HAVANA LETTER:It's 50 years on: Fidel is a frail shadow amid exuberance and new friendship with China, writes John Moran
IN MUCH the same way as nature abhors a vacuum and Dracula a cross, so habaneros abhor a silence. Or so it seems from this apartment above Teatro America on the corner of Galiano and Neptuno in central Havana.
Before the revolution, Galiano was perhaps Havana's premier shopping street. But that was 50 years ago. Now the paint peels on the street's crumbling plaster facades and most brickwork could do with a little pointing, to put it mildly.
The central Havana district begins at Chinatown and ends at the Malecon seafront. It lies between Old Havana, with all its ancient squares, museums and the main tourist street of Obisbo to one side, and Vedado's quieter residential neighbourhoods and its epicentre of life on Calle 23, with all its music and jazz bars, honky tonks and nearby old Mafia-run hotels.
While Galiano could do with a decent makeover, much of any ugliness here is, as in other parts of Havana, only skin-deep. Inside the building - which reminds me of the eclectic interior of the Chelsea Hotel in Manhattan - the airy apartments are well-maintained and furnished in the splendid Spanish colonial manner.
My landlady, a retired Ukrainian-born doctor, has spent the last 30 years in Cuba. She lives here with her daughter, a ceramics artist who works at her kiln out back. She tells me the Russian poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko, the poet of her youth, is in town.
Beneath the tall shuttered windows, outside on Galiano, motorbikes, classic cars and other motorised beasts clatter, chug, bellow and whine, while the irrepressibly boisterous folk of this teeming barrio argue, laugh and loudly chatter their way towards Chinatown or the Malecon. And all the while Cuban music blares.
On days when you waken to the sound of the soprano upstairs practising her art, all seems fine and dandy. And yet some locals say be careful at night to stay on the main drags. Since central Havana is no longer one of the main drags, for tourists anyway, gentle souls are advised not to be abroad at night in its backstreets.
But how could one resist the temptation of the romantic invitation from the neon lights of Café Américain, a late-night bar just across the street where salsa is danced nightly - especially after a long night enjoying Los Van Van and others at the 50th anniversary concert that took place outside the US Special Interests Section way up the Malecon.
One temptation I could resist again is the aptly-named Three Monkeys bar up a side street behind the Lincoln Hotel, which is just down the road. Here a sultry temptress found it hard to take "no" for an answer and the old guy at the bar whose good counsel I sought told me the area could be dangerous at night.
It must be said that the only danger this hombre encountered was from the young lady with the long nails in the Monkeys. She was lying in wait when I emerged but was easily dismissed after being fixed with a stern visage and a firm no gracias.
Galiano, however, is immeasurably safer now than it was before the "Triumph of the Revolution", when the Mafia-friendly dictator Fulgencio Batista was running the show and you might bump into his vicious police chief, Capt Ventura, at night.
At midnight on the Malecon seafront on New Year's Eve, the historic canons of Eo Moro castle began booming out over the city. When they stopped, a spectacular fireworks display exploded into the night sky - and ushered in a year that will have significant implications for the Cuban people and others.
The main event of political significance took place in Cuba's second city of Santiago de Cuba, where Raul Castro addressed a huge crowd in Parque Cespedes, under a balcony to which 50 years ago, on January 1st, Fidel Castro came down from the Sierra Maestro mountains to announce the success of the revolution.
The ailing Fidel has not been seen since appearing in newspaper photographs with visiting dignitaries some weeks ago. Perhaps significantly, given his deteriorating health, among his most recent callers have been Russia's president Dmitry Medvedev and China's president Hu Jintao.
Looking further than central Havana, there are three important factors that will make the year ahead a most intriguing one: first is the US presidency of Barack Obama; the second, the growing influence of China, Cuba's new best friend; and, as important as any, the emerging unity among Latin-American and Caribbean countries.
Considerations such as these will be on the mind of the European Union and no doubt Ireland's Minister for Foreign Affairs and his team during his forthcoming official visit next month.
Meanwhile, back in the barrio of central Havana, all these weighty considerations are put into perspective by my retired Ukrainian landlady. "Whatever happens, every morning when I wake up the sun is shining through my window. That's what matters most to me now," she says, smilingly serenely.
And, for me, it is comforting to know in these turbulent times that the son of another central Havana family I have stayed with many times over the past decade has grown into one of the young soldiers firing the historic canon that resounds over Havana every night at 9pm.