2/27/97
Wreck & Salvation
After countless hours on the web and phone calls to Air Mexicana in Mexico City, the tickets were bought & reservations made. Eight hours to flight time, I invited my nephew to go out for a farewell beer – checked my documents one last time – no passport.
Looked everywhere, crescendo of panic, disbelieve, anger. Overturned furniture, upended drawers – nothing.
Call to Glenn – we aren’t going. How about Mexico City for two weeks. Now there’s a good idea. Forget it, the whole deal is down the crapper.
1:30am. An angel of mercy (copy shop manager) and a miraculous discovery, another call, we’re on our way to Cuba. Fucking heart-attack & rebirth.
Mexico City
Get to Benito Juarez at 6:00pm stoned tired. Check in with my amigos at Mexicana to buy the tickets. No problemo – everything was confirmed Friday night.
Well, this is Mexico. Little problemo – all the reservations have been canceled.
Why? Why ask.
OK, no problemo, let’s make new reservations. No can do. No airplane seats, no communications with Havana, no hotel rooms, no nothing.
No problemo. Be nice, don’t backup, keep asking. 11:00pm we got seats, rooms, the whole enchilada.
Senior Glenn’s plane shows, but donde es el senor Enrique? Wander around for 2 hours. Adios. A time fuckup, we discover later.
Get to the airport early to get Glenn’s tourist card. Now everything is easy.
Havana
Havana airport – do you believe this. What the fuck are we doing here.
Ride to town in some kind of beatup wreck. Find Hotel El Capri. A big, no character dump, something between an overgrown Motel 6 and a rundown YMCA. The air is warm, people look at us, we’re huge gringos in Cuba.
The room’s better than I expected. No cucarachas. Hangout a little while and then brave the street.
We walk down toward the Malecon and every ten steps some kids offers us a taxi or cigars. No gracias.
Saliva
Picks us up about 2 blocks from the sea wall. Aids maybe or just severely malnourished? She’s rail thin, dark, with a very soft manner and voice. She walks with us – while we wonder what to do. Sit with her for while on the sea wall. Double back and head west along the Malecon & Saliva asks for a dollar. Sorry. Had it to do over I would give it to her. She was nice.
We find a “Chinese” restaurant to have dinner. This turns out to be a State restaurant so the prices are high & food mediocre. Almost the last one we eat at.
Everywhere we see “La Rampa”. What does this mean? Turns out to be the first six blocks on the main street of the Vedado district, Havana’s Rodeo drive.
First night heading back to the hotel, crowds on La Rampa for the international film festival. We turn the corner for the Capri and we get hooked big time.
These chicas are cute and they mean business. We, like a couple of gawky adolescents, fool with them for a while & retreat. (damn – nice though). They won’t get closer than 200 yards from the hotel.
We learn later that if the cops spot a girl with a tourist, they’ll pick them up later for a shakedown, blow job or whatever.
Dayami
Next afternoon, we return to the room and I give a buck to our smiley, plump 32 year old room maid. She comes into the room and makes us both little towel sculptures. Dayami is great.
She plops down on one of the beds and visits for about an hour. At one point she hoists up her dress to show us the nasty bruise at the top inside of her plump but nice anyway thigh. This place is unreal.
Eibis (ABC), her buddy shows and the four of us hang out for a while trying to communicate, flirting like mad and trying to figure out what to do next. We figure either one would do anything we ask for five bucks, but we don’t ask. Bye-bye. Really nice girls.
La Habana Vieja
We get a cab to La Habana Vieja and find La Bodegita del Medio – now a nifty tourist spot of former Hemmingway glory. Everyone signs their name on the wall.
Food’s pretty good and we wind up talking with an English girl who is remarkably friendly and adventurous (name?). Well what other kind of English female would travel alone to Cuba?
We dump her and walk around old Havana – is this safe?
Old Havana turns out to be really beautiful at night. It seems like it ought to be dangerous, but maybe the cops are so bad, no one dares to screw around. Anyway, nobody fucks with us – even when we act so stupid, we should be killed. (later)
I wish I had had a tape recorder with me – sounds of people, music and life filter to us through the maze of old streets – just amazing.
Che for a beer
We stopped at a little outside joint near the harbor and a run-down black chick comes over and begs me for a beer. I trade her for her Che Guevarra pin which I stick in my hat.
Laura
Walking toward the water, a pretty, 30 year old spanish girl passes us and then let’s us catch up to her. Smooth. Very engaging, warm, nice. Laura.
Laura Capote is, is, is – a master checkers teacher. You mean chess? No checkers – studied for five years. Cuba – the workers paradise. Glenn and I are really impressed.
Laura hangs with us and we stop for coffee and conversation. She invites us to her house “sometime” for dinner. Later we’re told it’s a real bad neighborhood.
Laura Capote
Corales 463 Entre Indio / Anjeles
Habana Vieja
Glenn has ideas, but we leave Laura with a $5 tip for something or other.
Only sixty miles
We decide to visit the 40th anniversary celebration of some revolutionary event. Cab it to the Plaza de La Revolucion where there is a whole mess of Russian military gear parked – canons, trucks, vietnam era jets, a couple of choppers and some big mobile missiles.
We wander around taking pictures and looking at the stuff. Ran out of film before we find the super cool VW dune buggy with about 16 machine guns strapped and bolted on it.
A soldier tells me it’s no problemo to take pictures. The panic expression on his face is great when he learns we’re from the U.S.
I talk to a Colonel (2 black stars) about the U.S. and Cuba. Que lastima that Sr. Clinton is one big assholo, but we are friends of Cuba. He likes us.
He make it his job to comfort us that the big honkin’ mobile missile we’re looking at has a range of just sixty mile so it can’t reach Key West. Man, I was so relieved I almost pissed myself!
La Plaza de Las Vuturas
We cross the big road over to the stark, white stone and cement Plaza de La Revolucion itself. Lots of steps leading up to the big squared off 500 foot tall phallus with nobody around.
Fuckin gringos can’t seem to find the right way. We go this way & that and a nervous black guard keeps showing up to get us on the correct side of the walk. Pay a buck to see the Jose Marti museum. Old pictures.
But Sr. Mike really needs to try to get us arrested, so we circle around the back and start walking across a big open parking lot area toward the obviously closed, you’re not invited so keep the fuck out, government complex.
We don’t get far before our guard shows again and chases us off, but at least we don’t get shot.
While we’re leaving we see that the ledges at the top of this ugly, stark, tall phallic monument serve as a popular hangout for a big flock of black vultures that circle continuously around the top. The image is outrageous and surreal. Plaza de Vulturas. It used to be the Esso Tower.
Ice Cream, no waiting for gringos.
The big circular ice cream park, La Coppelia, in the middle of the Vedado district is a big deal in Havana. People wait in very long lines to get in, sit together and eat ice cream. The only food we ever saw for sale on the street was foul looking, greasy “pizza” – really disgusting. So the good ice cream was a treat.
But no waiting in the people’s revolutionary ice cream palace for gringos with bucks, so we are invited right to the front of the line past the passive looks of the tired Cubans.
But, we want lunch. A really big young black guy, probably an athlete (how he got his cake job) asks me if I’m from Argentina. Refuses to believe we’re from U.S., but takes us around the corner to an upstairs room where we have a great lunch in mama’s kitchen. This kind of home kitchen restaurant is called a paladare and they’re all over Havana. The only place to eat.
Pablo, another young black guy, makes friends with us at lunch and wants to know what kind of girls we want. Welcome to Cuba.
Pablo Jimenez
Calle K 361
Apt 2
Tel: 320249
The Nacional
By far the nicest place in the Vedado neighborhood is the Hotel Nacional which has a beautiful outside, colonnade hangout area with huge wicker furniture and lawned park overlooking the ocean. We go there a lot in the evenings where I drink Mohitos (Hemmingway invention) and smoke wonderful, inexpensive cigars.
There are often pretty Cuban girls who are very civilized in their warm and intelligent disposition toward handsome and generous American men. And, one such night, Glenn enjoys a vigorous exchange of political views with a Cuban woman of Africa descent – Judith.
We noticed that the Cuban girls always seemed to travel in pairs and that one would always be nice and the other nasty – no exceptions.
Another night Glenn was assaulted by a certain Cuntesa while Mike was falling deeply in love with the young, beautiful, willowy, classic spanish beauty, INEZ…
Glenn retreated back to the Hotel Capri and Mike stayed, gazing into the dark eyes and holding hands with the beautiful INEZ…
Until the vile troglodyte Cuntesa fucked everything up and the cowardly Mike abandoned his Cuban flower, a mistake he will regret to the grave, and also retreated to the well guarded, no puta allowed in here, Hotel Capri.
The Castile Morro
Nice lunch, wandered around the old castle, looked at the ocean. Glenn sees some guys in a little lookout house up on top with giant binoculars on a tripod. Mike asks do they work? They smile big and say “venga”.
Too good to be true. Three young Cuban guys, one in charge of looking over the entrance to Havana harbor. We listen to Key West marine weather and they aim the 20 power Nikon binoculars at this and that all over Havana for us. Pointing the binocs, one guys grins broadly and winks to us “Russian Embassy”.
Then they pull open the flag drawers where they have flags for every nation and stand there holding a big, old, stained stars and stripes for us. Fucking outstanding. A moment we will remember forever.
Cohibas
Mike wants to find some real Cuban cigars to take back so we check the cigar store at the Nacional. Yes, we everything – sorry, no Cohiba. No problemo, I’ll just grab this box out of the bottom here. No Senor, those are for our special customers and not for you, chico.
So, we hit a few nice stores in Habana Vieja, but everywhere it’s:
“Si – We have no Cohiba”
In the little cigar store in the Hotel Valencia (remember this, nicest hotel we saw in Habana Vieja) an nice old Cuban guy very graciously asks what we need. We talk and off we go to a couple of places he knows.
Six or seven shops later, Mike buys a box of 25 Cohiba Siglo V’s for $218. This in a country where $10 a month is a very good wage.
I offer to buy Miquel Santiago to lunch at the Inglaterra, but he says forget it, the Monmarte is cheaper. We do lunch. History teacher, neat guy, Cleveland Indians fan. I gave him ten bucks “for his students”. Best money I spent the whole trip. I sent him a nice Indians cap – hope he gets it.
Miquel Martinez Montalvan
Animas 207 aptonto 4, entre Industria y Crespo
Zona Postal Habana 2
Cuba
Elizabeth
Walking around old town, we decide to head away from the tourist section and found a sort of pedestrian shopping area. At one point a pretty black girl with a wonderful ass spotted us and moved in. Unusual, because she was by herself.
We sat with her in the big park by the Inglaterra and talked. Elizabeth was from Santiago de Cuba and was in La Habana to visit kin for Christmas.
She wanted to go home, but couldn’t afford the $5 air fare. She repeatedly invited us to come to her home where she was staying in Habana to visit, but we declined. Unjustified paranoia and one of our more foolish mistakes. I think we gave her a few bucks. Elizabeth was very nice.
La Plaza de Putas
In Habana Vieja we visit the Plaza Catedral, a big cobblestoned square with a nice restaurant with an outside porch. But they play the music so loud that we can’t stand to sit inside so we just hang around out front with the little black pimps and assorted, raggity putas. They are kind of confused by us, since we don’t want anything they offer (girls, cigars, taxi), but we don’t go inside.
By this time, Sr. Glenn & I are pretty relaxed about telling the pimps to fuck off so we just enjoy the weird scene for a while before we split.
We walk a few blocks west toward the Inglaterra Hotel where there is a little outside plaza with tables and a trailer that sells drinks and fried chicken.
Sitting at a table, we watch and are watched by the circling kid beggars, putas, cripple beggars and other wretched con artists. Occasionally we will smile at a pretty girl and invite her sit with us. She always has a loser friend.
One night we had headed east from the Inglaterra when we were hooked by two chocolate drops, Mercedes and Yani. They were not coy. Yani was really cute, pure 5′ Zulu babe. Mercedes, well – Mercedes was Glenn’s so who the fuck cares?
We took a look at the Monmarte, but didn’t want to go in, so we walked two blocks to the Plaza de Putas. We bought the girls drinks and Yani proved to be a delightful kisser. Cute as a bug, with big pretty smile and absofuckinlutly beautiful tits. Yani takes my hand in hers and teaches me the Cuban word for pussy.
Mike is motivated and Glenn is a good sport so after walking around for twenty minutes while negotiating price, we are led by the girls to a “casa particular” for our promised full night of romance.
Around one corner – it’s getting questionable, but we’re no wimps. Around another and we’re in Beruit, but no guts, no puta. And then, the exit blocked by an abandoned, burning bus parked sideways and populated by glowering zombies on every side, we enter:
The Avenue of Big Killers Without Lights
Glenn Mitchell and Mike Johnson have to be two stupidest and most suicidal gringos on the entire island of Cuba.
Somehow we get as far a doorway guarded by a strapping rasta about 6’3″ tall who discusses business matters with Mercedes and we squeeze past the rasta into a tiny, narrow hallway at the base of a steep ladder.
Up the ladder and through a hole chopped in the ceiling we all climb and here is a single, grubby little bedroom. That is, one bedroom for, apparently, all four of us. No fuckin way man, we want the deluxe romantic trip we’re paying for – these gringos need separate rooms!
Glenn and his princess Mercedes vanish back down the ladder and Yani and Mike get busy. After shedding his clothes, Mike wonders what he would do if the rasta showed up with a knife and two or three friends. Die is the obvious answer.
Yani proves to be a lot cuter than she is talented, but things are fun anyway – she turns on a little radio and dances naked for me. All of a sudden, up the fucking ladder charges Mercedes with the used rubber hanging out of her mouth and Glenn chasing along behind. Hay man, what kind of fucking hotel is this? Mercedes wants the money, Glenn wants a bar really strong soap and we both want THE FUCK OUT OF HERE.
We give the girls some Yankee dollars and retreat with our lives.
Welcome to CUBA.
flatpik
