I spent the month of February in Havana, Cuba, where – before a bloody run-in with a hole in the pavement put a temporary halt to the arrangement – I went for daily jogs on the Malecón, the city’s iconic seaside promenade. Each morning, I passed an elegantly crumbling building that, without fail, threw me through a psycho-geographical loop as I became momentarily convinced that I was in fact in Beirut – one of my regular pre-pandemic stomping grounds and a metropolis that boasted its own iconic seaside promenade and fair share of holes in the pavement.
This particular building evoked the Lebanese capital for various reasons, not only its colonial-style architecture and Ottoman-esque windows but also the fact that one of its sections was fully collapsed – a common architectural repercussion in the formerly relentlessly celebrated “Paris of the Middle East”. Following its so-called “golden age” in the mid-20th century, Beirut had gone on to host, inter alia, a 15-year civil war (1975-90), brutal Israeli military assaults backed by the United States, vast post-war demolitions in the interest of historical amnesia and ever-savage elite enrichment, and the Beirut port explosion of August 2020. In that final landmark event, a significant portion of the city and numerous inhabitants were blown up thanks to wilful state negligence – a form of war in its own right.
In Havana, itself incidentally once dubbed the “Paris of the Caribbean”, contemporary warfare has primarily consisted of the longstanding de facto US war on Cuba. This began in the wake of the 1959 triumph of the Cuban Revolution, which spelled the tragic end to imperial plunder of the island under the charitable supervision of US-backed dictator Fulgencio Batista – who, as US author TJ English puts it in Havana Nocturne – relied on “torture squads” as well as “government-sanctioned terrorism”. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.