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.