On another page I've compiled the best photos.
Rachel and I decided to seize some free time in August 2014 to make a trip to Cuba. We chose not to affiliate with a person-to-person trip, which is currently the only legal way for an American to go to Cuba. Instead, we chose a two-week tour run by an Australian company called Cuban Adventures.
On another page I've compiled the best photos.
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I left San Francisco on Sunday 3 August and flew to Cancun Mexico, arriving at 9 PM. The flight was uneventful save threading thru thunderclouds (enormous standing anvils filled with lightning).
Mexico was hot and humid. I wasn't prepared for that, thinking no doubt of Cancun Minnesota. I met up with Rachel at our hotel near the airport and immediately began fiddling with Wi-Fi, glad my 5 hour period of deprivation was over. Little did I know that Wi-Fi famine is endemic to Cuba. Rachel and I focused on what mattered, which was choosing and downloading an app/book on Cuban birds. Then during the night I awoke and began fussing with downloading maps to store offline. That feature worked tolerably well, preparing me to deal with life without Google Maps. I was putting first things first. Monday morning we had a lovely breakfast and hung out by the pool at our resort. This was perhaps our last Batista moment. We went to the airport 3 hours early and finished check-in with a mere 2:45 to spare. We ate and dawdled and boarded the plane. The flight to Havana was just 45 minutes. From the air, Cuba seemed flat, agricultural, and deserted. Havana, not so deserted. We were treated to a Cuban festival of frustrated expectations as our bags took two hours to emerge from customs. No explanations, just streams of uniformed custom agents marching into and out of the back room, gossiping with each other. An Israeli we had struck up an acquaintance with started denigrating all Cuban work and employment habits. After an hour bags started emerging one every 3 or 4 minutes, and finally our two bags. I had been nervous that our airport greeter would have left but semper fidelis! She was still waiting for us. We changed money, learning something about Cuba queue behavior (hint: not in England) and went to our first Casa Particular (government regulated B&B). Well, went towards our casa. The taxi broke down a couple of blocks from our destination in the Distrito HIstoriço and we had to walk. It was lovely. Our room was clean and welcoming, our host happy to see us, it felt good. We reassembled at the group house and met our guide. Roger greeted us, made us feel at home, and introduced us to Rollie our driver and his tour bus. Roger was very well educated, spoke English with an Australian accent (which he originally denied but later copped to). Roger tuned out to be expert in Cuban politics, birds, and music! We went to our first Cuban meal that night and both Rachel and I ate very well. Rachel found avocado almost everywhere. I found crab. First day of Internet withdrawal. What to do? No email. No Andrew Sullivan. I started whimpering (with restraint) about Internet Cafes. No help in sight. So instead we made do with a wonderful breakfast and hit the road. We traveled to Santa Clara, in the middle of Cuba, via the eponymous tourbus. There were 9 of us plus Roger and Rollie. The bus was comfortable and capacious, seating 15 passengers. It had air conditioning, a large ice chest, (bottled water was temporarily in short supply here, so we bought it opportunistically whenever we could). Our group: Nick, Nicky, Isaac, and Ruby from London. Nick has a record label featuring Cuban and African music, so he knows the stuff. Nick and Nicky have been here many times and can talk about the changes. Isaac and Ruby are teenagers. Liubov (Russian) and Erkki (Finnish) from St Pete, Russia. Mostly kept to themselves. Nancy from Los Angeles. She made this tour last year and came back for more. She’s the designated older person, sometimes needing extra care.
The day started as usual with a big breakfast. Rachel and I were the only guests at the casa. We shared eggs and the realization that neither guava nor what passes here for watermelon were edible. Mango is fine any time of year. The plan was to revisit the Che Memorial. I was all for skipping it but the prevailing view was not to annoy Roger. Che worship is the national religion. Roger is a believer. He was our tour guide at the museum and simply gushed. Maybe Che is one of the greatest heroes of the 20th Century, alongside MLK and Elvis, but maybe not. After being the hero of Santa Clara, he became an apparatchik in the new Cuban government, rising to the lofty position of president of the Bank of Cuba. He was famously incorruptible, but not famously competent. Cuban finance didn't work all that well. Then he decided to go back into the field, stirring occasional trouble in Africa (failure) and Bolivia (big trouble, betrayal, death). Accomplished nothing except a hero’s death. All around the world Che is a hero. Killed by the CIA, what's not to like? Here his portrait and slogans are everywhere. Fidel, not so much. Fidel chose more modesty for himself, what’s not to like there? Poor Fidel has outlived his time. When he dies, who'll care? 5 years after he does, he’ll be Brezhnev. We left Santa Clara for Cienfuegas, a resort town on the coast. It has a beautiful parque and beautiful rich people’s accommodations. There are rich people in Cuba, mostly people living on salaries paid abroad (like Roger, who's not rich). A pretty town but dissonant with the story of Cuba. A real life to leave. The road from Santa Clara to Cienfuegos to Trinidad is not freeway at all, mostly sparsely paved 2 lane. Riding on it was wonderful. We went thru villages and farms and occasionally a town, seeing a Cuba that has not been prettified but has endured. It was the most fascinating view of Cuba I've seen. Trinidad is the entertainment center of Cuba, the best beaches, the best music, the best tourist shopping. We got shopped out quickly, all of us fagged out by the heat. We stopped for coffee and ice cream and were restored. Then siesta and prepare for dinner at the casa. Our host family ate themselves (about 8 of them) then served us on the roof. It was a wonderful meal. Three young musicians played while we ate and after. They gave us cigars which everyone smoked. Rachel surprised herself and us by smoking a full cigar, appreciating it, and picking up her flagging energy. We finished the meal at 10:30.
Tomorrow's a big day, and more rain is coming. There was a doctor visiting the party and I asked for something for my sniffle and cough. Believe it I not, she agreed to come back and see me at 11pm. The gang went off to a disco in a cave and I stayed home The doctor arrived at midnight with antibiotics (a course of six pills and some pain pills which I don't need. And said I didn’t have a fever. So this time again to bed. Rachel returned from the cave disco very late. My brief encounter with Cuban medicine left me with admiration for is their national slogan: doing more with less. The doctor actually cared what happened to her new patient. To the beach! We set off at 9 to avoid heat and crowds. Needn't have bothered. Heat was implacable. Crowd not a factor. The beach was lovely with coconut frond umbrellas and snorkel and scuba services. We were in the south of Cuba on the Caribbean Sea. No waves at all. Water temp about 60 degrees. And for all that, I was still unwell. Wobbly on my pins. I realized about then that I hadn't had a proper meal in 24 hours. I put in a virtuosic nap, followed by another of same, then deigned to try the water. Rachel of course was flipping and flopping like a porpoise. I was trying, mostly unsuccessfully, to stand up. I found a shallow place and sat down. Ah yes the life aquatic. By now it occurred to me that not eating was part of the problem, not the solution. The real solution lay in a ham and cheese sandwich. (Ham and cheese sandwich is the national lunch hereabouts) After that, life began to improve. The rains came (every day like clockwork) and we decamped. Imagine lots of sleeping. You got it. In the pm I was too late for the museum and under-equipped for the internet cafe, so I had make due with a cappuccino. In the evening, we ate at our new favorite restaurant (left over from Wed), then marched up the hill to Casa de la Trova, where they have singing and dancing. We sang, we danced, well Nicky danced with a local, persistent cowboy. Rachel ostentatiously smoked a big black cigar and warded off her suitors. She outlasted me by a couple hours. I posed the question to my fellow travelers: how can you tell we're in Cuba and not Mexico? Some answers: 1) It's cleaner here 2) It's safe here (my observation also. At midnight, walking on a quiet street with folks sitting on their stoops, I never felt a predatory eye on me. Apparently it's pretty rare.) Roguery is not rare. People on the street try to sell you stuff, mostly currency, and presumably not on terms favorable to you. People ask for money or gifts. I'd prefer they didn't but they seem to understand 'no'. I remember in Mexico having cafe workers shoo away peddlers who were bothering their customers. That's rarer here. Life can be tough, tourists are less common. 3) You can park. There's some back story here. When Castro hit pause in 1958, Cuba was filled with late model American cars. The same cars are still on the road, painted and looking spry. I've spotted many 55 Chevys, my father's climax car, but just one turquoise like his. Meanwhile an equal number of newish cars from around the world are on the roads. Cars, bikes and taxis all compete to scare pedestrians. Gas costs $8/gal.
To my knowledge, hay solemente one good road in Cuba. The rest stink. They're all concrete. 4) Dancing is the national pastime. 5) Cubans seem optimistic about their future. I'm not sure they're right. Accepting capitalism is tough (see union, soviet). A lot of Cubans' self-regard is tied up in "look what they tried to do to us and we're OK now." Sound familiar? 6) Alternative forms of personal transport. Bicycle taxis, horse taxis, bicycles. It costs a buck to take a bike taxi anywhere. 7) Scarcity. Toilet paper is scarce. Cuba cannot manufacture or import enough, so there's little to be had. Public bathrooms (like in our hotel) have none. Our casas particulares hosts try to have it available but you have to ask for it. And (and this is a big and) you're not supposed to put any paper of any kind in the toilets. There's a small plastic covered pail in every bathroom for paper. Bottled water is also scarce. Every day begins with a hunt to buy enough water for 11 people for the day. We never ever drink tap water or eat street food. 8) Drogas. No real evidence of drugs here. We saw drunks sleeping on corners but no one wasted on drugs. Cuba is poor and drugs strongly frowned on. Dunno if this norm will survive American tourists in numbers but who knows. It's pleasant living in a land without drugs.
After breakfast we had the bicycle race. Camaguey is one of Cuba's ancient cities, founded exactly 500 years ago (we had or would visit all five of them) and is wealthier than any city we have visited before. There are 9 cathedrals in town, a fact that astonished our guide-for-the-day, Hugo. The source of wealth has been beef farming, plus, improbably, smuggling (improbable because Camaguey is 100 km from the sea in either direction). The bike trip was well done and was probably the best way to see the city. We zipped around, in the unaccustomed position of scaring other pedestrians, then stopped, dismounted, walked around a bit (It was Sunday, and I loved seeing mass being celebrated with jazzy minor key tunes that sounded somehow Sephardic to me) Then back home and everyone crashed. Pent up sleep deprivation and frankly lots of us are not tip top. Colds, coughs, GI stuff abound. In the evening we walked to Roger's house, where he lives with his father and stepmother. This visit was a highlight of the trip so far. The house is grand and decrepit, stone walls and 15 foot ceilings like everywhere. The house was built in 1780, passed thru some notable families on the way to Roger's mother. But during the special period of the nineties, Roger and his family had to "eat the house". They tore down walls to sell the materials and sold part of the house to another family. Now with times better, Roger and his dad are attempting to restore and improve the house. It's a slow frustrating job, above the regulatory dance familiar to Californians. Roger's cousin is providing most of the labor. Roger's job is to scrounge materials. This is very difficult. There's no such thing as a building supply store. The route for consumer goods (overseas relatives send TVs, AC s, even cars from abroad) is impractical. So Roger schemes, trades, reuses, waits. He and his dad have big plans for the house.
Roger's step brother cooked for us. It was a grand feast, Cuban style. Haimish, the meat a bit tough but that's evidently Cuban style. Rachel mainlined avocado. Beer and rum flowed. A Dominos tournament. Roger assassinated a number of coconuts. And throughout, Roger supplicating "Eat more eat more.” The trip to Santiago took all day. The estimated duration was 7.5 hours but it actually took 8.5. As usual, it was sunny and hot in the morning and cloudy and threatening in the afternoon. It rained some. We made some stops, in Las Tunas, a tidy city where some famous people did some notable things, and Bayamo, where we got snookered. Roger got sold into a package where we would see live music, dance, and eat lunch. The band was left over from a recent tour at the Kit Kat Klub, where they'd been fired for obsequiousness. They gave all their presentations in English and German to draw in some droll tourists from that land. Meanwhile the entertainment turned out to be Rachel who was not amused. She was game but not interested in the endless Romeo and Juliet ballad sung to her. Lunch took another hour to arrive. We made another stop without incident and pulled into town as dusk hit. Our casa was quite nice. Roger pulled us out for a halfhearted city walk featuring the city hero Cespedes, who was shot by the Spanish for instigating a slave revolt like John Brown had done a few years earlier. Cuban slavery ended a few years later, in the 1870s.
We had dinner at the casa. It was great, probably the best diner we've had in Cuba. Our hostesses, the three Ana's (all related) included one great cook. We gourged, smoked our cigars and drank our coffee and tea. Then we walked to casa de la trova (they're everywhere) to listen to music. Cuba is a stew of three flavors but the three don't get equal billing. The indigenes battled among themselves until the Spanish arrived, who then brought in African slaves for sugar and tobacco culture. We went to a dance place called Casa de Los Dos Abuelos, where the grandfathers represent the two roots of Cuban music, Africa and Spain. Notice two not three. In Cuba today, you hear almost nothing about indigenes except creole cooking I asked Roger about indigenous portion of the gene pool and he said it basically doesn't exist. The Spanish wiped them out, then flooded the island with Africans. This is certainly different from Mexico and Peru. Maybe one of the most striking things about Cuba. No Indios left, no genes left. Santiago is very old and very hot. Its ancient port is the best on the south coast of Cuba. It has some perfunctory container facilities but not much evidence of shipping. Cuba neither exports nor imports much. Thanks to a shared conspiracy between Castro and the US, the economy hardly works. Our big toot that morning was a cab trip to a park an hour north of town, where we disembarked and climbed 450 steps to a monolith called Las Piedras. From the top we got a 360 view of all the mountains around Santiago. It was actually a lot of fun. On the way back we stopped at an abandoned French coffee plantation, now repurposed as a botanical garden. The French came here in numbers after the Haitian revolution that so discombobulated Napoleon that he abandoned his new world empire plans and sold Louisiana to the USA. (It didn't hurt that he was poking his thumb in the eye of the British). For 100 years the French dominated coffee trade in Cuba. Santiago has a rep as having the most authentic Afro/Cuban music in Cuba. It's arguably the poorest city in Cuba. In the afternoon Roger, the rooskies and I went down to the fort that guards the Santiago harbor. Started in 1630 and completed in 1840, it is a perfect fort - never once used. The pirates against whom it was intended took one look and departed for safer waters. The English took one look and landed 24 miles upstream. They took the fort without a shot and occupied Cuba for a year. Then they thought better of the whole thing and traded Cuba for Florida in 1763. I thought the deal could be argued either way. We ate at the casa again, an excellent meal. Then we headed out to Los Dos Abuelos. When the band began, two dancing instructors were on duty to pull us out of our chairs and teach us to dance. We were outgunned. But not cowed. I had incompetencies that woman had never seen before. As the crowds got thicker, so did my inhibitions; I left after the set and not without causing a stir.
Rachel tootled in later. She wondered why I decamped so erratically and truly I had no explanation. Another excellent breakfast and off we went. Today's drive was along a parkway it seemed, thru parks and rivers, Guantanamo (the city, not the base, which is nearby on the coast), then hugging the coast again. The road reminded me of the Baltimore Washington parkway on a day when it's closed. Two lanes in each direction with a flowered divider in the middle and nothing but green fields on either side And no traffic. We were going 40 mph and after 30 seconds passed two approaching vehicles, then 90 seconds, then two more. And even on that freeway, occasional horse drawn carts. Seeing Cuba that way, at moderate speed on the ground, there was a lot to see. Sugar cane fields everywhere, halfway to harvest. This was the rainy season and Cuba was green. We went thru every city in our pathway, and all the city suburbs had dreary Soviet style apartment blocks, a failed Cuban implant that's a bad match to Cuba's vigorous spirit. Driving thru villages was my favorite part of the traveling spectacle. That day was Fidel s 88th birthday and everywhere people were carrying birthday cakes, flowers, and decorations. The villages were ramped up for a fiesta, I saw it in their faces. Yaima our apprentice guide explained how the neighborhood social committees plan out these and other festivities and suddenly I saw something different. Cuban communism is after all communism, and communists do everything by committee and social pressure. So the circle of her life is circumscribed by commissars of various sorts. Roger talks about economic and social communism (the one bad, the other good). Dunno if an American can agree. Finally we were in a large flat valley lined with a straight mountain range. This was not a fertile area. Idle land. Some military shooting range activities. This was a no photo zone. We were near the American base. We stopped on a hilltop and took pictures towards the American base. It looked pretty dreary. Then we drove along the Caribbean/death valley border. It was otherworldly between the iridescent blue of the water (an ocean color I'd never seen before) and the brain coral rocks. Rachel scampered over the rocks towards the water below and scared me to death. Palm trees everywhere of every kind except date palms. Some foods they don't eat in Cuba: - dates - figs - goàts and goat cheese (except in religious sacrifices) - good cheese - good bread We looked down towards the naval base from an overlook. Guantanamo, like everything else in Cuba, looks like a relic. We Americans have no use for this decrepit base except as an invisible prison. And to poke our thumb in the Cubans' eye. Over the mountains and into Baracoa. Kind of a Cuban Rehoboth Beach. The ocean is an unbelievable color of shades of turquoise. Baracoa was only connected by road to the rest of Cuba in 1960 and is still inaccessible. Our casa was right on the Malecon. (Sea promenade). You could toss a nickel from our balcony on the second floor into the Gulf of Mexico. Rachel and I sat on our balcony rockers, smoked our cigars, and made sounds of gratitude. We had a late dinner of seafood cooked in coconut milk and other local delicacies, then went looking for ice cream. The local treatment is floating chocolate ice cream in chocolate milk. Horse taxis clip clopped past our window day and night. Goodnight. Breakfast was not up to our new standards. The rest of the day was fabulous! The beach was called Manguana. It was 45 minutes east of Baracoa inside the Alexander Humboldt National Park. (He spent a couple of years here) As beaches go, this one was thin on the ground. You had to rent Adirondack chairs and haul them under the trees and bushes abutting the beach, which was 20 yards wide. No umbrellas. The water tho was unbelievable. Three shades of turquoise, real waves breaking right on shore, allowing you to bob or float 30 feet out. It was stay all day water. No boom boxes. No critters trying to sting or eat you. In between swimming courses, we bought coconuts, passion fruit juice/, plus beer and drinks. We were there for 3 hours when Roger announced we had to go. Dismal man! Roger had planned a second adventure in the general area. We drove deep into the park and got out and walked along an unpaved road. We made one stop at a roadhouse where they fed us breadfruit chips, fruit, hot chocolate, and well water. After an hour, we crossed the river Duwada and hiked to a swimming place. Roger took some folks further to a waterfall but I was happy right there, sprawled in the fast flowing warm river stream. That night Rachel and I dined alone in our casa, with some trepidation after our breakfast, but it was good and it was a novel experience for us. Later we assembled to say goodbye to Rollie, who was splitting in the morning. We drank most of the remaining rum. Baracoa is the sticks. It's a rough place, not nice and not what we expected (What we expected was a resort.) The things to do here all involve nature. All over the world, there are places that used to be Baracoa and now are Cancun. I'm grateful that we got to see this one while it was still Baracoa. Our adventure that day had to be sin Rollie. We engaged a 1930s jeep that could hold 12 and 12 we were, 3 in front and nine behind. There were two parallel benches and a fruit crate up front between them. First stop was the house of an old lady who made chocolate. She showed us the various stages and served us cocoa at the end. Cottage industry. In 14 days in Cuba I haven't seen a single seatbelt. It's another way Cuba was frozen in 1958. Roads end was a small harbor on the mouth of the river Toa. We boarded a rowboat and pulled for a small island up river 1/2 mile. Then we walked and waded for another 1/2 mile to the swimming spot. We lay around in the warm river water and watched teen aged boys horsing around with rocks and a rope. Rachel pointed out that the scene could have been repeated in any place on earth in the last 10,000 years. Eventually we reversed the steps. Nick was our puller on the return, doing admirably, though less admirably coached by Ruby. Back thru town. Back to the Duwada.
This time Roger had arranged a pig roast. We were camped by the river with other family parties strung along nearby. Cubans like their family picnics. We alternately ate and soaked in the river. We were steadily accompanied by a dog named Perro (I may have that wrong), his pal Azul, and two pigs with absolutely no sense of irony (the pigs were cleaning up after the pig roast). There was a guitar player and our hosts distributed instruments but no magic happened. We were close to the end of the trip and were all feeling it. Last morning in Baracoa. Rachel and I walked down to the fort that houses now an archeological museum. Parts of it were moving. Columbus landed on this beach in 1492, on his first voyage. He evidently loved the place and talked it up big back home. He took cocoa back with him and I think tobacco. Real Time: ~ Baracoa has a tiny airport. The waiting room seats 38. We're up in the sky right now, on a prop with 44 seats. It's a more humane way to fly than on a jet, tho I suppose flying just ain't human. I have discovered that GPS works just fine without the internet so long as you have maps. I always know exactly where we are in Cuba, including when airborne.~ We landed without incident and emerged into heat and humidity at Havana's lessor airport. Our trip back into the city recapitulated Havana's palmy days. The Russian embassy in particular demanded awe and shock. Our new digs, nosebleed high and elegant, said money. Dinner fancy for once. Hollywood motif. The gang went off to a (the?) Jazz cafe but I hung out in the hood. Late nights ain't my thing.
Close to the end. Dinner at another celebrity restaurant on the 4th floor of a wreck. Good dinner, overpriced, painful bill reconciliation. We stopped briefly to get fleeced at Hemingway's favorite bar, then to bed. I'm tired and ready to go home.
Airborne en route Cancun. Smooth travel so far. At the airport, we changed our last $20. We cut it close. Panic in Cancun. Customs took an hour, then after trekking to terminal 3, miles away, we were confronted with Disneyland-style lines at the United counters. I managed to visit lost and found about the sweatshirt I left on the incoming flight (they handled it well) and finally found someone who was rescuing the SF passengers from missing their flights. Scary. The flight home was bumpy but who cares. Emily met us at the airport. All is well |
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