The
sun is making an effort this morning, but the skies are threatening more rain.
Ricardo
and I meet at 9:30 to head into Habana Vieja: we both have sights to see and regalos to buy. Buying gifts from Cuba
feels to me more than indulging in tourist kitsch; anything I bring back home
from la isla will feel like a
cultural artifact.
We
take a bus—I don’t know that I’d be brave enough to figure out the bus system
in Havana without Ricardo’s help, and mira,
it’s much cheaper: one Cuban peso covers both of us, with change not even
worth accepting; a taxi costs CUC$5-6—to Centro Habana. El Capitolio Nacional
is sheathed in scaffolding, and we can’t enter, but can still appreciate the
building’s majesty from the street. It’s easily comparable to (and, in fact,
slightly taller than) the US Capitol Building; it used to serve as the Cuban
Congress, but now houses the Cuban Academy of Sciences and the National Library
of Sciences and Technology. We snap a few photos, then head for La Calle
Obispo, one of Habana Vieja’s main thoroughfares: narrow and devoid of cars,
and rife with bookstores, art galleries, and, naturally, tourists. Pero al final, utterly enchanting. We step first into a bookstore, where I pick up two slim volumes of poems by Guillén.
 |
| Obispo |
Ricardo
stops at a food counter for a snack—a traditional Cuban pork sandwich, and,
what the hell, when in Rome Havana… It’s damn tasty, and costs just 10
pesos (moneda nacional).
After
Ricardo picks up some books at Fayad Jamás, a much newer bookstore on Obispo, our
next stop is the lindísima Plaza
Vieja...
...but this is really just a cursory, requisite stop on the way to what I’m really
after: the Taller de Serigrafía René Portocarrero, a studio shared by young
Cuban painters and printmakers, and exhibiting and selling modern Cuban art.
Una obra de arte Cubano is the souvenir
I truly want, and I’m looking for something for Phil and Kristen too. Looking
through the stacks of prints for the one I want is an equally heady thrill to
my visit to the arte Cubano building
of the Museo de Bellas Artes yesterday. I walk out, relieved of CUC$100, with
two Wilfredo Lam prints and one that I’ve absolutely fallen in love with by
Ernesto Garcia Peña.
After
stopping at a few more shops and wandering more of the Old City, the heat and
humidity have caught up with us. Ricardo wants a mojito, and I won’t say no to
a glass of rum, so we duck into a tiny little watering hole. It’s a little
after 12 noon.
From
there, we’re off to El Centro Cultural Antiguos Almacenes de Deposito San José,
a dizzying open-air flea market, housed in an old shipping warehouse along the
waterfront, dealing in arts and crafts, t-shirts, cigars, and miscellaneous
kitsch. Each merchant jockeys for your attention as you pass. Everyone here—vale, everyone in Cuba—thinks I’m
Chinese (Psst, psst, ¡oye chino! Ni
hao!). Ricardo’s looking for a muñequa
for his mother. My haul: a Havana Club t-shirt for Dad, another sporting the
Industriales logo (Havana’s baseball team) for my brother, a couple of cigars
that I’m gonna figure out a way to get to Elise and Nick, and one for myself.
“Check
your socialist ideals at the door,” says Lonely
Planet. They’re talking about the feria,
but it could equally well apply to our entire morning and early afternoon.
It feels a bit like we went shopping and, incidentally, saw a beautiful city
along the way. It’s started drizzling, and I’m worried about keeping my Garcia Peña safe, and Ricardo has an appointment at La Casa
de las Americas at 4:00. Back to Vedado.
* * *
Without
Cuban pesos or the benefit of Ricardo’s Spanish and Latin American street
smarts, I pay CUC$5 for a taxi back to El Centro for the 4:00 concert at El
Palacio del Teatro Lírico Nacional. We’ve been spared yet more heavy rains; the
weather by now is clear, and the building feels marginally less grungy. It’s a
mercifully shorter program than yesterday afternoon’s, comprising chamber music
all by Cuban composers. The first two pieces are by Waldo Lavaut Nazario: a duo
for flute and piano (with the composer at the keys), and Callejón de un solo caño (whose title, I imagine, is lost in
translation: Alley of a single faucet? My Spanish, claro, has a long way to go yet), for four flutes—una obra muy sencilla, but irresistibly
charming, and played with impressive conviction by the Grupo Flautas Cardinales
(four young women—pues, casi todos los músicos
que yo he encontrado esta semana son muy jóvenes). But the highlight of the
afternoon is Leo Brouwer’s lunatic Fourth String Quartet, played by the
Cuarteto de cuerdas Amadeo Roldán, Leo Pérez’s quartet.
These
guys are good. Borromeo good? Claro que
no. Amphion, Attacca good? Tampoco. But
the performance drives home a realization that’s dawned on me gradually this
week, from each concert to the next, especially those featuring the younger
Cuban players—and it’s maybe not hyperbolic to say has changed my entire
perspective on music. And this will sound sacrilegious to my intensely driven
colleagues back home, but: artistic excellence isn’t everything. It is, of
course, to be striven for at all times, and that’s no less true for anyone
here. But there’s something else to this quartet’s playing that’s very special,
and impossible to put into words. Mira, they’ve
got incredible chops, for sure. (In particular, the second violinist, William
Roblejo, has a hypervirtuosic solo in the Brouwer quartet that’s closer to
Dreamtheater than Haydn.) They don’t sound
great—and this, I suspect, has as much to do with not having very good
instruments (I don’t ask). It’s a performance that, were Karen and I to hear in
New York—where we recently had the three aforementioned quartets, plus the
Emerson, each give concerts within one
week of each other—we would
probably walk home dissatisfied. But this afternoon, para mí, it was riveting. Such conviction—but not just conviction;
such sincere and contagious joy in making music together—but not even just that
either. Vale, I truly can’t describe
it. But there’s something luminous in how this quartet plays that comparison to
even the finest, most sophisticated quartet-playing in the world can’t
extinguish.
* * *
With
time and good weather, I walk to the Basilica for the 6:00 concert and savor
the opportunity to take in more of the Old City. I take Obispo again, and from
there, am thrilled to realize that I can find the Basilica without looking at a
map. I arrive at the Plaza with plenty of time to spare; it’s cool and breezy,
and not crowded at all (and what folks are there are mostly tourists, which I
don’t mind; the din of chino! taxi? ¡Hola,
amigo! ¿De cual país? ¿Es tu primera vez en Cuba? has mercifully subsided,
and I take a moment the just absorb the beauty of the city. The sun is setting
over the muralla. And goddamn, La
Habana is beautiful.
The
first half of the program is given over to a wild spectacle of a performance,
conceived by the Catalan composer Josep Maria Balanyá, directing the Orquesta
de Improvisación del Instituto Superior de Arte: Azul, perfumado, podrido, for voice, piano, violin, flutes, bass
clarinet, bassoon, and two gaitas
colombianas. It’s a huge piece, played entirely without music, with the
ensemble clearly following a pre-conceived structure, but likewise improvising
based on Balanyá’s direction (conducting with his whole body—nay, dancing
before his ensemble, and as compelling to watch as the piece is to listen to).
The piece has a strong Dadaist element to it, and is hyper-theatrical—and, al final, totally thrilling. Each day of
this festival has brought something more impressive than the last, and tonight
is no exception.
After
Balanyá & co.’s unforgettable performance, the Nuevo Ensemble de Segovia
takes the stage again. Between last night and this evening, I have to concede
that this is one of the most badass new music ensembles I’ve ever encountered.
The strongest pieces of their set are Ritorno
in casa by Anna Bofill (what a discovery; quickly becoming one of my
favorite composers) and Cruz López de Rego’s Vital.
After
the concert, Ricardo, Efrén and I stroll Habana Vieja—both of them are leaving
tomorrow—but Efrén heads back to his hotel before long (Stella’s not feeling
well). Ricardo and I park at the Café Paris for some food and hear some more
music. This joint is an unapologetic tourist hang, and you know it right away
from the music, though vale, the band
can play, and their singer is especially baller.
Tonight,
we walk the length of the Malecón back to Vedado (I finally enjoy the cigar I’ve
been looking forward to all week—muy
sabroso), taking in the view, and the equally fascinating people-watching.
We head to La Torre, but are foiled again—lleno.
So we hit Sofia instead, hear some more music, and meet a young Mexican
tourist, Mario, who’s vacationing solo in Havana for a couple of weeks, and
seems determined to befriend (and photograph, and inebriate) everyone in the bar: a group of French tourists, a
party of Venezolanos, even the wait staff.
After
leaving Sofia, the three of us pick up a bottle of Havana Club and head over to
the Malecón. On a Friday night, this has to be one of the most magical places
on earth: young (and not-so-young) Cubanos just hanging out, making music,
fishing, flirting and philosophizing, sharing ron and making merry. The police come by (drinking on the street is
illegal down there too, but that law’s disregarded much more openly than in the
States), and the whole bacchanalian throng relocates en masse up Avenida 23. The communal joie de vivre feels like what I imagine Lollapalooza to have been
like back in the day, when it was still cool and I was too young to go.
I’ll
be home in 48 hours, and I’m ready: I’ve drunk up so much of this
glorious city, and I’m both satisfied and homesick; but I also don’t want this
night in La Habana to end.