April 2011

It was still dark out the next morning when we came out of the Parque Central carrying our bags and the rod cases to get on the bus that goes to Jucaro. Many men were already inside the bus, sleeping, and others were milling around the street making sure everything was properly loaded, the fishing cases resting on top of the luggage in the belly of the bus instead of on the bottom. Nick got on the bus to save a spot for Bobby, and Fletch went back inside the hotel to get a couple of bottles of water to take with us. When I came out the bus was crowded. Thick headed men with stale breath were sprawled across the seats in front, slumped like drunks. The only open seats were far in the back, near the restroom, which smelled heavily of urine. Hardy got on the bus and sat in a seat across from the restroom. “You know what they say,” he said, “if you’ve got diarrhea or want to meet people who do, sit next to the restroom on a bus.”

It was not yet four in the morning yet I could see inside the hotel that already a few people were having breakfast. The sight of them buttering their toast and pouring coffee from a white porcelain pot made me hungry. Fletch and his son, Nick, had eaten breakfast in the older part of the hotel before four and when Nick got on the bus he offered me a hard roll and two dry cookies he’d stuffed in his shirt pocket. I took them. The bus driver climbed on and with a hiss the door closed and we drove slowly down the block and around to the old entrance of the Parque Central where a handful of men were shivering in the shadows of the arcade, rubbing their arms to stay warm. While their luggage was loaded and they jockeyed for seats, sometimes waking up one of the thick-chested men taking up two places in the front of the bus, Hardy and Nick went back into the hotel to grab cold ham and cheese sandwiches from the table that had been set up in the lobby for early breakfast. Nick handed me two of the hard roll sandwiches and a bottle of water and I ate slowly as the bus lumbered through the empty streets of the still-slumbering city.

There was much wheezing and coughing and snoring in the dark bus. Hardy had fallen asleep before we’d even gotten out of Havana and Bobby and Nick were slumped against each other, their mouths open, their heads thrown back as if they’d had their throats slit. I couldn’t sleep. I could never sleep on a bus. I got my iPod and put on my headphones and listened to the three Tibetan bells signaling the beginning of a mindful meditation session and closed my eyes paying attention to the breathing from my belly. If I could not sleep at least I could meditate, which for me was almost as good.

Shortly after the sun came up the bus stopped at a little roadside restaurant where you could order a coffee and use the restroom. The thick men in the front of the bus, who looked like Russians to me, turned out to be Finns, which is pretty much the same thing. They bought bottles of rum and liters of the sweet, oily-tasting Cuban coke and when they got back on the bus, they started passing around clear plastic cups and making Cuba Libres though it was not yet eight. The Finns drank quickly, refilling their cups with more rum, sometimes dispensing with the coke, sometimes adding the odd-tasting Cuban orange drink instead. With each downed drink, their thick Slavic speech got louder. They began to stand up in the aisle, as if they were in a bar, laughing, shouting, sticking fingers as thick as sausages into each other’s chests. They also started using the restroom in the back of the bus on a constant basis, one wobbling down the aisle towards the back, their hands reaching out in front of them for chair or shoulder or whatever was available to keep them upright, as another came back. The toilet was used so much that it jammed yet still the Finns continued to squeeze their thick bodies into the small closet. At one point, our guide, Antonio, went into the toilet and saw that the bowl was sloshing yellow urine over the walls and floor and disgustedly got towels to clean it up. The Finn who passed him by on his way back to his seat jovially said, “Well, at least it’s only piss,” and all his compatriots laughed.

The Finns continued to drink. It was amazing how much they could drink so early in the morning. Bottle after bottle of rum came down from the luggage racks above the seats and when that ran out, cans of Cristal appeared from a large cooler in the front. The drive from Havana to the port town of Jucaro, where the boats were waiting for us, took over five hours and the Finns drank right up until the moment we pulled up to the desolate harbor.

The crews for the three boats waiting to take us out to the Jardines were milling about along the harbor along with several military officers, Cuban security officials, and the port authorities. I immediately spotted my old friend, Keko, whose real name is Jesus, and he came up to me, took the luggage out of my hands, and said, “David, my friend, how are you?” I call Keko the Cuban Buddha because he is squat and dark as a hazel nut and very serene. He is also the finest guide in the Jardines. Along with Keko was Jimmy, our other favorite guide, and Idelvis, who we called Elvis, the boat’s engineer and dive master. The crew, including Jorge, a thick-muscled young man with brilliant white teeth and an ear-to-ear smile who I immediately took to be the boat’s spy (there is always one), quickly gathered our duffels and rod cases and dragged them up the gangplank of the Avalon I and within minutes we were pulling out of the harbor, past the derelict fishing boats and crumbling wharf, out into the smooth, cerulean waters south of Cuba towards the archipelago.

As it turned out John Hefferman could not go to Cuba. He had an illness—or maybe someone in his family was ill, I don’t know. So Bobby Gold came. We flew into Cancun, Fletch, Nick, and Greg arriving from L.A. and Bobby from New York. Hardy was already in Havana having flown in from London. We were supposed to have an early flight from Cancun to Havana but there was some problem with the old Russian YAK-42D—perhaps an engine had fallen off or they didn’t have the fuel; it would not surprise me—and in the end it was midnight before our taxi found its way down the dark deserted streets of La Habana Vieja to the Parque Central.

In the morning it was bright and muggy, and they were sprinkling the Paseo del Prado, the wide boulevard lined with a thick canopy of trees and stone benches that runs down to the Malecón. Already, so early in the morning, it was very hot on the streets surrounding the Capitolio and almost as hot in the shade of the Parque de la Fraternidad where the old men argue over who is the best Cuban pitcher of all time, Luis Padron or Aroldis “El Ciclón” Chapman. We walked through the park to the Partagás cigar factory. The manager of the cigar shop, Abel Expósito Díaz, who usually sold us our cigars and then invited us into the dark VIP room in the back where he would pour us two-fingers each of dark Havana rum and invite us to smoke a Montecristo No. 4, Che’s favorite, on the house, was not there. Hardy bought a box of Cohibas and another of Montecristos, as did Fletch and Greg, and then we were invited into the dark back room with its framed photos on the wall of Fidel and Raul and Oliver Stone and even Steven Spielberg.

We went out into the street again where the men approached us offering to sell us cigars, the real things, they said, for very cheap. These were not the real things. They were cheap tobacco and sometimes they were not even tobacco at all but maybe dried banana skins and would not draw well and tasted of the bottom of a dirty shoe. We took a look at the Baroque Catedral de San Cristóbal where women in Colonial dresses sided up to us and wrapped their arms around our waist and kissed us on the cheek, leaving thick, waxy imprints of their lips before asking for five pesos. Everyone got a kiss so in the end the mahogany-colored women got thirty pesos for their unwanted besos, about the same as what a good cigar roller at Partagás makes in a month. There is no explanation for this. It is just the way it is in Cuba.

Then we went up and down several small side streets looking for La Bodeguita del Medio where Hemingway used to come when he was done working in the morning to drink his mojitos in the afternoon. Hardy thought he knew the way but it only led us back toward the plaza. After awhile I stopped a man selling roasted peanuts wrapped in a paper cone and asked him how to find La Bodeguita.

La Bodeguita is a very mediocre bar at best. It is cramped and crowded with tourists even in the morning and the mojitos are weak and overpriced. If you want a mojito you go to Los Hermanos or even El Templete. Still, it is a legendary bar, a place one always goes to when one is in Havana and we have always stepped inside to quickly down at least one mojito, in honor of Hem, even if none of us thought very much of it. But this day, more than usual, the bar was so busy that they had stopped allowing tourists inside and a line formed in front of the shuttered windows of the bar down the street. We decided to walk on, ending up at the Café Taberna on Plaza Vieja. It was hot, but the café had a cool, fresh smell and it was pleasant sitting at a long wooden table with all the hurricane windows open. A breeze started to blow, and you could feel that the air came from the sea. There were pigeons out in the square, and the buildings around the plaza were yellow, a sun-baked color, and I did not want to leave the café. There was a good son band playing, a blind old-man working the güiro, stroking the dry gourd with a small stick, and a young boy no more than 13 or 14 slapping a leather tumbadora almost as tall as him. Upstairs, over the band, a young man and woman practiced their salsa moves while the band played “Chan Chan.”

We ordered a round of Cristal. We matched and I think Fletcher paid for the beers, and then we ordered another round. The food is not very good here but the food in Havana, in general, is not very good so it did not matter. We ordered what you would order at any of the standard restaurants in the old town: rice with beans and a chicken dish and something with seafood. It did not matter what you ordered for it all tasted the same. You did not come to Café Taberna for the food; you came for the music and the cold beer and to avoid the heat of the day.

We walked back to the hotel, passing by the Floridita. We went inside where the bartenders wear red bow ties and red aprons and there is a large faded mural on the wall of the way the Havana harbor looked back when the country belonged to Spain and a bronze bust of Hemingway in the corner, where he always sat, looking like he is either bored or thinking about landing a right hook against the chin of a provoking tourist who has just told him that he thinks Hem is a macho, Jew-hating misogynist. We were too tired and it was too hot to drink and besides none of us really like daiquiris so we just patted Papa on the head, in respect, and walked back to the Parque Central to take long naps during the heat of the afternoon.