Our meeting with Mairo’s team over, Anna and I are back outside. The sun flooding the plaza is blinding. The heat of midday has returned, sucking the air out of my lungs.
“What now?" I ask, mostly to myself. I’m unable to think. My brain is still back inside that stuffy office rewinding the conversations, all in a language I didn’t comprehend. I can read faces, understand body language, and hear what’s meant by the tone of those voices. What I’m feeling is that we pitched a decent story; we didn’t screw it up.
“Lunch,” says Anna.
“Good idea.”
Tony, the administrator in a Che t-shirt, comes up behind us and volunteers to show us to a nearby restaurant, where he says, now in excellent English, we can have an excellent Cuban lunch.
The outdoor cafe is just around the corner from Fototeca. We are seated at a cloth-draped table, surrounded by potted palms and the open sky above. Tony explains the menu, and we place our orders. Over our meal of a grilled chicken leg, fried plantains, white rice, and black beans, with a small salad and a beer, we learn more about what it is to be a Cuban in Cuba. Tony says a meal like this is a treat for him.
“Lunch most days,” Tony explains, “is usually rice and black beans, a small salad. It might be six times a year that I have a meal like this. It's a treat to have chicken or pork.” Food is not the reason you come to Cuba, I realize. I learned that Cuban kids go to school full-time until the age of 18. After school, there are part-time jobs available, but during August vacation, all the kids either work in the fields or study in the morning and work in the afternoon. Teachers earn the most money.
“Is Castro still a father figure here?” I ask. Tony does not answer. Anna replies in a low voice:
“That's not something spoken of here." Anna is American but grew up in Mexico, and while this is also her first visit to Cuba, she understands the political situation.
I found myself alone with my thoughts, observations, and journal notes while Anna and Tony were chatting in Spanish. When I was a working journalist covering events and interviewing people, I kept notes. At the end of the day, I would jot down the insights from the interviews. I would reconstruct the day, including details, to ensure I had them when I wrote the story. I'm rusty at this observing and note-taking thing now; I need to get back in shape. It's similar to my body; both require effort.
Walking through the streets, I feel like I’m in Madrid, sometime around the Renaissance. The architecture reflects that era, with most buildings standing no higher than two or three stories, balconies adorned with wrought iron railings, arches leading to covered sidewalks, and everyone and everything crammed into the narrow streets. The only way to get through many of these narrow alleys and streets in Old Havana is by foot or a bicitaxi—a homemade contraption of welded bike parts with a driver-peddler up front, attached to a rickshaw in the back, with two seats and a canopy overhead to keep the sun and rain off the passengers. A ride costs a few dollars. They are more plentiful than taxi cabs, cost less, and are all beautifully painted and decorated. Ingenious Cubans.
Everyone we meet is kind, open, interested, and cooperative. There is no mention of the government or politics. At home, we are either arguing over sports or politics. Late-night talk show hosts ridicule our president and members of Congress, treating everyone as a target for humor. Here, faces on the streets are open, and eye contact is easy. Back home, on city streets, no one looks at you as you pass. Here, there is no animosity, no hate, and no problem. Anna and I walk back to the hotel, photographing life on the streets of Old Havana as we go.
I’m looking for subjects our workshop students might find worth photographing: kids playing with hula-hoops, kicking a worn-out soccer ball, old men shining shoes, and others shining their 1952 Plymouths at the taxi stand. I stop and watch four men playing dominoes, slamming their pieces down on the rickety card table with bravado. These Cubans take their game seriously, as does their audience. Fellow Cubans watch and kibbitz (or, as the Spanish would say, meter la nariz; stick your nose in other people’s business). Everyone is laughing. The people are tan, chocolate, or deep brown; their clothes are well worn but clean. Most people return my smile as I pass. The jingle of a bike bell behind me sends me to the curb as a homemade bicitaxi rumbles by.
- CHAPTER 5 -
What's It Like to Be Cuban?
Old Havana is full of textures, shapes, and age. The colors are not as vibrant as on other Caribbean islands I’ve visited; they are muted, as if the sun has stolen their vibrance, leaving behind a pastel world.
After leaving Anna at the hotel, I spend the afternoon alone. I need to be by the sea, so head in that direction, north along Agranonte Avenue.
A photographer works alone; their only companion is their camera. It’s a valuable tool for looking, seeing, and understanding a place, a face, or a culture. You look, you pause, and you begin to see. Stand back, get closer, and find a place where the scene all comes together within the viewfinder—then you wait for an actor to walk into the stage set you’ve just created. Stopping, waiting, and looking allows you to spend time with a place or a person, to truly see. Tourists don’t have the time. The camera is a reason to linger. It’s often the reason to get out of the house.
I often ponder the question: Do we travel to take photographs, or do we travel to take photographs?
The avenue is lined with five-story hotels, former department stores, and tall office buildings. I’m surrounded by Renaissance architecture from the 16th century; Spanish Baroque from the 1750s to the 1890s; Art Deco of the 1920s; and Russian Pragmatic from the more recent past. This part of Havana is newer, taller, grander, and more wealthy than Old Havana, where we were this morning—a rabbit warren of 1600s European Renaissance structures. Havana was first settled in 1514 by the Spanish conquistador, Diego Velázquez. He named his colonial outpost San Cristóbal de la Habana, which meant Saint Christopher of the Habana. After subduing the natives and decimating them with European viruses, Cuba was then ruled by Spain for the next four centuries. Havana was a magnificent city, even before the English colonists (including my ancestors) invaded North America in the early 1600s.
This is the newer city, Central Havana, was built at Cuba’s colonial peak in the 1700s and 1800s, when it was the center of Caribbean trade. The Cubans who fled or were exiled by the Revolution helped Miami win that title.
I’ve sailed through most of the islands of the Eastern Caribbean, walked the village streets, and even the capitals are mere outposts, hamlets compared to Havana. Once “The Paris of New Spain,” Havana fell into a state of decay after the Revolution and is just now being reborn. With investment from European foundations and Canadian hotel chains, Old Havana is coming back to its former glory, not for the Cubans but for the tourists. New hotels are rising out of the old ones. Galleries, shops, and boutiques are opening. It’s like walking along the “Strip” in Las Vegas—surreal and too new to be believable.
I pass an impressive building and then realize it’s the National Art Museum, looking even grander than the Met in New York City.
A park, lined with tall palm trees, lies just beyond the art museum. In the center is a one-story, glass museum—the Memorial of Granma, named after the boat Castro ferried his team of revolutionaries from Mexico to begin the war for independence. The tools of a rebellion are displayed outside, under the extended roof of the museum: the bullet-riddled body of the delivery van and a bulldozer draped with steel panels as an armed vehicle. Small airplanes, rockets, cars, and crudely made jeeps, which resemble matchbox models, are also on display. You can approach or even touch all these objects. For many Cubans, the Revolution is not that far away.
I read a statement by Che Guevara, Castro’s second-in-command. This Argentinian physician and Marxist rebel writes about the new man and the enlightened soul. He divides all societies into two groups: the enlightened elite, possessing a higher consciousness and a true ideology: Marxism-Leninism. This group was, according to Guevara, the driving force of the revolution. The other group, the sleeping masses, needed to be woken up, educated, mobilized, and pushed because, as a mass, they still didn’t understand the logic of history and the new values.
I can’t agree with Che. Yes, I know this division has existed throughout history. The king, the emperor, and the fascist governing models are examples. But as an American, I live in a democratic form of government, where all citizens are equal and have an equal vote in who they elect to run the government, make the laws, and enforce them.
To my mind, his form of governance differs slightly from the dictatorship that Batista led after the Revolution ousted him.
Tony, our guided for lunch.
