It’s a block from Hemingway’s hotel. The park dates from the 1600s. It’s shaded by immense trees, with a fountain in the middle. A crew of elderly women, in their blue smocks, their heads turbaned in towels, come to clean the park every morning. They work with stiff brooms and dustpans connected to long swivel handles. They inch along. It might take half an hour to make a ten-by-fifteen-foot section pristine again from the cigarette butts and gum wrappers and condoms of the night before. They’ll even comb the dirt around the protruding roots of the royal palms and Chinese banyan trees. They jabber in Spanish. By nine or so, the park is filling up with locals and tourists—Spaniards who’ve been disgorged the night before from Iberia 747s, Germans, South Americans. By then, too, the booksellers, who set up their portable wooden stalls every day on the perimeter of the park, are hard at their hawking—postcards of Che, last year’s calendars, Marxist manifestos, water-swollen baseball guides from the Cuban pro leagues of, say, 1946, bookmarks of Fidel and Hemingway shaking hands the one time they ever met.
