Wednesday, March 31, 2010

Havana, Cuba, March 2010

Inside the Cathedral, Habana Vieja (old town)

Los ninos malos at Callejon de Hammel about to go cuckoo for caramelos. The tallest stuck his hand into my bag, but he should have been more smooth. Work on your pickpocket skillz, mijo.

Stone cold goin’ nuts

Beautiful Habana Centro. Very poor, very beautiful. I hoped fruitlessly I didn’t look like a simpering asshole as I smiled at their “quaint, picturesque” lives.

A literal hole in the wall, near the university in Vedado. A man with a tracheotomy bandage had to summon his daughter to speak for him, and sell us beautiful books for a peso.

I am pointing! For scale? Or because I am awesome at pointing? You decide!

Paul was wandering into people’s houses to take pictures, as if we weren’t conspicuous enough already.

Beautiful. Near the Capitolio. I’d say 90 percent of the buildings were painted in one or another lovely shade of blue.

Habana Centro

Un foto de graffiti Cubano por mi hijo, Jimmy.

This man had Down syndrome or something similar. Paul was taking pictures of kids playing beisbol in an amphitheater, and he wanted us to take a picture of him, so he climbed up on the railing. I thought it was one of those “take my picture and give me a dollar” things, but he just wanted to see his image. He was thrilled to see it on Paul’s camera screen, and then he ran off happy.

Blue

There are tons of pocket parks in Havana in addition to big squares commemorating the heroes of Cuba. You don’t realize how park-poor Los Angeles is until you see a second-world country that manages to provide places everywhere for its children to play and its citizens to chill, even if it’s rollerblading in an empty fountain.

This is Dayam. He brought his sister Lady to the Hotel Nacional to meet us. They wore their most elegant clothes, and were lovely. This was one of the occasions when I did not succeed at being a Perfect Ambassador of American Goodwill. I will tell all about it next week at fourstory.org.

Paul’s favorite building in Havana.

And his second favorite.

Blue

The Plaza de la Revolucion. Paul walked to it and was gone for four hours. I started to worry. But he is a MAN! Also, that way he got to see tons of his favorite Brutalist architecture without my whining about having to look at it.

Like this …

I liked this one, though, because it is BLUE!

Our last night in Havana, we went to a free concert by Calle 13, a Puerto Rican reggaeton band that sounds kinda like Ozomatli or Kinky. Hundreds of thousands of people on the Malecon.

Do you know this man? He was mobbed as soon as he appeared; all the photojournalists turned to take his picture too. These girls …

… loved him, and when I asked them who he was, they just grabbed me and told me I nee-ded a picture with him …

… so they’d have an excuse to get another pic with him too.