Cuban Diary 3

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Time has flown by and I realised that I hadn’t sat down and written for well over a month. I have been reliably informed that summer has hit the UK so I thought it might be safe to write again without making you all too jealous of the beautiful weather we were enjoying while you suffered the cold. Especially now because someone here quite rashly turned the thermostat up in Cuba and we are finding it hard to do anything during the day because of the heat. We know that it will only get worse so are trying to adjust to the inevitable. Of course, there are perks to the weather change - we are officially entering mango season and they are popping up everywhere, big, juicy and cheap. And the heat gives a good excuse to stop in the shade of roadside stalls wherever possible and have a mango or guava shake.

My Spanish classes have been trundling along and would you believe that I am now in the Advanced class. While I do like the ring to ‘Advanced’ it is unfortunately an inaccurate description of my level, as I am still having trouble understanding most people outside my classroom because they speak so fast and drop half the syllables. Although, I am getting better at faking understanding and piecing together the few words I do understand to nod at the right moments.

Olga’s studies were quiet while our parents were here but things are going really well now as she has just secured two interviews this week - one with the widow of an important photographer she is researching and another with one of the most famous directors in Cuba. She says that if these come off then, (along with the two-week Biennal on Havana they had here last month), her whole trip will have been worth while, something that she has been questioning a lot due to the frustrations she has encountered. She has also heard from her university that she has been accepted for the transition from MPhil to PhD. Now she has to send them a schedule of how she will complete her PhD and is trying to come up with some creative ways of presenting our coming two month odyssey in Mexico. I can think of worse problems!

When I last wrote my mum and step-father were setting off on their three week trip around Cuba. They returned to Havana just before the last week of April glowing, having had an amazing time. They stayed with us here in Havana for their last week and for the first weekend they were back we travelled with them to Vinales, a beautiful mountainous area three hours to the west of Havana. The limestone mountains rise up sheer out of the plains, and look very similar to the mountains in southern China and northern Vietnam. The town of Vinales itself is like a little wild-west town. Wooden houses with porches run the length of the main street, and Guajiros (cuban cowboys) with weathered faces, cowboy hats and machetes trot past on horses and horse buggies. We stayed in a really friendly Casa Particular (private house) and found a great guide called Marilynn to take us on a hike to one of the non-touristy caves in the surrounding mountains. Olga and I came back a day earlier than mum and Richard because Olga’s parents were arriving for a week.

This would be the first time that our parents would meet and we thought that because neither set of parents spoke the other’s language and it would be tough for Olga to translate, we would arrange just one evening that we would all spend together. When they met the first night however, they all got on famously. I found I could do much more translating than I thought and Olga’s mum spoke a lot more English than we realised. So we landed up spending all three evenings together going out for meals and a few shows. It was also really nice that I could do more than nod and smile at her parents, managing to have what would definitely pass as conversations with Olga’s mum. All this study has paid off after all.

Both our sets of parents left at the end of the month, unfortunately just missing the May 1st celebrations here. May 1st in Cuba is a national, state-organized event celebrating workers and is centered in Havana, with millions of Cubans bussing in to the city to the Plaza of the Revolution to hear Fidel sharing a few thoughts. The event was all through the day on Monday but we had heard that the Havana university students were having a big party in the university grounds on the Sunday night and were going to party until 4pm when they would then start a march around the city that would end at the Plaza in time to hear Fidel speak at 8 or 9am. Now that is revolutionary party spirit. We thought that it was only right that we joined them, although as it turned out, it was just for the party bit, not the march (well, if you have to make a choice).We danced until 4pm and then went home for a nap until 7:30am when we roused our drunken heads to get ourselves down to the Plaza just in time to hear Fidel’s voice crackle across the speakers. It was surreal in the huge plaza with everyone wearing red and most people waving Cuban flags, and seeing the bearded commandante himself at the podium, expounding as if he had literally all the time in the world. The students however were quite clearly flagging, lying all over the floor paying scant attention to Fidel’s pearls of wisdom.

In amongst the crowds there were a lot of Venezuelan and Bolivian flags, symbols of the new compact between the three countries (called the ALMA) which had been strengthened just the day before when the three leaders had met in Havana. Following that meeting, on May 1st the new president of Bolivia, Evo Morales, announced that all the natural gas and other natural resource contracts would be renegotiated so that the majority of the profits (about 80%) went back to the Bolivian government. The US and big multinationals are definitely not happy about these new actions of independence and things are definitely hotting up in the region - US warships recently ran ‘training exercises’ near to Venezuelan waters and Chavez is speaking out ever more boldly against the US. If the US wasn’t in such a mess in Iraq I wouldn’t be surprised if things didn’t deteriorate into some sort of conflict very soon.

More to follow..(apologies for no photos here because I sent these photos to my dads, so will have to post them later)

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