Story

Cuba Libre

AH article image

Authors: Richard Reinhardt

Historic Era: Era 10: Contemporary United States (1968 to the present)

Historic Theme:

Subject:

November 1995 | Volume 46, Issue 7

In those days, back in the thirties, the forties, the fifties of this century, Cuba was Havana, and Havana was a dream.


I recently went to Havana o
n one a cruise to spend a few days in the country that had so long fascinated me.

The old dream was set to music—Xavier Cugat playing Ernesto Lecuona’s “Siboney” and “Malaguena” and “You Are Always in My Heart,” Bing Crosby crooning, “They’re glad to see you, in See-You-Bee-Ay.”

In those days, Havana could be smelled and felt and tasted like a tropical fruit. Its flavor was in a daiquiri cocktail mixed to your order at the Floridita, Ernest Hemingway’s hangout on Obispo Street. The bartender made your drink with Cuban sugar and the juice of Cuban limes and a wallop of Havana’s own Bacardi rum, and he shook it on the ice by hand. Havana’s touch was in the sun and wind along the Malecon, on the beaches at Miramar and Siboney. Its fragrance was in the blue-gray smoke of a corona, a panatela, a perfecto—seductive names that made an ordinary stogie sound as rich and mellow as it looked.

Reckless, contradictory, sensuous Havana! A young naval officer, steaming into port on an American cruiser in 1946, could sense its allure miles away: “The mixed aroma of coffee, tobacco, sugar, and rum was so strong that I can smell it still. And when we entered the narrow passage between the city and Morro Castle, the water around us was jammed with rowboats full of clamoring prostitutes!”

That was the trouble with the dream. Unpleasant realities kept seeping in. Cuba was a slave, and Havana was a whore. Most of the carefree American visitors were able to persuade themselves that the Cubans liked it that way. Every so often there would be a palace coup. New Bad Guys would replace the old Bad Guys. Editorial writers up north would express satisfaction that Cuba had finally changed its wicked ways, and the jolly steamers would glide to and fro, across the ninety miles between Havana and Key West. In 1953, the year that Fidel Castro and his comrades failed in their first, fatally botched attempt to overthrow the government of Fulgencio Batista, there were eighty tourist flights a week from Miami to Havana (forty dollars roundtrip, including a five-dollar U.S. travel tax). Down in Havana you could bet the horses, play the lottery, fry your brains with dope, or watch an exhibition of sexual bestiality that would have shocked Caligula. Orchestras of moist-lipped senoritas in low-cut scarlet dresses played rumba music in the cafés on the plaza. George Raft, the movie actor, ran a casino that everyone knew was owned by the mob.

I did not make it to Havana in those days, I was too young, too poor, too far away. But like most Americans, I carried in my mind a small assortment of blurred images of Cuba, like a packet of smudgy postcards from someone else’s vacation trip. There was