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Bernie and Lorna's 2005 Vacation to Cuba
When Castro DiesWhat's going to happen in Cuba when Castro dies? I ask Javier, our scooter guide. “I'll run the country” he jokingly responds. “And what will you change when you get into power?” I ask. “I like it the way it is” he says, quite emphatically. He adds: “I'd let people travel more, and I'd allow some more private business. That's all – for most people it's good the way it is.” I think about his answer over and over again and how Cuba has not changed much since our first visit there in February 1979. I realize that I am smitten with the country, the people, and the simplicity of their lifestyle. The Cubans have a great heart. They smile easily and are genuinely friendly with one another and even with tourists. They enjoy talking, discussing, visiting, and laughing. Honeymoon 1979
Cuba opened its side door to tourists from Canada after Prime Minister Trudeau visited Fidel Castro in 1976. In 1979 we landed in Havana and our plane just sat on the runway. After half an hour the captain welcomed us to Cuba and added: “We'll just wait here until we're told we can taxi to the terminal”. After 20 more minutes, punctuated by 3 false starts, (morale boosters we figured), we made the hanger and the engines were shut down. Then, the humidity and heat built inside the plane as it was misted with some kind of pesticide. Finally, at least 2 hours after landing, we were allowed off. Another 30 minutes and we were in the terminal, all 125 of us on our Sunflight Charter flight from Vancouver. I don't remember much about our airport arrival except we were studied carefully by every official. A Cubatour bus shuttled us to our “villa” in Varadero. There we were shown a Spartan concrete block hut with two single beds – hey, we were on our honeymoon so we really only needed one single anyway – one wooded chest of drawers, a shower that served as a breeding compound for mosquitoes, and a musty smell that penetrated everything. Two single light bulbs created a romantic glow after dark, and we learned always to wait a few moments after switching on the light to allow the cockroach's time to find a hiding place. This villa was a leftover from the Baptista regime and had not been used since. At least half of the little concrete huts were under some state of reconstruction.
The Russian villa was next door. The Russians were easily recognized on the beach because they were all overweight (not too unlike many Canadians today) and sat on beach chairs, leaning back with their arms turned inside out so they could tan their armpits. We concluded tanned pits must be a status symbol back home. The food was excellent the first day, familiar the second, and by the end of the week we had a name for every dish. Still, we never complained, nor did we get sick, and we were still eating much better than the average Cuban. Pork and chicken with rice and peas as the staples, we also dined on alligator tail and washed everything down with a fine Cervasa. In fact, Cuban beer was our main beverage so by the time two weeks elapsed our faces were wrinkle free and our belly's a belt notch or two larger. Cuba Revisited 2005This time we land at Varadero International airport and have a relatively painless wait for our bags (although flights from Germany, Denmark, and another from Canada arrived at the same time), a quick squeeze through customs with a customs agent that almost smiled once (they're the same everywhere), and then we are ushered onto an air conditioned bus and whisked off to our resort – Superclubs Breezes Jibacoa. Besides the Canadians, Germans, Italians, Danish, and many from the U.K. holiday in Cuba every year. Tourism is big business for Cuba. The amazing thing is besides fancy new, International quality, 3 to 5 star resorts, not much has changed for the average Cuban. And that's its appeal. The beaches are pristine, the food excellent and varied (depends on the resort apparently, but ours was great), the people as friendly and beautiful as they were 26 years ago.
We chose our resort for its relative isolation. It's situated halfway between Havana and Varadero, the tourist capital of Cuba, and is a popular spot for Canadian couples. It has a loyal clientele with many repeat guests. Our resort is owned 51% by the Cuban government and 49% by a Jamaican group. The controlling interest ensures the government doesn't lose its grip. At our resort most employees that we met had at least one university degree. The two delightful young guys who operated the scooter concession were typical. Javier was an English teacher at high school, his “partner” Adrian, was trained as a mechanical engineer. Education is free and the brightest, most highly motivated students get to choose their profession, attend University free, and most become productive contributors to a relatively laid back society.
Working their profession, their monthly salary was about 400 Cuban pesos a month. This converts to about $25 a month. No incentives, no bonuses, no income tax, and little chance to “get ahead”. A doctor who has specialized earns about 500 Cuban pesos a month. At the resort, these guys might make a month's salary in tips on a good day. Scooter Tours a HighlightWe loved the scooter tours offered as an option at our resort. The government owns them and pays Javier and Adrian about $20 a month to run the concession. A mechanic works with them (also a university grad with a mechanical engineering degree), and joined us on our “Cultural Tour” to Santa Cruz, a medium sized town about 15 km away, in case of a mechanical failure and to stop traffic at intersections so the dozen or so scooters could travel through uninterrupted. The tour to Santa Cruz, a city of about 15,000 (my guess), includes a stop in a government run ration store (virtually everything is government run in Cuba). This is interesting stuff. Every man, woman and child in Cuba gets a monthly food ration book that entitles them to the basics of sustenance – rice, flour, bread, some vegetables. “There are no homeless in Cuba” Adrian tells us. “No one is starving, education is free, and doctor and dentist visits are free.” He goes on, “we pay no taxes unless we have a home-based business, then we must get a license and the government taxes us heavily”. In two weeks I saw a few B & B's, a bicycle repair shop, a restaurant, and met a neat old lady that wove hats, bags, and little trinket boxes out of reeds and sold them to tourists on scooter tours. I asked Adrian if he took a commission on the bags his customers bought from her. He laughed, “No” he said, “but before we started stopping here her business was almost non-existent. Now she sells lots of her weavings. The deal I made with her was she had to keep her prices low for our tours”. I did a rough count and everyone on our tour bought at least one item from her in Convertible Pesos, ( this is the currency that tourists use in Cuba and that is tied in to the US Dollar – one Convertible peso = 25 Cuban pesos). I did the math and she earned more than a month's wages with sales to one scooter tour. But she pays taxes. Biking to Canasi
Besides the scooter tours, we bicycled nearly every day. The bikes had only one gear, like Canadian bikes forty or fifty years ago, but were a great way to explore the surrounding countryside. We pedaled our bikes to Canasi, a relatively poor town compared with Santa Cruz (a lot of our hotel workers lived in Santa Cruz and hence the comparative affluence). Pushing our bikes up the hill that leads from the resort we met and chatted with an attractive young lady with lots of smile and a natural charm. She invited us into her home. Typical of most Cuban homes in the country, it had a thatched roof and was one very clean room that had an old couch, a 50's style arborite table with four chairs, a double and single bed (she had a 5 year old boy), a flush toilet in the corner, cold running water, a two burner kerosene stove, and one little religious print on the wall. “Take pictures” she said, “you like banana?” I smiled (bananas are my favourite) and she went out back and returned with the sweetest bananas I've tasted, fresh off the tree. We left her a few bars of soap (the Cubans love our soap because theirs apparently is very harsh), a note pad and pencil and a promise to return with some candy for her son. We carried on to Canasi pushing our bikes up little hills and coasting down. Good fun.
We brought along some pens, pencils, notebooks and erasers for the elementary school in Canasi but it was Saturday and the school was closed. “Guess we should have thought of that” I grumbled. It took about 5 minutes and a friendly lady from across the street came over. “You Canada?” she asked. Then she started a conversation in French that fell flat. I know enough Spanish to tell her that yes; I'm from Canada but not from Quebec where they speak French. She laughed. “Come” she said, my nephew speak English good”. Her nephew was her niece. Shy, coy, beautiful, charming, intelligent all rolled into one 18 year scholar. Her English was excellent. She attends university in Havana – pre med. Her 24 year old brother is in med school. Her mother is a doctor specializing in communicable diseases. Her aunt (the lady who introduced us) taught at the university, edited a book of Egyptian poetry, and was employed as an interpreter for a time. Also living in the simple house were their 82 year old grandma and their 104 year old great grandma. Most houses have several generations living under the same roof, often in 2 or 3 bedrooms at the most. Cultural Tour to Santa CruzWe take the Cultural Tour to Santa Cruz, a town about 15 km from our resort, with Adrian.
Someone asks him how you can buy a new house in Cuba. “Even if you are living in cramped conditions that most westerners would consider “impossible”, no one can go to the local realty and upgrade. There is no realty. There are no homes “For Sale” he says. “If you want a new house you arrange a trade with someone who wants your home and you switch. If you need more space you apply for permission to renovate, put another story on your home so you can add a bedroom for your children who often live at home with their spouse” Adrian tells us. Then you wait. If you're lucky you are granted permission in a year or two and in many cases it may never happen that you get your renovation. That's where ingenuity comes in. Adrian outlined a scheme that's risky but can work. “If you want a new house here's how you can do it” he said. “It's not simple (understatement). It goes something like this (granted, I have probably lost some of the key details): “You divorce your wife. Your friend, divorces his wife. You sign your house over to your wife; he signs his over to his wife. You both apply for a new house and put up $5000 as a guarantee.”
“If you're lucky, you get a new house in five years. If you are unlucky, you lose your wife, you lose your original house, you get no new house, and you lose your friend and your money. Way too complicated and risky” he says. No kidding. So necessity creates the free enterprise black market. Here commercial goods are sold and traded in back alleys, sometimes in broad daylight, out of side doors, vehicles, garages. “Everyone has to do something extra or we'd still go hungry, even with the ration cards” Adrian says. One of our waitresses lives in Santa Cruz and is typical of the staff. Trained as an accountant, she quit that job to work as a waitress when the resort opened six years ago. “I make much more money in a week as a waitress than I made in a month as an accountant” she says. I asked Adrian if rum was rationed in Cuba. “No” he said, “everyone can drink what, where and when they wish. The Cubans are happy most of the time.” Yet there are some basics that are wanting due largely to the U.S. embargo (the US “punishes” any country that trades with Cuba, whether its basic medicines, basic home supplies like a good hand soap, shampoo, pens, pencils, paper). These things are not readily available to most Cubans. Essentials? Maybe not, but it's nice to be able too take a Tylenol when you have a headache.
“Every home in Cuba has electricity. There are no homeless. Most homes have running water and a toilet” he says. “It's easy to get married and divorced in Cuba. It costs $10 Cuban pesos to get married and $80 to get divorced. You can get married and divorced the same day if you want” Adrian tells us. “Mother-in-laws are the #1 cause of divorce in Cuba”. The cemetery in Santa Cruz is part of our scooter tour. Adrian provides the details how each above-ground family plot is worked. “The deceased is sealed in one end of the plot and the lid placed and cemented shut, not to be opened for 2 years and 15 days. If someone else in the family dies a temporary tomb is rented. After the wait the bones are scraped and cleaned and put into one concrete “urn” and placed at the head end of the plot alongside the bones of other family members who have “gone ahead”. Up to 24 urns can be buried in one plot” he explains. When we return later on a private scooter tour led by Javier, we are given a seldom experienced tour of the below ground Hershey burial tomb. Here, workers at the Hershey factory are buried in a large underground chamber.
Twenty four plots are stacked along one wall. Access to the tomb is down through a narrow, steep, spiral stair case. Even the relatives of the deceased seldom go underground. We go down and our guide Javier only last a minute and has to get out. We follow a few minutes later, assuring ourselves that ghosts don't like Canadians. It's spooky down there. We ride scooters to the Hershey sugar mill and were awestruck by the splendor of the houses, apartments, and buildings that Hershey provided to the management and workers. Old stone buildings mostly, with some lovely wooden homes reminiscent of the early plantation houses line the streets. The Hershey Train Into Havana
The Hershey train station caught our eye and we discover an old electric “people's train” that travels from Matansas to Havana four or five times a day. “What a great way to get to Havana” Lorna says. I agree. “Let's go tomorrow”. We tell our plan to our chambermaid at the resort. She looks at us sideways and says “Take water and a snack and don't have a set arrival time in Havana.” “One time a two hour trip took us four and a half hours because the train broke down and we waited in the heat until it was fixed. My baby screamed the whole time” she said. “Two hours late is nothing.” Everything about the train trip was interesting. Virtually no tourists use the train that Hershey chocolates built in the 1950's. Not much has been done to the train for years, and its windows are full of smudges and grime, the seats are torn but the floor is clean and there is no garbage anywhere. After being bounced around my seat for an hour or so I finally figure out how to flow with the train's rocking motion. It becomes quite soothing.
Farmers stop work in the sugar cane fields as the train passes and wave their machetes in the air in greeting. Goats run in circles around their tether poles, and each of the stations along the way has folks waiting for the train. It cost us 50 cents each for the 2 ½ hour trip to Havana (we are only half an hour late). At Havana we need to cross the harbour to get into Old Havana. We take the “people's ferry”, a rickety old tub that is loaded with a few hundred people and chugs its way across for 10 centavos (about 2 cents) per person. Before boarding we are put through an airport-style security check complete with metal detector and scanning conveyor. “Guess this is where someone hijacks the ferry and heads to Florida” I jokingly say to Lorna. We later learn that a few years earlier a group tried to commandeer the ferry and head north to Florida. They never made it.
In old Havana we walk the old cobble streets, poke into shops, check out the 500 year old Spanish church, take a ride in a coco taxi, and walk some more. The streets are narrow, filled with Cubans and tourists, and filled with the smell of diesel fumes from old diesel trucks delivering goods. We turn down a narrow back street, Lorna walks ahead of me a few feet, and a small group of Cuban ladies want to chat with me. I slow down, smile, and get a gentle hand on the front of my pants as I walk by. They giggle and I hurry and catch up with Lorna. “Do you know where she touched me?” I asked Lorna. “Learn to live with it” she replies. “That much was free”. We catch a pre-arranged taxi back to the resort from the steps of the government offices. The trip to Havana cost us .50 cents each, the boring return by taxi $28 each. We agree that the best part of our trip to Havana is getting there. One Horse Carriage
The common mode of transportation for Cuban farmers is the one horse carriage. Usually old-fashioned things that are kept alive by ingenuity and necessity, they move with dignity down the highway and pot-holed rural roads like they have always been there. We visit a neighboring farmer and ask George if he will take us to Canasi. We heard there is a three day festival in full swing. Two hours later George is hooking up the 7 year old horse to his 60 year old buggy. The carriage has springs, solid rubber tires over cast iron wheels about 48” in diameter, and room for 3 on the seat. It looks like a converted chariot. The jumper seat is perfect for his 7 year old son. His wife rides a bike. The carriage moves along slower than the bike but it has a delightful and relatively comfortable cadence. George knows everyone we pass and seems quite proud to be taking “the tourists” into town. As we leave his farm he says “you my friend if we see police”.
Transporting tourists with a “farmer's car” is not one of the approved activities for farmers but we heard that police don't often bother farmers in Cuba. We pass 2 on our trip to town and George waves or says hello. He parks his buggy in a back alley, pays our 5 Cuban pesos (.20 cents) entry fee to the festival. The main street in Canasi is jammed with kids, teens, families, and barbecued pigs. The street is blocked off with an instant picket sugar cane fence. The aroma of roast pork drifts to us as we close in on the crowd. Pigs are roasting over bbq's and provide the meat for pork buns. For .25 cents C. you get a bun filled with fresh cut pork and drippings. They are delicious. The cervesa arrives by tanker truck that inches its way through the crowd close enough to the smaller (250 gallon) tanks that dispense the beer for .20 cents - a glass, a mug, a recycled 1.5 litre water bottle, it doesn't seem to matter. Rum by the bottle is cheap. Happiness is everywhere. Yet we see no one drunk, disorderly, or acting obnoxiously. The circus is in town and creates an immediate flashback to the 1950's. I remember riding the very same electric train, mesh wire airplane, and mini cars. The smiles on the kid's faces are as large as the gap in technology and they laugh and giggle with each turn. Back to the 1950'sBack in the 1950's when I was a kid in Vernon it was common for drivers of vehicles to turn off the vehicle engines and coast downhill to save gas. Power assisted brakes, power steering and computer driven systems were unheard of. In Cuba, drivers of tractors, cars, motorcycles, trucks routinely shut off engines and coast downhill. Once a police motorcycle coasted by quietly, obviously coasting isn't against the law. Another routine procedure is to park vehicles, especially tractors, on a slope so they can be jump started. Again this was a common practice on our farm 50 years ago because batteries would commonly lose their charge overnight and in Cuba, like in the old days, it is expensive to fix or buy a new battery. The only cruel experience we are subjected to is the wait at the airport for our flight home. For some reason we are whisked from the resort 4 ½ hrs before departure time. Subtract a 45 minute bus ride and that left almost 4 hours of waiting in the cramped, noisy, smoke filled Varadero airport. Overall, our Cuba experience was great. We loved the Cuban people, the resort, the staff, the beaches, and the proximity to the countryside, the scooter rides, and the ease with which we could leave the resort and interact with local people. Our holiday style is not for everyone. Most tourists take the large air conditioned buses into Havana or to some other tourist destination. To see, feel, and experience the real Cuba you must meet the local people, and experience how they live. For us, that's what made the trip. For a “communist” country it sure feels a lot less restrictive than living under the perpetual fear of a lawsuit in most of Canada. In Cuba no one understands the meaning of “getting sued”. What would I change in Cuba? I've asked myself the question over and over again. You know, I like it just the way it is |
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