Tin Men

He was like that crazy blathering uncle, who says inscrutable things, either full of profound hidden meaning or full of incoherent, nonsensical dribble. Out of touch with everything in the twentieth century, save the bubble of his own self-importance. In the West, Castro was belittled as an obsolete despotic caricature shamelessly enamored with his own legend. Within the USSR, Castro was regarded as a tolerated nuisance. Without a whisker of doubt, he concluded, Castro's failed experiment with one party communism was best preserved in formaldehyde. A memory flashed of a blisteringly hot and humid afternoon when he first landed in Havana as a young, up-and-coming KGB officer, part of a soviet military delegation. His mind cast back to a travel magazine article he had read on the plane and kept as a memento of post revolution Cuba.

'The first impression is of the blinding midday sun, the parched air and the Cuban flag, the Estrella Solitaria flapping sluggishly in a light sea breeze high against a royal blue sky. If a city were a Picasso tapestry, then it would have been Havana. Every peeling pastel-coloured wall and wrought iron balcony stirs the emotions and seduces the eyes. Old Havana, the Paris of the Caribbean is a jarring jumble of mournful dilapidation and achingly beautiful grace the way ageing movie stars sometimes are. Narrow, cobbled lanes wind their way unhurriedly through the decaying city and faded, finned Cadillacs roam the grand avenues conjuring the magic of time standing still. Indeed, the clock had stopped precisely at midnight on New Year's Eve, 1958, at the birth of a revolution. Shallow, turquoise rock pools hem the scimitar curve of the shimmering Malecón, Havana's famous promenade and sea wall, where ebony boys squeal and splash each other without a care in the world. Under the cool green canopy shading the Avenue Paseo del Prado, artists display flamboyant canvasses and fervent lovers sit on stone benches holding hands and sharing cups of Granizado ice flakes in fluorescent hues of pineapple, strawberry and lime. Caressed by the airless, sweltering noon, lethargic, singletted old men recline on patched vinyl sofas with only the whir of a pedestal fan, an ancient gramophone and the tinny, wistful strains of Bolero ballads to keep them company. Who could forget the palm-fringed driveway that ran to the stately entrance porch anchored to the fabled Hotel Nacional de Cuba, built in the age of prohibition and lavish extravagance not seen since. Round capped Bellhops swish about gathering luggage in the plush Art Deco lobby and mulatta room maids skip down carpeted corridors pretending they still fawn over the extinct cosmopolitan jet set crowd of bygone days. At day's end, they return to their imposing, crumbling houses on rickety bicycles with worthless pesos jingling in their pockets, enough for a plate of pork, beans and rice. The triumphant proletariat had won its Marxist uprising against the dictator Fulgencio Bautista and ousted the American Mafia, but seventy years on, had little else to show for it. The tired majesty of a timeless colonial metropolis is the lasting impression of communist Cuba and its capital frozen under the hot tropical sun.'