RUM, RHUMBA & REMEMBRANCE: MY NEW YEAR’S IN HAVANA.

Once again, I tapped my watch on the table in a futile effort to get it going. Unbelievably, it had stopped working when my plane touched down in Havana several days before, and I had not been able to get it going again since. My cellphone was equally useless, as there was no connectivity, so unless I happened to be in front of the old analog clock ticking away on the wall of the ‘casa particular’ that I was staying in for my New Year’s week in Havana, it was hard to know exactly what time it was (a ‘casa particular’ is a Cuban kind of Air B&B, where individuals, with government permission and at set government rates, can rent out rooms in their apartment to travelers and tourists). The faded, cracked paint everywhere (paint is particularly hard to find in Cuba, as is most any item not manufactured on the island, so walls go unpainted for decades), the famously re-tinkered 1950’s Chevy’s and Ford’s on the streets (cars are maintained virtually forever, as few new cars are imported and only a few people could afford them anyway even if they were), the startling lack of technology (limited-to-no connectivity, sputtering electricity, and don’t even try to use your Amex card) all create an environment in Cuba that says time in fact did stop, somewhere around 1956. Though it was now 2015, going on 2016, my non-working watch confirmed what I was beginning to realize: why bother even…