Anthony Bourdain’s first impressions of Cuba, back in the day: “I’ve been to a lot of places, but I can’t think of another place that’s been less f**ked by time than Havana.” When Bourdain returned in 2015, it briefly looked as if that was about to change.
When Anthony Bourdain pulled back the curtain on the 2015 season of CNN’s Parts Unknown, the restless world traveller and homespun philosopher was nearing the midway point of what would prove to be his crowning moments in the TV spotlight.
Cuba was the 41st of, in the end, 95 hour-long TV episodes of Parts Unknown. In a departure of sorts for the often caustic, always irascible Bourdain, it also marked one of the few times he visited another country, cameras in tow, twice in such a short period of time. Parts Unknown’s Cuba episode followed just three years after his first visit for No Reservations’ 2011 season.
That was for Travel Channel; the follow-up was for CNN, but that wasn’t the only difference.
In March 2016, then-US president Barack Obama announced he would be lifting travel restrictions to Cuba for American citizens. Bourdain, reasoning this was too good an opportunity to miss, made the short 90-mile hop from the Florida Keys in an uncharacteristically — for him — sunny mood, buoyed by optimism for a more hopeful future for a people snakebitten by history ever since Spanish colonization in the 15th century.
In 2015, Cuba — then as now — was a mystery wrapped inside an enigma, a historical oddity, disarmingly simple on the one hand and yet maddeningly complex on the other. Fidel Castro, still very much alive and kicking at age 89, was a bogeyman to descendants of the Cuban emigres who fled to South Florida in the wake of the Cuban Revolution in January 1959, but a hero to a significant portion of the roughly 7 million Cubans who stayed behind, not all of them by choice, for good or bad.
Today, Cuba’s population has ballooned to 11.21 million (2022), more people than live in the states of Michigan and Ohio, but many of the same old issues remain.
Dates in history can play funny tricks on one.
Castro’s death on Nov. 25th, 2016, came 51 years and three days after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, on Nov. 22nd, 1963 — which, depending on how much faith you place in Oliver Stone conspiracy movies, Castro had a hand in … along with the CIA, the Russians, a cabal of disaffected Cuban emigres in South Florida, assorted Texas weirdoes, right-wing elements in the US military, and a lone nut with a gun hiding out in the Texas School Book Depository, now a museum no less, with a somewhat prosaic name, the Dallas County Administration Building.
Cuba features the work, too, of Parts Unknown director/producer Toby Oppenheimer and Bourdain’s longtime cameramen, Zach Zamboni and Todd Liebler, among too many others to name at production company Zero Point Zero.
Zamboni and Liebler must have done something right: They won the coveted Emmy Award for outstanding cinematography in a non-fiction program that year, to go with Emmys they won earlier in 2013, for Myanmar, and 2014, for Punjab.
As with so much of Bourdain’s best work — and Cuba is some of his best work if trapped in a weird political and socio-economic time warp thanks to unforeseen events, hello, President Trump! — Cuba very much has that signature Bourdain look and feel.
The rum no doubt helped. Cuba, lest we forget, is home to some all-world rum.
Bourdain repeatedly talks about how the island will drastically change, and for the better, in a matter of weeks — and, hey, What will all those people do with all those extra tourist dollars once the locals become cruise ship millionaires?
As we know now, to many’s regret, that never came to pass. Unless you’re Canadian, that is, as I am. Cuba has been something of a tourist mecca for Canadians — Europeans, too — since 1976 when then-Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau visited Cuba and kissed the Beard.
Richard Nixon, America’s president at the time, was singularly unimpressed. He even made a tape recording to that effect. (Nixon taped virtually everything he said, including things that were perhaps best kept to himself.)
Despite its misplaced optimism for Cuba’s short-term future, Cuba remains one of Bourdain’s more fondly recalled episodes among Bourdainophiles.
Just look at this comment, posted on Reddit a few years back:
“… watching Anthony Bourdain: Parts Unknown and for the umpteenth time marvelling at the images. Every goddam frame — well, 90% of them — is beautifully composed with perfect depth-of-field, rich contrast, colours and textures, and striking subjects.
“And the editing is really inventive, breaking up longer shots with tiny vignettes of apparently unrelated but complementary images. … (Even) if you don't like Bourdain, you can watch (the) episode with the sound off and just groove on the images and editing. … “
And that ending!
”(It) ends with one of the most amazing shots I've ever seen on TV. For a couple of minutes, they roll slowly along a blocks-long seawall where people are hanging out in the twilight, but they frame it so they only show the people from the chest down. Two minutes of slow side-scrolling past headless bodies, graceful, casual, random, almost abstract patterns of arms and legs in the twilight.”
But wait, there’s more.
Here’s unit photographer, Zero Point Zero regular and Peabody Award-winning filmmaker David Scott Holloway, who bird-dogged Bourdain throughout his travels for CNN:
“The restaurants in Havana’s Chinatown were delicious, and surprising. Also, going to see a show at midnight in a club was great. Things could be a lot different than when we were there, but I’d still check the episode and see if any of it speaks to you. Good luck!”
And that music!
Watching Cuba is a little like watching Buena Vista Social Club coupled with Babette’s Feast.
Many of the places Bourdain ate at, and according to the site Eat Like Bourdain, are still open today, at least as of this past December: in Havana, Cafeteria a la BBQ, along with El Aljube, Fábrica de Arte and Paladar “Los Amigos” among others, and in the small fishing town of Jaimanitas, Casy Santy, aka ‘Santy Pescador’ according to Google, where two brothers fish every morning for seafood they serve on the plate later that same day. It adds whole new meaning to the term, locally sourced.
Cuba was the first episode CNN aired after the emotional grind of Beirut, and the two make an unlikely yet oddly fitting couple. As with Beirut, the city that is, it’s clear Havana captured Bourdain’s heart.
He intimated as much in an essay for the social media platform Medium, titled Cuba!!!, which Bourdain shared in CNN's Field Notes.
“Whatever your feelings on the Cuban government of the last half-century,” he wrote, ”Cuba itself is beautiful. The Cuban people are uniquely wonderful: proud, resourceful (you sort of HAVE to be in Cuba), educated — and funny as hell. Even crumbling from neglect, Havana is the most beautiful city in all of Latin America or the Caribbean. The rum is the finest in the world, bar none. The music … fantastic.”
Bourdain saves a comment, too, for that shot at the end.
“A long tracking shot of people, mostly young Cubans, hanging out by the Malecon in Havana. We have sort of a bet among ourselves — those of us who make the show — where we challenge each other to see how long we can hold a sequence without voiceover, or dialogue. Just allow the images to speak for themselves.
“I think we outdid ourselves this time. I’m very proud of it.”
And rightly so.
Con razón.
Supplementary reading:
https://explorepartsunknown.com/directors-cut/when-something-was-good-he-would-tell-you/
CNN