Cuba day 1 - Where's Fidel?
Wednesday, October 24, 2012 at 8:35PM It was blue skies all the way. Until we got to Cuba. Then we descended through thick grey cloud and landed smoothly on the patchwork tarmac of the runway. I looked around for any sign of Castro’s private plane but nothing. Perhaps he was out for a jaunt.
The queue snaked slowly through immigration and a repeat through higher security with every passenger searched. I guess that is something to expect when you have a Commandante with more attempts on his life than the Pope. I suppose the exploding cigar being the most creative, if unlikely idea. We queued again for currency, the CUC (or Cuban Convertible Peso) being the only cash tourists are allowed to use and then we headed for our minibus which apparently we would get to know quite well over the course of the week.
Concrete roads passed tumbledown houses with ornate grills and folk just hanging around. Groups of men and boys sat or stood around under the cover of palm trees, stripped to the waist, smoking. We passed fields full of hungry looking hourses, then more fields of hungry looking cattle and thin goats. The people looked hungry too. The houses, flat roofed, one, two or three stories high are painted in bright colours pockmarked with brickwork where the plaster has fallen away. Floors look like they have been added at random and many of the properties have ornate grills rusting through which are wrapped around the terraces. The people sitting at tables are reading or just looking blankly into space and look like they are in cages. Others lean out on balconies and one guy, dark and mean-looking sees me looking at him and blows me a kiss. I feel happier when the lights change and the bus starts to move again.
Our first night is in a beachfront hotel in Miramar, an area of town where many of the Cuban American elite built their villas and mansions in the Batista era. We are told there are many beautiful properties. but I fail to see any and even the Russian Embassy looks derelict, at least from the outside. My impression of the place is like it has been through a war. Which I suppose it has. Its been throught two wars in a way, once for the revolution in 1959 and then again in the early 90s when after the collapse of the Soviet Union a million dollars of aid a day stopped almost overnight. The air is very warm and humid and it starts to rain. Nobody who is outside on the street seems to notice but then again it is the rainy season so I suppose they must be used to it. The adults just look lethargic and as if they have given up. The youth, like young people anywhere in the world, still have some life about them.
We reach the beach and head east towards our hotel. This is the municipal beach we are told and is very popular with the local people but from the vantage point of the minibus all I see is rows of concrete groins looking like the jaws of long dead whales sticking up through the sand. The sand itself looks brown and hard. It will be interesting to see how many people are using the beach in the morning.
The hotel is one of the best we will stay in on the trip so I am interested to arrive and just get a sense of what the quality of accommodation is like. The smell of mustiness hits me strongly as we walk through the door. The porter though is smartly turned out and polite. He is very keen to take our luggage. Normally I would do this myself – my bag is not overly heavy – but somehow I feel compelled to let them earn their tip as the CUC is valuable currency if you are a local.
My room is brown. The walls are painted mid-brown and give off a slight shine. The bedspread is brown. The tiles in the bathroom are brown. Most of the lights don’t work. I am feeling very depressed for reasons I will tell you about later and I sit down on the bed and have a good cry. I have an overwhelming desire to run back to the airport and get the first plane home. But, of course, I don’t. It is good that I am 6000 miles away from from where I think I want to be. After my cry I don’t feel particularly better but decide it is a sounder move not to wallow and so take a shower. I change out of my travel clothes which are now crumpled and sweaty. I take my hair down and hesitate as I see my reflection in the mirror. For a moment I hardly recognise the person staring back at me.
I decide to take my mind off things and the best way to do that is not to sit in my brown room and stare at my phone but grab my camera and head out to look around. I organise the room so that I will be able to tell if anyone comes in and double-locking the door I head over to the lift which is no more than 20 feet away from my room. I press the button and notice that the corridor smells. I notice it is also painted brown. After a couple of minutes and no sign that the lift is on its way I search out instead the stairwell which is narrow and dirty, several of the ceramic tiles which make up the stair treads are missing and so I have to carefully watch my step. The occasional windows have obscured glass. But I make it down three levels and emerge in an ancillary part of the lobby where someone is sitting behind a melamine topped desk with the aim of selling tours and excursions. There is a small, desk top advertisement for the Buena Vista Social Club. When I look more closely I see it is 18 months out of date. I recollect that I saw the Buena Vista Social Club at the De Montfort Hall in Leicester about 18 months ago and wonder if it is the same line-up. The average age then was about 80 so I figure several of them might have crooked it. But then, music can keep you going, look at the Rolling Stones, so they may well still be living it up at some jazz venue around the world. I hope so. The floor of the lobby is tiled and there are various small, glass fronted offices with floor to ceiling net curtains. Further along towards the reception desk is a small shop selling beachwear and other miscellaneous and in my mind, unnecessary items. The lobby opens out and is filled with 1980s-style boxy rattan furniture with sky blue cotton covers organised around various sizes of low occasional tables.
The receptionist smiles and greets me and as I pass the reception desk I glance up at the wall behind her where four clocks demonstrate various time zones around the world. The clock for London has the hour arm missing, the minute arm stutters but continues its solitary journey around the face. The solitary tick, tick, tick, of the single arm in its slightly agonised and impeded journey around the clock face disturbs me. I feel an idiot for feeling sorry for an inanimate object. But that is how it is. Outside it is raining lightly but as it is the rainy season that seems fair. The cloud cover is low and the humidity is high. I feel prickles of heat on my back and neck and my clothes already feel damp as I stand looking at the outside pool in which two young men are larking about. They notice me and smile and try to get my attention with their antics but I don’t smile back and so they go back to their game which really is for the benefit of two girls lounging on the sun beds and who give them the attention they are looking for. As I stand there in the shelter of the porch I remember how much I love to swim in the rain and make a mental note to take a plunge in the morning before breakfast. Being near water always calms me.
With still over half an hour before the group is due to meet for dinner, I settle into one of the chairs in the lobby and order a beer. I’ve brought my English-Spanish phrase book of many years standing but still my Spanish is poor in the extreme. I do know the word for beer though – Cerveza. I know the words for one to ten too so know, if necessary, the night will be OK. Inside the front page of the phrase book I have listed some of the places I have been that use the Spanish language and add to it Cuba, September 2012. One to cross off my top ten list assuming I come back safely. I tip the bottle of Cerveza Nationale up to my mouth and feel the fizzy coldness cascade down my throat and I feel myself relax and settle into the holiday. I look forward to losing the stresses of the last four weeks.
The other members of the small group that is the ‘Taste of Cuba’ nine day tour muster just before seven o’clock in the lobby. Though there is still a hint of rain and the roads and paths are shining with wetness, we decide to walk to the Paladar Vistamar which is our restaurant for the evening. Paladars are private restaurant that have become legal over the last few years and are beginning to spring up everywhere around Cuba in contrast to the state-run restaurants that have prevailed. Sometimes they are quite sophisticated like the one we were about to enjoy for our first night meal and sometimes they are quite basic. But either way they are private enterprises which show the beginnings of a shift in how the Cuban economy is operating. The rain has stopped as we walk down the hotel steps, avoiding the skinny cat and her kittens (we feed them titbits from breakfast in the morning because they look so undernourished and hungry) and the taxi drivers touting for trade, and we quickly disappear into the darkness once outside of the domain of the hotel lights. The pavements are badly maintained and so we mostly walk in the road as there is not much traffic. There are houses on either side, some of them very large but now fading in their grandeur and unmaintained. In the fifties this was a very smart part of town. We pass various small groups of people sitting in the darkness, chatting and smoking. Mostly they greet us with a few words and we wave back and smile, hoping they are friendly and haven’t just said “on the way back we are going to rob and beat you”. But as I come to find out in Cuba, despite the fact that most of its population are struggling in an economic sense, there is something quite unique about their sense of community, solidarity and friendliness. At least in the older generation. I am not sure that the younger generation really know what they still appear to be fighting for. As I walk into a pool of mud on the pavement that erupts over the top of my sandals I realise that is probably what they were warning us about. I really wish I spoke better Spanish.
We come upon the restaurant after about 15 minutes walk during which the houses have got steadily smarter and better maintained. There are flower beds and newer cars in the drives but they are now surrounded by high security fences. As a group we stand at the end of the drive to what we think is our restaurant and look up to the well-lit modernist exterior of the house and are not sure we have come to the right place but I check the card that our tour guide gave us and we are right and there is also a wooden sign on the wall telling us this is the Paladar Vistamar. I am slightly disappointed because I expected something much more, well, earthy and run down. Just more …. Cuban. We walk up the drive, the door is held open for us and we make our way up the modern wood stairs and are met by a mostly fluent English speaker who shows us to our table. The restaurant is small, only probably eight tables accommodating about 40 people, but it has sparkling silverware and polished glasses and the balcony outside is fully glazed and looks out over a sub-lit swimming pool and then the open sea. It is sophisticated, it is full of, for Cuba, smart clientele, and it is quite expensive. I am a bit disappointed. But, what the heck, it’s down the road, it’s the first night, the company is good and we all go with the house seafood special which costs £25. I could be in London at that price but the guidebook warned me that Cuba is not as cheap as you might expect.
Thirty pounds sterling lighter (equivalent. In Cuba you use the Cuban Convertible Peso), we leave having had our fill of the view and for some (not me) our first taste of a kosher (probably) Mojito. I stick to wine which I feel my dead Lobster deserved. I take a last glance around the place and notice that most of the clientele are older men with young women. It reminds me of the times I have spent in Russia and I don’t begrudge the girls their opportunism. Things aren’t really that much different at home. An electrical storm is unfolding on the horizon and slowly working its way in land and so we put on a pace as we head back to the hotel. I avoid the mud on the path but I have learnt too late, my sandals are already done for.
The road is darker still and as before we saunter down the middle of it, chatting, getting to know each other and generally feeling our way into a group dynamic. There is no moon because the clouds have obscured it and so we see only the vaguest outlines of the groups we passed earlier who are still sitting out in the evening warmth. We can just ascertain a raised hand in acknowledgement, which we return. Back at the hotel there is live music which we come to find is ubiquitous all over Cuba in bars big and small, in hotels, in cafes, even outside in leafy squares. Music seems to pervade the fabric of the country and culture. We settle down around a table and watch, none of us confident enough to venture onto the dance-floor. The band is swinging and looks like it is having a good time despite the small audience. Our table stands out because we look so…pale. I try to memorise some of the steps because I know that part of our itinerary involves a salsa lesson but the ‘special’ martini that the barman made me does not help my concentration and the one after that even less. It doesn't look, or taste, like any martini I have tasted before, and I am a bit of a connoisseur, but it’s strong and I know that it will help me sleep and that’s a good thing.
Mother cat and her brood invade the hotel lobby and given the way that the staff ignores them, I surmise that this must be normal. She is so thin and her hip bones protrude painfully, her eyes seem too large for her body. She comes close enough to make her presence felt but remains far enough away to escape if the we are not friendly. She has hidden her kittens behind the base of a sofa by the entrance and amazingly they sit, patiently, watching her. We have nothing to offer her, as much as we are drawn to her and so she retreats and goes off to nurse her offspring. I wonder how she has the resources to produce milk for them. We feel guilty that we have nothing to give her now, but make a pact to ‘procure’ something at breakfast for her and so ensues a moderately philosophical debate about why some cultures are more sentimental about animals than others. We all agree, though, that she (the cat) would not be worth eating because she has no fat on her.
Everyone is very tired now, we’ve done what the textbook tells us in coming west and have stayed up until our normal time to retire even though back home it is 3.15am. A wave of coolness blows over me as I open my bedroom door and I feel relieved the air-con is working, to the point where I actually get a blanket from the wardrobe. I smile because outside it is still twenty degrees. I check my belongings, money and documents and all seems well but being slightly concerned about security, even though I have double locked the door, I force a chair under the handle. This seems a waste of time when I work out that the patio door on to the balcony doesn’t lock. But I am on the first floor and I assess the risk as minimal as there is no one on the street. A thin cat, not the same one as in the hotel, takes a drink from the overflow pipe on the flat roof of the property next to the hotel. I get undressed, get into my brown bed in my brown room in my brown hotel on the other side of the world from home. And don’t sleep.
See the Cuba photographs on the Gallery.
