Cuba, Sunday Part 1 - missing my swimwear, getting a sense of Cuba and heading for Trinidad

I must have missed the bit where they told me to bring swimwear on the walk.  I am in a dilemma, having stomped around for two hours in the fairly boring surrounds of the countryside around Hotel Guajimico Villas, and because I am faced with the enticing prospect of a swim in the cool and shimmering waters of a secret cove.  But.  I. Have. No.  Swimwear.  Sadly, I have not even put on my best underwear.  Today it is not even Marks and Spencer girl, it is much, much worse. What to do?  The sweat is steadily streaming down my back, my clothes are sticking to me, I can feel the grit between my toes and I oh so want to swim.  I umm and ahh, yes I will, no I won’t.  Everybody else is down to their swimwear and navigating the steps and I decide I cannot possibly sit on the rocks here and watch them.  I would be summarily thrown out of the British Open Water Swimming Society.  So as nonchalantly as I can I strip down to my smalls, eschew the steps and as I take a running dive from the rocks I feel the water snatch away my knickers.  I catch them just in time.  Holding on to them I drift slowly to the surface and before I get there I open my eyes and catch the fractal spin of sunlight cast into all the colours of the rainbow and I taste the salt in my mouth. I surrender to the lap of the water and the warmth of sun on my face.   

Earlier, at breakfast, sitting with my luke-warm coffee, self-service from a military-green painted metal canteen that was so battered it must have seen active service, and munching on my dry crisp-bread, my mind dwelled for just a moment on the five-star Thailand Spa holiday I had considered as an option for this break.  Now, as I swam lazily across the cove towards the small beach at its end I was glad I was here, in this funny little country, that has such character and presence.  There was much I did not feel comfortable about in Cuba: at times it was dirty; disorganised; unkempt.  And despite the embargo there was no excuse for the litter and overflowing dustbins you saw about the place.  But at the same time there was a resilience I liked, a sense of unity, a sense of David and Goliath in its political stance and a desire to stand up for what it believed.  Somehow that made the basic amenities and idiosyncratic plumbing more acceptable. Even if I had to keep mending the toilets.

I talk to our trail guide after the swim as we amble our way back to the hotel and he tells me his grandparents remember the revolution.  But he himself can’t really relate to the embargo and the political isolation of Cuba and the practical difficulties that means for him and his family.   The revolution was in somebody else’s lifetime he says and he wants Cuba to move on and join the rest of the world.  It is an interesting and slightly sad conversation.  For me because I have seen and can predict the demons that capitalism and consumerism will bring when they come and have experienced how a lack of ethical constraint can lead to the worst of behaviours.  But for him the extreme socialism had only brought political and economic isolation and he feels he has no prospects and no future.  How long will it be though, before this little microcosm of socialism collides with the rest of the world.  What will happen in a country that has no income tax (though wages are very low by our standards), where there is no welfare system, where people even in the professions have two jobs to make ends meet.  Where else in the world would you get a taxi driver on a night shift who is also a professor at the university or a doctor at the hospital?  It’s almost too hard to comprehend.

On the bus to Trinidad, the perfectly preserved Spanish colonial settlement about an hour away from the hotel, I look out of the window at the soft hills, at the settlements of tiny houses with their kitchen gardens surrounded by home-made fencing and ruminate on Cuba’s history.  It’s a complicated tapestry of wealth, position and corruption in the post-colonial pre-revolution era and the barer threads of socialist zeal, theoretical equality and increasing political isolation in the post-revolution era. And, some would say there is still corruption, just a different type.