Dick Cluster landed in Havana's José Martí airport for the first time in 1969 and has been fascinated by the city ever since, exploring it by foot, bicycle, city bus, tour bus, car, ferry, and other means. An Oakland resident, he is a translator of Latin American literature, most recently editing and translating the collection Kill the Ámpaya: The Best Latin American Baseball Fiction and Mylene Fernández Pintado's novel of contemporary Havana, A Corner of the World. Previous nonfiction books include They Should Have That Cup of Coffee, and Shrinking Dollars, Vanishing Jobs.

Photograph © Ileana González Rafael Hernández is the editor of Temas, a Cuban quarterly in the field of history, culture, economics, and politics. Hernández has been visiting professor and researcher at Columbia, Harvard, Johns Hopkins, the Woodrow Wilson Center, Tulane, and the University of Puerto Rico. He has guided many American visitors to Cuba, whether students, academics, or travelers. His publications include three books of poetry and ten books of essays. His essay collection Looking at Cuba won the Cuban Critics Award in 2000, and was published by the University Press of Florida in 2003.

from The History of Havana

Near the docks and custom house of Old Havana, in front of the meticulously restored basilica of the convent of San Francisco de Asís, stands the life-size bronze statue of a figure with long, flowing hair and beard, wrapped in a D'Artagnan-style cape which seems to drift in the wind as he walks. This statue is one of the very few erected in Havana since the revolution of 1959. It does not portray a rebel hero, a patriotic general, a famous writer, a great architect, or the composer of some unforgettable song dedicated to this city on the bay. Rather, it is the statue of the Parisian Gentleman, El Caballero de París.

The French themselves would have called him a clochard, a vagabond. From the 1920s to the 1970s he slept where he could, on one corner or another as he moved about the city, feeding himself on what he found or was offered by street vendors or passers-by, holding up his pants with a rope belt from which dangled pencils secured by strings. Yet, dressed in his signature cape over a tattered set of tails, the self-styled Parisian Gentleman projected an aura of dignity and majesty. The European aristocrat washed up on the shores of this New World-or so he presented himself—made speeches to the crowds in seventeenth-century Spanish or busied himself arranging his mysterious bags and bundles and masses of newspapers and magazines.

He was, by most accounts, a Spanish immigrant who had come to Cuba as a teenager and found work in Havana's sophisticated stores and hotels. Some said he had gone crazy for love, while others said he'd been jailed for a murder or a robbery he did not commit. Over the course of decades, he became an institution. Ageless, capable of appearing at any hour of day or night, attached to no neighborhood in particular, white but poor, both comic and tragic, he became a sort of essential citizen of Havana, to whom the city's residents have dedicated songs, poems, memoirs, imagined biographies, and plays. "Un tipo muy popular", one such song calls him-which suggests "popular" and "of the people" all at once.

The Caballero died in 1985 and was buried in an obscure grave on the city's outskirts. When the ruined colonial church and convent of San Francisco (turned to civilian uses since the mid-nineteenth century) was restored in the year 2001, the city historian requested the transfer of the Caballero's ashes to that sanctuary beside the city's earliest marketplace. The reception this vagabond received sums up the spirit of his adopted city; throughout his lifetime on the streets, even those who laughed at him protected him. They conversed with him and accepted the quill pens and colored papers he gave out as gifts to those who offered him alms. He once buttonholed a Cardinal, who listened politely as the Caballero explained that the church should sell all its goods and distribute the proceeds among the poor. By the 1940s, he was such an institution that he was interviewed in the press. In the 1950s, he appeared on television alongside two similar itinerant characters, La Marquesa and Bigote de Gato. In the 1960s, he was afforded carte-blanche for free food from the kitchens of the newly state-run restaurants.

Dick Cluster landed in Havana's José Martí airport for the first time in 1969 and has been fascinated by the city ever since, exploring it by foot, bicycle, city bus, tour bus, car, ferry, and other means. An Oakland resident, he is a translator of Latin American literature, most recently editing and translating the collection Kill the Ámpaya: The Best Latin American Baseball Fiction and Mylene Fernández Pintado's novel of contemporary Havana, A Corner of the World. Previous nonfiction books include They Should Have That Cup of Coffee, and Shrinking Dollars, Vanishing Jobs.

Photograph © Ileana González Rafael Hernández is the editor of Temas, a Cuban quarterly in the field of history, culture, economics, and politics. Hernández has been visiting professor and researcher at Columbia, Harvard, Johns Hopkins, the Woodrow Wilson Center, Tulane, and the University of Puerto Rico. He has guided many American visitors to Cuba, whether students, academics, or travelers. His publications include three books of poetry and ten books of essays. His essay collection Looking at Cuba won the Cuban Critics Award in 2000, and was published by the University Press of Florida in 2003.

from The History of Havana

Near the docks and custom house of Old Havana, in front of the meticulously restored basilica of the convent of San Francisco de Asís, stands the life-size bronze statue of a figure with long, flowing hair and beard, wrapped in a D'Artagnan-style cape which seems to drift in the wind as he walks. This statue is one of the very few erected in Havana since the revolution of 1959. It does not portray a rebel hero, a patriotic general, a famous writer, a great architect, or the composer of some unforgettable song dedicated to this city on the bay. Rather, it is the statue of the Parisian Gentleman, El Caballero de París.

The French themselves would have called him a clochard, a vagabond. From the 1920s to the 1970s he slept where he could, on one corner or another as he moved about the city, feeding himself on what he found or was offered by street vendors or passers-by, holding up his pants with a rope belt from which dangled pencils secured by strings. Yet, dressed in his signature cape over a tattered set of tails, the self-styled Parisian Gentleman projected an aura of dignity and majesty. The European aristocrat washed up on the shores of this New World-or so he presented himself—made speeches to the crowds in seventeenth-century Spanish or busied himself arranging his mysterious bags and bundles and masses of newspapers and magazines.

He was, by most accounts, a Spanish immigrant who had come to Cuba as a teenager and found work in Havana's sophisticated stores and hotels. Some said he had gone crazy for love, while others said he'd been jailed for a murder or a robbery he did not commit. Over the course of decades, he became an institution. Ageless, capable of appearing at any hour of day or night, attached to no neighborhood in particular, white but poor, both comic and tragic, he became a sort of essential citizen of Havana, to whom the city's residents have dedicated songs, poems, memoirs, imagined biographies, and plays. "Un tipo muy popular", one such song calls him-which suggests "popular" and "of the people" all at once.

The Caballero died in 1985 and was buried in an obscure grave on the city's outskirts. When the ruined colonial church and convent of San Francisco (turned to civilian uses since the mid-nineteenth century) was restored in the year 2001, the city historian requested the transfer of the Caballero's ashes to that sanctuary beside the city's earliest marketplace. The reception this vagabond received sums up the spirit of his adopted city; throughout his lifetime on the streets, even those who laughed at him protected him. They conversed with him and accepted the quill pens and colored papers he gave out as gifts to those who offered him alms. He once buttonholed a Cardinal, who listened politely as the Caballero explained that the church should sell all its goods and distribute the proceeds among the poor. By the 1940s, he was such an institution that he was interviewed in the press. In the 1950s, he appeared on television alongside two similar itinerant characters, La Marquesa and Bigote de Gato. In the 1960s, he was afforded carte-blanche for free food from the kitchens of the newly state-run restaurants.