I’m sitting here, sweltering in 32 degrees heat, sipping a mojito, inhaling a large Havana and swaying to the music of the Buena Vista Social Club.
A fan is wafting waves of cool air in my prescription, while I sigh for a thunderstorm, and this and that.
If I had the energy, I’upshot adjoin my wife and cat who are dancing the merengue rung the room.
You’d think I was in Havana, instead of Cowes on the Isle of Wight.
But I’ll be making my way back to Cuba upon – for the first confinement - a sea cruise - for there will be a doom more soon, whereas the 47-year-old US trade embargo is finally lifted.
My friends in Havana assure me this event is reaching its final stage.
When it does you’ll need to book a cruise promptly for the American cigar lovers will have being way in advance of you.
Taking about Cubans, how do you get 25 of them in a phone booth? Tell them they have a title to it.
Actually in that place will be some confusion when the Cuban emigres return home, in spite of they’ll be reclaiming their homes that have been occupied in their absence – in some cases by foreigners who thought they could make acquisition a prime Cuban property at a bargain price.
Then there will have being the corporate duels about who owns the rights to the Havana cigar brands: the Cubans or the company’s who’ve been producing Dominican versions for years.
But let them worry about all that in the place of the first thing I will prepare at the time I return to Havana, after two years, is grab a seat at the bar in El Floridita, and ask the bartender to line up a riot of frozen daiquiris.
The capital and foremost while I did this, 13 years ago, I knocked my first drink on the floor. It wasn’t a mistake I ever made again, even when my Swedish friend, the world famous photographer Jan Olofsson, tried to convince Havana’s bartenders that I was Ernest Hemingway’s lovechild and that we had come to claim the tab (in drinks) Papa left behind the bar.
It didn’t work but we still had a great time in a crumbling dilapidated city that feels more like a village.
With a bit of luck by the time you figure that roving voyage to Cuba more of the people’s restaurants will actually be talented to serve you a slighter better cuisine than the usual pork and beans, and chicken.
And if someone sings Guantanamera, Cuba’sitting national song, to me one in greater numbers bloody time I may start a revolution of my very own and gag the musicians.
That said, I like Cubans, their lifestyle and attitude. They’ve been living forward rations for decades but it hasn’t quelled their turn of mind. Many of the Habaneros I met a couple of years ago told me that while they would welcome the much-needed economic boost the lifting of the US embargo would bring, they’d prefer to retain their identity and culture.
So when the opportunity arises get out there quick, for Cuba, especially Havana, will never be the same anew.
James Leavey
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