Havana

(Originally published at http://www.troysgonewalkabout.com)

All four of us split up and did our own things in the morning, and my plan was to walk to the Plaza de la Revolución. From the look of my map I figured it would take forty five minutes to an hour at most, a proposition over breakfast that made Gato put his paws over his eyes as he gave a little exhausted groan. Ben thought it would take substantially longer and suggested I take a coco taxi (the Cuban version of the Thai tuk-tuk) like they had done but, convinced I had the time, I set off on foot up the Prado enjoying the sunshine of the already warm morning.

Just past the Capitolio I turned right, and kept going towards Avenida Salvador Allende.

I was enjoying seeing a different part of the city, especially as I was not hassled by any touts, though I was a little unsure of the area’s colonial influences - the names of the destinations indicated on the front of the ultra modern buses along this way all looked German or Dutch. That the advertisements on the sides of the buses contained internet addresses ending in ‘.de’ and ‘.nl’ made things more clear, though I found it somehow amusing that the government department responsible for Havana buses were in such a great hurry to get these ones recently shipped in from Europe into service that they didn’t bother removing their former livery or final destination.

A little more than half an hour after leaving the casa I was walking across the great asphalted open space of Plaza de la Revolución.

Though it was undoubtedly a sight to behold when filled with close to a million marchers and onlookers two days earlier, I was astonished when comparing it to the squares of the other towns how empty, barren and downright ugly it was. This was evidently not a living, breathing part of the city offering recreation space for the populace, it was solely reserved for intermittent demonstrations of the strength of the revolution and that was that.

At the top of the plaza I entered into the star shaped tower of the José Martí memorial and took the lift to the observation deck, joining many perched vultures as I looked out over the 360 degree view of the city, the sea, the stolid Cold War era government department buildings ringing the immediate vicinity and a conga line of Ladas of the people who worked inside them.

I took a slightly different route back to the Capitolio through residential streets with no traffic, and as the late morning was now quite hot I stopped every so often to buy glasses of refresco, home mixed orange cordial for one national peso each, from outside the window of small shops many people ran from the front room of their ground floor apartments. At the last of my drink stops I found a particularly friendly old woman, and after downing my glass I offered her three more one peso coins and asked in as best Spanish as I could muster if she could change them into a three peso note for me - the last denomination I needed to complete my souvenir collection. In ready agreement she took the coins, left her front room and then quickly returned, presenting the red coloured note with the face of Che Guevara on it to me with a beaming smile.

I escaped the heat for a little while by going inside the Capitolio. With a dome almost identical to Washington DC’s capital building (though a tiny bit higher, just to put the Americans’ noses out of joint) and a copy of a massive twenty-five carat diamond in the floor of the entry-way, it is a fittingly grand edifice for a national parliament. Not that there’s been any need since 1959 to use it as such. After all, if the Cuban Communist Party is the only legal political party in existence then there’s no need for piddling things like parliamentary debate.

After all meeting up for lunch, deep-fried ham and cheese from a local street-side vendor near the Capitolio, Derek and I headed over to the tourist markets in Habana Vieja. I had been all over this area the day before but had somehow missed this particular precinct of clean and recently re-paved streets, exceptionally well maintained churches and forts, and large numbers of visitors milling around.

There were a few old locals dressed to stand out trying to make some cash by having their photos taken, amongst them an old man with a straggly grey beard wearing a cheap touristy army beret - who, without a shadow of a doubt, is the face on the cover of the 2006 edition of the Cuba Lonely Planet.

As dusk neared we all met up again and set out to walk most of the 7km length of the Malecón and, surprisingly, even Gato seemed almost cheerful about this. It’s this coastal promenade where the rest of Havana’s posers like to hang out, from the scene for a film, TV show or commercial that was being shot on location with a male model giving his best smoulderingly moody Latin looks to the camera, to the assorted guys sitting on the sea-wall playing trumpets and trombones with exaggerated technique to attract our attention.

There is a definite glamour or showiness to Havana that completely sets it apart from the rest of the country.

As the fiery orange the sun sank steadily into the sea, we had made it to yet another statue of José Martí.

Immediately beside that was a recently constructed memorial of over a hundred black flags - in remembrance of all Cuban civilians killed by externally influenced acts aimed at the country since the revolution. This site had a particularly active security presence that shooed us away from both the flag memorial and the most concentrated collection of road-side anti-US propaganda posters around it. What a co-incidence to later find out that the memorial had been hurriedly built in order to block out the view of the adjacant US mission - in particular the building’s illuminated ticker board that had been displaying messages of anti-Cuban propaganda.

That at least explained all the security, but sometimes this little game of tit-for-tat is just plain comical.

With not just Gato’s legs tired from all the day’s walking we took a taxi back towards Central Havana and after grabbing something to eat headed to the Casa de la Musica. We weren’t quite sure exactly what kind of live music show we were about to behold in the large cabaret-style theatre, but it turned to out to be a large band led by a gyrating, Malecón-esque poser of a lead singer wearing two pairs of socks - one on his feet and other stuffed down the front of his ultra-tight black leather trousers. At the table next to us sat a number of middle aged European men being fawned over by a couple of heavily tarted-up Cuban women no older than us.

As our table was also four foreign men, though with no female companions, we were attracting some unwanted attention from those we could only surmise to be the women’s pimps. It was becoming rather uncomfortable and, as we were all not keen dancers and had by this stage heard enough of the band, we hastily bid a retreat just as the show was reaching its crescendo and most people at the other tables were hitting the dance floor below the stage.