Apologies everyone – WordPress got well ahead of me this week and pushed out an early version of this essay. This is the correct one. Thanks for your patience!

I used to travel to Cuba a lot. At least once a year, maybe more, but my last trip was in 2019 and the closest I’ve been in the post-Covid world was to sip on a mojito at the Columbia Restaurant in the Tampa Airport last week and think about what I’ve missed in the past seven years.

Actually, this isn’t technically true — I’ve been to the Caribbean a number of times since 2019 and thus geographically near. But in this case, my closeness was spiritually true, sitting in Tampa, with its particular history of late-19^th century Cuban-owned cigar factories linking the island to this Florida city (you can read about that in my second book, El Norte, chapter 11). 

The state of Florida has a long, connected past to Cuba, from Tampa to Miami to Key West. I was in Tampa for a short trip to visit my friend, the writer and journalist Michael Deibert (who is the author of the excellent Substack, Notes from the World), a fellow habitué of the Caribbean, and we talked about what might await whichever one of us ends up back in Havana first. 

The prognosis is grim. This is not a newsletter that focuses on current events, but it’s hard to ignore the various wounds inflicted on the island, especially since 2020. The flagging post-Covid economy. The power cuts. The threats from the Trump administration. Now there is the painful and devastating lack of oil. Cuba is in the crosshairs of the US administration, and it’s not clear when – or if – a trigger will be pulled. 

In researching my latest book, I made the difficult decision to skip Cuba in 2022 and 2023, precisely because I had been many times and I could imagine how tricky the going might be with in these straitened times. Instead, I put my resources into traveling and researching in places I had not been, all the while wondering if that was the best course of action.  

With Cuba now back in the news, I can’t help but feel that the order of the day must be to write a tidy historical essay, illustrating how the people of Cuba have weathered so many storms — political, environmental, and international — through the centuries. And yet when I sit down to try, my mind instead wanders back to the long walks I used to take there, usually at the end of what was often a hot, sometimes frustrating, day. Whatever annoyances I had suffered, by 5pm there was a low hum in Havana as dusk settled in, casting a normally intense place in a mellow, late afternoon glow and doing likewise to my mood. These moments keep calling to me over the clamour and din of the current political crisis. 

Havana provokes many emotions — not least the desire to write purple prose about the beauty of its sunsets, seen while strolling along the bayside malecón (pictured above). But it’s not so much those — as lovely as they are — but the actual sensation of walking the city’s streets. 

I usually needed a stroll to unwind, to hear the silence of my own mind, after a day trying to communicate to others, as much as myself, about what I was chasing in the archives or what the hell I was doing on the island yet again. To be in Cuba is to have to speak, to have to interact with fellow humans. Everything was (mostly) analog in those years, and (mostly) cash only. Internet access had progressed in my time there, though initially I had to go to one of a handful of hotels and pay hourly to log on, using an ancient PC. By the time of my later trips, there were some limited WIFI hotspots, accessible by using pay-by-the-hour cards. In general, communication in person was not optional, as it now seems to be in much of life today, especially compared to the frictionless modernity of 21^st-century Seoul. 

When in Havana, I stayed at the same casa particular (B&B) on Calle 21 between M y N, in an area called Vedado, with the grand, Spanish-style Hotel Nacional anchoring the end of the street. Vedado was a wealthy suburb, with elegant houses built at the end of the 19^th century and the first years of the 20^th , laid in a mostly tidy grid, with the sinuous curves of the malecón hugging one side of the bay. Today it has been subsumed into greater Havana, though it remains more leafy and tranquil than the busy streets of the old town of La Habana Vieja, where music pours out from the bars and tourists go seeking cold drinks and hot nights. Vedado could be considered the prim cousin who keeps the Christmas sherry hidden in the cupboard: there is fun to be had, but it takes a little seeking out. The real amusement for me, however, was the wandering. 

As Rebecca Solnit observed in her excellent Wanderlust: A History of Walking: “Walking, ideally, is a state in which the mind, the body, and the world are aligned, as though they were three characters finally in conversation together, three notes suddenly making a chord. Walking allows us to be in our bodies and in the world without being made busy by them. It leaves us free to think without being wholly lost in our thoughts.”

Vedado is mostly in a grid and so each intersection serves as a compass, which is ideal for long stretches of this silent navigation of one’s self. The neighbourhood moves from late 19^th century grandeur to the mid-century modernism of the Habana Riviera hotel or the old Hilton, today’s Habana Hotel Libre. Many streets of Vedado remain shady thanks to the giant trees that have survived the tumultuous decades and many hurricanes. Their roots push up from under the sidewalk, making the pavement look like an open crypt while simultaneously providing the perfect trip hazard. And so, with one eye on the ground and another gazing at the often elaborate houses, I strolled. 

Spending long periods in Cuba with such limited internet access broke me of habits like walking with music or podcasts, so instead I would take in the sounds of dusk: gentle clattering from kitchens, the nightly gossip being relayed by talkative local birds, the distant sound of almendrones, the city’s famed classic cars that are put to work as collective taxis, ferrying passages along some of the neighbourhood’s main corridors. I liked to route myself to Avenida Paseo, a peaceful boulevard with particularly spectacular houses (one of which is today the North Korean embassy).

And so I would explore, finding traces of history and signs of busy lives in the present. These walks were set in a more hopeful, prosperous time, despite the fact that the first Trump administration had tried to close some of the doors the Obama presidency had opened. I found little cafes and lovely small paladares, which are privately run restaurants. I used to keep a list of them, always looking to add to it on each trip. Now I wonder how many are still open. 

There was no great plan on these strolls, though supper — and perhaps a cold beverage — would usually be at the end of it. My phone was off, my headphones left at home. I thought about my day. I often wondered what I was doing with my life and my career. I tried not to trip on the uneven pavement. Once I stumbled upon a local baseball game. I imaged the many generations of people who passed through these houses, who walked these streets. I’ve lived in many cities, and none have ever been so perfectly suited as Havana to this quiet ambulatory winding down. Now I wonder if the conditions that gave rise to those peaceful, meditative evening strolls still exist. There will be only one way of finding out. 

I took many of these walks, and sometime I thought about the Cuba book I wanted to write. Cuba has been part of all three of my books, but I have yet to do one entirely about this island, or even one devoted to Havana. Maybe I never will. One of the consolations of being a writer and historian is the prospect of repeat travel to a particular place. I went to Cuba more times than I could count between 2008 and 2019, and it was in those latter years I forged a relationship with the streets of Vedado. 

I console myself with the belief that there are no wasted trips. Everything is copy, as Nora Ephron rightly observed. I was struck by the discovery that author Ben Fountain went Haiti more than 30 times, with that island finally seeping into his short story collection, Brief Encounters with Che Guevara and a later novel, Devil Makes Three. (30 trips! For fiction, not journalism or history!) Writers are drawn to places for reasons they might not fully comprehend, and I’ve accepted that as part of the process. And so it is with me and Cuba. It’s no great surprise my thoughts turned to Havana while I was in Tampa, as it remains an only tantalising short flight over the Gulf of Mexico away. It may soon be time to go back.

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What I’m … doing 

This trip has been quite the mix of book promotion and catching up with friends and family, which has left almost no time for much else. I have one last in-person event in the US in Atlanta at A Cappella Books on 18 April. If you’re in the Atlanta area, come on by!

I’ll also be on PBS (!!) in the near future, on the programme Story in the Public Square. I’m just doing the interview today and it should be out in a few weeks. Watch this space (or my social media channels) for more information. In the meantime, however, you can see my recent interview with Tyrel Cameron Eskelson on his Interlocutor Podcast.

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