PBS’s Weekend in Havana special makes at least two valuable points.
The first, and most significant, assures viewers that Havana deserves a spot on almost everyone’s travel wish list.
Weekend in Havana, hosted by Geoffrey Baer and airing at 8 p.m. ET Tuesday (check local listings), offers a whirlwind tour of Cuba’s capital city. It hits enough of the highlights and includes enough of the qualifiers to provide a fair and intriguing perspective.
The second point concerns the special itself. What viewers can see on the air Tuesday night turns out to be only a sampler of Baer’s Cuba feature.
On the show’s website, those who are interested get a much more extensive look at subjects on which Baer can only touch in his on-air hour.
Using video and narration, the website offers a deeper look at Cuban baseball, an extensive timeline on U.S.-Cuban relations, a lesson in making the perfect mojito and a feature on the manufacture of Cuba’s famous cigars.
Neither PBS nor Baer is among the first wave of reporters who have rediscovered Cuba since the dramatic thaw in America’s relations with its island neighbor a couple of years ago.
But with President Trump reinstituting some of the restrictions on U.S. travelers, it’s worth noting again the value and appeal of visiting there.
Weekend in Havana does not, at least in the televised version, address any of those policy changes or the discussions they have triggered.
No, Weekend in Havana focuses on the state of the city and attempts to get a handle on how Cubans are feeling these days. For the record, they seem cautiously optimistic, while acknowledging the country’s economic situation since the fall of the Soviet Union in 1989 has left its infrastructure in serious peril.
Baer seems understandably fascinated by a downtown Havana building where 22 families live in one half, and the other half has been condemned. It’s almost impossible to avoid the symbolism there.
He notes renovation and restoration are such watchwords in Havana that whole classes of young Cubans are trained specifically in the art of restoring old buildings to the way they were.
Havana has breathtaking sights, both in the restored and unrestored areas, so any travelogue on the city will provide a visual feast and give most viewers an immediate sense of sympathy. You want Havana to come back, at the same time you don’t want it to lose its old-world charm.
Several of Baer’s local guides, who include a musician and an architect, make that same point. They talk about how many years it has been since the government had money for restoration and the hope that relaxed tourism rules will lead to an influx of foreign money that will, among other things, help in the rebuild.
So the televised version will make viewers want to go, which is good.
It does not, however, get into many of the grey-area details. Hotel and taxi prices have skyrocketed, for instance, since tourism began to increase. The infrastructure problems are serious enough that some hotels cannot guarantee hot water. Plumbing and sewerage are primitive.
Nor does Weekend In Havana mention why Havana’s once-teeming harbor has become virtually empty, save for the new cruise ships. Hint: History has shown that a number of Cubans allowed to take boats into the harbor kept sailing right up to Florida.
The reason things like that aren’t discussed on Weekend in Havana, presumably, isn’t sinister. It’s simply that there’s a limited amount of time, and that time is best spent focusing on what a visitor would see.
That’s not a bad decision. It’s just worth remembering, as the website version shows, that the deeper one looks into Cuba, the more complex it becomes.