As Cuba battles with rolling blackouts, our writer is determined not to let a simple lack of electricity stop him from making the most of Havana’s legendary nightlife.
‘The next light in that direction is Cancún,’ grins El Flaco, pointing west along the coast into the night.
We pause for slurps of slightly-too-warm Cacique beer and glance around. La Bajada’s half-dozen-odd creaky wooden beachfront houses constitute the only real community in this westernmost extremity of Cuba, a 50-mile-long finger of land resembling a stiletto tentatively stepping forward into the Gulf of Mexico. And it does give the impression of being a profoundly dark and silent place.
‘And in that one?’ I gesture east, back towards the rest of the country, which seems as far away in that moment as Cancún does.
Laughter reverberates around the group. Ironic laughter but laughter all the same. Cubans are the world champions of being able to glean humour from devastatingly sad situations, and they do have a lot to be down about right now.
Having driven here down the long and potholed road from Havana, I’ve observed that first-hand. Five hours’ travel time, Google Maps opines. More like eight or nine with the dilapidated state of the tarmac, with the excruciating detours to find functioning fuel pumps and the queues of vehicles waiting to fill up stretching back around the block when you finally do. Pull over for the night and you likely do so in darkness, with planned electricity switch-offs or unexplained outages the cause. For large swathes of the journey there was precious little to eat, either. We trundled through the entirety of Artemisa province, the region west of the Cuban capital, without encountering a single place serving food or drink. ‘No hay pan’ (there’s no bread), a bakery owner regretfully informed me; ‘no hay corriente’ (there’s no electricity) lamented a woman running a hole-in-the-wall coffee joint without means to heat water; simply ‘no hay’ (no there isn’t) was often the response we got wherever we stopped off, before we had even opened our mouths to ask anything.
“Darkness for sure. Especially in Miramar,” someone sarcastically says, referencing Havana’s wealthy government district which – according to everyone I speak to – seems to have strikingly fewer problems with ruinous roads, with fuel shortages, with electricity outages, with empty supermarket shelves and foodless restaurants and raging discontent than the rest of the country does.
El Flaco is the embodiment of how Cuba somehow, against almighty odds, keeps ticking by. La Bajada, the solitary fishing village he calls home, has historically been overlooked in favour of the two big attractions anyone ever used to venture out to this end-of-the-road place to experience – María La Gorda, offering some of the island’s best diving, and the Península de Guanahacabibes, one of its last true wildernesses. But both are government-run and appear seemingly run into the ground, much more so during Cuba’s particularly lean last couple of years. La Bajada meanwhile has always been the domain of private enterprise and private enterprise has always found a way to flourish, even when the restrictions placed upon it by in the Western Hemisphere’s sole remaining Socialist state have reached their most stringent. So El Flaco’s palm-shaded terrace and his menu of fried grouper fish, rice and beans, have become the peninsula’s only functioning restaurant, El Flaco’s renditions of Gunantanamera and Hotel California to the guests in his casa particular (bed and breakfast) are the only sounds of merrymaking for many, many miles around and El Flaco’s generator – because grid electricity, this far into the middle of nowhere, can rarely be relied upon – powers the only human-generated light in the sticky Guanahacabibes night. He’s one resourceful fellow. And it is similarly resourceful individuals propping up Cuba’s most dependable industry, tourism, right now: bestowing it with a great big beating heart, as opposed to the lifeless shells many government-operated enterprises have sadly become.
Since the fall of the Soviet Union, Cuba has dealt with two starkly contrasting realities: that of its tourists and that of its citizens. Visitors paid for services in their own dollar-pegged currency, CUC, while Cubans conducted business in pesos which fetched approximately 1/24 of the value and could not pay for imported goods; there was one transport system for foreigners and another for locals; Cubans were often not allowed into tourist hotels. This meant tourists operated almost exclusively in a sphere that bore no resemblance to Cuban life. They drank different drinks, consumed different food, smoked different cigars and came, saw and departed Cuba imagining it as a series of government-sanctioned and government-mythologised cliches. Invariably their only contact with Cubans was with tourist resort workers who were obliged to perpetuate the idea of the Cuban socialist idyll despite running their households for a month on less than a tourist might splurge on an evening meal. On the other side of the fence, tourist enclaves were kept sufficiently distant from real Cuban towns so that foreigners’ comparatively luxurious lifestyles would not make Cubans too envious, while state-run media helped mitigate the populace’s discontent and still succeeded, to a degree, in portraying the government as fighting for the betterment of the people.
But there comes a point when even the most impeccable revolutionary propaganda cannot paper over the cracks. That point didn’t come when Raúl Castro handed control of the country to Miguel Díaz-Canel in 2018. It didn’t come when 2021’s monetary unification failed to give the ailing economy its desired boost. It is coming now: when the increasingly regular power outages plunged Cuba into dimness for hours, sometimes days at a time; when food was rotting in fridges; when batteries couldn’t be charged; when there were no hot coffees or cold beers.
I see that as I gaze out at La Bajada’s black ocean, watching it break over the coral shelves onto the empty, pale, palm-bestrewn sand that would surely qualify as paradise to most. But being the one light in the darkness in a cut-off-from-it-all paradise is easy enough to romanticise: yes, even for an inveterate traveller to Cuba like myself who has long grown tired of the verve with which foreign travel publications recycle tropes about this country such as the 1950s cars on the roads or the 1990s tourist developments as if they are good or even great things when both are symptomatic of how Cuba continues to be hindered, not helped. But being the one light in the darkness in civilization? That’s unsettling.
Bound for Havana after Guanahacabibes, I stop in Viñales. This much-visited town’s landscape of looming limestone crags called mogotes that punctuate neat valley-bottom fields of tobacco still traditionally tilled by oxen has always been the exception that proves the rule in Cuba: the place that lives up to its idealised reputation, where its residents really do seem to be living the dream, or at least benefitting from a bucolic lifestyle largely lacking the hardship Cubans elsewhere face. They’re in the third day of a blackout when I arrive.
“There are the scheduled blackouts,” Daniela, who like many enterprising Viñales folk runs a casa particular, explains. “Only they don’t always follow the schedule. Then there are the unscheduled ones. We’re not sure if this is a scheduled one that’s not followed the schedule, or one that surprised the electricity company too.”
The town’s individual-run lodgings and restaurants still lend it an animated air, even though electricity is being provided by generators the owners have gone to great pains to source in the US and often spent many months financing, awaiting delivery and installing. But most houses remain dark. Government bus company Víazul has culled its services to the town leaving the only means of getting here with any private vehicles that might have fuel. In the countryside just outside, some hotels are half-closed. There clearly hasn’t been food served in their restaurants or water in the swimming pools their dated websites depict as full for a while. The showcaves, once the neighbouring San Vicente valley’s main attraction, are shut.
“It’s different in Havana,” my old friend Luis Miguel tells me. “Sometimes other parts of the country are without power and here we are fine.”
He too owns a casa particular in Centro Habana, the city neighbourhood squeezed between the historic centre and the Malecón sea wall. While he then qualifies what he’s said by conceding that there were times, such as in Hurricane Oscar last October, when Havana had electricity problems too, during my first couple of days in the capital it really does appear as though the city has been spared the brunt of the outages beleaguering the rest of Cuba: scheduled switch-offs, yes; unexpected blackouts, no.
“You can sometimes tell what type of power cut it is by the sound,” Luis Miguel explains. “The arranged ones are more like this,” (he clicks his fingers once), “the surprise ones more like this,” (he makes a slowly-decrescendoing drone like a plane powering down engines).
On my penultimate night in Havana, there is a longer-than-usual blackout. The restaurant I am at closes perfunctorily so I return to my hotel, order a room-temperature mojito and take it up to the roof terrace. There’s no-one up here. The lights have been switched off to preserve the generator’s juice, but it’s not totally dark. For there suspended above the blackness of the Malecón is the March blood moon, a shimmering rose-gold orb, with scarcely any light pollution to temper its splendour. Having had no Wi-Fi these last couple of days, I had totally forgotten about the lunar eclipse. And here I am with the perfect front-row seat. Perhaps, I think, dark sky tourism should become Havana’s next big thing.
The electricity doesn’t return all next day. The stores on Paseo del Prado, the main shopping street, are boxes of shadows. The lights are out at the Hotel Inglaterra and the Kempinski on the other side of Parque Central and the employees at businesses hereabouts are huddling in whatever piece of park shade they can find as air-conditioning almost everywhere has stopped.
In Centro Habana, the residents are living life during these power-deprived times out on the streets even more than usual. Their shuttered, high-ceilinged colonial homes were designed to keep the sunlight out so the street is now the only feasible place for domino games, neighbourly chats, family bickerings, even school homework and a haircut or three – in addition to the inevitable clothes-drying, car-repairing and impromptu vending of fruit, cigarettes, baby clothes, anything and everything. Somehow, because this is Cuba, the reggaeton still manages to ricochet around the blocks at the same maxed-out volume as ever, too. Friends of mine living here joke that even during blackouts, they can still watch amazing movies: they just open their shutters, look out at the street and one unfolds.
Always, on my last night in Havana, Luis Miguel and I enjoy a little tradition. We go out to see some jazz. I am a big fan but he is a bigger one: his grandfather founded Cuba’s first jazz orchestra and his casa particular, Casa 1932, was the place they used to rehearse. Tonight, we are thinking La Zorra y El Cuervo – probably Havana’s most iconic venue – and our hopes are raised come early evening when the power, at least in Centro Habana, makes a prodigal return. We get ready: Luis Miguel looking characteristically dapper, me smoothing down the one rumpled shirt I have with me for the occasion.
Then: the descrescendoing, plane-engine-powering-down sound.
We go out onto the street where everyone, having been halfway through the mad rush to cook the family dinner and charge every device before the next outage, is in a state of understandable consternation. Because it’s utter blackness this time. This one is a bad one: the main thermoelectric power plant has failed and darkness has fallen island-wide. Various reasons have been cited for Cuba’s protracted power outages, which have been steadily on the increase over the past year. A slowdown in fuel shipments from Venezuela and China, poor infrastructure for distribution within the country, the US embargo, hurricanes (which may or may not have come from the US). But on this Centro Habana street they didn’t care about explanations any more. They wanted results.
“Come with me,” Luis Miguel says, and we climb up to his neighbour’s rooftop. All along the Malecón to Vedado, where the jazz club is: blackness. Even Habana Vieja, the historic centre which is normally a bastion of dependable electricity on account of it being the key tourist district: blackness.
“No jazz tonight, but come on, you are only coming here every couple of years. We are still going out.”
We grab a couple of solar-powered lamps, jump on the back of a bicycle taxi and head off. As we bump along, the generators of those with the quickest reactions kick in and flare up odd beacons of light, like will-o’-the-wisps, in the gulf of city darkness.
“Closed,” mutters Luis Miguel, as we pass one of his back-up last-night-in-Havana choices. And, after another couple: “Everywhere is shut.”
There’s one more place Luis Miguel knows that we can try. And it’s open. What’s more, everyone who wanted to go out in Centro Habana and couldn’t go elsewhere seems to be here. I see from the word ‘Fidel’ scrawled on the stairwell that it is La Guarida, one of the city’s first paladares – privately, usually family-run eateries that emerged in the Special Period, the economic crisis that hit the country once the Soviet Union collapsed. La Guarida built itself up, bit by bit, level by level, terrace by terrace, always retaining that weather-worn colonial look. And on the topmost terrace? The trippy sounds of jazz filtering down. It’s Jorge Luis Pacheco, one of Cuba’s most talented young jazz musicians, and as we sit to watch he’s just placed the keyboard down on the ground, taken off his shoes and to rapturous applause began to play the keys with his toes, to the backing of some rather exquisite percussion and trumpet-playing. The lights of the performance, five lofty floors up above the city’s enforced gloom, are like those of a ship bobbing on a dark ocean. It is a perfect, magical night – though I feel almost guilty for having it, given what I’ve learned of Cuba’s daily frustrations of late.
“In your country you have this thing called a Plan B,” Luis Miguel smiles at me. “In Cuba we have all the letters of the alphabet.”
It had been his idea to come here from the beginning.
The next day, travelling to the airport, I pass by Plaza de la Revolución. This is the square where Fidel Castro used to address hundreds of thousands of Cubans on occasion: the statue of Cuban independence fighter José Martí looking serious in the middle and the building-high mural of Che Guevara looking on from the side of the Ministry of the Interior across the way, accompanied by that proud revolutionary slogan ‘Hasta La Victoria Siempre’ (Until The Victory Always). I stopped here to take pictures once, just like all the other tourists. But not today. The victory is going to be a long time coming if the power doesn’t come back on.
