I recently returned from Havana and a screening of "Disconnect" at the 35th Festival of Latin American Cinema.
It was a fascinating trip, as I was able to meet and talk with local and international filmmakers and producers, as well as talk to the audience after the screening.
In a country where most of the population has limited access to the internet, this cautionary tale about the effect of technology on human communication and interaction was both eye-opening and provocative, and lead to some good conversations.
I took the opportunity of a walk around old Havana to search out some old Cuban sheet music and scored when one vendor dug into his cardboard box and came out with some fragile and frayed and water-stained old paper with the lost beautiful notes of Ernesto Lecuona, Emilio Diaz, Nita Almansa and others.
For the musicians out there, and for others who just appreciate the vintage design of these rare papers, I wanted to share them with you here:
This last song was autographed by the great Cuban singer, bandleader and composer Miguelito Valdes. My wife loosely translated the inscription as "As I promised, I am sending this song and wishing you great success and much more to come. This won't be the only one!"
The island of Cuba has produced some great baseball players over the years.
Minnie Minoso. Tony Oliva. Cookie Rojas. Louis Tiant.
The trick is to spot talent young and nurture it.
Proudly displaying her Cuban heritage, second baseman Natalie Mora made her t-ball debut last night for the Amazing Mets.
As a lifelong White Sox fan, it was a little hard for me to find myself rooting for the New York organization of Marvelous Marv Thornberry. But blood is thicker than water, as they say, and its time for me to learn the Mets fight song!
Louis Aparicio was from Venezuela, but he was one of the greatest shortstops in baseball history when he played for the White Sox back in the '50's and '60's at the old Comiskey Park.
Maybe Natalie, aka Louisa Aparicio around our house, will pick up her own Golden Glove one day?
In 1979, Albert Berger and I took a lease on the Sandburg Theatre on the Near North side of Chicago, and reopened it as a repertory cinema showing classic films in double-features that changed three times a week. We learned the history of the theatre, which had previously been owned and operated as the Playboy Cinema in the 1970's, and before that as the Surf, and had its origins as a vaudeville theatre going all the way back to the 1920's.
The Sandburg was torn down in the early '80's to make way for a Walgreen's drug store which still operates on that site.
Now there is a website that catalogues and provides a forum for information about old movie theatres around the country and around the world and efforts to save them.
Cinema Treasures is where I found a list of Havana's old deco movie palaces, and which ones are still open and operating today.
Cine 23 y 12, the Riviera, La Rampa,and el Yara are colorful houses of cinema that have survived to the present day.
Cine San Francisco, above, looks like it could be ready for a restoration and refurbishment. Its architectural facade certainly gives hint of its former splendor.
Maybe it will reopen one day and be a home to a Cinematheque for classic Latin American films - a kind of Sandburg Theatre for the rich heritage of Cuban, Mexican, Brazilian, Argentinian and other home grown cinemas of the South?
A nice, air-conditioned Friday night screening of Tomas Gutierrez Alea's "Memories of Underdevelopment" in a restored 35mm print on the silver screen?
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.
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"!!!!
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
