Cubaverdad

Old Havana's peeling paintBy Sam LeithPublished: September 12 2009 02:34

When Anthony Trollope visited Havana at the end of the 1850s, he reported that "all Cuba was of course full of the late message from the President of the United States", which, according to Trollope's paraphrase, was that "circumstances and destiny absolutely require that the US should be the masters of that island". In light of this he foresaw that, liberated from Spanish rule, "Havana will soon become as much American as New Orleans".

A century and a half later, when I visited the city with my fiancée Alice in April this year, Cuba was also full of a recent message from the President of the US. At the Summit of the Americas in Trinidad that same month, Barack Obama announced he wanted a "new beginning" with Cuba.

This is a culture in which its more powerful neighbour is a perpetual presence: something the island looks towards – if only to define itself against it. Old Cadillacs and Buicks with the guts of Soviet Volgas growl through the streets; the national sport is baseball; the dollar is the shadow currency; the central prop of its ragged economy is a tourist mythos with Ernest Hemingway at the centre of it; and if you want to take a boat out on so much as a fishing trip you need to satisfy the coastguard that you're not planning to bolt for Miami.

But, unlike America, and almost anywhere else in the world, there are no advertisements. No neon, no branding, no billboards – only painted images of Che and Fidel, and exhortations to keep the revolution alive. "Venceremos," reads one blue encouragement painted on a wall, more in hope than in expectation.

Fidel Castro and Che Guevara march with their comrades in Cuba in 1960Fidel Castro (left) and Che Guevara (third left) in 1960Old Havana is something like a living fossil. Or, rather, a nested series of fossils. Here is the town-planning of old Spain; the art deco of 1930s hotels and office buildings; the wallowing American cars of the 1950s. They survive in a regime that is itself a historical curiosity.

It has a compelling, ruined grandeur. The people seem not to belong to the architectural spaces they've inherited, but to live in them like hermit crabs. A row of old warehouses on the east side of the old town stands empty, windows gaping and glassless. A man-high stencil of Che's face has been sprayed on to the opposite ground floor like a graffito. On the floor above, in one of the full-depth arched windows, a young man in a baseball cap lolls, smoking. Behind him, his friend sits on a beaten-up sofa.

The dun-coloured paint is peeling. The paint is one of the things you notice in Havana. Fresh paint and peeled paint: blues and greens, terracottas and yellows. Even the city's showcase cigar factory – where a guided tour feels somewhat like a visit to an aquarium in that none of the workers patiently rolling and racking cigars in wooden presses acknowledges your existence – has its tone set not by its broad, decrepit marble staircase but by its institutional walls in brown and sea-green. It is a fascinating, melancholy place to be.

From the roof terrace of the Ambos Mundos hotel we can see Havana's sedimentary history. An old terracotta roof; a prettily repainted wall; the dome of a church. Then gutted buildings and poured concrete carbuncles. In one direction are old colonial buildings like ruined teeth; in another, Soviet-style tower-blocks. Two inches of the view is Siena; two inches is Moscow.

Walking the streets is the best of it. We pass an empty and dilapidated building, its balcony propped up with a rickety timber scaffold. Right next door is a red-and-yellow high-windowed house with skinny pot-plants growing out through the ironwork at the windows. A woman's arm pops through with a brush and sweeps dust from the sill into the street.

Here, a manky stray cat camps out in the shade of the offside bumper of a powder-blue 1950s Chevrolet; there, an old woman sits on her step smoking a cigar the size of a baseball bat; there again, two five-year-olds play in the street with a baseball bat the size of a cigar. The old woman with her stogie and her splendidly wrinkled face, it occurs to me, couldn't possibly afford to smoke that sort of cigar – she's there, surely, to be photographed by tourists for a convertible peso or two a shot: smoking is her job.

For respite from the heat, and a rest for the legs, we stopped at the Chocolate Museum; more a café than a museum, where a few pesos buys a tall glass of cool, freshly made chocolate milk, and the chance to watch the chocolatier at work in front of an ancient, jiggling machine.

Later, in the warm night, couples sit crammed all along the low sea wall on the Malecón promenade, which sweeps round Old Havana. We walked out for a nightcap at El Patio, a restaurant and bar in three stories of an 18th-century building, with outside tables spreading across the cobbles of Cathedral Square.

It was the eve of Easter Sunday, and the big doors of the cathedral were open, with sonorous choral singing drifting out from inside. From the mouth of a narrow street running north-west from the flank of the cathedral, there came the clashing sound of a salsa band at full throttle. In an open courtyard 40ft down, a guy in a vest top and porkpie hat fronted a five-piece, amplified just to the edge of distortion.

Across the narrow street from the courtyard's closed iron gates is La Bodeguita del Medio, the bar where Hemingway drank his mojitos, and outside it a dozen people with bottled beers were dancing in the street; tipsy tourist girls with Cuban hustlers.

Just before midnight, the priests from the church processed into the square with a tall candle and stood praying in the centre. The salsa didn't stop. We drank rum at outside tables. After 20 minutes or so the priests returned with the congregation into the church, and then a power-cut put the square into darkness. All the stray dogs started barking at once.

Alice and I hired a car and drove the four or five hours from Havana to Cienfuegos. Driving in Cuba is not a simple proposition. Jorge the hire-car man – settling behind his desk in an air-conditioned cabin – chewed a fat stogie beneath his fat moustache. He gave off a sense of dry mirth, becoming serious only when explaining the arrangements for refuelling. There are three grades of petrol available, he said. "The hire car must be filled with "especial" gas. Not ordinary gas. And not under any circumstances" – here the look of a man staring into a precipice came over his face – "the other sort."

"Don't drive on the autopista at night," he added, "or an animal will come in the road and provoke a dramatic accident. Have you driven in Cuba before?"

No, we said. He smiled wanly at us, and made the sign of the cross in the air.

I think Jorge was teasing; but there were challenges. No doubt to thwart the Yankee imperialists in case of an invasion, Cuba is notably light on road signs. After you dip through the tunnel that takes you under the canal from Old Havana, you join an orbital road that sweeps round the city from noon to seven o'clock.

One of the spokes that comes off it is Cuba's main motorway, the A1 – heading south-west towards Cienfuegos in a more or less straight line. But figuring out which junction puts you on it requires shrewd guesswork. (A sign that appeared to promise Camilo and Cienfuegos turned out to be pointing us to an entirely different town, called Camilo Cienfuegos, 40km due east.) Finally, we found the junction by counting the number of railway lines we'd crossed.

It is worth the effort to find yourself down a broad and often empty highway. The countryside is level and green to either side. You pass the odd cow, banana palms, great black john-crows wheeling on the thermals, occasional flashes of small-scale industrial activity. You get tall palms, too – spindly-stemmed and with their leaves swept calligraphically to one side.

We used La Union – a boutique hotel in pretty old colonial Cienfuegos – as a jumping-off point for the coast road, day trips to the plantation town of Trinidad and ascents to the spectacular viewpoints into the Valle de Los Ingenios to its north.

A couple of days later, having negotiated donkey-carts, cobblestones and mountain ascents, we drove back to Havana. Jorge was back behind his moustache.

"No problems?"

"No."

"Good," said Jorge, taking the keys. Back at our room in the Hotel Nacional we turned on CNN. The screen showed Obama shaking hands with Hugo Chávez at the summit and the news ticker below it read: "PRES TO CUBA: LET'S TALK."

FT.com / Travel – Old Havana's peeling paint (12 September 2009)http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/a5c44462-9e61-11de-b0aa-00144feabdc0.html