Alfredo de Mello's comments on this post at end of this article.

Cuba 2000

By Ben Antao

Date: Wed May 10, 2000 10:34 pm

Cuba 2000 ( Part 1 of 3 )

By Ben Antao

Inside the 18th century-built Cathedral of Immaculate Conception in downtown old Havana are two imposing granite and marble pulpits, the kind that Catholics used to see in churches of the pre-Vatican II era.  A white stole bearing the emblem of the cross and Eucharist in gold was hung over them.

After taking a picture, I stood in the pew nearby to replace the cartridge. Suddenly I felt a gentle tap on my right shoulder. I turned around and saw a guard in khaki uniform point to my headgear. “Please, senor,” he said.  A thin dark man, in his thirties at the most, he showed kindly eyes and a solicitous face.

Immediately I took off the terracotta-toned cap I was wearing and he moved away. There were, maybe, a dozen or so visitors inside, at that hour of three in the afternoon. I looked down at the inscription West Side Story above the visor of my cap, which I had bought last summer at the Stratford Festival in London, Ontario, and waited for my wife who had lingered at the front portal.

It was an unusual request, I thought, to be asked not to wear a hat, especially in a church kept open for tourists. I recalled similar visits in the past to St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome, the Westminster Abbey in London, and the Church of St. John the Divine in New York. Many tourists had kept their hats on while looking around the interiors of these august historic edifices. And many times I had spotted visitors donning hats inside the St. Michael’s Cathedral in Toronto.

The strangeness of the request and the irony behind it in a country like Cuba was, to say the least, most interesting.

When Marinella came to where I was standing, she asked me for some money to give to the old beggar woman sitting on the top step outside the door. I gave her a dollar but told her to give it to the man with the amputated leg instead, since I had already given alms to the beggar woman on my way in.

A touch of irony seized me again to note that the Jesuits who built the cathedral of coral stone facade in 1755 were expelled from the island in the 1780’s. Outside the large square, tables were set up with white cloth canopies where throngs of Cubans and visitors sat, ate, chatted, and whiled away the afternoon in the warmth of the first week of January.

From here we wended our way through the narrow lane to La Bodeguita Del Medio, the bar where Ernest Hemingway and John Dos Passos used to drink in the fifties. Made famous by the Hemingway presence, this watering hole is a small and greasy space with a black wrought iron railing fronting the lane and a wall covered with old newspaper clippings and photographs of the American author of The Old Man and the Sea and his several drinking buddies. The unkempt bar was crowded when I went in and had my picture taken near the wall. Cigar and cigarette smoke and rum smell permeated its tight enclosure and enhanced the nauseating ambience.

Our guide said that Hemingway used to live in a hotel nearby called Hotel Ambos Mundos and showed us the place. On the top floor of this hotel, he said, the author’s room and bar are kept open for tourists. We decided to pass this tourist promotion. As one who has read Hemingway and been charmed by the simplicity of his style, it never ceases to amaze me how Hemingway could write so well after all the drinking he did during the day and night. One suspects that his editor at Scribners had polished his prose. Indeed, such a suggestion seems palpable after reading his biography, Papa Hemingway.

Earlier, we had walked through the historical center of the city, stopped at the museum, the Revolution Square and visited the new Havana. Outside the Museo de la Revolucion was displayed the Soviet tank used by Fidel Castro during the Bay of Pigs invasion by the US troops in April 1961. The inscription on the brass plate mounted on the pedestal proclaims: SAU-100
Soviet tank used by Fidel Castro to sink the “Houston” warship equipped by the CIA for mercenary invasion of April 1961 in the Bay of Pigs.

Fidel Castro who led the revolution and freed the island from the Fulgencio Batista regime on January 1, 1959 and has been president ever since of this island republic of 11 million is not the only hero of the Cuban people. Poet Jose Marti and Che Guevara are also given prominence in the Havana history and culture.

Jose Marti was the poet of the first revolution that began on January 28, 1865 and his statue in the historic center of old Havana is surrounded by 28
royal palms, the stately and elegant state tree of Cuba. Although Marti died in 1895 during the second revolution, his memory lives in the ever popular and haunting song Guantanamera, guajira guantanamera written by him and made famous by the American folksinger Pete Seegar in 1967.

Marti and Che Guevara, the Bolivian-born revolutionary who fought alongside with Castro, dominate the vast expanse of the Revolutionary Square in new Havana, the capital city of 2.4 million. A magnificent white
larger than life marble statue of the poet sits solemnly in front of the huge cloud-piercing revolution tower. Across the wide avenue from this tower on the other side looms the giant outline in black of the face of Che Guevara and his celebrated salute Hosta la victorie siempre (I shall see you forever in victory.)


Cuba by Ben Antao continues overleaf

Cuba - part 2 of 3

Cuba - part 3 0f 3