Search Salon

- - - - - - - - - - - -

Recently in Salon Travel

This is my home
We clarify ourselves among the foreign, make camp where we'd least expect to.
By Pico Iyer
[02/23/00]

A very foreign life
In Nara, Japan, a universe of connections and contradictions unfolds daily.
By Pico Iyer
[02/22/00]

Vagabonding
Skepticism and salvation in Cyprus
An unorthodox tour of the second and final tomb of Lazarus puts a strange twist into our correspondent's Larnaca layover.
By Rolf Potts
[02/22/00]

Daily Planet
The Great Firewall of China
China installs speed bumps on the information superhighway.
By J.A. Getzlaff
[02/22/00]

The alien home
A globe-wandering writer discovers that home is the most foreign place of all.
By Pico Iyer
[02/19/00]

Complete archives for Travel

- - - - - - - - - - - -

- - - - - - - - - - - -

- - - - - - - - - - - -

- - - - - - - - - - - -
By Rachel Louise Snyder

Feb. 23, 2000 | "We asked for cheap," Ann said. "Economico." The man shook his head. Even for Cuba this car was a bomb. A bomb that we'd waited four hours to get, arriving at 7 a.m. in Havana and hoping there'd be a car to rent that day. Now here we were in Santiago de Cuba on the other side of the island after six days of battle with the bomb, whom we'd affectionately named Franqui early on in the hopes of endearing it to us. We feared for our deposit. "The engine runs OK," I told the man, "we made it all the way from Havana. It's just everything around it that's crumbling."

I had come to Cuba to discover the island on the millennium. Literally, but also metaphorically. What was Cuba to become in this new century? We spent the first two weeks in Havana before our odyssey with Franqui, and by then I had established a routine much like any I have at home. I rose at around 6 a.m. and drank café con leche at a nearby cafeteria on the corner of Avenida 23 and Calle L in Havana -- one of the city's main intersections and home to Coppelia, the famous ice cream metropolis where Cubans line up for hours every day.

In those early mornings I strolled past the woman selling ham-and-cheese sandwiches or cigarettes, depending on what was available that day; past the tiny shooting booth where kids and adults re-created the Revolution; and by my final morning, when Franqui was just a bad but cherished memory, the "Save Elián" poster with his primary school picture faded to white.

The waiters at the cafeteria came to recognize me, one of them shouting "la periodista" when I walked through the door -- the journalist. For months leading up to this trip I had imagined myself prey to the deep and unabashed love that writers for centuries plummet into upon stepping onto Cuban shores. I saw Havana's sultry streets, salsa, rum, cigars, sexy women and amorous men; I imagined dancing till dawn and languid days in the sun with a population of idealist albeit somewhat disgruntled citizens. I thought of religious Santeria rituals and discussions of ideology. What better reason to visit a forbidden place than romantic longing for that which you have been denied? The proverbial apple. The problem with the apple theory, however, is that once you begin, the rest is left for you to finish -- core, seeds, bruises and all.

Asking Cubans what Cuba at the millennium means is a bit like trying to ask a 12-year-old to dismantle the engine of a Toyota. It's not so much that it can't be done -- more that no one really wants to try. In the U.S. we are forever asking who will follow Fidel Castro. Who will be Cuba's next president? What we are really asking is when will those darned Cubans come around to our capitalistic way of thinking? As one 25-year-old said to me, "Politicians all over the world are the same. Fidel is not bad or good. He is Fidel. The important thing is that I work and eat." This was his millennial Cuba. Work to eat. Eat to work. One century same as another. Or, to put a finer point on it, it's not what you drive, but how you keep it on the road.

Visiting Havana, many write, is like going back four decades. Our best example of an anachronistic city. Old American cars enigmatically still running punctuate the winding, cobblestone streets of Old Havana. Once-grand mansions of the '40s and '50s with intricate latticework and crystal chandeliers contain many of the same antiques they contained when their owners fled after the 1959 revolution. Couples along the Malecon walk by the sea amid tourists and prostitutes -- much like they did when the Mafia controlled Havana's economy midcentury. The embargo, many speculate, has done more to keep Castro's minions cheering for him than any other contrivance in Cuba's recent history. If the economy is poor in Cuba's post-Russia era, the blame can be pointed directly northward, Castro says. El bloqueo.

But those who speak of anachronism miss the point. The truth is that Fidel's millennial Cuba is as much in the throes of a new revolution as it was in 1958. This one, however, is more subtle, and more immutable.

Franqui's troubles were not apparent at first. Cars are difficult to rent in Cuba and reservations are nonexistent, so when we were presented with this red, shiny tot of a car for 40 bucks a day, we were overjoyed. No matter that I couldn't see over bicyclists as I drove. There's not much traffic anyway once you're out of the cities. Ann and I sputtered out of the Transtur office hailing Franqui as our ally in travel and, after loading him up with backpacks and 30 liters of black market gasoline and a siphon hose bought via the owner of our guest house, we were off.

Next page | Blocking out the world -- even Castro can't do that