Cuba
looks to the outsider like the island where time stood still – or, at least,
where it moved in a different trajectory.It is a fabled isle where the fabric of modern legend is woven. It went
from being the infamous playground of the rich and famous to the legendary
battlefield of revolutionaries, a small land with a mysterious pulling power
for the larger-than-life: from Ernest Hemingway to Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara.
Trinidad has a very different vibe to Havana –
much slower and more provincial. Rocking chairs framed inside barred windows
and doorways are ubiquitous, with the locals rocking to their own mellow tunes.
Sometimes the bars gave the eerie impression that the inhabitants of the houses
were caged prisoners or pets. One man we passed was standing guard outside his
house while his aged mother or grandmother sat behind the caged doorway as if
he was holding her captive to show off to passers-by.
Our centrally located casa was run by the personable and laid-back Albertico and his wife
– along with their daughter, son and dog. The easy-going patron came and picked
us up from the bus station. Owing to the language barrier, we communicated
mainly in short fragments and gestures for the duration of our stay. Our room
was on the first floor with its own private terrace which had a fantastic view
over the tiled rooftops of Trinidad, a perfect location to have dinner and
unwind. We also got our first taste of casa
food, which in most of Cuba is better than restaurant food and, in some
places, it is the only feasible option.
Trinidad’s gentrified town centre befits its
status as a UNESCO World Heritage
site for it sometimes feels like you are in an open-air museum. Its UNESCO
designation had also somewhat raised our expectations as to what we would
encounter there. This was probably partly due to the idea we had formed of
world heritage sites being on the scale of the pyramid fields, Islamic Cairo,
ancient Thebes (Luxor) and the Nubian monuments in Egypt; the rock-hewn
churches of Lalibela
in Ethiopia; and the grand monuments of Europe, such as the Acropolis in
Athens, to name but a few. But in our first evening there, we’d already walked
around most of the town.
We visited the Municipal Museum. I found the
building itself much more interesting than the exhibition. It was once the
house of a local noblewoman who was repeatedly poisoned by her younger husband
who wanted to inherit her! The rooftop affords spectacular views of the town,
the surrounding mountains and the sea. We also visited the Afro-Caribbean
temple. The term ‘temple’ is a little grand for this tiny structure built
around an open courtyard. Nevertheless, the mix of African and Catholic
iconography is interesting, particularly the black Madonna carrying a white
baby.
Trinidad has a number of attractive ruined
churches which we visited. It is worth strolling up the hill to the hilltop
vista to watch the sunset over the picturesque town. We didn’t go all the way,
as we’d set off a little too late, but stopped off by a collapsed house near
the top to watch the sun make its majestic descent. Katleen, in her fetching
blue dress, complemented the scene perfectly.
The nightlife in Trinidad is pretty staid, but
there are a few decent casas de la trova. Avoid the outdoor performers on
the Plaza Mayor because its central location tends to encourage the management
to put on more mediocre acts. Casa Canchachara serves a delicious concoction of
rum, honey and sugar which goes by the same name – ideal for early evening
aperitifs. Although it was hard to pronounce, it was pretty simple to swallow.
This was accompanied by maracas, bass, guitar and drums. At the taberna, we ‘chatted’ to the lead singer
of the band who seemed to be bored and restless. It appeared that the
excitement of his band’s forthcoming tour in Germany was making everyday
performances in Trinidad seem somewhat tedious. He was even trying to
self-teach himself some German, but he still had a long way to go if he was
going to make himself understood, particularly as he also spoke very little
English.
After another delicious dinner with our
friendly hosts, we headed for the town’s official casa de la trova where we were treated to some excellent
performances by a series of talented musicians. The place also had a pleasant
buzz to it.
Although the French girl we chatted to over
dinner was planning to spend six days in Trinidad, we were glad to be leaving
the next morning after two nights in the town.
After a super-early breakfast
and bidding our hosts goodbye with the elaborate handshake Albertico had taught
me, we took the slow coach east to Santiago de Cuba on the eastern tip of the
slender island. As a reward for wondering why the journey was scheduled to take
12 hours, it ended up taking 14 hours, as our bus kept constantly stopping in
every small town to pick up people or drop off drivers – an express coach, it
was not!
During our lunch
stop, we wisely decided steer clear of the dodgy food. However, I made the
fateful mistake of drinking two sips of the vile café con leche before throwing it away. I would live to regret it!
Exhausted and weary, we stepped out of the city’s main bus terminal into a
hustle of hawkers and a rabble of taxi drivers trying to sell us rooms for the
night and rides into town.
The taxi we settled
on was some dilapidated American hulk of a car from the 1950s driven by a
shrivelled old man who looked like he had also seen his prime in the 1950s.
After struggling to get the door open, he and his young assistant invited us to
sit in the back and then locked the door using a primitive latch on the inside
rather like that used in outdoor toilets!
The old man drove us
towards town, then, after a couple of turns apparently to throw us off the
scent, seemed to be heading back in the direction of the station, pulling up
outside a non-descript house. When we asked his sidekick if this was our casa,
he answered in the affirmative. A woman who spoke some English came out and
tried to lure us inside. When we would not budge, she finally admitted that she
was not Cecilia with whom we had booked a room. Close to anger, we informed
them in no uncertain terms to take us to our casa.
At the top of our
road, they stopped to ask for Cecilia’s house and were pointed to a couple of
houses further along. I knocked on the door and a baffled and slightly
intimidated woman appeared. The poor woman turned out to be a different Cecilia
and was shocked to find two unexpected foreign guests and a taxi outside her
house at this late hour.
Our real hostess was
a kindly middle-aged woman with gentle green eyes and a friendly, delicate
manner. Her husband was a largish, silver-haired man with a rather shy manner
who were to take very good care of us and feed us well during our time in
Santiago de Cuba.
The rooftop studio
were we slept was spartanly furnished with a creaky bed and a lumpy cushion,
but it was exquisitely clean. From the rooftop, we had an uninterrupted view of
the two spires of the city’s cathedral. We sipped at a couple of chilled cervezas and gazed at the skyline while
we waited for our sumptuous swordfish dinner.
Breeding ground for revolutionaries and musicians
Although it is the
home of revolutionaries, Santiago de Cuba does not possess the same charm,
energy and sophistication as Havana. People from this city and the Oriente
province in particular see themselves as the tough and rugged backbone of the
country and the west coasters as wimps. People in Havana regard people around
here as nail-chewing barbarians and their reputation for revolution has earned
them the nickname ‘Palestinos’.
Hilly Santiago
affords spectacular views of the Caribbean and the nearby mountains (there are
a number of good vantage points to view the port from). However, the city’s
streets are narrow and choked with pollution. There is also less to do than in
Havana. But Santiago de Cuba has a good – and well-earned – reputation for
music and you can hear it blaring out of people’s homes and on squares all over
the city.
Unfortunately, the
serious bout of diarrhoea that invaded my body and caused kilos of body mass to
abandon me over the days we were in Santiago was seriously affecting my
enjoyment and mobility. Luckily, I had a patient and caring nurse at hand in
the form of Katleen. It meant that our tours of the city progressed pretty
slowly and I was usually too exhausted by evening time to explore the city’s
vibrant live music scene.
The heart of Santiago
is the intrigue-packed Parque Céspedes, with its striking cathedral and the
legendary Hotel Casa Granda where Graham Greene wrote most of Our man in Havana and which features in the novel as
“a hotel of real spies, real polic informers and real rebel agents”. The street-side terrace of the Casa Granda
is a good place to hid from the afternoon sun and watched the world go by. The
rooftop terrace is a great place to view the city at night.
The Parque is the
square where Carlos Manuel de Céspedes declared Cuba independent in 1868 and
where Fidel Castro proclaimed the revolution’s triumph in 1959.
In fact, one evening
we ran into Luis, a 78-year-ol retired English teacher who spoke the best
English we’ve heard so far in Cuba. Only a couple of years younger than his
leader, he was there at that historic moment on 2 January 1959 when Castro
delivered his first epic speech as leader of the revolution. In one of those
mediocrities of real life, Luis decided not to stick around on the heaving,
sweaty square and went home instead to listen to Fidel on the radio – a high
fidelity (Hi Fi) broadcast if ever there was one!!
Nearly half a century
on; Luis is retired and living on a measly state pension which is probably the
main reason he comes to the square to talk to tourists (the official reason he
gave us was so that he could practice his English). We quizzed him on his life,
how people viewed the transition from Fidel to Raul, whether he still had many
friends his own age, etc. It struck us that Cuba’s impressive healthcare and
education systems were the revolution’s only successes. A pessimist might say that
Cubans’ high educational levels and life expectancy affords them all the more
opportunity to contemplate just how miserable their lives are.
After a polite
interval, Luis pushed his big glasses against his face and asked in a gracious
tone whether we could possibly spare some money so that he could go and buy a
cake for Christmas, particularly as his daughter was coming to visit. We did
not know whether that was his true intention or whether it was a polite
euphemism for begging, but the grace and dignity of this obviously lonely old
man (who asked us to send him a postcard because he enjoyed receiving them)
touched us and we handed over some cash. Santiago de Cuba is famous for its
hustlers, known locally as jineteros,
and Luis may or may not have been one of them. We did not particularly care.
Rum and roll
Not far from the
Parque is the Martyrs’ Square commemorating the various Cuban revolutionaries
who came from the city. The well-shaded Plaza de Dolores is a good place to go
to watch locals socialise, listen to good buskers and enjoy a drink at one of
the cafes there.
Don Facundo Bacardi
based his first-ever rum factory in Santiago de Cuba. It is now a rum museum
which we visited and learnt about the process of rum-making and got to savour a
seven-year-old vintage.
One evening we had
dinner at 1900, one of the few
eateries targeted at Cubans which could honestly be described as a restaurant.
This lively and animated hangout was full of locals out to rum and roll. Rivers
of ron, as Cubans call it, flowed and
the boisterous revellers on the terrace, all of whom seemed to know one
another, were getting louder and more boisterous as the good times flowed.
We drank possibly the
best mojitos we encountered in Cuba,
although the food was only fair. The only disappointment was when the
management tried to pull a fast one and use a ridiculously deflated exchange
rate between the convertible pesos and the local ones. We called their bluff,
nevertheless, by saying that we had local pesos and insisted on paying in them.
We still left a generous tip, though.
In Santiago de Cuba,
we happened upon a great CD shop where the woman who ran it was something of a
diva herself. She supplement the regular music store practice of playing sample
tracks by actually singing them for us – in fact, belting them out passionately
and emotionally.
Comrades’ cemetery
On the morning of our
last day in Santiago, we strolled downhill towards the bahia (port) – with a few rest stops for me to recover from the bacterial
attrition keeping me down – to find the horse-drawn transport to the Cementerio
Santa Ifigenia, the cemetery of Cuban heroes, that we’d read about.
Unable to find the
horses, we rented a bicytaxi. It felt awkward to be sitting behind a the skinny
young lad pedalling furiously towards our destination for our comfort. The
young pedaller was friendly and pointed out landmarks (many of them obvious) on
the way. His father, on another bicytaxi, pulled up beside us at a traffic
light – it was not immediately apparent to us that they were related, since the
young man was dark and his dad was white.
The cemetery is home
to many of Cuba’s national heroes, including Jose Marti. After a while
strolling around, I sat down, feeling drained and drawn, on a bench and left
Katleen to wander around on her own. She went off in search of various tombs
marked in our guidebook and to watch the pomp and ceremony of the daily
changing of the guard by Marti’s shrine which she described as a bit over the
top but professionally executed.
Afterwards, we headed
back to town and went to the barracks where Fidel and comrades attempted a
botched attack in the mid-1950s. Outside were the restored ‘original’ bullet
holes which Batista had had plastered over as a way of literally shoring up his
image.
Very early the next
morning Cecilia arranged for one of her neighbours to drive us to the bus
station where we were to catch the bus to Baracoa. He was a friendly young chap
with a goatee who chatted with us en route, sometimes unintelligibly. He told
us about his one-time work-related trip to Egypt (Suez, apparently). He
observed confidently that there were no Muslims in Cuba.
When I told him that
there was actually a small Muslim minority on the island and that we had even
come across a few here in Santiago, the look of utter astonishment and
disbelief on his face spoke volumes – Katleen nudged me to abandon this line of
conversation.
