betrothed. María then drowned, either committing suicide from heartbreak or by accident, and he wrote a poem to her, saying not that she had killed herself but that she “died of love.”

  Martí’s statues don’t resemble the man in photographs. In stone or bronze or plaster, the Apostle has a high forehead and a thick crop of flowing hair, crowning a lean and robust frame.

  The best Martí statue, square-shouldered and thick-haired, was erected in 1905 by the first Cuban president, Tomás Estrada Palma, in the Parque Central. Carved in Carrara marble by the leading sculptor of the day, José Vilalta de Saavedra, it depicts Martí stepping forward amid the royal palms (which must mean something) in his habitual coat, carrying some sort of cape or overcoat and raising his right hand while pointing with his index finger. Based on the statue’s location, there are two prevailing theories about it, both of which illustrate the sardonic Habanero sense of humor. The Apostle of Freedom, according to some, is stepping out of the Hotel Inglaterra, which is behind him, and hailing a taxi. According to others, he is walking toward El Floridita, which is in front of him, and ordering a daiquiri. Personally, I reject both of those theories. Clearly Martí, a known baseball aficionado, is making a point about the previous night’s game to the men who are arguing baseball every morning in the park below him.

  Fidel Castro may have had his own theory about the gesture, because he used it constantly from his podium in the Plaza de la Revolución, with another statue of Martí perched awkwardly behind him. In fact, the Comandante may have been trying in many ways to imitate the Apostle, who was famous for his oratory. Castro often paraphrased Martí or even lifted from him, though Fidel was clearly too large and hairy and possibly too long-winded to pass for a second Martí.

  An even more robust statue of Martí is the bronze one near the Malecón, where the Apostle is shown protecting a child and glaring menacingly at a threat from across the sea. This statue was erected in the year 2000, during the controversy over an attempt by Cubans in the United States to keep a small child, Elián González, from returning to his father in Cuba.

  The most spectacular statue of Martí, and the one that best expresses his image, is not in Havana, nor even in Cuba, but in New York City, the longtime home of the Apostle, on Central Park South at the head of the Avenue of the Americas, a designated spot for mounted Latin American heroes. Two other heroes are also there—a parading Simón Bolívar and a galloping General José de San Martín of Argentina—but the statue of Martí falling off his mount is far more impressive than the other two somewhat static equestrians. Well-dressed and unarmed, though more balding than in most statues (perhaps because the sculptor was neither a Cuban nor a man), Martí has just been fatally shot, and his charging horse is tumbling.

  The statue is by American sculptress Anna Vaughn Hyatt Huntington, who completed it in 1959 at the age of eighty-two. Her last work; it was a gift of the new Cuban government to New York. Relations having taken a bad turn, however, it was not placed in its current spot until 1965; the liberator Bolívar was moved to the side to make room for the Apostle.

  Though the real Martí was carrying a firearm and was probably not dressed in city clothes when he died, the statue captures that tragic moment. Death is unusually important to Cubans, and especially Habaneros.

  •

  Havana has the most celebrated cemetery of any city in the world except Paris, with its Père Lachaise. The 140-acre Cementerio Cristóbal Colón, where one million people are buried, is in Vedado. It has little shade and few benches, here in the broiling Havana sun, but it has avenues of monuments, some by renowned sculptors such as José Vilalta de Saavedra, who carved the 1905 Martí statue. The mausoleum of Catalina Laso, a wealthy woman who moved to France to escape a sex scandal was designed by René Lalique, complete with a Lalique glass dome with a rose carved in it.

  Like the living city, the cemetery has a few well-cared-for streets, especially the main avenue that runs straight from the gate, where a motto reads, PALE DEATH ENTERS THE PALACES OF KINGS AND THE CABINS OF THE POOR THE SAME. But the monuments of the cemetery are not all the same. The richer people have the larger ones on the main streets. And as in the rest of the city, many of the sites are crumbling. Havana has a long history of exiles, and exiles cannot care for family graves.

  Among the million buried in Colón are General Máximo Gómez; writers Nicolás Guillén, Alejo Carpentier, José Lezama Lima, Dulce María Loynaz; photographer Alberto Korda; anthropologist Fernando Ortiz; filmmaker Tomás Gutiérrez; drummer Chano Pozo and pianist Rubén González; and the great daiquiri mixer Constante Ribalaigua, who has a chapel at his tomb.

  One grave is a double-three domino. It is the grave of Luisa V. Antonia, who lost an important domino match by misplaying a double-three tile and then died of a heart attack. Another tomb is marked with a large marble chess king. It is the grave of one of the all-time greatest chess champions, José Raúl Capablanca. Born in Havana in 1888, he started playing at the age of four and liked to play many simultaneous matches. Once, in the United States, he won 168 games in only ten sessions. Havana has long produced great chess players—the Spanish brought the game to Cuba in the fifteenth century and it never left. It was one of the few things Russians and Cubans had in common in the Soviet era.

  Havana is better known for baseball, and many of the great players and managers have ended up in the Colón cemetery, including Dolf Luque, who between 1914 and 1935 played for the Boston Braves, Cincinnati Reds, and Brooklyn Dodgers. Cuban League manager Alberto Azoy and Cuban Baseball Hall of Fame first baseman Julián Castillo are also in Colón.

  There are hijackers, too, including William Lee Brent, a wanted Black Panther who hijacked a plane to Cuba in 1969. In the late sixties, there were so many Americans hijacking planes to Cuba, most of them black nationalists, that the Cuban government maintained a wealthy exiled businessman’s Havana mansion as “the hijacker house,” home at times to some thirty-five hijackers. According to one, Michael Finney, there were at one time as many as sixty American hijackers, most of them black, in Cuba. The FBI estimate was even higher. Many took advantage of the free university education and ended up with good jobs. Finney, who died of cancer in 2005, became a journalist, which may explain how he always knew when I was in town. He liked to talk to another American who h
ad lived through the sixties. He and other hijackers admitted that they sorely missed the society of black America.

  One of the most visited spots at Colón is the simple tomb of Amelia Goyri de Adot, who died with her daughter in childbirth in 1901. The baby was buried at her feet, but two years later, when Goyri de Adot was disinterred for reburial, a common practice, the baby’s remains were found in her arms. These things happen in Colón because the ground shifts, which is why the cemetery reburies after two years. But not everyone accepts that explanation, and pregnant women visit La Milagrosa, the miraculous one, as she is now known. When they leave, they back out of the avenue so as not to turn their back on her. Habaneros, for a secular people, have a lot of beliefs.

  •

  Martí was obsessed with death. At the age of sixteen, he predicted that his life would be short. His most famous collection of poems, Versos Sencillos, states in the first stanza that these poems are being told by an honest man who wants to release all the poems within him before he dies. The poems are full of death. Because of this, the Spanish Fascist movement of the 1930s, the Falange, which was almost a death cult, turned to Martí even though he opposed right-wing beliefs and was anti-Spanish. The Falange slogan was the nonsensical cry “Long live death.” Their anthem, “Cara al Sol,” comes from Martí’s Versos Sencillos:

  ¡Yo soy bueno, y como bueno

  Moriré de cara al sol!

  I am good, and so I shall die

  With my face to the sun!

  Some, including Guillermo Cabrera Infante, have gone so far as to suggest that Martí committed suicide by revealing himself to the sniper in the grass. Now that Cuba was engaged in what Martí hoped would be the final war for independence, or so the argument goes, what else could he do to continue contributing? He was forty-two—older than he ever thought he’d be—had no military skills, and was of little use in combat. But if he died in battle, his face to the sun, a martyr—that would inspire the cause.