(Vedado, Cuba) ... Fidel Castro's country is a magnet for travellers. It remains mysterious, old-fashioned, energetic and – for many – forbidden. Restrictions from the U.S. (and anyone who has U.S. visa/passport/residence connections with that country) are easing, and very recently, the Cubans began to allow its citizens to leave, despite the process remaining tightly controlled.
Havana, its capital has three main sections – La Habana Vieja, La Habana Central and Vedado, the westernmost of the three. It ends at the Río Almendares, a wood-sided river of herons, rowboats, political graffiti and litter. At the small park Anfiteatro Parque Almendares, there were a small zoo and a circular bar, a wonderful spot to avoid the heat. I have read that this stretch of Havana is dangerous.
We stayed on Calle 28 – even-numbered streets cross odd-numbered ones, so Calle 28 would not have a junction with Calle 26, for instance – at the incredible house of a very interesting man who was a former soldier and headed up one of the committees that was responsible for something very technical and complicated in regards to the retrieval and transport to Cuba of the long-buried body of Che Guevara from Bolivia. Even the lanes between tombs in the main cemetery, also in Vedado, keep to this system, even though Calle 16 at the cemetery veers off Calle 16 outside of it at an angle of 45 degrees, as though an earthquake had picked up and moved all the dead.
The house we slept in was three stories high, and at the back were two rooms for travellers. These are called casas particulares. The regulations state that householders are allowed to rent out two rooms per house if those rooms have a shower. Breakfast can be served, but not lunch or dinner, as this would eat into the government’s near-monopoly on restaurants. Outside of Havana, casas particulares can add dinner. Inside the main house all was old – nearly all permanently stuck in 1959 – and there was a grand piano and a table that looked like it might have been brought over on a galleon from Imperial Spain.
We had brought over some baby clothes, knowing that the owner’s daughter – who taught salsa dancing and had been to Spain and Argentina – just gave birth to her first child and thinking this was more sensible than bringing Levis, and also therefore not being open to criticism that we assumed everyone wanted these things and, besides, did not have them already – the first thing I saw in the house was a huge Mac computer system, a rack of guitars and a massive amplifier. The child’s father was an accomplished musician. There was no poverty here.
Another house on the same street that we stayed in at the end of our trip was a veritable Art Deco masterpiece, with delicate flowers painted in bright red on the walls and a hummingbird sat on its nest in a low branch of a tree in the back garden. I was scared to touch anything – whatever breaks cannot be replaced.
We spent a lot of time in this first house – a destination in itself – chatting. When we wanted to go to La Habana Vieja, we walked one block to the main Avenida 23 and hailed a 1950's American car for which the city is celebrated and further polluted. Vedado also is the right place to get to the incredibly out-of-the-way bus company – Viazul – on the junction of avenidas 26 and Zoológico. It is the cheap way to get to places such as Viñales to the east, on donated, comfortable Chinese buses, where Cuba’s famous cigars hail amid limestone sugarloafs called mogotes, and Trinidad to the southeast, a small city where the old Cuban way of life (yes, controlled, with tourists using CUCs (Cuban convertible pesos) and nearly everyone else using regular pesos) is not even remotely snuffed out by tourism.
On the corner of calles 30 and 27, or perhaps 29, there was a small market with half a roof that was a photographer’s dream of dappled light, weathered faces, government dogma and unrecognisable packaging. Further along Calle 26 at Calle 31 is a Chinese cemetery that had no attendant and no other visitors. It is the resting place of a people who by the large all left when the revolution came. Looking at Havana faces, you can still see slight signs of their bloodlines. We did not meet any Chinese, but we did meet a fairly obnoxious Ghanaian doctor, a young man who claimed that he received his medical education in Cuba in exchange for five years of unpaid service. This sounded plausible. I forget his name, but he was walking around Habana Vieja with a nurse, who he said was a friend but evidently was not. We bought them drinks, and the woman, Eliza, was very sweet. We were invited to her house, too, so bought a bottle of rum. The condition of the house beggared belief. It was clean, but the door had no lock, the bed was shared with her three children and I was glad I did not need to use the “toilet,” which was just a hole with no flush behind a curtain and populated by maggots.