On Streetscapes and the Pursuit of Authenticity in Havana, Cuba
Walking through La Havana Vieja, I couldn’t stop taking pictures of streetscapes.
I’d be walking down one block when I’d catch a glimpse of another and hurry there to capture it before it—I don’t know, disappeared? Changed? Before the onion seller moved his cart? The pristine vintage Studebaker pulled away? The wind moved the sheets drying from the windows into a less photogenic shape?
All of that could have happened and the scenes wouldn’t have lost even a bit of their appeal. The slightly modified image would still have been one I’d cherish. And it took me some time to figure out why.
It has something to do with authenticity—something we are constantly chasing as travelers, as humans, as people who voluntarily broadcast our lives and want to be well-liked for it.
We think about authenticity as this state of being real, but so much of how we experience it is through artifice. Authentic is a purposefully run-down bar, a heartfelt Insta story that took six takes to get right. It’s a “no makeup” makeup routine, an ice cream shop using vintage scoops to serve mass-produced flavors, a crafty salesman passing off made-in-China shawls as hand-woven artisanry to tourists. It is our obsession with the hipster, a person trying to eke out a way of life outside of the norm but forced to capitulate to the same forces that drive the norm (i.e., capitalism, self-consciousness) such that he remains, ironically, fully part of it, in the same rolled jeans and black boots and with the same mustache wax as all the others.
We hide so much of the ugly bits of life—all our selfies are smiling ones, we rely on domestic laborers to maintain the illusion of having it all at work and at home—to present only our best selves, and our understanding of authenticity is warped for it. That is, if authenticity exists at all.
We’re able to refine what we consider to be authentic because of the physical space and money we have and the emotional connections we don’t. We live in our own apartments or our own houses, doors shut. Perhaps we have roommates, but we don’t live in multi-generational households; in big cities like New York and Washington, D.C, the large majority of households have single occupants. And across the country, we’re increasingly less likely to know our neighbors, participate in local politics, and be part of professional organizations than our grandparents’ and parents’ generations. Our relationships are often made or maintained online, which insulates us from the reality of lives other than our own. No one really knows us, so we can present ourselves however we wish.
Not so in Cuba.
In La Havana Vieja, there’s no extra money or space to hide a life. Everyone lives on streets that were narrow when they were built in the 16th century and have only grown narrower since, with the additions of clotheslines bolted under window shutters and webs of wires stretching across the block. Families live together in government-provided flats, going in and out all day long. Commerce happens in public spaces—it’s impossible to image cardboard Amazon boxes piled up in crumbling doorways—and people talk, gossip, flirt, hassle while they wait in line at the market, at the telecom company, at the pharmacy. Almost no homes have internet, and those that do have a television leave it in their front room with their doors wide open, inviting both neighborhoods and fresh breezes to join them. The city’s heat preserves smells—food, bodies, life—for passerby to pick up on.
Each scene fascinates me because it feels like how things might have been in my community, too, before the suburbs and the cell phones and the internet. I felt like Belle, cataloguing scenes of a provincial liiiii-fe. Though of course I am not like Belle, because I’m an outsider, a white person who is not part of this community but is wandering through it anyways, and whose romanticizing gaze runs the risk of reducing a complex, diverse place to something aesthetically pleasing, something heart-warmingly “authentic,” air quotes included.
I don’t want to do that. I don’t want to reduce a place to my visual appreciation of it, appropriating everyday realities—laundry hanging outside! chipping paint! the rustic misshapenness of non-genetically-modified green peppers!—into a tableau to parade around and (mis)represent.
Because of course that’s not all La Havana Vieja is. For every few run-down colonial facades, there are pristine buildings with fresh paint and flowers. For every vintage car with rusty side panels and an oversized steering wheel, there’s a boxy Peugot ’02 206 parked next to it. For every hour I spent wandering around, there are hundreds of thousands of hours more in which the city kept churning without me there to notice it.
So instead of posting my streetscapes and pretend I’ve captured something hidden and magic, I will post my streetscapes and tell you this: Havana is full of people and life just like every city. It’s not only old and crumbling. It’s young and alive, too. And the beauty of having no extra demands on my attention—no wifi, no notifications, no posts to plan and virtual friends to check in on—means I could see the whole range of it.
The bloated-belly baby running up to us at the park and plunging her little hands into our pack of butter crackers. A snowcone-sized puppy pouncing on the shoelaces of an old man sitting in a rocking chair behind a corrugated iron wall who was more pleased than he’d like to be at the puppy’s insolence. A girl in cotton-candy-colored leggings and matching top walking hand in hand with a lanky boy in too-long shorts. A man picking over the bananas on a streetside stand, setting aside the least-mottled to take home. A cat batting at the light caught on the bar door. A group of boys in shiny shirts stretching with their gloved hands grasping their elbows over their head in a boxing class. A man in a dirty tank top scooping black beans out of a barrel with a giant general-store metal scoop and weighing them with a cast-iron food scale.
If you paid me to describe my old neighbors, I couldn’t do it. I used to wake up, leave my house, go to work, and come back, all without noticing the humans around me for a second longer than what was necessary. And even though I left my job to travel, even though I’ve spent hours looking out of bus windows and wandering through markets, I’ve never noticed as much as I did in Havana.
I think that’s why I was so drawn in to each block, to each scene. Life was spilling out into the street, there in every detail if I just looked hard enough. I had grown unaccustomed to looking. Had replaced it with walking around with my eyes on my phone or my focus on whatever I was on my way to do. In Havana, my phone didn’t work and I was never on my way anywhere. Havana reminded me what a privilege it is to see. Who knows if what I saw was authentic? I don’t know enough about life there to say.
I do know it was beautiful. I do know I am grateful to have seen it.
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