Word: havanas
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...Wednesday on the Malecon, where Havana meets the swelling breast of its bay. The Malecon is Cuba's promenade, its boardwalk, its Champs Elysees. Across the Straits of Florida in Miami, kingdom of dollars, citadel of wealth unimaginable, the exiles have a favorite T shirt: it portrays the Malecon after Castro's fall as an endless vista of shiny, neon-lighted fast-food joints. The crumbling, once graceful seafront is still a long way from that plastic vision. Potuombo gestures at the crowd in his cafe, who are placidly consuming not Whoppers or Big Macs but the tepid brown soda...
People stay because many Cubans are still loyal to the revolution -- if not the man -- that they believe gave them 30 good years. According to people on the street and in their homes in Havana and its environs, it is mainly the economic deprivations of the past four that have shaken their faith and their pride. Every Cuban must work out his own calculation for the moment when devotion turns to desperation, when the hardships become too much to bear, when the natural desire to stay is overpowered by the need to go. This summer that moment came for thousands...
...warrens of Old Havana, farther along the bay, Ana, 25, has another generation in mind: that of her three-year-old son. He has been waiting for a hernia operation for two years. At his day-care center, which lacks books and toys, there is no Mercurochrome for skinned knees. "All the children have colds," Ana explains. Flushed with anger, she beckons a visitor to accompany her to the nearest pharmacy. "Is there aspirin?" she demands of the clerk. "Is there flu medicine for my baby?" The answer, as always, is no. "You see!" she says. "They take...
Nearby, Jesus, a 31-year-old bank teller, shelters himself from the storm beneath the facade of Old Havana's Almacenes Lux department store. The Lux is filled with busy people buying soap from Mexico, soda from Venezuela, baby strollers from Europe, and shoes, clothes and neon-color backpacks, some made in the U.S. The buyers are Cubans with dollars, but Jesus has none. He lacks relatives in America and does not work in a dollar-paying job. Is he bothered by his deprivation? He shrugs. "It's in the nature of the poor to covet what the rich have...
...three days the weather achieved what Clinton could not, stemming the tide of rafters. On the beach at Guanabo, east of Havana, Saturday night's forecast is for 15-ft. waves and more rain. The balseros along the shore use their time to work on their rafts, dream, complain. Jorge Luis, 36, introduces his raft's crew. "Just because we're discontented, we're considered antisocial," he says. "But in fact we're all professionals. Cuba is like a prison these days. You work one month to eat one day. You . . . " And then he pauses and smiles, surveying one raft...