Free Falling Off the Map by Pico Iyer Page A

live out a temptation!
    Proprieties observed, we follow our host on the ten-minute walk to our suites, made-for-mobster caverns from the fifties, with mirrors all round, and enormous makeup areas for showgirls.
    “This is okay?” the young boy asks.
    “Sure,” I say. But one thing still bothers me: why doesn’t he care about the fate of Rajiv Gandhi?
    …
    Come to live out a temptation! Every time I return from Cuba, I find myself sounding like a tourist brochure. Cuba is one of the biggest surprises in the modern world, if only because it has occupied a black hole in our consciousness for so long. If people think of the island at all these days, they probably think of army fatigues, warlike rhetoric, and bearded threats to our peace. Few people recall that Cuba is, in fact, the largest island in the Greater Antilles and, as even my sour guidebooks admits, “the most varied and most beautiful.” That it has 4,500 miles of beach, nearly all of them as empty as a private hideaway. That there are more than eleven hours of sunshine on an average day, and the air is 77 degrees, the water even warmer. That it vibrates with the buoyancy of a late-night, passionate, reckless people whose warmth has only been intensified by adversity. And that it is still, apart from anything, a distinctly Caribbean place of lyricism and light, with music pulsing along its streets and lemon-yellow, sky-blue, alabaster-white buildings shining against a rich blue sea. Havana days are the softest I know, the golden light of dusk spangling the cool buildings in the tree-lined streets; Havana nights are the most vibrant and electric, with dark-eyed, scarlet girls leaning against the fins of chrome-polished ’57 Chryslers under the floodlit mango trees of Prohibition-era nightclubs. Whatever else you may say about Cuba, you cannot fail to see why Christopher Columbus, upon landing on the soft-breezed isle, called it “the most beautiful land ever seen.”
    In Communist Cuba, of course, you will find shortages of everything except ironies. The Bay of Pigs is a beach resort now, and San Juan Hill is most famous for its “patio cabaret.” The Isle of Youth, long the most dreaded Alcatraz in the Caribbean, entices visitors with its International Scuba-Diving Center. There is a “Cretins’ Corner” in the Museum of theRevolution, featuring an effigy of Ronald Reagan (“Thank you, cretin,” says the sign, “for helping us strengthen the Revolution”). And one beach near Matanzas (the name means Massacres) has, somewhat less than romantically, been christened Playa Yugoslavia. Cuba, in fact, has edges and shadows not often found in other West Indian resorts: the billboards along the beach offer stern admonitions (“The best tan is acquired in movement”), and the gift stores in the hotels sell such deck-chair classics as
The C.I.A. in Central America and the Caribbean.
Everything here takes on a somewhat unexpected air. “Cuba’s waiting for you,” runs the official tourist slogan. “We knew you were coming.”
    Cubatur’s most intriguing attraction is undoubtedly its four-hour excursion each day to a psychiatric hospital. But when I asked one day if I could sign up for the tour, the laughing-eyed girl at the desk looked at me as if
I
were the madman. “It isn’t happening,” she said. “Does it ever happen?” “No,” she replied, with a delighted smile.
    Yet the seduction of Cuba, for me, lies precisely in that kind of impromptu roughness, and in the fact that its streets feel so deserted; the whole island has the ramshackle glamour of an abandoned stage set. Old Havana is a crooked maze of leafy parks and wrought-iron balconies, where men strum guitars in sun-splashed courtyards, inciting one to the pleasures of a life
alfresco
; its singular beauty, unmatched throughout the Caribbean, is that it feels as if it has been left behind by history, untouched. Here, one feels, is all the quaintness of New Orleans, with none of the