The story
It was 1998, and I went off on hols. Costa Rica first, then
Cuba. It was my birthday present to myself, and I decided that the best way to
get to know some genuine Cubans was to go somewhere I could learn to dance.
Oddly, my bicycle taxi man decided to take me to the Caseón del Tango, not your
usual salsa place. I went there every day for a lesson with Ketty Angel and a
man called Felix, and at the end of the week I was invited to what I thought
was a little party. My Spanish wasn’t all that good, and it turned out that I
was performing on stage in front of 200 elderly Cuban tango fans. It was one of
the best things I’ve ever done, not chickening out when Iight dawned. Afterwards
I was hugged and kissed by all 200 of them, just for showing up and having a
go. There’s a picture that goes with it. I’ll see if I can find it.
Havana was intriguing, with a permanent sense of insecurity.
People are prepared to do almost anything to part you from your foreign cash.
You can try to stay in the tidy bits with your tour manager, or you can stray
off the path and visit the darker parts. I ended up one evening in a tiny
apartment - built from breeze blocks with another forty like it, stacked up on
top of each other inside a former grand villa - eating rice, beans and fresh
lobster ($5 each right out of the sea, I paid) with a bunch of elicit ‘banana
cigar’ sellers and rent boys. We had a great time, although they’d have been
arrested for talking to a tourist without a license if I’d been found there.
They have tobacco, sugar, rum and fruit. They don’t have
much of anything else. And there’s ingenuity, humour, fatalism and sweltering
heat. And this is the way I remember it smelled, walking through Old Havana to
the Caseón del Tango at night.
There are three versions: ‘tourist’, ‘dark’ and ‘now I’m
really scared’. I went with ‘dark’ and its heart is made with the scary
version.
The materials
In its intense heart, there are vanilla, tobacco, jasmine, toffee
and tonka, with extra added dirty. For the abundance of fruits I went with
oranges, peaches and grapefruits. Vanilla, labdanum and synthetic musk bring it
back from scary to dark, and I put in some black peppercorn for spice, because
that’s just the way Old Havana is.
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