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Eusebio Leal presents “Temas”

Introduction to issue number 43: “Tourism and society”, July-September 2005 (Ambos Mundos Hotel, October 2005), published in Temas, issue 45, January-March 2006.

Fifteen years ago, after one of the hurricanes that affect the country every year and shake up its usual dynamics, Eusebio Leal presented issue 43 of the journal Temas, dedicated to “Tourism, culture and society”. In front of an audience made up mostly of the employees and collaborators of the Office of the City Historian, more than a speech, Eusebio stitched together a candid conversation, exploring an important range of topics that concerned him in relation to the challenges that the Office of the Historian had taken on in its efforts to restore, preserve and develop the city's historical heritage. Many of those challenges that haunted Leal then are still present today, some even more so than when he pronounced these words at the Hotel Ambos Mundos.

Temas takes up these topics again today, in the midst of the difficulties that the Cuban people are facing, highlighting what lies ahead, pointing to what remains to be done.

I am very grateful to Rafael, Denia, Alfredo and the Editorial Board of Temas for the work done. Also to all the authors of the articles, essays with their points of view and to the journal which, by publishing them, demonstrates a true commitment to give testimony about objective matters of life, culture, and philosophy in our country.

It seems to me extraordinarily opportune that we return in this issue to the topic of "Tourism, culture and society" with a spirit of real examination of what it entails. I am not going to go over the frivolous intentions of Herodotus, but ever since his time, wandering the world –just like Hadrian and other ancient travelers, up until the so-called great travelers of the nineteenth century– we became accustomed to such testimony, to those travel tales, to man's desire to transcend.

As island creatures, for us transcendence is sought every from shore. I have always said that, while travelling the world, I have come across Cubans in different places who lack a certain vitality and when I have dug into the reason for their crestfallen look, for that lack of inner calm, I suddenly came to realize the reason: they are not near the sea.

I remember the agonizing request of a little boy to his father in Lima, when his father said: "Let's go for a walk with our friend," who was me. Then the boy said: "Dad, take me to see the sea." And that sea of the Pacific was one of a kind, a heavy sea, a sea of large and distant waves.

Those waves were very different from the recent ones we have seen in Havana providing us with a rehearsal of the times that await us: suddenly the sea flooded everything, covered everything ... We saw waves crashing against the Morro lighthouse, and cross forty-odd meters above its base. The sea clinched Havana and ripped away 100-year old chunks of the Malecón, pieces six and seven meters long, weighing four or six tons. She hurled some of them onto the Avenida del Puerto, while others she flung against the wall itself. The water passed over the shutters of the San Salvador de la Punta Castle – an award-winning restoration of a few years ago–, broke gates, occupied the moat and penetrated up to 1.2 meters. Although the museum pieces, for example the treasure of shipwrecks, was already safe, at dawn we had to rescue the workers who protected the museum, who stayed there as a duty call and, at the same time, out of individual heroism. Because the sea is beautiful, but when she fires up, she is formidable.

I remember –and I am not that old– the sections of the Malecón that were built during my childhood in El Vedado. And seeing in my maps and books the old routes, the old pools on the shore of the Malecón, the cove of San Lázaro or Juan Guillén, the one that opened in front of the old Ciudad Deportiva ..., I can confirm that the sea again invaded those places.

And here, in Old Havana, where there is a small island of rocks, the sea made a move on the Fountain of Neptune and continued beyond the pilings, because there are almost one hundred thousand breakers, put there between 1928 and 1929, and she opened gaps from which enormous fissures emerged. It's just that we - and forgive the digression - live by the sea; the sea is our border and, at the same time, it is our form of communication. Everything good and bad in our history has entered through the sea, everything has showed up in some corner of Cuba’s shores.

And tourism is like that too. People arrive and transcend. In the historical period that I have lived through, I remember a port full of boats, forty or fifty trading ships in the center of the harbor. That is why I am very happy when I hear that a large ship - white, blue, yellow, orange - is going to make its entrance along the channel, because it represents an act of breaking the isolation: the ship enters, and with it, people, and with them, the real possibility of communicating in the world with the world, beyond doing it with letters, that is, through the Internet, e-mail or other current forms.

Despite my keenness to write, and to do it by hand, letters, correspondence, are dying, and I only want to write them as an act of discipline, so that someone has the pleasure that I feel when an envelope arrives with postage stamps, franked, and I discover that His Majesty's ship has crossed the Atlantic, and that, sometimes a few months after being posted, it reaches my hands, but it arrives in the form of a letter and not via the coldness of e-mail, which, in addition, is read by almost everyone, because there is a commitment to privacy that in the latter case does not make the slightest sense. I see silly people writing nonsense, and I tell them: "For goodness' sake, get to the point, everyone's going to see it." It is like the passion for cell phones, constantly overheard. Almost everyone hears them. So they should be used for the basics and specifics. For me, the best thing is the dialogue between humans fostered by tourism, which must not be demonized or ignored for its role in the economy, energizing any society that develops it. It brings, however, great dangers and great challenges for those who allow its presence, when it becomes mass tourism.

Upon reading this issue of Temas –thinking it was the father and it turns out that it was the son–, I immediately went to look up an article by Hernán Venegas, who produced an excellent probing work, a real essay, which I am also going to study and urge others to study, on a matter that can only be understood from a cultural perspective.

Sometimes we make the mistake of thinking that culture is something that we hang up like a hat, like a parasol, an accessory. No, culture has to be the core. Any development project that ignores it only generates decline. In this very room - because the author of the "garlic soup" was me - I have commented on it to my collaborators many times.

The restoration has come about as a result of the arrival of tourists; if we were able to lock them up in this cage of twigs, and offer them many options, we would be able to take from them a part of the good things that they give us, and that we need so much, in exchange for what we were talking about a moment ago, « garlic, onion and papaya". It is essential that they leave us a part of their economic resources, and we use these for restoration projects. So we come to the second issue: seeing tourism as something objectively good, which does not have to be demonized, nor does it, in principle, have to scare us. Meanwhile, without culture, such tourism cannot be done - no one gives what they don't have - and it is wrong for us to turn up empty-handed for those people who arrive. And the only real shield for defending that relationship and that encounter is preparation, because without preparation it will be impossible to achieve.

On the other hand, it cannot solely be the work of a tourism institute, nor specialized police, nor a few museum guides. We are talking about a multi-level challenge which involves everyone in a country of eleven million inhabitants. And with this progressive increase in the number of tourists, expected to amount to millions in a few years, it is an overarching project in which every Cuban would have to participate.

But, sometimes, due to uncertainty, due to mistaken interpretations of the political or human relationship between individuals, society, the State, the people, there are those who feel terror when they have to approach a tourist or a foreigner. As a result, the tourist succumbs to a part of society that we, a priori, have condemned or excluded. And so it happens that honest participation is always in question. And then there is the terror or the panic that comes with offering accommodation to a tourist, the denunciation, that sinister and terrible document. We must face this with maturity and assume our political duty, our duty of ideas - I am not talking about ideologies or ideological issues, that is something more complex, I mean the idea - and engage contact with the tourist as a real possibility and an opportunity to participate.

Here we take as a premise St. Paul's letter to the Romans addressing first the Jews and then the Gentiles. This morning I said to museum directors: «If you are not capable of standing when a mother comes into the museum with the children, and you only stand, eager to get a tip, when a tourist arrives, you are betraying the fundamental principle. This has to be, first and foremost, about what is ours, because nobody gives what they don't have». The Rutas y Andares program, which was developed to allow the whole family to get to know the Historic Center of Havana, is based on this principle. The first year two hundred or so families joined in; this year ending, more than ten thousand families have come in a month. Everyone who was able to eloquently explain the restoration work in Havana was manically busy. The artists' workshops and libraries were opened, and that delight and enjoyment was created which is, in my opinion, the most joyous way to spread our Cubanness. And in my opinion, this is how this principle translates to reality.

Although I am not going to give you a breakdown of our restoration plans, I want you to know that it is an extensive, far-reaching project. I can tell you that we have paid close attention to the people who live in the Historic Center, so that they traverse, like a true human wall, the restoration projects such as those we have seen in other cities of the world - and sometimes, temptingly, in some places in Cuba - where someone, from a bureaucratic perspective, says: "we want to turn this house into a restaurant", but it happens that that particular house is somebody’s home. My conceptual problem - and I would say it's even philosophical - is that the family should stay, since I consider that the success of the project can be measured by the extent to which the family participates and is integrated, because that is part of the challenge and the reward.

For this reason, driving through Havana, your city and mine, in the days when it was isolated, we saw the usefulness of tunnels and bridges, even the old iron bridge, which is like «the old bridge aver the river and the Alameda» of Chabuca Granda. On one of those drives - I, the worst driver in the world, who saddled and ride that horse -, I went to Diez de Octubre, Luyanó. I then went along the river and through the wooded areas. I basically went round the interior of Havana. I also passed behind the Stadium, went along 19 de Mayo Avenue ... I was seeing Havana, our Havana, my Havana, and I asked myself: how long, how short a period will this Havana that we love last? El Cerro, a large part of Old Havana, the Malecón ... now, when we had taken such giant steps, everything was crushed again, in this case by the sea.

Of course, the day after the devastation, we started over. The gardeners came and asked me: «What shall we do? The water has practically reached the El Templete tree. Fortunately, the tree is still standing". And I said: "We will plant again." And we have been planting for days, taking advantage of the beneficial properties of freshwater rain brought by the cataclysm, which, it has to be said, caused less suffering than for many others around the world.

But I imagined a fifteen-year-old girl, or a bride-to-be, full of illusion in front of the mirror, and someone coming up from behind and throwing a bucketful of dirty water over her. That is what happened to us: the broken lamppost, the things that were not saved in time were lost, and many other already restored items were damaged. But this was not an obstacle for tourism, people came to Havana, and looked for Havana under that nostalgic veil that shrouds it. And they came to Old Havana, and they saw an effort and a rebirth that, above all, was like a project for us, and we said: "Well, this can be done because it is sustainable, it is possible, it is participatory." And our attempts to strengthen the community in the Historical Center is what has made the international awards and recognition possible.

That is precisely the third element that this issue of Temas addresses: society. How to face this phenomenon, how to embrace it, how to contribute to it, how to develop it, is the essence of this issue of the journal: society, tourism, culture, cultural heritage and critical thought.

There are relevant examples, not only from the Caribbean, but also from the continent, Europe, such as Toledo, a place where, according to what the mayor told me a few days ago, the number of people moving out is almost becoming uncontrollable, due to parking and accessibility problems. In Venice they are seeing the same problem: the owners of the houses have to face the task of how to repair the great palaces before the waters rise again, which this year, for example, will be the sixth time. So the families are relocated to land away from the Grand Canal, while hotels are being built and Venice is becoming the tourist city par excellence, with absolute tourism, without space for ordinary life.

This is the idea, and this is, perhaps, the spirit of Temas. I have discussed with the editor the importance of journals with single-theme issues, such as the UNESCO Courier which allow us to enjoy the spirit of a journal, which is more than just a daily paper; we can go deeper into the issues, open a dialogue with the authors of the studies, scrutinize them more closely and come up with ideas.

We are in that moral space that is philosophy, but praxis is needed. A great sculptor of medals was making a series, placing a hand in front of each face. When I asked him what it symbolized, he replied that they were women and men of thought and of the hand. And one day a very old tile was taken down from one of the roofs of Havana, bearing Chinese writing, meaning that it came from the period when the "Coolies" (Chinese laborers) were already in Cuba, working on construction sites or installing roof tiles. I took it to our Chinese community here, who are very careful in their judgments. They saw it and said: "We're not going to say anything now, we will call you when we have deciphered what it says." When they called, the most venerable elder spoke: “We are all Cantonese, but Canton is not a single city, it is a set of villages and towns from which we originate and that speak our dialect. This tile is written in Cantonese, but you know that Chinese has different written characters, and the characters used here show that its author used a particular writing style that shows he was an educated man and he left a thought inscribed on the tile. It is not exact, but the spirit of what it says is: the hand carries out what the heart commands. So, there was the answer to what the medal-man had replied: the hand carries out what the heart commands. And that is, perhaps, the spirit.

I know the hazards and difficulties involved in publishing a journal. I read what the sponsors and publishers say. Sometimes, to achieve this, you have to make connections, make requests, get generous contributions to move forward. I also know how hard it is to make something beautiful, because human beings need justice and bread, but also beauty. To a greater or lesser degree, we all need what's beautiful. It means that a flower shouldn't be wrapped, unless in extreme circumstances, in newspaper; it should be wrapped, if possible, in beautiful paper, or presented as a single unwrapped bloom.

I think the topic of this issue contributes to something fundamental, at least for me and my collaborators. These days we are on edge, not because of what we have lost, but because of what we have not yet won. The materials and resources that we had for our great restoration project, which also benefits tourism, now have to be redirected to the front-line, that is, the Malecón and the Avenida del Puerto. That doesn't mean we will give up on the restoration projects that are near completion, including a very important one for tourism, the Saratoga hotel, where Don Rafael Alberti and his daughter Aitana lived when they came to Cuba.

But the building has been an excuse, because there is one thing –that many of you who are not involved may not know– which is called the counter-value of workers' wages. In this case, we are entirely allocating this counter-value to the restoration of the Martí Theater, where we have already been working for a month. And since I'm not going to be around forever, there are certain things that I don't want to leave undone: the Martí theater, the Cueto Hotel in Plaza Vieja, the historic Sloppy Joe's building, so as not to lose a piece of Havana's 1880s architecture, in addition to the memory of that beautiful cafe-bar, part of what we could call American Havana, housing the shops, the most famous bars, the places frequented by North Americans.

We are engrossed in the Martí theater, as a fundamental project, and in a building in need of restoration in the Plaza Vieja. Someone naively asked me: "And did you leave these ruins as an example of how everything used to be?" I replied: «No; that would be cruel, because forty-five families live here». I'm talking about what used to be Bishop Morell's residence. Rebuilding each apartment costs ten or eleven thousand convertible pesos (on a par with US dollars), so we have had to get that money together first, before starting out on the property, and the interim housing is already being built in Oficios and Santa Clara. This wonderful project will start in a matter of weeks. And that gives me the greatest satisfaction. It is the relevance of "Tourism and heritage" which otherwise would be pure fiction.

A few days ago, I was saying to the restoration workers: "You have to take a good look at the things the nation did to preserve, for example, its natural heritage." They had thought about damming the Toa River, in the Baracoa area, but that would have entailed destroying that part of Cuba and flooding it with seawater, and they said: no. In Bariay there was an opportunity for a development plan with foreign investment, but I remember that Núñez Jiménez was with the foreign experts who came to look at the place. One of them, with a stick, pointed: "Here"; and he replied: "No, no, because this place is very important to us." "And what happened there?" asked the foreign investor. "Columbus landed here," replied Núñez Jiménez. The man was amazed: "And that's your reason?" To which Núñez Jiménez responded: "Well, for you it is not important, but for us it is."

A different case is the place where the country's largest nickel deposits are located and we cannot object to mining it, we have no way out. But it is necessary to study how, after huge mining activity, we could reclaim the natural environment. That is the challenge; this compatibility is the underlying issue.

I very much congratulate Temas and its collaborators, and the Editorial Board, for this issue, about which you will now have the opportunity to speak in more depth, and about the contributors, and their demands.

You will have to forgive me for finding a kind of outlet to air my greatest concerns of the moment, as the hurricane approached and fortunately did not make landfall.  You see what happened. What would have happened if it had hit? I remember that I have made promises that I have not yet fulfilled, perhaps that is why I have been punished; maybe Aggayú, aka St. Christopher, has punished me. I remember that when the previous massive hurricane passed near Ensenada de la Broa, everything was doomed. Suddenly, when it moved a few degrees, it crashed in the central highlands, and the force of the cyclone dropped. At a time when I was very close to Havana, I once again invoked the Martyrs of Cappadocia, who even the Church has forgotten about: “Mighty Saint Cristopher, stand in its path, and let it not strike Havana. Everything can be restored: the forests, the towns, I hope the smaller towns and their heritage will forgive me, but in Havana it would be devastating."

When I read how the hurricane was building, how it was approaching, I shared with my collaborators what passed momentarily through my mind: «Today is the last supper. The day after tomorrow a state of national emergency will be declared, the organized forces of the army will have taken the reins of the situation in their hands, and we will be surrounded by a sea of tents, because the first blow will demolish twenty thousand buildings. But then, History, which is like my crystal ball, came to my aid: I imagined Don Fernando Ortiz entering and rediscovering what he called "the Sistine Chapel of the Caribbean": the artwork of the Punta del Este cave, where the ancients left concentric circles as their only mark for posterity. What can this be, some that coincide with others, go in and out? That's what cyclones are like.

Later I remembered Christopher Columbus, condemned on his trip to the Caribbean, banned from returning to Hispaniola, and in particular to Santo Domingo, because those who despised him had taken power. But he, who asked to enter out of charity, sick and with his ship wrecked, saw a sight never before imagined by a man who had traveled to Iceland, who had been in the high tides of the Bristol, in the confines of the charted seas. He watched the endless flocks of birds flying against the current, the sky in amazing colors that reminded him of the aurora borealis. "A great storm is brewing," he declared on seeing such a spectacle of nature. "Do not go out with the fleet," he dutifully warned the commander of Lares, Nicolás de Obando, who was preparing to move the prisoner rebel chief Caonao, a store of treasures and other bounty. Obando replied arrogantly: “Who do you think you are, a prophet or a fortune-teller? The fleet is leaving now!” he ordered, and the entire squadron sank, except for Columbus's ship, which has not been found to this day.

I remember the testimony of those who were in Trinidad, in Casilda, when another cyclone destroyed the fleet, only the sailors who climbed the Escambray mountains were saved. I remember the hurricane of 1846, when Havana woke up to the San Francisco Basilica without its dome, everything destroyed. It was October 4. I remembered the terrible earthquake in Caracas, after the Revolution, which was proclaimed as a divine punishment, and Bolívar, from amongst the rubble, uttered those terrible words: "If nature opposes us, we will confront it and dominate it." And then, finally, I saw myself with our weather forecaster Rubiera preparing for the hurricane, with people nailing everything down, looking for the basic things that have become traditional in the Cuban cyclone: chocolate, bread, cookies, cans of sardines –I don't know what fixation we have with these things– and finally the cyclone headed off, and Havana, once again, was saved.

I hope Temas will forgive me for all these comments about cyclones, but if the hurricane had hit, neither the Director nor I would be at this moment caressing the copies of the magazine, thinking of who we are going to give them to.

Many thanks.

Traductora: Jackie Cannon