Sunday Journal

By STEPHEN BENZ

© St. Petersburg Times, published February 25, 2001

Our mailman in Havana

On my last evening in Havana, I was standing at the sea wall along the harbor when the mailman came along and, in a sense, salvaged my visit to the city.

Not that anything had been bad about the visit. In fact, I had spent three perfectly fine days shuttling around on tour buses to the city's famous sites: Hemingway's old haunts, the centuries-old Spanish forts, the Tropicana cabaret, the hotel strip built by the mob during Havana's heyday as a sin city.

I liked the tours well enough, but I had expected something more.

Havana had always cast a spell over me. When I was young, I saw photos of the city in old issues of National Geographic. Lovers lolled on seaside benches. Waves splashed at the foot of a cliff-perched castle. Tropical foliage rubbed against baroque facades. Dark-eyed beauties dipped water from stone urns.

I heard the voluptuous rhythms of Havana in my parents' Perez Prado and Xavier Cugat records, and I was enthralled.

The stories of Hemingway and Graham Greene -- stories of intrigue and demimonde exploits -- added to the allure. In my mind, Havana became the scene of romance and fantasy. The rumba, the mambo, the cha-cha-cha. Casinos and cabarets and carnivals.

I longed to travel the sultry curves of Havana's seaside boulevards, to take in the glycerin vista of harbor and sea and castle that only Havana offered. "You know how it is early in the morning in Havana," Hemingway wrote in To Have and Have Not. Well, I didn't know, but I had a fervent hope to find out for myself someday.

After many years, I finally got my chance. Three days in Havana on a newspaper assignment. Three fine days in which I saw at long last the city of my daydreams. But every moment of those days was prearranged, leaving me little chance to explore Havana on my own.

So, on that last evening, as I stood at the sea wall, I was a little disappointed. Disappointed that I would leave the next day without having seen anything more than what I had expected to see. The "real" Havana -- whatever and wherever that might be -- remained elusive to me even as the city was manifest all around me.

That's when he appeared at my side, a young man wearing a New York Yankees shirt. He carried a satchel. For a moment, he stared at the sea and said nothing. But I knew what was coming. In an hour's time a few dozen just like him had approached me with the same pitch: You want cigars? Girls? What you want, mister? They were called jockeys in Cuban Spanish, trying to ride the tourists, trying to sell something -- anything -- for a few dollars. Without U.S. dollars, life in Havana was hard.

I don't want anything, I told him. I came to see Havana, that's all.

"Come on then, I will show you Havana."

"I've already seen it."

"What did you see?"

I ticked off a list of the city's tourist attractions. He scoffed. "But you haven't seen anything! Come on, I'll show you Havana. You can join me on my rounds."

Rounds?

He patted the satchel. "I am a mailman."

We started off down a main street, then turned onto a side street and turned again. Soon I lost all sense of direction in the maze of narrow streets. As we walked, the young man kept up a steady monologue in rapid-fire Spanish.

His name was Vladimir, but he wanted me to call him Eddie. English names were better than Russian, he said. Normally he didn't deliver the mail this late -- evening had fallen and the unlit streets were now dark -- but his bicycle had broken down, and he was forced to proceed on foot.

As we entered different buildings to deliver the mail, Eddie told me something of their history. A famous archbishop's residence, a viceroy's house, the place where Cortez stayed, all of them dating to the 16th or 17th century, all of them teetering, on the verge of falling down.

The U.N. had declared this part of Havana a World Heritage Site, but so far little attempt at preservation was in evidence. Only the tourist hotels were restored these days, Eddie said. Each building, no matter how glorious its past, was now a tenement where several families lived. Now and again I caught glimpses into the flats and saw old but tidy furniture, faded floor tiles, peeling paint.

Of course, the Havana I saw during this walk was vastly different from the one I had seen from the tour bus. I heard now the sounds of Havana, the voices of its people, the music wafting from windows. I smelled the city now, too: the heavy perfume of flowers, the musk of tobacco and the pervasive smell of dust and crumbling mortar.

And I saw the faces of the city: schoolchildren in their red and white uniforms peering at passers-by through the iron bars of a schoolhouse window; a cigar-smoking crone seated on a wooden box; a bored girl occupying her assigned post at a street corner pizza stand that no longer had pizza to sell. It was a magic passage through the dimly lit maze of Old Havana.

When we finished with Eddie's rounds, we bought two bottles of beer and sat down on the sidewalk outside a former convent. An old man passed, carrying a squawking chicken upside down. Someone somewhere was playing a violin. The lambent moonlight cast shadows on the convent's facade of saints and angels.

"Now," Eddie said, "you have seen Havana."

-- Stephen Benz is a writer who lives in Miami.

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