A few weeks ago I woke up with a hangover and an email stating I and my friends Isabelle had just bought ourselves a ticket to Cuba. This being one of the less dramatic and dangerous fall-outs from a night of partying I was happy, and besides we had plenty of time to plan the details. However, it appears time in Central America moves faster than back home, much like water going to wrong way down the drain in the Southern hemisphere (and yes I realise that comparing time passing to water down a drain is a pretty darn depressing analogy... all the more reason to carpe the diem and live it up in Cuba.)
Touching down in Havana and driving in to town past all the huge propaganda posters brought me right back to my trip here three years ago with Eve (it had been our graduation treat to ourselves- though were so poor we ate nothing but cheap rum and rice and subsequently got very sick- a money saving trick of it own, you can’t spend money if you are laid out.) We even stayed at the same lady’s house that Eve and I stayed at. In Cuba if people have a spare room they can rent it out to tourists to make some extra money (the taxes from the renting go to building new houses for couples- which is nice.) Our taxi wove its way through the dilapidated grandeur of Havana’s centre to the apartment. Stepping back in side was like déjà vu, the high ceilings, the central open courtyard; even though the outside was, like most houses on the street, slowly crumbling, inside was as beautiful as ever.
Miriam, the lady we stayed with had two rooms and we stayed in the different one to Eve and I last time, though we shared an intersecting bathroom. I had a very weird Borges-eque moment when in the bathroom I spotted someone’s contact-lense equipment, remembered the eye-trouble Eve had had with her contacts last time (necessitating an exploration of Cuba’s renowned eye-doctors) and had the strangest feeling that we were staying in a room next to Maeve from 3 years ago. They say video games are bad for the mind but I swear Argentinean surrealists can mess you up.
We spent the next two days exploring Havana- this city takes a hold of you, the classic cars nonchalantly cruising down the streets, crumbling facades and colours everywhere. Our casa particular (the house) was in a fairly plain neighbourhood but walk 5 mins down the road and the street opens like the mouth of a river to the Prado, the main street. Here it is easiest to see the luxurious grandeur of a world frozen in the 50s- the Hotel Inglaterra, National Theatre and Capitolio (huge, domed, ex-presidential palace) peer down on the bustling street below.
We also did a fair amount of hanging out in my favourite square, the Plaza de Armas in the old quarter. These days the plaza is full of second hand books stalls, brimming over with political writing and fiction (I got myself some Marx and Hemmingway- when in Rome.... mobilize the proletariat and go fishing.) I also love that the “Arms Square” is full of books- the revolution will be fought with ideas not weapons.
We managed to actually find some good food to eat too, though I still got more than my fair share of plain rice and tomatoes (unfortunately my vegetarianism didn’t allow me to try the “gizzard and banana sword” at one restaurant. When, oh when, will the world make Quorn gizzard?!) I also dragged Isabelle all over town looking for the famous Coppelia ice-cream parlour where a key scene from seminal gay-rights movie Fresa y Chocolate, thus combining my hobbies of being a massive geek and eating massive amounts of icecream. Unfortunately they were out of strawberry icecream (the symbol in the film for homosexuality) so I had to have carmel and chocolate- I don’t know what this says about sexual freedom... icecream eating shouldn’t be so political.
The only downside to Havana, and the other cities we visited, was that everywhere we went, (and I mean everywhere), we were serenaded with cat-calls and this weird psst psst noise that seems to be a less energetic form of wolf-whistle. It was incessant and got very very annoying. I blame Isabelle for being a blonde, lovely Swede, (in fact as much as I hated the cat-calling it was a bit of a blow to the ego to hear them all say “linda rubia”- beautiful blonde. I wanted to shout “Shut up you misogynist pricks... and what am I chopped liver?!” Ah the feminist-egoist’s paradox.)
Other snapshots from Havana:
Walking along from the sea-wall at sunset I turned around to see some kids had grabbed Isabelle’s camera and were pulling on her bag. Her being awesome and tough she held on for dear life, I screamed “DEJALO!” (Spanish for LEAVE IT!) and the scamps ran off, dropping the camera on the way. So Isabelle got robbed but didn’t lose anything.
I was stopped in the street by a guy that asked where I was from, I said England and he got super excited and said “ahhhh Ali G- Booyakasha!” There is very little one can say in return to that.
We had a great night out by accident. We met some Cuban guys on the streets and they told us about a cool area to go out. We jumped into a collective taxi and zoomed off back to the North of Havana, right next to the icecream parlour we’d walked so far to find earlier that day. Now admittedly we broke all the rules in the book- allowing ourselves to be picked up by drunk guys on the street and guided to unknown places but I trust my instincts and in the end it turned out to be a great night (except a guy who was chatting me up suddenly stopped, looked at my stomach and said “oh wait are you pregnant”! Worst chat-up line ever.)My non-existent unborn baby and I ended up in this great reggae club filled with rastas. Thought I was getting a lesson in rasta philosophy from this brilliantly-turbaned guy, all about seizing the day and living life to the full, but turns out he was trying to persuade me to cheat on my imaginary-excuse boyfriend (quite the phantom family was forming). Years of skanking to ska helped on the dance floor and we danced the night away (totally sober), before trying to escape by going to the toilet, though we were followed. Shook off most of our want-to-be suitors and got a classic-car taxi home along the sea-front. They tried to charge us $40- I laughed in his face and gave him $6. A day of exploiting our attempted exploiters, dancing, icream and a lot, and I mean a lot, of walking. The next few days would take us out of Havana, though the adventures would continue....
Lessons learnt:
Repeating the same word continuously does make a coherent, persuasive argument. Being asked “taxi?” four-hundred times, despite having said no the first time, is not a great business model.
Smile nicely enough you can get yourself up to the private, roof-top bar of nice hotels... and then nurse the cheapest drink for an hour while taking in the view. Almost setting the place on fire due to a latent pyromaniac desire to play with candles is less likely to be tolerated.
There are a lot of very buff-body builders in Havana- apparently the body politik isn’t the only thing the Cubans have been attending to.
