Habana Yacht Club

But for all that wild longing, nobody comes back from Cuba very satisfied, no matter how many friends they tell they had the time of their lives. Hepcat New Yorkers bump into to someone they know, confirming their suspicion that they have arrived a year too late. Gueveraphiliac backpackers find the image of their prophet for sale on refrigerator magnets and shot glasses at the airport. Italians get herpes. Middle-aged Germans discover that the girl they thought liked them for their thick moustache and quaint pronunciation of Spanish was just playing the long con. I have been there six times now, and each trip has produced a new and unique disaster.

I have been detained in a hotel broom closet and interrogated on suspicion of being a baseball agent, sold stale cigars, had my head kicked in by unaccountably angry locals in Matanzas, and contracted hepatitis A after being dared by small children to swim in the murky waters off the Malecon.

I have never fallen in love, I still can’t salsa or understand half of what anyone says, and I have loaned out sizable sums of money I am unlikely to see again.

Still I keep going back.


Maybe because I have also swilled Havana Club and swapped dirty jokes with three time Gold Medal Heavyweight Teofilo Stevenson, dipped in the pool at Meyer Lansky’s old Riviera, wilded out in the nightclubs of the Isle of Pines with Jose Contreras’ former teammates, and copped an ebony and ivory chess set on the cheap at a secret antique house in Vedado.

When I was growing up here, New York used to be full of powerful revelations too. But these days - both because I know it better and because it’s changed so much - the city has less secret places and people. And with Time Out, the Village Voice, and a thousand online auteurs fighting to be the first to expose every inch of novelty, good things don’t stay secret very long.

Places in Havana get spoiled too, and you only have to have visited Hemingway’s Floridita and drunk overpriced daquiris with tourists from Kansas City once to understand how bad it will soon get.

But without the media machines, with Fidel’s stubborn foot on the breaks, periodic blackouts and jinetera crackdowns, no advertising and no money for renovations - it’s easier to find places with ghosts, and you don’t have to be as careful about who you tell about them.

A year ago, led by Flaco the Fixer, my friend Carter and I discovered the old beach and pool clubs of Marianao - La Concha, Nautico, and the Havana Yacht Club. It wasn’t really that they were so well-hidden. You could see their dilapidated spires and towers easily enough from the main road along the Malecon. It was just that they were untrafficked-”cerrado para restauración” or allegedly off-limits for foreigners.

La Concha was in the worst shape - literally crumbling, but we slipped a couple of dollars to the door guard and went right inside.

Fifties modern Nautico was harder to get to. It’s in better condition than the others and in current use for athletes, partidos, and other Cuban poobahs. They wouldn’t take our money there. They let us in because we said we were working on a college thesis, and I think because they were proud of how nice the place still looked.

Because there were a few layers of guards entry to the Havana Yacht Club ended up costing five dollars and a t-shirt, but it was my favorite of all - like the ghost-town cousin of The Breakers in Palm Beach. You could almost still hear the sun–tanned daughters of sugar tycoons giggling by the pool, taste the fresh mint in the mojitos that the bartenders must have churned out by the pitcher, and see the high masts, white sails, and hulls of the most gaudy and elegant sailboats from around the world anchored in its in natural harbor.

One day when Fidel is gone, and the money comes flooding in to Cuba, the HYC will be restored and regain its status as the playground of plutocrats. But it will lose something. It is a place more beautiful in its dereliction than it ever was in its splendor.