Castroville

Central America Caribbean » Cuba
January 16th 2016

Published: January 16th 2016

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Dr Jon

Fidel and Che ride again

Debra wanted me to title this "Gay Caballeros".

Havana

The plan to go to Cuba was hatched with my cousin exactly one year ago. But she had no memory of the evening when I told her I was ready to book flights. Maybe it had been the liquor talking. No matter. I called my most reliable friend.

"Jerry, Cuba?"

"Sure."

A month later we were strolling down Malecon, Havana's waterfront promenade. All along its eight-kilometer length huge waves crashed against the seawall, sending tall sheets of water over the sidewalk and well into the street. Passing pedestrians were dripping. Windshield wipers were wiping, and across the broad boulevard construction workers repaired storm-damaged buildings.

We turned up a random street and allowed ourselves to get lost in Centro, Havana's mostly densely populated district. Tall, once-beautiful buildings, now windowless, some roofless, house 170,000 people living off of government rations and anything they can hustle. The narrow streets were crowded with horse-drawn carts, 60-year-old cars, chickens, drunks, kids, vendors, prostitutes and Santeria priests dressed in white robes. We passed open doors and peered into tiny dark rooms inhabited by kids, parents, and grandparents. In one doorway a man solemnly dripped blood from the neck of a headless

Euphoria

Girl in the yellow hot pants shakes her boom-boom to live salsa music.

chicken while a woman chanted. A man sitting in front of another doorway proudly bellowed at us: "This is the REAL Cuba!" Jerry smiled and said, "I love this."

In the evening we returned to our rooms in the Vedado district, where the famous nightclubs used to be before Castro made them all move to Las Vegas. Our rooms were on the first floor of an old Spanish-style house with a veranda, tiled floors, tall ceilings, and pink and green walls. The house --well, at least the first floor-- belonged to our hosts, Leo and Ivelis. (Maybe "belonged" isn't quite the right word. Jerry and I had a tough time understanding Cuban property rights. Apparently when Castro came to power he told everyone they now owned wherever they lived, but that they couldn't ever sell.) Like most Cubans with reasonable houses or apartments, Leo and Ivelis rent spare rooms to tourists, sort of like AirBnb. In Cuba these quasi-legal businesses are called casa particulares.

Jerry and I each spent an entire day sitting on the Veranda of our casa. In my case I had to recuperate from a cold caught a few days before I left the US.

Santeria Priestesses

Will cast spell for money

A day later Jerry was having stomach issues. The night before we had gone to a government-run restaurant a few blocks from our house. After 9 PM the place transformed into a night club, so the interior was dark with black walls; disco balls hung from the ceiling, and music videos thumped from a big-screen TV. Judging from the couples at nearby tables, it must have been take-your-granddaughter-to-dinner night. I ordered the most expensive thing on the menu, a $12 chicken dish, wrongly assuming that more expensive meant more better. Instead, I got a platter with enough chicken to feed four people. Jerry ordered a $5 filet mignon, wrongly assuming that it wouldn't make him sick. (Whether we ate in restaurants or private homes, we were usually served the same meal—beans mixed with rice and a bland slab of pork or chicken resembling the sole of a boot in both shape and tenderness. No sauces, no spices. Nothing green.)

On Jerry's day to recuperate I visited Vieja, Havana's old colonial quarter. I saw an architectural riot of forts, plazas, palaces, churches, and cafes. I saw a cruise ship anchored in the harbor where the battleship Maine sunk. I saw

Free phone calls?

Entrance to Cuba's coolest jazz club.

tour groups following Hemingway's footsteps. I saw so many images of Che Guevara that I thought I was back in 1960s Berkeley. A crowd danced in the street in front of a cafe where a band played Cuban son music. A stunning girl with licorice-colored skin and wearing yellow hot pants shook her butt like she had a motor in it.

Around another corner a woman stopped me and asked if I spoke English. "Please, sir. No chica. No mafia," she assured me. In Spanglish she told me that she needed milk for her two children. She dragged me into a dingy government-run grocery store where I ended up buying $10 worth of powdered milk for her. (Yes, I made sure I saw her leave the store with the milk.)

I brought a bottle of Havana Club rum home to Jerry and made him listen to my adventures. He liked the story about me buying powdered milk the best.

A few blocks from our house I had noticed a long queue of people waiting to enter a Dr. Who style British phone booth. At first I figured maybe this was like the phone booth in my freshmen

trancing

Jazz Trance performed on our second visit to the Jazz Club.

dorm that someone rigged so that people could make free phone calls. After a few inquiries I learned that this was the entrance to an underground jazz club. In fact, it was the entrance to Cuba's best jazz club. By 10 PM Jerry was feeling a bit better and so we joined the phone booth queue. Inside, a narrow stairway led into an elegant room with low redwood ceilings. About 20 tables surrounded a small stage. Everyone was excited because the great Cuban jazz pianist Roberto Fonseca would be performing that night. We were joined at our table by a Norwegian saxophone player. I thought he was trying to impress us when he said that his greatest musical influence was the famous American saxophone player Michael Brecker. But then Jerry casually trumped him by announcing that Michael Brecker had been his childhood friend.

Fonseca and his band were fabulous. One memorable piece was a Bach fugue played with such energy and speed that it was transformed into a modern jazz piece.

Vinyales

Is Roma the Fellini film with the scene in which archaeologists accidentally open an ancient catacomb? As the air rushes in the paintings on the wall

My new pal

I befriend the drag clown.

immediately begin to crack and fade. The archaeologists must race through the halls to glimpse each painting before it disappears forever.

Sitting in a dirt-floor cantina in rural Vinyales, listening to a couple of guys sing, watching the mix of tourists and locals pass by, Jerry and I could almost see the last flicker of unself-conscious innocence fade from the native faces like the faces in those paintings. Like the archaeologists, we were racing through Cuba ahead of the rush of tourists who will start arriving when direct flights from the US begin in a few months.

That night in the town square we watched young men with greased-back hair moving to salsa like snakes. They wrapped around their oafish middle-aged gringas like boa constrictors around cows. No doubt this was the culmination of the salsa lessons we had seen advertised on every lamppost in town. Or maybe the culmination would come later still that night.

The next morning we hired a meaty cowboy named Carlos to guide us into the Vinyales National Park on horseback. The park is a valley surrounded by plug-shaped mountains with steep red cliffs and green forested tops. The mountains are made

Malecon Maelstrom

Wave exploding against the Malecon seawall.

of limestone, so there are lots of caves to explore. Beyond a few tiny farms, the valley floor, called Valle de la Silencia, is wilderness.

We first rode to a tobacco farm. At a rough table in the drying shed a young rail-thin farmer rolled a few cigars for us. Jerry and I would spend the rest of the day photographing ourselves with cigars clenched between our teeth like Dirty Harry.

We stopped at an organic farm for some mango juice. The farmer put a bottle of rum on the table in case we wanted to add it to our juice. It was 11 AM, a bit too early for Jerry and me to think about drinking rum; not too early for Carlos, though. He quickly drained his juice then twice refilled his glass with rum and drank it. When he reached for the bottle a third time I firmly suggested that we should get back on our horses.

Back on hoof, Carlos began singing loudly. Jerry and I reminded him that we were in the Valley of Silence and singing probably wasn't allowed.

Back in our casa we saw a poster advertising Vinyales's prehistoric rock

survivor

I survived another scuba dive off the coast of Playa Ancon.

paintings. Before Columbus, Cuba had been inhabited by stone-age people. Maybe these paintings had been done by them, sort of like the cave paintings in France. We hired a taxi to take us to the site. When we got there we saw that the entire face of a cliff had been painted with gigantic images of dinosaurs in bright colors. We paused at the base of the cliff. I asked Jerry how the colors could be so bright after thousands of years. "Never mind that," he said. "How did they know about dinosaurs?" A short while later we noticed a sign that explained that the paintings had been done a few decades ago by a student of Diego Rivera, and that the subject matter was prehistoric, not the paintings themselves. Later we would meet others who had also been suckered into paying the entrance fee to see the "prehistoric" rock paintings.

Trinidad

Most vehicles arrived in Cuba in two waves. During the 1950s the first wave brought Fords and Chevys from the US. In the 1970s a second wave brought Ladas from the Soviet Union. All of these cars are still in operation because cars are very valuable. By

caveman

Lots of caves to explore in Vinyales. I snapped this photo moments before Jerry cut his leg on a stalactite, or maybe it was a stalagmite. I can't remember which.

stuffing a car with people wanting to go somewhere the owner can make in a week what he would earn in a year from a government job. Diesel fuel (the gas engines have long-ago been replaced by diesel engines) can be purchased from government truck drivers who siphon off unused fuel at the end of each day and sell it. Everyone in Cuba has a scam. Everyone.

We hired a "taxi" to drive us six hours from Vinyales on the western tip of Cuba to Trinidad on the southern coast. The taxi was an ancient van that looked like it had started life as a completely different kind of vehicle before a welder got hold of it. Twelve of us plus the driver sat on four rows of benches.

At the halfway point the fat-faced brutish driver pulled over and told us to get out. Apparently more taxis would arrive at this spot to take us the rest of the way, maybe. All of this was in Spanish, so Jerry and I didn't have any idea of what was going on until the locals in the van exploded with rage. They screamed at the driver in rapid-fire Spanish.

Time to get ill

Jerry in the waiting room of a clinic in Trinidad.

The driver screamed back. There were wild hand and arm gesticulations. "This can't be good," Jerry calmly whispered.

Eventually several smaller taxis arrived. Jerry and I got in one with a French couple. I sat in the front seat. The driver didn't speak English but managed to communicate that we had another four hours of road ahead. Each time I fell asleep the driver playfully nudged me and said "No suenyo." No dreaming. I hated this guy.

Situated on the more tranquil Caribbean side of the island, Trinidad is a 500-year-old Spanish colonial town that time forgot. It's filled with old plazas surrounded by beautiful old buildings. Horses pull carts down cobblestone streets. What is the deal with cobblestone streets? Did the inventor set out to create roads that would rattle wagons and twist ankles?

After dropping our packs off at our casa we wandered through a sad fiesta marking the beginning of some sort of culture week. Street venders sold beer, greasy chicken, and creepy red dolls. Drunks jostled us. The music was loud.

We found a nice restaurant and I had a lobster. Jerry still wasn't eating, so the next day we found a

Cuban gas station

Diesel fuel comes from truckers who skim unused portions at the end of each day.

Clinica Internationale. We sat on a threadbare couch in a dimly-lit waiting room. An old TV in the corner was showing a Christmas-day NBA game. The doctor called Jerry into her office while I had a halting conversation with the security guard about basketball and Michael "Yordan".

A short while later the doctor led Jerry into the pharmacy and I followed. She gave Jerry some antibiotics then asked if I wanted anything. "Condos?" She said, and started laughing. I turned red. Jerry's pills didn't work.

La Salida

I spent my last morning in Havana wandering through the Colon Necropolis, Havana's City of the Dead. This was something Jerry wanted to do, but he was still feeling sick. I found the tombs of Ibrahim Ferrer, the singer for the Buena Vista Social Club and Jose Capablanca, the Cuban world chess champion. I found the tomb of Amelia Goyri, the Miraculous One. She died in childbirth and was buried with her baby at her feet. When the bodies were exhumed years later they found them uncorrupted, and the baby was now in her arms. The tombs made me feel sad.

The taxi driver who took us to

smoke this

Luis rolls a Cuban fatty for us "just the way Che liked it".

the airport was the same one who picked us up at the airport a week ago. Apparently I was the only one who thought this was miraculous. He told us that he was a lawyer who made his real money by driving. On the way to the airport he told us that the lifting of US sanctions was very important for Cuba, but that Castro was his father. Fidel paid for his kids to go to school and to see doctors. He was proud of Cuba's socialist experiment and didn't want to see it ruined by the coming wave of US tourists and products. Jerry leaned over the seat and said, "You guys aren't ready."

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