"La Habana"

Photo by tiago claro on Unsplash

I was dozing when the plane began its descent. The old man beside me nudged my shoulder. A stranger, yet he didn’t want me to miss the view coming into focus. He pointed out the window and spoke the words La Habana with longing and affection.

It reminded me of how the long-widowed speak about their spouses when looking at an old photograph of their beloved. When he called out the name of Cuba’s capital city, I heard in the timbre of his voice a lifetime of memories—joy, love, the adventures, the humdrum, the scrapes and bumps across his existence.

I wished I could have loved anything as passionately as that old man loved the city. But I was 27, and although I didn’t recognise it, I was privileged in 1991. So Havana looked sparse. Its port was somnolent, empty of cargo ships, and the cranes around the wharf stood idle in the strong winter sun like waiters at an unpopular restaurant on a Monday.

From the air, Havana looked deserted. There was little traffic on its roads because fuel was scarce. Only a short while before, the nation’s economic partner, the Soviet Union, was dissolved in an acid bath of neoliberalism. Without assistance from the Soviet bloc, and under a punitive U.S. trade embargo that cut it off from doing business with America and much of the West, Cuba was struggling to survive.

When the plane landed, that was the last I saw of the old man, who went off to be happily reunited with his family, friends, and city.

Inside the terminal at José Martí Airport, the air smelled like a humidor in an exclusive restaurant that catered to cigar-smoking bankers—unlike Sheremetyevo Airport in Moscow, which also carried a fug of tobacco, but smelled like a working man’s club at last orders.

I shared a taxi to my hotel, located near the University of Havana, with an American. He was amazed that he had mustered enough tepid rebellion against his Yankee government to go to Canada and obtain a travel visa to visit Cuba.

I wasn’t amazed to be in Cuba, because I had been there a few times already for my work in television production and promotional videos for corporations. Still, I was outside my comfort zone because I was alone and not on an expense account. I wanted to see the country on my own.

I also knew it was in bad shape, and that people I had met on previous trips had asked for help in obtaining medical supplies for their families—things that were once readily available in Cuba but were now, because of external economic pressures, rationed or unavailable.

In the cab to the hotel, the American talked non-stop while I stared out of the window or spoke in broken Spanish to the driver about how he was getting on during these special times.

“It’s difficult,” was his only comment.

Outside, people on the pavement got on with their midday lives, which, like the economy, were on hold. There was no air conditioning in the cab because it was an old Lada, and fuel was expensive and in short supply.

My window was rolled down, and you could hear the din from the streets—shouting, music, laughter, and the bark of errant dogs. Outside food shops, people queued for food, much of it rationed with the harshness of wartime.

On a previous trip to Havana, while riding on a media bus, I took a picture of a man. He was young like me and leaving a shop. In his hands was a meagre bit of bread, some beans, and not much else.

He saw me take the picture because the bus had stopped while waiting to make a turn. The man looked at me with hatred, anger, and outrage because I had invaded his privacy, his personal struggle, and his country’s struggle.

I knew it even then that I deserved that look and the hatred behind it. So much time has passed since, but I never lost the shame over taking that picture. #HandsoffCuba

Thank you for reading and for supporting Harry’s Last Stand. I use this Substack to preserve and promote the legacy of my father, Harry Leslie Smith, who spent the final decade of his life warning that we must not allow his past to become our future. Sadly, we have already crossed that territory. But resistance comes from remembering our working-class history and using it to overcome today’s fascism.

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On brighter news: The Green & Pleasant Land is now complete in beta form and with publishers. It will be published this year, and everyone who helped make it possible will be acknowledged in the book.

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Take care,
John