To Cuba

Gatwick to Havana, 24 February 1998

We take a Jules Verne package holiday in Cuba, where we’ve never been before. Just a one-week trip, so we only see a snapshot, but it opens up some questions.

First a flight out there on a second-hand aeroplane.

At Gatwick airport the flight is delayed, so we sit with a drink and watch the smiling Brits going on their holidays, plus a group of learning-disability people being looked after by their carers, who had to keep one woman from biting her hands to draw blood, and a man from removing his crash helmet, which he didn’t look at all pleased to be wearing, no doubt feeling rather a chump to be the only person in the departure lounge so attired, but presumably was needed to prevent him bumping into things and damaging his head. Were they going on an aeroplane? No, it transpired (it says in my diary, though what they were doing there if they weren’t, I didn’t record).

Our aeroplane had a peeling Cubana sign on the side, a DC10 which presumably used to belong to Air France, since all the signs were in French first. Cubana is not the world’s best airline, but we got to Havana, at 3.30am our time, 9.30pm Cuban time.

A misfortune at customs.

Then we queued at passport control. This was very slow, for no obvious reason, it just took the lines of officials in the Eastern-European-style cubicles a long time to check everyone’s visa. And why should the Cuban authorities be so concerned? The chance of a British tourist overstaying their visit must be slim, and even if they did, spending ages checking the passport is not going to change it. It does seem to be a rule that, the less likely it is that someone would want to stay in a country, the more convinced the officials are that you might want to.

We were last through because, as is always the case in Sainsbury’s, and Cuba was going to be no different, we had joined the slowest queue at the checkout. Fortunately Cuba had the advantage over Sainsbury’s that we did not have any ice cream in our trolley.

There are not many flights into Havana, only Cubana Airlines it seemed, so maybe the officials need to spin their time out.

Only two of our three bags are on the carousel, oh no.

But then we found the third one, separated from the rest. We were then accosted by the customs official, who required us to open the separated bag. It has obviously been opened by someone already, as a box of Jordan’s muesli bars had been torn open and some were missing; one of those remaining had apparently been half-eaten. But the item that caused the customs man to check us was some apples. He confiscated the apples. Presumably even a hungry Cuban would not stoop to Jordan’s muesli bars.

Eventually we got out of the airport, and there was a man holding a Jules Verne sign. He led us to the bus, where everyone else had been waiting for ages. A modern Volvo bus made in Brazil and delivered, we were told, just two weeks ago – our guide thought in exchange for nickel.

First impressions – protruding legs.

Through the dark we drove into Havana, past unkempt houses, some bars, and old American cars with legs sticking out from underneath, the owners of the legs trying to do some repairs. Everything a bit shelled-out looking.

A sandwich and to bed.

To our hotel, where we could get a sandwich, our guide informed us, since we had missed dinner. We were given an envelope with a key in and we went to our room, not putting our bags in the porter’s trolley as we only carry a little one each.

Downstairs in the bar there was indeed a sandwich waiting for us, on very good bread, and we sat eating it with a beer, $2 a can, noticing that, it being such mild and pleasant weather, the bar was in the well of the building, open to the sky.

Here we are in Cuba. What do we think so far? One of the airline stewards had been chewing gum while he served; our guide had a cartoon Mexican accent and seemed to be working hard for a good tip at the end.

There are two currencies in Cuba, we were told, the peso and the dollar. There was no suggestion we would need any pesos.

It was a warm night.

The story continues with Havana.

Havana

A Brief Look at Havana, 25 February 1998

Our first whole day in Cuba, this follows on from To Cuba. We take both an official and an unofficial look at Havana, we see a bar that Ernest Hemingway was once said to frequent, we meet some of our fellow travellers, and, touch and go though it turned out to be, we suffered the tat of the Tropicana for a whole few hours.

We got up quite early, for our bus tour of Havana.

Cuba seems to be selling itself to tourists as a reincarnation of the past, the glorious past of film stars and gangsters. Not too much mention of the past forty years except that Alfredo, our guide, is proud that there is one doctor to every 380 inhabitants. He also refers to Fidel’s seven-hour speeches, with more than a hint of irony in his voice.

The bus stops and we get out to be offered a photo taken by a man with a Kodak camera dating from 1900, he tells us, which is probably right.

Surprising things pass in the streets, like an old Paris Saviem bus, with the open-platform back, which were ubiquitous in Paris at one time, and are in Havana still painted in the green and white Paris livery. Subsequent research indicates that production of the Renault Saviem SC10 (for that is what they were) ended in 1981.

Also vehicles called camels, which are a bit like airport runway transfer buses, high at each end and with a sag in the middle, towed by a separate tractor unit. In Havana many of these are painted bright pink. There’s a picture and another.

Back to the bus for a drive round town, then a walk to the top of a fort where we can get a drink if we want. We do. $1.50 a beer this time, and we talk to one of our fellow travellers who wants to tell us all about being a midwife in Cambridge and doesn’t ask anything about us.

Then a walk through the town with our guide to see the free market stalls. Lots of books, some look like they might have been on the shelves of someone pre-revolution, but all in Spanish which means we don’t know what is useful, but nice old bindings, plus lots by Che Guevara all looking a bit faded and dog-eared. Cafés with the four-piece band which we will come to grow tired of. Seems a safe enough city to wander round; will do that this afternoon.

But first it’s back to the bus to visit one of Ernest Hemingway’s favourite bars. Through the tunnel under the harbour, built by the French in Batista’s time, early 19050’s, and past the tower blocks where the workers of Havana live, made from prefabricated blocks, each worker was given time off to build the place we are told, then when they’d built it they could live in it.

Some of the workers’ houses are the athletes’ village from the pan-American games in 1991. The stadium is still there, empty and crumbling. Presumably Fidel put all his energies into it in 1991, then went onto something else and since then no one has been responsible. That’s the trouble with a centrally-controlled state perhaps.

Down a side road to the famous bar, where we are to get a daiquiri (a cocktail of rum, lime juice and sugar), or is it a mojito (which is the same but with sparkling water and mint)? Anyway, we skip the bar and walk down to the sea where we eat our sandwich which we have obtained by wrapping bits of self-service breakfast in a serviette in line with recommendations, as we are told that lunch will be hard to come by.

We watch the local dogs cross the dusty square, which contains a kind of bandstand, some metal chairs, and a bust of Hemingway. One or two other tourists who are not gripped by a daiquiri wander by. Men in a café play dominoes or something similar and a woman brushes out her porch. All very sleepy. Could be Mexico. The people, though, are very mixed ranging from black to white and back again.

Back in the bus and back to our hotel where at last we have some free time. Out on our own. Scary or no?

No, it transpires. Very safe-feeling. We walk round the outside of the museum which houses the boat Castro landed on Cuba in – the famous Granma – named after a province of Cuba, plus some aeroplanes and tanks. We can’t see what the significance of these is without entering the museum and we don’t have time to do that today.

Round the busy streets. The people are poor, but no one is starving from what we can see. Some of the shops are reasonably well-stocked – the dollar shops – some are like old-fashioned haberdasheries with a motley collection of items, sparsely stocked, and some of the food shops are like those you see in Russia, a hole in the wall and either a scrum of a queue or closed. We learn later that most foods in Cuba are rationed. You use your ration card, presumably at the hole-in-the-wall shops, and prices are government fixed. Clothes we don&rquo;t know about, they all look second-hand in the non-dollar shops.

There are cafés and they look pretty OK. Every one has music, usually live with a four-piece of bass, two guitars and a maraca player.

Some people say hello, but for the most part they are not hassley and are very smiley.

We walk through the shopping streets and find the railway station where a man is letting people through an opening in the railings. He wants to know what we want. Nothing, just looking. He won’t let us get away with that and says we can come inside and look around (probably that’s what he’s saying – in Spanish). Still not good enough for us to be on our way. Who is your favourite team?, he asks us in English. Who you know?, we ask. Manchester United, Yeahh. Newcastle, Yeahh. Arsenal, Yeahh. To a backdrop of a poster telling us what socialism is, ending with some good stuff about there being racial equality with socialism in the Cuban People’s Republic. All very disconcerting, the Soviet Union in the Caribbean fronted by a man wanting to talk about Newcastle United.

We walk back to the hotel. Into the bar where we meet the first of our fellow travellers that we talk to in any depth. The retired bishop of Lusaka and then Fulham and his friends, a retired senior official in the Commonwealth Development Corporation and his wife. Very pally over some beers. Then off for a shower as we must eat early tonight, for we are going to the Tropicana.

The Tropicana is an optional tour, sold to us by our guide. We had to pay him and we didn’t have the cash, or felt we didn’t, so asked if we could pay with a credit card. Perhaaps, he said, go and see that lady over there. She booked us in and took our credit card, but we had a suspicion that she had booked us into a different seat from our group. There was some discussion in Spanish between her and our guide and there was clearly some non-clarity about it. Anyway, we are going to the Tropicana.

We had our dinner; self-service of pork rolled and fried in breadcrumbs, squid in tomato sauce, or chicken, plus rice or spaghetti cooked with cloves of garlic. Rather ordinary. Self-service seems to be the thing in Cuba. This is one of Havana’s best hotels.

Out to get the bus that will take us to the Tropicana. Show the lady our ticket. No, you need to get a different bus, it is a different tour company. I thought so, and there won’t be a different bus because the woman booking our tickets had ‘forgotten’ to book us transport, she’d said that at the time and said, don’t worry, just pay the tour guide this evening.

We’d already warned our group of possible problems and they kindly protested. All right, said the lady, you get on the bus and I will help you.

So feeling like the poor relations we got on the bus. Still we did not know whether we could sit with our friends in the Tropicana, we were guessing probably not. Was this a mistake? It was beginning to feel like one.

The bus stopped at other hotels to pick people up, then off we went to the Tropicana.

All off the bus, queue behind the bus lady at the check-in desk. She points to us and a man comes over and takes our ticket, then he comes back with a number scrawled on the back and says: you can go in, sir. No, we’re waiting for our friends. We go in with our friends. An usher takes our ticket (we should have hidden it) and tries to show us to our seat, but we won’t go. We can be very parochial, us Brits, when it comes to who we sit with.

With some negotiation, helped by the guide in the yellow jacket, who said she would help us, all the Brits get on one table, along with a couple of smoking Spaniards whose heart probably dropped, with us, the poor relations tagging along behind, getting the frontmost seats to block everyone else’s view of the proceedings. Bloody credit cards. And we never did pay for the transport.

The show started with some skimpily-clad girls with chandeliers on their heads and went downhill from there. The lights went down and the young girls who had shaved pubic hairs – must have we all agreed as their narrow costume could never have kept a hair tucked inside – walk out among the audience and at a signal, whaaa, all the chandeliers on their heads lit up. Don’t know where they were managing to keep the batteries.

Brash, loud – too loud really – one dance of chaps in patent leather shoes and girls with only a string covering their bottom followed another. And we were to suffer this until 2am, or so we’d been told.

There we sat, ten people on a long table, five each side of the table, in the open air under the trees, listening to and watching this tat. On the plastic chairs, along a table at right-angles to the stage, we are in the frontmost position and the rest of the party have to look at our backs. That’s what comes of being a poor relation.

Loud music, lots of spectacle, chaps and girls with paper flowers on their wrists, or piled upon their heads, and on their cloaks. A set of steps rose behind the stage and there were platforms where the chaps and girls could stand and dance and sing and be a spectacle.

A little man brought us a rum and coke in a plastic cup, then a plate of cheese and meats that neither of us felt like eating. The drink tasted of disinfectant so we barely touched that either. Altogether it was pretty ghastly.

There was just one act that I would say was an exception. An older, African-looking man in a white suit who stood on a platform to the side, moving to the rhythm, um bamba whey, etc, with a story acted out on stage by dancers, culminating in a girl diving from a high platform to be caught by four chaps standing below. Wouldn’t want to be there on the day that one goes wrong.

Good musicians. Brilliant pianist doing an excellent jazz backing to Besame Mucho as well as to rhythmic and repetitive African-style pieces. The whole thing with strong African influence, three African drummers in red tinsel trousers sat in front of the band. Everywhere in Cuba there is music.

At 11.30, just when we were wondering how we could cope with two-and-a-half hours more of this and a party of Japanese had trooped out, the plan seemed to be that the dancers came down into the audience to get the punters to dance, or more precisely, each of the fifteen-year-old scantily-dressed girls picked on a fat old man to dance with them. Penny was laughing her head off as it was me at the front of our bench and she said she could feel the look of horror on my face, oh! how funny! But possibly the girls could read their audience quite well, so none approached me.

Then the guide came to tell us it was over. It did not seem to be over for many of the audience, who were sitting around looking for all the world like they were eagerly awaiting the second half, but it was all over for us coach parties.

One of our group said that was good, wasn’t it, and I said I thought it was tat. Gradually, this then because the accepted view, though how much this was follow-my-leader (in this case the leader, unusually, being me) we don’t know. Maybe I had said something that otherwise would have remained unspoken.

The story continues with To Cienfuegos.

To Cienfuegos

Next Stop on the Cuban Tour, Cienfuegos, 26 February 1998

We travel by tourist bus to Cienfeugos, learn a bit about Cuban agriculture, about Castro’s vision for being on the receiving end of aid, about prisons, and about school lessons. Also we watch a synchronised swimming display over a beer.

Down next morning to our self-service breakfast. Today we are going to Cienfuegos. Self-service seems to be the thing in Cuban hotels, and it works; the bishop can have his eggs and bacon and we can eat cold meats and cheese. Dinner, too, is self-service.

But what do the Cubans eat? Our guide tells us they like pork best, and fried banana or plantain. During the time of Soviet influence it seems that Cuba became a great Russian sugar plantation, a cash-crop society. Food is rationed in Cuba, everyone has a ration card. Currently eggs and milk are in short supply because with the collapse in trade with Russia there is no grain to feed the chickens and no proper feed for the cattle. We saw a number of battery-hen sheds, open to the outside, but with no chickens in. No shortage of eggs or milk for the tourists of course.

In Havana yesterday we wandered through a fruit, veg and meat market, rather African in style, with each stall selling a good range of real-looking vegetables. This was one of the new ‘free markets’ where people buy things off-ration. people were buying, very carefully, squeezing every tomato, turning over every piece of meat. Presumably it is quite expensive. We are quoted a price in dollars for something but who knows how comparable this was? Now, we are told, Cuba is growing all its own garlic, tomatoes, onions etc. Did they not grow them before, or did they just not get any? We don’t know. Our guide is not free with his information, except what he wants to tell us.

Our bus drives out of Havana, past the unused stadium again, we are first on our way to Hemingway’s house

As with all things, along with the dull, something interesting may be found if you look hard enough. In the house/museum’s bookshop I find a book in English on Castro’s view of the economy and ecology of developing nations and, what do you know, he believes that the developing countries are being prevented from acquiring the technology they need to make a sustainable, ecologically-sound economy by the proprietorial interests of a capitalist few in the developed countries. The developed nations should share their technology, by which it seems he means machinery rather than expertise, with the underdeveloped ones. Sounds just like Africa, viz our Malawi trip. Did Castro invent this line? The book was written in 1992.

Back into the bus, at the allotted time, but earlier than the guide wants to go, so we wait.

Along the Cuban motorway with the old American cars, presumably acquired from the rich at the time of the revolution. Polluting Russian trucks, just about struggling along, and Ladas and Moskvitches, plus a few Citroëns and Toyotas, fairly new. Along the road, people flag down vehicles for a lift. At certain points policemen in special yellow uniforms ensure that cars stop and lifts are given t’s the law that people with space in their cars give others a lift. Every bus, every truck, every car except the military ones, is full of people. Our air-conditioned bus travels along with most of its seats empty, while we gaze out of the window.

Fields of sugar cane, some cattle. A very flat land. No real poverty to be seen, everyone is equally not very well off, living in a simple house, with electricity it seems, but no evidence of squalor.

We come to the orange-trees area, the area where they grow lots of oranges. Miles and miles of neatly-tended orange and grapefruit trees. Where do they export all this fruit to? We hear that the citrus fruits are a relatively new diversification for the country. Certainly there are plenty of oranges in the hotels and restaurants. And plenty on the ground below the trees. Are all these oranges eaten or exported? In 2002, a publication with the rather evocative name of the ‘Frozen Food Digest’ (eek!) was reported in All Business (‘a D&B company’ – Dung and Badfeet?) as saying: ‘fresh and processed citrus contribute about 8% of Cuba’s agricultural export earnings. Cuba is the world’s third largest grapefruit producer, after the U.S. and Israel . . . Over half the oranges and about 90% of the grapefruit are processed (primarily for juice) . . . Shipments currently go to the former USSR and the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (COME-CON or CMEA) Eastern European countries, although some shipments have recently moved into Western Europe and Japan. Much of this latter trade has been in processed citrus products. In European markets, Cuba faces tough competition from Israel and Spain on both quality and transportation cost grounds, particularly for fresh oranges.’ So now we know. Sort of.

We turn off the road towards a sugar mill called Australia, where Castro had a headquarters of some kind at some time, and into a tourist shop. The steam trains of the sugar plantation are whistling and sending clouds of black smoke into the air, though we cannot see the trains themselves. The guide says he sometimes escorts parties of Britsh rail enthusiasts who photograph every train and note down its precise time of appearing and disappearing again. He is rather incredulous at this.

It seems we are expected to have lunch here. Our guide takes the orders: pork, chicken, or a ham and cheese sandwich. We start with pina coladas in the bar. Whisked coconut milk with pineapple juice, some rum, poured over a drop of grenadine. Two spoonfuls of sugar in the coconut milk.

We ask the guide what happens when Castro dies. I dunno, he says, nobody knows. Everyone knows, really, the place reverts to a Batista colony, with casinos, hotels, mucho dollars, and presumably the big American fruit companies moving in to take over the plantations.

The system currently is that every worker, including our guide, is required to spend fifteen days each year working on the land. That has surely got to go as the fruit companies will not want to subsidise what in effect must be a holiday for everyone who isn’t an agricultural worker. It’s a noble idea but must be an enormously expensive system.

We drink our pina coladas and eat our lunch of pork fillet or chicken leg with ‘Moorish and Christians’ as our guide calls it, and some potato. (The moorish may be a Freudian slip by the guide, less so for us).

We talk to two of our fellow travellers, Londoners of Polish extraction, a jolly solicitor from Sidcup and his wife.

Then back in the bus, down the motorway through the sugar plantations, then turn right onto a smaller road. Three towns on this road our guide tells us as we overtake smoking trucks laden with people, or with timber that seems to be not fastened on too well so that the truck loses bits along the road.

We come across a machine that is cutting sugar cane. The driver stops the bus and we are entreated to get out and watch. It’s an old machine and rather clanky, but the guide is obviously rather proud of it, or perhaps more likely he wanted to stop for a smoke (he doesn’t smoke in the bus, mercifully, probably understanding that to do so would severly restrict the size of his tip at the end). We dutifully watch the workers on the farm, they do not seem to mind this at all.

Back in the bus, along the road past ranchero type chaps on horses, and dressed in ranchero hats.

We pass a town next to which a river has been dammed. This is now a rice growing area. Since Castro decided that being a sugar field for the Soviet Union was a tactical mistake, he seems to have decreed that Cuba should grow everything and that’s about what it is doing. Cubans here up to their ankles in mud, planting rice.

The next town has three prisons. A first offenders, a high-security, and a women’s prison. Our guide tells us that people in prison are given education and rehabilitation, without being too specific about what that means, however he does suggest that the aim is to get them back into society as reformed characters. He tells us that Cuba has the death penalty by firing squad for high treason and murder where the case is a high-profile one. The irony of this does not seem to occur to him but then in a state where the press is essentially a government propaganda outlet it follows that a high-profile case will be the most severely punished, as the profile will in effect be a preliminary to the punishment, so justifying it on behalf of the authorities. Most of the prisoners, we are told, are inside for forgery. This sounds a possibility in a land of ration cards.

Then into Cienfuegos. Factory chimneys pouring black smoke into the air. Cuba has an oil problem, though currently gets a fair amount from Iraq, but the fires have to burn anything to hand, including sugar cane waste.

We pull up in the main square, where the buildings are all painted up and looking smart, the facades at least. Our guide tells us that this has something to do with Cienfuegos being the location of Cuba’s paint factory, but we notice a Vatican flag flying on one of the buildings so perhaps the Pope came here. Our guide says the check-in time at the hotel is 4pm and it’s now ten past, so we should spend a little time here before we go to the hotel.

We stand in the square and watch some children in mustard yellow uniforms; middle school, being given military style drill by an instructor, though somewhat chaotically. They are being watched by the primary school children, standing around in straggly groups in their red uniforms.

On some park benches, a book lesson starts, though doesn’t seem to last long. Only the teacher has a book and the yellow shirts find it hard to concentrate with the red shirts looking over their shoulder.

We take a walk down the pedestrianised shopping street, and we look in windows where they are selling Pope-meets-Fidel-Castro T-shirts. Some of the dark, grimy, haberdashery shops, plus some more westernised ones with their prices in dollars.

Back in the bus and down the peninsula to our hotel where. our guide inform us, we should get into dinner early as the place is full of French people and they eat everything in sight. This doesn’t sound like the French, but we find that it is true, the hotel is used as a package destination for poorer French families; our Caribbean holiday at low cost. The hotel lobbies are like a Jacques Tati film.

We go down to the bar before dinner and meet the bishop and his friends. All very jolly, we join two tables together and eat our dinner as a sevensome; sette personas, getting in before the French.

Not a very good dinner, self-service; rice, potatoes, chicken, pork, fish and a kind of beef stew. With beers all round we’re still chatting when the synchronised swimming display begins in the pool, so we move over with more beers to watch it. All a bit amateur, with dancing on the poolside and swimming with lifting-up-the-girls acrobatics. Quite a few people drift away but we stay until then end, when the girls come to the audience to dance with any men who would participate, and the boys too with any women would would agree. It seems that dancing with the audience is the done thing in Cuba.

The final act involved a girl wearing a hat, the purpose of which now becomes clear as she brings it round for dollars.

The story continues with Of Horse Buses and Paladars.

Of Horse Buses and Paladars

A Look at Cienfuegos, 27 February 1998

Yesterday we came to Cienfuegos. Today we take a look at the town.

The next morning and the group is going on an optional-extra trip to Trinidad, which seems to be a town with heritage value, like Havana. The trip includes a tour of a cigar factory and a visit to a ceramics workshop, ‘So if choo want to get some ceramics, choo can get the here’, says Alfredo our guide. Anyone want any ceramics? No.

It seems to us that Cienfuegos, notwithstanding its pall of factory-chimney effluent, looks like an interesting place in its own right, so why go from one interesting place to another for £40? And so Cienfuegos proves to be.

We start by walking down past old wooden houses to the end of the peninsula. Some of these wooden houses were once grand; they now look mostly empty. We speculate that one or two of them were used by Russian officials when there was a Soviet submarine base here, as they have a Russian look about them in parts.

The Russian influence is accentuated for us when the dustcart passes; on the back is a man whose job it seems to be to bash two empty Coke cans together and sing – this is the Cuban influence – the Russian influence is his furry hat; the temperature is probably in the 80s.

We walk back to our hotel, next to which is a Moorish-style house which was apparently a casino in Batista’s day, and which we are told we can visit for a dollar.

When we get there, some Cuban’s are getting married. From what we can gather, the old American car pulls up and out pop the guests to get the photograph taken in the grand house, then they drive away and the next one pulls up. One of the wedding parties appeared to be having lunch in our hotel, the bride in the lobby looking about 14-years-old and terrified, and mama looking pleased as punch.

We paid our dollar and had a complementary rum and coke from a plastic cup on the roof of the house, in the wind, watching the factory chimneys smoking and burning. Then Hilary went back to our room for a kip, feeling a bit low, while Penny, John and I walked to the marina, past a military boat base with a notice, amateurishly hand-painted: ‘Jamás Relinquados Nostres Principados: Fidel Castro’. Never relinquish our principles.

Back to the road where the driver of a horse-drawn bus shouts to us. OK, let’s jump on. And there, with two Cuban women in their bright pink lipstick, we rumble into town. Another Jamás Relinquados Nostres Principados, we are discussing the exact meaning of the words, helped out in her best English by the pinker-lipped of our two fellow passengers.

Cienfuegos is a town of very racially-mixed people. Some of them look northern-European, while others are dark black. Our helpful pink-lips has negroid lips but natural blond hair and a mulatto skin.

We get off the horse bus and wonder how much to pay the driver. He holds up one finger and we give him a dollar, which he seems very pleased with. The Cubans give him an unidentified bronze coin. We haven’t seen an pesos, but perhaps this is they.

Just before the bus let us off, I had spotted what looked like it might be one of those private restaurants, the paladars, with twelve seats maximum and serving, so the guide book tells us, by law only pork. Perhaps we should give it a try. I’ll go back and get Hilary.

I walk back to the hotel, past dilapidated houses, including ‘The House of the Pioneers, Nguyen Van Troy’, a name that meant nothing to me until I looked it up later, as Wikipedia tells us: ‘Nguyễn Văn Trỗi was a Vietnamese electrical worker and Viet Cong (National Liberation Front) urban guerrilla. He became known after being captured by the South Vietnamese when trying to assassinate United States Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara and future ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr. who were visiting South Vietnam in May 1963. (He was executed while remaining brave and so became something of a martyr.)

There was a fish restaurant opposite our hotel that had looked a possibility for lunch, but now it had a coach party of French tourists filing in. Cuba seems to be big in French tourism, presumably because it is cheap. The French do not seem to be greatly into the politics and history of the country, from what we have witnessed.

With Hilary, back into the street. Where’s a horse-drawn bus? No problem, if you’re a tourist with dollars, a driver curtails his lunch from a side street for us.

The horse-bus picks up some more people on its way into town, including a man who wants to talk to us, and a couple, the man of which shouts to the driver to stop at a ‘Rapido’ for him to buy a bottle of rum; his breath already smells a bit inflammable.

The man who wants to talk to us has a bit of a struggle, as he speaks only Spanish, and our Spanish is very barely existent. It appears he is not a Cuban, but we don’t quite get where he comes from, it sounds like it might be the Canaries. We give him an Oakdene business card which he seems very touched by, the horse driver too showing great interest. An advantage of driving a horse bus over a diesel one is that with the former you can turn round and cast your attention on what is going on behind you, for the horses know where to go by themselves.

(The man we gave the card to subsequently wrote to us. It turns out he was a trainee priest and was keen to make contact with people overseas to enhance his learning. Fortunately for the translation at the time I was working alongside two Mexicans. We exchanged a few letters and then the correspondence faded.)

We see Penny and John sitting on a bench and call to the driver to stop. We give him a dollar, which he seems well pleased with. Our new-found friend gets off the bus too, and before he does he gives us a crucifix, which he says in Spanish he wants to be a present by which we will remember him. He is, he explains, in a seminary, then he disappears into the crowd, glancing back as we show our crucifix to Penny and John.

To the paladar, which has tables laid, but the door is locked. We try the door. Nothing. But then a passing youth says: ‘You want to eat?’, and knocks on the door. A lady answers and does not seem to be too pleased with getting some customers but she lets us in. We try sitting in the table by the window but she beckons us to a table at the back of the restaurant, so the place will still look empty from the street. Her rationale, we surmise, is that we are now where the floor-standing pink fan is located.

It’s a bit hard working out what the lady is saying as her Spanish has a strong accent, but by pointing to the fish tank which happens to be in the room, she seems to indicate that we will be getting fish. Boyo or fileto? she asks. We don’t know, so we say fileto, just for the sake of choosing (and I still don’t know what ‘boyo’ is).

We ask for beers and ‘agua con gas’, which she doesn’t understand, though eventually she tries: agua, but pronounced with such a soft g that it comes out as a-wa. We nod our heads. She brings a bottle of water to show us. Si con gas pero. Ah! Con gas! And we get our fizzy water.

It is about an hour later that our meal arrives, served by a tall black man that we haven’t seen before. He speaks to us in French: ‘Where do you come from?’ ‘England’, we reply in French. ‘OK’, he says, ‘let’s speak in English.’

The meal he brings us is the best we’ve had in Cuba. Fried fish fillet; Moors and Christians with a slightly char-grilled taste to the beans; fried plantain, really sweet and tasty; and a plate of tomato and cabbage, the cabbage tasting like goat’s cheese for some reason, probably because it was grown next to the goat (that was our theory anyway).

We tell him this is the best meal we have had in Cuba and he wants to know hoe many we are comparing it with. He calls his wife to tell her the good news. How much? Normally my price is nine dollars per person; to you: eight dollars because I like you.

Before we go, he asks us which town we come from. ‘Cambridge’, I reply on behalf of Penny and John. ‘Ah! Cambridge’; he calls us back to sit down. It transpires that he was a gold-medalist rower for Cuba; he competed in the 1976 Montreal Olympics and in various pan-American games and in tournaments in Poland and East Germany.

Where did he learn his English? Ethiopia, he said, though why he went to Ethiopia was not clear; we decided that perhaps Cuban troops were sent there to help one of the Socialist fighting factions at some time in the past, though that would hardly have been a cause for such good English.

Our host was quite a travelled man, then, and, we were given to believe, quite a famous chap in Cuba. The reason he was so excited by Cambridge was the rowing connection. Our impression was that after we had entered the restaurant someone was dispatched to get him away from coaching at the rowing club, which is evidently what he had been doing that day, to deal with customers in the restaurant.

Our host proudly showed us his photographs – him receiving the gold medal: the proudest moment of his life; gaining the bronze at the pan-American games in Mexico: the saddest moment in his life.

So where did he gain his gold medal? He rather gave us to understand that it was in Montreal, but Cuba did not win a gold medal for rowing at that event. Cuba certainly won a bronze in the 1975 pan-American games in Mexico City, in the men’s double sculls. They have subsequently won gold in some pan-American and Central American games, but which of these applied to our host, did not find its way into my diary.

Eventually we got away from the history of rowing in Cuba. No signs outside his restaurant, what was it called? Ley Ley. The sign is inside. Perhaps outside signs are forbidden, they probably are. [I have subsequently searched the internet for restaurant Ley Ley in Cienfuegos,unsuccessfully.]

Out into the street, penny and John decide to return to the hotel while Hilary and I take a stroll. Look in some shops. See the people buying pizzas from a stall in the street. bring your own bag. The price is marked a $3.40 but that cannot be, the people buying would not be able to afford that, until we come to realise that the symbol for a peso is: $. How very confusing.

We pass the ice cream parlour, which has a queue with a bouncer at the door. You go inside, sit at a metal table on a metal chair, and have a waiter serve you your helados. There is a range of flavours advertised outside. Many of the people are with children. Having eaten your ice cream you leave and some more people are let in. There is an empty table. Is it waiting to be cleaned or has the bouncer just not noticed it; it is out of his direct line of sight.

We go into a clothes shop which, unlike most of the shops in Cuba, seems to be making a conscious effort to sell something. Shirts, T-shirts and dresses from Indonesia, China, Pakistan and Mexico. Cheaper than in the UK: $5 for a T-shirt, which we take it must be US dollars. The fashion-conscious of Cienfuegos are in here, looking. No-one buying but that may be chance.

Round the painted square and into a poor street leading to the military zone; we thought it looked like a park. People in the poor street not at all threatening just rather poor, though not starving; it’s mainly their clothes that mark them out as poor.

Alfredo our guide tells us that in the 1980s there was no unemployment in Cuba. Now the figure is 17 per cent. This sounds like propaganda. It’s too bland, you wouldn’t give such sweeping figures in Britain. Anyhow, it seems there is unemployment here. The people just off the painted square look like they may be part of it, though Cienfuegos is obviously a city with plenty of work.

Back alongside the harbour to the main street, we pass a rifle club. Youths walking in and out with guns in carry-cases, people milling about the door of the shed, and an occasional report of gunfire from within. Doesn’t feel too safe so we hurry on by.

At the main street we look for a horse-drawn bus to take us to our hotel. Some pass, but they are all full. Diesel buses pass too, including an ex-Dutch one with Hilversum still on the destination blind, but we have not seen any service buses on our hotel peninsula and it’s a long way to Hilversum.

The driver of a horse-drawn bus in a side street calls us over. ‘Jagua?’, he says. ‘Yes.’ ‘Dos dollar.’ ‘No, uno dollar.’ ‘OK, hop in.’ The Cubans have a long way to go when it comes to bargaining.

Our bus is drawn by two horses and has no other passengers, unlike the other horse-drawns on the road, so maybe this man is a bigger crook than the others look. It is not such a fun ride; the driver does not avoid bumps in the road and overtakes other horse-drawns with the power of his two horses. We are in a kind of sunken area at the back, with metal seats screwed to the frame rather than the benches that the other vehicles have.

The driver must believe that all this warrants dos dollars. He probably believes we can imagine ourselves as Tsar Petrovitch†. He probably believes that since we are sunk down in the carriage we have the advantage of avoiding the stink when the horse does a poo, for the horse buses fitted with a sheet slung under the horse’s tail, so that the horse’s dropping are caught rather than falling onto the road. This may be for fertiliser, or it could just possibly be a health regulation; either way it can be a bit smelly for the passengers in the bus.

† I’m referring here to the Percy French song, Abdullah Bubul Emir, that has a verse about:

Tsar Petrovitch too, in his spectacled blue

Rode up in his new crested car.

You sometimes see ‘spectacled blue’ written as ‘spectacles blue’. Ho, ho, ho. And I think that the people who write this are being quite serious

More comment on this song on my page: A Trip to Trieste.

Anyway we get there and give him a dollar he says: dos dollars, and rides off in a huff. We learn from John later that his driver too demanded two dollars for the return journey, it may be that the two-horse buses see themselves as a cut above the single-horse and expect more money for the privilege. Or maybe it’s pricing off demand. Who knows?

Drinks again with the bishop et al in the bar before dinner. A sevensome at dinner again, but we’re all a bit tired and in our case not at all hungry, so we each drift away after dessert. A somewhat sleepy meal.

A fresh contingent of French tonight it seems. Same old pork and chicken. Potatoes are nice; they have been in most places; they have taste.

The story continues with North by The Bay of Pigs.

North by The Bay of Pigs

To Varadero 28 February 1998

Yesterday we were in Cienfuegos.

Today a 9.30am bus, for we are going to Varadero.

We buy a painting from a stall in the hotel lobby. ‘How much?’ ‘20 dollars.’ ‘Weeell, I don’t know, 20 dollars, hmmmm.’ ‘Maybe I can give you good price.’ ‘Maybe.’ ‘If you buy my paintings, I can give you good price. This is one of mine.’ It is the one we have our eyes on anyway. I offer him 15 dollars. OK, he says, looking quite pleased. The Cuban’s certainly aren’t into bargaining. Yet.

Into the bus. Back past the prisons and the rice fields, then turn left into a narrow road where the coach has to manoeuvre tight corners in villages; we are going to the Bay of Pigs.

The bay of Pigs is an area of significance to Cubans for it was here that they repelled an invasion by mercenary soldiers backed by the CIA in 1962. There are shrines along the road to the Cuban soldiers who died in the fighting.

We stop by the roadside so we can get out and photograph the houses of the local farmers, we are told, though really because we are running a bit early I think, and or maybe solely because Alfredo needs a smoke.

The local people don’t seem at all resentful of us getting out of our air-conditioned coach to gawp at them, even with them having to jack up their ancient Russian tractor to pump a flat tyre. Little boys stand at the door of our bus and look in in awe and wonderment.

The farmers locally are given a plot of land and on it they build their own house. Alfredo is not too sure of the system here but in the cities if you are granted this privilege you get an architect, really a quantity surveyor, to identify what you need in the way of materials, how many bags of cement etc, and the government gives these to you and you build your own house. It seems you get time off work to do this, as it is necessary to help deal with the housing shortage.

We also learn that everyone pays rent for their house, or flat, but that after a certain time this rent expires. Then it’s yours to live in for nothing, though it still belongs to the state.

Electricity and water used to be free, but now meters have been installed and people pay for usage; a man comes round to the house, reads the meter, and collects the money (we do not raise the potential for bunces that this system offers, there’d be no point).

Alfredo also tells us about the system of fifteen days work on the land for each citizen. It’s a way of life, he says.

Then we drive though the marshlands. Very marshy both sides of the road. Apparently it is forbidden to drive this road after dusk, as there is too much danger from crocodiles when your car breaks down and you have to crawl underneath to fix it.

We arrive at the Bay of Pigs. This turns out to be rather a surprise as it is a kind of 1950s holiday camp built by and for Canadians. Obviously it can’t have been built in the 1950s as it was presumably not there in 1962, but it is not new, that’s for sure. Rows of concrete bungalows. Now a scuba diving centre.

The beach at the bay is a nice beach, with good swimming, but just offshore is a row of concrete posts topped with concrete slabs, and the sea breaks over a concrete barrage, so that from the beach you can only see the ocean through rather small gaps in the structure. We are told that this is to make the beach safe from swimming against barracudas and sharks, bit it seems rather overkill for that.

Again we are stopped to kill time. We sit on the beach and are pestered by a drunk and a simpleton, speaking in Spanish but probably incomprehensible in any language. Essentially they want a dollar, but don’t get one.

Into the bus again, in time to get to a crocodile farm for lunch, 45 minutes early. Alfredo takes the orders for lunch: pork, chicken or ham and cheese sandwich. Oh, sorry, no ham, it will have to be a pork and cheese sandwich.

We look around the pen holding some crocodiles, then go into lunch.

Two gay men have joined our party, they are on the Jules Verne Costa Rica and Cuba trip, and we talk to them over lunch and make friendly contact. Before we arrived at the crocodile farm our guide announced that there may be mosquitoes about, and the two gay men immediately got out their insect-repellent spray, up and down their arms. This prompted one or two other people in the bus to get out their spray and start spraying.

There don’t seem to be any mosquitoes about, at this time of day.

Back in the bus after lunch, to drive north to Varadero, through extensive plantations of oranges, grapefruit and bananas.

Every few miles there are boarding schools, each built the same; a classroom block, two stories, and a dormitory block, three stories. None of them looks occupied at all, but Alfredo tells us that once children have outgrown their yellow trousers they go off to boarding school. Every day, in addition to lessons, they spend three hours working on the land under the instruction of farmers.

Agrarian economy. What do the children do in the evenings in these remote camps? No clear answer. Why do the places all look so deserted? We don’t know.

We reach the brow of a hill and look down over Varadero. More flaming and smoking chimneys.

The locality gets more industrial, and then we drive onto the Varadero peninsula

The Varadero peninsula is just ghastly; hotels, pizza, Chinese, hamburgers. It is a thin peninsula with effectively just one road in, so the high-spending tourists can be kept well away from the bulk of the population and they can all have a wonderful time seeing home-from-home in the sunshine. Or sort of, as there will be a fair number of Cubans employed, servicing these foreign tourists, so the separation is not with 100 per cent of the population.

We arrive at the hotel to find we cannot book in as it is full, a party has been delayed by a broken aeroplane and is having to stay an extra night. After some worried looks and negotiation by Alfredo we learn that we have been booked in up the road; a more luxurious place but a bit out of town.

We get in there and it is just obscene. At breakfast, in this country where eggs are rationed to seven per person per fortnight, there is a sculpture on the buffet table, of two life-size swans made entirely out of butter.

Canadian, French and Spanish tourists mainly, they will see nothing of Cuba. They will drink rum punch and lie on the beach. You can’t really go anywhere from here, it is twenty kilometers to the start of the peninsula.

At brfeakfast there is just about everything you could want, even including green beans (if that’s what you want for breakfast) but a couple of Spaniards have their own jar of olives on the table, though there are olives on the self-service spread, some mixed with frankfurter and carrot, rather oddly, but rather like the Brits who take in their suitcase jars of tomato ketchup so that the food on holiday will be palatable to them, these Spaniards had their own jar of olives.

The whole thing is just awful, but we sit on the beach, we swim in the sea, and we look around the shopping centre where we can buy Benetton and Gucci if we want, and it’s just awful.

On the path from the hotel to the beach there are palm trees, and out of a hole in one of the trees on our way past we see partly extended and peering, a small grey snake. The people pass with their beach towels. They don't see it. Not looking.