Reporter's Notebook:...Time in Insurgent Mexico...

 

By EDUARDO PAZ-MARTINEZ 

McALLEN, Texas | The Cafe La Habana near gobernacion in Mexico City drew me like a thin, leggy, pouty, beautiful woman. The first time I went there back in the excitable 1980s was while waiting for the government to issue my news reporting credentials. I needed the paperwork to bop about Mexico for The Houston Post.

What a time it was.

La Habana was a busy, noisy eatery favored by many in the Mexican government. You could see and hear politicians talking up a storm, about domestic and international issues, the latter mostly about the neighboring ("Meddling," they said openly) United States. I went back to the popular cafe many times after that, when not out writing about the provincia elsewhere in the country.

I even wrote a piece about the mood at La Habana for The Post's Sunday Editorial Page, in which I said essentially what I'm saying here. Perhaps I used more excitable words. I was much younger, a restless colt back then. And so I would dash off to Cuernavaca, to Taxco, to lovely San Miguel de Allende (for a story on the rather large American colony there), to scorching-hot Hermosillo (for politics).

In between came jaunts to some of Mexico's other gorgeous cities and towns, like Guadalajara, Monterrey (my stop: Hotel Ancira) and Real de Catorce. Writing stories for the paper. Capturing a bit of Mexico's pulse. Making friends, too. I had had a taste of Mexico as a journalist while working for The Brownsville Herald after college in the early-1980s. I covered neighboring Matamoros, Mexico, and one of my stories there was a report on the military shutdown of the fabled Boy's Town (the bordello) there. The newspaper splashed the story on the front page, accompanied by photos of scrambling women and armed Mexican army soldiers walking the unpaved streets with rifled at the ready.

No one was shot, but it was the end of an era for such attractions as La Rata Muerta Bar and a handful of nightclubs that featured pretty wild shows, including one offering a sort of pseudo-coupling between a woman and a donkey. It was the Mexico young dudes from Brownsville knew well, and, sure, some older men.

But back to La Habana.

One of my more memorable interviews came there while also in the country for The New York Post a few years after I'd left The Brownsville Herald. My assignment had been a story about what Mexico was doing with all the money it was getting from the U.S. government to fight the war on drugs. For that, a Post photographer and I joined the Army on Vietnam-era helicopter raids to large marijuana fields in the state of Sinaloa. I'd also visited with the DEA (U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency) in Nogales, Arizona and in El Paso.

My meeting at La Habana was with the Mexican Attorney General. He quickly told me he knew the cafe "very well," his office being just around the corner. I had been staying at the nearby Hotel Majestic on the other side of El Zocalo from Gobernacion. The chat went down nicely with cups of coffee and a few pieces of Mexican pan dulce. It was time well-spent, yes. When done with the interview, the AG left and I stayed for lunch. The flow of people in and out of the place was steady, arriving in waves.        

Busy, busy was the phrase-of-the-day back then.

The cafe is still around, perhaps as popular as ever. Back then, I rode taxis everywhere. When leaving Mexico City, it was on a bus or an airplane. The bus stuff actually came often, mainly because some of my stories were of the enterprise variety; that is, with no deadline. On a bus ride from Mexico City to San Miguel early in my reporting south of the border, the driver stopped at the bus station in Guerrero, where I chanced a cup of coffee from the adjoining cafe. It came to me in an old tin cup, and it was spectacular.

Retired reporters all have great memories of their wanderings, their interviews, their trips, their work. I found my days and time in Mexico to be some of my best as a journalist, although there was also good work in New England for The Boston Globe and out west for The Associated Press in Denver.

Maybe I'll draw on memories from those stops one of these days...

-30-

[Editor's Note: Photo above of the guy drinking coffee is yours truly - much older - at a popular restaurant in today's McAllen...]