William Horberg

A Stamp Collection

January 1st was the 50th anniversary of the Cuban revolution.

I turn fifty this March, so it puts my whole life in perspective to think that I have lived in parallel time to this epochal event.

Whatever one thinks of the government there, it is hard to imagine a more woeful, misguided, immoral and ineffectual policy than the embargo this country has maintained against this small island and all of its citizens for most of my life.

Under Bush the screws were tightened so much that even though the majority of Elsa's family still lives on the island, including her father and brother and sister, we are only legally allowed to go visit them once every three years, and not for more than two weeks, with absolutely no exception for medical or any other emergencies. If her father was dying in the hospital and we had been there in the last three year period, too damn bad is what our laws now say. We like to lecture the world about human rights, but does any just person think that that is a humane policy?

Elsa and I have great hope that one of the early acts of our own new administration will be to end this madness and restore trade and travel with our neighbor.

Stamp collecting has gone out of fashion for most kids, but at one time it was a great hobby, bringing the art and imagery and people of the countries of the world into our homes and meticulously arranging them in an album.

The world was a bigger place then and things seemed so much more remote and exotic. 

Elsa wasn't a stamp collector, but she remembers this album and these stamps and how coveted they were in Cuba when she was growing up.

If Americans know anything at all about the history of Cuba or the revolution, it is mostly the reductive story of just one man, Fidel Castro, the great boogeyman Communist dictator of American politics for the last fifty years. But the revolution, any revolution, is not the product of one man. Here then, is an old stamp collection of the other names and faces of the Cuban revolution.

If you want to know more, there is a brief bullet point history of the main events of the revolution here.

There was also a very evocative novel out last year called Telex From Cuba by Rachel Kushner which weaves a fictional account of the perspective of an American child growing up in a family that is working for the sugar cane and mining interests that dominated Cuba before the revolution, that reads like a memoir. 

It is interesting to hear a story from this unusual point of view, and instead of the head on history of the guerrilla movement in the Sierra Maestre and the canonized version of historical events that are so familiar to us, we get a different nuanced perspective that makes the familiar seem fresh and more relevant to us.

Hope to see all of you in Havana soon!

william

Happy Ending

A good story needs a happy ending. And a picture is worth a thousand words.

(Okay, okay I do work in Hollywood, after all!)

So here is the first photo of Elsa and I, taken one month after the end of my Havana Dairy, when I returned to Cuba in January, 2001, and we had our own dinner at La Guarida.

Hope you enjoyed this daily serial of my adventures in another country in the first year of the new century.

william

Tomorrow is Free Comic Book Day: check out "The Best Painter In The World"!!!!

Havana Diary pt 8

Havana Diary pt 8

On our last day, in the typical festival crosscurrents of rumours and unplanned events, we got wind of a cocktail party reception for participants being held at the Melia Cohiba, and when our credentials did not gain us official entrance, Marguerite, as a veteran jazz night club owner herself, and experienced victim of just about every conceivable con used by rapid jazz fans to gain entrance to an event, decided on the old “trojan horse” manoeuvre – go to the venue before it’s really set up and open and before the bouncers are at the door and hang around inside as if you belong there and are already “in”, chat up some of the local help so you can pretend to be working or involved with them in some general way, and then wait until the real guests come so you can blend in with the crowd and disappear. I know, an old dodge to be sure, but it worked like a charm.

Ibrahim Ferrer y Omara Portuondo - Silencio

And lucky for us that it did, as it turned out that the musical guests at the party where none other than Ibriham Ferrar and Omara Portuondo themselves, the Buena Vista stars at last, who brought down the house with renditions of Dos Gardenias Para Ti and Candela that had the audience clapping and dancing and even getting a bit teary-eyed with romance, nostalgia and affection for these geriatric crooners.

With the strains of Omara’s throaty vibrato ringing in her ears, Marguerite took off for snowbound Chicago. I stuck around for one more day before my Sunday 4 a.m. flight to Cancun started me on the serpentine path back to Los Angeles. At breakfast in her Thelonious Monk black sunglasses, Jane Bonner reported another rumour, something was happening at UNEAC, the Cuban union of writers and artists housed in another old villa at Calles H y 17, a short walk from the hotel. So I hightailed it over there and caught a great set by an unnamed band on the terracotta tile patio of the Huron Azul.

You’ve heard jazz lovers called “cats”, but have you ever heard of cats that are jazz lovers? Well, the Blue Heron was full of them and they stretched and played and meowed to the caliente music, much to the amusement and delight of the patrons and the band. Finally, back at the Amadeo Roldan theatre in a fitting end to this musical smorgasbord, Kenny Barron and Rufus Reid and Kim Thompson, a piano, bass and drums trio whose dance through Monk’s “Well, You Needn’t” made me remember my own brief days as a wannabe jazz musician, before I dropped out of The Berklee College of Music, when as a student at Wesleyan University I studied with Kenny’s older brother Bill Barron, a great teacher and tenor sax player who grew up in Philly and at one time was a roommate of jazz giant John Coltrane.

I heard that Bill Barron died a few years back, and of course Coltrane died at 36 in 1967, but the music, like my grandmother Florence, is almost 100 years old and still lives on, and the very best place to hear it these days is in Fidel Castro’s Cuba at the various venues off the Malecon in Habana, 2000.

william

Tomorrow: A Happy Ending!!

Havana Diary pt 7

Well, here it is, the moment you've all been waiting for (and THE MOMENT that I had been waiting for my whole life!!)

Havana Diary

We had dinner at La Guarida, made famous as a location in Thomas Guttierrez Alea’s film “Strawberry and Chocolate”, a paladar up three flights of broad marble stairs in the ruins of a once palatial building, with it’s waiting room full of old movie posters, it’s small crazy-quilt maze of dining rooms overlooking the black neon less night of Central Havana, and it’s gourmet Cuban cooking. The next day we ate lunch of queso and jamon sandwiches and Cristal beer in our favourite spot, the courtyard of the Hotel Nacional, overflowing with the film festival crowd headquartered there. A mad dash ride in the little taxis called Coco Cabs, which look like yellow baseballs on wheels – took us to the Plaza de Catedral in Old Havana, with it’s sprawling flea market and competing sidewalk bands in every restaurant and café, and a walk past the Ambos Mundos hotel with it’s sign advertising “Hemingway stayed here”, to the outdoor stalls in the park nearby, crowded not with Hemingway, but with every conceivable book ever written on the subject of Che Guevara.

Debra took us to an art exhibit in the gallery off the Calle des Oficios, a square of renovated office buildings on the waterfront that hinted at the possible, perhaps inevitable future of tourist-ready, shiny restored Old Havana gentrification. It was a stunning show of new work by Cuban artist Elsa Mora, a friend of Marguerite’s from her days as a visiting artist at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago years ago, and a beneficiary of Debra’s support and patronage.

Elsa moved from Holguin, at the tip of the island near Santiago, to Camaguey, where she first met Debra, and who now lives in Havana and is represented by the Phyllis Kind gallery in New York. Elsa has primarily worked and exhibited as a painter, pintora is what it says on her stylish calling card, but her new show is a fascinating combination of photography and bronze sculpture, small objects she forged in the “lost wax” process in Mexico and models in provocative and political poses in a series of large black and white photographs.

Later on we had the Alice-in-Wonderland experience of visiting Elsa at her “studio”, a non-descript block of grey apartments that have the look and feel of a 1950’s planned housing project in Queens and hold no promise of anything other than more greyness inside. After another “Cuban workout” trudge up long flights of stairs, her door opens on a magical world – a tiny apartment adorned with paintings, drawings, hanging objects, books, old photos and small sculptures, all infused with the spirit, intelligence and personality of Elsa, a small beautiful woman with a waterfall of curly black hair and an infectious smile. In a room no bigger than a large closet she churns out a prodigious amount of art to the rhythm of the constant street symphony outside her open window, a work habit which she credits to her astrological affiliation as a Taurus, her impoverished youth and her melodramatic family history.

From "Ejercisios de Silencio" by artist Elsa Mora

william

TOMORROW: The final chapter!!

Havana Diary pt 6

Today, part six of my Havana Diary from 2000.

The plot thickens, and events careen along to a nice ritmo cubana, leading me closer to a certain special someone...

Havana Diary

Debra Evenson is a friend of my sister who moved to Cuba from Chicago in 1993 and works as a lawyer for the government. Tall and rail thin, she has the ultimate Cuban exercise program – she lives on the eighth floor or a building whose elevator has been out of commission for several years.

Her boyfriend Vassilio plays trumpet with Irakere, the Cuban jazz ensemble headed by Chucho Valdes, who is also the director and programmer of the jazz festival, if it is indeed possible to use words like directing and programming when it comes to such a unsystematic affair. Debra has the bemused relaxed attitude of someone who has lived and worked in Havana for many years, and is comfortable and never surprised by the haphazard and indirect way things work here. You would think a week long jazz festival might have things like a reliable schedule of events, an information center, a known location to purchase tickets, but then you clearly have never been to the Habana Jazz Festival. There is a Salon de Informacion at the Riviera Hotel, but there is no informacion to be had there, so they direct you to the Ministry of Music, but they ran out of credentials a long time ago, and the one printed schedule they have is no longer relevant as the acts and venues and times have all changed.

In spite of all this, there was actually something deeply pleasing about the carelessness and casualness of the whole event. This is a jazz festival with the personality and habits of a jazz musician, a sense of improvisation underlining the proceedings that made the whole experience have the uplifting quality Cuban’s call descarges. And from the opening act at Teatro Amedeo Roldan of Chucho Valdes and Chano Gonzales, with surprise guest Herbie Hancock completing this trio of solo pianists, to the disastrous Italian duo performing jazz covers of Beatles songs at Club La Zorra y El Cuervo, through to the last night of tight hot salsa from the Havana Ensemble in the open air plaza of the Casa de la Cultura, somehow the music was only half the point, the picture in the frame that was the excuse to visit the gallery.

Eric Dolphy once said “Music, when it’s in the air, it’s gone. You can never capture it again.” And it’s true that the live experience of the crowds, the mojitos, the full moon over the stage, the bleachers full of writhing beautiful dancers, the painted backdrops and the $5 taxi rides from venue to venue, the cool breeze and the rapid-fire chatter of the Cuban language in the crowd, created an ambience that no recording device will ever reproduce.

Tata Güines Manteca

Here is the master himself.

How can one write about Tata Guines, one of the best percussionists in the world, or Bobby Carcasses and his flugelhorn and ritmo vocals, or Jose Ruiz Cortes, the flute playing leader of NG La Banda, or Canadian soprano sax player Jane Bonner whose pig-tails and pork-pie hat are comic props that might cause you to underestimate the strength and beauty of her Coltrane-like solos over a solid foundation of Cubano soul, or any of the nameless, faceless musicians lined up at 4 a.m. outside of the Bar Elegante in the lobby of the Riviera for the last call jam session each evening, some amateurs struggling to hold their own and then heading back to the woodshed, some stunning soloists that in a more just universe would be headlining the festival, all of them reflected for one brief blues chorus moment in the spotlight that bounces off the tacky gold- flecked mirrored wall behind the makeshift bandstand?

william

TOMORROW: Havana Diary continues with one of the last two installments

Havana Diary pt 5

I have always been a Hemingway aficionado, in fact I learned the word aficionado from reading Hemingway’s description of bullfight partisans in Spain, so there was no way I was going to leave Cuba without a visit to the master’s residence, the Finca Vigia in San Francisco de Paulo, a thirty minute taxi ride outside of Havana along the coast road.

My sister Marguerite had finally arrived from snowy Chicago, and we had lunch in the broad green esplanade behind the Nacional Hotel, where we ran into Francesco, the karate student from the day before, and his girlfriend, a Bulgarian journalist named Marina. In another of those “small world” coincidences that seemed quite common here, it turned out that Marina and I had met a few years ago, in Rome, at a terrace party in the palazzo of a Contessa that Cate Blanchett was living in during the filming of “The Talented Mr. Ripley”. She was here covering the 22nd International Latin American Film Festival, which this year coincided with the jazz festival and the Art Biennale, making Havana a rich cultural Mecca indeed.

After lunch, we rode out together to the place where Ernesto wrote The Old Man and The Sea and many other books and lived for most of the last 20 years of his life. A white house with an adjoining tower and guardhouse in the driveway, the Finca sits on a large estate, a former plantation, that Hemingway bought from the French owners in 1940, and lived in on and off, mostly with his last wife Mary Walsh Hemingway, until his self-inflicted death in 1961, in Ketchum, Idaho. The house was surrounded by Cuban women standing guard, as tourists are not allowed to enter inside, only to peek in through the windows, and the sight of a camera is greeted with consternation and a warning – it’s five bucks a picture if you want some snaps of the famous man’s digs. We peeked around in the various rooms: at the still half-filled liquor tray in the living room whose walls were covered with paintings and posters advertising long ago bullfights in Spain; the manual typewriter standing waist high and covered with dust in the rear workroom (Hemingway always wrote standing up); at the bedroom with its mounted heads of kudu and Oryx and Thompson’s gazelle and other beasts remembered from readings of The Green Hills of Africa; at the closet with racks of loafers and a few old fedoras and a grey military uniform on a hangar.

Marguerite speaks passable Spanish and after touring the emptied out powder blue swimming pool and the makeshift structure that shelters the dry-docked fishing boat with it’s famous name painted on the stern - Pilar, Key West, she befriended one of our watchers, who quietly snuck us up to the tower building, which used to house all of their considerable fishing gear. It is now a small photo room dedicated to The Old Man and The Sea. There is a display case with a signed manuscript, a framed picture from the film of Spencer Tracy as “Santiago” as well as a behind-the-scenes shot of Ernest himself on the set of the movie, and then a more recent picture of the real Old Man that the story is based on. It turns out he is still alive! 103 years old! Incredible.

Upstairs on the top floor was Mary’s own writing room, as far away as possible from the master, with an incredible view over the rolling hills of central Havana and the harbour about 30 kilometres away. A writing desk sits on top of a rug made from the skin of a lioness, and an art deco divan next to it looked like a great place to read or snooze or otherwise enjoy life’s moveable feast.

Our visit was cut short by the arrival of the director of the museum, accompanied by a coterie of men in business suits, and a few in military uniform. The Cuban women working there grew tense and asked us to skeedaddle, and the friendly one informed my sister that this was an advance team of Russian men and Cuban military advisors who were scouting and preparing for the imminent visit of Russian President Vladimir Putin with Fidel Castro that evening. There is a big picture of Ernest Hemingway shaking hands with Fidel on the wall next to the bar at the Floridita, known as the “home of the daiquiri”, but I wondered what the great writer, traveller, hunter, fisherman, boxer, adventurer, womaniser, boozer and raconteur would have had to say about this house call, and the about the new political order at the end of the twentieth century.

This photo and the one at the top of the diary, of Hemingway aboard his yacht, the Pilar, were taken by the famous Cuban photographer Raul Corrales and bought as a series of postcards from the "shop" at the Riviera Hotel when I was there.

william

My Havana Diary continues TOMORROW!!

Havana Diary pt 4

This week I resume my story of my trip to Havana in December of 2000, including my fateful meeting with a certain wonderful artist who later became my wife!

Havana Diary pt. 4

With the urgent need for U.S. dollars, there is a large black market in Cuba, and almost everyone I passed in the street had something they were offering to sell, usually cigars or cd’s of Cuban music. Prices are not cheap, with the street price of a cd ranging from $15 to $20 dollars. Alex wanted to be my middleman in these transactions, and so when we ran into his friend Luis, a handsome young Cuban man who looked a little bit like a bronze Pete Sampras, he hastily arranged for us to go to his apartment around the corner. We squeezed through a half open doorway and climbed a narrow flight of stairs to a padlocked room on the second floor. Inside, Luis showed us his “studio”, a 6 x 8 room crammed with a flea market’s worth of used computer equipment that looked like it was held together with spit, tape and shoestrings, but functioned well as a makeshift operation for this bootleg cd factory. In a manner of minutes he could strip the tracks off of any cd, digitise them as MP3 files, burn them on to a new cd, and even provide a scanned colour Xerox of the album cover to slip into the jewel case.

Although many people I spoke to here liked the Buena Vista Social Club, or at least appreciated it’s benefit to worldwide interest in Cuban music and tourism, many more were also openly critical of the film as a very shallow picture of contemporary Cuban life and were not too interested in the “old-fashioned” music featured in that movie. “Imagine if someone came to America and made an album in which they ‘rediscovered’ Perry Como, and his music became hip again, and then they made a film about how neglected Perry Como had been in your culture. The movie was a typical ‘touristic’ view of our musical heritage.”

Alex and Luis were jazz fans, but they had never heard of Art Tatum, or even Keith Jarrett, and were more into the very modern synthesis of Salsa, Son, hip hop and house music performed by bands like “Orishas”, whose infectious groove blared from the thumping skin of Luis’ uncovered woofer as we sat in his secret lair. I bought the Orishas cd, and another by Los Van Van, for $20, and all parties were happy with the transaction. As quid pro quo for the tour, Alex directed me to a “paladar”, a Cuban restaurant, usually the front room of someone’s house set up to serve meals. We went to the “Aries” near the University, and I bought Alex and Nairobis dinner, Pollo Asada con cerveza fria.

The lack of paint and crumbling exteriors gives Old Havana a dilapidated quality at night that reminds one of the creepy Mexican border town in Orson Welles’ Touch of Evil. A vast film noir set of solitary street lamps, crooked half open doorways, fifties Chevrolets, and starvation thin dogs nosing around in vain search of a scrap of a meal.

A Touch Of Evil

At midnight the level of darkness and silence is different than any urban center in the West, a ghost town feeling of wide open empty streets, rubble strewn, entrenched, a permanent feeling of work suspended, mid-construction, frozen in the time line defined by the 40 year long embargo. Yes, CNN is available in Havana. But not Starbucks, The Gap, Nike, McDonalds, Anthropologie, Pottery Barn or any other sign of the omnipresent material culture that surrounds us in the first world. As in Vietnam, the ironic by-product that comes alongside the true suffering imposed by the U.S. economic embargo, is the purity and relief of a landscape uninfected with the homogenous layer of goods and signage and lifestyle imposed by capitalist free markets. When I first moved to Los Angeles, all I could see was the smog and I was sickened by it on a daily basis. But after years there, my perceptions, along with my lungs, mutated, and I became inured to the point of not noticing the air quality except on particularly bad days. In Cuba, I suddenly felt the same thing about the visual panorama of American life – the barrage of advertising images in the media and throughout the landscape had deadened my senses to the point where I was no longer conscious of the clutter, the constant low grade noise of commercial imagery that surrounds us. Cuba was a breath of fresh air for the brain as well as the soul.

TOMORROW: Part 5 of my Havana Diary

william

Havana Diary pt 3

Welcome back! I hope you are enjoying this story of my first trip to Cuba in 2000. It sure brings back a lot of memories for me.

Havana Diary pt 3

I was supposed to meet up with my progressive-left big sister Marguerite Horberg at the festival. In fact, she was the one who turned me on to the idea of coming down here in the first place, as she has been travelling to Cuba since 1989 as part of the Venceremos brigade doing solidarity work on the island. But she was caught in a Chicago blizzard and found herself stranded in an O'Hare whiteout, so the next day I headed out on my own to explore the streets of Old Havana. But I wasn'™t alone for long. A few blocks from the hotel on a sunny morning along the Malecon waterfront, I was asked the time by a handsome young Cuban couple who offered to be my tour guides to the "real" Havana. Friendly locals, or was I being hustled? I wasn'™t terribly concerned, and I welcomed the company, and the insight offered to a strange and foreign land. Alexander was 24 and had his own aspiring Salsa band, Los Chicos del Son; his girlfriend Nairobis, was a dancer in his band, and a biology student at the University of Havana. Alex spoke fairly good English, Nairobis very little.

We walked the dusty streets of central Havana and Alex told me his views on the good things and bad of life in contemporary Cuba. Free education at good schools. A warm society of people used to working together in groups. A high value on art, music, culture. Great baseball. Poverty, yes, but the focus of life here is not exclusively on money and success in Western terms. Limited freedom, the inability for most people to travel abroad, the hypocrisy of a society in which all people are "œequal€" and yet obviously great inequalities exist. Thirty percent of the population have telephones, the rest are in a years-long queue for this government supplied commodity.

We passed by a karate dojo, a cavernous room in a dilapidated building whose broken walls and missing roof reminded one of a bombed out structure in post-War Berlin. Alex introduced me to the Master, a black belt with a Mickey Spillane buzz-cut who is purportedly one of the top teachers in the world. Later I learned that he had spent many years in Russia, training Special Forces units. His student was a middle-aged Cuban who lived in Rome. Shirtless, sweating, he pantomimed his way through a series of karate chops and kicks in the semi-darkness of the makeshift gym.

I'll be back on Monday with more of my "Havana Diary". Have a great weekend.

william

Havana Diary pt 2

More of my Havana Diary from December of 2000 (boy, does that seem like ages ago!).

The flight from Miami to Havana is only one hour long, but the US economic embargo and strict travel prohibition makes the boarding process in Miami one of the most torturous in the world. Roped off at the check-in gate like quarantined lepers, the passengers have to endure a 3:00 p.m. check in for a flight that is not scheduled to depart until 8:00 p.m., but which, on most nights, takes off an hour or two after that. The travellers, mostly Cuban, mostly elderly, are loaded down with luggage and mountains of material goods purchased in the States, all of which gets processed in a huge plastic wrapping machine which hermetically seals all goods and baggage, for security reasons, leaving a shining blue pile of suffocated belongings behind for the handlers.

The only thing that made the wait bearable was the comic scenario being played out across the waiting room, as pianist Herbie Hancock, a last minute surprise guest for opening night at the Jazz Festival, was engaged in a fruitless attempt to prove to the ABC Charter operators of the flight that he really did have a first class seat and did not have to travel coach with the rest of us proletarians. The white woman travelling with Herbie, clearly his girlfriend and handler, was trying her best to remain bemused by her temperamental artist lover and client, but the language barrier finally got the best of him in his debate with the Cuban flight attendant, as did his cell phone, which gave out mid-tirade, ending the connection to what sounded like his beleaguered travel agent. But as soon as his options were clearly exhausted, his mood changed like the weather, and it was fun to eavesdrop on his conversation - even though Herbie graduated from Julliard and I had dropped out of music school myself, it turned out we had one thing in common - it was my first trip to Cuba, too.

It was close to midnight when we finally got underway, and I staggered into my seat next to an elderly light-skinned Cuban couple and their very black-skinned young grandchild. I dozed off into a fitful, cramped sleep, and when I woke up, I smiled warmly at the sight of the old woman, as she showed the girl on her lap the Havana skyline at night out the window. It was only then, in a hallucinatory moment, that I realized the "girl" she was whispering to was really a fancy doll, braided hair, embroidered dress, probably a Christmas present from America for a soon-to-be reunited relative.

The Habana Riviera is a faded hotel on the Malecon in Vedado, the kind of Dean-Martin-gone-to-seed style you remember from bad Matt Helm movies or In Like Flint. Gold-flecked linoleum, wrought iron spiral staircases sweeping up from the center of the lobby and leading nowhere, an Olympic size swimming pool with a three platform diving tower; purple, turquoise, orange and other unimaginable colours dominate the decor. At the check-in desk a mob of just-arrived jazz musicians struggled to get their rooms organized, which, if you'™ve ever spent any time around jazz musicians, you know is a bit like expecting a kindergarten class to fly an airplane.

Suddenly, a vaguely familiar face separated from the pack, carrying the familiar shaped case of an upright bass player. After a brief guessing game, we identified each other. John Weber, a classmate of mine ages ago at the David Bloom School of Jazz on Rush Street in Chicago, was playing bass with the Ronnie Matthews trio as a last minute substitution for the ailing Walter Booker, Jr. I hadn'™t seen John since 1986 when we both left Chicago after the death of our mutual friend and fellow jazz quintet member Tim Alcock, who passed away from cancer at the young age of 26. I discovered that John had moved to New York and gone on to become a gigging jazz musician, scraping together a freelance living, touring the world through jazz festivals, and I was made to consider the path not taken in my own life, and I envied his pursuit of la vida musica.

TOMORROW: Part 3 of my 2000 Havana Diary

william

URGENT ACTION:

As the subject of this week's blog is Cuba, it is only fitting that I share with you all these appeals for help from our friend Sandra Levinson and the Center for Cuban Studies in New York City. The recent hurricanes have been devastating to the island, and Sandra offers us all a way to help with direct humanitarian aid, something the U.S. government sadly refuses to do.

Havana Diary

Welcome back!

I've written a fair bit about Chicago in these posts. As my hometown it has a special place in my heart, and I am sure to revisit it often, in memory, and in my writings here.

But as you can see from the images in the banner to this blog, the other defining corner of my own personal geography has been Cuba, Havana in particular, so I feel it is high time that I share some of my experiences there with you as well.

In December of 2000, the chads were still hanging precariously in Florida, Castro was ironically volunteering to send election monitors to assist in our democratic process, and the downward spiral from that stolen election to the fall of the Twin Towers to the Shock and Awe doctrine of the Bush years that has rocked us from Baghdad to Wall Street was not yet even a mote in our collective eye.

It was in that heady environment of the last months of the Clinton presidency that travel to Cuba, while still extremely restricted by the shameful and anti-human embargo that has been our policy towards that island for the last 50 years, was still relatively easy.

It was on my first trip then that I met the woman who later became my wife, the artist Elsa Mora. I wrote a diary of my adventure back at that time.

It's strange reading it again now, 8 years and two children later. My grandmother is no longer with us, but in some ways thinking about her life then was the inspiration for my journey and the starting point for my....

Havana Diary

Every family has their own myths, stories passed down and retold countless times, embroidered to fit the occasion and the listener. One of ours involves my grandmother, Florence Horberg, who is either 99 (according to my Aunt) or 101 (according to my Dad). If Florence knows, she’s not telling, so let’s split the difference and call her 100 in the year 2000, a nice symmetrical shape for a 20th Century life. I was born in 1959, and for my whole life, I never saw my Grandmother travel, anywhere, at any time. She spent her days within a bus ride of her apartment at 555 Cornelia, on the near north side of Chicago, where she still lives today. I guess it’s not so unusual for a person of her generation to have a different view of the world, of a person’s place in the world, a deeper understanding of the meaning of security or home that accrues to a survivor of the great depression. But her story had a more unique twist, one that filled my imagination as I flew down from New York City to Miami, on my way to Havana, Cuba for the 2000 Habana Jazz Festival.

It seems my grandmother did take one trip in her adult life, a grand adventure that ended so surprisingly for her that she never ventured forth into the world again. She was a young widow; my grandfather died years before I was born, when my father was only 14. Rumour had it he was a dye-in-the-wool gambler who squandered whatever meagre income the family had, so his absence may have stanched the negative family cash flow, even if it left my grandmother as the sole breadwinner and parent to my Dad and my Aunt. She worked hard her whole life, until she was at least 75 or 80, as the executive secretary to a man who ran the Universal Cable and Wire business. She never remarried, in fact never met another man, as she was married to her job, slavishly loyal to her boss, and frugally managed to raise two children without any help. So it must have been an amazing thing when she took her nose away from the grindstone, that Christmas of 1958, and took the first and last vacation of her life, a trip to the Riviera Hotel in Havana, Cuba, the place Meyer Lansky built.

One can only imagine the glamour and ambience of Havana at that time and place, sharkskin suits and turquoise tail-finned Pontiacs and rum yellow Cadillacs, mango and tan guyabaras and two-toned shoes, Perez Prado and the floor show at the Copacabana, Battista and gambling casinos and mojitos and Ernest Hemingway at the Floridita and mambos and rumbas and sambas and the real Buena Vista Social Club.

One can only imagine my Jewish grandmother, alone in this swirl of colour and music and dance, a frozen heart melting in the tropical heat, a hibernating creature stepping out of the cave after a sleep of years, a flower bud opening it’s petals after seasons away from the light - was the future opening up for her? Would she allow herself to reconnect with the pleasures of the world, or, god forbid, of the flesh? We’ll never know, and she never found out, what changes a week in the blazing sun of the Malecon may have wrought on her hard life, for it was only a few days after her arrival there that she collided with another event that was to change the lives of so many people, in fact to reshape the political map of much of the second half of the twentieth century. For at that moment, Che Guevara, Fidel Castro and the rest of his revolutionary guerrillas were on the outskirts of the city, fighting the decisive battle that would sweep Battista from power and overturn the nation. Picture this 59 year old woman, still elegant, in the lobby of the Riviera or the Nacional or the Presidente, waiting for the tour bus to the floor show at the Copa, when the first bearded soldiers marched in, bandoliers slung across each shoulder, machine gun held high, shouting “Viva La Revolucion”. Cuba Libre! This image, like a snap shot, or a still frame frozen from a Technicolor 50’s movie, “Florence Horberg meets Che Guevara” danced in my mind as my flight began it’s descent into Miami International Airport.

TOMORROW: More of my Havana Diary from 2000!

william