Back to Havana for a fortnight of music blogging. That was the plan. I arrived on a beautiful tropical evening, the sun was setting over Havana’s suburbs, which mix Caribbean tropes with Soviet industry. I hopped in a taxi, to rendezvous with Kamila, eat and see if there was enough energy left in the tank for a return to the Fabrica del Arte, Havana’s most swinging hotspot. But as we drove through Vedado, turned through Centro, and neared Old Havana, I noticed an enhanced gloom. Lights were limited to a few well heeled apartments, streets subdued.
At 7:15 pm on 14 March, a power station in those same suburbs bowed to the inevitable, a constant excess of demand, supply limited by 1960s technology, brought it to its knees. The collapse triggered a domino effect across the island, not for the first time in recent months. By the tine I arrived in Peña Pobré, all the facilities taken for granted by the wannabe music blogger – electricity, light, internet, amplification – were taken away. The signs weren’t good, but they were accurate. Previous outages had lasted three days, with scarce food rotting in refrigerators, all non-essential business closed, no pumping of water to raised floor apartments, people who suffer enough at the best of times coping with infinitesimal resources suddenly dealing with a fraction of that.
I sat in a candle-lit apartment awaiting Kamila, who was understandably delayed. My hosts were stoic, and as kind as ever, but the reality started to sink in. On her arrival, prime time Friday night, we went in search of food. Nada. Businesses that normally magic a silk purse from a sows ear forced shut by the absence of power. Thankfully our hosts provided the ubiquitous cheese and ham sandwich, never were duty free Toblerones better received, and the dark arms of Morpheus pulled us in, assisted by the uncanny absence of street noise. Of course the Fabrica was not happening.
So the first response, sitting in a mid-range casa particulare is one of boredom and frustration, in a stifling environment where the hot drinks aren’t hot, but the cold drinks are, thinking of the wasted opportunity of a Havana weekend. The second response is to catastrophise, imagining all the events that could compound the situation. But the third is to empathise with the Cuban people, who can’t buy their way out of a situation, who suffer the same again and again, for whom the catastrophes that I lay awake imagining are day to day realities.
On the second evening we found a rooftop paladar serving food with reduced means of cooking, but still voluptuous fare, and a small acoustic band serving up the classics with one guitar and traditional percussion. A small start but it’s hard to stop the music in Havana.
El Grito 