Dual citizen gives visitor an insider’s tour of Havana, Cuba
Let’s just say if I had known Manny was a distant cousin of Fidel and Raul, I might have made it to his daughter Suzie’s wedding in Havana two years ago at the base of the Spanish fort overlooking the Old City. Manny hired 30 vintage American cars and the 102 guests, who had flown in from Belfast and Hong Kong, Paris and New York, San Diego and Charleston, all were chauffeured to the La Divina Pastora restaurant for the festivities. Most of Manny’s ex-wives even showed up. He’s had four and is on to No. 5. They still all speak to him, which shows how good a negotiator he may be.
Manny Ramos, a former founding partner at Procopio, is the only person I know to hold dual U.S.-Cuban citizenship. At age 8, he was on the last flight out of Havana after the revolution. His father was the Havana city treasurer during the Batista dictatorship, and his job was to collect the taxes from the mob casinos. His father did not come to Suzie’s wedding.
But by all accounts it was a great wedding.
After Procopio, Manny’s job was to sue other lawyers for malpractice. Then he applied online (no kidding) to gov.com and became the only Latin lawyer to recover money from corrupt and failing banks after the Crash of ’08. He quit after two years, out of boredom.
So I knew when we got off that almost-too-good-to-be-true 9 a.m.-4:30 p.m. direct flight from L.A. to Havana on Alaska Airlines (for $355 round trip), we were not going to get the usual Cuba tour you read about in the glossy travel magazines.
No, we were going to get the Manny Tour.
Manny picked us up in a multi-parted Renault from an earlier century, and took our crisp $100 bills to achieve the best rate on the open black market. My wife, Ines, who is from Brazil and always nervous in developing nations, had asked Manny to set us up in a safe place. He put us in a one-bedroom air-conditioned apartment overlooking the ocean on the Malecón causeway, across from the American Embassy; cost per night, $40. It was a bit austere, the view, but well guarded.
In the morning, Manny returned us some hundreds of dollars in CUCs, some kind of Cuban money. He told us not to worry about holding cash; there is no street crime in a Communist country, he said. And we buzzed off to the Club Havana for lunch and a dip in the ocean. On the way, he showed us his old house, which occupied an entire suburban block, next to the house formerly owned by the Barcardi rum family. Manny’s house was now a neurological institute. After the Revolution, Fidel wanted to keep an eye on the remaining bourgoisie so he garrisoned troops a block away, and as a rapt child Manny played with the soldiers. To the shock of his parents, his fraternizing turned him into a socialist, or at least a kid with a foot in each camp, communist and capitalist.
Afterward, Manny had some shopping to do with Yanette, his fifth wife. He dropped us off in front of the warehouse of folk art back downtown, where I was struck by the street traffic, vintage ’53 blue Buick Specials lined up beside brand-new Chinese transit buses.
“After Columbus killed off the Indians,” explained Manny, “the Spanish came, then the Americans, then the Russians. Now it’s the Chinese. See you tomorrow.”
We wandered on foot along the back alleys toward the American Embassy. My paranoid wife made us stroll down the center of the streets, as daughter Julia, a 2017 graduate of La Jolla High, snapped pictures on her iPhone. I poked my head into churches and crumbling apartment lobbies with electric Chinese motorcycles lined up next to fish tanks. This was pretty much the slums — but these slums struck me as safe in this most contradictory of countries, with $500-a-night hotels frequented by pop stars like Beyoncé and Jay-Z cheek-to-jowl with vastly under-code residencias from centuries past. This crazy mixed oldness fascinated Julia, a child of Southern California newness.
Day 2: Manny picked us up for a morning at Los Pinos Beach. Above us in the lanai of the beachfront restaurant on the perfect stretch of sand, 50 Danish women were having rumba lessons. As Manny and I swam out from the beach with a strong current carrying us toward Havana, the Buena Vista melody splashed around our ears.
After our swim, Manny took us to Le Mare in Guanabo, where Don Cheadle filmed the last episode of Showtime’s “House of Lies,” with Manny as location manager. Le Mare was a completely unpainted (paint seemed in short supply in Cuba) restaurant on the water, where we shared a bowl of paella with shrimp so fresh they squirmed on the plate, and a dessert of flan. Then we stripped to our bathing suits, walked down the short steps from the open dining room to the water and bodysurfed in the 80-degree waves.
Day 3: Museum day. Julia rousted us at 6:30, jet lag be damned, and we rocketed out of the apartment on Cuban coffee.
First we hit the Museo de la Revolucion. This is not the U.S. view of history. We saw photos of how Che and Fidel came out of the mountains to defeat the American-backed dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista, then photos of the many attempts on Castro’s life, the CIA’s poisoning of Cuba’s tobacco crop, the bio-warfare (hotly denied by us) using swine flu germs, department stores bombed, and Cuban Flight 455, which was, according to Havana, blown up by Cuban exiles, killing 73 people, including the Cuban fencing team and several children.
Out the back door of the Museo is the glassed-in Granma, the boat Fidel and the revolutionaries motored over from Mexico to annoy America for the last 58 years. The Granma, 63 feet long, is Cuba’s Shroud of Turin. Next door is the National Museum of Fine Arts, with paintings as good as anything you’ll find at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
Lunch was at the La Guarida, the “Locacion del filme Fresa y Chocolate.” I had never heard of the film “Strawberry and Chocolate” or the restaurant, but Julia had noticed the Kardashians had eaten there. La Guarida was a bit like an extension of the National Museum of Fine Arts, with surrealistic paintings of naked crow-women on the walls. I watched as outside two beefy guys pedaled a large working tricycle loaded with seven skinned and gutted pigs to market, the pigs pink, the houses behind a cerrilean blue. Cuba. Beautiful.
Dinner was at El Cocinero (“the Smokestack”). Julia wanted her picture taken smoking an el Cubano with a glass of Ron Santiago de Cuba 11 anos, a drink specially paired with the better cigars, and a snifter you will not find at most graduation parties in San Diego. Next was an art reception for 500 college students from Canada, California and Europe.
We noticed there are no visible homeless in this city of 2 million, and Manny quoted James Patterson, the world’s highest selling author, after Patterson returned from Cuba last year: “Why can such a poor little country like Cuba take care of, for free, all the basics like education, health care, housing, and food, and America can’t?”
Day 4: Hemingway.
The Hemingway Tour is not overrated. We started at 7 from the lobby of the El Presidente, which is much less formal than the Nationale, and vanned with our guide to Ernesto’s home, the Finca Vigia, or farm with a view, overlooking Havana.
The house is open on all sides. Tourists circle it like a museum that has been frozen from the memories of the many books we all read in high school — “The Old Man and the Sea,” “The Sun Also Rises,” “Islands in the Stream” — as you look inside at the author’s bed; the scale upon which he weighed himself every morning, the weight marks still there beside the toilet; his typewriter, an old Royal, which is, if you ever thought of writing a novel yourself, like gazing upon the bare bones of some saint; the African skins on the floor; the Wyoming antelope heads on the walls. Below is a long swimming pool where everybody swam naked, and beside it the Cubans have dry-docked the Pilar, Hemingway’s boat from “For Whom the Bell Tolls” fame.
It started raining, a tropical downpour, and we ran to a tent where a live band was playing Afro-Cuban jazz and young Communist women thrust Havana Club rums into our hands and then maybe couple of refills, and we were ushered back into the van and on to a restaurant in the harbor where Hemingway kept the Pilar before it was a museum piece. More cheap rums were forced into our outstretched hands, and there was more dancing, with the Germans especially having a good time, this new live band wailing, and it was barely noon. With the rain increasing, we were shunted back to downtown Havana to visit the hotel room where Hemingway repaired when too many guests showed up, John Huston, A.E. Hotchener and the rest of us.
Here things got a little turned around. We entered the Floridita Bar, probable source of the proto Cuba Libre, the whole place vibrating with happy patrons from every country in the world; more rums, etc., and I lost the group.
I thought I found them at the Don Quixote statue down the street, but I was mistaken. We finally reconnoitered on top of the Hotel Ambos Mundo for lunch. By this point, our guide looked like she wanted to kill me.
I forget what lunch was, but the view from the rooftops was of the coming apocalypse: two mammoth white cruise ships rising up between antique buildings on the harbor. Thousands of people would soon be taking the Hemingway Tour, crowding the Floridita, busing to the country idyl of Venalles.
Even if the president makes changes to the current Cuba travel rules, group travel will be booked, if not by Americans, then the Italians, the Canadians, the Chinese. So get on that too-good-to-be-true Alaska direct flight now, before the Coca-Cola billboards rise over the Guarida. The Kardashians have already lunched. The cruise ships cometh. Cuba is just too much fun to stop the onslaught. Politics, be damned.
Chapple is the author of “Outlaws in Babylon,” and co-author of “Let the Mountains Talk, Let the Rivers Run.” He is a visiting scholar at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography.
If you go
Alaska Airlines: daily direct flights to Havana from L.A.; www.alaskaair.com
Cuba Visa Services: $85 each, https://cubavisaservices.com/product/touristvisa-card
Airbnb Cuba: (the money goes directly to Cubans) www.airbnb.com
La Guarida: www.laguarida.com/en
A savvy attorney’s predictions about Cuba travel rules
“Nothing changes until the new rules are published and the comment time expires,” explains Manny Ramos. “The hotels and restaurants that Americans cannot stay at or eat in because they are 51 percent owned by the Cuban security apparatus will need to be identified. Lots of hotels and restaurants will not be on that list.
“Group travel will not help get money to small establishments, which is what Florida Sen. Rubio wants, and so I think the only real change is individual travelers, to be safe, will need to take better notes and keep records to establish people-to-people exchange, or whatever reason they are traveling.
“In the eight years of Obama, not one American got fined for violating the congressionally enacted tourist ban. I predict the same will happen with Trump. Also, 55 senators, led by Jeff Flake of Arizona, have signed on to the Freedom of Americans to Travel to Cuba Act.
“When Raul steps down Feb. 24, 2018, and no Castros are in the government, my guess is that it will pass and Trump will not veto it.”
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