Cuba: Day 6 - Part 2

The Bay of Cienfuegos

We head back to Cienfuegos for lunch - with musical accompaniment, of course - at the Casa Verde across from our hotel.  It’s like being on the lakeside back home, eating out in the open air.  But in January!  (That part isn’t like back home.)
       Then another opening for adventure, if we want to walk into town on our own and meet up by the statue of Benny Moré for our next people-to-people.  I jump on the opportunity to unwind my legs and burn off at least some of the calories from all this lobster that’s being forced upon me.  Besides, it’s comfortably warm and the sky is blue.  Perfect for taking photos.  And it’s impossible to get lost because the hotel is on the only road into town from this peninsula.

The waters of Cienfuegos’s Caribbean bay are much calmer than Havana’s Atlantic waters. This is the same blue that I know from Martinique, and it’s very inviting, even in January.  I pass the Yacht Club where we had lunch upon our arrival, and then on past house after house with a blue anchor sign indicating a privately-run B&B, all newly painted and pleasing to the eye.  On the waterfront, there’s a huge billboard - a rarity in Cuba and usually reserved for political messages.  This one is of a man doing a dance step and saying “Cienfuegos is my favorite city”.  He looks a bit like Michael Jackson but is probably Benny Moré.  Farther along, a young man walks atop the breakwater, a bucket in one hand and fishing nets in the other.

        All of a sudden a pedicab stops and the two men in the back ask me if I speak Spanish.  They have Slavic accents and want me to ask the “driver” whether he has to pay anything at the hospital if he gets sick.  That is within my capabilities.  The answer is no, he doesn’t, it’s free.  The pedaler thanks me and pedals them off, all happy.  I guess once an interpreter, always an interpreter.
       In town there are lots of people, many of them young.  Maybe it’s a week-end.  I’ve lost track of the days.  I poke around a bit, and when it’s time I ask for directions to the Benny Moré statue, our group’s meeting place.  After one young man tries to lure my tourist pesos into his Benny Moré café instead, someone has pity and points to the corner.  There’s the statue; I’ve walked right past it.

       Our group reconstitutes itself, arrival by arrival, and we’re off to our next appointment.  On the way, we go into a few stores to see how things function in Cuba.  One is a pharmacy where a sign says “It’s free for you, but here’s what medical services cost” (I’m assuming in Cuban pesos, not CUCs) - and then there’s a whole list of treatments:  general and local anesthesia, angioplasty, glaucoma surgery...  All very interesting.  And obviously designed to make people realize that they’re getting their money’s worth with Fidel, and now Raul.  Another store is a dry goods and old-fashioned general store, with a corner for “recycled” clothing.  All very interesting and orderly.  Very 1950's rural America, actually.

       We’re allowed a few minutes to take a spin around the main square, with its Arch of Triumph that’s the only French touch I see in this reputedly “French” city.  Another bigger-than-lifesize statue of Jose Marti... with a pigeon on his head.  Just like the pigeon that sits atop the head of King Henry IV’s statue in Paris.  Or the one on Lincoln’s head at his Memorial  in Washington, DC.  Worldwide, pigeons have no respect.

        Our people-to people is at a theater on the square.  It’s a performance of the Choir of Cienfuegos.  17 singers in an a cappela group that has traveled the world, including Paris but not the United States.  They start out with Monteverdi, move on to a Cuban classic and a more modern Cuban song.  Then, in honor of the Yankees, they perform Oh Shenandoah, and close with a stirring version of a gospel piece, My Soul’s Been Anchored in the Lord.  We’re very honored, and their harmonies are beautiful.

Back at the hotel, I avail myself of the services of René, the bartender.  Last night he served me a pineapple juice, followed by a pineapple juice “but this time with rum”.  Which he taught me is called a Habana Especial. When I walk into the bar and say Hola, he smiles and asks “Habana Especial?”  Good memory.  We talk a bit and I tell him he has a French name.  He’s relieved to learn that René is also a man’s name in French, if it has only one “e”.  He thought is was only a girl’s name.

       Then it’s across the parking lot to a Moorish mansion, or “rather palace”, the Palacio de Valle.  Shortly before the Revolution, a company bought it and planned to turn it into a casino.   (Perhaps it had Mafia connections?)  But Castro returned, won the war and decreed that casinos were a thing of the past.  So now it’s a restaurant and meeting place for the Hotel Jagua.  Built of alabaster and marble from Carrara in Italy, accented with exotic woods such as mahogany, the walls and ceiling completely covered with elaborate carving, and all of it lit by crystal chandeliers of astounding proportion, it’s overwhelmingly luxurious.  The meal is every bit in keeping with the setting... and there’s lobster yet again. For once, the wine flows freely. Will this torture never end?

For a look at the Palacia de Valle, try this link:  http://www.cienfuegoscity.org/cienfuegos-city-arch-valle-palace.htm

Cuba: Day 8 - Part 1

Our last full day in Cuba.  And it’s a varied schedule.
       After breakfast, Chris gives a talk with a slide show of his photos of those vintage American cars we’ve been seeing each and every day, all over the place.  They are not museum pieces; they’re a true means of transportation.  Sometimes it feels like time traveling back to my childhood for me.  With his talk, Chris has set the theme for the morning:  things with engines.

   
 Which is why our next stop - in the Vedado area of Greater Havana - is to the workshop behind the home of Luis Enrique Gonzalez, where he keeps his flock of Harley-Davidsons running through extreme talent and ingenuity. As with those classic American cars, no Harleys have been sold in Cuba over the 50+ years of the embargo.  So these are vintage bikes.  Sometimes visitors to Cuba bring parts with them.  But not entire bikes.  And yet there are 200 Harleys registered and running in Havana alone.  Their owners call themselves Harlistas.  Luis shows us motorcycles in various stages of rebuilding.  He calls what he does resolver, to resolve.  Or as he says in English, “keep it running”.  One example of Cuban ingenuity:  enema tubes used for brake linings.  I feel Luis’ efforts merit a Harley T-shirt from Ann Arbor, or maybe Paris... or both.  Maybe Chris can bring it with him on his next trip.*


       On our way to our next stop, we drop by Lennon Park, also in Vedado.  And yes, that would indeed be John Lennon.  Not only does he have this park named after him, but he also can be found sitting there on a park bench.  Of course, both Lennon and the bench are bronze (by sculptor Jose Villa) but the likeness is striking, right down to the granny glasses, which are real, but not John’s.  And there’s a funny story behind that.  The glasses have been stolen several times so now someone stays nearby, 12 hours at a time, rain or shine - just like the guard at Jim Morrison’s tomb in Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris - and places them on John’s nose whenever people come to take a photo. Which is often.  Today the Glasses Custodian is a shy lady who lets me take her photo, and even tries to put my own glasses on John, but the temples aren’t right so they won’t fit over his bronze ears.  How sweet of her to have tried.  My (bad) Spanish seems to endear me to the Cubans, and they go the extra mile to connect.

Our lunch spot today doubles as another people-to-people because we’re eating in a home-cum-museum.  The art here reminds me of two artistes in France:  Picassiette from Chartres and Le Facteur Cheval.  Picassiette used broken pieces of pottery as mosaics to cover everything in his modest home, including his wife’s Singer sewing machine.  (I’m sure she was thrilled.)  Being very religious, he also drew frescoes of the famous Chartres Cathedral and covered them with pottery shards as well.  Le Facteur Cheval was just that:  a postman, with a rural route in the hills near the Rhone Valley.  On his rounds, he would find strange-shaped stones and wheelbarrow them home, gradually building towering monuments behind his house.  The complex became known as his Palace and includes one ensemble that looks surprisingly like a Cambodian temple.  Surprisingly because Cheval never even saw a photo of a Cambodian temple.
       Here in Jaimanitas, the artist is José Fuster and we are greeted by his son Alex.  Fuster’s home is a fantasy world of strange shapes à la Facteur Cheval and covered with mosaics that would make Picassiette proud.  Its three stories are covered with mosaic tiling in bright colors on walls that look as if they’ve erupted like fireworks.  The best way to sum it up is Gaudi Meets Picasso.  There’s a modernist Madonna holding a baby Jesus up for the Three Wise Fishermen to see from their boat below.  A pool provides a perfect reflection of the shapes high above, and the floor of the pool is also tiled with designs. We lunch at tables around the pool, on food that’s the usual Cuban fare, but delicious, and we just all dive in while people pop back and forth to the kitchen to refill anything that has run out.  Finally it’s time to leave this amusement park of mosaics and head back to the hotel.

      But first we’re given a bit of time to walk around because Fuster has also decorated some 80 homes nearby over the past ten years, turning this simple neighborhood into a colorful, fun place to visit... and probably to live.

* Chris duly delivered the sweatshirts I bought at the Paris Harley-Davidson store for Luis and his daughter on a subsequent Cuba trip.  They were vintage D-Day reprints, as H-D was the motorcycle used in the invasion of Normandy and the freeing of Europe from Nazi rule.

Cuba: Day 7 - Part 2

Finca Vigia

Our next stop:  Finca Vigia, the house where Ernest Hemingway lived for 21 years and wrote For Whom the Bell Tolls, The Old Man and the Sea, and A Moveable Feast.  From its hilltop, the house affords a fantastic view of Havana only 10 miles to the northwest.  Tatiana, our talkative and very learnèd guide, explains that Hemingway’s wife-of-the-moment (Martha) wanted to get him away from the bars of the city, and he hated the place in the beginning.

       After the Revolution, and with talk of Castro wanting to nationalize property owned by foreigners, Hemingway moved to Idaho but kept the house. It remains as it was upon his departure, wild game trophies, paintings, furniture... even his deep-sea fishing boat, the Pilar.  He had hopes of coming back, but the house was expropriated after the Bay of Pigs.  It has remained in a time warp, just as he left it, books and all.

       We hear two versions of how it became the property of the Cuban government.  The official one says that Hemingway’s widow Mary signed it over to them in 1961.  The unofficial one says that she had no choice, so yes, she did sign it over, but under duress.  Whichever is the case, at least the house was preserved, rather than being sold and transformed beyond recognition by someone else’s interior decoration.  Today it operates as a Foundation.  (And by the way, there was a group of musicians playing live on the premises.)

View of Havana from Hemingway's terrace

Our return to the Hotel Parque Central feels sort of like a homecoming.  But we’ll be here only two nights.  And tonight is our Havana free night. Dinner on the town at the restaurant of our choice.  Cindy is planning on dining at Dona Eutimia’s, the paladar just outside the Taller printing shop we visited early in our trip.  Ever since that day, I’ve been wanting to try some of their renowned ropa vieja so I’m going along, as are five others.  We walk down through the animated streets, working up an appetite.  The food is excellent and the ropa vieja lives up to its reputation.  Made with lamb instead of the usual beef, it’s the best I’ve ever tasted.
       After dinner, Cindy and I head back to the hotel on foot while the others drive off in classic-car taxis to the Tropicana night club for their show.  I’ve seen the Lido and the Folies Bergère in Paris, so I’m content with the relative quiet of the Havana streets.  Plus a chance to have a conversation with Cindy, who has been so very, very good at this guide/mother hen thing.  She’s one competent lady.

Cathedral of Havana

Hemingway's office

For a look at Hemingway’s house, there’s a video on this link.  You’ll see it as we did, maybe even better, because no one is allowed inside.  Luckily there are a lot of windows and doors:
http://www.hemingwaycuba.com/finca-la-vigia.html

Cuba: Day 7 - Part 1

Cienfuegos had an influx of French from New Orleans after the War of 1812.  We were told its French influence could be felt, and if we had more time here, I might feel it more.  But it’s already time to head back to Havana,
  Before we leave, our tour team wants us to experience the municipal market.  For some Americans, it would be a rude awakening in hygiene, but I’m used to it from rural France and so are those of my co-travelers who have been abroad before.
       Still, the meat counter is not for the faint of heart, and I hate to imagine how it is in the heat of summer.  I hope they have ice, but there’s none in sight right now.

.  

One seller fluffs up his rice into neat little piles.  A veggie guy smokes over his vegetables, his ash perilously ready to drop off.  Portraits of Che, Jose Martí, the Castro brothers, and famous slogans such as “La victoria siempre” (victory, always) are painted on all the walls.  The vendors seem curious about our unfamiliar faces, but smile and exchange holas if we start things off.  I catch Ismaël buying tomatoes and other vegetables to take back to his wife in Havana.  He tells me they’re fresher here, and cheaper. 


I catch Ismaël buying tomatoes and other vegetables to take back to his wife in Havana. He tells me they’re fresher here, and cheaper.

His veggies safely stashed under the driver’s seat, Ismaël navigates us expertly down narrow, meandering roads and through small hamlets that are poor to the eye.  At one crossroads, charcoal is being made by burning down pyres of wood.  I’ve read about this practice in medieval France but never seen it actually being done.  This is obviously not a rich part of the country, and one where the Old Ways have been preserved.
  After not too long we arrive in Playa Girón, known to Americans as the Bay of Pigs.  Instead of a battleground, it’s strange to see all the brightly painted cabins that make it look like The Shore of my childhood, where people would live in tiny houses for a month or two in the summer.  We’re dropped off in front of the small museum that tells the sad story of the invasion, from the Cuban viewpoint.  It interests some of us, but personally - war not being something I enjoy - I prefer the other option:  walking along the beach, looking for shells.  There are very few, and National Geographic doesn’t allow people to remove them anyway, so I end up just wading in the warm turquoise water and enjoying the sun.  I wish we had time for a swim, but it’s on to lunch.

  We arrive at Hostal Enrique in nearby Playa Larga, where you can rent a room or just have a great meal.  Things work boarding house style here, with the food set on the table and you choose what you want.  And there’s a wide choice:  calamari, meat stew, the ubiquitous chicken and the equally ubiquitous beans-and-rice, plantains... typical Cuban fare.  Obviously there is live music, and Cindy somehow ends up on the maracas.  Here again, we go for a stroll along the beach until Ismaël is ready to drive on.  (We were supposed to tour the sugar mill where Fidel was headquartered during the ill-fated U.S. invastion and to take a ride on an old steam locomotive through the sugarcane fields, but it’s being repaired.  Instead we’ll visit Hemingway’s house, which sounds like a good fall-back plan to me.)

There are billboards crowing about the Yankees’ defeat in the Bay of Pigs fiasco along the road.  One marks how far “the Mercenaries” got... which certainly isn’t very far:  only 4 km, or not even 2½ miles.  Evidently planning was poor, the site ill-chosen and Castro’s infrastructure vastly underestimated.

  The entire length of our road back to the A1 highway runs along the Zapata Peninsula.  Similar to the Everglades, this vast marshland - 5,000 square kilometers, or over 1.5 million acres - got its name from its shoe (zapata) shape and is now a national park.  It’s the largest not only in Cuba but in the entire Caribbean.  In addition to its beaches, it offers wetlands for birdwatchers and is a wildlife refuge.  Before lunch, back at Enrique’s, Armando Herrero, one of the park rangers, told us about all that’s being done to protect endangered species, including crocodiles, and we see some of them as we travel along the road.
  During the long drive back toward Havana, we have time to take in all we’ve seen so far.

Zapata Peninsula

Cuba: Day 6 - Part 1

This morning is a morning of greenery.  Out in the countryside.  Ismaël and his Trusty Bus take us down the backroads around Cienfuegos, past several Yellow Jackets and to the Cienfuegos Botanical Garden.

What I call The Mermaid Tree

     Our guide will be botanist Roger Echeverria.  I blurt out "un nombre vasco" (a Basque name) because I recognize it from Basque friends back in France.  Yes, he admits.  He has Basque ancestors. That and the fact that my father was a veteran gardener build a bridge between us as he leads us around the garden.
       It was founded in 1901 by a Massachusetts family named Atkins to carry out sugar cane research for their sugar mill across the road. Now it’s owned by Cuba’s Department of Technology and Environment.  Roger guides us around the extensive property, pointing out all the exotic trees by name, both common and Latin.  At the end, I mention to him the Matthaei Botanical Gardens of the University of Michigan, and he’s heard of them!  I take his e-mail address so I can put them in touch with each other.  I’m sure they’d have very interesting exchanges.  Especially as Roger’s English is impeccable.

Former Soledad sugar mill

Atkins' mansion

The next stop is Atkins’ old Soledad sugar mill complex, originally built by a family from the town of Trinidad, who arrived in 1820 with 800 slaves.  The Atkins family took it over in 1884 and modernized it after slavery was abolished two years later.  (Atkins was an abolitionist.) The young Atkins set about helping the ex-slaves obtain land.  He also developed the infrastructure of the entire area:  phones, electricity, a school, a dispensary.  Although the plantation was nationalized in 1960, along with most everything else on the island, a lot of what Atkins set up is still visible here, even though the sugar cane operation was closed in 2002 because it couldn’t be mechanized.  12,000 machetes would be needed to farm this terrain.  In spite of that, the population living on the plantation’s imprint today is a walloping 4,000.  This has become an industrial zone - cement plant, oil refinery, asphalt plant - that also raises cattle and grows some vegetables.  Funds have been obtained to restore what remains of the plantation as a part of the region’s history, and the house will need a lot of restoring!

       After a presentation by yet another Nancy (which seems to be a popular name in Cuba), up steps Pedro Gutierrez, who used to be a steam train engineer on the property.  Farming the cane required 300 train cars, seven locomotives - Baldwins from Philadelphia he tells us American tourists - and 80 kilometers of track.  Now Pedro is the night watchman.  It’s touching that the system has provided a job for him, and allowed him to present his part of the plantation’s history to visitors.  He walks among us, proudly sharing the few photos he has of this part of his life.
      After the presentation by Nancy and Pedro, we're set free to roam.  In the kitchen of the worn-out mansion, a smiling woman is cooking lunch for the entire staff in huge cast iron pots that may well date back to Atkins' time.  It's pasta today, and she invites us to stay.  Another woman is mopping the mansion's courtyard with water that no longer comes from the huge well her plastic bucket is perched on.  What the mansion really needs though is a new coat of plaster and some fresh paint.

Inside the "Company store"

       I’m curious about what could possibly still be sold in the bustling Mercado Industrial Amenecer (Daybreak Company Store) across the way, open 9 to 5 according to the hours painted on the building, right alongside “Still offering good service” in red letters.  I stroll past a tired horse and cart and into the relative darkness of the century-old building.  On the wall is the now-familiar blackboard listing prices, as they were at the bodega in Havana.  Interestingly, quantities are always quoted in pounds rather than kilograms, a vestige of America’s past influence here.  And as with the bodega in Havana, shelves here are... let’s say “airy”, with few goods visible.  Condoms, prominently displayed, cost 1 Cuban peso, if you’re interested and a sign declares that you have to be 16 to buy cigarettes or alcohol.  With Chris’s help, I manage to buy a colorfully-painted wooden puzzle for my younger grandson.  I say “manage” because the price is in Cuban pesos, as are all prices, and we need to know how much the clerk will sell it for in CUCs (the tourist currency), and that takes quite a while.  It appears to be a major undertaking because few foreigners buy anything here; it’s truly a store for locals.  Fidel looks down from his painted place on the wall, keeping a careful eye on the Evil American trying to subvert his people.  Everyone else just watches with amused curiosity.  What a strange creature I must seem to them!

To be continued...

Cuba: Day 5 - Part 2

The cobbled streets of Trinidad, Cuba

After regrouping in the square, it’s on to meet the Horse Whisperer, Julio Munoz.  Once an electrical engineer, he switched to running his colonial home filled with priceless antiques as a two-bedroom B&B when it was allowed in 1996.  Thanks to Spanish ancestors, he has a second Spanish passport, and he tells us that when he goes to Florida, you can’t get him out of Home Depot.  I think he brings goods back to fix up this wonderful old house.  He has plans for expanding the B&B now that that’s bingo!  It’s all part of the Cuban enigma:  living by the law, but stretching it, massaging it to achieve the desired result.  We see this time and time again.

Julio

allowed, and in spite of strange government laws that say you can have a business but you can’t build it up.  The way around that is to raise the ceiling, then split the resulting taller rooms horizontally, after which you cut the house in two, again horizontally, and you donate the upper part to your wife, which means she then has a house that she can rent out.  And
       But where does the Horse Whisperer part come in, you ask?  Well, he fell in love with photography and traveled the countryside taking pictures.  The only way to do that was by horseback.  Although the penalty for killing a horse in Cuba is 15-20 years in prison, they are often just left to starve to death when they get old.  Julio’s kind heart couldn’t stand that.  He started out with one horse, but now has seven that he’s rescued.  And he’s used Monty Roberts’ horse whisperer method to train them.  He  receives no pay for what he does.  He uses what he makes from the B&B to provide for his equine wards, affording them senior years that are dignified.  And often brings them into the house to greet guests!
       Julio is a practicing Catholic in a country that until recently touted itself as avowedly atheistic.  He is the last of his family in Cuba; all the rest have left.  But he has many friends. And a reputation that extends well beyond Trinidad, and even Cuba.  His very life is part of the Cuban enigma.

There were some other colorful characters in Trinidad.  The guy all dressed in gold, his face painted the identical color, who played at being a statue, just like the street actors back in Montmartre.  The man with the big cigar astride a donkey with a sign around its neck that said “For Rent/ Photos 0.50 CUC”.  Our ears, eyes and hearts full of wonders, we reluctantly get back on the bus for the trip back to Cienfuegos.

Tonight is our first of two free nights in Cuba.  It’s been a full day.  A small group of us decides to eat at the paladar near the hotel instead of foraying farther afield.  One of us, Patricia, is of limited mobility, but she’s determined to walk.  A young man with a pedicab sees her outside the hotel and insists upon taking us.  He’ll do it for free, he says.  But Patricia is stubbornly independent.  She only gives in when she wears out halfway there. Thank goodness he’s followed us.  He delivers us to the door and says he’ll come back for her after dinner.

Ismaël

     Cindy has made a reservation for the five of us here at Villa Lagarto.  A lovely setting built around a garden on the bay, but the menu is disappointing.  Well, the menu is fine except they’re all out of the rabbit and there’s no fish or seafood tonight, which means it’s pork or chicken.  Again.  Before the food comes, I spot Ismaël over at a table all by himself. I invite him over to ours and then spend the meal trying to hold a conversation with him in my rusty, spotty Spanish and playing interpreter between him and the rest of us English-speakers.  Through it all, he retains his light-up-the-room smile and good humor, which makes it all worthwhile.
       True to his word, the pedicab is there when we come out after dinner and speeds Patricia and I back to the hotel.  He says it’s free, that he has a grandmother of his own, but we pay him anyway, having asked Ismaël what a fair price would be.  It seems only right because it’s 11 pm, he has many miles to pedal to get home, and has to be back at work in town at 5 am tomorrow morning.
       We’ll get to sleep in a bit longer than he will, but still... it’s time for bed.