CHAPTER 1
CUBA SÍ
PLUNKED ON AN IMPOSING BLUFF by the sea, Cuba’s Hotel Nacional remains Havana’s best place for gazing over its seawall and pondering the city’s present and past. First opened in 1930, the stately cream-colored hotel was built to house Prohibition-era American tourists, who came to quaff rum cocktails invented by the hotel’s bartenders to separate yanquis from their dollars. Since that time, the Nacional’s rooms have hosted even more stars and statesmen than evidenced by the hundreds of cracked photos watching over the lobby, which is as dusty as you’d expect of a once-luxe place that’s been managed for decades by the Cuban Communist Party. But with its patio still stalked by emerald peacocks and waiters in faded black-and-whites, the grounds are lovely. And it’s not hard, sipping a mojito in a wicker chair here, to imagine the scene on a fateful day in December 1946, when the Nacional was closed for a private meeting.
On that afternoon a few days before Christmas, a group of distinguished foreign visitors tucked into a feast of ersatz local delicacies. There were crab and queen conch enchiladas from the southern archipelago, swordfish and oysters from the nearby village of Cojímar, roast breast of flamingo and tortoise stew and grilled manatee, all washed down with añejo rum. It is unknown whether the attendees—whose number included about twenty of North America’s most notorious gangsters—ended their meal with a cake like the one served at their feast’s fictional rendering in The Godfather: Part II. But as in the film, the purpose of the gathering was clear: to divvy up shares in the empire of vice they were busy establishing in Havana.
During the next decade, the Mafia built a seaside gambling resort, which soon rivaled, in profits and glamour, its sister project in dusty Las Vegas. Under the canny direction of Meyer Lansky, the Jewish don who’d risen from the streets of New York’s Lower East Side, members of the Havana mob became fabulously wealthy. So too did Cuba’s U.S.-backed dictator, Fulgencio Batista, whose stake in the mob’s affairs exceeded the sacks of cash delivered weekly to the presidential palace. With Lansky and fellow mobsters like Santo Trafficante employed as “tourism experts” in his government, Batista eliminated taxes on the tourism industry, guaranteed public financing for hotel construction, and even granted responsibility for Cuba’s infrastructure development to a new mob-controlled bank, Bandes. In December 1957 the opening of the Riviera, a $14 million Mafia show palace just down the seawall from the Nacional, was celebrated by a special episode of The Steve Allen Show on U.S. television and a gala in Havana featuring Ginger Rogers. Three months later, the twenty-five-story Havana Hilton—mortgage holder: Bandes—became Cuba’s biggest hotel yet.
The party ended on New Year’s Day 1959. Fidel Castro’s barbudos had built support for their cause, in Cuba’s countryside, by decrying the capital’s occupation by mobsters. Now they advanced on Havana. Batista fled the island, and Castro’s bearded rebels established their headquarters in the Havana Hilton. They loosed a truckload of pigs on the sleek lobby of the Riviera. Castro announced the “socialist nature” of his revolution. Nikita Khrushchev sent Soviet missiles. President John F. Kennedy—who, during a visit to Havana the previous year as a senator, had spent an afternoon with three mob-supplied prostitutes under the gaze, from behind a two-way hotel room mirror, of Santo Trafficante—instituted the embargo which would for decades define U.S.-Cuba relations. And Cuba, once coveted by Thomas Jefferson as “the most interesting addition which could ever be made to our system of states,” became an enduring thorn in that system’s heel.1
When I first stepped into the garden at the Nacional, I was an American student chuffed to be visiting a place that in the late 1990s my government would rather I didn’t. Since then, the sharpness of Cuba’s thorn—blunted first by the fall of the Soviet Union and then by the senescence of Havana’s leaders—has now also been softened by the warming waters issued from a new American president in Washington. Barack Obama’s restoration of Washington’s formal diplomatic ties with Havana, just before Christmas in 2014, also included a partial end to the ban on U.S. travelers coming here, if not an actual tearing up of the decades-old embargo that was still described, on a billboard I passed a year after the announcement, as “El Genocidio Mas Largo En La Historia”: the longest genocide in history.
Such state-sponsored propaganda messages, which supplanted old placards for Coca-Cola and Esso Gas at the start of the embargo, have long dominated Cuba’s visual landscape. Artifacts of blunt lefty moralizing, if not of Cold War kitsch, they were once manna to those “internationalist” visitors who came here to cut sugarcane and do volunteer work in solidarity with this anti-capitalist wonderland whose billboards didn’t tell people that they were ugly or that they should buy Crest toothpaste to be happy. Instead, these signs proclaimed Cuba’s devotion to the cause of Nelson Mandela or to proudly touting a society in which “no Cuban child sleeps in the streets.” That claim can remarkably still be made, in a country with huge problems but also a functioning social safety net.
What kept a rusty state-run economy afloat for the decades after the revolution here was never the volunteer work of crusty Bolivians or Berkeley-ites. It was the patronage of the Soviets. When that patronage ended after the fall of the USSR, Cuba lost 90 percent of its revenue. But Cuban officials determined to keep their social safety net working and the state vaguely solvent. They realized that the funds had to come from somewhere—and so they came from European and Canadian tourists. Attracting tourists’ dollars became official policy.
The fantasies that foreigners now come here to fulfill with those dollars, especially now that the foreigners’ numbers are set to include more Americans, are usually a lot less noble than those carried by old members of the Venceremos Brigade. They include both the dodgy visions of sex tourists who’ve always found exploitative joy here and of befuddled beret-sporting admirers of Che Guevara’s legend. They include the pretensions of NPR-listening parents and their German peers, who turned Buena Vista Social Club into not merely the best-selling record in the history of “world music”; played by monied northerners to warm their wine parties, the Buena Vista record comprised a kind of greatest-hits reel from the mob-run heyday of Havana’s dance-band peak in the 1950s. Its cuts were performed by survivors of that era who were no more or less charming, in their perky pageboy caps, than most older citizens of an extroverted nation where it’s not just performers who perform, and the job of sexiness is never left solely to the young. The album conjured a world, especially for U.S. listeners, sundered from them by politics and time. It furnished the perfect aural accompaniment to a certain image of Havana that need never be sullied for the sort of visitor here who rolls around town in a convertible cab, treating a city that’s home to two million actual humans as a kind of sepia set. For such visitors, Havana’s art deco lines and old autos, if not those cars’ actual riders, feed an especially unearned form of nostalgia.
What’s wrong with that particular form of nostalgia, when projected onto today’s Cuba from outside, is obvious. The charm of a ’55 DeSoto, if you’re its owner, dwindles fast when it’s breaking down every few blocks, or if it catches fire because it’s been refitted to run on propane. A crumbling tenement’s faded pastel hue, won by being blasted by salt air and unmaintained for five decades, isn’t as cute when its roof caves in (as occurs to an average of three buildings a day in Havana, says an oft-quoted statistic here). But what’s more knottily interesting about nostalgia here is its larger role in Cuban life, both on the island and abroad. For particular kinds of longing on which fierce nostalgia feeds have found in Cuba a plenipotent source at least since the November week in 1492 when Columbus poked around its northern shore and promptly began eulogizing “the most beautiful land that human eyes have ever seen.”
For some decades now similar sentiments have been especially audible among Cubans
