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Red-Hot Caribbean Sensual Cuba still moves to the rhythms of history. by keith mundy
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A view of the El Capitolio dome
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cross the yellow ochre walls of the Moncada Barracks in Santiago de Cuba, bullet holes pockmark the surfaces. All is serene, because it’s now a museum of the Cuban Revolution. But on a baking-hot July 26, 1953, while the old port city revelled in its annual carnival, this was the bloody scene of the first battle in that revolt. After severe setbacks, the rebellion – called the 26th of July Movement– culminated in the taking of Havana at the other end of the Caribbean’s largest island in January 1959. The Cuban authorities take great care of all the crucial sites in the progress of the revolution, consecrating them as beautifully kept museums, not least because some of the people who lead that struggle are still in power, most notably the two Castro brothers who headed the Moncada attack.
Raul Castro is president of Cuba, and his long-serving predecessor, the extraordinary Fidel Castro, although retired, is still an influence behind the scenes. An eminence rogue, you might say, who keeps the revolutionary flame burning. The Moncada Barracks and July 26 have become the most iconic place and the most iconic date in the revolutionary legend that all Cuban schoolchildren learn about, and all Cubans get reminded of each year as the heat reaches fever pitch in the height of the tropical summer. Hotter than anywhere else on the island, set beside the Caribbean on Cuba’s most southerly stretch of coast, Santiago de Cuba ramps up the heat even more with not one but two major festivals involving lots of music and dancing. Held in early July as the heat rises, A typical Havanan street
The syncretic religion of Santería is a mix of Yorùbá tribal beliefs and Roman Catholicism
one is actually called the Fire Festival (Fiesta del Fuego), a pan-Caribbean celebration of music and dance, in the streets and in theatres, with some academic, artistic and literary events on the side. But the really hot stuff comes with carnival at the end of the month, when the streets are filled with Santiaguero music groups, drummers and dancers, and impromptu conga parades rock the neighbourhoods, while outlandishly dressed characters preen and prance in the carnival procession. Climaxing on July 26, the most beautiful event is the dancing in front of the town hall in Cespedes Park, where Afro-Cuban dance groups perform anti-slavery dramas in multi-coloured costumes evoking the colonial era. It was from the balcony of the historic blue-and-white town hall that Fidel Castro, relishing the extraordinary moment, gave his victory speech on New Year’s Day, 1959. The Moncada attack was a complete failure, with most of the assailants killed and the rest
captured. But Fidel Castro lived to fight again, setting up a guerrilla base in the rugged Sierra Maestra mountains to the west of Santiago, with a band that included the soonto-be legendary Che Guevara. Breaking out in mid-1958, Comandante Che led a daring thrust into central Cuba to capture the strategic city of Santa Clara. City of Che Guevara’s men fought their way to the main east-west railway line and derailed a trainload of troops and arms, smashing the dictator Batista’s plan to halt the rebel advance on Havana, after which he fled the country. At the spot, now a calm suburban level crossing, stands a dramatic museum of the event. Beside the track, a zig-zag of freight wagons artfully resembles a derailment. Climbing inside them, you see the multimedia story of the Battle of Santa Clara. The decisive battle made Santa Clara a sacred revolutionary city with a vast Revolution Square, overlooked by a huge Che statue,
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The cathedral of Havana San Cristobal
All of Old Havana is a World Heritage Site, with historic buildings constantly being restored after decades of neglect, some with major rebuilding, others with mere facelifts.
FACT FILE Flights Air France – KLM has daily flights to Havana via Paris or Amsterdam, details at www.airfrance.co.th and www.klm.com/thailand . Three airlines operate internal flights to Santiago de Cuba, including Cubana, details at www.cubana.cu . Hotels Hotel Casa Granda (Heredia 201, Santiago de Cuba; www. hotelcasagranda.com). Ideally situated on the main square, this classic grand hotel was where Graham Greene wrote part of Our Man In Havana. Hotel Habana Libre (Calle L, Vedado, Havana; www.hotelhabanalibre. com ). Originally the Habana Hilton, occupied by Castro’s government in its first months, this is a gem of 1950s interior design. 234
Festivals Fiesta del Fuego, Santiago de Cuba, 3-9 July, 2014. A celebration of Caribbean arts. Santiago Carnival, 21-29 July, 2014. An explosion of drum rhythms, music and dance with colourful parades and dramatic performances. Havana Carnival, weekends in late July and early August: street parties, parades, music and dancing. Cubadanza, Havana, early August: a showcase of the best of Cuban dance.
El Capitolio, Gran Teatro and the Inglaterra Hotel
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Cuba is the country that has always produced the best smokes. Many of Havana’s great cigar factories date from the 19th century and, amazingly, so do their methods. And workers can puff however many they like at work.
Staircase at the entrance to La Guarida restaurant
seven metres of black bronze standing on a high stone-built platform. Under the platform, a museum commemorates the core revolutionary band of the Sierra Maestra. A special section is dedicated to Che’s life, including a real gem of revolutionary couture: the tight-fitting, zipup, collarless jacket he wears in Alberto Korda’s iconic 1960 photograph of the world’s most famous guerrilla. In great contrast, Santa Clara’s central square is a quaint haven with many neoclassical buildings, plus one modern oddity. Looming out of the 1950s, ten storeys of pastel green concrete, is the Hotel Santa Clara Libre, hosting the city’s leading cinema. In 2004 the cinema gave the Cuban premiere of The Motorcycle Diaries, attended by Gael García Bernal who played the young Che in that fine Latin American road movie. The day after the battle, Che’s rebels set out for Havana along the main highway, through a landscape of endless sugar-cane
fields, and that is still the way it is when you take the Carretera Central today. No major town comes into view for hours until the “Pearl of the Caribbean” appears from out of the cane field ocean. Have a Havana Havana has had many lives. A city imbued with music, over its 500-year history it has danced in turn to the tune of gold, tobacco, sugar, gambling and revolution. Out of this has come a city of wide and fascinating contrasts, a city whose buildings tell its story. Walk from the 16th-century forts past the 19th-century cigar factories and 20th-century grand hotels to Revolution Square and you have had a living history lesson. Founded in 1519, Havana became the most important transit point for the riches of the Spanish empire, its great natural harbour ringed by fortresses and thronged with gold-carrying galleons. In 1589, it was made the island’s capital with a coat of
arms showing three castles above a gold key – “The Key of the Old World to the New World.” Long before North America had even its smallest colony, Havana was a great port. Those fortresses still line the harbour entrance, sentinels to today’s oil tankers, sugar freighters and cruise liners. A little way back lies the Plaza de Armas, power centre of old Cuba, and the Plaza de la Catedral, the heart of Old Havana, as the historic centre is called. Enriched by tobacco and sugar trading, 17th and 18th century Habaneros built fine churches and palaces in stone which remain to this day, architectural treasures of the New World. All of Old Havana is a World Heritage Site, with historic buildings constantly being restored after decades of neglect, some with major rebuilding, others with mere facelifts. Mansions, convents and town houses from the 16th to 19th centuries line the narrow streets gleaming as if
built only yesterday, but still much of the old town is crumbling, home to 60,000 citizens on pitifully low salaries. Havana’s most iconic product is the cigar, for what else are the world’s finest cigars called but “Havanas”? The place where Europeans first encountered tobacco, Cuba is the country that has always produced the best smokes. Many of Havana’s great cigar factories date from the 19th century and, amazingly, so do their methods. Visit one today and you see rows and rows of men and women at wooden workbenches dextrously hand-cutting and rolling the world’s finest cigars. And smoking them too, for they can puff however many they like as they work. In the city centre, the brownand-white stucco façade of 235 the Partagas cigar factory faces the neoclassical grandeur of the Capitol, a near replica of Washington’s, and a telling symbol of 20th-century Cuba. After the Spanish-American War of 1898 brought independence from Spain, the USA took a whip hand to Cuban affairs, and here in the neo-Renaissance grandeur of the Capitol, a corrupt legislature did Washington’s bidding, while the American Mafia built a casinoand-brothel culture. Vice and graft money filled the pockets of the powerful and Havana was the largest, loveliest and most sumptuous city in the Caribbean. Sin City Dubbed “the Monte Carlo of the Caribbean,” Havana became America’s tropical playground for sin-soaked vacations. Hollywood’s Carmen Miranda, pineapple atop her head, had a Week-End In Havana in 1941. Movie stars partied by the pool – Gary Cooper, Ingrid Bergman, Spencer Tracy, Marlene Dietrich and many more – while the iconic
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Sloppy Joe’s bar was packed with American merrymakers. (Last year, Sloppy Joe’s had an amazing resurrection after half a century of closure, its mahogany bar – “the longest in Latin America” – buffed to a high sheen and looking just as it used to, according to an octogenarian neighbour.) Into the ‘50s, even as Castro’s revolution stirred and the dictator Batista’s repression intensified, the dice kept rolling and the vice kept booming, with the Mafia building new casino hotels in incongruous highrise styles that towered over the traditional elegance of Havana. The Riviera, the Capri, the Deauville all rang to the sound of spinning roulette wheels and orchestras pumping out the mambo and the cha-cha-cha,
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while mulatta hookers exercised their charms on the enchanted gringos. The biggest of the new hotels dominated Vedado, the 20th century suburb at the eastern end of the Malecon seafront boulevard, and still do. In fact, only Havana’s governmental district has seen major new buildings since the 1960s. The jewel sits four-square upon a rise overlooking the sea, the massive Hotel Nacional, a monument to the 1920s and a clone of the Breakers Hotel in Palm Beach, Florida, now upgraded to modern luxury standards. Very much in character, George Raft, the star of gangster movies, had a penthouse atop the Capri and was the greeter at its casino. Just emerged from a total renovation, the Capri still
Calle Obispo, a famous pedestrianised street
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glories in its 1950s decor, the cabaret in the Salon Rojo – Red Room – again shimmers, but the gaming is long gone. Raft would feel bereft, but comforted by all the finned Chevrolet and Buick classics rumbling past, the 1950s American gas guzzlers that Cubans keep on the road by any means possible. In its January 20, 1958, issue, Time magazine recorded the scene in its heyday. “Sparing neither velvet draperies, nor soft polish on exotic wood, nor white silk for the crapshooters’ dinner jackets, the new casinos of Havana rate as the hemisphere’s most alluring and elegant. Says a dice man in the deep-carpeted gaming room of the Hotel Nacional: ‘We are getting bigger bets than Las Vegas. All the real big Eastern crapshooters are coming down here to take a crack at us’. And for all the real big Eastern hoods, running Havana gambling looks to be this winter’s richest bonanza.”
Dance, dance, dance While the rest of the country remained backward and poor, the capital swilled Bacardi and swayed to the mambo, nowhere more sensuously and more dramatically than at the spectacular Tropicana cabaret. Amazingly, you still can, as long as you skip the Bacardi and order Caney rum instead, the brand now produced in the confiscated Bacardi distillery, or Havana Club, another brand belonging to the state. “The greatest show under the stars,” the Tropicana is an immense open-air cabaret – two orchestras and a tight combo, a huge stage, well over a hundred dancers, and royal palms towering over it all strung with coloured lights. It’s been a state enterprise for half a century – surely the world’s sexiest governmental operation – with stunning Afro-Cuban showgirls pulsating to red-hot rhythms, sensationally costumed and halfnaked at the same time, flashing
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Buildings at the end of Paseo del Prado
While the rest of the country remained backward and poor, the capital swilled Bacardi and swayed to the mambo.
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Cubans in general were thankful for the revolution that eventually brought higher standards of welfare and education, but not for the chronic economic failure, which has caused crumbling homes and near-universal poverty.
A typical street scene
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sensual smiles and flicking ostrich feathers in your face. The casinos – reviled symbols of Cuba’s corruption – were all shut down soon after the Revolution, cueing their kingpin, the mobster Meyer Lansky, to lament, “I crapped out.” But Fidel Castro was pragmatic over the Tropicana, turning it into a money-spinner for the nation instead of the mob, and thankful we visitors can be, because there is no better tropical kitsch in this world, along with the superb musicianship that seems to come out of Cubans’ bones, no matter what they’re playing. Cubans in general were thankful for the revolution that eventually brought them high standards of welfare and education, but not for the chronic economic failure, which has preserved Cuba’s traditional form, but caused crumbling homes and near-universal poverty. Unique in the romance of its colonial cities untouched by traffic jams and brash commercialism, the island is a time-warp with a magnetic
attraction for visitors, but the locals are somewhat less charmed by the nostalgia of it all. On the downbeat Speaking Spanish, you can sense their frustrations through the fog of evasion that they put up, fearing denunciation for knocking the regime. In Cuba, the walls have ears. The regime’s fans, who have no problem voicing their views, will habitually say that Cuba’s deficiencies are all the fault of the Yankees. Anti-Americanism, or rather anti-Washingtonism, is a constant riff of official Cuba, dramatised on the Havana seafront with a huge billboard that faces across the sea to Florida. On it, a cartoon revolutionary shouts to Uncle Sam: “Messrs. Imperialists, we have absolutely no fear of you!” For decades until 2005, the message faced the nearby US Interests Section, the de facto American embassy, the words glowing in neon by night.
A fortune teller smokes a Cuban cigar
In his 1953 trial for the Moncada attack, Fidel Castro gave a four-hour defence speech which famously ended with the words, “History will absolve me”. After the revolutionary regime’s break with its colossal neighbour and the US blockade which still continues, wags have loved to reply, “But not geography.” Cuba has been marked for half a century by a stand-off with the world’s greatest power, with no end in sight. But change is surely coming, for Cubans are weary of being poverty-stricken socialists. In their half-millennium of history, they have danced to many tunes, and they want some new steps now. What moves will Cuba make next? And who will be laying down the beat?
photo: ©corbis / profile
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Revolutionary Destinations When odious regimes fall to idealistic rebels, the world enjoys the view. Many capitals around the world have seen dramatic takeovers followed by radical transformations. Here are three such revolutionary destinations.
Managua, Nicaragua Elsewhere in Latin America, despite Cuba’s encouragement, revolution only occurred in one country, Nicaragua. Rather more of a ragtag band than Castro’s guerrillas, the Sandinista rebel forces chipped away at the brutal Somoza regime until it crumbled and fell, capturing the capital, Managua, in 1979, in a jubilant procession recalling the taking of Havana. Their prize was a ghostly city whose centre had been levelled by a catastrophic earthquake in 1972. Sprawling between an extinct volcano and a greasy lake, the ruined downtown had become overgrown and deserted. Still today the area is largely greenery, whilst downtown activity has shifted elsewhere. With most of its monuments dating to recent decades and marking the Sandinista struggle in some way, Managua is one of the world’s more oddball capitals. Lately it has regained some commercial dynamism, with casinos a surprising feature. The top tourist draws are the eerie shell of the quake-battered cathedral and ziplining across the flooded volcano crater.
Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam Or Panic Button City, you might have said on April 30, 1975, when North Vietnamese tanks clattered into Saigon, its then name, before the last US officials had time to make a safe exit. Captured on TV, the desperate scenes on the US embassy roof as helicopters winched up fleeing staff are burned into the memory of all those watching. Initially emptied of all its economic dynamism and chillingly renamed Ho Chi Minh City, in the 21st century Vietnam’s commercial capital has bounced back with a rediscovered enthusiasm, driving the nation’s recovery. Swarms of motorcycles pack the streets with a dizzying energy, and a once low-rise city reaches for the sky with new luxury hotels and office blocks. Dong Khoi Street, the focus of French colonial social life and American War-time nightlife, is now a swish avenue lined with chic restaurants and designer stores. And the French-built Opera House boasts new stucco and paint.
Addis Ababa, Ethiopia For a century the drowsy capital of an archaic regime, in 1974 Addis Ababa had a rude awakening. Emperor Haile Selassie and his fawning court, the last exemplars of an ancient and exotic ruling class, were ousted by a military coup led by the Derg council, and a brutal Marxist revolution followed. When that was overthrown in 1991, Addis Ababa gained a more normal kind of African regime, but this city remains a one-off, a sprawl of villages and commercial centres punctuated with striking monuments that speak of its tumultuous history. Haile Selassie’s medieval-style rule is commemorated in his old palace, now Addis Ababa University, and in the city’s neobaroque cathedral; the imperial Lion of Judah gets both traditional and modernist statues; Africa Hall evokes the heady days of optimistic post-colonial Africa; the National Theatre enshrines the new cultural pride of the same period; the towering Derg monument expresses Marxist-Leninist triumphalism; and Italy’s fascist occupation gets vengeful recognition too.