Havana

Fletch and Nick with our tour guide at the Partagas cigar factory. Photo by David Lansing.

As I said, in Havana everything is always the same; everything is always different. We decided to take a tour of the cigar factory which we had not done in five years. Back then, you could take your camera; this year you had to go to a coat-check room and store your camera. I asked our guide about this and she said that with “special consideration” you could take pictures. I took this to mean that you needed to pay someone. For a country that hates capitalism the government participates in a great number of capitalistic enterprises.

Yet the very fact that everyone who works here, from the director of the cigar store to the portly man in a Panama hat who does nothing but open and close the door for visitors to the factory, is protected by the state means that insolence and derision are part of the uniform for anyone in the so-called service industries. Take, for instance, our guide at the Partagás factory, Maria. The first thing she did was ask us where we were from. When we told her the U.S., she rolled her eyes and said, “Oh, god. Americans. I have a headache already and they give me Americans.”

I asked her what was wrong with Americans. “You talk too much,” she said. “You talk more than old women. It gives me a headache.” It just so happened that as she was telling me this, Hardy and Fletch were standing at the rear of our little tour group having a private conversation. Maria stared at them as if she were an exasperated grade school teacher. “This is what I mean,” she said to our group which included four Russians. She worked her hand in the air like a shadow puppet. “Talk, talk, talk. They never shut up, these Americans.”

Then Maria gave us the ground rules for our tour: Do not go anywhere she did not go. Do not talk to the workers. And, most importantly, do not try and buy any cigars from the rollers. “If you try to buy a cigar, then the tour is over. Immediately. Understand?”

This was an odd restriction as we soon found out when we reached the top floor of the factory. This is the room where fifty or so cigar rollers sit at long tables side-by-side rolling the Cohibas and Montecristos that are for sale in the cigar store downstairs. When I asked Maria what happened to a roller who tried to sell a cigar to someone like me, she said dismissively, “They would be fired, of course.” Yet we weren’t in the room for two minutes before one of the rollers propositioned us to buy his cigars. “Good price,” he whispered while Maria’s back was turned. And he wasn’t the only one. Four or five other rollers, both men and women, offered to sell us cigars. And none of them seemed particularly worried that they might get caught doing it. I was tempted to buy some. Just to see what Maria would do. But then again, maybe she wasn’t bluffing. And the poor bastard would be fired. The possibility of that was enough to keep me from causing any trouble. Which is probably what Maria had in mind when she laid out the rules.

The funny thing was that as rude and obnoxious as Maria was during the tour, the minute it ended and Fletch handed her a $20 tip—or about a month’s salary for her—she suddenly became very pleasant. She said she loved Americans. “God bless America.” And then she suggested that we take some photos with her. Which we did. With her wrapping her arms around the boys and grinning as if she were the winner of the Miss Cuba contest. Amazing what a little dinero can do.

Photo inside Partagas VIP room by Nick Fletcher.

Every year it is the same here in Havana; every year it is different. Always we start off by going to the Partagás factory to buy cigars. Every year we have met the director of the cigar shop on the ground floor, Abel Expósito Diaz, a tall, handsome man who will cradle a box of Cohibas in his hands as if it were a child. Always Abel comes over to us on the sales floor and says, “So you are back in Cuba. Welcome, welcome.” And then he will fish out a small tarnished bronze key from his pants pocket and open a locked drawer behind the counter and grab a handful of cigars that have no bands, no name. These are specially rolled cigars, something that you cannot buy, and he will dole out one to each of us, smiling and looking hard in your eyes as he slips it to you, as if he were divvying up the loot from an especially sophisticated bank heist that he had orchestrated.

While it is encouraged to smoke cigars in Partagas it is not polite to smoke these particular cigars on the sales floor. It would be like sipping Cristal at a wine tasting while everyone else was getting tiny pours of an Australian merlot. So Abel will come out from behind the counter and say, “Come on, my friends. Come with me,” and lead us to the special room in the back with the walk-in glass humidor and the well-worn leather armchairs and the wood paneled walls with photos of Fidel and Raul and even Che. Abel will invite us to sit down and he will light our cigars while a waiter pours us glasses of aged rum and Abel will ask us how we like these cigars and if we think Havana has changed since we were last here, and we will ask him about his family.

This is what we have done almost every year since our first trip five years ago, but as I say, everything is the same and yet everything is different and this year there is no Abel and when I inquire about him in the cigar shop the young clerk will shrug and feign that he has never heard the name although I do not believe him. So without Abel and without an invitation, we go into the VIP smoking room anyway, almost daring one of the young salesmen to stop us or ask us what we are doing. The room is exactly the same as it was the last time we were here and yet it is completely different. On our last visit, the room was crowded with buyers from Japan and Germany and France and the smoke was so thick that Abel immediately turned on an industrial fan. This time there was no smoke and no clients; the room was empty. I had never seen it empty before. It looked the way a house does the morning after a particularly raucous party when the harsh light of day streams in and everything that had looked romantic and convivial in the candle-lit room now simply looks tired and threadbare.

We slipped into the walk-in humidor and examined the stacked boxes of Montecristos and Cohibas and then Hardy pulled out a color Xerox of a story I’d written about us at Partagas that also had a photo of him blowing smoke directly at the camera. He slipped the article and the photo between two framed photos hanging on the wall and we all admired the addition to the gallery and then someone came into the room and told us that the tour of the cigar factory above us, which we had already paid for, was about to begin so we hurried out of the shop, wondering if it would be possible that the story and photo of Hardy would still be pinned to the wall if we returned next year while knowing full well that it would not.

The bar at the Parque Central in Havana. Photo by David Lansing.

We were scheduled to get into Havana from Cancun in the late afternoon but when we checked in to Cubana Airlines they told us our flight was delayed for three hours. There are only two things to do at the Cancun airport: eat and drink. I didn’t feel like doing either. I read a Sunday NY Times magazine that I had brought with me and then I found a quiet corner of the airport and meditated for half an hour and then I fell asleep. When I woke up, it was time to board the flight. I walked up to the counter and the agent said the flight was delayed another hour. I asked her what the problem was. She shrugged and said, “It is a very old plane–usted entiende?—and it comes from Cuba.” Then she shrugged again.

As it turned out the flight was delayed several more times after that and we ended up spending nine hours at the Cancun airport. I had never flown Cubana airlines before. In the past we always flew Mexicana but they had gone out of business last year and now there was only Cubana. The plane was a YAK-42D, a Russian plane designed for landing on short runways known for major mechanical problems. The Russians sold Cuba four of the planes in the early 1990s. This was one of them. All of the signage in the plane was in Russian and some of the seats were broken and had yellow tape across them and when we took off the plane shook so violently that several overhead bins opened up spilling their contents.

I don’t normally think about planes when I am on them and couldn’t tell you the difference between a Boeing 707 and a 727, but last week there was an incident where a Southwest 737 bound for Los Angeles had part of its roof ripped off and lost decompression and had to make an emergency landing in Yuma, Arizona. They said the problem was that the plane was 15 years old and had developed stress cracks. And here I was flying in a Russian plane much older that was known for having vibration problems. Still, what could you do?

We landed a little after 11 that night and after gathering up our luggage and clearing Customs, went out into the greeting hall where Antonio, a representative for Avalon, the Venezuela-based company that has the fishing concession in the Jardines de La Reina, was waiting for us. To be honest, we were all a little crabby at this point. In addition to the nine hour plane delay, Fletch had received a text message in Cancun telling him that we would not be staying at the Saratoga in Havana where we’d stayed the last time. There had been some mix-up in the reservations and we would be going to the Parque Central where we’d stayed three years ago. There was nothing wrong with the Parque. And, like the Saratoga, it was right in the middle of Havana near the Capitolio, but it was not as nice or as modern as the Saratoga and, anyway, Fletch had paid an extra $100 a night for each of us to stay at the Saratoga.

But Antonio, who looks like a young Antonio Banderas and whose father used to train Cuban spies to work in foreign countries, told us not to worry. We would stay in the Saratoga when we returned to Havana after our week of fishing, plus he had some other good news for us: We had been upgraded from the Halcon to their newest boat, Avalon I. We had stayed on Halcon for three years running and knew nothing about the Avalon but Antonio assured us we would like it. So we climbed into a large white van waiting for us and drove into Havana. It is always startling to drive into Havana late at night because the streets are always empty. It was not yet midnight yet there were no lights, few cars, and only a few people walking around the city. Here is a city known for its music, its rum, and its hookers yet it is dead by midnight.

As it turned out, we were fortunate to get rooms at the Parque Central instead of Saratoga. They had built a new wing of the hotel which is where our rooms were. Greg and I shared a suite that was as large and lavishly furnished as something in the Ritz. Fletch, who had a room to himself, got two bedrooms and two bathrooms. All the rooms were nicer than anything we’d had at the Saratoga. Much nicer. We had a drink down in the bar after midnight. There were a couple of hookers in the bar. One was an attractive blond sitting at a table by herself. She turned her chair to face us directly and when that didn’t work, she picked up her drink and moved to a stool at the end of the bar right beside where we were sitting on chairs in the lounge. Cameron and Nick had never seen hookers so overt in a nice hotel and kept asking us questions about them. After awhile, Cameron started calling them “snookers.” I rather liked that. They were like fish following the bait or perhaps it was the other way around and we were the fish and they were the bait. In any case, there was this game that they played where they’d ignore you completely for five or ten minutes and then turn and stare hard at you and maybe uncross their legs or light a cigarette and if you didn’t respond, they’d turn away, annoyed. Then ten minutes later, they’d start the whole routine all over again. Nothing was said and they didn’t approach us. It was more like a dance where they led. After about an hour of this, some Russians came in and the snookers got up from the bar and sat at a table close to the Russians. It took only a few minutes before one of the Russians got up, went over to the table with the snookers, bent down and said something, and a few minutes later the four Russian men picked up their drinks and joined the snookers. I’m sure they had a wonderful evening.

That was fun. The whole The Sun Also Rises Over Cuba thing. See, a young friend of mine from NYC was part of a boy’s trip to Cuba with me and four other guys. He went to El Floridita and drank a daiquiri next to the bronze Hemingway statue; he learned to play the 3-stringed tres guitar at La Terraza, the elegant little café in Cojímar where Papa hung with the fishermen, listening to the stories that eventually became The Old Man and the Sea; and he took a 50s-era Ford Fairlane up to Finca La Vigía where he saw the epic kudu that the author wrote about in Green Hills of Africa. In short, he was immersed in the whole Hemingway mystique. So much so that on our boat in the Jardines de La Reina, he read The Sun Also Rises. Which he didn’t like.

“I just don’t get what he’s trying to do here,” he told me when we discussed it one afternoon while fly-fishing for bonefish. “It just seems antiquated. And I don’t understand why he writes the way he does.”

I explained to him about Hem’s clean, crisp writing, free of adjectives and adverbs, and how space was important to him and why the things he left out of a story were often more important than what he put into a story. But that just confused him even more. So I made a deal with him. I told him that I would take some of the experiences we were having in Havana and on our fishing boat, Avalon I, and write them the way Hemingway would have. Perhaps if he could see how I used the language in a contemporary setting, it would make more sense to him, I thought.

That’s what I’ve been doing for the last two weeks. And truth is, I could have done it for another two or three weeks; it was great fun for me. But enough is enough. It’s time to get on with the real telling of what happened to us in Cuba, which I will begin on Monday.

So, did my young friend appreciate Hemingway’s masterpiece more after my little literary attempt? Isn’t it pretty to think so.

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.