Blazing the trail for a student immersion experience later this year, a Wabash professor finds a familiar scene in an unexpected place.
Everyone had a high-school hangout. Mine was Puerto Sagua.
Long before South Beach was “SoBe,” this neighborhood diner was classic and casual, serving no-frills Cuban sandwiches and coffee to everyone from blue-collar workers to old Jewish ladies in the cultural melting pot that was the Miami Beach of my childhood.
The diner was nothing new. It had been established in the early 1960s, just after the Rivero family, like so many others, fled Cuba in search of a better life in the United States. And even then, Puerto Sagua’s walls were decorated with intricate murals—cityscapes of Old Havana that reminded the cafeteria’s owner of the place he left behind.
I showed those murals to Professor Dan Rogers last May on our way to Cuba to explore the possibility of taking Wabash students there. We had stopped first in Miami—I had to show him my old hangout!
Then we traveled to Havana, the place where Puerto Sagua, its owners and so many of its patrons got their start. Crippled by decades of poverty and backward politics, Havana today looks remarkably like the place depicted on Puerto Sagua’s walls. Spanish Colonial architecture and Art Deco buildings still stand as incompatibly next to one another as they have for almost a century, although the paint on both is peeling. Hucksters and fruit vendors still sell their wares on the Malecon, the city’s once-famed seaside boulevard. And cars from the 1950s still roam the streets as if time had passed them by, which in so many ways, it has.
There’s simply no way to understand the change and consistency of Cuba’s recent history without seeing this city for itself. No textbook can convey the sense of loss and hope that communism has bestowed on its people. Walking the streets of old Havana, Dan and I experienced a place that is simultaneously a casualty of the Cold War and a symbol of national resilience. That’s why Dan and I went to Cuba. And that’s why, as part of a class on Cuban politics and culture, we plan to take students there in the fall of 2013.
The sea between Miami and Havana isn’t nearly as deep or as treacherous as the political, cultural, or ideological chasm brought on by years of mistrust and neglect. Separated by a mere 90 miles, the Cuban people of these two cities have led parallel lives: one, an American dream; the other, a communist nightmare. Politicians and pundits from both countries curse their counterparts on the other side of the Straits of Florida. They may speak the same language
—they may even be relatives—but they’ve largely lost the ability to communicate.
For Dan and me, the most poignant reminder of this historical divide appeared to us in the form of a vague recollection, the kind one has of early childhood or of a long-dead relative. Walking the dimly lit streets of Old Havana on the last day of our trip, we stumbled upon a building that was both an ordinary restaurant and an old friend. There it was! The original Puerto Sagua—the very restaurant the Rivero family left behind!
Today, of course, Havana’s Puerto Sagua is a state-run enterprise—stolen (or ‘nationalized’) by Castro’s regime when the original owners fled. The old restaurant even boasts a similar menu to that of its American cousin, although one never knows how many of its offerings are actually available on any given day.
Yet the Havana restaurant’s exterior is a dead ringer for the building depicted in my own Puerto Sagua’s mural, where the clientele still speaks Spanish and where people from all walks of life still gather for cocina criolla and respite from the Caribbean sun.
Hollander is assistant professor of political science at Wabash.