Casa Granda, Santiago de Cuba, 17th May 2003
Pavel took us on a tour from the Parque Cespedes to the area known as Tivoli. Called ‘the most authentic picturesque mixed quarter of Santiago’ by our guide book, it’s been settled over the centuries by Arabs, Jamaicans, Chinese, Dominicans and Puerto Ricans. A colony of French people from Haiti settled there in the 1700s and it’s from them that the name derives. The buildings were faded and decaying, but it was on a domestic scale, not the crumbling grandeur we saw in Havana.
At the top of the Escallier Padre Pico we were serenaded by the Duo San Juan – ‘La Paloma’, ‘Guantanamera’, ‘Hasta Siempre, Comandante’ – watched by three small boys, more interested in us than the music, which they have probably heard too often. The guitarist asked, ‘Are you from Germany?’ (everyone seems to think we are). ‘No, England’. ‘We have been to Europe, to Germany’, he beamed proudly, Pavel, always touchingly honest about the limitations of life in the Cuba he clearly loves, doubted this. The lofty figure of Agustin Suaerz Portuondo opened his shoulder bag and produced a bundle of photographs of the Duo in Berlin, Bonn, Munich, and Cologne. He pointed to a women in one of the group pictures and explained, ‘She makes a business of finding local musicians to take abroad to play in clubs and hotels’. Pavel smiled and shrugged; he’s resigned to the strange twists and turns, the inconsistencies, of Cuban life.