Steven’s Cuba Blog

Cuba Chronicles, Chapter Four

RECLAMATION

Carretera Central from Matanzas to Colòn, Monday September 5th, 2005, 6:45am
Despite 3 straight nights of partying at Las Palmas outdoor nightclub - usually followed by more partying at a nameless after-hours “young communists” underground club paid in Cuban Pesos - I woke up energized at 6am Monday morning, having packed and secured my bicycle the night before. The flat, straight 82km to the small town of Colòn turned out to be surprisingly easy - I made it there by 11:45, with few stops.

I guess I was “in the zone” that day, feeling good, the jungle mist playing games with the light as it slowly rose above the palm trees. A bunch of little things helped too - there were hordes of butterflies out, some of them following bike or leading in front of me, criss-crossing and waving through the air. There are hundreds of species of butterflies endemic to Cuba, and some of them are really incredible to behold.

Colòn is a very small, quaint town, with lots of horse-drawn carriages. I easily found my casa through the unmarked streets - they all branch off the main street, which is just the carretera central, really - and went to my spartan but comfortable room. I was only staying here for one night, as a pit stop between Matanzas and Santa Clara, my next “real” destination.

The good news is that as a small town Colòn was very inexpensive. Everything - including the fancy restaurant in the hotel I ate at - was paid for in Cuban pesos. I had a huge, delicious pork filet with potatoes, beans, salad and rice, for something like 50 cuban pesos, or about $2.50 CDN. For reference, a similar meal here in Montreal would cost me at least $15. I spent the rest of the day running some errands, making phone calls and posting a couple of blog entries from the local ETECSA (phone and internet state company), and taking photographs.

Then, I returned to my casa and found the owner chatting with her daughter who had just arrived - an absolutely stunning 21 year old bombshell, and a single mom. This would be a recurring theme throughout my stays at casas (especially unofficial ones), and I would have to try quite hard indeed not to get myself into any trouble staring at them too long.

What is it, exactly, that makes Cuban women so incredible? To be fair, there are beautiful women all over the world - again, I love Montreal - but there just seem to be more of them in Cuba - especially tucked away in the villages and small towns. It’s just the little details that jump out and grab your attention - the way they walk, the way they coyly look at you as they walk by, the way they shift their eyes and bat their eyelashes semi-consciously when talking to you, the way their hips meet their waist at the most perfectly curved angle. Why, why, why? There are several reasons that come to mind:

• The climate? Sure, people sweat more and dress less than elsewhere, and get nicely tanned but there are other hot countries too.
• The genetic diversity? Yeah, this is a big part of it. Cuba was really a total melting pot of cultures - Spaniards, Africans, Natives, Asians, and even Arabs have lived here - and intermixed - for 500 years. Today, most people of mixed-descent have inherited the best features of their ancestors; it’s not uncommon to meet a stunning, dark-skinned mulata with curly long blond hair, and slightly slanted green eyes.
• The diet? Well, beans, pork, salad and rice are a staple here - along with rum and beer. But most everything is fresh - frozen and canned foods seem to be rare, and as far as I’ve discovered, everything is organically grown. In fact, most of the farms / hydroponics I visited also had their own lab for research into new organic growing techniques.
• The economic situation? Not having many cars means that a lot of people are walking, standing around for a bus, or biking all day. People just seem healthier than literally anywhere else I’ve been.
• The culture? Well, there’s the dancing…

Sorry, I got sidetracked there a bit. Where was I? Right. Colòn. I conversed with the daughter and absolutely adorable granddaughter for a while before retiring to bed; I wanted to get an early morning start for the long 120km to Santa Clara.

My spartan room had suddenly become not-so-spartan; a few small green lizards had found their way into my room. They were pretty cute, so I let them stay, turned off the light, and went to bed, with the sounds of roosters, squealing pigs and barking dogs singing me to sleep - and waking me up at 5am the next morning.

Cuba Chronicles, Chapter Three

LAUNCHPAD

Autopista between Havana and Matanzas, Thursday September 1st, 2005, 10am
I got off to a rocky start this morning - I had planned to be on the road by 8am, but I had some complications getting my sports bag and other equipment secured to my bike. The fact that I had to set everything up downstairs, outside in the morning mist (I wasn’t about to set up my bike upstairs and then carry it down or shoehorn it into the tiny elevator) didn’t help matter much either. I paid the casa owner, got on the bike, and rode up to the Malecon. I took my time and headed all the way east until the Paseo, then turned right onto to it until the Capitolio and the ramp onto the ciclobus - a conveniently gutted city bus used to ferry people with their bicycles to and from the Playas Del Este (the only other way to get across the Bay is the tunnel, and bicycles aren’t allowed there for safety reasons).

The bus ride costs a few cents, and it’s worth just about that. I ended up standing next to several other people, mostly men, some in work clothes, others in suits, all with bicycles, mopeds or small motorcycles balanced treacherously on the bus’s uneven floor. I was in a particularly awkward position, in the center of the bus with one arm steadying my overweight Marin mountain bicycle and the other trying to steady myself on the overhead hand grip. Every turn the bus took, I had to lock my arm so that I didn’t fall over my bike. This 15 minutes bus ride was almost as gnarly as the hours-long bike rides I would later undertake… in all fairness, though, my bike was horribly unbalanced with way too much weight on the back.

At the other side of the tunnel, we got off the ramp single file, and everyone went their separate way to work. I got on the right-most lane of the highway, reserved for bicycles, and started making my way to Matanzas. The highway is mostly straight with few hills, but there were a couple of forks where I had to stop and ask people which way to go. Everyone was immediately friendly and helpful - I didn’t get lost once anywhere in Cuba, mostly due to everyone’s approachability and willingness to help.

The excessive weight I was carrying quickly became apparent whenever I faced an uphill climb, even a very small one. I never had to resort to walking my bike, but I came pretty close a few times. I did make sure to build up a lot of speed on top gear before an uphill (my speedometer creeped over 50km/h several times), and I overcame a few of them en valseuse - standing up on my pedals.

It would become all too obvious that leaving as late as I did would make it very difficult for me - by 11:00am, the heat was nearing unbearable levels, and by 12:30pm it was painfully clear that I would have to stop until the sun started going down, whether I wanted to or not. I pulled into one of the tourist resto-stops at the side of the highway, ordered a soda and relaxed in the shade. I also took advantage of that time to ask for some tap water, and refill my 1.5L Ciego Montero bottle, adding some drops of purifier (Tap water is more or less safe around the city, but I have a history of bad luck while traveling, so I didn’t want to take a chance at the very start of my trip). At around 1:45pm, I got back on the road. I only stopped once more at 3pm to drink and water and relax in the shade near a big oil refinery with a Canadian flag flying high.

The scenery, needless to say, was quite breathtaking all the way from Havana to Matanzas. It starts off as your average, “Autoroute des Laurentides”-ish divided highway, but the crowded leafy trees and lampposts quickly give way to spectacular natural views just kilometers away from Havana. You’ve got the ocean and sandy beachy shores on your left (I was almost tempted to stop and jump into the waves on more than once occasion), and vast fields and hills just covered with Palm trees and all sorts of vegetation as far as the eye can see. There are many species of flora and fauna endemic to Cuba, so it’s no stretch of the imagination to say that you’ll only see sights like this in Cuba.

By the time I made it to Matanzas, a light rain had started so I had to stop and cover my equipment with my tarp and put my raincoat on. I had serious trouble getting my bearings in this city - there are two “parts” to the city separated by a huge bay (Matanzas is the 4th-busiest sugar port in the world), and as with several other Cuban cities (as I’d be loathe to discover), there are also two addressing schemes; the “old” one and the “new” one - names, and numbers.

My good luck invariably had me carrying contact addresses in one format while in reality the city still functioned on the other. I rode for a full 30 minutes through the unmarked suburban/rural sprawl of eastern Matanzas, searching for an address I wasn’t even sure was accurate, eventually realizing that I was going in circles.

Tired, soaked and with the sun disappearing past the horizon, I gave up, and approached a group of 8 young inked / pierced guys sitting on the curb in front of their house - something I would never do here, not out of fear, but out of embarrassment. I explained my situation to them, told them the address I was searching for, and asked if one of them would get on his bike and show me how to get there. The youngest one - Yanmay - volunteered, and soon we were on our way. Within 10 minutes we were at my casa. I thanked him, paid him some change (very little for me, but probably a couple weeks salary for him), and he offered to show me around the clubs and such while I was staying in Matanzas.

I spent the next few nights hanging out with him and his friends, and - as a sign of things to come - made my first real friend in Cuba (excluding people I already knew through work or the Internet). I made many more of what I call “friends” (I don’t use the term loosely) in Cuba these +/- 2 months than I have in the past year in Montreal.

Cuba Chronicles, Chapter Two

SHAVING THE YAK

Casa Particular, Vedado District, Sunday August 28th, 2005
I woke up sunday morning after a comfortable night’s sleep, despite the heat. The friendly but distant casa owner prepared me a decent breakfast, and then I spent the better part of the scorching day walking a few miles up and down the deserted, beautiful Malecon. I also assembled my bike and took it around the block, making sure everything was solid.

It was a good idea to get here on the weekend, giving myself a day to familiarize myself with the city and get my bearings. Most of the city is easily walkable from where I was staying (Vedado): Habana Vieja, the Port, etc. The only part of the city I didn’t explore in detail was Miramar, which, if you live in Montreal, can be compared to the West Island; suburban, many foreigners and rich families, more expensive. That alone made me prefer the inner city streets of Vieja and Barrio Chino, which were more of an artsy “Plateau” type of attitude.

On the way back, I stopped at a paladar for a well-deserved drink. Bottled water was $1.50 CUC; a bottle of beer was $1.00 CUC. Guess what I drank for 2 months?
Back at the casa, I spent the rest of evening going over some papers for work, sitting on the balcony, until the sun went down in front of me in a red-and-purple sky. I could definitely get used to this.

Havana, Monday August 29th, 2005, 1pm
I met up with the doctors from the Escuela Latinoamericana de Medicina (ELAM) that I was working with this morning, and had some great conversations about what kind of participation they’d like to have in our project. This led to a fair amount of “Yak Shaving” - “Sure, we’re totally interested in participating in this online community project of yours! First, we’ll need computers and an internet connection” - but it was still way more productive than similar meetings I’ve had in North America, or - gasp! - Europe. People are excited and motivated when you come to them with new ideas, and they actually take the initiative and make sure that they’re doing their part to make the project work. Despite the excessive paperwork and bureaucracy involved in getting the ball rolling, Cubans make things happen.


Afterwards, I went to the University of Havana, and biked around much of Havana, including the awe-inspiring Col√≥n cemetery. The whole jintero / jintera phenomenon (hustlers, prostitution, etc.) really didn’t stand out to me as much as others said it does. Now, that might have something to do with my dark skin and attitude, but I still don’t quite pass for a local. My bicycle is much flashier than I’d like, and while I didn’t bring any fancy clothes with me, I’m still dressed slightly different than the average Cubano. I get a lot of looks - but Cubans are the type to stare at everyone who walks by. It’s not a bad thing or a good one - it’s just the way it is. (Some Cuban men also feel the need to holler at every girl that walks by, and again, it’s only out of courtesy - most of them don’t expect a response, but they feel that if they don’t acknowledge her, she’ll feel upset. So they’re only doing her a favor, really…)

Havana, Capitolio, Tuesday August 30th, 2005, 12pm
Sitting in the internet cafe in the capitolio - probably the fastest connection I’ve had in all of Cuba - checking my mail and various other things I need to catch up on. I walked another big chunk of Havana Vieja and surroundings today - Zapata, Avenida de Los Presidentes, and pretty much all of Barrio Chino. On foot, I got approached more often by Cubans, whether hustlers or not. After making it clear that I had no money on me, most of them were still just as happy to sit and chat.

I decided that I’m going to leave Havana on Thursday, find a place to stay in Matanzas for a few days, then continue on eastward.

Cuba Chronicles, Chapter One

GENESIS

Sitting in the lobby at Pierre-Elliott Trudeau Intl., August 27th, 2005, 5:45 PM.
Well, this trip is off to a great start - the Cubana Aviacion flight’s been delayed 2 hours until 8pm. Which means that I won’t be in Havana until midnight. Normally, this wouldn’t be a problem, but the fact that I’ve got 60kg of equipment with me means that I won’t be taking the bus to the city, and will have to settle for a $20 CUC Taxi. I’d been planning this bicycle trip for a long time - nearly a year, to be precise. It was originally supposed to be a purely personal trip - a sabbatical, if you will. However, as the departure date was nearing, it turned out that one of the projects I had been working on for a while had taken on some Cuban members, and I could get a chance to work with them for a few days before starting my bicycle trip across the island. So the plan was 5 days of “work” in Havana, and then 6 weeks of bicycle travel as far east as I wanted to go, then backtracking to Havana, and maybe heading out west to Pinar Del Rio and Vinales, time permitting.

On board Cubana Flight 170 to Havana, August 27th, 2005, 11:30 PM.
Approaching Jose Marti Intl. airport, it’s immediately clear - even from the plane - how radically different Cuba is from any other place on Earth. While Montreal from the sky was lit up with street lights, skyscrapers, and car headlights, much of Havana is shrouded in darkness. Looking up at the starry sky and looking down at the city are in fact not very different - both give the impression of a backlit canopy with holes punched through it. Which is to say, peaceful and beautiful.

As the aircraft’s landing gear deploys - and its metal parts start clanging - I down my Crystal Cerveza and a flurry of thoughts that I had managed to subconsciously avoid so far start coming to mind:

• What the hell am I - a Canadian / Iraqi-Assyrian (CIA?) - going to do in Cuba for 2 months?
• I’ve never biked this far before, not even at home, and especially not for weeks at a time. What if my bike breaks down in between cities? What if I get injured?
• Did I bring enough money? What about credit cards? What if I get robbed?
• What am I going to do with my Powerbook? Carry it in my backpack through 35+ celsius degrees heat in direct sunlight while biking for hours at a time?

These questions plague me for about 30 more seconds, and then my cooler side bitch-slaps my nervous side and convinces me to relax. I’ll do whatever I want in Cuba - I have no other agenda than to learn, and have fun. If the bike breaks, it breaks. Cuba’s got a fantastic inter-city bus system. I won’t get robbed - I’m a bearded, heavily tattooed, dark-skinned muscular guy wearing ragged clothes. I’ve got enough money, and my powerbook will have to put up with the heat or STFU and die. ’nuff said.

Sorry to bore you, but the landing, disembarkation, customs and taxi ride to my casa were all woefully uneventful. I exited the air-conditioned plane into a scorcher of a Havana night, with the recent rainfall still hanging in the air. I changed some money to about $100 CUC, then I walked through the “nothing to declare” portal with my huge bicycle crate on the wagon - which could’ve contained many non-bicycle related items - with not so much as a second glance. The predicted $20 taxi to the Vedado district was fine as well, but was also a rude awakening to the fact that my spanish is nowhere near as good as I thought it was.

When I got to the casa, the popular owner - known as the “casa mafia” in Havana - told me that he had no space for me, even though I had reserved a full month in advance. He sent me downstairs to a neighbor’s home, which was dilapidated but spotless. It wasn’t worth anything near the $30 he was charging me, though. I’ll stay here for 5 days, then likely leave Havana early and make up for the lost time on the way back.

On Snail-Mail and Email in Cuba

Communication with my friends in Cuba has been proving to be quite the daunting task.

Example #1 -
I wrote an email to a friend there, which was immediately bounced back to me with the following error header:

This is an automatically generated Delivery Status Notification

Delivery to the following recipient failed permanently:

xx@xx.vcl.sld.cu

Technical details of permanent failure:
PERM_FAILURE: SMTP Error (state 9): 550 Mail from <steve.mans@gmall.com> to <xx@xx.vcl.sld.cu> prohibited from your location (UNKNOWN@UNKNOWN ip=72.14.204.194)

Now, it’s obvious that the message was rejected, and never made it to the recipients’ inbox. However, I later received a reply from the recipient who told me that she received my message - a few days late. I asked her to forward me the message, which she did… and the header was obviously manually truncated/modified from the original message. My SMTP skills are a little bit soft, but… it’s pretty obvious that the message was screened, bounced, and then queued for review somewhere.

There is actually a physical person between me and her scanning all of our email.

That is so not cool. The more I try to figure out how to extend the work I’ve been doing around Cuba, the more I run into really really discouraging shit like this.

Example #2 -
I’ve just received mail (regular, snail-mail) from some friends, and the letter was obviously opened, then put back in the envelope and taped shut again. No comment. Oh, and it was a “Hey, how’s it going?” kind of letter, nothing more.

I can’t help but wonder how much more progress Cuba would be making technologically, economically and socially if they invested as much effort into improving the system as they do in spying on their citizens. I understand the need to protect the revolution - it is worth protecting, IMHO - but the state’s fear of the Internet is due to its own misunderstanding of it. Information is indeed power, but the state should be more worried about its citizens feeling watched than about them emailing with friends.

Open up net access - not just email, but full, uncensored access - and the relations Cubans and Cuba build with the rest of the world will flourish. Most Cubans I’ve met already feel that the majority of their problems are directly related to the policies of the United States, and not only to the Cuban government. Let them talk about it, let them get the message out.

Like someone once said, “Our greatest natural resource is Cubans”. Give these Cubans a voice, and they will do the work for you in terms of educating the world about Cuba and correcting misconceptions and propaganda spread through the American media.

Join CODEPINK for New Year’s in Cuba

Cuba is one of the most beautiful and fascinating countries on Earth���and George Bush says you can’t go there. Well, we’re going anyway, and we invite you to join us!

This New Year’s CODEPINK will be organizing a large group of fun-loving and freedom-loving Americans to break George Bush’s ban on travel to Cuba. Join co-founders Medea Benjamin and Jodie Evans, together with Academy Award winning producer Paul Haggis, as we visit with farmers at their co-ops, doctors at their family clinics, dancers at the National Folklore Group, and young people at the ballpark. Don’t miss this historic chance to dance salsa, drink mojitos, and visit beautiful beaches - all while defending our constitutional rights!!!

The federal restrictions barring travel to Cuba are not only counterproductive and outmoded in this post-Cold War context, but also a violation of our constitutional freedom to travel.

The Bush administration says we can only travel to Cuba if we have immediate family there. Well, we do. Cubans ARE family - Somos Familia. And while we’re there, we’ll be holding a mutual adoption ceremony in order to demonstrate that family transcends political boundaries. In the ceremony, each participant will be paired with a Cuban brother or sister. After all, we are all part of one human family and there should be no artificial barriers dividing us.

Read more…