Cuban Diaries - Preface

Our Cuban encounter really began in June of last year already, when we found ourselves at what was evidently the most popular event of the ‘Cuba 50’ celebrations at Barbican Centre, to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the revolution. It was a memorable evening, as much for what was on stage as for the audience itself. I had, uncharacteristically, booked the event without much knowledge about any of the acts: an aged, Buena Vista Social Club-esque salsa band, an excellent young jazz trio, and finally, as the main act of the evening, a second half of nueva trova with Pablo Milanes and a small synthe-acoustic band. Judging from the ecstatic response from the Spanish-speaking crowd around us (an exceptional audience demography even for the Barbican, perhaps), we could tell he was a bit of a national icon, a Cuban Elton John of sorts. But then again, the spontaneous mass sing-alongs, which ended up accompanying almost every number he belted out, seemed to contain just a little more than mere passion for the music itself. After all, the guest of honour for the evening had been Madame Guevara, daughter of El Che himself, and the words ‘struggle’, ‘solidarity’, ‘freedom’ had been more than just recurring themes in her impassioned five-minute speech.

There was a certain sense of indefinable, quiet determination in the behaviour of the audience at large, even though the majority of them would presumably have been living in London for a while. They didn’t seem to want to make a big Patriotism manifesto out of the evening (whatever the intention of the event’s organisers had been), and yet the natural, effusive sense of pride, for the achievement of their artists, was acutely palpable and very, very infectious. At the time I was still ignorant of Milanes’s own eventful life story so far, which had included extended persecution by the government because of his homosexuality, ultimately redeemed by officially-endorsed icon status. That fact that he was now firing up the nostalgia of two thousand immigrants – a mixture of legitimate ones and exiles, I could only assume – seemed to carry more than a touch of irony.

The evening fascinated me in so many ways already, and I really, really couldn’t wait for our trip to begin, to see this ‘Land of the Miracles’ (as Steve Smith aptly entitled his beautifully-written book – a must for anyone who wants to know more about the country before visiting it) with our own eyes. If anything, for us it ought to be the Land of Fraternity, for China has supplanted Russia as the main economic benefactor of the nation, ever since the latter stopped its previously generous, crucial aid in the nineties, precipitating the long and bitter ‘special period’. We would again, I thought, stand out among the throngs of Western tourists, as always in the developing countries frequented by more adventurous travellers. But would we be hustled everywhere with non-stop ‘Ni-Hao-Konichiwas’, which inevitably taints one’s memories of even the most beautiful cities? Would we, even worse, be stared at everywhere by the vulture-eyes of expressionless locals who simply regarded us as strange novelties (growing up in China, I always thought this a privilege of the blue-eyed ‘foreigners’, until I inadvertently became one myself, in Burma, in the Middle East, in more remote corners of the US, even)? The only way to find out, of course, is to be there, to go everywhere, to experience – but first of all, to arrive.