Next Year in Havana(41)
The Hotel Nacional de Cuba is ahead, the design and entryway lined in palm trees, reminding me of the Breakers back home. We walk past a row of vintage cars and head inside.
Luis walks behind me, silent, as I explore. He seems uncomfortable here, his hands shoved into his pockets, his head bent, his eyes downcast and hiding whatever emotions linger in his gaze. The contrast between the bisected home he shares with his wife, mother, and grandmother, and the tourists’ domain is stark. Thirty minutes pass—we explore the lush gardens, the public rooms, the infamous café bar—and then we leave the hotel behind us, in search of the next landmark.
We walk by the Museum of the Revolution, the old Bacardi building. I’m more interested in my grandmother’s Havana, the sites that formed her love of the city, but I mark my impressions of the other places for the article, my grandmother’s ashes in my bag weighing heavily on my mind.
Havana is a beautiful city shrouded in sadness, yet the remarkable thing is that it’s almost as if the people didn’t get the memo. They laugh, and there’s a jubilant quality to the air. The frenetic pace I’m used to is replaced by an ebullient atmosphere that gives the impression that life is a big party. The Cubans probably have the least to laugh about compared to everyone around them, but they laugh the loudest.
We continue walking, Luis pointing out more sites and answering my questions with thoughtful precision. It’s impossible to walk these streets and not feel a measure of pride as a Cuban for the beauty that is our capital city. The Great Theatre of Havana is stunning architecturally; the Cathedral of Havana is equally so.
I hesitate at the church’s entrance, watching the tourists file in.
“Do you want to see inside?” Luis asks.
“Do you mind?”
He smiles indulgently, glancing over his shoulder and gently guiding me out of the path of a group of tourists. “Not at all.”
I grab a scarf from my bag, covering my shoulders as we enter the church.
Beautiful chandeliers punctuate the interior, the landscape peppered with elegant statues sculpted and carved to exquisite detail. My grandmother and her siblings were baptized here, my great-grandparents married at this very altar. I imagine my grandmother here as a young girl, sitting in the pews beside her sisters, Beatriz whispering and gossiping to Isabel as the priest says Mass.
The sensation of standing in the spot where she once stood, sitting in the wooden pews where she once sat, brings a tear to my eye. And another. This is a piece of my family’s history I didn’t expect to have returned to me.
I don’t realize I’m crying until Luis silently hands me an ivory square handkerchief, his expression somber. My breath hitches, and I stare down at the fabric in my hands, anything to distract myself from his searching gaze.
His initials are embroidered on one corner of the handkerchief, the fabric slightly yellowed with age. I rub my fingers over the letters there, a smile playing at my lips. It seems somehow fitting that a historian would carry a handkerchief, and I have no doubt his grandmother painstakingly embroidered his initials.
“Thank you,” I whisper.
Despite the Catholic Church’s difficult relationship with Castro—his attempts to wholly eradicate religion from the country—there are a few Cubans sitting in the pews praying, their heads bent, rosaries in hand. Tourists mill around us—I recognize two men who were at the Hotel Nacional earlier. Clearly these are the popular spots to see in Havana. I make a few notes about the church on my pad.
I turn away from Luis, lingering over the artwork, exploring the side chapels, attempting to soak in every inch of the beautiful building. I’ve never been particularly religious, but the ambiance adds an air of solemnity to our surroundings.
Luis trails behind me, leaving a few paces between us, and the few times I glance back at him, his gaze is fixed on me and not our surroundings.
“What’s it like to be Catholic in Cuba?” I whisper to Luis once he’s caught up to me, his earlier warning about curbing my words fresh in my mind.
His gaze sweeps across the church before returning back to me. “Nearly as difficult as it is to be Cuban in Cuba,” he replies, his tone dry.
We walk around for a few more minutes, and I pay the extra fee for us to climb the bell tower, the city spread before us. I look out past the terra-cotta-tiled roofs that appear as though they would simply crack off with a strong gust of wind.
“Are hurricanes bad here?” I ask. Growing up in South Florida, I am intimately familiar with the havoc storms can wreak.
“It can be hell,” he answers. “Often the buildings are in such a state of disrepair that even relatively mild weather can prove a problem.”
He keeps his voice low again, closing the distance between us. Even here, surrounded by tourists, it’s clear he’s afraid to speak his mind.
Across the water, there’s La Caba?a, the infamous prison Che Guevara ran after the revolution. The sight of it sends a chill down my spine when I think about the blood shed there, the lives lost. There’s a violence to our history that gets lost somewhere in the telling, buried beneath the beautiful scenery, the deceptively blue sea and sky, the palm trees swaying placidly in the breeze. It’s the sound of firing squads that echo in the wind.
“They’ve built shops there now, a restaurant,” Luis murmurs, his body tucked away from the tourists, his mouth hidden in the curve of my neck. “You can gawk at the world’s largest cigar in the site where we bled.”