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T H I S+W E E K Forbidden island: Travel to Cuba By Don George, Editor >Cuba libre! By Mark Schapiro A hot art scene brings the world to Havana's door. -A gallery of images -Books on Cuba Irish idyll By Patric Kuh Savoring Ireland's greatest hotels D E P A R T M E N T S The Surreal Gourmet By Bob Blumer Your own sitcom, with curry Postmark San Francisco: The borrowed city By Gary Kamiya -Books on San Francisco Passages: "Paris in Pink" An affair in Paris By Katya Macklovich Readers' Tips and Tales Philadelphia: Weirdness Capital of America? A letter to the Editor An Uzbek responds <- - - - - - - - LA S T+W E E K Saturday, May 24 Praise the Titanic! By Doug Cruickshank Eighty-five years later, they're still going down with the ship A full list of all Wanderlust articles

A hot art scene brings the world to Havana's door - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - A GALLERY OF IMAGES: ART FROM THE HAVANA BIENNIAL - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - BY MARK SCHAPIRO | hAVANA -- I am staring into the great liquid barricade of the Caribbean Sea off the shores of Cuba, aquamarine waters that shimmer with political barracuda: the driftwood of rafts, the jet engine parts of downed airplanes, the spoils of failed CIA intrigues. Ninety miles away, the presence of Miami hangs perversely in the air with the mysterious allure of a Havana hooker. Behind me is Havana itself, a crumbling museum of 50-year-old mansions, fine lattice-work balconies and art deco archways, peeling away in layers of decaying grandeur. From where I'm standing, I can see piles of rubble on the edge of Havana Vieja, heaps of bricks, window casings, entire walls that have collapsed into the street, left to become as much a part of the landscape as the stately old façades themselves, testaments to the travails of this country's 38-year revolutionary history. I am standing on the Malecon, the boardwalk that curls for four miles along the northwest rim of Havana. The Malecon has been rendered countless times in literature, from Ernest Hemingway to Graham Greene to Gabriel García Márquez. In fact, it is for the most part extraordinarily nondescript, a concrete walkway perhaps 10 feet above the beach, with no typical amusement parks, no snack stands, no one selling postcards. There are young girls in loose dresses and their paramours in ragged polo shirts embracing against the wall, and there is the merengue band that sets up on Wednesday nights to let loose with that explosive Cuban rhythm against the silence of the sea. The Malecon is Cuba's border, and more than any other single feature has come to symbolize the island's unique and seductive luster: the aroma of sleek cohibas cigars; the blasts of heart-jumping music; the mysteries of the young men and women wearing the neck beads that signify initiation into santeria; the strange mix of raw capitalism and Caribbean socialism that is Cuba today. Perched here at the edge of the great moat of the Caribbean, a young Cuban man puts it another way. "We call the Malecon our Berlin Wall," he says. And like its former counterpart in Berlin, the Malecon is inviting its own, at least symbolic, destruction. It does not take long to see how. Right here, perhaps 10 yards from where I'm standing, at a busy terminal off the main Havana harbor, a gleaming white Costa Playa cruise ship is docked. Flying the flag of the Bahamas, the ship is collecting its motley assortment of passengers before embarking on its next round of Caribbean stops. While the U.S. tightens the screws as part of one of the most ludicrous, and self-defeating, examples of economic warfare in history, the rest of the world is descending. Rebuffed by its closest neighbor to the west, the country looks east, and from the east they're coming: from Spain, Italy, Britain, not to mention all of Latin America. The air is sultry, the smells are ripe: Pristine beaches abound with young French girls in bikinis, and white-legged Brits take forays to the Museo de la Revolución, where they clutch their guidebooks and stare slack-jawed at the actual Granma, the ramshackle yacht that carried Fidel, Che and his band of brazenly unshaven barbudos from Mexico to launch the Cuban revolution. N E X T+P A G E | A virtual factory of ironies - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - A GALLERY OF IMAGES: ART FROM THE HAVANA BIENNIAL - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

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