21 Nov 2014

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 otherwe 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.