It’s a heart-pounding climb up a dark, piss-drenched stairwell. The greasy iron elevator that services the flaking 1920s apartment building seems to function only intermittently.
A small group of German tourists is trapped inside. The bargain-priced apartment they’ve been renting maybe doesn’t seem like such a good deal now. There’s no word of when a maintenance engineer will show up or even if such a person exists.
This is clearly no intellectual’s ivory tower. And that’s just the way Cuban author Pedro Juan Gutierrez likes it.
“Up here, I’m like a ghost. I’ve been a privileged witness to what has gone on in the neighborhood,” he told me on a recent visit to his home.
Gutierrez has been living on the top floor for more than 30 years now. He’s transformed a small roof terrace into his own observation platform — to peer down on what he calls Central Havana’s “dirty” reality.
These days, Gutierrez says he’s turned to Buddhism to beat his addictions to cheap rum and wild sex. Up in his ninth-floor sanctuary, he’s just about out of harm’s way.
But one teeter and he may just fall — he says maybe he’ll join me for a “small drink” down at ground level in the next few days.
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She says police once gave her a ticket for “harassing tourists,” official speak for prostitution. She says her day job is a physical education teacher for primary school children.
She earns just $10 a month with her state salary and spends that in the bat of one of her false eyelashes. But she says the job provides her with a vital cover story.
Having legitimate employment, she says, keeps her out of trouble with the law when she turns tricks at night. She charges her foreign clients $100 a night, if they don’t bargain her down, she says.
Like many others, she has high hopes that she will be able to cash in on the potential influx of American tourists, after President Barack Obama’s announcement of more stable U.S.-Cuba relations.
But back up the street, Gutierrez is not convinced there will be a quick fix to those relations. The problem, he says, are elderly Cubans on both sides of the Florida Straits.
“For more than half a century, there’s been a lot of hatred between Cubans in the U.S. and those on the island. There’s been a lot of thirst for revenge. We have to wait for the years to pass and the old men to die,” he says.
“Only then can we resolve things in a civilized way.”
