The school, a state-run place called the Heroic Vietnam School, was housed in a mansion abandoned by this area’s old overclass, whose porch was now hung with a sign depicting not Mickey Mouse or Elmo but a little cartoon member of the Viet Cong in a pointy hat. Back home, Carlos and Dagdelay spoiled Carlitos, a catty little boy who liked sitting in the middle of the living room floor crashing toy cars into each other, within an inch of his life, and then would complain with a sigh, on the rare occasions when they asked him to do something, that he was “un poquito malcreado” (a little badly made). I loved them dearly, and they stayed in my life for years.
But if the homey feel of sharing Carlos and Dagdelay’s Vedado days was one happiness of life at 19 y F—19th Street and F—what also made life there a joy was the ideal base it made for exploring the city on foot.
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HAVANA WAS BUILT by the narrow entrance to the sheltered bay that was long its lifeblood. It’s a maritime town whose historic core is built onto a musty bulkhead guarding the harbor’s gate. Each evening at 9:00 Old Havana still pauses at attention, as cannons are fired from near the base of its Morro lighthouse, marking the old hour of its closing to new boats wishing to enter from the sea. Along the water, old forts guard the cobbled streets and shaded plazas fronted by old churches built from coral by Spanish monks and by the great storehouses made from stone by old hidalgos to keep the gold and other treasure, plundered or mined from across the Indies, that was gathered here to ship home. Havana was the port through which all people and goods bound for the Spanish Americas, or returning from Spain’s colonies to Europe, had to pass until the era of the U.S. revolution.
But as the empire declined, Havana’s island began to produce wealth itself—first from cultivating tobacco in the eighteenth century, and then from sugar’s brutal trade in the nineteenth—and Havana expanded west and south from the old port. Gobbling up land along the great Male-con seawall over which gray waves now crash during winter storms, Havana grew clear to the mouth of the Almendares River—five miles distant—and then crossed the river, to colonize its newer suburbs of Miramar and Cubanacan and to fill in the humbler zones, tucked in behind, of Marianao and La Lisa. With strong ties to its vast hinterland having emerged during that period of rapid expansion, it grew as linked to Cuban towns like Santiago and Camagüey as it had long been to Cartagena, Cádiz, and the Bight of Benin. But like a devoted servant of Yemaya, the Yoruba goddess of waters, whom women here praise at dusk by the Malecon with beads and songs, it remains a city preternaturally focused on the sea: a place built to overlook the great invisible current coursing just a mile or so offshore, into which Spanish sea captains angled their convoys to slingshot out through the Bahamas and then to catch the mighty Gulf Stream that sped them home to Seville.
Nowadays the closest that many of Havana’s two million inhabitants get to boarding a seagoing vessel may be hopping a raft for Florida. But with Havana’s brisa blowing off the water to salt the air and buff its homes’ pigments into that mottled pastel so loved by cameras, this is still a sea-loving place whose inhabitants, on hot summer nights, empty onto its seawall to flirt or fight or ponder or make love. An atavistic attachment to the sea, however, isn’t the sole reason people here hang out on the Malecon. Havana’s a warm-weather city where many kids live for decades in their parents’ homes, and where no one has any money to hang out except in the street. And as I settled into life at Carlos and Dagdelay’s, waking to her bread and hot milk and looking forward to enjoyable classes or visits to community projects to occupy my days, I made it my business to learn as much of the city’s squiggly grid as I could.
Changing my U.S. dollars into Cuban pesos to explore Havana allowed me to see what was still possible to do with the island’s currency—which was, it turned out, quite a lot. It was from Havana’s peso economy that I developed, with the help of vendors selling small cups of thick and sweet café from their stoops for one peso (about four cents), my first taste for coffee. I learned, too, to lunch most days on pan con tortilla, the basic but filling egg sandwich those same vendors laid on for about thirty cents (and occasionally the less desirable pan con jamon—bread and ham, served dry with no fixings of any kind—that they also peddled, in a country mad for pig meat in all its forms). If ever I was stranded across town or in need of getting someplace more quickly than my feet or a bus allowed, all I needed to do was to hold up a hand along a main boulevard and flag down one of the big lumbering maquinas—old American cars that trundled down set routes on main drags, their old engines replaced with newer Korean numbers or burping motors borrowed from tractors. I’d then hand the driver ten pesos (about forty cents), and sink into a cavernous backseat with an old abuela or a pair of young lovers or whoever else was going the same way. Maquinas, though, were only for when I was in a rush. And I was rarely in a rush. So usually I walked.
Vedado was a world in itself. Its sloping grid of fern-lined streets reached down to the sea. The once-exclusive bastion of Havana’s sugar rich was laid out in the late 1800s as an urban garden whose every par-terre between curb and sidewalk had by law to contain a green strip of grass or shrub, and whose every intersection was inlaid with a little granite pyramid, as if in advance readiness for the monumental memories these streets’ denizens would form around the fragrant corner of 17 y F or 21 y C. Built by Cuba’s rich, Vedado was given over, after the revolution, to the ideas of its Communist Party and the fierce will of tropical nature. Many of its sidewalks were now a treacherous tangle of concrete slabs, pushed up and askew by the surging roots of its banyan trees. With no funds in the public budget to repair the sidewalks, it was often better to walk instead down side streets that, given the general paucity of cars beyond the city’s main drags, were blessedly free of both traffic and noise beyond the happy cries of playing kids and chatting mothers and the groups of men in flip-flops who crowded around rickety tables to slap down dominoes and talk jovial shit in the shaded yards of crumbling mansions. Many of the grander homes, abandoned by their owners or seized by the state after 1959, were converted into multi-family dwellings. Other of the more baroque examples were taken over by the state or leased to foreign powers for their embassies.
Two of these in easy range of Carlos and Dagdelay’s apartment were the North Korean embassy, by whose vaulted gate a glass-encased billboard featured photos of Kim Jong Il “greeting his people,” and the magnificent gabled mansion, a few blocks down 17th, that since 1959 has housed the headquarters of UNEAC, the national union of writers and artists. In that lush tiled garden, old party-line poets in berets gathered in the afternoons to sing along to old boleros. (The menu pointedly did not include discussing the rather more trenchant work of nonunion writers like Pedro Juan Gutiérrez, whose Dirty Havana Trilogy had recently exposed for the world the seamy underside of Special Period life.)
Another porticoed palace nearby had a front hall hung with a big portrait of Fidel. Its porch welcomed patients to a cardiovascular hospital, the best one in the country. Years later, I was walking home from a night out with a friend who’d recently had heart surgery and wasn’t feeling well, and we stopped in to rouse the sleeping guard. We were swiftly ushered in, at 1 a.m., to see an impressive young doctor. He checked my friend’s vitals and gave him a thorough checkup, with no fuss and no demand for pay, before sending us home with a smile. Maintaining sidewalks had never been a priority for the revolution. But expending resources on its vaunted system of socialized medicine still was. That system had its problems—round-the-clock checkups are one thing; actually having medicine to prescribe is another. But it was still cherished by Cubans like Carlos, who looked deeply confused whenever I tried to explain to him that no, Americans couldn’t just wander into a free clinic, like the one he frequented down the block, whenever they had a headache.
That was Vedado. But at least a couple of days a week, I made sure to head down to the university, onto San Lázaro and past the bit of anti-Batista graffiti at its great steps’ base, to take the two-mile walk down through Centro Habana to where the city began.
In Centro, buildings crept right up to the street, their fronts studded with ladders of balconies. Women in tank tops lowered old buckets on frayed ropes, raising
