Beatriz Pages, “The other Latin-American countries have tens of millions of beggars; Cuba has none. In other Latin-American countries, you see children cleaning car windshields, running among the cars to do that.” I stopped at a red light. Children ran among the cars, cleaning windshields. Not that there were many windshields to clean. Traffic in Havana was mostly a matter of bicycles and pedestrians who had grown so used to empty streets that someone who looked both ways before crossing was probably a paranoid schizophrenic. People dawdled along, peddling at four miles an hour in the passing lanes and pushing baby strollers down highway exit ramps. Old ladies stood in the middle of the avenue puzzled that there should be someone who wanted to get by. There were, however, still traffic police, hundreds of them, one on almost every corner doing God knows what all day. And traffic rules were completely in force, though stoplights were burned out and street signs were illegible with corrosion. It was, for instance, almost impossible to make a legal left turn in Havana, and all the streets in the city seemed to go one way to the left. These streets are numbered odd east-west and even north-south. I was inclined to give up mojitos when I found myself at the corner of Tenth and Eleventh streets. Habana Centro looked like 1960 Cleveland after a thirty-seven-year strike by painters and cleaning ladies. But the old city, La Habana Vieja, was beautiful. Cuba’s Spanish-colonial architecture is classical and restrained, less Taco Bell influenced than Mexico’s. And unlike the rest of the Caribbean, Cuba’s old buildings are made of stone. The island has, during its history, suffered various periods of neglect, such as the present one. Maybe the Cubans were trying to design things that would look good as moldering ruins. The tourist areas of the old town had been cleaned up, and somewhat more cleanup was in progress. A number of museums and government-owned restaurants were open and were, as Fodor’s Cuba guidebook says of one such, “decorated with antique furniture recovered from the great mansions of the local bourgeoisie.” Tactfully put. Outside of the tourist areas, however, there was a fair danger of experiencing some freelance socialism; you might find that you were the local bourgeoisie from which something got recovered. Later in the morning, Havana’s streets grew crowded, but not with a madding crowd. Nobody was doing much of anything or going anywhere in particular. Thousands of people were just hanging around in the middle of a weekday in a country where, by law, there’s no unemployment. Some people were walking
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