Cuba Part 2: Havana

Gigantería, a street theater ensemble who perform a dance show on stilts

Havana lived up to my expectations, in fact it was better than I expected. We focused mostly on ‘Old Havana’ as far west as the Avenida de Italia (Galiano), where the Lincoln is. As you walk around (the distances are easily walkable) you can’t help trying to imagine what the city was like in its heyday. Over decades it got more and more dilapidated – I read somewhere that even in the Batista days, it was neglected and the intention was ‘comprehensive redevelopment’, the approach that ripped the guts out of many British cities at that time, in the 1950s and 1960s, and is still favoured by many planners and developers.  Anyway, perhaps before the revolution, and certainly for much of the period since, a lot of the city has been allowed to go to wrack and ruin. It’s only recently that restoration has really got going – and it’s happening on a massive scale.

Cast iron columns with classical detailing, as seen all over Cuba

Old Havana’s laid out quite formally, mostly on a grid pattern. You’ve got the grand public areas, around the Capitolio and the Parque Central. There are the cathedral, great churches and leafy squares, presided over by statues of revered personalities. In the evenings hundreds of locals turn out to stroll along the Malecon, which runs along the shoreline; or along the Paseo de Marti. Narrow, pedestrianized streets such as Obispo and O’Reilly (!) are picturesque and full of interesting shops, but to the extent Havana has a tourist trap, that’s where it is. 

Havana Cathedral (you can go up the tower for a view)

As I said in the previous post, the areas I enjoyed best were those hadn’t yet been done up, where the grand apartment buildings are occupied by many more people than they were designed for, and life is happening on the streets. In New York or Rio you wouldn’t dream of wandering around such places late at night with a camera. In Havana, perhaps naively, I didn’t sense any threat at all, and people were friendly and keen to chat. I bet that won’t last long after money and tourists start to flood in from Cuba’s neighbour to the north, and the party’s grip on society loosens.

Not many people speak English, even in Havana, and my understanding of Spanish is based on the Latin I learned at school, the French I learned at university, a bit of Italian picked up on trips, and some basic Spanish spoken by my travelling companion of many years, Michael Hill. Signs and newspapers were OK, conversations not.

My guidebook had quite big sections on parts of the city that had grown up more recently than Old Havana, in the 20^th century, areas where development was driven to a great degree by dodgy money from the States. There wasn’t enough time to get to know them properly, apart walking up past the imposing university buildings in classical style to the Monumento Jose Marti, and the huge open space where Castro has traditionally harangued Cubans in their tens of thousands. But a two-hour bus tour, not the sort of thing I usually enjoy, was enough to persuade me that we hadn’t missed a lot.

Evening on the Malecon

Buicks must have been big sellers in the early 1950s, although Chevrolets of the same era are everywhere

While we were in Havana we did a quick trip to Matanzas, a provincial capital with a characterful old town centre. As in other towns in Cuba, there aren't a lot of star sights exactly, but the whole place is a cheerful blend of streets and squares and old churches not yet buggered up by insensitive development – definitely worth the half-day we spent there. It had a most elegant fire-station in the Palladian style, and a sort of museum, including a horse-drawn Merryweather fire engine. The old pharmacy in Matanzas is more interesting than the one in Havana.

Friendly natives in Matanzas – not quite what I expected

Cuba Part 1: Heading for Havana

Old Havana in the evening

For a long time I have been planning to go to Cuba. I’m old enough to remember the TV coverage of the Bay of Pigs fiasco and the 1962 missile crisis, when we all got close to being incinerated in an atomic war. Fidel and Che hypnotised the more deluded of my generation. More recently, I read how, following the Soviet collapse, Cuba was frozen in time, and as a heritage nut I wanted to see this place where, for whatever reason, most of the old buildings had not been swept away in the cause of urban renewal (as many of them have been in Singapore, where I live).

As a nerdy child in the 1950s I was fascinated by American cars, and knew every fact and statistic in the Observer’s Book of Automobiles. I had the first edition (1955), the only one in which all the photographs were etched out – and two or three later editions too. Famously, cars of that era are still in daily use in Cuba, although all is not as it seems mechanically. I shall write about the cars in a separate entry later. Be patient.

Anyway, it was obvious that, with the Castro era nearing an end and contacts between Cuba and the US on the up, the time to see the place was NOW, before everything changes.

The Hotel Lincoln as it once was

So on 20 March, this year, my friend Michael Hill and I arrived late at night in Havana. The outer parts of the town seemed deserted as the taxi took us to the Hotel Lincoln. You have to be impressed by the scale and formality of the colonnades lining the streets – larger, Spanish-colonial equivalents to Singapore’s ‘five-foot way’. When, well after midnight, the driver said we had arrived, I was doubtful. Were we at the right place? We seemed to be in a dodgy part of town. In the run-down street around the hotel entrance, people were hanging around, drinking and chatting.

The Lincoln Hotel as it was when we arrived

The Lincoln was grand when it was first built, in 1926. It makes a big deal of the fact that Juan Manuel Fangio, the racing driver, was kidnapped here in 1958 by followers of Fidel Castro. Now it’s run down (‘timeworn’, as Lonely Planet puts it politely), only one lift works (and that very slowly), the rooms are dingy, and the breakfasts are dreary and communistic. I learned not to look closely at the ham slices. In the restaurant (which has a fantastic view over the city) customers are often outnumbered by the staff, who like gossiping and watching local pop videos on the wall-mounted TV.  For a whole evening there was no water supply in the hotel. But the Lincoln’s cheap, it takes credit cards, and it’s within walking distance of the historic centre.

By day the area’s better than it looks at night, although that walk takes you through some areas untouched by restoration, where people live their lives on the streets once the heat of the day dies down, the kind of places you might avoid, say, in New York. In fact, I sensed no threat at all – people seemed either positively friendly or, at worst, indifferent.

The streets of Old Havana – no sense of a 'no go' area.