19: Mehr Licht!

Goethe’s last words were supposedly “More light!” In Havana the lights would have blinded the German genius—not just the light from the insulting sun and the swollen moon of the tropics, but from the proliferation of aristocratic lamps that multiplied the inner spaces of our immense mansions. A Cuba of ancestral lineage continues intact in the midst of ruins, at least as a concept. Only the stage is left set, but it is good for nothing. In the crass, or cachectic, crisis of the ‘90s, most hours were without electricity; we spoke not of “black-outs” but of “light-ons.” Havana ceilings lost their ornamentation, and then their plaster, until all that was left was an exposed crosshatch of rusted rebar.

The short circuit between collapse and splendor, between decadence and prestige, between history and rust, was most obvious when looking up in Cuban houses. The lamps, designed for a legion of candles or bulbs, were barely saved from this leprosy, remaining with just a humiliating single power-saver bulb.

With the boom in tourism and foreign investment, even these lamps disappeared. The temptations of the market led their owners, desperately poor, to sell them for a fistful of dollars they could use to prop up the house, or the family’s diet, or both.

Today identical lamps glow, all of them with a democratic commercial design. Everything is depersonalized. And it might be better this way. No city deserves to live forever imbued with the luminous halo of its past. And now Havana has, perhaps, “silent ships and empty convents” to spare, but it urgently needs more shadowy spaces, places to repose in silence from the dictatorial limelight that every Revolution implies, from the revolution of limelights implied by every dictatorship.