Discovering Religion, Art & Philosophy in a Cuban Alley

Our travels a few weeks ago in Cuba brought us to Central Havana, in a barrio called Cayo Hueso ("Key West").



There, we found ourselves in the Callejón de Hamel ("The Hamel Alley"), two traffic-free blocks of street art murals and scrap material sculptures, named after 19th century German arms dealer and slave trader Fernando Hamel.



If you were to visit, you might come upon a Santería priest smoking a cigar or a band of Afro-Cuban musicians playing rumba while they twirl their brightly-colored dresses.



Of course, it was only after Russia pulled out of Cuba in 1990 (and the resulting collapse of the economy) that Santería was able to emerge from the underground, where it had been hiding from the government stronghold on religion.



You wouldn't have found this alley in Havana before then.



Now, you could swear you're in a California sculpture garden.



While the sounds of rumba swelled around me, and the rain fell on top of me, I noticed a stone wall embedded with metal bathtubs that had been painted with characters from The Little Prince ("El Principito"), one of my favorite books of all time.



But the words aren't those of French author (and pilot) Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. They're excerpts from Cuban literature, namely a 1989 children's book called La Noche by Havana's own Excilia Saldaña Molina.



The excerpted passages chronicle a philosophical conversation between a young girl and her grandmother. It ponders the bigness of the universe through questions she asks her. For instance, "If freedom is happiness, then what's happiness?" The answer, her abuela says, is peace.



The answers aren't always quite so simple. Is it better to be a river or a bridge? Well, that depends on whether you want to keep moving or if you don't want to get cold.



Why do poor people fight? For love and respect. Why do the rich fight? For gold and for fun.



Like The Little Prince, it covers some pretty heavy topics like envy, jealousy, fear, and loneliness.



And those are all things we all can relate to—regardless of which language we speak, write, or read, and regardless of whether we're as young as that little girl (or The Little Prince himself) or as old as the grandmother (or the pilot).

I think there's something about The Little Prince that really resonates in Cuba. You have to see things with the heart in order to see them rightly there. If you're only looking with your eyes, you're likely to miss out on what's really essential.

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A Cooking Oil Factory Heats Up Cuban Nightlife

Normally, I wouldn't be terribly excited about visiting a nightclub while on vacation in any foreign land. I'd rather go to a cemetery or some archaeological site or just have a really nice dinner.

But when the club is inside an old factory—that's been rebranded as an "Art Factory"—well, I'm in.

In fact, I'm all in.

On a guided tour, sometimes you've got to stay with the group, regardless of your level of interest in any one specific expedition. But on our second-to-last night in Havana (which was also our second night in Havana), we had our choice of nightlife: the Cuban national ballet at the national theater of Cuba, or the Fábrica de Arte Cubano.

It didn't seem like a very big gamble to choose the factory.



And oh, my, the factory! I'm not much for going to the "place to be," as I prefer to be where no one else is at, but it's no wonder why this place is so popular.



You can climb a spiral staircase up the chimney...



...getting closer to the chandelier that's visible through a window from the street—the only thing that really indicates something is going on in there.



High up inside the smokestack—way above the diners of the restaurant El Cocinero below—there's some kind of sculpture...



...surrounded by a million points of green light that illuminate the brick cylinder from the inside.



El Cocinero isn't just the name of the restaurant, emblazoned on the outside of the chimney—it's also the name of the brand of cooking oil that used to be cranked out of this factory, back in its industrial days.



Although the industrial facades are festooned with all sorts of modern, colorful sculptures...



...very little changed when the building changed hands to the Ministry of Culture.



The windows and walls got a coat of white paint.



The ceiling, however, did not.



Neither did the upper reaches of the warehouse walls...



...nor the honeycomb-tiled floor.


Photo by Yoeztudioz (Own work) [CC BY-SA 4.0], via Wikimedia Commons

They did add some shipping container galleries (and bar) in the back.



Once designed and built purely for utilitarian purposes, this space is now home to flourishing art of all types. Yes, there are the sculptures—but there are also galleries and displays of photography, jewelry, printmaking, video arts, dance, and music across multiple levels, inside and outside.



And there are bars to serve you a multitude of rum drinks (mojitos, daiquiris, or just straight rum) and toaster oven-cooked Cuban sandwiches, no matter where you are and which cultural experience you've decided to partake in.

Maybe London, Paris, Montreal, or Berlin have got something like it. It's kind of got Brooklyn written all over it. But this is Cuba, a place where adaptive reuse is an absolute necessity—a necessity that's started giving birth to some pretty cool experiences.

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Photo Essay: Hemingway's Havana Home

Ernest Hemingway might be more closely associated with the time that he spent in Key West, Florida, but it was in Havana, Cuba that inspired him to start writing The Old Man and the Sea in 1951...


Circa 1946 (U.S. National Archives and Records Administration) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

...and it was in Havana that he lived while he tried to figure out how to start writing it, for over a decade.



He'd moved to Cuba in 1939, taking residence at Finca Vigía ("Lookout Farm"), a country home just outside of the urban constraints of Havana. By the time The Old Man and the Sea was published —and became a hit, and won him the Pulitzer—Hemingway himself was a bit of an old man, looking for a break.



He had two wives here, in this house built in 1886.



He witnessed World War II and two Cuban revolutions (including the ousting of a U.S.-backed government) here.



And once he'd left in 1960 to receive treatment for depression back in the States, he could never return. After the Bay of Pigs invasion, the U.S. had imposed a strict embargo on Cuba, which had declared itself a Communist state in 1961.



That same year, Hemingway committed suicide.



The house and surrounding property has been run by the Cuban government as a museum since 2007. The guest house—where Hemingway's sons once stayed during their visits—is occupied by administrative offices.



Tourists flock to the site, coming by bus or taxi.



And while the interiors are cordoned off, you can look inside from the outside...



...and you can climb up to the top of the tower where Hemingway did much of his writing...



...the only place he could seem to concentrate, and the only place to keep him out of the bars.



You can also take in the view that Hemingway himself must have had from up there.



There was a pool, though Hemingway himself preferred to be out at sea.



His fishing boat Pilar is now on permanent display there, dry-docked for the world to see.



But don't try to sit in the chairs.



At this farmhouse, you get a sense of who Hemingway was as a man—not just as a writer. This is where he famously began to keep lots of cats, but he also had an affinity for dogs, especially black ones—who have by now, of course, passed on.



But their progeny live on, greeting visitors from around the world and subtly begging for snacks.

Hemingway loved Cuba, and Cuba loved Hemingway. It makes you wonder what would've happened, had he been able to return—rather than instead retreating to Idaho, where he met his final demise.

He spent decades chasing and reporting on wars, and yet the home front he loved the most was one of the most war-torn of them all.

There must've been something about it—and something about Fidel—to draw him there and keep him there. And it must've been something that we couldn't possibly perceive in just three days' time.

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Cruisin' Cuba in a Convertible

Cruisin' Cuba in a Convertible

If you were to ask any American to describe Cuba, I'm betting they'd rattle off one or more of these three things:

1. rum
2. cigars
3. classic cars

And they'd be right, of course, with any or all of those choices. But what we think we know about Cuba, we have no idea.

If your idea of rum is Bacardi or Malibu or Captain Morgan, you haven't had Cuban rum—that dark, aged, slippery elixir of añejo that you could mistake for a sipping tequila or a smooth bourbon.

And if you think that the air of Cuba is filled with the smoke from Cohibas smoked by Castro, you haven't inhaled the diesel exhaust fumes of the streets of Havana.



There's also this myth that Cuba has been so frozen in time that everybody drives cars from the 1940s and 50s. Well... sure, you do see brightly-colored, shiny-chromed cars with tailfins parked in droves around tourist attractions and cruising the street of Havana.



But the people behind the wheels of those cars don't own them. They're taxi drivers.



Why take a regular yellow cab when you can arrive in style in a pink Cadillac?



On our last night in Havana, all 38 of us hopped into a conga line of classic convertible cruisers for a joyride that took us from our casas in Vedado...



...all the way down to the Malecón in Old Havana.



Even our local tour guide Manuel joined in.



It was hard to feel bad about the misconception I'd had about those classic cars when none of us could wipe the smiles off of our faces.



Crossing the Almendares River and sailing through the tree tunnels of the Bosque de la Habana, a.k.a. the Havana Forest (in the Gran Parque Metropolitano)...



...we saw more in that break-of-dusk ride than we'd seen from the windows of our tour bus in the three days prior.



To our delight, our drivers drag-raced each other around corners, through traffic circles and traffic lights, sounding their horns (ours to the tune of "La Cucaracha") through the Tunel de la Habana, across the Entrada Canal on our way to an 18th century fortress known simply as "La Cabaña."



Though the wind was whipping through my hair, it felt as though it were Havana whizzing by, rather than me whizzing through it.

I can hardly believe I was there at all.

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