Havana Read online

  Havana

  To Cuban writers, the ones who supported the Revolution, the ones who opposed it, and the ones who did both.

  BY THE SAME AUTHOR

  nonfiction

  •

  Paper: Paging through History

  International Night: A Father and Daughter Cook Their Way around the World

  Ready for a Brand New Beat: How “Dancing in the Street” Became the Anthem for a Changing America

  Birdseye: The Adventures of a Curious Man

  Hank Greenberg: The Hero Who Didn’t Want to Be One

  What? Are These the 20 Most Important Questions in Human History – Or Is This a Game of 20 Questions?

  The Eastern Stars: How Baseball Changed the Dominican Town of San Pedro de Macoris

  The Food of a Younger Land: A Portrait of American Food from the Lost WPA Files

  The Last Fish Tale: The Fate of the Atlantic and Survival in Gloucester, America’s Oldest Fishing Port and Most Original Town

  The Big Oyster: History on the Half Shell

  Nonviolence: A History of a Dangerous Idea

  1968: The Year that Rocked the World

  Choice Cuts: A Savory Selection of Food Writing from Around the World and Throughout History

  Salt: A World History

  The Basque History of the World

  Cod: A Biography of the Fish that Changed the World

  A Chosen Few: The Resurrection of European Jewry

  A Continent of Islands: Searching for the Caribbean Destiny

  fiction

  •

  City Beasts: Fourteen Stories of Uninvited Wildlife

  Edible Stories: A Novel in Sixteen Parts

  The Belly of Paris by Emily Zola: A New Translation with an Introduction by Mark Kurlansky

  Boogaloo on 2nd Avenue: A Novel of Pastry, Guilt, and Music

  The White Man in the Tree and Other Stories

  children/young adult

  •

  Frozen in Time: Clarence Birdseye’s Outrageous Idea about Frozen Food

  Battle Fatigue

  World without Fish

  The Story of Salt

  The Girl Who Swam to Euskadi

  The Cod’s Tale

  CONTENTS

  PROLOGUE • A Black-and-White Feast

  ONE • Change

  TWO • The Hated Sea

  THREE • Danger of a Black City

  FOUR • Cecilia’s Fire and Sugar

  FIVE • Beyond the Wall

  SIX • The Monster

  SEVEN • The Death It Has Given Us

  EIGHT • The Twenty-Six-Flavor Revolution

  NINE • The Mulata Returns

  TEN • The Sound of an African City

  ELEVEN • Frozen in the Tropics

  TWELVE • Sunny Side Up

  THIRTEEN • How to Argue in Havana

  EPILOGUE • The Nocout

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  GENERAL BIBLIOGRAPHY

  BIBLIOGRAPHY OF HABANERA LITERATURE

  INDEX

  A NOTE ON THE AUTHOR

  Esta especie de ensoñacíon o desvario subtropical, bajo el sol, al borde de la bahía hermosa, diabólicamente hermosa, abierta a las peligrosas aguas del golfo de México, atestadas de tiburones y de almas en pena.

  This subtropical delirium, under the sun, by the edge of a beautiful bay, diabolically beautiful, open to the perilous waters of the Gulf of Mexico, swarming with sharks and lost souls.

  — ABILIO ESTÉVEZ, Los Palacios Distantes (2002)

  HABANA VIEJA SEEN FROM THE SEA, FROM ILLUSTRATED NEWS, JULY 23, 1853

  PROLOGUE

  A Black-and-White Feast

  El corazón es un loco

  que no sabe de un color.

  The heart is a fool

  that knows no color.

  — JOSÉ MARTÍ, Versos Sencillos (1891)

  If I were ever to make an old-fashioned film noir—with a cynical plot full of intrigue, violence, and sudden twists, filmed on dark and menacing streets in misty black and white—I would shoot it in Havana.

  My reason for choosing to shoot in black and white might not be immediately apparent to people who know Havana. Havana is a Caribbean city with yellow and pink and turquoise buildings set against a hot cerulean sky and a sea that is bright blue with a dark cobalt stripe formed by the Gulf Stream, always present in the distance.

  Sometimes, as Americans in particular have occasion­ally observed, the sea off of Havana can appear violet when it reflects the sky moments before daybreak. Ernest Hemingway, for whom “violet” would have been too flowery a word, described the Gulf Stream there as “nearly purple.” But Habaneros—that is, the people of Havana—tend to be less poetic about the sea, and the only one I ever found who thought the waters of Havana were violet was the mid-twentieth-century Habanero poet and novelist José Lezama Lima, who wrote:

  The violet sea longs for the birth of gods,

  For to be born here is an unspeakable feast . . .

  John Muir, the Scot who became America’s great naturalist and perhaps first environmentalist, went to Cuba in 1868, the same year he first saw and made famous Yosemite. To Muir, Havana was a yellow city: “On one side of the harbor was a city of these yellow plants; on the other, a city of yellow stucco houses, narrowly and confusedly congregated.” Muir found yellow everywhere. The hill on which the Morro Castle guards the opening of the harbor, according to Muir, was covered with yellow weeds.

  Similarly, British novelist Anthony Trollope, on his 1859 visit, called Havana “the dingy yellow town.” And that is how American Impressionist Childe Hassam painted it. Although he was a great colorist in New York, New England, and France, when he went to Havana in 1895, he painted yellow buildings faded to pastel by the white-hot sunlight—a dingy yellow town. In his paintings of Havana, even the shadows were muted—into a pastel blue—and the only true saturated colors were the red and gold of the Spanish flags. Hassam loved flags.

  Contemporary Cuban writer Pedro Juan Gutiérrez, who consciously avoids lyrical flourishes, made an exception for Havana at sunset, which he called “the beautiful golden city in the dusk,” and it is true that when the sun’s rays burn into the city at an angle almost parallel to the ground, Havana is a golden city.

  Federico García Lorca, the great Spanish poet, is beloved in Havana for his boyish charm and because he came to a tragic end—he was shot by Fascists at the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War. Tragic endings always play well in Havana. But in 1930 he wrote, “Havana has the yellow of Cádiz, the pink of Seville turning carmine and the green of Granada, with the slight phosphorescence of fish.”

  Were these writers seeing the same city that I was seeing?

  •

  One reason for the difference between these writers’ impressions, at least in the early accounts, and mine was that these writers first saw Havana from the sea.

  Havana is located on the north coast of Cuba, along a primary shipping lane that runs between North America and Europe, and through the Caribbean to Mexico and South America. It and San Juan, Puerto Rico, which is situated much farther from North America and Mexico, are the only major Caribbean ports on the Atlantic Ocean. Most Caribbean ports are on the Caribbean side of their respective islands, where ships have to struggle through treacherous inter-island passages to get to the Atlantic.

  The French knew the right place for a port, establishing the capital of what is now Haiti in Cap-Haïtien, on the Atlantic coast, but after the Haitian Revolution of 1791–1804, Port-au-Prince, on the Caribbean coast, became the capital. In Cuba, on the other hand, the Spanish originally did it wrong, establishing the island’s capital at Santiago, on the Caribbean side, and only later moving it to Havana, on the Atlantic coast. Havana has a perfect harbor, with a long, narrow in
let leading to the long, wide, and well sheltered Havana Bay.

  That bay and its waterfront in the old part of Havana, now called Habana Vieja, was once the heart of the city, the place where every visitor first disembarked, where huge warehouses of the nation’s ample sugar and tobacco crops were loaded and shipped abroad, where goods entered and were inspected by customs officials.

  In To Have and Have Not, Hemingway’s only book set in Havana, published in 1937, the action takes place on the waterfront of Habana Vieja’s eastern side, with docks and warehouses, stevedores and rough bars and cafés. At that time, the waterfront was populated by the poor looking for work, the “street bums” sleeping against the walls, seamen and gangsters and their murderous henchmen.

  Tourists visiting the restored colonial sites in Habana Vieja today only have to turn right and walk a block or two to reach this once famous area. But almost no one does. Most tourists have little sense that there is a waterfront and a harbor in the neighborhood. The bums and the gangsters and most of the seamen are also gone.

  Today, people arrive by airplane, which offers a completely different view of Havana than arriving by boat. You fly in low over vast, green, and well-trimmed farms outside the city. The taxi rides a bumpy road past a few not very tall high-rises, unusual in Havana, including a large state psychiatric clinic, and drab gray buildings, or rust-streaked, turquoise, and rotting pink ones—resembling birthday cakes left out too long. In surprisingly little time you are swiftly careening—if you have a younger, healthier taxi—around the curves of the oceanfront road, the Malecón, and into Central Havana, reaching it so quickly it is hard to believe that this is a city of two million people.

  From much of the city, the ocean is visible, blue and empty. Seldom is a boat of any kind seen—certainly not recreational boats, but not even fishing boats. This seems unnatural, because it is obvious that there are fish out there. The dark streak of the fish-rich Gulf Stream, the great marlin grounds that drew Hemingway, is visible from the shore. Men and boys stand along the seawall fishing. Sometimes they float out on an inner tube to access larger catch. The prize is pargo, the large local snapper. Hemingway called the pargo by an American name, muttonfish, and said it could be caught on the rocks off the Morro, the castle guarding the harbor. Locals catch them using minnows or squid that they net. But there are many other Caribbean species as well, most reef-feeding fish, and many with folkloric names like pez perro, the dogface, a goofy-looking bucktoothed creature.

  But nothing is being caught from boats. Even in adjacent Cojímar, Havana’s “fishing village,” there are no boats in sight, and the few remaining fishermen are elderly, no longer fishing but loaded with reminiscences, sometimes of fishing with Hemingway. Explanations for this lack of boats range from a fuel shortage to the theory that all working boats have left for Florida. And the real reason probably does have something to do with the city’s proximity to Florida, because there is still an active fishing fleet on the southern coast of Cuba, though there it is focused on lobster and shellfish.

  Since the 1959 Cuban Revolution and the subsequent 1960 U.S. trade embargo, there has been little marine traffic in and out of Havana. Even during the years of Cuba’s close ties to the Soviet Union, when there were regular shipments arriving from Eastern Europe, there was never enough activity to create the old-time bustle.

  In fact, Havana Bay became a dank, foul place, and until the mid-1980s, when Cuba got United Nations money to clean up the harbor, a tremendous amount of sewage from rivers and storm drains flowed into its waters. Slaughterhouses, a yeast factory, two alcohol distilleries, a leather tannery, and the flaming oil refinery in Regla, on the eastern side of the waterfront, contributed to the pollution. Three decades of cleanup work in Havana Bay has not increased its usage, either. In fact, since the demise of the Soviet Union in 1991, the harbor has been used even less.

  This could be changing. Immediately after President Barack Obama announced a thawing of relations with Cuba in 2015, American entrepreneurs started laying plans for boat service to Havana, even though the trade embargo was still in place. But the old harbor and waterfront are not likely to ever again be what they once were. If the harbor does become lively again, it will most likely be as a tourist port rather than a commercial one.

  The truth is that what was once the most perfect harbor in the Caribbean, the one that first inspired Havana to be built, is now a bit dated. In the days of smaller ships, the harbor, with its deep water and narrow entrance—only about three hundred yards wide for almost half a mile, until it broadens to several square miles of sheltered water—offered a great military advantage, both for defense and offense. An attacker trying to bottle up a fleet could sink a ship at the harbor’s entrance, closing it for entry or exit. The harbor is still an ideal shelter for sitting out a hurricane, but it is not deep enough for modern shipping, and a larger deepwater harbor is now being built to the west of the city. In the old harbor, the entrance is too narrow. In addition, although Regla is still a serviceable location for shipping to and from eastern Cuba, the streets on the Habana Vieja side are too narrow for moving goods by truck.

  •

  That dense, crowded world of narrow spaces in Habana Vieja is where my film noir could take place. The light there is so hot it is white, and that makes the shadows very dark. This tropical city was built to have as much shade as possible, and the narrow streets are mostly dark. In fact, in Habana Vieja, the streets are so narrow that until recent times, awnings were strung between the buildings on either side to keep the street below shaded.

  But there are other reasons for seeing Havana in black and white. Because of the U.S. embargo, color film and color film processing have not been available, so for many years after the revolution, the country’s leading photographers, such as Raúl Corrales and Alberto Korda, shot in black and white. (A true Habanero, Korda, famous for his black-and-white portrait of Che Guevara, said that he had become a photographer “to meet women.”)

  Awnings across the buildings on O’Reilly Street in Habana Vieja provide shade for shoppers, 1871.

  One of the best Havana novels reads like a film noir. You don’t think in color while reading El Acoso (The Chase), by Alejo Carpentier. It is a testament to the openness of Habaneros to foreigners that Carpentier—who was born in Switzerland to a French father and a Russian mother, died in Paris, and had a French accent when he spoke Spanish—is accepted in the city as a great Habanero. Most Habaneros do not even realize that he was not born there.

  The Chase is set in the 1950s, during the dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista, and is the story of a political activist being pursued through Havana by secret police agents. It is one of several Carpentier novels that influenced Colombian Gabriel García Márquez and other Latin American writers to turn to what came to be called “magical realism.” But despite the book’s magical quality, it is full of gritty realism because it is set in the streets of Havana. It captures what the city looks like, feels like, and especially smells like. There are occasional references to color, though: “Following the paint smeared on the houses, he moved, he moved from ocher to ash, from green to mulberry, passing from the portal with a broken coat of arms over it to the portal adorned with filthy cornucopias.” And that has always been Havana—ornate but disheveled, somewhat like an unshaven man in a tattered tuxedo.

  Perhaps it is the book’s story line that so suggests a film noir, or the fact that it takes place mostly at night, making it seem like a chase through a black-and-white city. Carpentier hit on the true essence of Havana when he wrote, in his 1970 book La Ciudad de las Columnas (The City of Columns), “The old city . . . is a city of shadows, made by using shadows.” Havana was built by Europeans looking for shade in a hot country; they created a shadowy world.

  In The Chase, darkness heightens the sense of smell. For, like all tropical cities, Havana is filled with sweet, sour, and bitter scents, many of them unpleasant. It would help if the garbage were picked up more often, but the
re are many other smells as well. Carpentier wrote of “the stink of the kitchens of the poor.” He even wrote of “the scent of termite-eaten papers.” Hunt through old used books with slightly eaten pages at the stalls in the Plaza de Armas, the city’s oldest square, and you will know that scent.

  No one could write about a city with as much detail as Carpentier does without loving it for all its stench. As Nelson Algren once wrote about Chicago, “Before you earn the right to rap any sort of joint, you have to love it a little while.” The Chase was Carpentier’s homage to the dark and rough city.

  Another enduring black-and-white image of Havana comes from the photographs of Walker Evans. Carpentier even makes a reference to one of them in The Chase. In 1932 or 1933, Evans went down to Cuba with a commission to illustrate a book, which was never published, called “The Crime of Cuba.” But in three weeks of shooting, and also a lot of drinking with Hemingway at the Hotel Ambos Mundos, Papa treating, Evans shot his black-and-white Havana masterpieces. His pictures do not show the Depression-era poverty of his American pictures, just streets full of people trying to look all right in a hopelessly tattered world.

  There have also been real film noirs of the city, such as the 1959 Carol Reed black-and-white adaptation of the 1958 novel Our Man in Havana. The fact that the book’s author, Graham Greene, also wrote the screenplay makes this one of the rare movies that lives up to the novel on which it was based.

  The story is one of a British vacuum cleaner salesman who convinces British intelligence that vacuum cleaner drawings are designs for a weapons system in the Cuban mountains. His plan is to get the British to pay him so he can send his daughter to prep school in Switzerland. It could be argued that the story is too comic to be a film noir. Fidel Castro, who permitted the film’s crew to shoot in Havana, complained that it made too much light of Batista’s security operatives. But the story does have a dark side, including a torturing police agent with a cigarette case made of human skin and scenes of people being shot down in the street—dramatic flashes of gunshots in the dark. Greene’s book is fundamentally a comedy, but, as the novel states, “someone always leaves a banana skin on the scene of a tragedy.”