shoes on noodle legs, pie-wagon-sized jogging shorts, and idiot logo T-shirts. The Cubans, poor as they were, looked much better. Not that their clothing was good. It seemed to be from American relatives who had gone to Price Club and put together large boxes of practical duds. But the Cubans wore that clothing well—tight where tight flattered, artfully draped where artful draping was to the purpose, and when all else failed, the clothes were simply absent. There were bare midriffs, wide skirt slits, buttons undone to the navel. Cubans are stylish. Cubans are even glamorous, especially the women. And some of the women were entirely too glamorous for the middle of the day. Because there was one kind of economic activity on the streets of Havana, and lots of it. Flocks of women stood along major roads plying the trade just as it’s plied in L.A. “Why is that girl hitchhiking in her prom dress?” I heard a tourist ask. The whores were budding in Cuba, and everything else was old, withered, blown, used up. Even the Young Pioneers, solemn kids in red kerchiefs doing calisthenics in the park, seemed to be obsolete children, products of some musty, disproven ideas about social hygiene. Tired, stupid slogans— SOCIALISM OR DEATH —were painted everyplace. The paint on the signs was peeling. All the paint in Cuba was peeling. Half an hour in Havana was enough to cure a taste for that distressed look popular in Crate & Barrel stores. Crumbling and rot abounded. Of course, there was a good neighborhood in Havana. There always is in these places. Miramar is on the beach to the west of downtown. The streets were lined with royal palms and also with new BMWs. The cheerful mansions had been built in the style that’s called Spanish if you live in Pasadena. These were perfectly maintained and lavishly gardened, and every one of them was owned by a Cuban government institution, a foreign corporation, or an embassy, and so were the cars. In between the cheerful mansions were mansions of little cheer. The Castro government “recovered” these and turned them into housing for “the people.” It was part of the liberty, equality, and fraternity espoused by the Cuban revolution. The fraternity in question must have been the one portrayed in National Lampoon’s Animal House. Much of Miramar looked like the Deltas had been living in it for the past seventy-four semesters. They’d all gotten crabby and gray. And they’d run out of beer.
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