LAST DANCE IN HAVANA
The love I have for you
I cannot deny
My mouth is watering
I just can’t help myself.
--”Chan Chan” by Compay Segundo
Am I dreaming or on the moon? Havana at night is surreal. I’m not prepared for the darkness, the decay lit only by florescent lights casting an eerie gray glow over the crumbling arcades and torn up sidewalks. There is no neon, no advertising save for the dim Viva la Revolucion! billboards, no commercial signs, few streetlights, only the occasional low watt gray porch light. Havana is the darkest city I’ve ever been in. The ghostly figures I see moving among the shadowy ruins might be waltzing to Prokovief in Disney’s Haunted Mansion. But going about their business in the dark are the colorful, vibrant, infinitely practical Cuban people moving to the Cuban rhythms heard everywhere in the streets and in their daily lives. If Fidel is the father of modern Cuba, music is the mother of its people.
Being in Havana now feels like I’ve journeyed back through the decades to not only another place, but another time, an island Brigadoon, an eroded Atlantis found. This is the land of pirates and buccaneers, of Conquistadors and Castro, of castles and kings and exotic Communism. A tropical paradise that some thought to be the Garden of Eden, with a bloody history that includes American presidents, the Mafia, and the search for the Fountain of Youth. And all of this is in a five-hundred-year-old country only ninety miles from the U.S.!
But I didn’t come to get involved in history or politics. I came here for the timeless pleasures of music and dance. I knew when I saw “The Buena Vista Social Club” that I had to go to Cuba. The old American cars cruising under the spray from the waves crashing against the Malecon to the song “Chan Chan” --that scene made me cry, and travel all this way to explore why I was affected so much by a piece of popular music.
The U.S. Government only allows Americans to travel to Cuba and spend dollars if they have relatives there, if they are journalists, or for educational and cultural exchanges. Otherwise we are violating the Trading With The Enemy Act.
The basis for my trip is with a group to teach the Cubans Argentine tango and for them to teach us to dance salsa. Rather ironic for a native Californian of mixed European ancestry to presume to teach Latinos a Latin dance. But for Cubans, Argentine tango is as foreign as West-Coast Swing.
I stay at the Hotel Seville in Habana Vieja, the heart of the tourist center. Built in 1908 and now owned jointly by Cuba and France and recently restored, its large public spaces and guest rooms are plain but comfortable and the Roof Garden on the ninth floor is absolutely stunning with old world grandeur. Although Havana is a UNESCO World Heritage Site, it’s only the tourist hotels currently being restored with foreign money.
Like other world capitals, with the Coliseum, Westminster Abbey, the Empire State Building, or the Eiffel Tower, Havana, too, is its architecture. But the general disintegration of it’s once-grand Spanish Colonial mansions, now with flags of colorful laundry on the rusted baroque balconies, only adds interest to the history-starved Norte Americano’s vacation plus lots of photo ops. We can go to Europe if we want to see the golden arches nestled among ancient edifices.
Havana satisfies our nostalgia for days gone by, for what we’ve lost. Here we are young forever, here we can see the world that perhaps our parents inhabited. And so very much better than a trip to Main Street U.S.A., Havana is real, a romantic, mysterious, two-faced and forbidden time warp. We visitors murmur to each other, looking at pastel palaces turned into tenements, imagine what it was like before!
Our group of American, Canadian, Argentinean and Cuban dancers meet daily either in the hotel or at the Union Arabe across the street on the Prado, where giant loudspeakers constantly blast salsa, the blanket term for son, mambo, Afro-Cuban, chachacha, rumba and other forms of Cuban music. At first the dance exchange is a struggle for everyone; the visitors can’t move their hips sufficiently in the salsa classes, and the Cubans can’t not move their hips as the tango requires.
After classes we all go dancing together to clubs in a big bus. When dancing in Havana it doesn’t matter what kind of shoes you wear, or if you wear any at all, or how you’re dressed (the Cubanas favor Lycra), or placing your feet with precision. You just let the music take you! People dance alone, in twos, threes, and even in large circles. Details don’t matter, just move! the music insists.
At the Casa de Musica, the music takes several in our group back to the hotel in a taxi due to the decibel level of the live band. But for the rest of us, drinking Cuba Libres and mojitos, we reach an altered state of consciousness on the packed dance floor with body heat, hypnotic drums, repetitive hip movements, and pheromones filling the smoky air. Eduardo tells me it’s like the camels, the public buses which cram hundreds of people into their hump-backed spaces--never too full to take more passengers, and always a sensual experience: heat, smells, and lots of body contact.
Another night we went to Salon Rosado at El Tropicale, an open-air club on three levels, and supposedly for the over-40 crowd, but it’s just as sex-charged as the Casa de Musica. I look around and enjoy the sight of black and white faces mixing happily in impromptu conga lines and a rueda de casino, a kind of circular salsa Virginia Reel. Everyone dances with everyone else regardless of age, color, language, national origin, politics, or marital status, and everyone exults the power of the music with their bodies.
Suddenly the electricity goes out and we are thrown into a silent darkness lit only by the full moon behind the silhouettes of towering trees. The stars blaze in the black bowl above us. Accustomed to the rolling blackouts that are an every day fact of Havana life, people calmly light cigarettes and socialize. When the power returns twenty minutes later heralded by blasts from the band’s brass section, the dancing renews its frenzy.
When not dancing, I’m a typical tourist. I visit a cigar factory, the cathedral, the lighthouse and ancient fortress across the channel, and La Bodeguita del Medio, one of Hemingway’s hangouts and the birthplace of the mojito, a rum drink with fresh mint that I can’t seem to get enough of. Every day I eat morros y cristianos (black beans with white rice.) And oh yes, I walk along the Malecon kissed by Caribbean salt spray, hearing “Chan Chan” in my head. So different in the light of day, the cobblestoned streets of Habana Vieja are colorful, even without the flowers that decorate old stone cities all over the world. I’m agog at the medieval architecture, the Spanish tiles, the colonial blue of the restored woodwork, the lack of propaganda.
Whenever I get tired, I hop on a bicitaxi and am bicycled back to the Seville, usually for a dollar. There are cute little yellow motorcycle taxis, and horse-drawn carriages, too. Animals and wagons are picturesque in the capital, but necessary in the provinces, where gas and motor vehicles are relics of the Soviet subsidized past.
Try as it might, however, Havana doesn’t get away with being the European city it tries to emulate. For example, there is only one newspaper, Granma, the Pravda-like party organ. And there virtually is no shopping. In La Moderna Poesia, a large modern bookstore on Calle Obispo, I take a photo of the empty shelves, so strange for one used to a crammed Barnes & Noble. The elegant old pharmacies have polished mahogany shelves bare but for herbal remedies. The department stores feature sanitary napkins in the window as if they were straight from Paris, and clothes so dull and without style; I wonder how the Cuban women look so fabulously fashionable. The available souvenirs often show African caricatures that would be unacceptable in the States. And there are no homeless, at least officially. Panhandlers ask for soap or shampoo (I never leave the hotel without some in my bag.)
Che Guevara’s image is everywhere-- Che in Cuba is like Christ in Rome. And the paternal words and visage of El Maximo hover over the city, faded but ubiquitous.
Cuba goes way out of its way to make tourists happy, as tourism is now their biggest industry. But the tourist doesn’t get a good look at the other Cuba, the one of the Cubans.
The Cubans live in two worlds: their own and that of foreign visitors. Cubans get two government TV channels; tourists get CNN and satellite stations in several languages. There is the peso market and the dollar market (and the meeting of the two in the black market.) There are Cuban taxis, restaurants, hotels, markets, and shops, where only pesos are spent. Then there are the dollar stores, products and services. (Americans can forget about using their credit cards.)
How paradoxical it is in this anti-capitalism regime that foreigners must change their Euros and Yen into American dollars to spend in Cuba. It’s only recently that Cubans are allowed to own dollars, and it’s with dollars that they can buy meat, fruit and products to elevate their lives above the basic subsistence the government provides. Sugar cane is the foundation of their economy, but sugar and rum aren’t sufficient to feed an island cut off from world trade. How much better to plant food instead in the fertile ground that can grow anything, and many Cubans do indeed rely on backyard gardens to supplement their meager diets. Is it genetic or cultural that the Cuban people are so thin?
The Cubans may not have a lot of material things, but still they know how to enjoy themselves. Luckily the best things in life are free, because the Cuban people glory in their music, their dance, and their sexuality. They smile, their dispositions are sunny, and if they complain, I never hear it.
Havana feels very safe. There are police everywhere, in front of every important building, on every street corner, looking into every bar and restaurant for illegal activity. I ask permission to take photos of them, so stunningly handsome in their uniforms, but am denied. There are also cadres of security people stationed throughout all the tourist hotels, making the tourists feel secure, but also keeping the Cuban people out. It is against the law for a Cuban to be in a tourist hotel room--for their own protection, they are told. One of our Cuban dancers makes a mistake; after class she teaches a dance step to two American women in their room and the chambermaid reports her to hotel security. Rudely ordered downstairs and to show her identity papers, the plea of the two Americans doesn’t prevent her breaking down into tears. She ís mortified--and so are the Americans.
Tourists feel safe, but evidently the President does not. People just know that an unexpected convoy of black Mercedes surely contains Fidel, and that he’s not on his way to the Cuban equivalent of official residences like the White House or 10 Downing Street. No one ever knows in which of his thirty residences “the bearded one” will be sleeping that night.
We tourists see the old-fashioned charm and warmth that is carefully orchestrated for us to see. We love Cuba, but we also can leave. A new Cuban friend says that since the triumph of the Revolution, no one dies of hunger as before. Samuel Johnson wrote that freedom is ”the choice of working or starving.”
The next day my friend tells me how his brother’s raft sank on its way to Miami...
The Revolution also brought racial equality, universal medical care, and excellent free education for all. But Cubans aren’t allowed in many tourist locales, drugs and medication are scarce or non-existent, and students don’t have enough pencils, paper or books. People are equal in their poverty--unless they are part of the government.
Although being American I feel guilty about so many things, the Cuban people don’t seem to blame us. “It’s not you, it’s your government officials,” is the gracious way they put it. They seem to realize (but not vocalize) the fact that the glory of the Revolution is past, and since the end of the Soviet Union, they are simply waiting. And making the best of it. They wait for better times, and meanwhile are determined to live.
Cubans are amazingly resourceful, innovative, and clever at creating what they want and need out of what they have. The classic American cars that they keep running on cannibalized parts, clunky Soviet engines, and spit are the most famous example of Cuban ingenuity. But there are many, many others. Making silk purses out of sows’ ears is a national talent.
At our farewell party in the Roof Garden of the Hotel Seville, there’s an all-girl salsa band, and performers in thongs and feathers. We all dance salsa, and many of us dance tango. We exchange promises to write, but without easy access to the Internet in Cuba, email is difficult, and regular mail is extremely slow, unreliable, and censored. The Cubans ask when we will return, and wistfully grow silent when the time comes for them to say when they might visit us.
Handsome Esequiel grabs my hand, saying, “Vamos, mami!” and we dance our last dance. I have learned this week that his sad expression is probably more due to his need for dental work than his mood. I awkwardly give drummer Carlos a tube of heavy-duty cream for his rough hands, as lotion--like soap and shampoo--is almost impossible to come by due to the U.S. embargo. I promise to send Eduardo a Spanish/French dictionary by DHL, the best way to communicate between our two countries, but I don’t know at the time that it costs $80 to send a small package from the States. I give Teresa, Yolanda, and many other women satin baseball hats I’d brought with me. And to Rey I give the most treasured gift of all, a bottle of aspirin for his mother. Here in Cuba, when locals whisper to you in the streets, it’s indeed about drugs, but it’s Tylenol, cough syrup and antacids they are interested in.
I receive a small blackface doll in a rumba costume, a necklace of watermelon seeds and shells, a postcard of Havana--precious mementos I’ll cherish always. The Cubans and the visitors laugh together without end the last night, all of us with happy Cuban faces. If we didn’t laugh, maybe we’d cry.
Luis whispered to me with a smile, “I see you are sad because you are leaving. Look at me, I cannot leave, yet I am happy.”
As the old Soviet-era propjet takes off for Nassau the next morning, I see the ribbons of highways bisecting fields of sugar cane down below, empty but for only the occasional vehicle. Before long the turquoise sea sparkles in the sunlight. The United States and its many choices is so far away. I hear “Chan Chan” in my head, and I’m crying
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