La Habana in Feb

And other stories from Cuba by Michael Skowronek ( copyright 1998)

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(Michael is a writer in Chicago who is starting a "travel service" to Cuba. (skowronek@prodigy.net)

La Habana in Feb

I was in Havana for 2 weeks at the end of February. I meant to explore the country a bit but couldn't bring myself to leave the city.

It was so beautiful it made my head spin. Thinking back and while showing my photographs to friends I realized that there was a strange"movie-set" or "time warp" quality to it that I wasn't quite aware of while I was there.

I checked into the Habana Riviera and checked out after two nights. It was one of the nicest hotels I have ever stayed in but I wanted to stay in a casa particular and try to experience what it was like actually live there. Impossible, I know. However, I wanted to be able to better imagine it, at least.

Through a Mexican-Venezuelan/Canadian couple I met in a cafe, I was introduced to someone who wrote me a letter of introduction to a fellow who was known to rent rooms. I took a taxi to the address in Consulado Street, Habana Centro.

It was the remains of an old Hotel and was really rather magnificent in its decay. The materials used to build this place were amazingly opulent to me; later I found that they were commonplace in downtown and Old Havana.

The staircases were very worn but of thick white marble. The sort of tile wainscotting going up the stairs was detailed and rich with tiny very classical patterns of color. The ceilings were over 20' tall and light would come in from the center well of the building through huge windows onto the hallway floors that I thought at first were of linoleum because of the oldfashioned patterns. It took me over a day to realize that the floors in the halls were layed with beautiful pinkish tiles. I could never figure out how old the building was. It could have been 300 years old as far as I could tell or it could have been built in the 20'sin the style of a much older era.

Don't get me wrong: most people I know would say the place was a dump. It was crumbling. It would have been condemned anywhere in Chicago. The elevator shaft hadn't been used for 30 or 40 years and I would really be surprised if some small child had never fallen to his death in it. There was a trickle available from the bathroom tap but about every drop of water was hand-carried sloshing up the marble steps to be stored in plastic 55 gallon drums in the living room, kitchen, anywhere available, and above you head in the bathroom with a small faucet hanging from the bottom for you to bathe standing up. Plastic 5 gallon buckets werethere for you to flush the toilet with and it would make me feel bad to flush with the quantity of water I'm used to here next to Lake Michigan.

I would always think of how much effort had been expended to bring itup.

"PLEASE, SOMEBODY TELL ME WHAT THE TURTLE WAS FOR! IT SEEMED SOMETIMES

THAT I ASKED THEM EVERYTHING ON EARTH BUT I COULD NEVER BRING MYSELF TO

ASK WHY THERE WAS A LIVE TURTLE IN A FEW INCHES OF STAGNANT WATER IN A

CERAMIC BOWL ON THE FLOOR OF THE BATHROOM!"

There were no shutters and no glass in the huge windows in the halls. Each of the rooms had been chopped horizontally into two floors by installing a ceiling halfway up the over 20 foot height and after subdividing the once huge spaces vertically the once breezy ventilation was gone. There must have been at times a difference of 25 degrees Fahrenheit between the rooms and the hall.

But I loved the place. People lived in the hallways it seemed as much as their apartments, passing by, saying hello, offering to sell things, asking to use the one or two telephones in the building, asking for this, sending some kid out for that. And the place was full of kids and they flowed in and out of everyone’s apartment. Kids, like the adults, of every color of the species. Fair-haired white ones to very African black ones ("petroleo" they would joke with me when we would compare our hides for fun) and every combination in-between.

The adults were mostly unemployed or street musicians of widely varying degrees of success. One fellow had a terrific steady gig with his band at Santa Maria beach and got up everyday and went to work like a salaryman. Another strolled the malecon with his lovely 17yr old wife in the evening and sometimes only collected less than a dollar's worth of Pesos.

Most adults were rather young, under 40. My landlord was a young-looking wirey 62 and had fought in the hills during the revolution. He was also "el Presidente" of the local CDR .There was an adorable woman of about the same age down the hall thatloved the fact that I was American and dredged up some flirtatious phrases in English and lines from old songs. She was tall and fair and could have been quite a looker in '59. I got the feeling she had a lot of fun back then. She seemed to recall it fondly.

1st Piso

The address on my letter of introduction showed the phrase 1st Piso. My Spanish is more like a big collection of words than anything else. Over the course of many trips to Mexico my accent has gotten very good and sometimes when not forced to say anything complicated I am mistaken for being fluent. Sometimes…I mistake myself for being fluent. "1st Piso", Primero Piso, first floor, no hay problema", I said to myself.

Deep down, I am really a shy person. But with only two weeks in Cuba, caution was not going to work in my favor. As I approached the doorway I decided to trade my reserve for a big friendly smile and everything Icould remember about the basics of courtesy and diplomacy.

I walked up to the door off the sidewalk , knocked, and peered inside. Everyone in Havana with a street-level apartment, I would later find,lives hard against the street. The doors are almost always open and the living quarters flow right up the door. Sometimes on the sidewalk or walking down a narrow street you feel as if you have inadvertently stumbled into someone’s living-room. The rooms off the street are usually fairly small and without prying you get a feel for them as much as you would if you had been invited in. The furniture is immediately apparent as is the color of the walls and the decoration. You look up and see people conducting their lives, working, relaxing, waiting, sometimes dancing, all manner of activities not requiring more than amodicum of privacy.

On one particularly narrow side street not far from the waterfront I strolled in a misty rain feeling like I was at a neighborhood home-tour. The sky was grey and cloudy for once and the old street empty from the drizzle. Everywhere I looked the doors were open and the individual and distinct colors and activities inside each place seemed to spill outside in little pools onto the wet concrete of the sidewalks and curbs.

But it was sunny and in the middle of another busy Havana workday as looked into what would become my doorway on Calle Consulado. And this room was different from most in that it was very long. That is to say it was as narrow as most but continued deeper into the building and became the kitchen at the far end from the door. Three women were sitting at a tall "L" shaped table on stools about where the living room ended and the kitchen began. The younger two were preparing some food in bowls at the table while a much older women sewed or embroidered a piece of white fabric.

The woman sewing invited me into the apartment with a motion of her hand and after many buenas tardes, and con mucho gustos, they set about reading my letter. There was some confusion. The address was right but no one knew the addressee. They looked at the letter and then back at me. It was a little crazy just my standing there, my being there so suddenly with my odd introduction, and this added to the bafflement. They asked where I was from maybe just for everyone to have a moment to think.

I never felt comfortable telling people I was an American and I never liked the alternatives in Spanish. Americano didn’t seem right as everyone from this hemisphere had a right to that term. Norte-americano sounded like Canadian to my ears. Estados Unidos was too much a political designation like US or United Kingdom and didn’t have the warmth that the name for a nationality should have. I never considered Yanqui (although I might have had some fun with that) and I didn’t think anyone outside of Mexico would know what a Gringo was. So, when asked, I would just say Chicago. Usually a moment would pass then an expression of surprise would cross the questioner’s face. At this point I would enjoy hearing what term they would come up with. Usually, it was Americano. I told the woman I was from Chicago. "Extranjero", she deadpanned to the others.

The note was passed around again for further review. It seemed to me to be well written, to the point. It was even in a beautiful hand, something I got so used to during my stay in Cuba that my own rude handwriting would shock me and I was actually embarrassed once being seen filling-in a postcard.

Something was wrong. Something beyond simple miscommunication. Without saying a word, we had all reached the consensus that I was in the wrong place. My heart started to sink a bit. Everything had gone so smoothly until now and I began to feel foolish and rude having invaded these peoples’ home and privacy with my hail-fellow-well-met routine no matter how polite I had succeeded in being.

The youngest woman was about to say it when suddenly she noticed the address: 1st Piso. "Ohh! Roberto!". It was then I realized that first floor in Cuba is like first floor everywhere else in the world except the US: the first floor above the street. A lot of rapid Cuban Spanish was exchanged and I wasn’t the only one who felt relieved to be out of this uncomfortable situation. With note still in hand, the young woman happily whisked me out of the apartment, onto the sidewalk, and back into the building via the next doorway and up the old staircase to meet Sr. Roberto.

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