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)