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Published: January 27th 2007
My promised “10-12” hour journey from Havana, to Santiago de Cuba in the South East of the country actually took 16 hours!
Cuba is Long! It’s longer from tip to tail than the British mainland and my journey was similar to London to Aberdeen.
Not much to say about the journey really. We travelled first along an empty motorway, stopping at a few places on the way, and then the roads got smaller and more confusing as there were no sign posts.
From my bus window, I saw countryside and towns full of tiny, dirty houses with as much poverty as I’ve seen in India or in those parts of Latin America in the “US Empire”.
I finally arrived at Sofía’s house at 1.30 am, four hours later than predicted. She seemed non-plussed.
Had a lie in the next day.
Sofía is very pleasant. She lives in a first floor flat right in the centre of Santiago with her husband and two children, aged 10 and 14. Sofía’s father showed me up onto their roof terrace with a view down to the harbour and of the cathedral.
It is noticeably hotter here than in
Havana (where it was cloudy every day and there was always a breeze). I felt quite lethargic all day.
In the afternoon, I visited the Museo de la Ambiente Cubano. It’s the oldest residential building in Cuba and I’ve got to say I was quite impressed!
There are lots of
jineteros here, especially around Parque Cespedes, the main square. One guy tried to change a Scottish note with me. I was suspicious, so turned him down but regretted it later as he would have had no other place to change it. I also had people trying to change Euro coins. It’s not so helpful when tourists give locals tips which they can’t use or change without hassling other tourists.
Inevitably, there are also loads of prostitutes. And they are not shy! They will shout at you from the other side of a busy street.
From Sofía, I’ve been getting a very different view of life in Cuba from Geraldo’s.
A conversation about the Soviet-era air conditioning unit let to her telling me how her husband, an surgeon, works long shifts and earns only enough to pay for the electricity bill. It’s clear the family earn way
The CDR
The CDR (Committee for the Defence of the Revolution) is a neighbourhood watch scheme devised to root out counter-revolutionaries.more from being a casa particular. They are lucky to have a spare room and live right in the centre. I walked through some outlying parts of town today where no tourist would want to stay...
Talking about Cuban TV, she said “Oh, there’s nothing worth watching: only news and education”.
As a middle class family, I suspect they’d love the opportunity to live abroad for a while, earn some money and see the world.
The next morning, I went to visit the Museo Emilio Bacardí Moreau. It was founded by the creator of the famous Rum dynasty (exiled since the revolution). It even had an Egyptian mummy. Of most grizzly interest were the slave-era exhibits. There were stocks used for public amputations to punish wayward slaves and a “Palo mata negro” (“Kill the black stick”).
I then headed to the west of town. The “Reparto Vista” area used to be very desirable and has loads of colonnaded mansions which are now falling down. There were two museums I wanted to visit here.
I visited the Casa de las Religiones Populares, in a spooky old mansion. It contained just a couple of rooms and showed
Casa de las Religiones Populares
Fascinating mix of Catholicism and African belief systems. some of the home grown religions developed by the slaves, which combined African beliefs with Catholicism.
I got caught by a
jinetero who I couldn’t shake off. A guy helped me to find the place and I wanted to give him 10Ps which I felt was fair. He refused this, ended up giving me a tour of the museum (which from what I could make out he hadn’t been to before) bounced me into getting my fortune told for CUC10 and then demanded CUC3 for his guiding.
I eventually got rid of him and visited a TV and Photography museum. There were some fascinating bits of old equipment there and an unusual picture of Fidel in an Native American headdress.
I finally found the last museum: the Centro Africano Cubano. I got given a guided tour and was not charged anything. I actually wanted to give them something, but didn’t know how. I really can’t get the hang of this!
Santiago was one of the important places of the revolution. In 1953, Fidel Castro and his chums stormed the Moncada barracks. They were unsuccessful that time, but given that they won in the end, it is
now glorified and is a museum.
There were exhaustive details on the attack and on the nasty Batista regime which the rebels rightly fought against.
That evening, I watched “Mesa Redonde” (“Round Table”) a one and a half hour “debate” on Cuban TV. It was nothing of the sort, consisting of people sitting round a table and giving monologues on various subjects.
- That day’s victory of the Sandinistan Daniel Ortega in the presidential election in Nicaraguaand celebrating it as a victory for the “left”. This was accompanied by repeated readings of a statement issued by Fidel (who has made no public appearances since the summer). It didn’t dwell on Ortega polling only 38%!a(MISSING)nd it being a free election, something that doesn’t happen in Cuba.
- The US mid-term elections where the Republican Party got a kicking.
- Hugo Chavez’s campaigning in the Venezuelan elections. No other candidates were mentioned at all.
- Slagging off Australia for being a “pawn” of the USA (for attempting to add an amendment to tomorrow’s UN vote - see below - saying that the U.S. measures were motivated by “valid concerns” about the lack of freedom in Cuba and calling on Havana to release political prisoners).
For me, it was good Spanish
practice and culturally interesting to see what TV is like in this country. However, it would be very tedious to live here. I’m glad Sofía knows it’s all propaganda and pays it little attention.
There is background music on TV News articles. You may see some long article showing noble peasants working on the land and there will be pleasant piano music. Then, footage of George W Bush will randomly appear and the music will get darker, like Darth Vader has just entered the room before going back to show the Ewoks (sorry, noble workers in some factory!).
That was my last night at Sofía’s. She has another booking from tonight, so I moved to her friend’s flat just along the road.
The next day, I found the Museo de la Lucha Clandestina, which I wanted to see. It was closed for renovations, yet all the staff were still there. This is a country with no unemployment, but with lots of people paid to do not very much. Typically, when you do visit a museum here which is open, you buy your ticket from one person, then hand the ticket to someone standing next to them, who
tears it.
I had a siesta and watched the TV news. Today’s big story was the annual (this is the 14th year) debate in the UN General Assembly on the US embargo against Cuba. Every year almost every country in the World votes against the embargo and then the vote is ignored. I had difficulty finding
any news about it at all on my return.
This year, only the USA, the Marshall Islands, Israel and Palau voted against.
I do sympathise with Cubans here, but it is very tedious to have a half hour speech given by the Foreign Minister shown twice in one day.
Santiago is the second biggest city in Cuba: quite a bit smaller than Havana. It’s one of the country’s oldest and used to be the capital. But it’s been playing second-fiddle to Havana for a long, long time now. There is a fair bit of rivalry between the eastern and western parts of Cuba. The east (el Oriente) feels that more money is spent on the west. The wars of Independence and the Revolutionary war all started in the east. I wonder if change in Cuba will come from this way in the future?
I quite enjoyed
Run-down villas
In the Reparto Vista Alegre neighbourhood of Santiago. my time here, but four days were enough.
The next day, I went over to Sofía’s house as she’d asked me to come and meet her new guest, Pat.
Pat is about 70 and is in Cuba for six weeks to learn Spanish (with the same company that sent me to Havana).
She’d had a nightmare of a time when she arrived at the airport the previous day. She’d been ripped off at the bureau de change, had money (possibly) stolen.
I was able to help her at the police station. We had to go to some special police station out in the suburbs which we would not have found had we not got a taxi (and then got our taxi driver to do the hard work of finding the place). It took some explanation to get a police statement typed up on an old East German typewriter.
That afternoon, we got a taxi out to the “Moro” fort out at the mouth of the bay. It gave a fantastic view of the sea and mountains! It looks impressive, but apparently was captured by an English pirate called Christopher Myngs who found it unguarded.
There was an interesting museum of piracy there. In Britain, we have this romantic view of pirates, but for Cubans, people like Jaques de Sores and
Henry Morgan were menaces. Towns had to be fortified against them and they were the cause of much death and misery.
After that, we went to the holiest site in Cuba: the Church of the Virgen de la Caridad at El Cobre. It commemorates a figure which supposedly saved the lives of some sailors.
It is a picturesque site, but what most fascinated me was inside. On a table, was a table protesting the “New” prisoners of conscience in Cuba. There was a printed card from Amnesty International listing many current prisoners in Cuban jails; as well as many handwritten notes and photographs from families. We were gobsmacked! This is the only piece of dissent I’d seen in the whole of Cuba.
Pat is very interesting. She lives in Carmarthenshire with her husband and son of my age. She works as a freelance economic analyst and is just about to publish a paper on the vulnerability of the UK’s food supply. It makes for very scary reading...
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