The Bizarre Truth (34 page)

Look what happened when the Berlin Wall fell, or in 1971 when the U.S. State Department lifted the ban on travel to China, leading up to the presidential visit there in ’73 that birthed “the week that changed the world.” A lot happened over dinner and dumplings, I can assure you. Mutual distrust with Russia and China, Vietnam, and other formerly closed worlds replaced by an advancing understanding and ongoing free exchange of ideas. Opportunity feeds relationships. I am of the mind that if it can happen with those countries it can happen now with Cuba, a country ninety miles from our back door. And I believe that cultural and political osmosis begins with a meal. I went to Cuba with an open mind and an open heart. I spent time in Havana, lounged at the Nacional, stayed in Frank Sinatra’s old room, prowled the music clubs, danced to the salsa beat, visited with world-famous artists, and strolled the storied ancient cobblestone streets of Vieja Habana. I saw for myself the beauty, inside and out, of this amazing country, and I believe more than ever that restrictions and barriers do nothing but foment misunderstanding and make life tougher on citizens of both our countries.

We are all richer for a free-flowing exchange of ideas, and the people of Cuba feel the same way. I asked. We have a rare opportunity here to see a country on our doorstep redevelop in many ways, and the stagnating isolation of the last fifty years has been our loss. Canadians and Europeans, South Americans and Africans all travel safely to Cuba every day. They are the richer for it. We are the losers here, and I can proudly say we have a lot to offer Cuba. I ache to see walls removed, not created. I believe travel is a game changer for remaking our world in a more positive way, and I can safely tell you that Cuba is a once-in-a-lifetime travel experience.
The country isn’t diluted or polluted by the corrosive aspects of culture that prevent our seeing what a people are really like or how they live. In some cases, Cuba is a paradise-prison. Ninety-nine percent of Cubans can’t get on a boat (even to go fishing), beef is considered contraband, and markets are sparsely stocked despite many resources.

However, the country is changing at breakneck speed, and the sooner you see it for yourself the better. Once the Palm Curtain rises, the country is changed forever, for good and for bad. The doors to Cuba will open soon, and trust me, once they do, it will transform at a rapid rate. Look what happened in Eastern Europe. Estonia, for example, carried on in a style more like the Bronze Age than the Modern Age for hundreds of years. The moment the borders opened up, they experienced a Western technology boom, bypassed hundreds of years of development, and eased into the twenty-first century overnight. In Estonia, you can pay for a bus, a movie, or a parking meter with your cell phone. Estonia entered the modern era at warp speed.

It certainly would not surprise me to see a similar change in Cuba. I’m sure they’ll devalue one of their two currencies—the Cuban peso, which is the official currency used by the citizenry, and the Cuban convertible peso, or CUC, which is typically used by tourists and was created to take foreign currency out of circulation—and the rush will be on. Take one nighttime stroll in Havana, one of the most glamorous cities in the world, and you’ll quickly discover the intoxicating sights, smells, and sounds of this sexy, caliente-hot environment. The old Russian buildings serving as state-run hotels in some of the most beautiful parts of the country will be demolished; most are empty anyhow, but they will finally be nudged out of the market by grand five-star resorts. The Four Seasons in Trinidad, Cuba, is not far from becoming a reality. Giant tourism companies offering too-good-to-be-true packages, cruise ships overtaking the harbors. Katy, bar the door! This place is going to be crowded in a hurry. My advice? Get down
there while you can, because when the Palm Curtain does rise (or is it proper to say it will fall?), it’ll only be a few years before you are looking at Nassau, Jamaica, theme parks, or, maybe even worse, the Dominican, a country where barbed wire surrounds the great resorts to keep the “locals” and the guests from intermingling, unless you count the towel attendant at your cabaña. Talk about a place that’s ripe for a revolution.

I flew from Minnesota to Toronto, then on to Havana’s José Martí Airport, armed only with some elemental credentials for the Cuban government. The issue for Americans is in returning and in finding external travel help in booking reservations. Domestic travel businesses won’t even talk to you about Cuba. American travel to Cuba isn’t illegal per se, but the U.S. government prohibits Americans from spending money there. Our production company made the necessary arrangements working through a British company doing business in Cuba. I was nervous, even jittery, leaving Toronto. I’ve never been harassed or felt like I was in danger from any official representative; I figured the worst that could happen is having to spend the night in the airport and head right back home the next morning. But things went smoothly going in. I landed, breezed through immigration, and met our fixers, who took me to get my official credentials at the Cuban Press Association’s office in Havana. I continued on to our hotel, the Parc Central, located on the edge of the historic old city. Our stay coincided with the International Conference of Non-Aligned Nations, with every crackpot, two-bit dictator, and his delegates flooding the hotel. This made for great people-watching—if observing awkward security shakedowns and marveling at the audacity of snotty teenaged diplobrats is your idea of a fun time. The events of the conference made for more traffic, crowded eateries and cultural events, and increased security at every hotel in town. It also meant getting bumped from my room at the Nacional, where I had been booked for months. No matter, the PC was a great hotel, and ironically, the rooms were a lot nicer. New hotel, foreign
owner/partners means nicer everything. Even with international heads of state around, the Cubans can’t quite get it together enough to serve anything other than tinned imported ham on the breakfast buffet line at the Nacional, where I did manage to stay my last two days in country.

The Nacional is one of the great hotels in the world from a historical and cultural standpoint. This was the place to see and be seen in the decades leading up to La Revolución. In its current condition, I felt I was visiting an ailing legend on its deathbed. Think Gloria Swanson in
Sunset Boulevard
. The food is terrible, the service bottomed out, the grounds unkempt. The cleanliness factor appeared to have reached an all-time low. Despite the hotel’s condition, I found my stay thrilling in the extreme. Sipping a virgin mojito in the same spot as Churchill, taking in the view of the ocean beyond the Malecón, was simply surreal. I stood on the same space occupied by every legendary gangster, international jet-setter, president, and king who lived in the first half of the twentieth century. I even slept in the Frank Sinatra and Ava Gardner honeymoon suite. Not the luxurious accommodations I’d expected: dingy, oddly small, located on the second floor with an average view, and offering no amenities at all. I’m no dilettante, but this room didn’t strike me as the way Frank would roll; I did sleep in the bed he schtupped the lovely Ms. Gardner in, and that was enough for me. The Nacional is rich with stories and history—everything from the visible shell marks on the outer walls of the hotel from the 1933 Sergeants’ Coup, to the incredible smoking lounges where kings and princes sat enjoying a late-night cigar and a glass of aged rum, makes the hotel as romantic and classic a spot as you’ll ever find. The famous Parisian Nightclub, though not as big and swanky as the Tropicana, remains one of the greatest locations to see a show in Cuba.

Cuba teems with fabulous nightlife. Discovering phenomenal food proved more difficult. The majority of restaurants are staterun, and these restaurants are trash. Restaurateurs must purchase
their food from the state, must adhere to the portion control administered by the state, use only the recipes mandated by the state. The servers, many of whom have never even eaten in a restaurant before, come from state-run service schools and are expected to give tourists Western-style service. With a few exceptions, which I will get to later, avoid government-run restaurants like the plague.

Instead, try eating at one of the many paladares—or privately owned, family-run restaurants—in town. This type of eatery, fairly new to Cuba, emerged on the food scene in the nineties when Castro relaxed tourism requirements. The resulting curiosity boom led to a huge demand in eateries. The government remains very involved in the business. Paladares are one of the only Cuban businesses that pay a hefty tax to the government, essentially profit sharing, and they must adhere to a strict code of conduct. For instance, a paladar cannot have more than twelve seats and must serve rustic, Cuban food. I did discover that rules are often bent, wildly and fantastically bent, but if caught, owners can face serious jail time.

My first Cuban food adventure took place at La Guarida, an old mansion where the Spanish film
Strawberry and Chocolate
was made. This faded, crumbling, 200-year-old building with marble balustrades and classical statuary was once a large, single-family home. Currently, it houses over a hundred people, some who live in squalor, sharing teeny rooms way in the back of the building. I crept all over the old palazzo and saw some shocking, sordid things, most having to do with deplorable living conditions. But many other Cubans live in beautiful rooms up front, in what I found out was a crazy sort of first-come, first-served basis. If Cubans want to move (they can), they have to trade spaces with someone else. Good if you live in a nice spot already, bad if you don’t. But on the building’s third floor, you’ll find one of the country’s best paladares.

Since La Guarida is privately owned, paying huge license fees and “taxes,” you can eat like a king. The Cuban chef Enrique Nuñez
del Valle was tight-lipped about how he’d managed to check out food around the world, but it was clear that he had had some serious training; nothing rustic here. We ate a sautéed, grilled piece of tuna skewered on sugarcane over a lobster salad that was just stunningly plated, with a real eye for modern plating style. We ate an eggplant and goat’s cheese timbale (they called it a tart), layered with paper-thin slices of roasted vegetables. Their eggplant terrine was as good as anything I’ve ever had in Europe or San Francisco; the octopus salad at La Guarida rivals that of any seafood restaurant in Spain or California. And clearly they are cooking for Europeans, using local ingredients for a discerning crowd: European-style food, European-style decor with crazy little antiques everywhere, piled high like you would imagine Auntie Mame’s house would look. The pictures on their hallway wall featured every icon you could imagine, everyone from Benicio del Toro to Rob Schneider to Steven Spielberg. It’s like the Cuban Carnegie Deli.

On the way home, I swung by La Floridita—best known as Ernest Hemingway’s favorite haunt, as well as the place that put the daiquiri on the map. This bar is as faded as everything in Cuba, despite the fact that it’s one of the most visited spots in the country. Tourists are compelled to down at least one drink at La Floridita, myself included. As I drank my juice, I took in my surroundings. Here is a 100-year-old room in dire need of a renovation. The vinyl-upholstered banquettes are ripped and falling apart, the velvet curtains faded and dusty, void of their original luxury. You’d think the government would be interested in maintaining this legendary destination, but that’s not how Cuba works. The country has been working with the same goods for fifty years. Occasionally, they get an infusion of product from a particular country—but remember that for decades the Russians ran this place, and free trade (if you can call it that) has been going on here for only about fifteen years. Oddly enough, we ran into some Canadians one night who freaked out because the school buses from
their hometown were rolling through the city, the signs calling out stops in the city of Montreal still in the front windows. For fifty years, the Cubans have existed on secondhand goods from all over the world, but not from us. And they still make it work.

The next day, we took a carriage ride around Old Havana, a UNESCO World Heritage site. Now, here’s a model for renovation and reclamation projects in any ancient town in any country in the world. The ancient Governor’s Residence and all the old, private homes have been meticulously restored. The Plaza De Catedral, dating back to the eighteenth century, and the Plaza D’Armas, constructed in the sixteenth century, are two of the most stunning public squares in the world. This is a wonderful spot for tourists to check out—rich in history, architecturally stunning. You can still buy used books, pillaged from the houses fifty years ago when the Fidelistas came through. You can buy first-edition books on the street, often in Spanish, sometimes in English, for pennies on the dollar. Smoke a great hand-rolled cigar, sip a fresh OJ, and check out some of the only stores in Havana that sell real merchandise. Walking through the old town is a lot of fun, and since they do not allow cars in the area, I did it by carriage ride.

I am a sports nut and insisted we check out a local boxing gymnasium. Cuba’s sporting life is immense, mainly because few activities here are anything more than homespun distractions. Life is simple and slow, so everyone dances, plays instruments, is religious about playing one or several sports. With only a couple local radio and television stations that repeat the same propaganda and stale telenovelas, Cubans swap plopping on a couch and eating Doritos for painting, or whatever they are inclined to do. And of course, they play sports. I’ve never seen such incredible talent exhibited in any culture I have ever spent time in. During my stay, I saw nearly 100 pickup baseball games. These were just little kids mostly, between eleven and fourteen years of age, and I guarantee that most of them could make any college team in the States. That’s how good these kids are. I saw them using secondhand equipment
and hand-me-downs; I even saw kids playing with homemade cardboard and masking-tape gloves. I saw kids boxing at the gym (open air, by the way, with no changing rooms) in street shoes and work clothes. Some kids donned forty-year-old baseball cleats in the ring, the metal weathered down to the rims. Cubans typically do well internationally in sports not only because of natural athleticism, but also because they work so hard at it and are graced with a lifestyle that allows them to train extensively at whatever they find interesting. It was awe-inspiring.