To walk down Obispo Street was my favourite sport. In fact, if anyone who knows me well read this will say that it was, basically, the only sport I practiced. And that was a sort of compulsory rite demanded by the fact of having worked, during so many years, in the Cuban Book Institute, located on the Palacio del Segundo Cabo. Now I think that after working for over six years in that magical space (the Palacio, I mean), the best thing I could do was leaving it behind, because, as they have announced, the Institute will have another seat in the intersection of Obispo and Aguiar streets, a sort of bunker where I sadly saw, just weeks before coming to Canada, how the police was taking out the body of a man who had died the night before. Bad omens for Cuban literature that will have its location in that space that since that morning is, for me, somehow sinister. The Palacio del Segundo Cabo still has such appealing magic that compels you to get there at least to sit in the patio and admire the amazing colonial architecture. It is a beautiful building turning into pieces but it still has some enchantment and undeniable magic.
I used to walk down Obispo street and stopped at my friend´s art galleries, where I had special gatherings with Álvaro Almaguer, Silvio (not Silvio Rodríguez), Julia Valdés, Ronaldo Encarnación. From those places I could see Cubans juggling to survive. From those places I tried to unravel the dynamics established among any sort of characters that mill around that street. In the middle of that predominant sepia in Havana, the colors were surprising: prostitutes, policemen, artists, professionals, students, peddlers (those who hawk and those who whisper), dogs (scabby and some with pedigree), madmen and beggars (scabby and with pedigree). Everything I saw in Obispo Street, that was a constant anthill, called my attention and, almost a voyeur, I looked at all, cautiously, because they could also take me by an undercover agent, and no possible explanation on literary purposes would save me from a problem with the marginal mafia of Old Havana. And one of the things that really called my attention in that ancient artery (I like to call it artery because blood runs through it, just like in Obispo Street) is the way information moves all along that street. Since you start walking down in front of the Floridita and you go getting into what is supposed to be a boulevard, you can get to know the most recent events that interest the common Cuban: the last artist or baseball player who deserted, what TV station or team hired him, how much they are paying him, and you can listen to any of these information or see how they smuggle printed emails and internet pages, compact discs or flash memories.
In Cuba is very common the traffic of movies, TV series and soap operas. The one who does not have a satellite or a satellite connection (for the reasonable price of 10 CUC a month), has a DVD player and someone who supplies (for the reasonable price of 5 Cuban pesos) all kinds of materials that can be series like CSI, Dexter or The Tudors, or a soap opera where César Évora is the main character, or a compendium of the Univisión newsreals, or the last game of the White Sox where Alexey Ramírez made a grand slam or the fight where Yuriolkis Gamboa got his first professional world title, and even a TV show where some former agent of the Cuban state security reveals secrets of the Commander in Chief himself. That personage who supplies those materials goes walking by the street with his backpack, just like a common citizen, and gets into your house like a family member or a close friend and announces the highlights. I met some who even use pens with invisible ink so that when they are caught there are no written proofs left.
On Obispo street, I saw people, from door to door, winking eyes and talking in codes to interchange those materials. On that street I even saw people smuggling with books of writers banned in the Island (Cabrera Infante, Zoe Valdés, Jesús Díaz, Norberto Fuentes), films and documentaries about Cuba that are not screened in the movies or television. As little kids, Cubans love whatever is prohibited and anything coming with the label of proscription generates immediate temptation. I have a friend who used to live, before leaving the Island, in a building that was connected (every single apartment) to the cable television of someone who lived three or four buildings away from his. He told me that when the guy came to install the wire, he doubted because there was a family of "integrated" people (that is, communists) and of course they didn´t have a penny to pay the illegal service, besides, there was a possibility of denunciation. And the solution was that every house would pay an additional dollar to defray their connection and they received it gladly. I also know the story of an old man who fell from a third floor and died trying to rip off the wires after he heard that the police was coming to the building to carry out a raid. The Cuban television, now with five channels, shows most of the so-criticized North American series (I mean criticized by the national media), but people keep on renting other series and shows and sports events. And people still keep on printing emails and internet pages with polemic subjects on the Island, and they still listen to the music, watch the TV shows, movies, games and fights of those who defected. Cubans have thirst of information, especially when it has to do with their own people´s achievements abroad.
When the Soviet Union erected as the center of the international socialism, this practice of publishing and distributing banned texts was called "samizdat". A novel printed this way was The Master and Margarita, by Mijaíl Bulgakov, published in Cuba (I don't know if by mistake). I sold my copy when I was living in Las Tunas and recently I found a similar one being advertised on eBay for 60 dollars, maybe mine. By the time, the reproduction used was that one by means of carbon paper, with those old stencil machines still on some Cuban institutions. The policy of the Soviet state to fight any ideological disassociation was the famous "glasnost", that is, the informative transparency: a total governmental control on publishing houses, newspapers and magazines. Same thing still happens in Cuba. There is a sort of "samizdat" in the Island (of course, now helped by novel technologies) impossible to be controlled by the government. I am aware that the regime has tried to deactivate every underground network but it has been impossible: for every network they deactivate, ten more emerge, although I have to say that in many cases, almost the majority, those networks are held by economic problems, as a way of living, and not as a mere exercise to dissent.
