Thursday, July 01, 2004
Report from Havana 2004
To be honest, I flew back to Mexico City this afternoon, where I´ll be until Tuesday, taking care of my 23 rolls of photos and doing fun things. By the time I left Havana my travel wardrobe was looking grungy, my dollars were dwindling, and I was starting to get sick of “Quizás, quizás, quizás,” but leaving was painful nonetheless—if money were no object, I’d gladly go to Havana four or five times a year, just to hang out. But to continue the narrative from where I left off:
From Santiago I took the tourist bus to Camagüey, a medium-sized city known as the city of plazas or the city of tinajones, which could also be called the city of bicycles and bicitaxis. Some of the plazas are quite charming, my favorite, the Plaza del Carmen, including, as well as the indispensable church and pastel-colored houses (one housing an elegant restaurant), some delightful life-size sculptures of just folks doing ordinary things—three middle-aged women sitting sipping coffee in little cups and chatting (with one empty chair should you care to join them), a man pushing a cart, a middle-aged man and woman, the man with his arm around the woman’s shoulders, a man sitting on a bench reading a newspaper. Three curved benches sport tinajones in the middle used as planters. Tinajones are huge earthenware jugs, at least three feet high, that during colonial times were sunk in the ground in front of homes under gutters to channel rain water to counteract chronic water shortages. Now they crop up in plazas and patios, and minatures are sold as souvenirs.
I would also call Camagüey a city of bicycles and bicitaxis because the streets are flooded with them, along with some motorcycles and a few cars. A bicitaxi has the front wheel and handlebars of a bicycle merged with two seats that have two wheels underneath and a canopy above. A small platform juts out at the back to hold your luggage, secured with a bungee cord. The afternoon of my arrival, a bicitaxista was eager to give me a tour of the city. I was able to exploit his eagerness to get directions to cybercafes, one closed, one with a line of people (Cubans, interestingly enough) waiting, then to learn that there was Internet access at the Gran Hotel, to which I let him take me.
The streets of Camagüey are an irregular maze, designed that way to fend off pirates (the city was sacked twice in the 17th century). Luckily there are innumerable signs pointing the visitor to plazas and churches.
I had arranged in advance to get together with Alfredo, whom I mentioned in my last report as requesting copal, blank CDs, and a case for them. I arrived by his house as planned (he is divorced, lived with his mother but she has died—of course I couldn’t stay in the extra bedroom because it’s illegal for Cubans to have foreign houseguests), gave him what I had brought, explaining what I had learned about how to use copal, then as I was expecting him to ask me how much he owed me (he had insisted in the letter making his request that he would pay me), he presented me with three books, a poster-size calendar with photos of Camaguey, and a poster-size print. (The last two have stayed behind.) Apparently that was his payment, for he never asked me what I had spent. (I later discovered that one of the books had marginal notations and another a broken spine.) He also gave me two letters to mail, one to Nicaragua and the other to Switzerland. Speaking of which, the next day I was stopped on the street by a slim 60ish woman who (like everyone) wanted to know where I was from; after telling her I lived in Mexico I tried to move on, but when I heard “carta” I agreed to go to her house, only a block away, and take a letter to be mailed to someone in Mexico City. She gave me a miniature tinajon with “Camagüey” painted on it in return.
From Camagüey I had to get to Remedios, a colonial town of 20,000 that Alfredo had insisted last trip I must see, the complication being that the tourist bus doesn’t stop there. So I took it from Camagüey to Santa Clara, whose only distinction in my mind was being 45 kilometers from Remedios (the guidebooks tell you about the Stalinist-style monument to Che Guevara, but such things don’t interest me). The bus, really a bus from Santiago to Havana that stops at provincial capitals on the way, complicaed my life by arriving in Camagüey 40 minutes behind schedule and in Santa Clara an hour 45 minutes late, thanks to an hour-long supper break that hadn’t been factored into the schedule, so it was after 10 at night when I arrived Tuesday the 22nd.
The following day I arranged with a taxista called by my host to use his services to and from Remedios Thursday morning and Saturday afternoon. The rest of the day I managed to discover two notable aspects of Santa Clara: In a hotel coffee shop I drank the best lemonade I have ever had, made in a blender with the ice, the crushed ice having a marvelously cooling effect. And in the Museo de Artes Decorativos (more antique furniture) there was a lovely bargueño (I get high on bargueños), and the guide opened some of its drawers for me, including a deep narrow drawer for a Bible and a shallower one underneath for a rosary (I’ve always wanted to be able to open the drawers of a bargueño). A bargueño, for those whose lives have not included this peak experience, is a colonial portable desk, generally with exquisite inlays of ivory, tortoise shell, or wood of a different color.
Remedios did not live up to its billing, although the main church had the only gold churrigueresque retables that I had seen in Cua, plus the only known imagen (figure) of a pregnant Virgen. (The old man showing me around said that several visiting MDs had judged from the position of her belly that she was 7 months pregnant, gut I wondered if the anonymous sculptor had had that intention.) Around the main plaza the buildings were quite lovely and well maintained, as was the large house that served as headquarters of the Municipal Committee of the Communist Party, but almost everywhere else there was an urgent need of plaster and paint.
I hadn’t been able to make a reservation in the only casa particular I knew of, so I ended up at the only hotel in town, a 14-room restored colonial jewel. Upstairs the doors to the hall and between a little foyer and the bedroom were about 10 feet high, panels painted blue and ivory. The ceiling was about 15 feet high before it angled up to a peak, wood painted blue. Double doors led to a balcony over the plaza, hard to open because of the air-conditioning (which, unlike the air-con in all the houses I’ve stayed in, was not Soviet but new). The furniture was elegant, and the TV was perched on a mahagony cube with a frigobar in it, all, I thought, a bargain for $30 in the low season. The TV, via satellite, gave me CNN—not CNN en espanol but the original product—and I felt rather weird watching US television while in Cuba. (CNN sparmed me from starvation for news given that Remedios had no Internet access and therefore reading newspapers wasn’t a possibility—I didn’t even see Granma being sold.)
I somehow managed to shoot four rolls of film wandering around (the horse carts were picturesque) and spent some time at the Casa de la Cultura chatting with a contact of Alfredo’s. He had to tell me all about the parranda, a Christmas Eve blowout (floats and fireworks) for which Remedios is famous, took me to the Museo de la Parranda, and would have shown me a video at his house but there was no electricity that day. And I did yoga and of course watched CNN.
It was back to Santa Clara Saturday aftrnoon simple for the purpose of spending the night and taking a taxi the next morning that my host had arranged to get me to Havana, since I couldn’t bear the thought of repeating my previous bus experience. (It was $50 for three and a half hours.) Saturday night I was seized but what I told myself was an irrational fear that the taxista would not show up at 9 as scheduled, but that’s exactly what happened. My host was the hero of the day, somehow getting me another taxista at the same price (my taxista to Remedios had wanted $100 to Havana) and I was off at 10:15.
The big event of my last stay in Havana was doing something I had thought of doing since my first trip—spending $50 on an enormous and gorgeous coffee-table book of photographs of the before and after of the restoration of La Habana Vieja, with historical information on the buildings pictured. (What probably made the difference this trip was having a nylon tote bag to put it in, which I had used to take three framed enlargements to Asela.) Reading the preface by the city historian, I learned that in 1993 Fidel signed a decree creating a company called Habaguanex, which owns hotels, restaurants, and other tourist-related businesses, all of the profits of which go into the continuing work of restoration. (My general reaction to socialism, after experiencing the Cuban version, is that it just doesn’t work--but this scheme I like, and I wish Mexico City had something similar.) The book made me aware of an alameda (a stone-and-iron walkway) and a lovely church that I never heard of, a little out of the way, and in general left me awestruck at the enormous effort of a valient people to preserve the beauty of their history.
Written July 1, 2004 as an email mailing
From Santiago I took the tourist bus to Camagüey, a medium-sized city known as the city of plazas or the city of tinajones, which could also be called the city of bicycles and bicitaxis. Some of the plazas are quite charming, my favorite, the Plaza del Carmen, including, as well as the indispensable church and pastel-colored houses (one housing an elegant restaurant), some delightful life-size sculptures of just folks doing ordinary things—three middle-aged women sitting sipping coffee in little cups and chatting (with one empty chair should you care to join them), a man pushing a cart, a middle-aged man and woman, the man with his arm around the woman’s shoulders, a man sitting on a bench reading a newspaper. Three curved benches sport tinajones in the middle used as planters. Tinajones are huge earthenware jugs, at least three feet high, that during colonial times were sunk in the ground in front of homes under gutters to channel rain water to counteract chronic water shortages. Now they crop up in plazas and patios, and minatures are sold as souvenirs.
I would also call Camagüey a city of bicycles and bicitaxis because the streets are flooded with them, along with some motorcycles and a few cars. A bicitaxi has the front wheel and handlebars of a bicycle merged with two seats that have two wheels underneath and a canopy above. A small platform juts out at the back to hold your luggage, secured with a bungee cord. The afternoon of my arrival, a bicitaxista was eager to give me a tour of the city. I was able to exploit his eagerness to get directions to cybercafes, one closed, one with a line of people (Cubans, interestingly enough) waiting, then to learn that there was Internet access at the Gran Hotel, to which I let him take me.
The streets of Camagüey are an irregular maze, designed that way to fend off pirates (the city was sacked twice in the 17th century). Luckily there are innumerable signs pointing the visitor to plazas and churches.
I had arranged in advance to get together with Alfredo, whom I mentioned in my last report as requesting copal, blank CDs, and a case for them. I arrived by his house as planned (he is divorced, lived with his mother but she has died—of course I couldn’t stay in the extra bedroom because it’s illegal for Cubans to have foreign houseguests), gave him what I had brought, explaining what I had learned about how to use copal, then as I was expecting him to ask me how much he owed me (he had insisted in the letter making his request that he would pay me), he presented me with three books, a poster-size calendar with photos of Camaguey, and a poster-size print. (The last two have stayed behind.) Apparently that was his payment, for he never asked me what I had spent. (I later discovered that one of the books had marginal notations and another a broken spine.) He also gave me two letters to mail, one to Nicaragua and the other to Switzerland. Speaking of which, the next day I was stopped on the street by a slim 60ish woman who (like everyone) wanted to know where I was from; after telling her I lived in Mexico I tried to move on, but when I heard “carta” I agreed to go to her house, only a block away, and take a letter to be mailed to someone in Mexico City. She gave me a miniature tinajon with “Camagüey” painted on it in return.
From Camagüey I had to get to Remedios, a colonial town of 20,000 that Alfredo had insisted last trip I must see, the complication being that the tourist bus doesn’t stop there. So I took it from Camagüey to Santa Clara, whose only distinction in my mind was being 45 kilometers from Remedios (the guidebooks tell you about the Stalinist-style monument to Che Guevara, but such things don’t interest me). The bus, really a bus from Santiago to Havana that stops at provincial capitals on the way, complicaed my life by arriving in Camagüey 40 minutes behind schedule and in Santa Clara an hour 45 minutes late, thanks to an hour-long supper break that hadn’t been factored into the schedule, so it was after 10 at night when I arrived Tuesday the 22nd.
The following day I arranged with a taxista called by my host to use his services to and from Remedios Thursday morning and Saturday afternoon. The rest of the day I managed to discover two notable aspects of Santa Clara: In a hotel coffee shop I drank the best lemonade I have ever had, made in a blender with the ice, the crushed ice having a marvelously cooling effect. And in the Museo de Artes Decorativos (more antique furniture) there was a lovely bargueño (I get high on bargueños), and the guide opened some of its drawers for me, including a deep narrow drawer for a Bible and a shallower one underneath for a rosary (I’ve always wanted to be able to open the drawers of a bargueño). A bargueño, for those whose lives have not included this peak experience, is a colonial portable desk, generally with exquisite inlays of ivory, tortoise shell, or wood of a different color.
Remedios did not live up to its billing, although the main church had the only gold churrigueresque retables that I had seen in Cua, plus the only known imagen (figure) of a pregnant Virgen. (The old man showing me around said that several visiting MDs had judged from the position of her belly that she was 7 months pregnant, gut I wondered if the anonymous sculptor had had that intention.) Around the main plaza the buildings were quite lovely and well maintained, as was the large house that served as headquarters of the Municipal Committee of the Communist Party, but almost everywhere else there was an urgent need of plaster and paint.
I hadn’t been able to make a reservation in the only casa particular I knew of, so I ended up at the only hotel in town, a 14-room restored colonial jewel. Upstairs the doors to the hall and between a little foyer and the bedroom were about 10 feet high, panels painted blue and ivory. The ceiling was about 15 feet high before it angled up to a peak, wood painted blue. Double doors led to a balcony over the plaza, hard to open because of the air-conditioning (which, unlike the air-con in all the houses I’ve stayed in, was not Soviet but new). The furniture was elegant, and the TV was perched on a mahagony cube with a frigobar in it, all, I thought, a bargain for $30 in the low season. The TV, via satellite, gave me CNN—not CNN en espanol but the original product—and I felt rather weird watching US television while in Cuba. (CNN sparmed me from starvation for news given that Remedios had no Internet access and therefore reading newspapers wasn’t a possibility—I didn’t even see Granma being sold.)
I somehow managed to shoot four rolls of film wandering around (the horse carts were picturesque) and spent some time at the Casa de la Cultura chatting with a contact of Alfredo’s. He had to tell me all about the parranda, a Christmas Eve blowout (floats and fireworks) for which Remedios is famous, took me to the Museo de la Parranda, and would have shown me a video at his house but there was no electricity that day. And I did yoga and of course watched CNN.
It was back to Santa Clara Saturday aftrnoon simple for the purpose of spending the night and taking a taxi the next morning that my host had arranged to get me to Havana, since I couldn’t bear the thought of repeating my previous bus experience. (It was $50 for three and a half hours.) Saturday night I was seized but what I told myself was an irrational fear that the taxista would not show up at 9 as scheduled, but that’s exactly what happened. My host was the hero of the day, somehow getting me another taxista at the same price (my taxista to Remedios had wanted $100 to Havana) and I was off at 10:15.
The big event of my last stay in Havana was doing something I had thought of doing since my first trip—spending $50 on an enormous and gorgeous coffee-table book of photographs of the before and after of the restoration of La Habana Vieja, with historical information on the buildings pictured. (What probably made the difference this trip was having a nylon tote bag to put it in, which I had used to take three framed enlargements to Asela.) Reading the preface by the city historian, I learned that in 1993 Fidel signed a decree creating a company called Habaguanex, which owns hotels, restaurants, and other tourist-related businesses, all of the profits of which go into the continuing work of restoration. (My general reaction to socialism, after experiencing the Cuban version, is that it just doesn’t work--but this scheme I like, and I wish Mexico City had something similar.) The book made me aware of an alameda (a stone-and-iron walkway) and a lovely church that I never heard of, a little out of the way, and in general left me awestruck at the enormous effort of a valient people to preserve the beauty of their history.
Written July 1, 2004 as an email mailing
