Falling Off the Map by Pico Iyer

that windows are thrown open so that reggae floods the streets, and passengers waiting for a plane draw out guitars and improvise sing-alongs in the departure lounge. Many Cubans have made an art form of their appetite for wine, women, and song—all the more precious in the absence of everything else; one young friend of mine in Havana knows only four words of English, which herepeats like a tonic each day, accompanied each time by a dazzling smile: “Don’t worry! Be happy!” Very often, in fact, the island reminds me of that famous statement of the eighteenth-century Englishman Oliver Edwards: “I have tried, too, in my time to be a philosopher; but I don’t know how, cheerfulness was always breaking in.”
    This exhilarating sense of openness hit me the minute I landed in Havana on a recent trip: the customs officials in the airport were dressed in khaki but winkingly turned the other eye whenever they saw cases piled high with fifteen pairs of new ready-for-the-black-market jeans; the immigrations officials, when not cross-questioning tourists, made kissing noises at their female colleagues. Out in the streets, I was instantly back inside some romantic thriller, with crimes and liaisons in the air. Dolled-up señoritas looked at me with the sly intimacy of long-lost friends; rum-husky men invited me into their lives.
    By the following night, I was sitting along the seawall with a group of earnest students eager to thrash out Hermann Hesse, Tracy Chapman, yoga, Henry Fielding, and liberation theology. Later, walking past the commercial buildings of La Rampa, I heard the joyous rasp of a saxophone and, following my ears through the video banks and rainbowed portraits of the Cuba Pavilion, found myself in a huge open-air disco, free (like most museums, concerts, and ball games in Cuba) and alive with teenagers jiving along to a Springsteenish band in WE STICK TO FIDEL headbands and Che Guevara T-shirts; thus—the government hopes—are party-loving kids turned into Party-loving comrades. When the concert ended, round about midnight, I walked over to the ten-stool bar in the old Hotel Nacional, where four cheery, red-faced Soviets were singing melancholy Russian ballads to a flirty
mulatta
of quick charm. The girl counted off a few numbers on her long pink nails, then swiveledinto action. “Ivan, Ivan,” she cooed across at a lugubrious-looking reveler, “why don’t you dance with me? Ivan, don’t you like me?” At which Ivan lumbered up, popped a coin into the prehistoric Wurlitzer, and, as “Guantanamera” came up, threw his hands in the air and began wriggling in place with all the unlikely grace of a bear in a John Travolta suit. This, I realized, was not Club Med.
    The country’s beaches—289 of them in all—start just twenty minutes from the capital. At Santa María del Mar, a virtual suburb of Havana, lies one of the loveliest, and emptiest, strips of sand you’ll ever see, with only a few old men—salty castaways from Hemingway—standing bare-chested in the water, trousers rolled up to their knees, unreeling silver fish. Behind them, across a road, reclines a typical Cuban seaside hotel, filled as always with something of the plaintiveness of an Olympics facility two decades after the games have ended. Inside its once-futuristic ramps, bulletin boards crowded with eager notices as happily crayoned as a child’s birthday card invite foreigners to “Workers Shows” (“a very nice activity,” offers the unread board, “where you will see the workers become artists for your pleasure”) and “Happy Shows.” Every Monday, at 4:30, there are “Cocktail Lessons,” and every afternoon, “Music, Dance and Many Surprises.” But when I looked at my watch, I realized it was 4:45, and Monday, and not a single cocktail student, not a sign of music or dance was in sight; somehow, in Cuba, it is always out-of-season.
    The proudest attraction of the Cubatur office—and its brightest hope for gaining