I’ve never kicked a crab before and in my defence, it was in the dark and it was an accident. And there were so many of the critters. It is late, dinner is over and I have just stood out on a grassy bank beside an open-sided terracotta-tiled bar looking at the Milky Way. It is a vivid strip of speckled beauty pinned onto the velvet darkness of the night sky. Everywhere you look you see stars. This is Hotel Villa Guajimico, 42 kilometres from Cienfuegos up first into the hills and then back down to the coast. From my vantage point on a bank which sits high above a clef cut deep into a cove, the moon trails a golden path of light across the sea. I smell jasmine on the evening breeze, the bats sweep and soar about me and everywhere the cicadas are playing their love songs, mad for a mate.
I am on a whistle-stop tour of Cuba in rainy season, but it doesn’t rain much. And not even a tour of the whole of Cuba as I have only a week, but I intend to take a good bite at the central block of this crocodile-shaped-island which straddles the space between North America to the north and the rest of the Caribbean islands to the south. I will taste the delights of Havana, take a quick nibble of French-influenced style at Cienfuegos, digest the effects of the huge sugar fortunes in perfectly preserved Trinidad, chew on Cuban history in Guevara-instilled Santa Clara and then head back to the capital once again. I have been told that when you enter Havana for the second time on this tour, Cuba has somehow got inside your head and found its own little space in your heart. I am looking forward to testing the theory out.
It’s something to begin your day having dipped your toes into the choppy Atlantic Ocean on the north of the island in a city famed for its cigars, rum and enigmatic leader and by lunchtime be standing feeling the tender waves of the Caribbean lapping around your ankles while your toes sink into perfect golden-white sand. Even more so because exactly where you are standing (probably) is where some ex-Cuban exile turned freedom-fighter stood in 1961, marooned after an American invasion attempt turned into what the international press of the time not very politely called a ‘fiasco’. Castro got wind of the invasion, circumvented the attack and took most of the soldiers prisoner. A year later, I understand, he successfully traded his ‘goods’ in rather capitalist fashion, for fifty-three million American dollars worth of food and medicine. Needless to say, the Americans didn’t use this particular approach to try and bring down Castro again. But for me, as I stand enjoying the tranquillity in 2012 I raise my hand to my brow to block out some of the glare of the sun and all I see is the heat shimmering off the water and the view bleached into shades of white and palest blue. Playa Larga is not well-frequented by tourists and is the better for it. Today it is quiet enough for the chef at the small pink-stuccoed café to be sitting out front with his mates, laughing at something so funny I am sure for a moment he will fall off his chair.
In Cienfuegos I eat home-made ice-cream as I stroll across the central plaza whose colonnaded buildings and neo-classical styling earned it a place as a Unesco World Heritage site in 2005. In Trinidad I sit beneath a canopy of vines in the central courtyard of the Casa de la Trova and listen to a band every bit as good as the Buena Vista Social Club and about the same vintage. In Santa Clara I stand for quite some time in front of the small, simply engraved sandstone plaque in the intimate surrounds of the mausoleum which houses the remains of Che Guevara, killed in Bolivia in 1967 and brought back to Cuba in 1997. A single candle is kept burning.
Back in Havana, I do see the place with different eyes and a different heart. I understand better the poverty, the resourcefulness, the determination to remain independent and not to be bullied by much bigger powers. I admire its almost unique determination as a nation to remain undefeated by capitalism and the relentless march of consumerism. But, in its strength I also see its weakness and I worry that, once Castro goes, this little haven of socialism and self-sufficiency will have its innocence stripped away and become like any other holiday island in the Caribbean. Visit now if you wish to go.
See the photographs of Cuba on the gallery.