Let me take a time machine backwards… We are now on a corner of Havana, some six decades ago, and a boy who was not yet five years old is out for a walk with his parents. They are about to board that slow, constitutional and democratic carriage called a streetcar. This one, in particular, is identified as the “L4”; it leaves the Lawton neighborhood and stops at Central Park, right in front of the place where we are tonight, where every night on top of that building, there was a luminous advertisement where a bather jumped over and over again from a trampoline to advertise Jantzen swimwear to the point of exhaustion.  An advertisement that, because of its novelty and striking, still remains in the memory of those who saw it and those who imagine having seen it, because it is already part of fanciful Havana.
A trip full of charm on that “L4”, one that allowed a child to “drink the wind” through the window; to see from his seat, the mysterious thick wall around the church of Jesus del Monte, the “small square” of Agua Dulce with its bridge, that by then only the eldest ones had managed to see, and the suggestive intersection of Infanta and Carlos III, with its Quinta de los Molinos on the left side of the route and the descent down San Rafael Street to begin to enter a roadway of the more than twenty kilometers of stained glass windows of commercial establishments that showed the Havana of that time, where even the poorest of us could buy with our eyes the beauty we saw. At that time you could live in Lawton, Santos Suarez, Cerro, Arroyo Apolo or any other neighborhood in the city, but Havana residents only recognized as Havana the area of Central Havana and Old Havana.
You can just imagine, that kid on “L4” who was so absorbed from the streetcar window, was me. I am not that old, I don’t know firsthand how a streetcar was operated and I am not able to talk about the parts that made it up, but I did see and use those vehicles. My father thought, so that I would have the memory, he would have me photographed in front of one of them when, in the early 1950s, it was announced that they would cease to operate.
A slow agony preceded their disappearance. The poet Nicolás Guillén, in one of his chronicles, alluded to the «progressive paralysis of the streetcar» because the cars and the infrastructure were deteriorating without their owners, the Havana Electric Co., making the necessary investments to save them. Everything was due to a shady business deal, which enriched the company’s large shareholders and ruined the small ones, aimed at bringing into the country the company Autobuses Modernos, which brought to Havana those English-made buses, remnants of World War II and painted white, which the people soon baptized as «the nurses».
More than sixty years after their disappearance, Yanela Ruano, a young artist, revisits the theme of the streetcars. Because of her age, she never saw those vehicles. She is not from Havana either, but by taking them to canvases of small and medium formats and with diverse techniques, she wanted to pay her tribute to this city where she has been living for seven years and where she confesses to have fully realized herself.
Her discovery of the streetcar was, for obvious reasons, late and by chance. Another young artist, Lázaro García Driggs, who had never seen those vehicles either, told Yanela about them and showed her a splendid model of a Havana streetcar he had built. There were also streetcars in Santiago de Cuba, but that was before Yanela’s time. There were some routes in that eastern Cuban city, such as Vista Alegre-to-Cementerio, which had only one track, and at the head of the route, the seat backs moved and the driver changed platforms, while in Matanzas it was the women who collected the fare.
It was an unprecedented theme in Cuban painting. The artist saw in the streetcar numerous plastic possibilities. It was like an arrow piercing her, because Yanela Ruano immediately realized that that trolley, with its double row of wicker seats and whose speed was not measured in kilometers or miles, but by a scale that went up to nine points, could transport her to anywhere or to nowhere, but it could also transport her to the future, and, equally important, it allowed her to glimpse the city from the window’s point of view and thus recreate its landscape and the people who inhabit it, without ruling out the struggle between the streetcar that would eventually cease to exist and the streetcar that was dying with its claws drawn out.
The artist recalls that moment: «I could be anywhere in Havana in the 1940s. Fascinated that I lived in a two-tone panorama of correct and friendly people. I mounted the wooden car, the bell rang, and the streetcar creaked onward…».

Yanela was already immersed in an era in which she did not live. If nostalgia is the regret caused by the memory of some lost good or the sadness caused by the absence of a loved one or the distance from the homeland, the artist will feel the longing, the homesickness, –the spline, as the romantics used to say– of what she did not live. The nostalgia of nostalgia.  And let us say in passing that nostalgia is a word that comes from the Greek. It is made up of two words: nostos, which means «return» and algos, which means «pain».
There is no pain, however, in the streetcars that make up this exhibition. Vehicles that, hopefully, will be filled with the right and kind people whom the artist envisions and who will see Havana passing through its windows. Let’s confidently ride on any of them and accompany Yanela Ruano on her trip down memory lane as she pays tribute to this city of ours that generously welcomes her.

Ciro Bianchi Ross