The Golden River and the Doctor

Where the gold ended up

I had been building a picture of this part of the world for months before I arrived, listening to podcasts on my postal round in Dulwich — the history of the Spanish Empire, the voyages, the civilisations that collided when Europe pointed its ships west. Street by street, through Dulwich and the Kingswood Estate, letters in hand, I filled my head with Columbus and Magellan and the machinery of conquest, so that by the time I landed in Seville I thought I had a handle on it.

I pictured grimy riverbanks, smoke, dirt — the industrial weight of empire, men hauling barrels in the grey morning light.

What I found was golden.

The Guadalquivir caught the afternoon sun and broke it into pieces, rowers moving slowly along it while kayakers drifted past and tourists stopped to take photos, orange trees lining the streets behind me with fruit hanging heavy and unpicked, the air carrying that faint citrus smell. I stood there knowing this river had once been the artery of an empire — that ships had left here chasing something they didn’t fully understand — and yet it was calm, beautiful, completely indifferent to any of it.

Inside the cathedral, standing in front of Columbus’s tomb, that contrast stayed with me. Four carved figures carry it on their shoulders — enormous, elaborate, impossible to ignore — and whatever you think of Columbus, and there is plenty to think, he sailed into the unknown looking for China and found something that changed everything instead. The consequences of that are still being worked out now, but standing there the first feeling wasn’t that. It was awe.

That feeling shifts in the Archive of the Indies, where the scale of it all becomes harder to ignore — marble floors, curved stone walls, and rows of records, every expedition, every plan, written down and filed away. A gold bust of Cortés. A portrait of Columbus, red sash, exactly as you’d expect him to look. Then Alvarado. You can see them as explorers, or as something else entirely, and perhaps both are true at once.

Standing there, you get the sense that this is where decisions were made that would play out thousands of miles away, long after everyone in those rooms was gone. The walls don’t say anything, but you can imagine what they’ve heard — armour, boots, voices, plans taking shape.

Later, in the Plaza de España, flamenco echoed around the curved walls, the stamp of feet and the clap of hands bouncing back across the tiles while the city carried on around it. Seville kept everything. The gold arrived here, and it stayed.

A city wearing its history the way the cathedral wears its gold — heavy, fixed, not going anywhere.

I was looking at where the wealth had ended up. I hadn’t yet seen where it came from.

Some crossings are harder than others

Columbus reached Cuba after weeks at sea. I flew eleven hours and complained about the seats.

Some crossings are harder than others.

The airport told you everything straight away, the queues not really queues but a loose crowd pressing forward while a bored officer watched it all unfold, people edging ahead with their luggage, carving out space where they could.

Once I was in the taxi I looked back at the terminal, neon lights running along the front, glowing in the dark — pure 80s — and that feeling stayed with me, not as nostalgia but as something more fixed, like the place had settled there and never quite moved on.

Marissa was waiting at the guesthouse in Havana, the outside giving almost nothing away — shutters, a small sign — but inside it opened into a courtyard rising three floors, tiled and airy, high enough to give a clear view onto the street and into the buildings opposite, where doors didn’t quite shut and windows didn’t fully close.

From up there you could see into other lives without trying, glimpses through half-open spaces, and the next morning, sitting on the balcony as the city woke, it all came into focus — washing hanging from windows, dogs moving across rooftops, barking at each other across the gap, and opposite me, behind a set of grand colonial doors built to impress, a mattress laid out on the tiled floor with a man still asleep on it, the doors wide open to the morning air.

No privacy, no performance, just a life being lived however it could be.

The architecture of empire, repurposed for survival.

Value, traded

That first day I walked through Havana and a young couple fell into step beside me, easy conversation from the start, and I knew, more or less, what it probably was, or what it could become, but I went along with it anyway.

The man answered everything I asked, talking through Cuba, the economy, the buildings slowly giving way around us, and when I mentioned I wanted to watch Arsenal he spoke to bar staff on my behalf, getting the game on when others wouldn’t. We walked for hours like that, conversation turning into something more useful than I’d expected.

He never asked for money, not directly, just small hints dropped into conversation — a daughter at home, not well, medicine difficult to come by — and whether that was true or not I couldn’t say, but by then it didn’t really matter. He’d given me his time, shown me around, answered my questions, and I was always going to pay something for that.

In the end I gave him what felt like the going rate for a guided tour and bought them both drinks, noticing the tattoo of his child’s name on his arm, his partner quiet beside him.

It might have been a story. It might not have been.

But in Cuba that didn’t feel like the most important question.

No one asked for anything without offering something first.

The Pearl of the Caribbean

That evening I walked to a show in Old Havana, the streets dark in places, figures in doorways, the city revealing itself in fragments as I went.

They introduced her as the Pearl of the Caribbean. She must have been well into her nineties, small, steadying herself as she made her way to the chair at the front of the stage, taking a moment before she began.

And then she stood.

When she opened her mouth, the room changed.

The voice that came out of her didn’t belong to her body anymore — rasping, full, completely alive — carrying something far beyond the room itself. She moved forward slowly, singing like the moment demanded everything she had left.

Months later I saw that she had died, a short post on social media, easy to scroll past if you hadn’t been there.

I’m glad I was.

The effort did

The city kept returning to the same idea in different forms. A corner shop that looked like it hadn’t changed in decades, shelves stocked but unmoving, dust settling slowly over everything, time not quite passing in the way you expect it to.

Outside a bar one afternoon, flies drifted through the heat while a fan turned slowly overhead, doing very little, and my drink arrived as something half invention, half excess — a mojito with a beer bottle pushed upside down into it, bleeding slowly into the glass.

Across the street a man sat sketching, thin, focused, and after a while he came over and handed me the drawing.

It looked like a police sketch.

The drawing didn’t matter. The effort did.

I gave him some money and his face lit up, properly lit up, the kind of reaction you don’t fake, and he walked away still smiling.

Later that evening, a band in white shirts set up in a bar and played like the room was full, saxophone and guitars moving easily through the air, voices rising and falling as though there was somewhere else they needed to be.

There wasn’t.

I tried to Shazam it.

The algorithm didn’t know.

I still haven’t found it.

In other places, tourists waved them away without much thought, not rudely, just not interested, but I clapped anyway, sometimes the only one doing it.

This was work, done properly, regardless of who was there to hear it.

There was a dignity in that you couldn’t miss.

The unofficial system

We had arrived with cash because the official system didn’t really function, and so another one had formed around it, informal but widely understood.

At a bank in Varadero I asked about withdrawing money, the cashier explaining the fees with the flat tone of someone describing something unavoidable. I turned to leave and the security guard leaned toward me slightly, lowering his voice just enough.

He knew someone, he said. Someone who could help.

In most places that would have been enough to walk away.

In Cuba, it felt like the only sensible option.

Sometimes the vehicle is the view

The taxi back from Varadero wasn’t what I expected either. Outside the hotel sat a two-tone Ford sedan from the 1950s, cream and sea green, chrome catching what was left of the light. The driver wore dark sunglasses and handled the car with a kind of quiet care, as though he understood exactly what it was.

Inside, the back seat was one long stretch of worn leather, the windows down, warm air moving through as we drove the empty road back toward Havana.

Sometimes the vehicle is the view.

Earlier that day the sky had shifted without warning, blue giving way to something darker, then darker again, the line of it moving across the horizon while the sea below stayed calm until it didn’t. When the rain came it came hard, sudden, heavy enough to empty the beach in seconds, palm trees bending, water running through the walkways of the hotel.

It passed as quickly as it arrived.

The place didn’t feel fragile. It felt indifferent.

The doctor

Trinidad had been there since 1514, the Spanish building it and then, in many ways, leaving it as it was — cobbled streets, courtyards, heat sitting on the rooftops in the afternoon.

Maria’s guesthouse followed the same pattern, opening into a courtyard where life unfolded in front of you, my room just off to one side, close enough to everything that you never quite felt separate from it.

From somewhere nearby a voice cut through everything.

Migueeeeel. Migueeeeel. Migueeeeel.

Whoever Miguel was, I didn’t envy him.

When the electricity went out one day, no one reacted much. Life just shifted outside — children running along the cobbles, dogs lying in the shade, people sitting in doorways talking as though that had always been the plan.

It didn’t feel like disruption. It felt like routine.

A few days later I heard it again, stretched across the rooftops.

Migueeeeeeel.

Cuba, I thought, was asking a lot of Miguel.

I climbed a bell tower and found at the top a bell cast in the mid-1800s, its surface worn but intact, the detail still visible. Standing there, looking out across the town, it was hard not to think about everything it had been present for — empire, independence, revolution, whatever came after.

It had heard all of it.

And said nothing.

On my last afternoon I found a rooftop restaurant and sat in the full heat of the sun, looking out across the town as the light began to change.

The waitress came over and looked at me with what I can only describe as professional concern, asking if I’d consider moving downstairs — the sun at this hour, no hat, not a good idea — and then, almost casually, she told me she was a doctor.

I sat with that while she moved on to the next table, taking orders, thinking about what that meant — years of training, a profession built on keeping people alive, and now she was carrying drinks because it paid better.

And yet she couldn’t switch it off.

She saw a problem and reacted to it.

That was still who she was.