Time passes slowly at the Bar Galiano in Old Havana, Cuba
by Mark Jolly

(reprinted from One Magazine, San Francisco's premier design publication, 2/2001, www.onemagazine.com)

Modern-day Cuba is a compelling enigma -- a patchwork of motley elements, a nation that, 40 years after Castro's revolution, derives its makeshift aesthetic sense from both the paradox and poetry of its surroundings. Venture off Havana's tourist track, and discover Cuba's indomitable creative energy  

I first found it, or rather heard it, in the roar of the cariola. I had decided, like any decent tourist, to spend Day One getting gloriously lost among the cobbled backstreets of Old Havana. No map. No route. And no ideas to trace, save my aimless meanderings. But as I wandered, mesmerized by the catacomb of decaying mansions, jungled courtyards and narrow passageways, I was rudely startled by an alien, thunderous rattle.

I spun around, expecting to see some monstrous machine. Instead, I was confronted by a child on a ramshackle scooter -- a cariola -- fashioned from scrappy wooden slats and an old car axle. In its crude bricolage construction, I saw something sturdier and eminently cooler than those chrome Razors that had become the omnipresent accoutrements of urban America. I saw beauty in the life of an everyday thing. I saw Cuba.

Cariolas, I later learned, were a part of most every young Habanaro's experience -- and yet each model is a unique realization, redolent of the city itself. With a 500-year architectural heritage that jump-cuts between colonial, neo-classical and art deco, interfused with a street-style dose of 1950s Americana (courtesy of all the old Chevys and Oldsmobiles) and the odd concrete turd (courtesy of the Kremlin), Havana is a Caribbean port like no other: a composite of crumbling beauty that wears its rough-around-the-edges smile with a singular brand of faded elegance.

In recent years, the city has undergone a mammoth restoration project -- which, coupled with a legalized dollar and a global Latino fetish, has fueled a new tourist economy. Yet the new gloss has also washed away some of the old color. Since their paint lick, Old Havana's two main squares, Plaza de Armas and Plaza de la Catedral, have been taken over by the hawkers and the camera-wielding clowns. And several revitalized pockets of the city seem to have been conspicuously cleared of Cubans altogether, aside from the ones left smiling and singing and maraca-ing Buena Vista favorites for the tourists.

To really absorb the spirit of the city, you have to penetrate the less polished sections -- anywhere south of Plaza Vieja, or go beyond Old Havana entirely and into the heart of adjoining Centro. You won't find any tourists here. In fact, you won't find much at all, beyond people leaning up against doorways and whiling away the hours in some of the most densely populated barrios in the world. This Havana has long quit trying to glam it up for the boys: Corinthian colonnades are ravaged to the bone; severed shutters dangle in the half-light between a thousand shades of blue; and layers upon layers of frescoes peel one under another, like strips of polychromatic rotting bark.

"In the U.S. you have all these clean, neat houses," says artist Carlos Estévez, "but with the buildings here you can really feel the old stories, the ghosts of yesterday, the lost souls." Estévez, who works out of an alleyway studio cluttered with random street collectibles he has salvaged, leads me to a tattered model airplane cheekily attached to makeshift propellers that were once the blades of three electric fans. I ask where the plane's corroded metal body comes from. Estévez frowns, as if the answer were blindingly obvious. "The garbage," he says.

"I'm interested in objects that can't be replaced," he continues, "objects that are not made in a factory, objects that have a sense of history." He flashes me a knowing smile. "It flies." It what? "Well, to me it flies," he returns, "in the imagination."

It's this raw creative sense, born from a bare-basics environment, that informs so much of contemporary Cuban design. "Remember, as ordinary people we have not had any access to decorative materials," says Esther Cardosa, an actress and artist who remodeled her turn-of-the-century home in Centro using classic colonial motifs. As we look into a decrepit art deco building, where groups of teenage girls dance the rumba under a flickering fluorescent lamp, she elaborates: "No magazines for inspiration, no media culture, no imports, no offices to contract designers, nothing."

Such constraints have bred a burgeoning recycling aesthetic, rooted in the intrinsic value of simple workaday objects, that I witnessed over and over again in Havana: in the cigar boxes of Antonio Rodríguez, who paints luminous Caribbean panoramas on the exteriors, leaving the utilitarian integrity of the interiors intact; and in the patchwork quilts of Ibrahim Miranda, who spent two years in the tobacco province of Pinar del Río collecting discarded shreds of fabric -- old shirts, coverlets, tapestry -- and then sewed them together to provide a multicolored background for his monotone matchstick imprints.

"I don't like using conventional materials like canvas or paper," says Miranda, who also takes old maps of Cuba and paints over them until they are almost unrecognizable. "And I don't believe in the permanence or durability of art. For me, it's not about hanging it up on a wall your whole life but using it as an everyday piece."

Artist José Fuster treats his entire domestic environment as his canvas. For the past four years, he's been turning his three-story home in the sleepy fishing village of Jaimanitas, on the outskirts of Havana, into a tropical funhouse. In his own exuberant faux-cubist signature, through paint, ceramics and mosaics, Fuster has transformed every space imaginable: every pillar, beam, ceiling, fence, railing and patio tile. From the moment you walk through the garden walls, plastered with an overwhelming collection of the artist's own ceramics, you realize you have just stepped into one of the most inventive homes in Cuba -- or anywhere else for that matter.

Fuster calls the never-ending project "a celebration of the happiness of life," which is a better approximation of the Cuban soul than anything adopted from Karl Marx. But what happens when he runs out of space -- does the party stop? "Oh no," he chuckles. "My next-door neighbors have asked me to start on their house, then there's a mural I have in mind for the place opposite, and then after that I want to start painting the street. Who knows -- maybe I'll paint the whole town."

Havana itself is nothing if not a work in progress. It's also a city of discovery, a kaleidoscope of unfolding dramas that flow through open doorways and into vistas of quiet urban poetry -- a mottled courtyard, perhaps, where an old woman hangs her wash out to dry while the old boys play dominoes; or a long, ragged stairway that seems to rise interminably. One such stairway, in the leafy neighborhood of Vedado, climbs four stories and leads to the garden terrace of artist and sculptor Adela Herrera. An impossibly rich wonderland that has taken 18 years to create, Herrera's gallery-home is based on the rustic designs of Cuba's early settlers -- rough daub walls, low sloping beams -- ornamented with myriad objects she has collected from nearby beaches and demolished buildings.

From the 1930s to the 1950s, Vedado was a notorious gambling-nightlife mecca for moneyed Americans, not least the Mafia, who paid off General Batista for control of the neighborhood's casino business (at one point the largest in the world outside Las Vegas). The good times ended in 1959, when Castro took over what is now the Habana Libre Hotel and began to unleash 40 years of sociopolitical lunacy -- while anyone who owned anything hit the Florida Straits. Today, the area is a grid of boulevards lined with gorgeous mansions, uninspired high-rises and legendary hotels. But until the late 19th century, Vedado (which means "forest reserve") was open countryside, and it was in the spirit of this nascent state that Herrera envisioned her oasis.

"When Havana's elite fled, they abandoned these beautiful mansions," she tells me as we enjoy some home-cooked malanga fritters amid a barely discernible rooftop breeze. "But it was only then that the rest of us discovered how ridiculously ostentatious their sense of style was -- like installing fireplaces in a climate where we're constantly trying to ward off the heat, not add to it!"

The aesthetics of Cuban life can be deliciously ironic. It's funny, for example, that communism's last outpost wound up with the two most clichéd symbols of fat-cat capitalism: big cigars and flashy American cars. And consider this: Cuba's two most venerated revolutionaries, José Martí (who forged the independence movement against Spain in the 1890s) and Che Guevara -- both of whom were consummate poets and probably knew a thing or two about beauty -- are memorialized by two of Cuba's greatest architectural cock-ups: a horrendous obelisk honoring Martí and a giant sculpted wall image of Che, which reproduces the 20th century's most iconic portrait while blocking out half of the Ministry of the Interior.

It's also beguiling how Havana feels so airy and open despite such tight spaces -- which goes a long way in explaining why it's among the most seductive and photogenic of cities. There is, of course, a practical reason for all those open doorways and glassless windows: basic ventilation. (It's something the Cubans inherited from the Spaniards, who got it from the Moors by way of Andalusia.) But beyond being an advertisement for natural air circulation, Havana's industry-standard postcard of people sitting on stoops and gazing out across balconies seems almost to suggest something deeper: a collective waiting game.

As it stumbles about in its two-steps-forward-one-step-back approach to change, the country remains locked in a groove, the needle stuck, the bittersweet bolero played over and over. You know how everybody banged on about Berlin and Prague 10 years ago? Go now. Before they rebuild the place. Before it's too late. Of course, nobody truly knows what will happen después de Fidel -- after Fidel. But as UNESCO sorts through Havana's rubble, one thing is clear: Her songs of bruised majesty won't last forever. So yes, go. Before someone bothers to switch the music, before it becomes South Beach, while Havana still sparkles -- to borrow from Le Corbusier -- as a beautiful catastrophe.