Cuba: Day 8 - Part 1

Our last full day in Cuba.  And it’s a varied schedule.
       After breakfast, Chris gives a talk with a slide show of his photos of those vintage American cars we’ve been seeing each and every day, all over the place.  They are not museum pieces; they’re a true means of transportation.  Sometimes it feels like time traveling back to my childhood for me.  With his talk, Chris has set the theme for the morning:  things with engines.

   
 Which is why our next stop - in the Vedado area of Greater Havana - is to the workshop behind the home of Luis Enrique Gonzalez, where he keeps his flock of Harley-Davidsons running through extreme talent and ingenuity. As with those classic American cars, no Harleys have been sold in Cuba over the 50+ years of the embargo.  So these are vintage bikes.  Sometimes visitors to Cuba bring parts with them.  But not entire bikes.  And yet there are 200 Harleys registered and running in Havana alone.  Their owners call themselves Harlistas.  Luis shows us motorcycles in various stages of rebuilding.  He calls what he does resolver, to resolve.  Or as he says in English, “keep it running”.  One example of Cuban ingenuity:  enema tubes used for brake linings.  I feel Luis’ efforts merit a Harley T-shirt from Ann Arbor, or maybe Paris... or both.  Maybe Chris can bring it with him on his next trip.*


       On our way to our next stop, we drop by Lennon Park, also in Vedado.  And yes, that would indeed be John Lennon.  Not only does he have this park named after him, but he also can be found sitting there on a park bench.  Of course, both Lennon and the bench are bronze (by sculptor Jose Villa) but the likeness is striking, right down to the granny glasses, which are real, but not John’s.  And there’s a funny story behind that.  The glasses have been stolen several times so now someone stays nearby, 12 hours at a time, rain or shine - just like the guard at Jim Morrison’s tomb in Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris - and places them on John’s nose whenever people come to take a photo. Which is often.  Today the Glasses Custodian is a shy lady who lets me take her photo, and even tries to put my own glasses on John, but the temples aren’t right so they won’t fit over his bronze ears.  How sweet of her to have tried.  My (bad) Spanish seems to endear me to the Cubans, and they go the extra mile to connect.

Our lunch spot today doubles as another people-to-people because we’re eating in a home-cum-museum.  The art here reminds me of two artistes in France:  Picassiette from Chartres and Le Facteur Cheval.  Picassiette used broken pieces of pottery as mosaics to cover everything in his modest home, including his wife’s Singer sewing machine.  (I’m sure she was thrilled.)  Being very religious, he also drew frescoes of the famous Chartres Cathedral and covered them with pottery shards as well.  Le Facteur Cheval was just that:  a postman, with a rural route in the hills near the Rhone Valley.  On his rounds, he would find strange-shaped stones and wheelbarrow them home, gradually building towering monuments behind his house.  The complex became known as his Palace and includes one ensemble that looks surprisingly like a Cambodian temple.  Surprisingly because Cheval never even saw a photo of a Cambodian temple.
       Here in Jaimanitas, the artist is José Fuster and we are greeted by his son Alex.  Fuster’s home is a fantasy world of strange shapes à la Facteur Cheval and covered with mosaics that would make Picassiette proud.  Its three stories are covered with mosaic tiling in bright colors on walls that look as if they’ve erupted like fireworks.  The best way to sum it up is Gaudi Meets Picasso.  There’s a modernist Madonna holding a baby Jesus up for the Three Wise Fishermen to see from their boat below.  A pool provides a perfect reflection of the shapes high above, and the floor of the pool is also tiled with designs. We lunch at tables around the pool, on food that’s the usual Cuban fare, but delicious, and we just all dive in while people pop back and forth to the kitchen to refill anything that has run out.  Finally it’s time to leave this amusement park of mosaics and head back to the hotel.

      But first we’re given a bit of time to walk around because Fuster has also decorated some 80 homes nearby over the past ten years, turning this simple neighborhood into a colorful, fun place to visit... and probably to live.

* Chris duly delivered the sweatshirts I bought at the Paris Harley-Davidson store for Luis and his daughter on a subsequent Cuba trip.  They were vintage D-Day reprints, as H-D was the motorcycle used in the invasion of Normandy and the freeing of Europe from Nazi rule.