Luckily, most cars and buses in Centro Habana were limited to a few main drags too. I shared its streets’ middles with sweaty onion vendors pushing wooden carts and with women sauntering to market toting little plastic sacks and dressed in bright Lycra bodysuits. The latter outfit, a look indicative less of ostentation than informality, was only in keeping with the deeply undemure norms of self-presentation in this country. Here, uniformed customs agents at the airport welcome you to Cuba in clingy skirts and, no matter their age or shape, black fishnet stockings. Here, where the general rule for female evening wear has long been the higher the hemline and the higher the heel, the better, the modern Cuban love affair with spandex crosses genders: rare is the younger man who doesn’t wear his T-shirts sleeveless and as tight as possible (or who, for that matter, doesn’t also sport eyebrows as carefully tweezed as any young woman’s). Here, comfort in one’s skin and with one’s looks is less a tactic for social advancement than a necessity. In a place where every skinny boy is called flaco by strangers and every fat woman is fondly dubbed gorda to her face, many forms of body shame and attendant politesse familiar to the neurotic North feel entirely absent
The vendors pushing their carts cried out as they went, with full-throated pregones, to hawk their pork rinds or peanuts (“Maniiiii!” the peanut vendor said). It was the cry of el manisero, the peanut seller, that inspired the Jazz Age composer Moisés Simons to pen the eponymous tune that became, after the era’s great singer Rita Montaner brought it to New York, both one of Cuba’s best-loved songs and one of the most-recorded melodies of the twentieth century. Watchful bystanders, usually male and often sitting on a wooden box or car bumper and utterly unconvinced of the foreign custom that says staring is rude, offered more spontaneous cries. The speech act that’s known here as a piropo is prompted by its speakers’ admiration for the curved waist or sway-hipped strut of some passing muchacha. The customary response to piropos, bouncing off their ever-dignified objects like flies and carrying little of the implied violence of northern “harassment,” is the same as with a pregón: they’re ignored—until some lout crosses a line that his piropo’s target will signal by letting fly a withering volley of insults to undress her accoster, in front of his fellows, shrink his manhood, and make plain that his prowess could never match hers.
As a male person of evidently foreign hue, I was largely spared the necessity of building up my piropo defenses (unless you count the lewd propositioning that invariably follows foreign men, especially, from the jinetera hookers down Dragones as dusk nears). But on a Cuban street, no one is free of the need to hone both one’s body language (to convey ease) and one’s verbal defenses in those situations—and there are many—where there’s nowhere to hide. I learned how to deal with annoying touts who’d made being a jinetero—literally, a jockey—a new form of Cuban street hustle. The jinetero, whose aim is to attach himself to a wandering tourist and not let go, commonly begins by approaching the unwary foreigner and making some busted-up reference to the Buena Vista Social Club or calling out, “My friend! Where do you from?” The reply I learned to give, to start another kind of conversation, was to say in jesting Spanish that I was from Bauta or Diez de Octubre or some other provincial town on Havana’s outskirts where no tourist ever treads.
Growing fully attuned to Cuban Spanish—a variant of Castilian marked by extreme volume and speed—I picked up idiosyncracies pertaining, for example, to the varied meanings one can attach here to the word for “penis.” In a country whose phallocentrism goes far beyond the great granite pillar of the monument by the Plaza de la Revolución (dedicated to nineteenth-century Cuba’s greatest mustachioed espouser of cubanidad, José Martí, but from whose base Fidel used to harangue his people for hours), it’s not uncommon to hear a person or song or thing described as de pinga (of the penis). The crux is in how it’s said: ¡de pinga! means something’s awful; de pinga, said without the exclamation mark and with a warmer timbre, means it’s great. In Centro Habana neighborhoods like Cayo Hueso, there was never any shortage of sights or sounds or smells that one could reasonably describe as de pinga in either sense. The warm scents of frying garlic and cumin mixed with rum and diesel fumes and rotting fruit and cheap shampoo. Many blocks also bore the unmistakable scent, from behind some door or down an alley, of dead cat.
Wandering through Cayo Hueso, which allegedly won its name from the surfeit of migrants from Key West who once settled here, I continued down San Lázaro and into the barrio called Colón. There I often stopped by a historic recording studio where some rumberos I knew banged out astonishing polyrhythms on their tumbadoras and cajón box drums. Melding Congo figures with accents of Yoruba and Calabar into only-in-Cuba patterns, they painted astonishing figure-eights in sound, far deeper in complexity and spirit and drive than any other rhythm-based music I’d ever heard. The studio where they played had moldy egg-cartoned walls and was named for Ignacio Piñeiro: a local sonic pioneer who incorporated Afro-Cuban accents—notably songs from the Calabar-derived secret society known here as Abakuá—into his dance band’s repertoire in the 1920s. Adding a singing trumpet to the traditional “son cubano” lineup in that same era, it was Piñeiro who evolved the basic sound with which the outside world grew smitten, after Buena Vista’s release, seven decades later.
I passed under the ornate paifang arch guarding what’s here called Havana’s barrio chino to find blocks that now boasted far more Chinese restaurants than Chinese people, but that once hosted (thanks to the workers who came in the 1830s to build Cuba a railroad before Spain had one) the Americas’ largest Chinatown. I walked into the historic barrio Jesús María, abutting Old Havana’s southern edge and the train station where many of this zone’s Afro-Cuban residents arrived by train a century ago, from the sugar fields around the old slave port of Matanzas, where the rumba took root. Through a friend I met a santera, a priestess in the syncretic Yoruba faith that’s the closest thing Cuba has to a national religion. She took me to her home, which was decked with yellow and green beads and bells for the orisha who was her spirit mother, Oshun, and invited me to attend the initiation of one of her goddaughters into the path: a last day of drumming and drinking and convivial time that also marked the culmination, for the shy young woman at its center, of having spent a year dressed like one of the many people—black or olive-skinned and all the browns in between—who walk Havana’s streets dressed in white from their shoes to their umbrellas. Proving their devotion and their capacity to live in purity for a year, they are readying to accept Oshun or Changó or Elegba less as their personal savior than as a kind of guiding ally whose aché, or force, along with that of all the orishas, they may have use for in facing obstacles attending both this and the spirit world.
North from the train station and past the Parque de la Fraternidad’s waterless fountains, I passed Cuba’s immense but mothballed Capitolio—built here to resemble the U.S. Capitol in the 1920s but where no legislators have met since 1959. Beyond the Capitolio, I skirted the rococo edifice of Cuba’s opera house, the gleaming Gran Teatro that was the hemisphere’s biggest theater when it opened in 1838; Caruso sang, and Alicia Alonso, the half-blind grand dame of Cuban ballet, danced here. By the hedge-lined benches of the Parque Central, men played chess and talked more shit. I paused for coffee or to read Granma on the broad terrace of the elegant Hotel Inglaterra and ambled onto the grand Prado Boulevard’s promenade, guarded by a pair of cast iron lions. It was down that median’s marble tiles that haute Habaneros paraded in the nineteenth century to court new mates or gossip in muslin frocks or cravats.
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