Cuba: Day 4 - Part 1

José Marti's birthday parade for Cuba's youth

A hero of Castro's 1956-59 Revolution?

Up and packed and ready to travel.  While we wait for everyone to gather, I step outside.  And discover thousands of little children, all in costumes, milling about.  Last night our photographer guide Chris recruited people to experience the March of the Torches.  Every year at midnight on Jose Marti’s birthday, university students carrying torches march down from the University to the heart of Havana. This morning’s children are too young for a midnight march so they’re celebrating the same event in the sunlight, minus the torches but with banners.  Eager parents, teachers and elderly chaperones - many with medals on their chests - channel the hundreds of children massing outside the hotel.  Don’t know where they’re headed.  We’re headed to Cienfuegos.

More children coming for the parade

Exiting the A1

As soon as we’re outside of Havana, traffic on this four-lane divided highway - the A1 - becomes sparse at best.
       En route, Alicia (our Cuban guide/interpreter) speaks to us at length of her life.  It’s an inside look at what Cuba has gone through in our lifetime - hers and mine.  I was still in high school during the Cuban Missile Crisis and remember well the tension of that moment in history.  It’s interesting to hear what those years were like from her vantage point.
       Alicia speaks of her mother, a teacher sent to the hinterland to teach the campesinos to read and write.  (To prove their - and her! - success, they were required to write a letter to Fidel.)  And how proud of her Alicia is!  She goes on to describe how state salaries are low, how her father - a medical doctor - earned $20 a month back then.  She relates the relatively easy times of the 80's, when the Soviets bought themselves this forward base only 90 miles from Key West and times were good for Cubans.  Then Gorbachev saw an opening to improve relations with the U.S., but it meant ditching Cuba.  So wham bam thank you ma’am.  Practically overnight, the Soviets left and the good times ended.  No more free oil, no more sales of Cuban sugar far above its market price.  The Special Period had begun.  Electricity, gas, water, food... everything was rationed and even then service was spotty.  That lasted for over a decade.  It wasn’t until Venezuela started providing free oil in return for Cuban doctors that life became easier.

       Then Alicia mentions something that reminds me of the Whites Only lunch counters of the Deep South in the 1960's.  For years, Cubans weren’t allowed in hotels; those were only for foreigners.  But now they can frequent any hotel they want.  And now they can travel.  Perhaps not to the U.S. yet, unless they have a second nationality as well as Cuban.  Alicia says that to travel is her dream.  She tells us quietly how the U.S. Interests Section (acting as a U.S. Embassy) recently refused her a visa because she doesn’t have enough family to ensure she’ll return.  She has a six-year-old child here.  A mother and father.  Listening to this, I’m embarrassed about my country.  “Some day,” she says, wistfully.
       The most moving moment for me, one that has me in tears, is when she says, “When I go to work, I don’t worry someone will come to my son’s school and shoot him.”  It’s a trade-off for the privations of life here.  And it puts a painful finger on something I worry about myself, having two grandchildren of my own.

After about three hours, we make a pit stop somewhere in Matanzas Province.  As on American highways, the rest stop has a restaurant where Chris indulges his Ice Cream Jones and others use the restrooms.  There’s also a separate gift shop with all kinds of T-shirts, postcards and craftsy things at ridiculously low prices, where I buy a few things for presents next Christmas.
       Behind the rest stop is farmland, and some of us, the more curious ones, go to take a peek.  A thin, quiet man in a striped polo shirt offers us bananas that are incredibly sweet.  We give him some CUC (convertible peso) coins, peanuts to us but worth 24 times that in Cuban pesos, the currency he uses every day.  I suddenly realize the bananas came from the trees above us and ask if they’re his.  He smiles and nods.  Happy that I can speak Spanish (kind of), he shows me his field:  tomatoes, sugar cane, beans...  He’s so proud.  And hands me another banana, this time waving away my money.
       Time to get back on the bus.

Yacht Club de Cienfuegos

A short distance later, we leave the A1 and take a winding road into Cienfuegos.  It’s lunchtime and we’re booked into the Yacht Club (shades of Grosse Pointe).  A look into what life must have been like pre-Castro, provided you were one of The Chosen.  It’s located on the hotel peninsula, has a swimming pool and a marina filled with sailboats, even an old two-master, plus a few of what my father called stink-boats (powerboats).  There’s live music with lunch - a reasonable two guitars.  After eating, I’m lured outside by the blue of the Caribbean.  I ask about the two-master and learn it can be hired.  I’d love to do that!
       The Jagua just down the road is a typical beach-front hotel:  tiled floors, terraces with huge windows, a swimming pool, a large bar with a piano.  Unlike the Parque Central in Havana, it was probably built during the Soviet years, but is very modern and attractive. We drop off our luggage in our sunny rooms and head out for our people-to-people of the day.

                                                                                     (to be continued)

Marina of Cinefuegos Yacht Club