The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - The Telegraph Magazine
Cuba libre
Cuba has played host to President Obama, Chanel and the Kardashians this year – all part of its emergence from fve decades of isolation. Attending the island’s frst luxury fashion show and meeting local artists, Lisa Armstrong wonders what change will com
On the Chanel catwalk in Havana
Staging a fashion show in a country that still has food rationing was always going to be contentious. C o mp ar e d wi t h President Hollande’s visit in May 2015, during which he urged the USA to lift its 50-year embargo of Cuba, or President Obama’s in March of this year (the one man with the power to do something about the blockade, or ‘ el bloqueo’, as it is known colloquially on the island), the benefts to the country of Chanel’s visitation were less obvious.
After almost 60 years of isolation, suddenly it seems as though everyone’s arriving in Cuba at once. On the coat-tails of Obama, Conan O’Brien, one of America’s biggest chat-show hosts, flmed a series of comedy skits in Havana, including one in which he and his trademark red quif investigate one of the city’s supermarkets and mock the meagre array of stock – somewhat insensitively, you might think, given the circumstances. Where there’s a trend brewing, the Kardashians are never far behind. Sure enough, they arrived, with a camera crew, to flm scenes for their reality show during the Chanel festivities.
Chanel knew nothing of these trips when it began planning its Cruise show 14 months ago. ‘Karl Lagerfeld just thought it would be an inspiring, invigorating place for the desig n team to see,’ says Bruno Pavlovsky, the brand’s president of fashion and the man charged with making financial sense of these (on paper) fnancially insane productions. ‘It’s really not about a f inancial t ransaction for us. We’re not going to be selling here for a very long time to come, if ever. It’s a question of Chanel being culturally engaged with the world. We’ve had Chanel in Seoul, Chanel in Salzburg, Chanel in Dallas…’
None of these provided quite the same cultural dissonances as Cuba, I suggest. ‘True,’
Palovsky acknowledges, ‘and we wanted to work with that. We deliberately didn’t want to fy in chefs from France, or impose our ideas on the hotels here. Initially we thought that we wouldn’t actually be able to come to Cuba – that it would be more of a concept than a geographical reality, like when we did a Chanel-Bombay show in Paris. But the Cuban government was keen. They invited us.’
Could it be that fashion is the Cuban revolutionaries’ weak spot? It was Alberto Korda’s 1960 black and white portrait of the young revolutionary as a brooding heart-throb that turned Che Guevara into a global pin-up (his image is still ubiquitous in Cuba) and made the beret, that quintessential emblem of Left Bank Parisian chic, a symbol for armchair communists the world over – memorably satirised in the 1970s BBC sitcom Citizen Smith. President Raúl Castro’s granddaughter studied fashion in Paris and even interned at Vogue Paris, or so a Cuban designer tells me with authority. I can’t fnd confrmation of this, but then the Castros have form when it comes to controlling inconvenient news. More f lag rant ly, Fidel Cast ro’s own g randson Tony Cast ro – an Alice-band-wearing, Cara Delevingne-browed 19-year-old – is a sometime model who, to the
‘We thought we wouldn’t be able to come to Cuba. But the government was keen. They invited us.’ Could it be that fashion is the Cuban revolutionaries’ weak spot?
glee of the international press, was rumoured to have been booked to appear in the Chanel Cuba show.
Except that he wasn’t among the handful of Cuban models who walked in the show alongside international stars such as Stella Tennant, Lindsey Wixson, Mariacarla Boscono and Binx Walton, all of them wearing luxurious, eclectic colours and prints – how Cuba’s elite might dress, if it existed. Nor, according to Pavlovsky, had Castro junior ever been up for discussion. ‘The r umours,’ ref lected Pavlovsk y, as we sipped strong Cuban cofee in the garden of Havana’s Teatro Martí the morning before the show, ‘have been wild.’ He did not look unhappy – although he might have been irked to read repor ts the day af ter the show stating that Cubans had been barred from it, thanks to Chanel’s very own bloqueo around the Paseo del Prado. These were followed by a leak that a group of Cuban architects had penned a letter following Chanel’s after-show party to complain about the takeover of the historic plaza behind Havana’s cathedral.
It is true that not every single one of Cuba’s 11 million inhabitants was invited, any more than all of France’s 66 million residents are ushered into Chanel’s regular shows in Paris. It’s a matter of crowd control. ‘But we were very specifc that we wanted the show to be in the open air so that many more people could see it than we could seat,’ Pavlovsky says. In that regard, mission accomplished.
Having been designed by a Frenchman in the 1770s, Paseo del Prado is perhaps the most naturally perfect open-air catwalk in the world. Besides being lined with pastel colonial mansions – and the occasional brutalist block – it incorporates a 170m tiled promenade: ideal fâneur material. Chanel was abetted in its search for the location by the team it felded to its Central and South American HQ in Panama for four months on recces, and by Eusebio Leal, the 73-year-old director of restoration in Old Havana, who pushed for it to be made a Unesco World Heritage Site in 1982.
While 170 vintage American conver t ibles g rowled a long t he Paseo, horns not so much hooting as serenading as they deposited some 700 guests, Cubans waved, cheered and blew whistles from the balconies and roofs of mansions along the tree-fringed boulevard. Tilda Swinton, Gisele Bündchen, Vanessa Paradis, the editor of Portuguese Vogue – one got the distinct impression they were one and the same to the Cubans, although Vin Diesel, who was in Cuba flming Fast 8, earnt an extraloud roar.
Given that, as one local told me, most Cubans have only the haziest concept of what Chanel, or any other luxury fashion brand, is (Adidas and Nike have more currency at the moment), their enthusiasm bespeaks a collective good nature, along with a willingness to party at the slightest excuse.
Cuba is not a quiet society. There are groups of besuited, dapper old men and rufe-skirted women performing their own versions of Buena Vista Social Club on every other street corner and in many bars and cafes. Is it for the tourists? Undoubtedly. But the locals enjoy it too.
The loudness begins with those gorgeously nostalgic Technicolor cars. How, in a nation of shortages, do people acquire those lime-green, cerulean and dafodil car paints? ‘By accident,’ Michel, my guide, tells me. ‘In the 1950s, the colours would have been more conventional, but over the years the cars’ owners had to take what paint they could get.’
All of Havana’s grand, faded beauty has a wild makeshift defance, like a Southern belle teetering in the gutter with her skirts hoicked up. Perhaps it was always like this. ‘To live in Havana,’ wrote Graham Greene in 1958, when Ava Gardner and the Rat Pack were regulars, ‘was to live in a factory that turned out human beauty on a conveyor belt.’ Even now, when the sar torial pickings are meagre, when stonewashed leggings and frosted nail varnishes are about the sum of it, there’s no missing that Cuban carriage, bordering on swagger.
As for the spectacular architecture – it has acquired an ex t ra half-centur y’s pat ina of drama a nd depr ivat ion. For ever y lov ing, Unesco-funded restoration, there are another 20 or 30 buildings in a state of post-apocalyptic decay. Colonnaded mansions have become tenements, their plaster long since worn away; roofs rotted; balconies hanging on by little more than bolts and prayers; trees sprouting
‘Chanel coming to Havana has to be a good thing. It’s a show of support and a political act. Fashion always is. It’s about economics and status’
internally, poking through broken windows; faking doors ofering glimpses of dark interiors lit (when the power is working) by fickering television screens. Imminent collapse is a constant, genuine concern.
The weather provides a reprieve of sorts – most of the time it’s so hot, life happens on the street. There are times, however, when entire neighbourhoods seem deserted, their buildings so dilapidated that, as another journalist told me, the last time she saw devastation on this scale she was in a war-torn African country. Weirdly, it’s all ridiculously photogenic. And it knows it. La Guarida, Havana’s most fashionable restaurant, is located on the second foor of an imposing early-20th-century mansion in an ify par t of Central Havana. It is wildly popular, at least with foreig ners – at $100 for two, its prices are way beyond most Cubans’ purchasing power. This is where Obama, Jack Nicholson, Rihanna, Beyoncé, Jay Z, Steven Spielberg, Pedro Almodóvar and yes, Conan O’Brien, have all eaten, and there are framed photos to prove it. Yet while the restaurant itself is a warren of cosy, chandelier-lit rooms and French windows, the frst two foors resemble a bombed-out shell where the only clues to habitation are a grand staircase and two washing lines belonging to the groundfoor tenants.
At times it can seem as though Habaneros, and certainly the tourists, are fetishising the decay. Yet this is not the dour communism I saw in East Berlin and Moscow in the 1980s. ‘It’s Latino communism,’ says Pamela Ruiz, a Colombian American who has lived in Havana with her artist husband since 1995. ‘They would consider it more as socialism.’ Ruiz, who was at the Chanel show, spied her dream house in 1999, a 19th-century villa in one of Havana’s beachside suburbs. Its owners had fed in 1959, leaving their housekeeper in charge. A clause in Cuba’s fendishly complicated property laws meant that while the housekeeper owned it, she couldn’t sell to Ruiz, only exchange with her. ‘I didn’t have a place that she wanted to move to,’ Ruiz recalls.
It took a further seven years for Ruiz to fnd another couple who agreed to swap their apartment with her, enabling her, fnally, to swap with the housekeeper. Ruiz’s reward is a stun- ning period house she has rescued from fooding and fy-tipping and flled with mid-20thcentury gems, with a garden large enough to host art festivals that now attract busloads of American collectors.
She must be one of few to have made the reverse journey to Cuba in the 1990s, I say. Even now, the shoreline around the island is eerily empty: Cubans aren’t allowed to own boats in case they make a break for Florida. ‘I think I may have been the only one,’ she says. ‘It was impossible to immigrate to Cuba at that time. The government just couldn’t compute it.’
As the Soviet Union began to collapse in 1989, Cuba lost its main life support. Fidel Castro introduced the Special Period – a brazen euphemism for a time when many people in Cuba didn’t have enough to eat. Life remains tough. A medical doctor earns $60 a month. The average Cuban salary is closer to $20. There are still plenty of very skinny folk begging in the street, many of them elderly.
But there are also glimpses of socialism as the early revolutionar y idealists might have imagined it. This is a society that feels comfortable allow ing it s child ren to hitch to a nd from school. Or maybe there just aren’t any school buses. Meanwhile, at the governmentowned Cohiba cigar factor y, a meticulously maintained primrose-coloured mansion in a suburb once dominated by lushly landscaped country clubs, the workers decide each week which novels they want to be read to them through their headphones by a narrator on the g round foor. Chanel’s desig n team has global excursions; Cohiba’s tobacco-leaf rollers, communal stories.
‘It’s a bit self ish,’ Alexandre Arrechea, a Cuban artist, tells me one morning, ‘but I don’t want the country to change too much more. I know that’s hypocritical because I’m doing well from all the Americans coming here to buy
‘Another journalist told me the last time she saw devastation on this scale she was in a war-torn African country’
Cuban ar t. But Havana’s already becoming a theme park.’
Ar rechea, who split s his t ime bet ween Madrid, New York and, increasingly, the apartment where I visit him in Havana, has mixed feelings about his homeland. ‘On the one hand, I was nurtured here. I was sent to a special art school when I was 12. On the other hand, it’s a racist societ y. You st ill won’t f ind many black artists…’
This sense of impending regret that Cuba, on the cusp of rejoining the rest of the world, may lose more than it gains, is a refrain I hear often – from Cubans who spend part of their time abroad. The trickle of 25,000 visitors a year has swelled to three million. The Adonia, the frst cruise ship to sail to the country from the USA in more than 50 years, docked in Havana the day before Chanel’s show, and the Starwood hotel group recently announced plans to operate three luxury hotels in Havana. If it can make the existing state-owned ‘fve-star’ hotels in Havana, including the once-glamorous Hotel Naciona l, wit h it s mag nif icent ar t deco, Moroccan-inspired lobby and Soviet-inspired rooms and food, raise their game, while creating more jobs, that may be no bad thing.
Other imports will be seen as more questionable. The night a group of British journalists went to La Guarida, for instance, the Kardashian clan, flming for their reality show, bumped us from our table. The next day, at Cuba’s other ‘best’ restaurant, they arrived, camera crew in tow, on the terrace where we were having lunch. Bemused by the entourage and cameras, the Cubans seemed blissfully unaware of who they actually were.
The ig norance won’t last. At the studio of Jorge Torres and Larry J González, two Cuban satirical artists who work together under the name jorge & larry, Anna Wintour has been immortalised in ink, alongside montages of fashion shows. Torres’s family owned department stores before t he revolut ion. ‘Chanel coming to Havana has to be a good thing,’ he says. ‘It’s a show of support and of course it’s a polit ical act. Fashion always is. It’s about economics and status.’
It is too early to see whether Cuba will establish a fashion industry alongside its burgeoning art culture. This is a society living largely hand to mouth. ‘We’ve lost most of our craft tradition,’ Arrechea says. There are entrepreneurial shoots sprouting all over the country, however – small craft workshops; privately run restaurants and bed and breakfasts in people’s homes, which are generally far more enticing than the dispiriting state-owned concerns. For these to fourish, Cuba, which bans most advertising (except for the government), must ignite in its socialist-reared population a desire for life’s non-essentials.
‘Will you be taking your shower gel when you leave?’ The hotel maid pointed at t he bottles Chanel had placed in all its g uests’ bat hrooms and beamed wit h an intensity that left no doubt as to the hoped-for answer. This, it turned out, was a scene being played out on every foor. When I told her she could have the lot, she kissed me. That yearning for the trappings of status – when was it ever hard to ignite?