Reaching Moa, Cuba: the beautiful and the ugly

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This is what I would have posted December 27-28, 2014, had we had Internet access in Cuba...



I gaze through the open window, my hair blowing like a child’s in the back seat of the small, boxy Lada. We pass through pasture land where the largest herds of cattle I’ve seen in Cuba graze. In Cienfuegos we’ve been unable to buy beef and I wonder if the people here can buy it or if it is all shipped off to resorts along Cuba’s north shore as I’ve heard. About halfway to Moa, we pull off the road and park on a rise beside a tienda. James returns from the small store with bottles of water. Our driver braces the rear tires with stones and crawls under the car; his friend hands him tools. After a bit of banging, he kicks away the stones, invites us to jump in, and takes off as if trying to make up for lost time. The landscape changes and the large agricultural fields become small plots. Vendors along the road hawk onions, bananas, and, to my surprise, apples, which I haven’t seen anywhere else.

At Moa, our patient driver searches for a casa particulare, stopping to ask a string of people who shrug and shake their heads. We drive around, circling through the centre of the sprawling town. Finally, someone points us toward the harbour and after two or three blocks we see a sign. We’re lucky, Yegsi has room for us.

We are clearly off the proverbial “beaten track.” James buys a hamburger and kola and pays with Cuban Convertible Pesos; the change is in the people’s pesos. We find a table near the bridge and notice how the bank of the stream is eroding. The back verandah of a house across the way has begun to pull away and seems about to topple into the water. The bridge, too, has been supported with logs and a twisted metal cable.

This is not a place that travellers visit. We are an oddity on the street, earning glances from those we meet. The town seems old, tired, and impoverished. The streets run with reddish puddles following the slope to the harbour. Yet there is beauty too. We pass a small alcove sporting a blue frieze of a raised saxophone player framed by rod iron, an invitation to jazz. Across the street, we wander into an impressive art gallery, and down at the red-tinged harbour we find children playing on rocks and a young man who asked if we have a daughter he could marry so he can come to Canada. There is no future in Moa, he tells us.

Yegsi serves platters of delicious food: chicken marinated in freshly-squeezed lime, onion, and spices; rice; a platter of beautifully arranged coleslaw, tomatoes, and cucumbers; a side dish of fried plantain. This feast will be hard to surpass. Delicioso. Yegsi lends us her cell phone to call our friends in Baracoa; we arrange to meet them at the casa at eight in the morning. Then we decide to stroll once more through the neighbourhood before tucking in for the night. In the fading light, we turn toward the mountains and see a scar spreading like disease down the mountainside.

Moa is in partnership with a Canadian company, Sherritt International, to mine nickel laterite. Iron is one of the minerals in laterites, which accounts for the red dust coating everything in Moa. It tints the earth and the water of Moa and makes the place look as if it is rusting. The mining-scar down the side of the mountain, looks like an open sore against the green background of Alejandro de Humboldt National Park, a United Nation designated world heritage site. The park is over seven hundred square kilometers with elevations of over eleven hundred meters. Endemic plant and fauna species are protected. The promise and the reality of the site appalls me. If the industry was in Canada, rather than Cuba, I have no doubt that a clean-up of the environment would be underway. Tomorrow, when our friends Alber and Delmer pick us up in the old, blue Ford jeep, we will get our first glimpse inside Humboldt and then happily we will return to Baracoa.

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Photos

A two-dimensional blue frieze announces music; James takes a rest. Photo: Kathryn MacDonald©

Between the centre of Moa and the harbour, we popped into an impressive art gallery. Photo: Kathryn MacDonald©

Happy children play on rocks at the harbour. Photo: Kathryn MacDonald©

The harbour, like the streets of Moa, is drenched in rusty iron. Photo: Kathryn MacDonald©