Now on a cultural tour of Cuba, at a street-side cafe in Havana, Clay and his guests stumble into a magical, transcendent moment.
The road surfaces improved and widened as we got closer to Havana from the Cuban south coast. Eventually, we were on a four-lane divided highway into the national capital. From about 75 miles out, things began to seem less impoverished — more buildings with fresh paint. The fields were better groomed. Fewer horse-drawn carts. The huts and shacks looked less depressing. More variety in the roadside stands. Our guide, Marlin, said we were crossing the boundary into the city. We all looked northwest and saw the skyline of Havana, such as it is, and the ruin of the Spanish castle that once protected the harbor from privateers like Francis Drake of England.
We dropped off a few people with the one-day flu at the new, international, “luxurious,” and somewhat sterile hotel. The rest of us used the restrooms and got back on the bus, which took us a few miles east to Old Havana.
We toured the narrow streets and alleys of the old city on foot. Marlin, our guide, told us stories of entrepreneurial courage and success, a modest experiment in privatization; showed us the Cuban capitol, took us to Five Corners, immortalized in films (including the sequel to The Godfather) and literature. After that, we sat down at an outdoor café for lunch. Lunch consisted of Pepsi with ice, water bottles, or beer. We took turns going into the café to choose one of several sandwiches for lunch and skewers of fresh fruit.
The temperature was in the 80s Fahrenheit with a slight but cooling Atlantic Ocean breeze, and the sun was hot but not oppressive. A perfect day in Havana.
Then the Magic Happened
A three-piece musical group — two men, one woman, two guitars, and one small pair of maracas — began performing against the wall outside the café. They sang a series of traditional Cuban songs and then a few American tunes just for us. The trio could not have been more unprepossessing. One man was very overweight, like Sydney Greenstreet in Casablanca; the other man was youngish and in bold blue shorts, a white t-shirt, sunglasses, and close-cropped hair. The woman wore an army green t-shirt, sack dress, and gray tennis shoes. The woman and the obese man had given up trying to take care of their bodies long ago. The man in blue shorts was still too young to surrender. They were not ready for Hollywood.
But their music was beautiful. Here is a country filled with economic deprivation and even desperation, where the electricity goes out for hours several days per week and sometimes for longer periods. So deprived of the basic amenities of life — soap, toothbrushes, shampoo, laundry detergent — Cubans show genuine gratitude when we give those items away in small quantities on the street. Cuba is a nation mismanaged in almost every way, with a central government that is not without serious corruption: a failed economic ideology coupled with a stubbornness born of 60+ years of the quest to defy the Colossus to the north. The average Cuban has to scramble for food — egg, hamburger, fresh fish. The average Cuban stands in line for hours every week, sometimes hours each day, to take a few dollars worth of pesos out of a bank, purchase a pound of hamburger, buy a half gallon of milk poured from a vat into whatever plastic container the consumer could bring to the shop. The average Cuban wears the kind of seedy cotton clothing characteristic of what Jack Kerouac called the fellahin (peasant) the world over. The average Cuban has no car, horse, or money to travel even short distances.
And yet, these Cubans played their music with joy, passion, and good humor. Here we were, 25 Americans, none rich (I think) by American standards, and yet infinitely richer than the average Cuban, eating ham and cheese sandwiches and half listening to these musicians playing 10 feet away.
But then, almost everyone in our tour party was suddenly caught up in the beauty of the moment. People stopped talking about reruns of Yellowstone and the time they spent in Barcelona and began to quiet down and listen to the exquisite music. Toes began to tap, shoulders almost imperceptibly sway. My friend Dean began to move his body in his metal outdoor café chair.
I’m a pretty stiff white guy, inhibited in all sorts of ways. But at that café, in Old Havana, 1,932 miles from home, I found myself saying to myself, almost out loud, “I think I should get up and dance.” This idea was so out of character as to qualify as astounding. Then I realized I actually wanted to get up and dance because I wanted to celebrate Life, the life force, resilience, and the baseline vitality of life. It was my first Zorba the Greek moment, decades into my left-brained life!
So I got up, went over to Dean to ask him to join me, and cajoled my 84-year-old dear friend Woody into getting up and dancing with me. Woody was, of course, game. We did not dance well together, but we moved our bodies to the beat of the music. I urged but did not cajole the others in our group to join us and dance for the pure joy of this moment. We were far from home. We had nothing to lose by letting go a little. We could try out a little freedom we deny ourselves at home in the U.S., in our home communities, where our peers might raise their eyebrows or shake their heads. We could live more freely for an hour in Old Havana.
It was liberating, and I was only slightly embarrassed to make a spectacle of myself in front of strangers, friends, and paying guests. I ask myself with great regularity why I am so uptight. I’m the guy who ducks when the hypnotist is looking around the audience for a subject. I’m the guy who avoids eye contact when the salsa dancer (or the Texas line dancer) comes into the crowd to choose a one-song partner.
Why am I, why are we afraid of life? All so-called “primitive peoples,” let’s rather say all Indigenous peoples, make dance and song a central fact of their existence. What exactly are we entitled, first-worlders trying to protect? Like Saint Paul, I’m the chief of sinners.
I looked around. Everyone in our group was relaxed, swaying to the music, realizing — I hope — that there was no way they would hear music this pure, unselfconscious, and joyful back home.
A very fit, stylish Cuban woman in heels walked up the street past the café. As she passed and the music reached her ears, she performed a one-second sway with her body without ever slowing down and then resumed her journey. If Jack Kerouac had been there, he would have turned to Dean Moriarty and said, “Dig that lone chick carrying the ancient rhythms of song in her soul, she has it, she has IT, she knows time!” (Whatever all that means?!) At several points, I looked at the 40-something waitress who stood with her back to the café wall. She’d be mouthing the words to the song to herself, but when she caught me observing her, she shut her lips and ceased her singing abruptly.
I looked again at the trio. I mean absolutely no disrespect — precisely the opposite — when I say that they were not much to look at. (But then look at us!) They could never compete in the capitalist American performance paradigm, where a naturally talented singer like Shania Twain is remade into a Nashville musical production star. These three Cubans were the real thing — not ready for prime time or The Voice, but lovely, generous, joyful, and comfortable in their own skin. Not to mention very talented.
Their guitars were old and battered and cracked. They looked like they cost $18 at a pawn shop. And yet, the music that came out of them was exquisite.
I loved them. I loved it that for one brief shining moment, I opened my person to their beauty, which broke most of the standards of capitalist performance culture, let go of a few of my well-rooted inhibitions, surrendered to life, and let myself express joy without having to translate it into words.