\nFrom the look of the cars, or what’s left of them, it’s the 1950s. And nobody is hurrying to
\nwork. The hush of dawn lasts until 10 in the morning, when the grocery stores finally open. But
\nthe faint odor of petroleum from the nearby oil refineries already hangs in the air. It will last all
\nday, until a fresh sea breeze washes it away at evening. <\/P>
\n
It’s not only the sight of American-made cars from an earlier era — a 1951 Chevrolet parked
\non its axles, a 1955 Studebaker in need of a paint job, a 1954 Chrysler cab in front of my hotel —
\nthat lends Havana a feeling of stopped time. It’s the sleepy pace of daily life. <\/P>
\n
There’s no big-city bustle in Fidel Castro’s capital, population 2.2 million, unless you count
\nthe crowds that pack the bus stops under the midday sun or the tourists that jam the clubs and
\nhotels at night. From every corner you can see empty stretches of impoverished streets paved with
\ndirt, dilapidated buildings with once-ornate facades now crumbling and blackened with age.
\n
Though hardly a cure for the poverty, joyous Cuban music can be heard everywhere
\nday and night. I’ve come to think of it as the holy order of the clav\u00e9, and it may be something of
\nan antidote to bitterness. I have no other way to explain the graciousness and openness of the
\nCubans I met. Even the persistent street hustlers selling cut-rate cigars and the pretty, equally
\nunavoidable prostitutes in the dance halls were remarkably pleasant, their aggressiveness just a
\nform of friendly persuasion.<\/P>
\n
Then, of course, there’s the stopped-time image of Che Guevara in his military beret, a distant
\nif famous memory of the ’60s, but still seen everywhere in today’s Cuba. Che’s handsome,
\nbearded face \u2014 on billboards and postcards, on T-shirts and posters \u2014 is not just an emblem of
\nthe Revolution. It is the symbol, some would say relic, of a state religion.
If you go to
\nChe’s shrine in Santa Clara southeast of Havana, where he is buried beneath a gigantic
\nSoviet-style statue that commemorates both his decisive military victory over Fulgencio Batista’s
\narmy in 1958 and his departure for Bolivia in 1965 to foment another (this time unsuccessful)
\nrevolution, you will see him heroically outlined against the sky.<\/P>
\n
The words “Hasta la victoria siempre” (“Always to victory”) are inscribed on the statue’s
\nhuge granite pedestal. He carries his rifle in one hand. His other hand, wounded in battle, is
\nwrapped in bandages. The dimly lighted crypt beneath the monument, where Che’s bones are
\ninterred in a wall vault along with 30 others who died with him in Bolivia, has the sacred aura of a
\nmartyr’s burial place.
The great man himself, Fidel Castro, far from being preserved in
\namber, is a constant living presence with his own aura of grandeur and mystery. Yet the
\n75-year-old father of the Revolution -\u2014 whose ideas are law and, however dubious, communist
\npolicy — is nothing if not a reminder of the past: a walking, talking embodiment of stopped
\ntime.<\/P><\/BLOCKQUOTE>
\n
<\/P>
\n
I went on to point out that the
\npleasures of Cuba are many<\/FONT><\/EM><\/B><\/A>,<\/FONT><\/EM> its famous cigars in particular, “but fine dining is not one of
\nthem. The food I ate was tasty (leagues beyond, say, Czechoslovakian cuisine). But we were
\ninvariably served a monotonous diet of the “Cuban trilogy,” our tour leader’s phrase for chicken,
\npork or fish (always red snapper).”
I noted, too, that music is a
\ndaily devotion<\/FONT><\/EM><\/B><\/A>. “Because there are about 14,800 well-trained
\nprofessional musicians, most of them concentrated in Havana, the city’s restaurants and cafes,
\nhotels and dance halls come alive with the joyful sounds of swinging bands and lilting singers. In
\nmy experience, only Vienna (though decidedly more sedate) can match the Cuban capital for its
\ndevotion to music in daily life.” And finally, when some in the group were mugged after a baseball
\ngame as they left Havana’s main stadium — a mugging that sent one of us to the hospital — it was
\na too-vivid reminder that even where time has stopped and the music plays on, poverty and
\nviolence still lurk like evil twins.<\/P><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"It’s about time: “Defying a threatened presidential veto, the Senate joined the House Thursday in moving to end four-decade-old restrictions on travel to Cuba.” Maybe sanity will prevail, and not the politics of South Florida, where Gee Dubya Shrub needs to curry favor with the Cuban emigr\u00e9 community for the next presidential election. I went […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-420","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-main","7":"entry"},"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/sbvgEs-cuba_si","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/420","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=420"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/420\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=420"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=420"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=420"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}