A couple of days after returning from Las Terrazas, my friend Sara asked if I wanted to go to Cienfuegos with her and a few others. I almost said no – I had only just returned to Havana, and the weekend she was planning to go was the one directly before our Spring Break trip. But, on impulse, I accepted, and promptly forgot about it for the next week and a half. It was only the day before we left that I remembered, and this lent the trip an impromptu air that, as it turns out, was unearned; Sara had planned everything, and the trip went off without a hitch.
Four of us went: Sara, Adam (my roommate here at the Riviera), Alexandra, and I. We rented a car (which I, not being twenty-one, was unable to drive), set off, and promptly got lost.
This is understandable, because driving in Cuba is a haphazard and frustrating experience. To begin with, there is an almost ludicrous lack of signage. It’s often impossible to tell what road you’re on, where it’s going, or how to get to any other road. Cars share the freeways with bicycles, horse-drawn buggies, herds of cows, and hitchhikers. And once you get off of the main autopista, the roads decrease sharply in size and quality; what looks in the atlas like a major artery turns out to be a winding one-lane spit of pavement.
Often, the only way to find where you’re going is to ask the people around you, but this presents a new host of problems. For one, if you ask any four people how to get somewhere, their instructions will inevitably conflict in some fundamental way. And because most people in Cuba don’t drive, their directions usually use routes and landmarks more conducive to walking than to driving.
All in all, driving in Cuba is difficult, and it took us two hours – maybe a little more – to even make it to the Autopista #1. Luckily, it was a straight shot from there to Cienfuegos, and we drove into town in the mid-afternoon.
Cienfuegos is a reasonably large town, the capital of the province of the same name. The city sits on the Bay of Cienfuegos, on the southern coast of Cuba, in almost the exact middle of the island. While picturesque, it’s not a big tourist draw yet, and we found the city to be refreshingly laid back. It’s also a new city, built up mostly in the 40s and 50s, and this meant that large parts of the city felt distinctly like American suburbia; at times, I could have believed we were in the Florida Keys.
Coming into town, we passed by what was to be Cuba’s first nuclear power plant. It was only half-completed when the Soviet Union fell, and so now it stands, inoperative, its one huge tower looking oddly incomplete on its own.
We stayed in two casas particulares on the western side of town, the girls in one and the guys in the other. Casas particulares are one of the more interesting side-effects of the Special Period, and they represent Cuba’s most official step into capitalism. They are similar to a bed-and-breakfast: Cubans with appropriate houses are allowed to let out one room, usually for twenty or thirty convertible pesos (the tourist currency) per night. Although there are stiff restrictions and taxes – the casas are usually only allowed to convert one room to let, and they pay as many as three hundred convertible pesos per month to the government – the owners are almost always able to make a comfortable living off of it, especially since for an extra ten or fifteen pesos per day they will make you breakfast and dinner. They are a nearly perfect way to travel, and I would not recommend that anyone coming to Cuba stay in a hotel; the particulares are cheaper, have better food, and offer much more chance of interaction with Cubans.
Both of our casas were very nice: one with a beautifully tiled interior and the other with a porch garden. The room Adam and I stayed in, though, was obviously meant for couples: it had red silk sheets, a heart-shaped pillow, and the bedside lamp had been modified with a red bulb. Each casa also had some sort of infestation: the girls’ was crawling with geckos, while Adam and I had several impressively large cockroach buddies to keep us company. (Personally, I would have preferred the geckos.)
That night, we walked into the center of town, which is organized around a square called – wait for it – Parque Jose Marti. This is the tourist center of town, such as it is, and we gawked for a bit at the cathedral, the 18th-century theater, and the impressive statue of the park’s namesake. The area around the Parque was well-kept and new, but this stopped as soon as we ventured away from it: the streets became cracked and crowded, the houses fell into disrepair. Eager to see the sunset over the ocean, we walked toward the bay, but we found instead an abandoned train yard, with people living in and around the old train cars and the decrepit depot. I had started to think that everyone in Cuba lived at relatively the same level of poverty, but visiting a place like this drove home that even here there are drastic differences in people’s living situations. Some residents of Cienfuegos lived in homes little different from ours back in the United States while others, for no reason that I could discern, were relegated to shantytowns built upon deserted railroad tracks.
In the fading light, we made our way back to our section of town, and then we walked down the peninsula until we came to the very tip, a place called La Punta, where there was an outdoor bar. We parked ourselves in a gazebo on the waterfront, watched the waves, played cards, and sipped the best (and cheapest) mojito I’ve yet found in Cuba.
The next day we rose early and drove a few hours to Trinidad, which is in the nearby province of Sancti Spiritu. Trinidad, a remarkably well-preserved colonial city, is almost certainly the most-visited spot in Central Cuba, and indeed it was crawling with tourists – and with people trying to take their money. In fact, while Trinidad itself was beautiful, our afternoon there was a depressing one, mostly spent weaving between beggars and trinket-filled stands. Everyone, it seemed, was trying to sell us the same guayabera, the same Che t-shirt, the same racist fat-black-woman doll.
Just as it seemed that our afternoon in Trinidad was going to be nothing but unpleasant, we drove to the outskirts of the city, to a small waterfront community called La Boca. Here, there were no tourists (except us) and we found a small, beautiful beach and put down our towels. We swam for a bit, watched the sun go down and the fishermen throw out their nets. At one point a young boy, shirtless and unshod, galloped past us on a horse and rode straight into the water, and then the horse reared back and the whole scene was really quite stunning – the two figures, silhouetted against the scarlet sunset, droplets of water cascading from the horse’s mane. Unfortunately, I had left my camera in the car, and when I returned with it the boy was guiding the horse out of the water.
We ate that night at a casa palidar, which is similar to a particular except that it only serves meals. While we were there, we met a French-Canadian man who lived the strangest sort of migratory lifestyle. From April to October, he lived in Montreal, working as a landscaper; as the weather cooled, he flew south and lived in La Boca through the winter. All told, the man hadn’t experienced weather cooler than sixty-five degrees since 1985. He was quite happy with it, but I don’t think that I could live like that – nor, for that matter, do I think I could live in Cuba permanently. I like the cold too much, rain and snow and jackets and fireplaces.
(Talking to Cubans about snow is a strange experience, because they only know about it in the abstract. Rollo, my Spanish teacher, once asked us what snow felt like, and an artist that we met painted polar bears into Cuban landscapes because he felt the juxtaposition was so absurd – he compared them to unicorns.)
The next day we rose early, checked out of our particulares (bidding our hosts farewell with a peck on the cheek), and drove to Santa Clara.
Santa Clara is in almost the geographical center of the island, and this as much as anything explains why the city exists: not only is it in the middle of important trading routes, but it has been the site of many battles, since the revolutions in Cuba tend to start in the East and work their way westward. It was here in 1958 that Che Guevara and the rebels had their most decisive victory against the Batista Administration, derailing a train loaded with soldiers and weapons. It was one of the turning points of the war, and it was in Santa Clara that, after his death, an enormous memorial to Che was erected.
The memorial was the first thing we visited. It’s pretty tough to miss – the statue of Che, fully a hundred feet tall, looms over the autopista. The memorial, though, was oddly deserted, and a little underwhelming. The statue doesn’t even look like Che, really – the figure depicted looks much older than Che was when he died at 49. We soon headed toward Santa Clara proper.
It was a Sunday, and it was hot, so most of the population of Santa Clara was indoors. We wandered through town, visiting the main square and the diorama-style reenactment of Che’s battle. At about two in the afternoon, we passed by an open doorway, and inside I glimpsed a television. On it was a large, parliamentary-style room full of men in business suits.
We walked a couple more feet until it hit me, and I turned around. “I’ll bet those are the elections,” I said, for it was the 24th, the day that Fidel’s successor was to be elected by the Cuban Senate. We walked back and huddled around the doorway just in time to hear the chairman say, “…nuestro nuevo Presidente, Raul Castro!”
There were six old ladies in the room watching the television, none of whom were a day under eighty, but when the news was announced they all came to their feet, whooping and clapping. They must have been the most revolutionary old ladies in all of Cuba. I believe one of them actually started to dance. They turned around and saw us standing in the doorway and invited us in, and we watched Raul speak for a couple more minutes before excusing ourselves. It was a pretty perfect way to witness the election of Cuba’s first new President in fifty years, and we departed Santa Clara for Havana feeling that our trip had been a success.