Havana 2010
By Varela
The August heat in Cuba bites, doesn’t burn.
I remember Martí’s aphorism that the sun has spots and that the grateful people talk about its light while the ungrateful ones talk about its spots – but I talk about the sun, not the spots.
Maybe because of the heat, to save bodily energy, Havana has become a city of signs and whistles. Nobody calls out other people’s names; they whistle. Both a cop and your girlfriend will whistle at you. You understand what your girlfriends tells you but not what the cop says. A cop needs subtitles or dubbing into Spanish, like the kung-fu movies. That’s because they’re Orientals – from Oriente. I didn’t know that so many languages were spoken in Cuba. I always knew that the Chinese spoke Chinese to each other; the Haitians I met in Camagüey talked to each other in dialect, but now the Orientals …
Well, now I know why the Ladies in White, the Argumentative Bloggers and the Pestering Prisoners in Spain can’t speak without gesturing with their hands. Everybody in this city does the same, each in his own way.
You walk into a lunch room and ask for a soda and a hot dog (in this heat, that’s redundant because all you need to say is “gimme something to drink and a dog”) and the waiter turns to the cook, who’s leaning out a window fanning himself, and sticks up one finger, then two. I suppose that if you ask for a halfway-melted ice cream, he’ll raise three fingers.
I go out for a refreshing walk on the seaside Malecón, the way people here have done since the 19th Century. I see a crowded street fair outside the Hotel Nacional, a lot of people dancing, giant TV screens flashing musical videos, with cold-water containers and beer cans on the seawall.
From there to Avenida del Puerto, the sea is as smooth as oil and smells like saltpeter, which is the way it should smell, not like the Port of Miami, which smells like the disinfectant they throw into it to counteract the disposable needles with remnants of drugs, the tar balls, the chunks of bodies, the condoms, the turds, and the sharks that come every summer to eat tourists, as the newscasts say. At least here in Havana those sinister fish that have taken over the coastline – the clarias, or carnivorous catfish – eat lizards and beer cans.
The night is unreal, all the more if you go to 23rd and G streets, where the young people gather in tribes. They make themselves different by their clothing, makeup, hairdo and way of speaking. I walk over to them and ask who they are; they are the Mikis, they say, the Reparts, the Emos, the Goths. I ask about the Bloggers, but nobody knows them. Some have painted their faces on one side only, others wear their hair in point. Others wear one shoe in one color, the other in another color. I see a Nepalese flag, a clown’s cap, clothes torn on purpose. It looks like a carnival, not a Sunday night.
This is Havana 2010 as I pack my suitcase to return to Miami, in 104-degree heat, a hurricane on its way, and the Miami ultraright warning me that they’re going to tear me apart at the airport.
