Free Falling Off the Map by Pico Iyer Page B

self-admiration. And the freewheeling gaiety of a Sunday afternoon in Lenin Park, where soldiers twirl one another about to the happy rhythms of steel bands, is all the more intoxicating because it is so spontaneous; here, one feels, is all the hedonism of Rio with none of the self-consciousness. Everything in Cuba comes scribbled over with the neglectedair of a Lonely Place; everything feels like a custom-made discovery.
    The other great achievement of the Castro government, of course, is that its overnight arrest of history has left the island furnished with all the musty relics of the time when it was America’s dream playground, and many parts of Cuba still look and feel like museum pieces of the American empire. Yes, there are troubadours’ clubs, bohemian dives, a film school run by García Márquez, and a Humor Museum. But the most aromatic of the culture’s features are, in many respects, the backward-looking ones: the savor of rum in the bars that Hemingway once haunted; the friendly dishevelment of the seaworn old Mafia hotels, crowded now with Oriental-featured tourists from Siberia; the rickety charm of white-shoe bands playing the theme from
The Godfather
in red-lit Polynesian restaurants that must have looked modern when first they were built, half a century ago. You can almost feel the city where typical honeymooners from Connecticut could stay at the Manhattan (or the New York) Hotel, take care of their needs at the Fifth Avenue Shoe Store, and cash their checks at one of the First National Bank of Boston’s six local branches, before whiling away their evenings at the Infierno Club (or, in better circles, the Country Club). You can almost taste the tropicolored island where the Dodgers used to hold spring training and Fidel Castro was just another pitching prospect for the Washington Senators. You can almost hear Basil Woon exclaim, in his 1928 book,
When It’s Cocktail Time in Cuba
, “ ‘Have one in Havana’ seems to have become the winter slogan of the wealthy.”
    Yet it is something more than poignant memories, and something even deeper than sun-washed surfaces, that keeps me coming back to Cuba, and it is, I think, the fact that every moment is an adventure here, and every day is full of surprise. I never want to sleep in Cuba. And even after I have returnedhome—and the place has disappeared entirely from view—I find that it haunts me like a distant rumba: I can still hear the cigarette-voiced grandma in Artemisa who took me in from the rain and, over wine in tin cups, spun me family tales strange with magic realism, before leading me across puddles to hear Fidel; I can still taste the strawberry ice creams in Coppelia, where languorous Lolitas sashay through the night in off-the-shoulder T-shirts, beside them strutting Romeos as shiny as Italian loafers; I can still see the round-the-clock turmoil of carnival, and the Soviet doctor who sat next to me one year, blowing kisses at the dancers. Sometimes, when I go out at night and sit on the seawall alone, feeling the spray of the salt, the faint strumming of acoustic guitars carried on the wind, and the broad empty boulevards sweeping along the lovely curve of Havana Bay, I feel that I could never know a greater happiness.
    Cuba, in fact, is in many of its moods the most infectiously exultant place I know: it sometimes feels as if the featureless gray blocks of Marxism have simply been set down, incongruously, on a sunny, swelling, multicolored quilt, so that much of the sauce and sensuality of the louche Havana of old keeps peeping through. “Every step I took offered up a new world of joys,” wrote Thomas Merton, the Trappist monk, who felt himself a prince surrounded by graces “in that bright Island [where] kindness and solicitude surrounded me.” Norman Lewis, after sixty-five years of traveling, told me that he had never found a place to compare with Havana. And even during these days of post-
glasnost
privations, the fact remains