"Sorry it took a while", Gayle is emptying her shopping bags. She's got a bunch of small bananas, two green peppers, a plastic bag with a dozen white eggs, a bunch of onions tied with their own greens, some tomatoes and a loaf of bread. She taps the kitchen counter with the bread and it gives a hollow report. "It's a bit hard, but it was only 4 pesos", she says quickly before I can start criticising. "And I had to queue forty minutes for the eggs. Forty minutes!" It's true, she has been gone a while. It is our second day in La Habana and while I set upon rebuilding the bikes in our rented appartment, Gayle has been stocking up. Or not as the case may be. "It's a desert out there. Like Mongolia. What did we cook in Kyrgyzstan?" For some reason Central Asia is always recalled as a comparator, invariably negative, when it comes to food options. The good news is there's a Chinese restaurant down in the street below.
We are in Chinatown in central Havana. We arrived from Cancun on a cloudy and refreshingly
chilly Tuesday morning. At the baggage
carousel we waited beside the "Outsize Baggage" ramp for our bike
boxes to appear. Beside us stood a group
of chubby Cubans waiting for their air-conditioners and flat-screen TVs to
appear. One family bear the air of
serious dealers - with four trolleys full, and a wad of cash being banded about
between them. Out past the customs there
is a queue for the cash machine. Of five, only one appears to be working. A man is assisting tourists with its use
because the machine also changes currency and clearly none of us are capable of
using a machine on our own. Some elderly
Chinese travellers are handing the man dollar bills which he feeds into the
slot for them. Our bank card works in
the machine and I withdraw CUCs, Convertible Cuban Pesos which are pegged to
the dollar and are used primarily by tourists for accomodation, transport and
restaurants but increasingly also by locals for imported food and goods. Outside I immediately agree to surrender a
proportion of said CUCs to the softly spoken and undemonstrative taxi driver
who has a VW combivan which will take our boxes. I think I'm overpaying the going rate but I'm
just happy to find someone so quickly who can take us into the city.
The ride into the city gives our first real glimpse of
the country. Crumbling concrete. It's
the international symbol for failed communist states and not what first springs
to mind when someone utters the exotic word 'Cuba'. On the roads are quite a few of the old American
cars from the fifties, but also an equal number of Ladas and the old Fiat 126 -
the model my mum used to drive when we were kids. There are a few buses chugging along, but
judging by the numbers of people waiting at the bus stops, not enough. Looking at the people I am reminded of
Brasil. There's a real mix of white and black and all shades between and they
are dressed for the heat.
We arrive two hours early at the airbnb appartment we've
booked since everything has gone, quite unexpectedly, to plan. Our taxi driver stops to check the address
with someone on the street and then he pulls over at a crossroads. Our place is fifty yards down a one way
street. A young woman appears and asks
are we looking for a casa particular, the name for private rented rooms? I just want to unload the bikes and bags and
carry them to the door of the appartment and already we are being hustled by a jinetera. And while Gayle talks to the young woman,
another guy in a vest is now unloading our bike boxes and starts carrying them
down the street in our direction. Who's
he? And then Gayle says "This is
Yudalmis" pointing to the young woman.
She is our host. I'd been
expecting some wizened old lady to answer the door, the kind you'd find in
Croatia or Chile. And the young guy now
carrying our heavy bags up a narrow staircase is her husband.
We are on the third floor but it's worth the climb because
the appartment is, as the brochures say, full of character and charm. The building is probably about 130 years old
although it's hard to tell in Havana where everything seems to be slowly
decaying. This would have been a
middle-class family house, with three rooms off a corridor lit by an open
atrium, and kitchen and bathroom at the back.
All the rooms have interconnecting doors, high ceilings, louvred french
windows. The doors and window shutters
are warped with age and humidity, but the tiled floors and breeze blowing
through keep everything cool.
And it is cool outside too. We wander the back streets lined with these four-storey buildings now in various forms of decay. A large boulevard and the grand capitol building separate us from the city's Old Town. These are the streets leading down to the docks and the railway station which would have been the commercial heart of the city in its heyday. The heyday was back in the twenties when a boom in the sugar industry brought wealth to the landowners. Here the narrow streets are lined with grand buildings from the Spanish era, banks and commercial premises from the independence years and residential buildings squeezed in between. Communism is fairly represented by the brutalist and crude concrete appartment blocks that don’t quite match their surroundings.
And it is cool outside too. We wander the back streets lined with these four-storey buildings now in various forms of decay. A large boulevard and the grand capitol building separate us from the city's Old Town. These are the streets leading down to the docks and the railway station which would have been the commercial heart of the city in its heyday. The heyday was back in the twenties when a boom in the sugar industry brought wealth to the landowners. Here the narrow streets are lined with grand buildings from the Spanish era, banks and commercial premises from the independence years and residential buildings squeezed in between. Communism is fairly represented by the brutalist and crude concrete appartment blocks that don’t quite match their surroundings.
This hodge-podge of architectural styles lies in a grid
of streets and there’s little public space but for three plazas and some small
green corners here and there. One long
boulevard with a central pathway, the paseo, runs down to the seafront where
the city ends abruptly at a low sea wall and pavement that runs for miles – the
Malecon. I’m disappointed. There’s a big road running along it and the
seafront lacks character and atmosphere.
It’s only on another warmer day, as the sun is going down, that I see
locals hanging out at the wall, sitting and chatting and listening to music,
enjoying the sea breeze. And drinking rum.
