Havana

Famous for its live music, performed in tattered theatres and spilling from once-grand rum bars onto cobbled streets, the Cuban capital is striking up the band again after two years of restrictions.

- By Jamie Lafferty. Photographs by Kav Dadfar, Susanne Kremer, John Plumer

“It's not so easy to find music right now, but we might get lucky,” says my guide, Mirvel Bravo, explaining that tight Covid-19 restrictions have hushed Havana, a city with a long and rich musical tradition. I'd come chasing its sounds — the Cuban capital is famous for the pedigree of its singers, institutions like the Buena Vista Social Club and a feeling that someone with a guitar or trumpet might appear at any moment. The pandemic had halted all of that, but while most venues are still closed when I visit, the situation seems to improve and grow noisier by the hour. From day to day, more bars and restaurants are reopening, and others, seeing their neighbours take a risk, are following suit. Bands are then hastily assembled and installed inside.

Sitting on the edge of the busy Plaza Vieja, La Vitrola - meaning The Jukebox' – was one of the first to reopen its doors and strike up the band. Mirvel and I take a seat at the back, but we can hardly hear each other talk as the noise of the bongo ricochets off the walls and the high trill of a cornet competes with a whirring ceiling fan. For the players, some performing with their eyes shut in an energetic rapture, the music looks as much an exorcism as it does a concert.

La Vitrola, like many places around Havana, is a tribute to another, more affluent time, one of starched collars and bow ties, of lavish neon signs and real Coca-Cola. Just when was it, this golden era? Mirvel suggests the 1950s, hesitantly. It strikes me that the bar's aesthetic might be reaching back to an artful reconstruction of the past — part saturated holiday postcard, part heavily edited nostalgia - largely for the benefit of travellers like me. But this much is clear: Havana's good old days belong to a period that may or may not have ever truly existed, but in any case exist no more.