Cuba

Santiago De Cuba

Thu, 14 Jan 2016 17:40:16 +0600

Baracoa

Mon, 11 Jan 2016 17:50:19 +0600

Baracoa - One of the most remote towns in Cuba, one of the first seaside cities founded by Velasquez and then abandoned by the Spanish for over 200 years until a road finally connected it to the rest of the island in about 1961. We are met at the Baracoa Airport by a transportation vehicle which reflects this area’s lack of forward movement in time: a 1948 Ford with a Peugot steering column.. Below a a view toward the sea from the rooftop of the “home base” casa for our group.

A church with a cross produced in Cuba at the time of Columbus is in the main main square with a 2 block main street, with city hall, the post office, the telephone office and now tourist-enticing cafes and small family-run restaurants, most now nicely repainted in bright colors. You can walk across the town, from seaside to mountain, in about 5 minutes and from top to bottom in about 15. The water off shore is a clear turquoise blue but breaks hard against sharp volcanic rocks so swimming along the curve of this town-side walk is not an option. Below, the casa Judy H. and I stayed in with a lovely family with a 10 year old boy.

The main square itself is a brilliantly lively place - and the wifi hot spot in town. We were in Baracoa over the weekend when the trees and fountain-centered plaza was filled with young people on their mobile phones texting their comrades, with old folks sitting and taking in the scene around them while families were enjoying the gracious weather. There is a music club with a band playing in the evening, high quality Cuban music, with those who can afford inside and those who can not afford outside dancing in the open air and listening and moving with the music. There is a club like this, Casa de la Trova, in every small town, providing government-sponsored entertainment. Below, the main plaza in the early morning and one of the many roving street carts selling fruits and vegetables. As we quickly learn, the only easily found vegetables in most of Cuba are cucumbers, as on this cart, cabbage, and tomtoes. The brown root vegetables on the bottom of the cart are called “malangas”

On Sunday night, as our group walked to our restaurant, our guide was excited to see an outdoor platform set up with a large projection screen, loudspeakers and rows of audience with a star performer he knew as a well-know Cuban rapper, presented to the town of Baracoa by the local Cuban Cultural Association. We stopped and watched and listened while Osmel, a large black man in a brilliant white suit, sang and rapped out an educational program directed at the masses: one song providing the history of Cuba, from founding through revolution, another about preserving the environment, from air pollution to endangered species, with video images to match on the screen behind the performers. The recent environmental talks with world leaders were shown as well as images of dissolving icebergs, U.S. traffic jams, polluting factories, and disappearing mammals. Larry bought the DVD Osmel was selling which has such favorites as “So You Have Diabetes” and “Save Our Fragile Earth”. A great teaching tool.

Our cooking class, at the casa of our group’s “headquarters” was more eating than food preparation but the results were fantastic: Calalu, a local vegetable stew, made with coconut milk, a traditional dish made with fish and coconut milk, small fresh octopus steamed in a pressure cooker, shrimp in a tomato saffron broth, a soup made with root vegetables and pork, and parboiled cabbage and green peppers with fresh tomatoes and cucumber. Plus rice. We are not going hungry here. Judy S. in cooking class and our dinner together at the “Bueno Sabor” restaurant.

Our surprise the next morning was to find two old Willys jeeps, one painted yellow and one bright green, to take us far out of town to a secluded river village. This meant an uncomfortable ride there and back with rough roads and even rougher suspension of the old refurbished Willys, riding in canvas tarped vehicles with roll bars at head level, on benches facing each other, or in the jump seat in the hot sun. Judy S. and I got considerable exercise climbing in and out of the back of the jeep all day. We are 8 people, the 4 of us, an interesting guy from Washington D.C. who is a pharmacist of Serbian origin and 3 women from Colorado who will be with us for the first week only. We all get along well with each other.

Although I have been to innumerable visits to plantations and farms in Asia, I had a wonderful experience on the next day’s visit to a cacao demonstration farm, due in part to the farm guide who had a bubbling sense of life and vitality, humor as well as information about the cocoa and chocolate making process.. I bought several heavy balls of chocolate to be ground and used in hot chocolate - but whether I can or should try to get them through U.S. Customs is another matter.

A row boat trip to the end of a water inlet dammed with sand beyond which lay a gritty black sand beach and crashing blue water, later a climb to the outlook of a large deluxe hotel overlooking the town and a delicious dinner - after which we were beyond exhausted by the heat and the intensity of all the experiences on that day.

The next day we mount the jeeps again and make a stop far out in the country to a farm which grows coffee and cocoa, run by a lovely young women with a small baby who went to college, became a pharmacist and then chose the country life with her family. Warm and smart, we both learned from her and enjoyed her company -- at the conclusion of which our guide Inti picked up a guitar and we sang a few Beatles songs together, sitting under a plantain leaf thatched leanto, smelling the chocolate and coffee which roasted in a nearby pan. As you will hear in other posts, Init is a phenomenal guide who knows everyone and everyone seems to love so they go out of their way to make things happen for us.

A memorable lunch in a little out of the way open air restaurant near the river. I give the lovely cook who has a young daughter some girls’ clothes that I brought with me - from my nieces to my daughter and then to Cuba.

And a ride to a swimming hole, accompanied along the way by some local girls who wished to sell us some of their homemade crafts. The people here are very distant from the world that we live in. There was a beautiful 17-year old in 11th grade, her friend had already graduated and, like many here, can only find work 3-4 months a year when the cacao or coffee harvest happens. The first photo in this blog is me and this group of lovely ladies. But these country folks do have the safety net of a socialist system which provides them enough to eat, free health care, free education and some form of shelter. Below, children in front of their rural school.

I am amazed by the variety in the clothes we see on everybody. I think back to my time during the cold war in Moscow when there were only 5 or so kinds of dresses made so everyone wore the same thing. I am told that most of the clothes are used, brought in from elsewhere, often by “mules” who pick up clothes in the U.S. and then manage to get them into Cuba where they are sold through some kind if distribution system that gets them on the street to be purchased by the local population. Consequently, I have seen many t-shirts with familiar U.S. names on them, sports shirts, and jeans. An interesting system in a socialist country where goods are very scarce.

A panoramic view of Baracoa from the hotel on the hillside.

We all love Baracoa for its quiet remoteness, its old buildings, its friendly people and the lovely countryside. And its excellent food. But this will end tomorrow when we head for the second largest city in Cuba, Santiago de Cuba.

An addendum: the main transportation around town, and in the countryside, is by horse drawn cart, a public transportation system on the main streets in town and in the rural areas where oxen/water buffalo pull farming tools as well. Of course there are the old cars, but only for the lucky and/or wealthy and the new cars as well that are coming in from Asia. And a word about the buses: we are amazed by the beautiful new buses, both some of the public buses in the towns and the tourist buses we find ourselves on. It seems that Cuba is trading its sugar to China for credit toward new buses so that the tourists here have some lovely air conditioned vehicles for their tours. The local buses range from new to falling apart and very crowded. A country of great contrasts .

A Taste of Havana

Sat, 9 Jan 2016 04:19:57 +0600

Waiting in the Playa Baracoa Airport outside Havana, a one-level concrete structure with peeling plaster and paint, some tattered blue and white striped awnings are fluttering in a light wind while outside our well-used blue and white prop plane sits on the tarmac. We will walk outside in the warm humid heat, climb the steps and board in about an hour. This is Cuba and we arrived yesterday afternoon.

The security inspection upon entering this tiny airport outside of Havana was interesting. We were warned by our local guide, Inti, to remove from our hand luggage and put in our checked luggage anything sharp, such as scissors or tweezers, which would be taken from us, as well as metal water bottles. But liquids were okay. Nevertheless, one of our tour mate’s red nail polish was taken away. The beautiful security guard may have liked the color.

This tiny airport is called “Playa Baracoa” and I don’t know if it services more than local flights between Havana, Holguin and Baracoa. Very basic. The military-personnel sitting near the exit door to the tarmac did not seem to mind tourists photographing out the scratched windows. But this airport seems efficient: our plane left 20 minutes early, when everyone was accounted for and on board.

Judy H. and I spent a fabulous day among the Coba Maya ruins near Cancun the day before yesterday and then met Larry and Judy S. in the Cancun airport as planned. We flew from Cancun on a new Aeromexico jet plane and landed in the red accented modern Havana international airport on Friday afternoon. Modern is a relative term and although we gratefully exited on a ramp directly into the airport, the structure is not being well maintained although I did not catch that subtle wiff of cleansing food masking decomposition that I often catch in Asia.

Our first taste of this isolated country was our car ride upon our arrival into the heart of the Old City of Havana. Our driver took us on a route from rural to urban landscapes, not on main roads but on side roads, through housing projects, and small one-story concrete houses with the same look as poor areas in India. We drove past a disintegrating, if not closed, factory, with a banner proudly painted on its crumbling walls of Fidel’a face and the slogan in Spanish of “Socialism or Death” faded on its walls and a little further on a closed manufacturing site that once processed tobacco. Soviet-style 5-6 story apartment blocks are everywhere which were designed to be basic originally and have not been maintained or upgraded since the day they were completed. I understand there are 4-5 families to a single bathroom.

After we checked into our lovely Casa Particulare, La Gargola, a 5 room renovated second floor B&B, the 4 of us went for a walk in the neighborhood, the old Viejo Habana, known for its collection of old buildings from the turn of the last century.

We were all enthralled by the interesting sights and energetic people as we walked from a narrow main street, Cuba Street, down to a smaller size street, Brasil. Paved with sometimes broken pavement and raised sidewalks, the beautiful old buildings everywhere, each one in a different state of dissolution or renovation, on every block, caused us to stop and gawk. Narrow houses with beautiful art deco facades next to structures that were faceless from cracked and spalling concrete facades near to great neoclassical stone buildings that were once banks.

We stopped at one grand building with large carved double wooden doors wide open which we could see was being renovated and had a sign indicating it was the site of an architectural preservation center. Inside was stained glass, carved cornices and inlaid floors and there in the center of its atrium sat the original elevator, pulled out, rusted and waiting for . . . who knows as it seems unlikely it could ever work again. [See photo below]. But if people in Cuba have enough ingenuity and resourcefulness to keep the American 1940’s and 1950’s cars which we see all over town running without access to U.S. replacement parts, then perhaps they can manage to repair a 1910 elevator.

Although there was almost no garbage on the ground, there was a significant amount of dog droppings, smeared and piled here and there so there has been no education about that aspect of good community living. We passed by several bare stores with people lined up for their bread rations a number of “ateliers” for vocational training of one sort or another, a beautiful private enclosed garden on one corner and a public mini park on another and everywhere 3 or more story homes in sometimes bright colors in various levels of decomposition.

We pass an old fashioned barber shop and people waiting to use pay telephones. We were told later that 50% of Cubans now have mobile phones but I question that number -- and those who don’t use pay phones. I think this pay phone station was for international as well as domestic calls.

It is obvious that changes are happening quickly, mainly in the number of new and attractive bars and restaurants that have opened up since 2011 when restrictions for operating small businesses were loosened under Raoul Castro’s leadership. And that opportunity has led to the increased availability of B&Bs for tourists and for places acceptable to feed them.

My parents honeymooned in Havana in 1937. Somethings have changed little since those days. On the way to our initial first dinner in a fabulous Russian restaurant, Nadastrovna, I see something out of time and place -- an ancient film equipment truck pictures below “Cameras-Lighting-Grips”. This is part of the constant surprise which makes Havana so enjoyable.

And now we are on the plane on the way to the North East end of Cuba.

I will finish this quickly in case there is actually a possibility of sending this out while I am here. Adios.