Modern Havana is an egalitarian dream trapped in a faded, peeling gentility. Whole quarters are lined with colonnades of every style and color, most teetering on the edge of catastrophe. There is dust everywhere as a thousand renovation projects unfold. And yet a hundred thousand more beckon, maybe hopelessly.
Posted on every third building are hand-scrawled notices of work permits. But there is hardly ever anybody actually working. Just vans standing open, wheelbarrows idle in gardens of dust, full rubbish bins waiting to be carted—as if the contractors just stepped away for breaks that never end.
The place it reminds me most of is Palermo. The Sicilian capital and Havana share a similar island climate, geography, a baroque distress that add up to what writer Mark Kurlansky calls a “subtropical delirium”. In both cities, the marble scat of recently extinct oligarchs. It’s easy to imagine an aged Burt Lancaster strolling out of sight behind some peeling facade in Vedado, as Luchino Visconti envisioned the end of aristocracy in The Leopard.
Except here, the economic war never ended. No EU money— nor Mafia money, for that matter—pours in. But the pride is similar, whether it be in the shattered grandeur of a capital city, or in the way the locals never accept a tip unless it is subtly given, with no air of implied inferiority.
Or in the cars. Visitors talk about the American Fairlanes, Bel Airs, Champions and Roadmasters, circa 1950-1961. And they are remarkable—painted like tropical birds, dagmars engorged, V-8s rumbling, they process down the avenues like plus-size runaway models, ribbons fluttering from antennae, drivers giving each other knowing nods. It must have been much the same, this street-pride, when the smart vehicles of colonial Havana were horse-drawn volantes with man-sized wheels. For most tourists arriving in the city, these are the first things they notice.
But it’s not all ancient Americans or charmless Russian Ladas. Havana is a car-spotters paradise, with old Triumphs, Mercedes, Peugeots, Fiats, Jeeps, VWs, Volvos—whatever happened to be on the island the day Batista fled. All of them are kept on the road with ingenuity and determination, jerry-rigged with custom parts, spit, and love. There seems no reason that ‘55 Ford Victoria with the two-tone paint and whitewalls can’t be around in twenty years. Yet we all know it has to end sometime. Even steel has its limits.
Stone and steel break down, but people don’t. For all their material distress, the Cubans themselves are a constantly renewable resource. To us, visitors from a land long hostile, they offered nothing but friendliness, kindness, familiarity. Cubans may lie off the mainstream, but the mainstream isn’t everything. As evidence of their fundamental civilization, of their rationality and decency, I need only submit one fact: their children are safe to play in the streets.
Yes, their buildings may be falling down, their cars nursed and cajoled into another year of life. Their future is untold. Yet the Cubans do not grow up afraid.
© 2018 Nicholas Nicastro
