Missive #3 - El Vedado, La Habana, Cuba - Saturday, September 10, 2011

Saturday,  September 10, 2011

El Vedado, La Habana, CUBA

It hasn’t even been a week since my airplane touched down, and it already feels like I’ve lived here at least half my life and nearly like I never really left.  


I caught a ride on Thursday afternoon from the seminary in Matanzas to Havana with the rector, who commutes between his two homes.  His wife teaches at the University of Havana, as do several of the other professors at the seminary, so there is something of a shuttle service between the two cities.  I’m not sure yet how or when I will get back to the seminary in time for my classes on Tuesday morning.

Yesterday, I jumped over the Malecón into the clear aqua waters nearest my family home, where I am staying until Monday.  Fully clothed, once again.  I have to learn (or remember, or care) to put on a bathing suit before I walk out the door.

Right after drinking the best café con leche in the world, and eating a couple of slices of Cuban bread toasted over the stove on a pan, with butter and peach preserves,  I headed outside the two sets of huge wrought-iron gates into the street.  I love to just walk around,

but I need some kind of a goal, or else I look too touristy, and that can be dangerous.  


So the mission was to find a mailbox, in which to mail a couple of the postcards I’d bought in Matanzas, to send to those of you whose addresses I knew by heart.  (I neglected to bring

any kind of real non-electronic address book with me, mainly because I haven’t had or used one for years.  I still have lots of stamped postcards from Matanzas and from Havana to address and send to whoever e-mails me their full address.)  


So off I went through the Parque Villalón to the next large cross-street, Línea, hanging a left toward Paseo.  There, sure enough, stood a large post office on the corner, not nearly as crowded as the one in Matanzas, but where I nevertheless stood in line behind a single man, waiting my turn.  I needed to be sure that the postcards had the right amount of postage (yes) and then where to put them (in the blue mailbox behind me).

El Vedado was a neighborhood of mansions, each inhabited by a single family and their many servants.   My aunt is one of the few who has gone on living in the same house where she and my father and their siblings grew up.  My paternal grandmother also built an apartment building in the rear of the property, with six large apartments, to eventually house each of their six children, their spouses, and their children.  I and my siblings, and many of our cousins, aunts, and uncles, thus all grew up living in the same building, right next to our grandparents, attending the same schools, playing together every day, and sharing vacation weeks at the beach house in Varadero. A true extended family complex.

After the post office, I decided to head in the direction away from the Malecón and the sea, where I found one block after another filled with one huge mansion or palace after another.  The sidewalks on these streets are fully shaded by those enormous trees with roots that hang

down from their branches like vines.   


These formerly majestic residences are surrounded by wrought-iron fences, oftentimes barred

from sight by the addition of large sheets of metal, with gates here and there, all locked, and thus are fairly inaccessible to the public.  But it was easy enough to detect that the largest palaces had all been turned into government buildings, ministries of this or that.  Some are now also schools or cultural institutions.  Only the smallest of these former mansions remain residential abodes, and these, like my grandparents’ house, have been split up into living units for several families, where there once resided just one.

I then turned back toward the Malecón, the famous seawall that runs for several miles in Havana.  A man showed me a few fish he’d caught--long, skinny, shiny things he intended to cut up and use as bait to catch larger fish such as red snapper.  I was too late in taking out

my camera; he was packing up to leave.  It was nearly noon, and most people were heading home for lunch, or at least out of the sun, so the Malecón was nearly deserted.  But I couldn’t take my eyes off that blue-green water!  


Nobody was swimming just then, but by the scattered debris left from the night before, just over the other side of the seawall, it was obvious that people went swimming in these waters.

The question was how the heck I was going to climb over and down the other side without killing myself.  


In cases such as these, I’ve found that the best thing to do is to just sit and wait to see what happens next.  So I climbed up atop the seawall, and sat and waited.  Within seconds, two men came crossing the large avenue, right over to where I sat.  They immediately became my guardian angels, showing me how and helping me to climb safely over and down to the series of concrete shelves on the other side of the seawall, over which we could jump into the water and swim!  Ahhhh!  


Interestingly enough, this water in Havana is not as salty as the water in Matanzas.  And just like in Matanzas, since I had not planned to go swimming, I was wearing a light dress. It was almost dry by the time I walked the five blocks back to the house for the midday meal.

Before the end of our collaborative and adventurous midday swim, the two men and I had exchanged contact information.  David had lived in Washington, D.C., for a year, working for the Cuban Interests Section, in the visa department.  He is currently unemployed.  Regis is a film producer who is working on a documentary about hurricanes.  He wants me to give him English lessons whenever I come to Havana.  

We agreed to meet this afternoon at a café right across the street from our swimming place.  And this time, I am already wearing my bathing suit before I walk out the door.