Havana

I hesitated to include Havana as a travel location, since I only spent one day there, on a kind of bus tour. Then I remembered that in fact I have only spent a single day at other travel locations on this blog, so there you are. I'd prefer to be consistent in listing cities rather than countries.

Dogs, chickens, donkeys and goats
The bus ride from Varadero to Havana takes you along the Atlantic coast of Cuba. The scenery is fantastic, with lots of limestone formations and the occasional jungle ravine. Seeing all the turkey vultures, who nest in little limestone caves, reminded me of the Savage Chickens, who have the following conversational exchange: “why do birds suddenly appear, every time you are near?” “Hey, those are vultures!” In addition to these very large scavengers, dogs also apparently roam free in Cuba. I saw three little pugs following each other in a row across an otherwise empty pasture, and a few minutes later there were two rottweilers together, trotting along on dog business of some sort. There were also plenty of chickens and roosters scattered about the place, scratching and eating and ruffling their feathers. Other livestock included cows of every make and model, which was unusual coming from Alberta, where the herds tend to be predominately one breed or strain, the black Aberdeen Angus that we raise to eat. There were a few donkeys and mules, and a herd or two of goats. At one place a small horse was grazing in the ditch, accompanied by a man who was just standing there looking meditative and picturesque, and holding onto his lead.

Bananas and Sisal
The big communal farms are in the interior, where there is soil. Out on the limestone coast there isn’t much farming, although occasionally there are small plots of land where some enterprising farmer has hauled in truckloads of dirt and is now growing bananas or sisal. I hadn’t seen sisal before, which is a member of the same family as the agave plant they use in Mexico to make tequila. Sisal is used primarily for rope. Our guide mentioned that there are over thirty different kinds of banana, although I don’t know if all of them are grown in Cuba.

Revolutionary Square
You stand in a giant empty parking lot of a place, which would be full of standing people at the opportune moment. There are posts in rows with lights and speaker arrays. On all sides are the buildings of government. The Ministry of the Interior behind you has the stylized face of Che Guevara, ten storeys high. The Ministry of Communication beside it has a set of satellite dishes on the roof. But the real symbolic action is up in front, where a monolith, built by Batista, but now called revolutionary, tessellates up into the sky, surrounded by what Susan tells me are Liberty Trees from the French Revolution. The idea was that you showed your support by erecting a pole in the village and putting a red Phrygian cap on top. Here there are four of them and the caps could fit elephants. In front of the monolith is a speaker’s platform where Fidel makes all his speeches. A giant marble statue of Jose Marti, the Cuban reformer who fought the Spanish, stands looking down with a watchful eye on the speaker. Curiously enough, this was also put there by Batista, but if you were speaking from that platform, it seems to me that you couldn’t help but be conscious that you are being scrutinized by the patron hero of the country. Since he equally scrutinized Batista and Fidel, it just goes to show how flexible a patron hero can be in his views. Statues of Marti litter the city of Havana.

Fidel
Our tour guide preferred to call Castro by his first name, perhaps because there are several Castros but only one Fidel, or perhaps by local convention. Not all of the family, apparently, were reconciled to the politics of young F and Che and their friends, since when they nationalized all the private property in the country, they started with the rental properties owned by the Castros. Fidel has an older brother who is devoted to research in animal husbandry, and a younger, more radical brother, Raoul, who is now running the country. This has to be making some people nervous, since it was Raoul who signed the agreement with Khrushchev that led to the Cuban missile crisis. None of Fidel’s six sons are interested in politics, which might be because they aren’t starting by organizing a revolution, which seems a lot more exciting than functional management.

Fidel’s House
Just behind the speaker’s platform, the statue of Jose Marti, and the revolutionary monolith, there is a concrete complex they call, with what I assume passes for socialist humour, the Revolutionary Palace. Fidel refused to live in the usual location, the Presidential Palace, on the basis that a lot of corrupt presidents had lived there. I don’t know if he thought it would be a corrupting environment, but that may be the case, since he also decided not to have the government take up its seat in the Capitol building, which resembles the provincial and federal capitol buildings we have in Canada. Instead, he converted the presidential palace into a museum of the revolution, and the capitol building into a college of science. The various statues of past presidents strewn about the city were torn down and the plinths left standing empty. In some cases you can still spy the occasional foot or pair of ankles.

A Piece of an American U2 Spy Plane
One of the things on display outside the museum of the revolution is a ground-to-air missile, and placed underneath it are some pieces of an American spy plane. We couldn’t help but think there had been someone in that trophy before it was shot down, but then of course he had been spying. They also had some improvised equipment from the revolution, including a shot-up delivery truck and a couple of home-made tanks.

Cuba—Country of Paradoxes
“Country of paradoxes” was a favourite phrase of our tour guide in Havana. He seemed to have a mental ledger, with things like “healthy children, vaccinated, clothed, and fed” on one side, and on the other side “all the buildings are neglected.” Which was true. Havana appears to be falling apart, although a massive restoration project has started, and a part of old Havana has been declared a UNESCO world heritage site. Other items in the positive ledger include a hospital dedicated to Ukrainian children affected by Chernobyl, international teams of doctors devoted to disaster relief, and one teacher for every 42 people. For comparison, Statistics Canada reports that we have one teacher for every 33 people.

Daily Life
Although property was nationalized in 59, now about 80% of homes are privately owned. It is illegal, however, to buy or sell one, so as children grow up, many families have accommodated the change by adding a second floor built into the high ceiling. They cut a window up there and that’s where the kids have their family. There is a food ration, compulsory 2 years of military service for young men, and a chronic transportation shortage, although China just sent a fleet of new buses. University students are exempted from the second year of military service, and do the first year before they start school.

The Camels of Havana
Buses in Havana are actually semi-trailer trucks, only instead of pulling a trailer of goods, they pull a trailer of people. These vehicles are called camels because the ceiling is higher at either end. Lineups for the camels stretch down the sidewalk.

The Year of Literacy
The revolution was in 1959. In 1961, the government decided that the people should be able to read and write, so they declared a year of learning. 300,000 volunteers ran a program for people of all ages. At the end, they declared it a success, although I have no idea what measure they used. Certainly the local people we’ve seen give every sign of being educated, and my opinion is that if you can run a country with so few resources, someone has to know how to do their job.

The Tropicana
Since 1939, the Tropicana has featured leggy Cuban women wearing feathers and sequins, so we went to see them. At $75 a ticket, the price was a bit steep, but I got my money’s worth in the opening number, which featured dozens of women in high heels and g-strings with piles of fruit on their heads. The tradition of goofy hats and forgetting to wear their pants continued throughout the evening, although there was nothing that would have scandalized Bertie Wooster and his pals 70 years ago. One of my favourite numbers involved a wedding where the back was missing from the wedding dress, and the supporting cast of chandelier girls stood around with giant lampshades on their heads, many of them lit with candles.

Night Life in Havana
According to our tour guide, who seemed quite proud of the fact, there is none. Certainly the streets we travelled were very quiet at night, although we were there on a week day. He said other Caribbean islands go in for more riotous living, but Cuba had enough of it pre-1959. Now the tourist crowd, he said, consists almost entirely of couples from Canada, who come to lie in the sun and get a little peace and quiet. “Amen to that,” we all thought, gingerly holding the sunburned hands of our partners.

Columbus Cemetery
Occupying more than five square kilometers, this cemetery, also called the Necropolis de Colon, reminded me in many ways of the one we visited with Jan and his family in Krakow. The graves here are similarly arranged with large flat surfaces at knee height, with giant old trees growing among them. Here the trees are ficus, which seem to me particularly suitable for graveyards. They spread by dropping ropy bundles of creepers that will take root once they reach the ground, but in the meantime they blow in the wind and add a spooky atmosphere to the place. One of the local attractions here is the grave of Milagrosa, who has become a kind of unauthorized patron saint of young mothers. She died in childbirth in 1901 and was buried with the baby. When the tomb was later opened, she was intact. I can’t explain why they were opening the tomb, but there it is.

Folk Magic
Susan tells me that Cuba is also the home of Santeria, one of the Caribbean folk religions, a bit like voodoo. We kept a sharp eye out in the graveyard for any signs of its practice, but aside from some grain left here and there on the surfaces of tombs, we didn’t spot anything. There was some very nice eighteenth-century iconography cut into some of them, consisting of a small set of images altogether no bigger than the palm of your hand. There was a skull and crossbones, and inverted Roman-style torch, and a scythe. Susan says “They were awfully nice. They wouldn’t have made a bad Jolly Roger.”

Varadero

Cuba is an island country of 11 million souls. 2 million of them live in the capital city of Havana, which they spell here with a “b.” We arrived at 10:30 at night at the Varadero airport, slightly ahead of schedule. We flew Air Transat direct from Edmonton. By 2:30 we were done scrounging around the midnight buffet, which had been a bit slim pickings, although a very kind chef arranged to feed us an eeyore burger.

Varadero
There are 14 provinces in Cuba, and the Varadero region, on a little peninsula of Matanzas province, is almost entirely given over to the tourist industry. There are more than 50 resorts and hotels, and the complex we are in has a staff of 600 and typically hosts about 2300 tourists. Most of them, our guide tells us, are from Canada. Tourism is the second largest industry in Cuba, and it is rapidly overtaking sugar production for the number one spot.

Cuban Universities
There are a total of 58 universities in Cuba, with at least one in every province. They are spread over 169 campuses. You go for free to university, but when you finish your undergraduate degree you owe two years of service to the state, which could involve you moving anywhere and not necessarily working in a field related to your studies. This sounds a bit rough until you ask yourself what kinds of work Arts students get in Canada. If you go to grad school, you can do your two years part time while you are still in school.

Hitchhiking
People here rely on hitchhiking as a normal means of transportation. Our guide says she hitchhikes to school and work every day. License plates are colour-coded to help simplify the process, and there are 6 or 7 different colours. Tourist rentals, for instance, are red, which I take to be the universal colour of warning. Government vehicles get blue license plates, and are required by law to pick up hitchhikers. What a great idea. We should have this policy in Canada, along with the one from Sweden that says your effluent pipe into the river has to be upstream from your intake.

Dried Starfish
The ocean is beautiful, the sand is white and soft, and you have to go pretty far before the water is deeper than your waist. If you walk up the beach and pass the line made by buoys, there is a between-resorts area where you meet some local men. The first group of five or six we met were standing around an overturned can with four dry starfish and a large conch shell. We stood and smiled at each other for a while. Then we all shook hands. Someone handed me one of the dried starfish to look at. It seemed enormous to me and in very good condition. I showed it to Susan, then handed it back. “Are you interested in buying one to take home with you?” someone asked. “Oh, no,” I said, grinning idiotically. “Oh, well, happy new year,” someone else said. “Happy new year,” we said, and went further. “Can you take dried starfish back to Canada?” I asked Susan, remembering my ill-advised purchase of a bottle of snake wine on my first trip to Hong Kong. “I think you can,” she said.

Camilo on the Beach
Slightly further along were two more men, looking rather worse for wear than the starfish salesmen, with shabbier clothes, and in the case of Camilo, bloodshot eyes. They hailed us and we stopped to introduce ourselves and shake hands. They didn’t have anything to sell, although one of them—Alejandro—gave Susan a small conch shell. We had some translation difficulties, but I think they would have liked to initiate some form of gift exchange. We talked about cigars and rum, for instance, and used clothing. When I told Camilo that I was a professor from Canada, he told me that he was a construction engineer. I would have liked to give them some money, but like an ass I didn’t have any with me. Luckily on the return walk down the beach it occurred to me that they might like my t-shirt. Camilo had gone off to get into trouble with the hotel security staff, but Alejandro was still at his post, so I turned it over to him.

New Year’s Eve
The resort put it around that there’d be a bit of a feast for New Year’s Eve, and they weren’t kidding around. We had roast chicken, lamb, and suckling pig. I ate mine with candied pear, and Susan tracked down a very soft and white blue cheese for me, which I am assuming must be locally produced. In any case, they seem to have a lot of it around. For dessert there were three kinds of what I like to think of as space alien ice cream, with flavours like carob, pixie-stick peach, and Lowry’s cherry blossom.

Cello and Double Bass
The musicians who entertained us in Cuba were without exception very good musicians. Susan railed at one point against the unfairness of making a good violinist play such, I believe her word was, “crap.” New Year’s Eve, on the other hand, included a dinner performance by a man on cello and a woman on double bass. They were combining two instruments that are not generally considered the most melodic in the orchestra, and they were doing it beautifully. “Listen to the crispness of that mordant,” Susan told me, as I scarpered down my last bit of smoked salmon.

Tropical Buffets
I feel that the best way to conduct yourself at a tropical buffet is to temporarily suspend all normal gastronomic prejudices. Simple rules, of course, such as “eating that will kill me” are another story. But the variety and ingenuity of the available selection do seem to suggest a certain scope for indulgence. Tonight’s dinner, for example, consisted of fish consommé, proscuitto ham, crab legs, and fresh blue cheese, accompanied by delicious gherkin pickles, green olives with pimentos inside them, and some large capers. I followed that with a fruit course consisting of several pieces of ripe papaya, two kinds of fresh pealed grapefruit, and a bread roll. For dessert there was vanilla ice cream with cloves and four kinds of cake. There could be some trouble around the third buttonhole during the early watches of the night, but what I say about that is God Bless the makers of zantac, lactaid, and acidophilus. The invention of the artificial digestive system has been the best thing to happen to international travel since the invention of the pocket compass.

Floating in the Ocean
Some people go in for snorkeling and others like to surf, but to my way of thinking there are two ways to have fun in the ocean, depending on whether it is calm or not. When we first arrived here, the water was like a giant blue mirror, disturbed only by busy toddlers and flocks of teenagers in pursuit of the occasional fish. With this kind of water, what you do is float on your back. It is not necessary to complicate your life with a flotation device, since salt water and middle age spread are all that you require. Milena and I discovered this a few years ago when we went to some trouble to procure air mattresses and haul them around with us. One day I fell off mine and found there was no discernible difference. Just lean your head back, let your hands float free, and watch the cares of the world drift away like a cloud of squid ink. You may paddle your fingers a little, if you wish.

Knocked Over by Waves
The second way to enjoy yourself in an ocean involves waves. The wind came up on Wed, so we had some waves then, except they closed the beach altogether. However, on Saturday they opened it again, and we had some fairly large waves that were not life threatening. You walk out to where they are breaking and let them push you right off your feet. Or you can also go just past that point, then try to swim fast enough to catch them and let them drag you along. You don’t spend a lot of time worrying about how your research is going when a wave has picked you up bodily and flung you at the shore. The only downside is that you will end up with some sand inserted in various locations around your anatomy. These aren’t places where you would particularly want to keep sand. But it is a small price to pay.

Seven Blue Jellyfish
The weather was cool and windy from Wednesday through Saturday. On Thursday, along with about 100 other Canadians dressed in shorts and bunny hugs, we took a stroll up and down the beach. The various bits of jetsam were endlessly fascinating, and included bright red corals, still soft and alive, a variety of sponges, and a total of seven bright blue translucent jellyfish. We were careful of their long tentacles, which we believed may contain stingers, but with some careful manipulation with a disposable plastic cup, we managed to fling two of them back into the ocean. It was interesting to see how their colours brightened up when the seawater hit them. The pink stripe at the top of the sail was particularly affected, going from a dull pink to an incandescent neon.

Black Parrots
Every country has its variations of corvidae, the crows, magpies, and ravens. In Denmark the magpies have comparatively short tails and eat fish. In Sweden, the crows wear gray shawls. In Cuba, the resident black bird has a long tail and handles itself like a magpie, except it is all black and the tail is rounded at the end. The beak is also shaped like the beak of a parrot. We ran across a family of them on our way to the beach one day. The mother was sitting up high on a post and called to her ratty youngsters, who were attempting to climb up the wire fence. She had a very pleasant chirping voice, rather than the squawk we had expected.

[I note that Susan has since informed me that these weren't corvids at all, but are in fact Anas. Related to cuckoos, they are not very good at flying, lay up to two dozen eggs at a time, and eat insects. A group of them is variously called a Silliness or an Orphanage. There is a rough-looking customer on wikipedia, although the ones we saw didn't have grey shoulders: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ani_(bird)]

Anoli
In Siena we saw little green lizards with long whip-like tails. They lived in the rose bushes on top of the stone wall on the way to the swimming pool. Here in Cuba, the lizards have much shorter tails, and rather than being the vivid Italian green, the one we saw was the colour of sand. We looked at each other for some time before he began doing pushups and extending his throat pouch, which Susan tells me are his way of telling us not to mess with him. Certainly it was true that although he was only as long as my little finger, he could do more pushups than I can.