Cuba: Day 3 - Part 2

Ismaël and his wonderful smile

Ismaël drives deftly across town to the opposite shore of the Port of Havana and into La Regla, an industrial suburb where the elementary school is named after a Viet Cong bomber who tried  to assassinate United States Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara and future ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge Jr. when they visited Vietnam in 1963.  A bit of lingering dialectic.  Down the hill are the container dockyards, as well as the Shell and ex-Esso oil refineries belching their smoke into the blue sky.
       Our destination is a community art project called Muraleando, housed in an abandoned water tower.  Not only have Victor Rodriguez and his team refurbished this tower, turning it into a center for artists, dancers and musicians, but they have also rallied the entire area to reclaim the surrounding fields, clearing out tons and tons of garbage that had accumulated.  Victor takes pride in the group of musicians he presents, playing guiro percussion behind the star singer.
After the music, which again ends in us getting up and dancing, we tour the premises, marveling at the many frieze, the clown statue on the garden bench, the egg sculpture welded out of rusty mechanical parts, and many other works of art.

Then it’s back on the bus and back into Havana proper.  We’re given a choice:  either stay on the bus and ride back to the hotel for a rest or be dropped off along the Malecon and walk back on our own.  My legs need stretching, the beans and rice need digesting and my camera wants to see what it can see, so I hop off, along with the other photo buffs.

        We head hotel-ward, each at his or her own pace, clicking away as we go.  The sky is blue to the west but threatening to the east, and although the bay is calm, the Atlantic comes crashing over the seawall.  Two boys tempt fate, their mother admonishing them to stay away from the edge... but like children worldwide, the waves are too tempting.  The boys end up with squishy shoes, and me with a good photo.
  When the Malecon turns, I head up the Prado to the hotel, staring at all the vendors along this tree-lined promenade and at the people out on their terraces above, many hanging laundry to dry.  Or just leaning on the wrought iron handrail, gawking.


I get back to the hotel in plenty of time for the last activity of the day.  Another show.  This time it’s a children’s theater, La Colmenita (Little Beehive).  The founder lost his father in a plane crash and decided to turn his pain into something useful by creating this after-school program that uses song and dance to promote social values.
  The play we see is based on a Caribbean folktale.  The heroine of the story - Martina - is a ladybug (they call her a cucarachita - little cockroach - but she’s dressed in red and white spots so she’s a ladybug to me).  Martina wants to get married.  After turning down the boastful rooster, the goat, and some other problematic animals, she eventually chooses the lowly mouse.  Many of the grade-school children in the program graduate to professional studies and status.

Martina, la cucarachita

A touch I particularly appreciate, given my admiration for Montessori education, is the inclusion - in the front row of the bees chorus - of a girl with visible Down’s Syndrome. Although a bit less agile in her movements than the others, she’s totally integrated into the show and accepted by her fellow bees, and she knows all the lyrics.
  Yet again, it all ends in dance, with the bees descending into the audience and pulling the Yankees to their feet.

Dinner is at a different paladar.  (We never went to the same one twice.)  This one is the decidedly modern and minimalist Elite, where the walls are bare and everything is black and white, except the food.  Each succulent dish laid before us is a delicious work of art, complete with what I call the chef’s “art of the dribble”.
And then the bus takes us back to the hotel.  Quick to bed.  Tomorrow we leave Havana behind and go explore Cienfuegos and Trinidad.

Video of La Colmenita:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EG-gh2tu_eA

Morro lighthouse, Bay of Havana

Cuba: Day 3 - Part 1

After yet another copious breakfast built around my usual omelet con jamon y queso (ham-and-cheese omelette), we’re back on the bus, headed for something I’m not really looking forward to because it involves tobacco and I’m a non-smoker.  But who can go to Cuba and not see how their famous cigars are made?  Besides, that’s where the bus is headed.

       We are told that no photos are allowed inside.  As the former owners of the factory took their cigar technology with them when they fled Cuba, this seems to me to be locking the barn door after the horse has gotten out, but it’s their factory so...
       First, our guide Camillo Blanco walks us up to a huge, well-lit room, comfortably warm in January but probably stifling in the Cuban summer, especially as no fans are allowed because they would dry the tobacco leaves out and that’s a cardinal sin in cigar-making.  The workers here are called strippers and they are scantily clad (pun intended): women in short sleeveless cotton dresses, men in undershirts or T-shirts.  I have to wonder what else they could take off when the hot season comes.  Their job is to remove the tobacco leaf’s vein and sort the top, middle and bottom leaves - which are not of equal quality it seems.  We stand among the rows of tables while Camillo explains the sorting process.  The lovely lady seated in front of me reaches up and hands me some of the scraps she has cut off the leaf’s edge to make it straight.  Her smile lights up the room, and I thank her.  Then we watch other workers actually roll the different kinds of cigars, and that is fascinating.  Some wind leaf after leaf in a never-ending process, the cigar growing larger as their fingers fly; others roll large leaves around less-perfect filler leaves.  They roll 150 big cigars a day, or 300 small ones.
       Camillo tells us the oldest worker, who just retired, is 93 and the first five cigars he rolled each day were the five a worker is allowed for themselves (whether to smoke or sell); the old guy said he’d never smoked a cigar he hadn’t rolled himself.  Like that retiree, everything on the premises looks fairly ancient and when Camillo is asked how old the wooden chairs are, he replies that if they don’t break, why replace them?
       After that we visit other rooms where other jobs are performed, including quality control.  And yes, they do inspect every cigar rolled.  We’re not allowed in the curing room - it would disturb the cigars - and so the short tour comes to an end with Camillo escorting us next door to the shop where I dutiful buy one cigar for my friend Jose (of Cuban heritage) back in Michigan.

Mercaderes Street

From there, the surprisingly pleasing fragrance of tobacco leaves still filling our nostrils, Ismaël’s bus takes us onward to the home/library/office of the late Antonio Nunez Jiménez.  After a tour of its library of 23,000 volumes and the museum’s vast collection of specimens brought back from the geographer’s various expeditions, all open to the public, we listen to a presentation by Professor Marta Nunez Sarmiento, a socologist specializing in gender equality.  Her perfect English, honed while teaching at Brown and other American universities, makes it easy to ask questions, although some of her answers only serve to confirm the enigmatic nature of Cuban society.

       She reveals that although gender and racial inequality were almost wiped out by the Cuban Revolution, they’ve started up again, largely because of the Special Period - the hard times brought about when the Soviet Union abandoned its economic support of Cuba in 1989.  One problem is that, as most of the Cubans who fled to America and elsewhere were white, the remittances flowing in from abroad, a necessary adjunct to citizens’ meager finances, are profiting white families disproportionately and affording them a head start with the new semi-capitalism being born. Another problem is that teachers are moving to more profitable professions in other sectors.  (In fact, Alicia, our Cuban guide, was a teacher but now makes more money working for the state tourism board.)  There is also a problem of homophobia in Cuba, as there is in many Latin American countries.
       But the biggest question is that of Cuba’s future   Marta sketches a portrait of what may lie ahead for her country, now that it is opening up to capitalism, and especially in view of the possibility of broader relations with America - a topic we will return to again and again throughout our trip.

at El Aljibe

For an antidote to the seriousness of these topics, we head off to El Aljibe for a traditional Cuban lunch.  I believe this is not a paladar but rather a state-run restaurant, and the tourism supervisor we saw checking up on our tour at the hotel puts in an appearance.  He is jovial, but his omnipresence is the closest thing we see to a “minder”, even though it really isn’t ideological, just managerial.
       Here again there is live music, a quartet this time.  And chicken, which seems to be the dish of choice when said choice is limited.  Accompanied by the ubiquitous beans and rice.
       On the way out of the restaurant, we pass one of the posters that has existed for many years but has now outlived its purpose.  It calls for the return of The Five Heroes of the Republic aka The Miami Five.  Now the last three of those heroes are back in Cuba, traded only a month earlier for Alan Phillip Gross and an unnamed American intelligence agent.  (There’s also an identical poster still up at our posh hotel.)

       As we get ready to board the bus again, an old car, this one a white 1953 Chevy, pulls up to collect some diners.




                                                                  (to be continued)

Cuba: Day 2

I didn’t know what to expect on a tour, even if I’ve led some (the largest was five people).  But National Geographic has an “in” with a lot of places and experts I wouldn’t be able to access, and they know the terrain, which I don’t.  The trip will be much more enriching with them at the helm than me trying to go it alone.
       So here I am - Day 2 - sitting on a rooftop overlooking old Havana and the Caribbean, sipping a courtesy daiquiri, my camera already filling up with great images and memories.

Today has been a whirlwind.  At our smorgasbord breakfast (“buffet” is not adequate to cover the cornucopia of food available), I learn that Cuba is famous for coffee; it is not known for its tea... and there’s a reason for that.
       After breakfast comes a fascinating discussion by a renowned Cuban architect and urban planner, Miguel Coyula.  With amazing humor, he sketches out and fleshes in Havana’s past, present and future.  The question is:  rebuild or preserve?  Many buildings in Old Havana are past saving and restoring - it’s said three crash to the ground each day, on average.  I ask if it’s possible to do what Paris does:  build new buildings but that fit in aesthetically (with some glaring exceptions).  Coyula says he hopes so, and gives me his card.  I plan to stay in touch.


     Then we pile onto the bus, driver Ismaël smiling warmly, his gold tooth shining.  He skillfully navigates us along the waterfront, past the Morro lighthouse and the Fort of San Carlos on the opposite shore, to a spot along the Malecon where we de-bus and enter Old Havana.  Across from the Royal Fort Castle is a small plaza where people make a living selling books or posing for photos in folkloric dress.  There are a few artists, as there are on the Place du Tertre back in Montmartre, and one of them (wearing a baseball cap with Paris emblazoned on it) attaches himself to me, sketch pad in hand, pencil already in action.  He asks me where I’m from and I reply “Estados-Unidos... y Paris”.  He seems more interested in the Paris part and we natter on about art and artists until he attaches himself to someone more sketchable.

Antonio Gades

       Our group wanders over to the Plaza de la Catedral, past a street mural half a block long.  The plaza is still relatively unbusy at this hour, but hawkers are already out, under the watchful eye of a statue of Antonio Gades, the masterful flamenco dancer and loyal supporter of the Cuban Revolution, albeit Spanish by nationality.

       Off the plaza is a sort of trade school for the graphic arts, Taller Experimental Grafica.  We’re given free rein to walk around, take photos, talk to the artists and ask any questions we want.  The equipment is classic - probably ancient - but artistic talent and creativity are rampant, as they will prove to be throughout Cuba.
       After that comes a quick visit to a bodega, selling mostly staples - rationed - to the locals.  As this is probably a position of patriotic merit, small Cuban flags, slogans and multiple photos of Che Guevara provide colorful decoration to the fairly bare shelves.  A large board in the corner indicates the price, in Cuban pesos, not the CUC (convertible peso) currency of tourists.  Prices are ridiculously low, but inventory is also low.
       Our lunch today is at another paladar:  Los Mercaderes on the street of the same name.  As with the previous one, it’s upstairs - seeing as all these places were once people’s apartments.  The stairs are strewn with rose petals.  Also like all the other paladares, there is live music, with Besame Mucho and Quizas the perennial fare for tourists, I guess.  The walls are decorated with graphic arts rather than paintings (maybe from the nearby printer’s we just visited?) and the furniture is reminiscent of the splendor of 19th century Cuban homes.  There are even a few tables on the narrow balcony, in addition to the three rooms of the ex-apartment.

     On our way to our next people-to-people appointment, we wander around the Plaza de San Francisco.  And what a lot of fun that is.  There’s a traveling international exhibit here called United Buddy Bears.  The principle is simple: one bear for each country, decorated by that country.  The U.S. predictably has its bear totted out like the Statue of Liberty, and Cuba’s - also predictably - is smoking a cigar.  In each successive country, the bears are arranged in alphabetical order in the language of the host country, which means that the bears aren’t always next to the same ones, and that often makes for interesting pairings.  The large plaza is alive with children having their photos taken with The Bear of Their Choice... along with some parents and even some non-child-accompanied adults.

Casa de Africa dancers

       Next stop:  Casa de Africa, where we learn about the African influence in Cuba, and peripherally a bit about santeria, the blend of the slaves’ native West African religious customs and the Roman Catholicism imposed on them.  After an explanation of the various African gods and goddesses, it all ends up - as it so often does in Cuba - with music and dancing, all of us Yankees invited in, except for those of us too busy immortalizing the moment on film.

After a well-deserved rest at the hotel, it’s down to the meeting room for a presentation of Cuba’s idiosyncrasies by our photo-expert-cum-guide, Christopher Baker.  A complete slide show of his most excellent photos, with his knowledgeable commentary.
       Then off to dinner at La Moneda Cubana back in Old Havana, yet another old home that has been turned into a paladar under the new, relaxed private enterprise exception to Cuba’s state economy.  The antiques are gorgeous and Mona Lisa thrones over our tables as course after course is served.  My meal choice?  Silly question.  I go for the lobster.
       But the night isn’t over yet.  For those of us who feel intrepid, it's off with Chris and Cindy to hear some Buena Vista Social Club type music at Café Taberna a few minutes away by foot.  After some muscle-flexing to get the tables that had been promised, we settle in to enjoy the music. The tables are end to end, three lines of them stretching the entire length and width of the room.  Chris goes to sit at the bar and Cindy watches over her brood like the beneficient yet spritely mother hen she is.  One singer follows the other, and one of them, an older man - dark, silver hair and mustache, sporting a stingy-brimmed hat - looks suspiciously like one of the group from The Bar at Buena Vista show who performed in Paris in December.  At the table abutting mine is a strange group of tourist men and Cuban women (of the night, I think), drinking heavily, the men ogling the women, the women singing along with the music and moving rhythmically.  When it finally escalates into a conga line, most everyone at the front of the room joins in, led by the young dance couple who have been performing for us off and on throughout the show.
       Partially deafened by the music and loud crowd, we are all ready to walk home in the relative silence of the still animated Havana streets.  And more than ready to fall into our beds.  Tomorrow’s dance card will be full.  Again.

Parque Central