Two days in Havana

Americans get a peek at Cuba during a Caribbean cruise

Author: By Arthur S. Harris Jr., Globe Correspondent

Date: SUNDAY, November 22, 1998

Page: M13

Section: Travel

We were bemused. My wife, Phyllis, and I spent 48 hours in Havana in late spring and saw fewer cars downtown than you might see parked at a minor league baseball stadium some night.

And I do mean old cars -- Chevrolets with divided windshields, most likely '52s. Fin-tailed Detroit cars. Russian and English cars, all ancient and burning regular gas.

Wide Cuban streets carried little auto and truck traffic. Some bicycles as well as occasional pedicabs toting passengers under cover of rain or sun in back reminded me of Bombay decades ago.

All right, what we were doing in Cuba, and how did we get

there?

We were on a Caribbean cruise. Most ships on this sojourn stop at fairly conventional ports -- San Juan, Ocho Rios, Bridgetown, Santo Domingo. When we discovered that the British ship the Black Watch was scheduled to call on Havana for two days, we couldn't resist the chance to see the island as it appears near the end of this century. (Much of its harbor area apparently looks today as it did when the century began, only less well maintained.)

As US citizens (with exception of academics and journalists who can take charter flights from Miami), we are not permitted direct air flights, although the final leg into Havana can be taken from the Bahamas, Jamaica, and Mexico. Anyway, a ship would be the logical approach toward this isolated island. A two-day sail from Cozumel found us approaching the fort guarding the port of Havana, then easing down the shipping channel into the inner harbor and berthing at a spruced-up cruise pier.

Incidentally, the Black Watch (the Royal Viking Star before its expensive refurbishment) was one of the first passenger ships to call on Havana. A Club Med sailing vessel preceded us, and also was berthed at the terminal.

And did Cuba ever lay out a welcome! As we maneuvered to berth right downtown (not at some remote quay, as the Brits put it), we heard music wafting from the Immigration and Custom Shed. Once cleared and carrying our passports down the gangway, we made our way into an airy reception hall to be greeted by costumed dancing women.

Wearing the requisite smiles, hardly stopping for a breather or tourist cameras, they performed until the last lingering passenger strolled by and proceeded to customs and immigration, at best a two-minute procedure, since the ship had arranged visas and given us shore passes. Each time when we departed or returned to the ship, we passed through this speedy passport control.

On our day of arrival in sunny Havana, we wanted to see Ernest Hemingway's house in San Francisco de Paula, just outside the city. As it was a Saturday and I was concerned the house might not be open for visitors on Sunday, we arranged in pidgin Spanish to engage a taxi right outside the port terminal. Frankly, I'm not certain even now whether spending US dollars is legal or whether perhaps there's a limit, but the agreed-upon rate of $25 US for a trip out, a wait for us to visit (the afternoon was waning), and return appealed to the driver, who flashed a big smile at our Yankee dollars! No language necessary.

We later learned that many a Cuban professional (doctor, dentist, lawyer) earns about $21 a week but that nearly everyone has something going on the side. For instance, the front parlor of a streetside home might be turned into a Ma and Pa restaurant. Or a professional's offspring might be hawking Cuban cigars (or alleged Cuban cigars, some made with banana leaves) on the streets.

Before we left the ship, we stood next to the swimming pool on the aftdeck and admired the city before us, dominated by the Capitol. In the foreground 200 yards away, we could see stubby residence buildings that showed hard usage. In once-elegant (and we hope elegant someday again) residences, laundry hung, mortar scars showed -- a sad, crumbling appearance. Call it deterioration waiting for rehabbers. And don't think Canadian and German companies haven't eyed these seaside blocks in this once-proud Caribbean capital city.

Our taxi was a Lada, a Russian-built car we first saw in Leningrad a decade ago. The driver responded to our gentle request to lower the volume of the radio as we headed for the Hemingway house. (Later, it came to us that he was showing off that he actually had a radio, since most cars don't). We proceeded on a wide (and ready for road repair), almost carless route the dozen miles to the green hill overlooking both the city and the sea -- Finca Vigia, generally translated as Lookout Farm, the Hemingway house, first occupied by the exuberant author and hangers-on during its best days in the late '40s. By 1960, during Hemingway's final stay, writes A. E. Hotchner, ``the proud old home was sad and crumbled, as was its master.'' Hotchner's ``Papa Hemingway'' is a good read.

I don't know what draws the two of us to homes of American authors. We'd seen the Hemingway house in Key West with its collection of cats. We'd visited Thomas Wolfe's birthplace (actually his mother's rooming house) in Asheville, N.C. And only this May, we dropped in on Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald's one-time home in Montgomery, Ala.

We didn't have time on our brief visit to become acquainted with the local currency -- something we generally try to do. So I'm not certain of the official admission price. I do know that to proceed past the gatehouse (the estate is fenced in) we forked over $2 each. We taxied up to the main complex, a rambling white building with its bedrooms, library, study, dining rooms, and verandas. With elevated location and adjacent shaded patios, it looked as though the house might be cool on warm days. Landscaping has been restored.

At Finca Vigia, the Hemingways entertained plenty of visitors -- often to the author's distraction. He wrote mainly in his bedroom in the main building and not always on a typewriter, although he typed most of his correspondence. His manuscripts are today divided between Princeton and the Kennedy Library in Boston.

Many people seeing a nearby four-story, narrow, towerlike structure (not unlike a lighthouse) assume it was a writing studio. In fact, Hemingway did go to the very top floor by an outside iron staircase to work on galley proofs, but the strange building was constructed mostly to get the cats out of the house! Things were getting out of hand with odor, hair on furniture, and even guests tripping over cats, so they were relegated to this building. We spied a few cats lying on cool patio stones, but not the six-clawed variety we'd seen at the Hemingway house not far across the sea in Florida.

Spanish-language challenged, we couldn't determine why we weren't allowed inside. Later, we heard that certain well-guided groups were admitted, but that too many valuable first-edition books have disappeard from the bookcases that line several rooms.

Nor were we supposed to take interior pictures, but with fast film and no flash, we poked the Canon lens into an open window and got pictures of book-lined rooms and a mounted deer head or two. An English couple dropped by and posed for us at the front entrance.

Hemingway's much-prized boat, Pilar, on which he went marlin fishing, lies propped up near the empty swimming pool, a stroll downhill from the main complex. This cabin cruiser slept six, with two more in the cockpit, and was alternately berthed in Key West or Cuba. When too much guest conviviality took over at the main house, Ernest and Mary Hemingway retreated to the boat.

Later, back in central Havana, we strolled safe streets, purchased nary a postcard, and were pretty much left alone instead of being pestered the way we have in many Caribbean islands: ``You want seashells, glass-bottom boat ride?''

Several hundred passengers off the Norway-registered Black Watch attended an outdoor Tropicana nightclub revue, which lasted until early morning. Some returned with Cuban cigars, ship models in bottles, or so-called primitive paintings.

All right, so the great sweeping beaches west of the capital, the interior with coffee plantations, must await our next visit. We may be induced to stay in a Four Seasons, Trust House Forte, or Steinberger hotel in downtown Havana if the US embargo, weakened only slightly, continues. At present, Canada is the biggest investor in the island.

While the Black Watch will sail the Caribbean this fall (with free air fare from New York and Miami to its port in Barbados), it's not scheduled for a Cuba stop in the immediate future.

But with that roomy cruise terminal and its performing dancers, more cruise ships may come calling. One has the feeling Cuba may soon wake from its slumber as the century ends. Whether the United States will be a player in its reconstruction -- and whether, in fact, change is even a good thing when fast-food outlets crop up -- is something about which most of us don't have a clue. I do know we liked the lack of commercialization we found, and the Cuban civility everywhere.