(Havana, “Australia”, “Bay of Pigs”, Santa Clara, Cienfuegos, Trinidade, Camaguey, Santiago de Cuba, Guantanamo, Baracoa)
Havana Airport: Saturday, 1.20am:
A bleary post-flight, post-midnight, post-customs, post icy-Canada-now-into-tropical-torpor welcome to CADECA, the Cuban governments’ unlovely monopoly foreign exchange bank, with consistently usurous daily rates across Cuba. Straight away, in a queue of 20 people outside of a dingy room (my taxi driver having “vamos”ed for a grumpy smoko when he sighted the extended queue), visitors meet one of the most widespread and annoying bits of Cuban officialdom: the door keeper who will allow only one at a time into the exchange office: “Only One,” is her muttering as she admires her newly silver-glittered nails.
And this is when it gradually dawns upon you that, whatever your travel intentions, you are actually here with only one clear purpose. You are to provide hard currency to a cash-strapped nation using not the Cuban Peso (which all Cubans use unless they are in the tourist / foreign exchange / black market economy, and which they cannot convert to foreign currencies) but “Convertible” pesos, or “CUCs” which are worth 25 times the national currency and tied to the US Dollar in value. You are visiting so you are rich. You are spending “convertibles” so your spending can be tracked. Because tourist spending is the greatest source of foreign exchange, you will be “milked” at the highest possible rate in a parallel economy and discouraged or forbidden from using some services (such as the national bus line), steering you to more “comfortable” (expensive) options. You will have the best time while doing this: the whole nation is in on this racket. Enjoy!!
So, waiting for my initial “One Only” CADECA experience, I have an extended time to enjoy the highly political and hugely entertaining exchange rates display. Canadian Dollars (which I have) seem to be worth more, in the scheme of things, than the UK Pound, far more than the Euro, and 30% more than the US Dollar (which is then punitively taxed a further 10%). Smugly, I enjoy the fulmination of the US businessman behind me who has suddenly realised how quickly his pockets will empty. Not Happy: Full Volume!
At nearly 2am the maudlin, silver-clawed door-keeper grudgingly admits me (“One Only”) to the wonderful, interminably slow, world of CADECA, where I am greeted by another exhausted looking woman (fluoro-pink nails) who yawns, stretches: considering my proffered Canadian dollars with severe disinterest. “How much do you want?”. I want to convert all of the $150 to CUCs. This does not “translate”. She lethargically counts the 3 notes: “You want 150 in CUCs?”. Several minutes of extensive paperwork later, I am financial. The taxi driver considers my approach over the broken airport paving and points and grunts: “Get in Back. “He does not speak for the 45 minutes of speedy Lada driving through largely deserted streets to Old Habana, narrowly missing the odd slow dog or slower lurking man in the early hours...
2.45am: The guesthouse (we are not told in advance where we are staying: a driver waves a sign at you in Arrivals, then chauffeurs you to who-knows-where....) is dark and no amount of bell ringing or door knocking has led to signs of life. It takes more than 20 minutes and three irritated taxi-driver cigarettes before an angry man yells at us from an upper balcony then disappears.
More hammering and ringing before the man appears from a doorway to a set of stairs. He mutters and disappears again. An adjacent door opens slowly and the lady of the house is prodded out, very sleepy, to make me welcome while being berated by the upstairs man. My room decorations are hilarious (French Tarts’ Parlour circa 1915) but the bed is comfortable and I am beyond caring... with the fan cutting through the oppressive heat of my windowless cell.
Our landlady is quite partial to Cuban dance band music of the 1940’s and 50’s... at any hour of the day/night... at full volume, as I find at 6.30am. She sings quite well when not shouting into the phone.
La Habana: Sunday:
A day wandering Havana’s old city:
Buildings outside the inner city are inhabited by often several families in not-many-rooms: crumbling; decrepit.
In Old Habana, funded by a levy on tourists’ spending of CUCs, buildings are being impressively restored for the city’s 500th Anniversary in 2019 (and the 60th anniversary of the “Glorious Revolution”). Along with competing salsa bands for visitors and diners, local Cuban families populate the streets as the city’s planned rebuild ensures the continuation of locally owned residences, ration services, old people’s day-care, schools, pre-schools and free health clinics.
Doing business is punctuated by the door-keeping fetish at banks, stores selling basic soap and detergent and basic shampoo (all luxury items here), corner pharmacies (not at all retail, looking as “welcoming” as any scrappy Australian public hospital pharmacy window hole-in-the-wall) and at ETESCA: the monopoly phone company which restricts wifi access to the holders of scratch card (1 CUC per hour). We soon learned to pay a premium for the scratchies at hotels to save hours of not-very-organised “queueing”...of which: more later...
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The image of 40’s, 50’s 60’s American cars in Havana is, if anything, more restrained than the multicoloured, prone to breakdown, rust-ravaged-and-patched, flag-us-down-on-any-street, exhaust-roaring reality. They are everywhere... as hired taxis or as the 1 hour “doing the sights” drive in Havana. Our pink Dodge convertible driver was more than happy to take us from the seafront Malecon (“Look north: 90 miles to Florida!”) to the Hotel National, by the most indirect historical route, smarming to the ladies, before we enjoyed cocktails surrounded by black and white images of the cream of Hollywood and the assorted mafioso who were thrown out with the “Americano Dictator Batista” by the Glorious Revolution.
Cuba appears to be infested by morose dogs and outstanding quantities of pavement dogshit. Well-fed looking strays with plastic identity tags on Old Habana are fed by manual workers restoring the city whose union collectively “owns” the pooches who sleep around their work sites. Everywhere, doors are open, salsa music booms from houses as adults dance with kids in the streets and ageing relatives gaze balefully from front rooms. Runaway pigs in the dark streets added to post-dinner-walk excitement as two hogs escaped their feeding from a household front door swill bucket, stumbling over the cobbles towards a building site pursued by excited children.
We’re quite enjoying the odd mojita as this journey develops. We have become complacently used to obediently spending more on each individual meal than most Cubans earn in a month.
Local musicians are subjecting us to “Guantanamera” several times each day. When locals over, say, the age of 30, find out some of us are from Australia nearly they do kangaroo impressions and yell “Skippy!!!”
Waratah Park and Channel 9 have a lot to answer for.
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“Australia”: Tuesday, 11am:
We’re doing this Intrepid trip across the island in our own small bus (a sparklingly new import from China, owned by the monopoly tourist transport company, along with hundreds of others). I’d researched possible train journeys across Cuba and the response was always along the lines of: “Are You Mad?” Or: “They Might Have Trains But No-one Will Recommend Them,” or: “Don’t Even Think About It!”. Sanctions and a lack of hard currency have made Ferrocarrils de Cuba a severe “make-do-and-mend” operation. Should you book a departing train for, say, 10pm, then it is not unusual for you to be sitting in that train, having not departed the station, at 7 in the morning while the Ferrocarrils is still trying to source a working locomotive. Do not even think of the alarming condition of the “sanitarios” on the train, or what has built up underneath the carriages overnight... The long lines of “dead” engines under tarpaulins at Estaciaon Central (semi renovated with a “grand reopening” date of 2018) are not encouraging...
At each main intersection and highway underpass, as we drove out of Havana, were scores of men, women; children... attempting to flag down any passing vehicle waving a fistful of pesos and surrounded by scattered luggage. Transport is “not adequate” according to our tour leaders, and anything on wheels could be flagged down, especially at the roadside “cooperativas” where the potential “taxi” “fares” were more organised. (An English couple I met later in Trinidade had travelled across Cuba like this but found themselves stranded for a week around New Year’s Day with no available transport of any kind to leave town. He was an engineer who’s worked in Syria. She ran an ostrich farm near Tarragona in Spain...).
Apart from hundreds of horse-drawn taxis and hundreds of old US autos (usually with “new” Toyota, Lada or Hyundai engines and vast creativity to keep them on the road), we also saw tractors and farm trailers as local “buses” and hundreds of old Russian trucks converted for official passenger carrying with the most basic windows and seats on the back, usually full of passengers.
The freeway out of Havana is largely empty apart from an occasional truck or packed long-distance bus.
The yellow lines on main roads are where farmers can spread their corn or rice for threshing by passing traffic.
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The wisdom of the Tour Leaders (as we travel 3 hours east along the untrafficked highway and our guy won’t give the microphone a rest...):
“Felice Navidad is not a big thing here. Celebration was forbidden by the Revolutionary Government: don’t go to church or you will be punished”. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Cubans are free to practice religion as long as it doesn’t interfere with government. We pass freeway propaganda posters of Fidel and Che: “Eternal and Immortal!”.
We have an apprentice tour leader with us on this trip; a former primary school teacher: “The skills are similar, especially the herding cats stuff...”. With dry humour she describes how each house has a roof tank because piped water is only supplied every second or third day, so household storage is needed by everyone.
Then she discusses the “Special Period” (one of the great political and historical euphemisms) experienced by Cuba after the collapse of the USSR:
· After being a victim of a one-market economy selling sugar to the USA until 1960, the Soviet Union came to Cuba’s economic rescue as another one-market export economy, and times were good (“prosperous and supported”) until the Soviet government collapsed. There were immediate food shortages: no beef; chicken imported from the USA(!). Rationed protein was black beans and one or two eggs per month.
· After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Cuba faced more than 4 years of starvation: “We ate cat; we were imprisoned for slaughtering a cow.” There were few eggs, little electricity and no fuel for transportation. “We’d like to show you some of our alligators near the Bay of Pigs, but most were eaten.”
· There are basic rations for every Cuban which used to be free, but are now more restricted and have a small cost (which can be difficult on a tiny government pension). By whatever means, no Cuban goes hungry. Education and health remain free and will continue to do so under the new constitution from 2019.
· Until 2009, the job for which the government educated you was the job you were stuck with. This was an edict of the Vice President to ensure that labour matched government needs, despite any personal hardship or low wages. After Fidel’s death, the Vice President was found to have embezzled $30 Million, and his wife’s European shopping trips were exposed in the Cuban media. They were removed from power (but not imprisoned) and the rules tying people to jobs were relaxed. So now we have a former academic and former teacher leading our tour, paid in pesos but tipped in CUCs, (half of which must be passed on to the company).
· If you want to apply for or change a government job (and let’s face it, that is virtually any organised labour in Cuba), you need to be recommended by your CFDR: The “Committee for Defence of the Revolution” who are local, know you and watch you, and will recommend (or not) your suitability for a job application, or for election. (!) At this time of Felice Navidad, I’m afraid that the Communist version of “making a list and checking it twice, gonna find out who’s naughty or nice...” did come to mind. As did the Stasi in East Germany…
· Farming is now horse and human labour dependent, however free education has meant that as Cubans achieved better employment, it is increasingly difficult to find farm labour, especially with the past taint of slavery (not abolished here until 1886, then the Spanish, who’d supported slavery, were thrown out as colonial rulers in 1898). In effect, Cuba has now educated its people (with free education from Kinder to Doctorate...) to be “disinclined to undertake” farm labouring and is struggling to produce enough food. Army conscripts are used now to harvest sugar, for example. 70% of food is imported from Vietnam, China and some South American countries. This is not good for foreign exchange reserves as Cuban exports remain constrained by sanctions.
· The government owns all cows as a “national resource” for beef, milk, leather; bones, especially in time of war. If a cow dies, anywhere, there is a formal enquiry into cause of death which a vet must certify. (Likewise for horses, given their critical role in transport and farming).
· The revolutionary government quickly realised that home ownership would be good for Cubans (and reduce maintenance costs for the government) so now more Cubans own homes than rent from the state.
· There is increasing evidence of foreign aid from China (such as airport scanners, the fancy bus we are in; Huawei phones everywhere...) otherwise imports are from countries willing to work around the sanctions, at a huge cost in hard currency. North Korea is a strong public friend. Other governments do things more quietly.
· Farmers/fishers are expected to sell 70% or more of their production to the state at (low) fixed prices. The best food is kept by the government for the tourist industry (lobster, seafood; beef paid for in premium prices in CUCs), otherwise it goes into rations or exports. Manufactured ham is everywhere. Small farmers’ stalls and free markets are used to sell the remains after government purchase. Fishers have ways of hiding the best of their catch in coastal caves, before their catch is “assessed and bought by the government when they return to port”.... The best stuff, on dry ice, is then quietly retrieved by land and on-sold to hotels and restaurants.
· Most of the electrical appliances and air conditioners we are seeing and using are “private travel”: Cubans are free to travel (to the restricted number of countries that will let them in through extensive visa requirements with strict requirements to return to Cuba) but have no money to do so. Entrepreneurs will pay for acquaintances to make one trip a year, fully paid, to bring back an appliance or two as checked baggage. (So that explains the washing machine and air-conditioners being wheeled out of Havana Airport from the Panama flight...). The black market is thriving.
· Cubans have had 3G phones with internet access since only mid-December, 2018. There is still a sense of wonder about it all.. . Town squares are now quiet places (“quiet” is a relative concept in Cuba) as that is where public wifi access can be found. Park benches are now full of intent Cubans, Huawei or Samsung device in hand.
We listen to and question all of this as welcomed guests, pampered in a parallel economy....
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When Fidel nationalised the sugar mills (i.e. “stole them back from the previous exploitative owners”), they were all renamed after Southern Hemisphere countries. “Australia” is on the way to the Bay of Pigs, and we used the roadside bar (alcohol available at all hours across Cuba: the new year roads were becoming interesting...) Standard menu: ham sandwich, ham and cheese sandwich, cheese sandwich; americano coffee.
We offload the largely worthless local peso coins which cunning shopkeepers had secreted into our change (making 25 times the profit by doing so) on the toilet ladies (more guardians of the doors), who were happy to take them, but at the correct rate.
Thanks, “Australia”!
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Santa Clara: Tuesday, 4pm:
Having weathered the 1962 propaganda film about the USA’s crazy attempt to reinvade Cuba as a covert(?) operation - featuring escaped Cuban residents seeking revenge, retribution and restitution, business families and organised crime figures with an extreme sense of entitlement were shipped in small boats from Florida with CIA air support using US warplanes with false Cuban insignia - we were expected to visit the mausoleum of Che Guevara with a suitable posture of manufactured respect.
Having previously been in the presence of the Pickled Mao, the Pickled Uncle Ho, and the Pickled Lenin (a second attempt 2 years ago, as he was “closed for renovation” in 1980), I was a tad disappointed not to be able to score a ‘quadrella” here: Fidel is buried under a large rock in Trinidade, and there was not enough left of Che to pickle, apart from his head, so we mutely looked at memorial walls to various revolutionary heroes and a room of more or less doctored images of the heroic life of Che, under a massive cast socialist-realist-heroic-striding-Che which thrust itself several storeys high above the mausoleum with some decorative posters at his feet thanking Fidel. Lined up near old buses were scores of bored green-uniformed school children waiting to perform in a pageant to hundreds of empty seats, celebrating the Glorious 60th Anniversary of the Revolution.
“This is Cuba,” said our Cuban tour leader dryly, “so it is not running to time.” A few soldiers smoked as they sprawled on plastic seats, guarding a battered mini bus labelled “PROPAGANDA Sonid”. In the background, horse-taxi drivers yelled out, hoping for a fare as our sparkling new bus had been “moved on” as a security precaution. Laura, the Bulgarian member of our group, was reading various photo captions out loud, dripping with irony, having lived through the collapse of Communism in her own country, and expressing something well beyond resigned cynicism about the whole “spectacle”.
The Cubans are quite proud that, in amongst the hundreds of attempts by the “Yanquis” to remove or murder Fidel, the Bay of Pigs was such a public failure of American “diplomacy”, and that Cuba was the first country to secure war reparation payments from the United States. More problematic, on all sides, is the determination of successive US governments not to “have another Cuba” in their South American sphere of influence, thus the succession of coups and dictatorships engineered by conservative forces in Chile, Argentina, Uruguay..... in the second half of the 20th Century. Today, the many posters across Cuba of the special friendship between the Castro brothers and Hugo Chavez do reek of a “special” political/economic irony...
There are still a few posters of Obama’s visit: “he came, he spoke, nothing changed for us.”
Exposures to “Guantanamera” performances today: 2
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Cienfuegos: Wednesday, 9am:
A bit of a wander around this pleasant and architecturally interesting town: amongst the Art Nouveau buildings are numerous horse drawn buggies and cabs driven by slow-cigar-chewing cowboys (looking to be from a similar era), rumbling over long abandoned tram lines in the cobbles. “Yes,” says our tour leader, “the American businesses abandoned their streetcars when they were abandoning Cuba.” The other street noises in the main square include clunking walking frames from an American cruise ship which has sent its inmates on organised city walks. I feel soooo young in this crowd.
Down at the harbour the cruise ship and ferry are the only motored craft: “It’s illegal for a Cuban to own a boat with a motor or to go out more than 10 miles from the coast,” we are told, even though the “wet feet/dry feet” automatic entry to the USA, only 90 miles from Havana, no longer applies.
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One of our tour group took suddenly ill during our flash Christmas dinner (costing two months’ Cuban wages...) last night. Crouching prone over ice bucket and vomiting loudly is SUCH a good look in a fine restaurant... Her night in the local hospital was hilarious, in retrospect, as the doctor and nurse were carrying on a raging affair over the ward desk, then later in the toilet (“much giggling”), while also running a business selling second-hand clothes AND offering drugs (for cash) she did not need, to maximise funds for the hospital, and her travel insurance claim. She was quite well by morning, so the treatment and care must have been appropriate.
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Trinidade: Thursday, 3pm:
How to order lunch in a Trinidade beachside cafe:
1. Split decision amongst the tour group about whether to have lunch on the beach or in the cafe. Lots of tired jokes about majority/democratic votes, quorums and so on...
2. Three of us head to the cafe and grab a table. It is some circuitous distance in the sand around crowded heavy tables from the counter and kitchen. This becomes important.
3. Three more of group have a change of mind and want to join us. Tired-looking young waiter, eyeing us earlier, decides not to take our orders yet; pauses: mutters: “Memento...” until numbers and table are settled. This takes some time.
4. Two seated group members change minds and head to bar to order ice cream. Waiter arrives. The two change their mind and rejoin table. Water gives baleful stare and pauses, distributes menus, refuses our order until numbers settle. “Memento...” Slithers back to kitchen over the sands.
5. Waiter has disappeared for an extended time. Several of our group go to the bar to buy water. Waiter reappears, observes changes, goes “vamos” again for an extended time. We all sit. Deep anticipation.
6. Waiter reappears. First order is “chicken”. Pause. “Memento,” waiter slithers away over the grey sand to see if “chicken” exists.
7. “Lamb?”. Pause. “Memento”..... slithering kitchenwards across the sand for some considerable time.
8. “Fish?”. Pause, “Memento....” Slithers.
9. Meals arrive by three unexpectedly express slithers, FAST: all good.
10. Le questa, por favour? Pause. “Memento...”
11. The bill arrives by return slither: hilarious. Cannot work which of our waters, ice creams bought from counter are yet/not yet paid for. One member of group is at the “banhos” hoping for loose change from the toilet lady to pay his share, whatever that may be. Listed meals seem utterly unrecognisable from what has been physically presented and consumed. Table dissolves in laughter, splits bill 6 ways and leaves large tip as a memento of our visit and a travel allowance (for extended slithering, making ever deeper trackmarks into the sands of the restaurant). We quickly escape to avoid another “Memento”.
12. The swimming was brilliant.
Number of times subjected to “Guantanamera” by strolling bands/competing beachside sound systems today: 4. (“At least it’s not bloody mariachi,” say Australian tour group members who suffered mightily in Mexico City on their way to Cuba.)
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Our tour included a salsa lesson. With only 2 elegant dancers and 10 “uncos” in our group, you may imagine what it was like, and ONLY imagine it as there are NO photos of this event.
No.
None!
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Number of Skippy impressions today: 2
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I do feel the need to mention that at the salsa lesson, I was not the slowest or clumsiest on the floor. Being partnered with Laura, and her Bulgarian determination to follow the rules to the letter (if not the spirit), meant that I was “encouraged” to do ok. We declined the photo opportunity, committing the experience to our shared “forgettery”.
Trinidade: Friday 2pm:
There is a vague rumour of local Cuban train actually running, to a regular timetable, and it runs from here. A Thursday “pre-salsa-lesson” wander down to find out led to an interesting half hour with the rail yard master and his enterprising mechanic who invited me in for a guided tour. They were insistent. Following a landslide, this branch line is isolated, but the locals do a tourist run to a colonial tower and abandoned sugar mill each day with what ever locomotive they can get to work.
The rail yard looks to be lines of abandoned junk. It is a collection of old Russian, Romanian, Uruguayan and locally built bits of trains, in various states of dilapidation and incompletion, including the most basic of local passenger carriages converted from freight cars with a few added windows and hard plastic seats: the rail equivalent of all of the converted trucks-with-windows that cart local people across Cuba. Near-operational steam locomotives and various stripped down diesels from a variety of countries were described in rapid Spanish. We posed for photos in the working Russian locomotive (with engine parts from several countries adjusted to work together) and the open carriages for tomorrow’s train. This would look like a hopeless scrap yard anywhere else: here it is a triumph against international sanctions and isolation from the rest of the rail network as it does, just, work. The crew made me promise to be here at 9am for the train…
…I was not alone: 30 tourists and an added bus tour from the sugar refinery terminus meant lots of CUCs for local imaginative mechanics and jobs for local rail workers, let alone musicians and various hawkers along the way. The waiting room is decked out with “Yo soy Fidel” slogans and pictures of a smiling Hugo Chavez (who is presented as the latest in a line of revolutionary heroes following Sandino, Che, Bolivar and Marti... propaganda that has yet to catch up with actual events in Venezuela, it seems). On a whiteboard with drawing of unflatteringly accurate overweight tourists in floral gear, carrying mojitos - welcoming their 12 CUCs for the pleasure of a slow roll through cane and vegetable plantations to an abandoned mill - is the rarest of information in Cuba: an accurate and predictable train timetable.
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Number of performances of Guantanamera today: two, by a tone deaf guitarist bellowing next to me on the morning train, while we were getting a close-up view of horse-drawn and hand-ploughed Cuban rural existence.
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Camaguey: Sunday, 10am:
There is an ice cream shop amongst lines of “Hollywood Art Deco” buildings in pastel colours which were the “last gasp” of US architecture in this town. Today’s ice cream menu is “Chocolate”. Only. 1, 2 or 3 scoops, enjoyed under a flickering fluorescent tube, surrounded by empty shelves and cabinets and several bored wait-staff. The bill for all of this is half the Cuban monthly wage.
We amble past an expensive clothing shop in our bicycle cabs: “We call this a museum: we can go in and admire the exhibits any time because no one can afford to buy.” A severe-looking woman (gold fingernails) is minding the door.
We ask a restaurant owner how he spends his day: “It takes all of my day to search for and buy food for the menu each night. Every day is different”. Today there is no “Fresco” (Cuban soft drink imitations of Coke products) available, so imported Sprite from Mexico is the option. “You’ve heard about our flour problems?”...which explains the long queues outside of bakeries to collect daily rations, and the crunchy baked bread (to preserve it) that we eat at so many guesthouse breakfasts smeared with rich quince jam.
On the road to Santiago we regularly pass families carrying white and wobbly freshly slaughtered pigs, or sides thereof, through the streets to new year parties.
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Santiago de Cuba: New Year’s Eve:
Waiting outside our homestay: an excited young guy runs to us, asking where we are from (Skippy impression: 3 times...) hugging and kissing “Felcidades” to all of the women for new year. He was commencing a second round of greetings when his buxom girlfriend bellowed from the balcony above, throwing him a box of party food, and yelling: “And which country are YOU from???”
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Our group is arranged at the back of the nightclub on one side of a long a table like a dysfunctional wedding party. In front of us are tables of multi-generational families for a new year dinner and cabaret. I feel a colossal throbbing and clogging head cold brewing as the massive screen shows distorted videos of various Latin crooners, acappella groups and ABBA, mixed with glitterball colours from green and purple flickering fluorescent lighting. The paracetamol has barely touched the sides when the luke-warm allegedly-chicken soup arrives, along with a skinny, primped and preened Master of Ceremonies (50 going on 25) who proceeds to make lame jokes about kangaroos. He asks the two people in the middle of our group if they are sweethearts. This does not go well for him.
Slow cooked and long tepid main courses arrive (Rabbit? Chicken? Vegetarians in the group are very relieved) as does the floor show which is AMPLIFIED local crooners-gone-to-seed who holler cliched romance to fuzzy recorded soundtracks while sidestepping the owner’s children who have decided to play extended “chaseys” across and around the dance floor, between performers’ feet.
The interludes with a very good jazz guitarist are a welcome and enjoyable relief.
With the “flan” dessert, a well-upholstered Latin Temptress, well beyond the first fresh bloom of youth, in swathes of electric-blue taffeta bellows LOUD and FLAT... The running children screame and swerve in her general direction... scrambling my virus-addled brain. Gulping the last of a weak mojita, grabbing the bottle of iced water, I flee two blocks for the welcome comfort of Codral, Drixine and sleeeeeeeep, interrupted briefly by car horns and firecrackers at midnight.
I’m told that the midnight celebrations in the city square (60 years after the proclamation by Castro of the Glorious Revolution on the same site) were somewhat restrained for Cuba. There was no televised dancing in the streets.
I cared deeply.
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Cemetario Santa Ifigina: Tuesday, 9.30am:
Laura from Bulgaria is beside herself with something other than enthused excitement: “PLEASE!!! Not aNOTHer Heroic RevolutionARY Monument: not MORE glorious revolutionary commEMoration...”
Before our relentless guide, between half-hourly interruptions for a tinny-recorded-music changing-of-the-guard, could pronounce the patriotic actions at yet another graveside, Laura would gently anticipate the likely Socialist Rhetorical Script in advance, which was then largely parroted by our guide in the stifling heat.
In amongst the nationalistic grandeur, and in front of a pink granite memorial to martyrs of the failed revolutionary attack on Santiago Army Barracks in 1953, and memorials to the Glorious Revolutionary Dead of Nicaragua and Angola, is the recently deceased president, buried under a massive boulder “...to symbolise the shape of foods such as corn which he provided to his peoples...” (That was unprompted from the guide, even Laura couldn’t stretch the grandiloquent Socialist rhetoric to quite that extent). As the leader didn’t want “CASTRO” plastered on memorials, the brass nameplate just says: “FIDEL”. Behind the pink granite, recently relieved guards sit, exhausted, panting, from their 30 minutes’ duty in front of the revolutionary graves in the stifling heat, stripping off their sweat-drenched formal woollens.
One former president’s grave does not have the Cuban flag draped limply above it. He is the first president of “the US Militarised Government” after the Spanish were thrown out, who signed the Guantanamo Base agreement with the “Yanquis”: Not Forgiven.
Meanwhile the uniformed acolytes on two way radios were harassing us all to move on, as they set up the potted plants and the plastic chairs for Raoul Castro and various Party heavies who were present in town to pay their respects to Brave Revolutionary Heroes later in the day.
Laura eagerly led our departure.
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Santiago Harbour entrance: Tuesday 11am:
In a massive Spanish stone fortress atop a looming cliff, designed to fend of the piracy by the likes of Sir Francis Drake, among bloodthirsty displays of the 16th and 17th centuries, beautiful acappella singing wafts gently through the wooden barred windows from the souvenir sellers. In the surging waters below, Cuban coast guard vessels patrol, ensuring that no local boat ventures out beyond the 10km limit.
Local ATMs spit out CUCs very efficiently, having first converted your ATM currency into US dollars - at a phenomenally disadvantageous rate. At the end of the transaction, a LOUD bell rings to announce to the street: the end of the transaction, that you have cash, and that the Cuban government’s hands are firmly in your pockets, grasping for the hard currency.
Skippy impressions today: 0
Performances of “Guantanamera” today: 0
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Guantanamo Bay: Wednesday, 11am:
It’s 20-30 kilometres away from this mountain top, shimmering in the heat. From the top of a small metal tower we can make out US military aircraft hangars and water towers and not much else. Neither the US or Cuban governments want us to get close: the US because of what they can get away with here, which is unconstitutional at home, such as “enhanced interrogation techniques”; the Cubans because they don’t want their citizens to be able to set foot on US soil and claim refugee status (or more likely become dead meat on the extended landmine fields).
It’s seems banal, standing here, with a black and white photocopied aerial reconnaissance photo of “what’s there” just seeing, while not seeing, as a 1950’s Ford Zephyr sounds its muffled horn to attract possible taxi passengers from the cafeteria below.
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Baracoa: Thursday 4pm:
How to get an hour of wifi access in Cuba (and this may take nearly as long to read...):
1. Join the milling mob outside the ETESCA phone company. The guard on the door selects a handful of people at a time to be admitted through the tinted glass. For nearly an hour, a few people emerge (as those outside enthusiastically yell and wave to friends on the inside, while others tap on the glass with a growing sense of hopelessness). There is no system, so we in the mob eye each other suspiciously and try to work out some kind of unspoken pecking order.
2. Door opens, sweaty crowd rushes it. Security guy says “seis!!!!” But 10 squeeze in before he forces it shut. The rest of us wait and tacitly plan our own strategic rush when the door next opens, after and interminable half an hour...
3. Inside! A newly arrived young guy squeezed in front of me and jammed his foot so I could follow the massive push to get through. Air conditioning! Lovely, but no idea of how the “system” works.... Modern posters of on-line wonders adorn the back wall.
4. There are two women at a counter, six black furry comfyish armchairs in a semicircle, about 20 computers set up on desks for internet access, a couple of women staring vacantly from office desks, and a mob of 10 of us standing at the back along the office partition. As soon as a black comfyish chair is vacated by a customer who has not yet died of old age and is summoned to the counter, there’s a kind of non-musical-chairs exercise of grabbing that seat. So THAT’s where the pecking order is established!!! Meanwhile the pathetic tapping on the glass from those outside continues as they try to peer through the heavy tint. Security guy insists that a critical mass of “satisfied” customers builds up inside the door before he dares open it, so their escape momentum keeps the other riff-raff outside.
5. At last, I score a comfy chair!! I am 6th in line, and it’s only been an hour and a quarter. Will this be over soon?
6. No.
7. An old lady taps urgently on the door and is admitted. She is bringing fresh coffee to one of the counter women who stops, mid-conversation with customer, and enjoys a chat and a coffee with her waitress. Customer stands and waits. Another tap at the door and a waiter arrives with afternoon coffee for the other counter gal who does the same. Customers maintain stance and wait until coffee is consumed, news shared, cup removed... and the transactions continue. Waitress and waiter stand inside glass doors until a critical mass of people builds to be rushed out.
8. A drunk waiter with the wineglass and backpack appears.
9. He sidles in through the tinted door, full glass of white wine in hand, to wish every employee, individually, an extended and boozy happy new year. Each “worker” stops in turn for this (with customers standing in front of them), as he toasts them and totters to the next counter. Once he’d “worked the room”, all toasts were completed, and the glass was drained, he staggered back out of the door into the crowd massing in its attempts to get in.
10. The man in the comfy chair next to, and ahead of me was, by this time, muttering “Wait... wait... wait...”. He apparently goes through this “customer service” each month to pay his phone bill.
11. By this time I am well over staring at the ETECSA promotional poster which dominates the room. It is of an elegant woman surrounded by images of everything she can do with technology to make her life soooooo easy. I feel the urge to slap her smug face.
12. My turn: I purchase a 5 hour wifi access card for 5 CUCs, but only if I can show my passport. This transaction takes 3 minutes and is very pleasant.
13. After 90 minutes, I have pushed through the clump of 30 losers still outside the tinted doors, and I am free.
14. The wifi in the town square is excellent and I can upload photos of my lovely trip.
Number of today’s Skippy impressions: 3.
Number of “Guantanamera” performances: 2
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Baracoa to Havana: “White-Knuckle Airlines”. Saturday: 11am.
I have just signed away all my legal and contractural agreements with Intrepid Tours.
I will get them back at 5pm IF our flight makes it to Havana.
The anticipated modern French-built plane has been replaced by a Soviet Russian Tupolev prop-jet from the 1970s.
All (insurance) bets are off.
Our options are a 20+ hour taxi ride for the 1000 kms to Havana on uncertain Cuban roads, overnight - causing several of our group to miss connecting flights home - or else to sign the waiver that we are, in effect, abandoning the Intrepid tour (and related insurance cover, including some travel insurance cover) for the duration of the flight.
After a clear presentation of the document and extensive “waiver”ing, we all signed up.
This also permitted our tour leaders to join the flight (because if even only one of the tour group had refused to sign, they would have been left behind for the long taxi ride home to complete the “official” tour)... So they have also signed a waiver effectively resigning from Intrepid (and therefore insurance coverage by the company) for the duration of the flight. Our trainee group leader, who commences her first tour out of Havana tonight, has just effectively resigned, seven hours before commencing work.
(You might ponder the employment ethics of this particular bureaucratic manoeuvre... Intrepid is an Australian company which subcontracts to a Cuban government entity to do this stuff.)
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Baracoa Airport. 12.30pm.
The check in office for the 30 passenger queue was stifling with all windows sealed shut in the midday heat. No seat allocation, just passenger numbers: 30 breathing, sweating bodies counted on - 30 (hopefully) to be counted off at 5pm. No sign yet of anything resembling air transport on the horizon....
Baracoa Airport. 1.35pm.
A major sensation occurred today in Security at Baracoa Airport. Three security staff dropped all they were (not) doing to stare, gobsmacked, as a bag was reversed through the scanning machine not once but three times. Heated discussions ensued. Uniformed staff were agog as they identified an elegant blonde woman as the day pack’s owner and questioned her intently.
Unabashed, the passenger unpacked her bag to reveal: an electric hair straightener. The naughty passenger was officially directed back to the stifling checkin counter through the pebble glass doors to book her device in as checked luggage.
Throughout this ordeal, the other 29 passengers were endlessly subjected to a detailed announcement loop in 3 languages, detailing security requirements for passengers from this airport: bottled water: ok; marmalade: not ok; electric devices for straightening long blonde hair: not mentioned.
No further scanning of passenger baggage took place until all processes were duly followed, again, as all three of the available scanner trays were trapped inside the big X ray machine for the duration of this serious event.
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Baracoa Airport. 1.40pm.
And with the howling squeal of a whingeing two-stroke engine, a vintage blue and white prop-jet moaned past and coughed to a stop outside the terminal. The pilot opened his side window to wave to the ground crew setting out witches’ hats, before sauntering in to the waiting lounge to greet old friends among the passengers with kisses and hugs.
The Minder of the Doors is, this time, a uniformed airport employee (uniform = polo shirt with small logo, plus anything else of choice) who officiously locks and unlocks the door for various airline and cleaning staff to wander to and fro. Outside, at the witches’ hats, the ground crew members are each very publicly scanned for explosives before being allowed to inspect the museum piece and to clean it.
The long buffet counter, containing a pink plastic thermos and a fake-Coke red drink can, then offered coffee and Fresca. No customers in evidence.... (we were mostly too gobsmacked by the plane)
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Baracoa Airport: 2pm.
We boarded the flying riveted dinosaur for the “3 hour cruise” at just-below-cloud-height, with great landscape views from unstable seats which were at various stages of “ reclined” or fallen forward. The raw flames shooting out of the engines as they started up were a bit of a shock.
Announcements, such as they were, were tinny and inexplicable in two languages.
We are still waiting for the safety demonstration, although the welcome basket of lollies from the rather severe hostie (working solo in a cabin of 30, between long, animated chats to friends in the back row) and the in-flight “fake Sprite” lemonade was nice.
Arrival into a tiny airstrip surrounded by red dirt and palms way outside of Havana was smooth (and relieved). Our Tour Leaders were automatically re-employed. After such an experience, there are many questions but the main one seems to be: why would anyone pack an electric hair straightener into a cabin bag for a three hour daylight flight across Cuba?
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Havana: 6pm
The drive in to the city was our last hour of tour-leader-with-microphone explaining How Cuba Works (after his hour long description of government “consultation” over a new constitution for which every Cuban must vote in March, during the drive to Baracoa, we were beginning to dread the intricate and esoteric details from our former academic tour leader). This time it was how rationing supports every Cuban, regardless of income, and the fixed, very low, pay for any government job from office worker to teacher to waiter to doctor: “The government pretends to pay us for what we pretend to work...”
On our last night in La Habana, we are unable to score tickets to the famous Havana Ballet or even to a Tropicana show. Other music venues start very late and already our tour group was fragmenting as we departed on a variety flights after an outstanding dinner with a great band (“Guantanamera”: twice), who got our two “non-unco” gals up to salsa with them, several mojitos into the meal.
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La Habana: Sunday morning:
A slightly hungover breakfast on the terrace, three very narrow and tottery flights of stairs up to the top of our guesthouse. The two extravagant guys who run it (thus the over-the-top concrete-Baroque-Belle-Epoch interior decoration) provide style and quince jam and heart-starter thick black coffee.
Some New Yorkers share the table. They too were told there were no ballet tickets last night, but turned up anyway. “Wait there,” they were told, being directed to a Staff doorway. An official approached through the crowd: “This way...” and they were shepherded down a narrow corridor and to third row seats. They were given tickets and it was quietly suggested that, when they were offered programs, they were to refuse and to immediately those return programs to the seller with $30 inserted into each. The performance (officials and dancers) was excellent!
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When walking down Ave Italia, looking above the heads of the window-shopping crowds, the architecture you see is that of an American Main Street frozen in the 1960. There’s a great deal of not very much to buy, but the offices and storefronts, including what must have been a very flash new red brick and aluminium constructivist department store (Sears?) are as well maintained as the important pre-independence buildings in any former colonial outpost.
“Guanatanamera” performances today: none - I stayed well clear of the tourist areas.
Havana Airport: Monday, High Noon:
There is no departure tax from Cuba (!).
Departing members of our tour group have posted warnings online NOT to carry any Cuban artworks in hand luggage, as they were slugged their last remaining cash CUCs for some mystery, unwritten artistic export tax by uniformed airport officialdom.
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