I’m a creative who’s passionate about film, takes inspiration from everyday life and finds simple, meaningful insight to underpin my work. Beneath is the cutting room floor of my creative endeavours; shadow puppets, floating sculptures, wire trapeze artists, a story about the time I met a Cuban genie, an ice-skating heron and a poster I made for a jazz festival without music…
barneybes@gmail.com
Video
A shadow puppet video I filmed about being unable to sleep in the city.
Creative Writing
Travel writing that I was shortlisted for by a New York Times jury
Our Genie in Havana
It’s evening at the palatial tourist trap known as the Hotel Nacional. I recline into a stylish wicker chair, sipping on an overpriced Cuba Libre as the palm trees salsa drunkenly with each other. While I sip, a dollar at a time, I reflect on my week spent in Havana and try to arrive at some sort of conclusion to my experience in this beguiling city.
My mind wanders to last night. A depressing evening spent on the outskirts of Havana at the famous El Tropicana cabaret, a place with the decaying charm of a Christmas tree in March. Once, this nightclub’s lavish shows attracted the likes of Frank Sinatra and Nat King Cole, however the only spectacles that take place here now are perched firmly on the elderly noses of the cruise ship passengers who come to puff away their pensions on the exorbitant cigars.
John, my tall, blonde, curly haired friend, a beacon of Englishness, compares the way El Tropicana uses its gaudy reputation to tempt in tourists, to the way the Anglerfish uses its luminescent lure to attract its dinner. The analogy might be a little extreme but it reflects our pessimism upon leaving. Deflated, and with the growing impression that the Havana we are seeking no longer exists, we head home through the empty streets of the city.
Seeing Havana late at night buoys our mood, the eroded colonial architecture and pockmarked, concrete walls conjuring the Havana of the books and films. Reality however, sensing our nostalgia, soon tears us reluctantly from the pages of this fantasy.
Arriving back at the house, we realise that our casa particular had a 12 a.m. curfew which we wilfully forgot. We are locked out. After trying the key in the lock, a dozen times, we become desperate. I climb onto John’s shoulders and use a stray windscreen wiper in an attempt to hook the latch from the other side, all to no effect, other than providing some Chaplin-esque entertainment to the audience of street dogs which take a break from their patrolling of the capital to watch us.
Just as we reach peak slapstick around 3 a.m., as if through divine intervention a figure emerges around the corner shrouded in a cigar smoke fog. An imposing Cuban man in a straw pork pie hat. In limited Spanish, John explains we are locked out. The mysterious Havanan is sympathetic and tries our keys to no avail, shrugs and then in what I take to be the Cuban equivalent of ‘hold my beer’, hands me his cigar. He takes a step back and kicks the metal door once, knocking the latch clean off the back. I have to stop myself from shouting, “viva la revolución!”.
Our hero takes back his cigar and tells us to hurry to our flat, before the residents who have inevitably woken up see us. We offer him an additional cigar in gratitude, which he declines, before he strolls down the street and disappears as he arrived, in a plume of cigar smoke. A veritable Cuban genie, perhaps off to rescue a few more hapless gringos before sunrise.
The following morning, we timidly go downstairs, expecting the worst, but there is no sign of last night’s break-in, in fact the lock has already been welded back on as if it was just a rum-induced dream. Remnants of cigar ash and a windscreen wiper by the door tell us it wasn’t.
The flair and selflessness of the 3 a.m. genie is how I will remember Havana. Yet, the sad truth is that Havana is on the brink of gentrification. The talismanic symbols of Cuba; Fidel Castro and Che Guevara have long been commercialised almost beyond recognition, adorning t-shirts and bedroom walls, poster boys for irony.
However, for the time being, it is reassuring to be able to report that amid the impending flood of US goods and the erosive effects of tourism, the rebel spirit of Castro and Cuba is still alive and literally kicking.
I finish my drink and listen to the Cuban band at the Hotel Nacional play a hokey Guantanamera, while the sounds of tyres screeching and dogs barking play out in the distance.