"My daiquiri in El Floridita, mojitos in la Bodeguita del Medio." That’s what the famous hand-painted sign in La Bodeguita says. This was the bar-stool mantra, the daily routine even, of one of Havana’s most famous expatriates, writer and legendary soak Ernest Hemingway, who lived in Cuba’s capital for a few years towards the end of his life during the late Fifties and early Sixties.
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It’s a nice, PR-friendly image: Papa Hemingway having a single-shot sherbert in one bar then toddling off to another, just down the road, before heading back to his garret to write another paragraph of The Dangerous Summer. Or, more likely, get his head down for an afternoon nap.
The truth is more robust. Hemingway’s serial tipple of choice was a tincture named in his honour, the papa doble, confected by combining two-and-one-half jiggers of Bacardi white rum, the juice of two limes and half a grapefruit, plus six drops of maraschino, all whirred together with shaved ice in an electric mixer. Hemingway held the Havana house record for consuming 16 of them in one sitting. That meant he drank 60 ounces of 80 per cent proof rum, the juice of 32 limes and eight grapefruits, 96 drops of maraschino and still managed to walk out. According to journalist George Plimpton, who knew Hemingway well, one could see his liver “stand out from his body like a long fat leech.”
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But we shouldn’t be too hard on Papa for his liquid indulgence. Havana is the original Western hedonist’s holiday destination, an itchy, sexy, priapic kind of place where the heat, politics, poverty, salsa and rum all conspire to mug you rotten, get a hold of you by the hips, free your stupid, sanitised, homogenised, materialist mind-set for a while and compel you to have a good time.
You certainly don’t go to Havana for the shopping. On your first day, you might go on a little spree, buying Ché Guevara T-shirts for your friends, a box of Cohibas, a couple of homemade guayaberas (those perennially cool, short-sleeved Cuban shirts with the embroidered fronts and four patch pockets) and some local folk CDs maybe... but after that, you’re pretty much done. As far as shopping goes, Cuba is ground zero. There’s no Prada or Gucci or branches of Gap. But that’s just the tip of Havana’s deprived iceberg.
The initial culture shock is that there are no globally familiar logos visible anywhere, mainly because advertising is illegal. Billboards on the highways are reserved for political messages (George Bush with a Hitler moustache, that kind of thing) and even shop signage is at best perfunctory, some retail units no more doorways or, literally, holes in the wall. In a communist society you get paid the same whether your shop is thriving or dying, so why bother seducing potential punters with window dressing?
What else don’t the Cuban’s have? How long have you got? They don’t have butter or beef. TV is like British telly from the Seventies (indeed, the sitcom George And Mildred was very popular here back in the early Eighties and visitors are guaranteed to meet at least two or three slender, café-crème skinned lovelies called Mildred, in honour of actress Yootha Joyce’s gap-toothed cult comedy character). Chicken is a rarity, seafood, despite Havana having a huge port, is something only the privileged get to eat.
Public transport comes in the form of filthy and unreliable city buses. Cuban movies play in the cinemas instead of Western blockbusters, the books on the shelves are mostly political or dog-eared classics. Hiring your own car requires the kind of paperwork and patients that would get you a new nationality in the UK.
But don’t let any of this put you off because Havana’s state-sanctioned parsimony and its paucity of tawdry commerce is, in delirious, long-weekend dose, utterly liberating. Cuba’s capital is beguiling, truly beautiful and totally exhilarating after dark. Like the no-strings-attached one-night stand you always prayed you’d have, Havana is a town that wants to get drunk and bump and grind with you, then leave you in peace to sleep off your hangover the next morning. After a day or so, you forget about the luxuries the city can’t deliver and turn your attentions instead to the stuff it has in spades.
Of course, you’ll be appreciating the gorgeous rawness of Havana life all the more if you’re lucky enough to be staying in the Saratoga, Havana’s premier luxury hotel in the heart of the city’s town. The Saratoga overlooks the magnificent Prado building and Parque Centrale, and from my room I could see the Parque cigar factory.
There’s a rather fabulous rooftop swimming pool and bar (there aren’t many pools in Havana) with views of La Gran Teatro de La Habana. It has big soft beds, air-con, cable TV and a socket where you can plug in your laptop. The breakfast buffet in the Mudéjar-style restaurant gets more appealing every day when you see the prison-standard slop the most of poor Havana has to put up with. Best of all, the hotel is run by the office of the City Historian of Havana, which means that a share of its profits are invested in the restoration of the city’s historical centre.
And the centre, in the elegant state of rather splendid slow, warm desiccation, needs all the help it can get. This is a city held together by gummed paper glue that somehow manages to thrive on its own crumbling dysfunction. I have never been anywhere quite so beautifully conked-out as Havana.
The Hotel Nacional de Cuba is in pretty good shape, though. It’s full of bland tourists now but once it fizzed with American ring-a-ding. Frank Sinatra and Ava Gardner stayed at the Nacional (room 225) for their honeymoon. Greta Garbo, Harry Belafonte, Johnny “Tarzan” Weissmuller and mobster Charlie “Lucky” Luciano were also guests from the hotel’s golden era.
Outside on the Malecón, Havana’s seafront esplanade, surf spray smashes against the sea wall and young couples neck like prom kids, right in front of the American embassy.
This panorama is worth a photo because spoiling the new view from the front, the football pitch-sized area that used to be the American employee car park, has now been reclaimed by the Cubans who have planted it with a small forest of tall flagpoles, one for every year of the Revolution, each of them fluttering with a Cuban flag rendered in sombre black. Its intended as a vista-eclipsing “fuck you” to the Yanks who now have to park their vehicles around the back and can’t get a clear view of the ocean any more.
But Havana is as much social as it is political. At night, eat at one of the privately run “casa particulaires” restaurants. Go to the Karl Marx Theatre and check out the jazz musicians or book a table at the Tropicana for some racy cabaret. If you want to dance, head off to La Casa de la Musica where some Havana clubs and hit the floor but be prepared to be humiliated by the locals whose moves will make you feel as if you’ve got anvils in your loafers.
It’s the people of Havana who are its most valuable civic treasure, a resiliently romantic, steadfastly optimistic lot. Spend more than a few days in the city and you’ll hear locals talk of “la lucha” - the flight. The flight to stay alive, to get some of fulfilment from their harsh lives under their unique regime.
Which is why you really need to go Havana before that inevitable future shows up and all the elements that make the city so vibrant fall away, especially now that Castro has succumbed to old age. Before the girls start to look as if they stop at Gap. Before all the old cars go off to die and new ones replace them.
We didn’t mention the cars, did we? It’s a cliché but like every other Havana visitor you will be transfixed by the big-haunched Buicks and shark-finned Chevvys that cough around town apparently powered by three-star phlegm, their ready-to-blow gaskets sealed with chewing gum. These charming, sclerotic hunks have now become an iconic image of tourist Cuba, foreigners marvelling at their survival and old-fashioned American build quality. ”Ha!” exclaimed my driver as we passed a chundering Studebaker. “This is not am American car! This is what we call ‘una Chino maquina! - a Chinese invention.”
That is to say, the car in front may look like it is an authentic, all-American hunk of Duane Eddy-era engineering from the outside, but pop up the hood and you’ll find, say, a Nissan engine, Datsun transmission and a stick-shift gearbox off a salvaged Honda and threaded through a hole bashed in the floor pan.
With this Heath Robinson setup in mind we headed off to get petrol, my driver asking for directions in that initially alarming, shouty manner that is the default-setting of human communication in Cuba. We turned down the offer of black-market fuel by a man who told me how he once ate a cat because he was so hungry, how he once met Castro and how he was saving up until he had £2,000 – enough to build his own house.
These priceless stories and thousands more come for free in Havana. So, be generous when you’re in town. Pay for everyone’s drinks. Buy strangers dinner. Accept their invitations to go to their houses. They probably live in small, simple nooks but the chances are they will be immaculate with a pot of rocket-fuel coffee bubbling on the stove. I met a troupe of ballet dancers, a Cuban folk band and even got drunk with a couple of clowns who were into Coldplay. I want to go back, get drunk with them again, consume a Hemingway-esque amount of papa dobles, hang out in the cafes, listen to some music and learn to salsa dance... properly, really properly, this time.
Originally published in the November 2007 issue of British GQ
