Where else do you
find vintage American cars running off Russian Lada engines, ration
shops juxtaposed against gleaming colonial palaces, and revolutionary
sloganeering drowned out by all-night parties?
Habaneros
(inhabitants of Habana) love their city and it’s not difficult to see
why. Amid the warm crystalline waters of the sparkling Caribbean, over
500 years of roller-coaster history have conspired to create one of
Latin America’s most electric and culturally unique societies. The
stomping ground for swashbuckling pirates, a heavily fortified slave
port for the Spanish and a lucrative gambling capital for the North
American Mafia, Habana has survived everything that has been thrown at
it and still found time to innovate. At the forefront of modern Latino
culture, Habana has spawned salsa and mambo, Havana Club rum and Cohiba
cigars, mural painting and Che Guevara iconography… And the list goes
on.
But with its
crumbling tenements and increasingly traffic-clogged streets, Habana is
no conventional beauty. Despite boasting colonial edifices to
rival Buenos Aires and a dramatic coastline to match California, the
city lacks the jaw-dropping magnificence of Paris or the spectacular
physical setting of Rio de Janeiro. Instead, a large part of Habana’s
attraction lies in the visceral and the abstract. Walk the mildewed
neighborhoods of Centro Habana or Vedado and you’ll soon pick up the
scent – here a mysterious Santería ritual, there a couple of drummers
pounding out a rumba beat. The ins and outs are often hard to define and
the contradictions endlessly confusing – perhaps this is why Habana’s
real essence is so difficult to pin down. Plenty of writers have had a
try, though; Cuban intellectual Alejo Carpentier nicknamed Habana the
‘city of columns,’ Federico Lorca declared that he had spent the best
days of his life there and Graham Greene concluded that Habana was a
city where ‘anything was possible.’
But thorn or flower,
Habana’s mesmerizing powers will quickly lure you in. The opportunities
to lose yourself in the melee are limitless – take a guided tour around
Habana Vieja’s enchanting colonial monuments, experience the pizzazz of a
late-night cabaret show, stroll along the Malecón (Av de Maceo) as the
waves crash over the sidewalk, or admire the skillful reconstruction job
on a sleek, streamlined 1956 Cadillac.
Traditional sights
aside, Habana’s greatest attraction is its earthy authenticity. This is
no trussed-up tourist resort or cynically concocted amusement park.
There are museums here, of course, along with beautifully preserved
palaces, top-notch hotels and rather tasty restaurants. But walk a
couple of blocks north of leafy Parque Central and you’ll suddenly find
yourself on the set of a real-life Elia Kazan movie, a dusty 1950s time
warp where workingclass mothers still go shopping with their hair in
rollers and young kids play baseball in the street with sticks and
rolled-up balls of plastic.
While 50 years of
Socialism have taken their toll on Habana’s fragile social and economic
fabric, the indomitable spirit of its citizens is a constant source of
inspiration. In a society that invented camel buses, stretch Ladas and
steaks made from grapefruit skin, survival is second nature and personal
sacrifice almost a rite of passage. But how ever much you fall in love
with this flawed yet utterly seductive city, capturing it in a sentence
will always be a conundrum. ‘Habana is very much like a rose,’ said Fico
Fellove in the movie The Lost City, ‘it has petals and it has thorns…so
it depends on how you grab it. But in the end it always grabs you.’
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