Americans in Havana
Cuban children talking to tourists in Havana.
CREDIT PHOTOGRAPH BY CHIP SOMODEVILLA/GETTY
“The Americans are coming,” a waiter announced at Mediterráneo, a private seafood restaurant in Vedado, one of Havana’s trendiest districts, where eateries and bars of all sorts have opened rapidly over the past two years. Some have set up shop in leafy villas that were, until recently, home to at least one Cuban family; others have taken over rooftops or penthouses in apartment buildings; and a few, like the flashy Saraos bar on Calle 17, are slick architect-designed spaces, complete with bouncers and valet parking, that would be more at home on South Beach than amid the tree-lined (and potholed) streets of a neighborhood still filled with ruined nineteenth-century mansions and populated by stray cats.
The waiter was referring not to the impending arrival of mass tourism but to a more immediate invasion: a tour bus had just pulled up by the entrance gate and two dozen well-heeled tourists in their sixties were pouring into the lobby, the villa’s former living room; a small army of uniformed waiters showed them to their table. “We just started working with groups,” the host later told me. “Travel agents were tired of the poor service and bland food at government-run restaurants, so they started coming to us and to other private places in the neighborhood. This week, we have a group coming almost every day: some from New York, others from California.”
The Americans have arrived, and they seem to be everywhere in Havana. On a recent Sunday night, Holly Block, the director of the Bronx Museum, led a group of collectors from New York on a tour of artist studios in Vedado. One of the artists—a successful painter who lives and works in a spacious apartment in a midcentury building—hired a waiter to serve drinks and offer small bites, pork brochettes and ceviche on oyster shells. At one point, as she stood next to a painting, she explained the importance of sugar cane in Cuban history, until a grey-haired man in the group interrupted her midsentence: “If you have so much sugar cane, you can process it into ethanol. Then you guys wouldn’t have to import fuel from Venezuela.” The artist politely replied that such a plan might be difficult to implement given the country’s economic woes, but her interlocutor was undeterred. “Ethanol fuel can solve all your problems,” he drummed. Minutes later, one of the collectors inquired about the dimensions of a small painting and the artist rushed back to one of the bedrooms to retrieve a measuring tape.
Over the past decade, Havana’s visual artists have benefitted from the influx of American and European collectors and from the international art market’s ongoing romance with Cuba. Painters and photographers sell their work in hard currency—many keep bank accounts in Spain, Canada, or Switzerland, depending on the location of their foreign galleries—and have one of the highest standards of living in the island. One successful painter lives and works in a two-thousand-square-foot mansion in Miramar, Havana’s most exclusive district; travels regularly to Mexico, Miami, and various European countries; and is known for hosting lavish parties featuring guayabera-clad servers during the Havana Biennial.
Other kinds of Americans are roaming the streets of Havana. Recent sightings include: two literary agents from New York City attending the Havana Book Fair; an art consultant preparing a project for the Biennial; and a technology venture capitalist who managed to get a local number and Internet access within hours of his arrival (“The guys at Ultra Cell in Vedado were great at jail-breaking my iPhone”). There was also House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, who was here the week of February 16th as part of a congressional delegation.
At least in the capital, most Cubans seem unabashedly optimistic about the influx of guests from a country that, until two months ago, was routinely decried in the official press as “the Yankee enemy of the Revolution.” “I hope the American embassy opens soon and more tourists start coming,” a fifty-year-old actress told me last week. “Hopefully then property prices will rise.” Gustavo, a thirty-year-old who sells souvenirs on a beach near Baracoa, Cuba’s easternmost city, praised Americans as “the best tourists in the world. They buy lots of artesanías and spend money on food and drink. Not like the Germans who come to the beach and sit all day reading a book and don’t buy anything.”
After Raúl Castro was elected, in 2008, his administration introduced a law that allowed Cubans to become cuentapropistas, or entrepreneurs, running private catering companies, restaurants, bed-and-breakfasts, and taxi services, which largely draw their profits from tourists. Some of the cuentapropistas are doing extremely well; they are buying cars, villas, trips to the U.S., and, in a few cases, apartments in Miami or Barcelona. They also find creative ways to get around the law’s limitations. The government offers licenses for restaurants but not for bars, though there are hundreds of these in Havana alone. The King Bar, a new night spot in Vedado, has set up a charcoal grill on the terrace leading to the dance floor. “If an inspector shows up at two in the morning, someone from the dance floor has to rush to the terrace and sit down to eat a hamburger,” a friend joked.
The cuentapropistas seem especially optimistic about the diplomatic thaw with the United States: guesthouse owners and restaurateurs rave about the hundreds of Americans who have descended on Havana in recent weeks, and dream of thousands more who will bring that much more cash with them. Alejandro Pérez López, an economist in his twenties who graduated from the University of Havana in 2013 and now works for one of the largest state-run tourist agencies, explained that a number of economic reforms are on the way to help small-business owners cope with the impending arrival of American tourists. “Right now, we are in the middle of high season and all the hotels and restaurants are full, almost exclusively with Europeans. We need to create an infrastructure to receive the millions of Americans who will start coming soon.”
But some Cubans, like Reina María Rodríguez, a well-known poet and recipient of the prestigious National Literature Prize, have a darker view of the years to come. “During the special period, we were all poor,” she said, using a common term for the early nineties, when the loss of Soviet subsidies and the collapse of sugar prices triggered an economic depression. “But now most of the population is poor while a tiny minority is getting rich. These inequalities are generating resentment, frustration, and violent crime. The other night, there was a machete fight on my street, in Centro Havana—something I had not seen in all the years I have lived in the neighborhood.”
Discussion of the future of Cuban-American relations seems notably absent in Guantánamo, a bustling town five hundred miles east of Havana—the bus ride takes twelve hours—and twenty miles west of the U.S. military prison. Guantánameros, as the locals are known, have profited from both the fertile lands around the town and the recent opening of the agricultural sector, which has attracted both cuentapropistas and agricultural coöperatives. On weekend nights, Cubans of all ages—there are almost no tourists—pack the downtown bars, restaurants, cafeterias, and dance halls.
El Paladar de Edgar, a new restaurant run by a chef who used to work at the state-run Hotel Guantánamo, was booked to capacity on a recent Saturday night. Prospective diners arrived by taxi—a nineteen-seventies Lada—or on motorcycle and waited patiently on plastic chairs on the veranda. Inside, a dozen tables were set up on the shiny granite floors of what was once a comfortable family house. In the various dining rooms—former bedrooms and sitting rooms—flat-screen televisions played Iggy Azalea music videos while couples and families, dressed to the nines for a weekend outing, ordered shrimp, seafood stew, or ropa vieja, a meat stew that is a staple of Cuban cuisine.
As they dined, these upper-middle-class Guantánameros talked about family or gossiped about friends. No conversations seemed to touch on the diplomatic thaw or the effects of the new friendship between Havana and Washington. As a waitress brought a dish of seafood to a young couple, the woman opened her purse, took out an iPad, and photographed her dish. At another table, a teen-age girl did the same with her iPhone. Five family members stood up to pose by a painting while a sixth snapped photos with his Samsung Galaxy smartphone.
Several diners spent most of the evening glued to their phone screens, sliding through photos and showing their dinner companions images they planned to post on Facebook. One teen-age girl texted throughout dinner as her parents watched music videos on the restaurant’s television. As they left the restaurant, some diners made a point of carrying their phones and tablets in a conspicuous place, seeming to show off cherished status symbols. One can find similar scenes in Havana, but they are less striking given the mix of Cubans and foreigners in upscale locales in the capital.
Nowhere in Guantánamo did I hear people exclaim, “The Americans are coming,” perhaps because the Americans have been down the road for more than a century, or perhaps because they have not been seen in town in decades. The U.S. set up the base in 1898, in the wake of the Spanish-American War. During the first half of the twentieth century, Americans stationed at the base were ubiquitous on the downtown streets, but since the Revolution they have been forbidden from leaving their side of the fence. “Maybe one day they will be allowed to leave their base and come here,” a local hotel receptionist said nonchalantly.
Rubén Gallo is the Walter S. Carpenter, Jr., Professor in Language, Literature, and Civilization of Spain at Princeton University, and the author of «Proust’s Latin Americans» (Hopkins, 2014) and «Freud’s Mexico» (M.I.T., 2010).