This is the real experience, my friend,” said Robert, lighting up a harsh Cohiba cigarette as I looked around. We were in a hole-in-the-wall bar around the corner from Plaza Hotel and Robert, who worked as a doorman there, had appointed himself my guide for the morning. It had been years since I’d had a drink before noon, but two mojitos sat on a rickety table in front of us. As soon as I started to stir the sugar at the bottom of the tall glass, Robert got down to business. “I have a cousin who works in a cigar factory,” he said. “I won’t lie to you. If I can get you to buy through him, I’ll be able to buy more food for my wife and baby.” And more mojitos, I told myself.
We finally decided on a price of 80 CUC—the Cuban Convertible Peso that only foreigners can use and which amounts to around Rs4,000 now—for a box of Montecristo No. 4s, the cigar made famous by a certain Ernesto Che Guevara Serna. I told Robert—“Like De Niro, eh?” he said, flexing his biceps and settling into a Raging Bull pose—that Che was one of the reasons I was in Havana. Not only did I share my birthday with him, but I was also the nephew of a doctor devoted to the socialist cause. There’s no one I admire more than Che.
Also See |Trip Planner / Cuba (PDF)
“You must go to Santa Clara then,” he said. “See the memorial.” And in Havana? He smiled. Che, and José Martí, a hero from an earlier age, are all-pervasive, ghosts that have sustained a revolution through a missile crisis, an economic embargo and abysmal standards of living. Robert would not talk ill of the revolution, but he also wanted all those things—a sharp linen jacket, pointy shoes and a nice watch— that it was unable to give him.
Cuban colours: Sunset comes to the Malecon promenade. Photo: Dileep Premachandran
We talked of baseball (
bei’bol), Cuba’s biggest sporting passion, and I told him that my room at the Plaza was just down the corridor from Suite 216, where Babe Ruth had stayed 90 years earlier. He talked of watching Omar Linares and Orestes Kindelán as a teenager, and of the Hernández brothers, Liván and Orlando (El Duque), who defected to the US and Major League baseball in the 1990s. There was no anger in his voice as he talked about them, but neither was there the pride so transparent in his mention of boxing legends Teófilo Stevenson and Félix Savón. “Do you know what Stevenson said when they offered him money to fight Ali?” he asked, eyes shining. I did, but I let him say it anyway: “What’s one million dollars compared to the love of eight million Cubans?”