Sunday Mornings: Coffee, Reflections and Music

On your marks, get set, and... what's that? Oh, no, SAS troops rushing down the stands, tanks breaking through the walls into the stadium. Usain Bolt standing in the middle of the track, looking confused like Aleksandr Orlov. What's caused this pandemonium?

Someone decided to light up a fake cigarette in a "no smoking" area.

If the above scenario looks like a joke to you, then, think again. A very real, similar event took place just a few days ago near Lichfield, Staffordshire when the passengers of a coach bound for Victoria station, London, were forced to evacuate the vehicle amidst fears that there was a bomb on board.

The ancient Olympics. Not a brand in sight

Welcome to London's Olympic Games 2012!

I've been trying my best to leave my cynic's mask at home these days but it almost feels as if the London Organising Committee of the Olympic and Paralympic Games doesn't want me to. In between scares from the sponsors about what products I'm allowed to bring into the venues with me and which ones will leave me with a hefty fine, scares about the budget (that was ages ago and it was never sorted out. We were way over then and still are) and scares about tickets availability and allocation (it's just transpired that a huge chunk of them are going to corporate guests) my initial enthusiasm for the Olympic Games has diminished. Not that I was ever over the moon about them in the first place. Although I do confess to having felt proud for a nanosecond when I found out that the British capital was to be the host.

What is it about big sports showcases that makes otherwise responsible adults behave like over-excited children in a sweets shop? Already London 2012 is shaping up to be a sponsor- and brand-driven fest (and, pardoning the pun, a "feast" for the lucky few who will be making a few bob out of hoi polloi). Have a McDonald's for breakfast, lunch and dinner. Down the plastic-texture burger with a good ol' XL-sized bucket of Coca Cola. Dessert will come courtesy of a Cadbury's chocolate bar. And get drunk later on (although for those whose teams do well in the medals table, this will probably start early in the morning) Heineken. You see? I just sorted your diet. For a fortnight. Someone, please, pass us the sick bag.

I'm not being Mr Curmudgeon here, although this might be the first step towards my Cuban persona being taken over by a British one. I'm a sports enthusiast. I support an English football team (Chelsea), two international ones (Brazil and Argentina. There's an oxymoron for you) and still root for my hometown baseball team (Industriales). The concept of money in sports is not alien to me either. To Chelsea, Russian billionaire Roman Abramovich's favourite toy, I can add The New York Yankees, the team I support in the Major League in the US. But I take all this fan's malarkey with a pinch of salt. The time when I wouldn't talk to a girlfriend because Industriales had lost to Vegueros in Cuba's Baseball Championship are happily over.

The Olympics are different. If you go by their history they should, in theory at least, call to a nobler part of us. In ancient Greece conflicts used to be put on hold until the games finished. And as far as I know there were no brands to advertise.

However London 2012 is slowly becoming the prostitute of the sports arena. And I profusely apologise to those involved in this trade. I mean no offense to you. But what's been happening for the last couple of years in the British capital is the closest you'll come to getting shafted for dosh.

I've personally been there before, in Cuba. In 1991 we staged the Panamerican Games, a sports meeting held every four years between countries from North, Central, South America and the Caribbean. In 1991, however, the "special period" (or economic crisis to give it its proper name) was in full swing in Cuba and the Panam Games (as they were known) were seen by many as an unnecessary waste of money. In hindsight, we were right. Security was tight. Athletes, foreign television crews and tourists were encouraged by Cuban officials not to mingle with the locals, except for designated areas to which the guests were taken (the US delegation, especially, was under close surveillance. Needless to say, the government's efforts were pretty useless. The Yanks did whatever took their fancy). The immediate outcome of the games was an apartheid-style split down the middle between those who had access to the new tourist facilites and those who didn't. As someone who had just finished his second year in university and had secured a summer job for the first time ever at a nearby hotel, I experienced first-hand this division. The Capri Hotel where I worked for six weeks in '91, was one of the three venues where the US television crews stayed. I saw corruption, bribery and theft almost on a daily basis amongst the hotel staff, including senior management and security personnel. This was the beginning of a terrible period in our socio-economic and political history and I still strongly believe that the catalyst was the Panamerican Games.

Fast-forward to London 2012 and what have we got? A famous area in east London, Stratford, whose reputation owes more to deprivation than middle-class aspiration. Yet the Games were meant to change that perception and inject much-needed cash into its regeneration programme. Instead what we have ended up with is a military lockdown. Which has had to come into force because G4S (the company tasked with providing the security personnel) cannot guarante the supply of the 13,700 guards it was contracted to deliver. Shambles doesn't even begin to cover it.

Snipers on roofs, a total takeover by the likes of McDonald's and Coca Cola and foul weather. I know that once the Olympics get going I will join my wife and children on the sofa (we have not got any tickets to any of the events, of course) or maybe at Trafalgar Square (apparently they'll have a big screen there and the National Gallery, one of my favourite places in London as you all know, is also in the vicinity) and cheer for Cuban and British athletes. And once the Games are over, I will join friends and colleagues to whinge about the opening ceremony, the technical glitches and the weather. To which I can only reply: Dear A Cuban In London, your transformation is complete. You are now a truly British citizen.

And this is all for me for the time being. I will come back in the second week of September to let you all know how the Olympic Games went. That is, if I survive them! :-) The blog will not be closed, though. I will have a mix of music and past posts to entertain you all. Since I'm doing the stay-cation holiday this year it's very likely that I will carry on visiting your blogs and reading your fabulous posts. Have a brilliant summer break.

© 2012

Next Post: “Coffee and Music”, to be published on Sunday 22nd July at 10am (GMT)

Meditations on London (Adagio)

'This ain't my London no more'.

The words pierced the air on the chilly, early January evening. They sank like two pieces of lead in my stomach. The melancholy behind them could not hide the anger J felt at seeing her birthplace transformed in a hipsters' paradise. We were standing on Bethnal Green Road, near the newly-opened Rich Mix and J was getting all teary and nostalgic. Also pretty worked up.

London's East End has always worn its pride on its chest. After all, this is the birthplace of the Cockney Rhyming Slang, the secret language developed by the East-End dockers 200 years ago and adopted later in the 1850s by the underworld to confuse the police and eavesdroppers. J was a cockney through-and-through and felt that she was part of a dying breed. With developers moving in and preparations for the Olympics well under way, she reckoned this part of London would be blitzed to oblivion in a few decades. According to what she related to me that evening the new regeneration programmes were doing away with the fabric that had held together all the different communities of the East End. The story of this forsaken part of the capital was one of immigration, innovation and can-do attitude. From the Italians in the 1840s to the Jews in the first part of the 20th century, the area had seen no shortage of immigrants. Nowadays it was the Muslims in the areas of Brick Lane, Mile End and Tower Hamlets that gave the East End a different hue and shade.

'This ain't my London no more' 

These words left me at the same crossroads on which I found myself when I came to live in the UK almost ten years ago. The immigrant's dilemma is one where they have no past in the future country they'll inhabit, nor present or future in the one they’ll leave behind. They are like shipwreck survivors, swimming, limbo-like, in the deep waters of involuntary amnesia and adaptability. Yet, this by no means guarantees that they will necessarily become new Robinson Crusoes, their desert islands occasionally being nothing more than mirages in the middle of the ocean.

 J's comments yielded no reply from me. What could I say? I didn’t know much about the current situation in the East End, or even in similar deprived areas where massive regeneration programmes have been implemented. Very often, with very little regard to what the local populace have to say about them.

 It's a delicate issue, identity and belonging, it always is. Once in their adopted land, an immigrant’s experience usually feels like travelling through a narrow passage to an unknown, but much broader world. A journey seen mostly through the prism of those around her/him. It takes a long time for the immigrant to put on their own glasses in order to see their new surroundings in their own way, unaided. It is then that comparisons are often made. Comparisons that are nothing but ways to compensate for lack of a previous life in the new country.

 To me, this manifested itself when talking about Thatcher and Blair (apparently, the latter was a political reincarnation of the former) or missing out on references to 'Coronation Street' or 'Eastenders'. The tendency in this instance is to look for parallels. And as J's words 'This ain't my London no more' reverberated in my head, my mind flew back to Havana and converted her phrase into 'That’s not my Havana no more'. No, it hasn't been for a long time. No hipster-driven gentrification there of which to speak. But the combination of corruption, mismanagement and incompetence I witnessed when I went back to the city of my birth recently left me feeling like J, pretty worked up. As another smoke ring came out of J’s mouth, I began to think that after all, there were two, not just one, people standing on Bethnal Green Road, feeling betrayed. We both looked at the newly-opened Rich Mix, its lights drawing two parallel lines on the pavement.

 © 2007