By Thomas Boswell, The Washington Post
Sunday, March
28, 1999; Page D01
HAVANA—Going back to Havana after 21 years is like looking in the face of someone you once loved after the corpse has been exhumed. You cannot believe that something so beautiful can become so hideous while still resembling itself. Rust never sleeps. Neither does decay or decomposition.
Cuba is falling apart one crumbling concrete wall, one unpainted pillar and one dry-rotted '46 Oldsmobile coupe at a time. If a jet flew low and created a sonic boom, would the whole city of Havana collapse into a pile of rubble?
Just two decades ago, a walk along the shore near Morro Castle, looking back at the city, was exhilarating. Now, those same grand haciendas, hotels and restaurants are just disintegrating shells, occupied by any squatter willing to risk his life by sleeping under such a roof. Except for a few pockets of modest urban restoration, Havana looks like a nihilist nightmare "Road Warrior" version of New Orleans or Madrid.
As six of us, all veteran journalists, rode through the city on Friday night after attending Game 1 of the Cuban equivalent of the World Series, our cab wound through dozens of residential side streets -- largely lightless, as bleak as some Eastern European blitzkrieged bomb site.
"Have any of you ever seen anything like this anywhere?" I asked.
Nobody even bothered to answer. There's no place on earth -- lost in time, paralyzed, giddy with despair, waiting interminably for one man to leave the scene -- like Cuba. How much of this island's plight is caused by Fidel Castro's fanatical, discredited politics? How much is the result of 40 years of American efforts to isolate Cuba and, in essence, abet its slow, inexorable economic implosion? Who could know? Let history sort it all out and craft a special hell for those responsible.
Perhaps the one uplifting lesson of Cuba's revolution is that no matter how ill-conceived, oppressive or incompetent a political or economic system may be, people still wash their clothes, fix their hair and go out dancing on Saturday night. The Cuban people are still the Cuban people -- smart, stylish, cheerful, artistic, civil -- but on $20 a month.
On a Friday afternoon, as the work week ends, you can drive all over Havana and see several thousand people up close in less than an hour. Ignore the squalid, almost frighteningly dilapidated buildings where they live and work. Instead, look at THEM. How many look destitute, impoverished or even dirty? You have to scan hundreds to find one. How many have a bit of style in their unpretentious dress, a sense of personal pride? Perhaps the majority. How many smile, hold hands or laugh? A lot. As many as back home, perhaps.
The Baltimore Orioles arrived here Saturday from Miami, 90 miles and 40 years away, to play a Cuban national team on Sunday at Estadio Latinoamericano before a crowd of 50,000 invitation-only guests. How can these millionaire innocents have any conception of where they are or what they've suddenly become part of? Cuba has waited for this game since 1959.
This island's own Serie Selectiva between Industriales and Santiago is a complete afterthought. Friday night's crowd was perhaps 35,000, but plenty of seats -- at a nickel each -- stayed empty. Of course, hard as it is to believe, a nickel here is like several dollars in the States. For $10 a day, you get a personal taxi driver who'll take you anywhere, then wait outside until you want to go somewhere else.
On this huge island, roughly the size of Florida, Sunday's game is everything. Why is the Orioles' arrival so important? Partly it is an issue of national pride: America's "national pastime" against Cuba's national obsession. Partly it's the intense love-hate relationship between the countries. Cuba hates the United States; but Cubans love Americans. Say you are "North Americano" here and you are likely to get a big grin, a conspiratorial wink or even a thumbs-up. But no words. Words are rash.
There is, perhaps, another unspoken reason that this game has gone far past the usual big-game buzz of sports and, instead, is more akin to an adrenaline rush. Maybe it's because there are no clocks in Cuba. In two days, not one clock has come into view anywhere. Time has stopped, become irrelevant, as have ambition and the nourishment that comes from dreams. Cut off from information, from free travel, from the range of choice and aspiration that Americans take to be indivisible from life itself, Cubans have nowhere particular to go and no reason to get there at any special time.
For example, Saturday a journalist tried to pay his hotel bill. He got the runaround. Go here. Go there. He became anxious. Finally, a hotel manager said softly, "This is Cuban time. Be happy. Don't worry. The woman in charge of that will be back later. Just pay her sometime before you leave." Or, perhaps, don't. Who cares? The government would get the money anyway.
Why paint a wall or fix the millionth gargantuan pothole? What would it get you? Who would it serve? Yes, Cuban time. Be happy. Don't worry. The sun is warm, the Caribbean breeze sweet. Wash your clothes by hand and hang them on the balcony to dry. The people are so handsome, the beer sometimes cold. Why not go to a baseball game to see the grace of Antonio Pacheco or Omar Linares, the power of Orestes Kindelan or the magic of shortstop Herman Mesa? Isn't that enough to live on? Fine baseball?
If, someday, this level of denial -- this desperate avoidance of your status as enervated prisoner -- rushes up in your face like madness, then you can set off in an open boat for Miami as many have. Some even arrive alive.
Until that day, however, there is the baseball. And it is special -- vibrant, shimmering with melodrama, the island's daily soap opera, a thing of the highest order done splendidly. For just a nickel.
Until a year ago, games were free. "Sport is the right of the people," said Fidel. But things are changing. More '90s cars spice up the parade of amazing antique vehicles. A dozen downtown tourist hotels have been gussied up so you can get a room that's nicer than most in Manhattan for half the price. Of course, almost every structure you can see from your panoramic picture window looks like it's been neutron-bombed.
They say that things here, finally, are beginning to have a price -- a real price -- as the barter system fades and a market economy starts to be born. Some things, however, are literally priceless. Like a ticket to Sunday's game, for which all 50,000 tickets are by Invitation Only.
Think that the people who stood all night Friday, cheering for Industriales and Santiago, shaking cow bells and blowing horns, will be the ones to get the tickets? No, it's going to be a different crowd. The "in" crowd. The kind communist countries aren't supposed to have, but always do in spades.
If you see Scott Erickson pitch on Sunday, don't expect real Cuban crowd reactions. On Friday, for example, a rowdy fan was thrown out of the stands. Thrown. Picked up by several fans and heaved in a lovely arc -- head first -- down an open ramp way. Then dragged away bleeding by the police.
After a home run, the players in the Industriales dugout stood and formed a conga line, high-kicking in unison. On a close play at first base, one team argued. The whole team. They came off the bench, 25 strong, like a hockey fight. At a real Cuban game, you never know what you'll see. A woman may come on the field in the fifth inning to serve the umpires coffee near third base. Down here, you even have to watch the foul balls. One was caught by a cop in the third base crowd on Friday. With no windup, he fired what must have been a 90 mph strike from the stands right to the third baseman. A blur. A seed. Down here, you even have to put a radar gun on the cops.
Too bad most of the real fans won't be there. But, in a sad way, isn't that how it should be in this country of the government, by the government and for the government? The true fans, as always, will be gathered in the city's central park at the famous "hot corner" -- Esquina Caliente -- where nothing except baseball is discussed, usually at high volume, all day. None of them, they say, has an "invitation" to the game.
Saturday, a few journalists took some U.S. preseason baseball magazines to the "hot corner" as gifts for the fans. They thumbed the pages furiously. They already knew every major league player, every off-season trade, every statistic. Some had xeroxed sheets of major league stats -- pirated, duplicated. Tom Paine's broadsides couldn't have been more dogeared.
What they could not get over were the pictures -- color pictures. "Mark McGwire!" erupted one fan. Yes, Mark McGwire. So what?
In Spanish, the man replied softly, "I have never seen him before."
© Copyright 1999 The Washington Post Company
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