His nights were inhabited by herds of poets who wanted to be cursed and drank coffee with milk in crystal glasses while discussing life, art and death; exiles who hid in the seams of the Mexican capital and guerrillas who were lost in the current of history. That convulsive Federal District of the 1950s was the setting for a spy novel, and Café La Habana was one of the privileged places in that vertiginous city. Between the high ceilings like those of an evangelical polygon church and the Italian coffee pot of 1952, characters from bohemia and literature, guerrillas and politics, journalism and intelligence services nested. It is said that in that place of literary encounters, a bearded Argentine named Ernesto, nicknamed Che and surnamed Guevara met with a Cuban exile who wanted to return to his country to make the revolution: Fidel Castro. That, sitting at the wooden tables, the two young men conspired to bring down the dictator Fulgencio Batista, who would forever change the course of Latin America.
It is also said that in front of the enormous windows that watch over Bucareli, Gabriel García Márquez wrote passages from One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967), that Octavio Paz and Carlos Monsiváis were regular customers or that the café was a hive of Spaniards who had fled after the Civil War. The infrarealist poets, an avant-garde movement founded by Roberto Bolaño and Mario Santiago Papasquiaro, used it as a meeting point. Bolaño immortalized him in his novel the wild detectives (1998) with the pseudonym of Café Quito, and so, halfway between myth and reality, the years passed until this 2022 has completed seven decades.
“Che and Fidel met here [en el café La Habana], because they lived eight blocks away”, defends Victor García, coordinator of the establishment, on a Thursday in July. “They sat and talked at the back of the bar,” he clarifies. The surroundings of Bucareli housed several cigar factories and had become home to a small Cuban population, although to prove the passage of the two revolutionaries through coffee there is only second-hand testimony and literature. Che arrived in Mexico in 1954 from Guatemala, where he had seen President Jacobo Árbenz be overthrown in a US-sponsored coup. Castro arrived in 1955, after two years in prison in Cuba for a first failed attempt at revolution. They met at 49 Emparan Street, in the Tabacalera neighborhood, and in 1956 they left for the island. The rest is history.
Roberto Bolaño wrote in Amulet (1999) a supposed meeting between the Salvadoran poet Lilian Serpas and Guevara: “One night, she also told me this, she met an exiled South American in the Quito café with whom she was talking until they closed. Then they went to Lilian’s house and got into bed quietly (…) The South American was Ernesto Guevara (…) It may have been a lie (…) In the Quito cafe, on the other hand, more than one of the old failed journalists had known Che and Fidel, who frequented him during his stay in Mexico…”. Photographs of the city of Havana and of the revolutionaries now decorate the bar, as well as a plaque that commemorates them as distinguished visitors.
A few meters from Havana were the editorial offices of the main newspapers of the time, such as Excelsior either The universal, which made the cafe a regular stop for journalists. To contrast, the place was also visited daily by police and snitches due to its proximity to the Ministry of the Interior. The first time that the writer Elena Poniatowska, at that time chronicler of the city, entered the premises, she had been summoned by the poet and exiled Spanish León Felipe. “It was a course where many Spaniards went, many refugees from the Civil War, they were always in those downtown streets,” he recalls by phone. “They yelled a lot and interrupted each other. The Mexicans ordered coffee almost begging the waiter. The Spaniards banged on the table, clinked glasses, spent two, three, four hours there, and said they were going to return to Spain as soon as they died. [el dictador Francisco] Frank”.
Lost poets in Mexico
The infrarealists took over from the old journalists and the Spanish exiles. In 1975, Bolaño and Mario Santiago Papasquiaro met at the Havana café and, together with another handful of very young Mexican authors, founded their poetic movement, an avant-garde that sought to “blow the brains out of official culture.” It was a countercultural current, a staunch enemy of established writers such as Octavio Paz. Although he had a marginal existence, with little commercial success —largely due to his antagonism with the Mexican literary elites—, the Chilean author portrayed them in the wild detectives, his most emblematic novel, making them known to the general public. In it, the protagonists are Bolaño and Papasquiaro, under the pseudonym of Arturo Belano and Ulises Lima.
Café La Habana became his place of reference, a starting point to start the night and hold gatherings on literature until the wee hours of the morning. The poet infra Guadalupe Pita Ochoa, one of the founders of the movement and represented in Bolaño’s book with the pseudonym Xóchitl García, remembers it this way: “A large number of long-haired young people arrived, with backpacks, many books and who consumed little. Hardly anyone had money, sometimes it was only enough for a coffee with milk. But it was not a place to go to eat, but to go have coffee and smoke, smoke, smoke, and talk, talk, talk… We read poetry aloud, free versions of translations of poets, or some expropriated book from some library. It was basically a place for journalists and agents from the Government, the political police… that’s why Che and everyone also went there… Octavio Paz passed by, but it was too poor and popular for him. Surely it was once, but not when we were going”.
Rafael Catana was part of the infrarealists in his second stage, when Bolaño had already left for Europe and Papasquiaro wanted to give a new life to the avant-garde. Years later he was also the founder of the rock music movement. “They were very strong, terrible years, but also years of experience with poetry. I was several times in the café La Habana after some demonstrations, and sometimes with Mario Santiago. Ramon Mendez Estrada [otro poeta infra] He summoned several of us there to make a magazine that would be called With peyote the dog dancesin this drama of literature, of poets, of daily life, of the workers’ revolt that took place in those years in Mexico City”, he evokes.
The journalist, documentary filmmaker and writer Diego Enrique Osorno first came to the café in 2003. He had just landed in Mexico City to work for Milenio, whose newsroom is located a few meters from Havana. “It looked like an old boxer cafe. I remember that there were many veteran journalists from the old Excelsior, old reference columnists. I grew fond of the place, that area gradually gentrified and the coffee was maintained, partly due to inertia. Everything seemed to indicate that they were going to close it or transform it into a fucking bar hipster and finally they give it as a relaunch recovering the story not only of The Wild Detectives, but also of Che Guevara and it became a legendary coffee”.
Years later, Osorno launched an investigation in the footsteps of the late poet Samuel Noyola, which he would document in the Netflix film midday cowboy (2019). The author had also frequented Havana: “It was already an endearing café for me, and when I started the search I was not surprised to learn that Mario Santiago Papasquiaro and Samuel had had a very peculiar date in that café. Mario Santiago saw him arrive with cowboy boots, denim pattern, buckle, a norteño outfit, to an appointment around 11:30 in the morning. They had had a coffee and were waiting because Mario Santiago had the rule of not having the first beer until 12, and when the time came they left the coffees and toasted the ‘cowboy at noon’, the nickname that Mario gave to Samuel” .
Osorno discovered the wild detectives during a trip to Caracas, Venezuela. Since then, fascinated by Bolaño’s universe and the infrarealists, he has delved into his stories as a literary archaeologist. Despite their marginality, that group of young poets generated an enormous influence on several subsequent generations of artists. Singer, songwriter and writer Patti Smith also fell in love with Bolaño’s work. Trying to learn as much as possible about the author, she came to Café La Habana, and in 2017 she gave a concert there before 200 people, in honor of the Chilean narrator.
Like Smith, tourists and readers from all over the world continue to arrive at the café, following the trail of Bolaño and Che, of García Márquez and Paz. Wild detectives after the accumulation of memories that Havana hides, the traces of infrarealism, the Latin American revolutions, the cultural vanguards that were going to change the continent, in a place where history and legend sometimes fade.
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