The only way to settle a debate on life in Cuba is
I’d been sitting next to a middle-aged skin-head wearing black silk trousers and shirt. He turned out to be some sort of gangster type who apparently had connections with the new owners of the Riviera hotel on the Malecon (I had no notion at the time about the history involved with this place). Even though I had paid already for another room, he convinced me that a $30 dollar sharing of a suite there would be a far better deal, and, to my later delight, I agreed.
I was the only gringo on the flight, and Cuban Customs tore my stuff apart for an hour and a half (my seatmates said they thought it was my flashy yellow “fat pants” that made them do it…!?). They were friendly though, afterwards.
Still truckin’
We drove through the outskirts of Havana and I thought it reminded me of a semi-deserted American city after the Third World War; There was no paint visible on any building and every other one seemed to be crumbling. The very few cars in sight were American ones, from the 50’s. This made me start feeling good since they were the heroes of my youth, and I went into a kind of daydream and reminisced the rest of the way to the hotel.
The Riviera is quite a site; the architecture doesn’t resemble anything one sees in the modern day U.S. ; It’s sort of like a multi-winged jet plane turned-on-its-side. My companion-character explained that it was the brain-child and baby of Myer Lansky (I started remembering who HE was later that evening)…
He was the only gangster that “they” never got. By the time he was brought to trial he was 92 years old and the jury felt sorry for him and let him go. He’d built the Riviera after he was sure that his new Mafiosi empire was surviving and prospering. After his brainchild, Las Vegas, was off the ground, but faltering, he’d convinced the mob to move to Cuba where Batista had promised him a carte blanche operation. All I know about it I saw in the
movies…
The lobby ceiling seems to be 100 feet minimum with crystal chandeliers the size of Cadillac’s adorning. Just inside the main entrance is the door to the “Palacio de Salsa”, next to the Copacabana, probably Havana’s most famous club and show. I never went; $25 seemed steep, though I really don’t know WHAT I missed.
That first night in the suite, after a quicky visit to the Plaza de Armas and a couple of Mayabes, my room-mate, Frank, handed me one of the Cohiba’s he’d bought on the street and lit up the other. I took 2 or 3 tokes, got dizzy as hell, and fell asleep for the rest of that evening. I never dared to puff on a Cuban cigar again, but wondered how someone could smoke without inhaling (almost all vices remind me of Bill Clinton anymore…). Frank spent most of the evening in the Palacio, woke me up when he stumbled in at 4am, and then proceeded to watch TV at a high volume ’til I screamed for mercy at 6.
I woke up, thick-headedly, at about 9 and we went out searching for an orange juice squeezing stand. We might as well have been looking for purple elephants. There were no businesses open, certainly none with anything to sell, food or drink wise, and surprised and “starving” we returned to the hotel dining room for the $7.00 breakfast of canned juice and cold scrambled eggs. “This is the “upper-class tourist meal-method?”, we thought. We wondered what the Cuban people were eating that morning…
Read all six parts of Iowa Yankee in King Castro’s Court
Part One
Part Two
Part Three
Part Four
Part Five
Part Six