Unforgettable Cuba

Darkening skies and evening humidity greeted us at La Habana. Anxious moments passed as we negotiated a somewhat primitive process of retrieving luggage then a considerable delay until the large packages containing our bikes finally reached the arrivals hall. Our guide was waiting; tall, dark, athletic and very welcoming. As we wound our way across the city, I peered from the bus through barred windows and doors. Bare walls, simple furniture, unlit streets, and everywhere there were people, lounging, mingling, talking, walking, making their way across broken pavements and dirt tracks. By contrast, our shiny tourist hotel offered us some semblance of controlled comfort with air-conditioning humming us to sleep.

The morning brought breakfast, fresh tropical fruits, bland cheese, a strange selection of spicy food, and machine-brewed coffee of the worst variety. A group briefing, bike fitting and a short ride by the coast watching turkey vultures wheel over the rocks was followed by lunch and a walk through central Havana. Monstrous concrete blocks remain from the ‘Russian’ period, hovering over more stylish colonial remnants. A project to repair, refurbish and rebuild the waterfront is underway. Behind lies a web of narrow streets and weakened structures where the final collapse of housing creates a space for a new enterprise…a ‘secured’ car park in the empty shell.


As we left the capital by way of the popular Malecón it seemed that many of the crumbling buildings there were still occupied despite evident decay. Because of their proximity to jobs in the city, families will tolerate poor and crowded conditions just to stay close to the centre. Many classic cars patrol the city, some are taxis and remarkably well-preserved for tourists, others in rattling disarray for hard-pressed habernos.

Outside the city lies a vast open rural Cuba where cycling provides a perfect pace to explore. Increasingly we took to our saddles, tested our legs and unwound.

Transportation is a major problem for this struggling economy; workers squeeze into all manner of bus and truck to reach work. Horse drawn carts mingle with those ancient classics and bici-taxis carry passengers over shorter distances. Choking acrid fumes are the single worst aspect of being overtaken by large vehicles…fortunately it didn’t happen constantly. Long stretches of open and empty road swallowed our pedalling energy, scattered with political slogans, small family dwellings, various sub-species of palm trees and crops…mostly sugar cane and tobacco line the routes. Small towns, comprised largely of box-like state-funded houses, with roadside vendors and sleepy dogs are hives of human activity. Uniformed children play in school yards, workers wait for the next passing vehicle.

Men and women walk slowly with bags of provisions or wait by their gate until someone shows interest in the fruit laid out for sale on a rickety table.
Raw meat hangs in the air at the roadside butcher's hut or slouches on rough wooden boards waiting for purchase. Often there are people repairing something in a garden, or crawling into and under a broken-down vehicle. Inevitably there are appreciative calls to passing European women, an offer to swap bikes, even an invitation to abandon the bike and share a seat on his horse! It felt good-natured and unthreatening. Dogs usually ignore passing cyclists. The only pair of yapping hounds to set out barking in my direction was distracted at the open gate by a squawking flapping chicken while I escaped unscathed.

Towns generally bristled with people whatever the time of day. They seemed to hang around in doorways, or gather in small groups on corners or neat public parks. I struck up a conversation with a few jubilados playing dominos in the park where we stopped but when they invited me to join in the next game my complete absence of strategic thinking was exposed!




We walked in the Sierra Maestra, wooded mountains where Fidel and his revolutionary soldiers could vanish into thin air to evade Batista’s forces…and were welcomed into the home of an elderly farmer...for an authentic Cuban coffee and yet another chance to hear the shortened local speech patterns as he explained some of the changes in Cuba. Recently Cuban TV has begun to broadcast a range of educative programmes, language tuition, science and other subjects. Scheduling is staggered through the evening and morning to give working people opportunities to watch and learn. Emphasis on educational opportunities is strong, lots of slogans on bus-shelters and school walls remind anyone who might have forgotten that children represent the future of Cuba and they must be educated. University courses are highly valued and tuition is free; many students travel from abroad to study medicine after a single year studying Spanish.

Political slogans are everywhere…urging that everybody must work hard, the truth must be defended, the fight must go on…quotes from Fidel or Ché Guevara on hoardings and houses or even small placards in gardens. Slogans encircled the interior walls of a cigar rolling factory while at the front of the factory floor was a microphone on a table next to the sparse pages of Granma (órgano oficial of the central committee of the Cuban Communist Party reporting on local and world affairs from a Cuban perspective) ready for the factory supervisor to read to the workers, feeding their brains while they continued to roll, press, glue and pack ugly tobacco-brown cigars for domestic sale.

Cuban society is hightly regulated, tightly controlled under the directions of Fidel for so long that much of the population have known nothing else. Now that his health is deteriorating and his strength fading, Raul is showing a lighter touch, but he has little in the way of resources and outside influences are strong. In the past people have banded together and made a contribution though there is a strong element of ‘they pretend to pay us and we pretend to work’. Consumables and technological advances are in short supply and expensive; the few electrical goods we saw had woeful energy efficiency ratings.  Subsidised food and household commodities are available in bodegas in each neighbourhood at lower than open market prices but allocated according to strict personal rations . Oil is decanted from a large container into a litre bottle, then funnelled into an empty container brought by the customer. Even a flimsy plastic bottle has intrinsic value. Huge casks of azucar crudo wait, uncovered and small flies feed on scraps on the simple counter…it’s an uninspiring place to shop but essential for survival for the majority. Some feel it is time for more change…whatever lies ahead, it will be different.

We’d read that we should expect some inconveniences…limited menus, cold showers and power cuts but with so many distractions their impact was minimal. In fact, the only power cut coincided with our final dinner together which transformed it into a magical candlelit occasion. Next day we heard that the blackout had nothing to do with the island’s legendary power supply problems, but was caused by a truck collision bringing down the lines. Nobody told us the full details, but next day we passed a badly damaged truck, one of those crude public transport trucks we’d so often seen packed to the doors…

So many things to notice and remember…that first warm salty swim in the Caribbean, the bathroom invasion of frogs, upbeat rhythms and dancing in Trinidad,   the markers of revolutionary fervour in Santiago de Cuba, lobster, and the absence of lobster, breakfast spreads of fruit and thick sweet guava juice, ripe bananas and sliced green oranges from the support van, topping up with water and more water along the way, watching out for the rest of the group…alternating between speeding freely at the front, chatting in the middle and stopping for pictures from the rear, snorkeling over a small reef dotted with colourful fish and spectacular life-forms, bold iguanas on the beach, drinking freshly pressed cane juice, first-aid by the (un)level crossing, accompanying another cyclist to the public ’clinic’ to buy some medicines, discovering new levels of stamina, enthusiastic bautistas encouraging us to join their evening gathering,  impulsively buying a beautifully marked helmet shell…then trying to clean out it’s smelly debris, cafe cubano and mojitos, piña coladas, daiquiris, cuba libre…

And all the time detaching from the every-day stuff of life at home.

Perhaps that’s why it’s not easy to re-engage…