Cuba Si
Cuba Si?
In this episode, Ryan…
-gets blessed by a shaman in a Santeria ritual
-goes fanatic at one of the world’s zaniest rivalries of béisbol
-bumps and grinds his way to libertad in a Havana nightclub
You might be asking yourself, “What the hell is Ryan doing in Cuba, I thought he was finishing his Masters.” Well, you’re right, I should be doing my Masters, but since my advisors have disappeared on me and I’ve learned that thesis work basically amounts to pissing in the dark, I deemed once again that I could learn more from hopping on a plane to foreign lands rather than reading theory… and once again I was proven right!
It all started last Christmas break at the King’s Head Pub in Winnipeg, when my friend Megan—a midwife and capable of explaining what exactly the hell a midwife is in a bunch of different languages—proposed to a group of us that we should all head off to Cuba in February. Mutual friends Ray and Jill had already done so a couple of years ago, and I paid lip-service to the idea, thinking—as has been the case of most idle travel plans I’ve made with friends in the past—that no voyage would actually come of this seemingly whimsical aspiration. To my surprise though, Megan contacted me near the end of January wanting to confirm flight details. Now at this point I probably should have done the responsible thing, but I had just had a week from hell involving a dumping, a huge quarrel with my boss, and a nasty case of food poisoning from some shady shawarma which ended up ruining my birthday and its intended concert. So I told Megan, to hell with it, I’ll go to Cuba with you.
So we went to Cuba. Now at the time, the cheapest way we could find to reach Cuba was by snagging one of those all-inclusive deals on Sell-off Vacations.com. Now, let me start by saying I’ve never really been an eager pursuer of all-inclusives and in fact hostels are more often than not just fine by me, but in Cuba’s case it was considerably cheaper to buy the all-inclusive than to pay for flight and hotel separately. So we swallowed our independent tendencies and headed off to Sunbeach resort. We flew Cubana airways which I soon learned had a poor safety record (yay!), although for some reason the flight to and from Veradero was on an aircraft painted with “Flair Air” colouring. Now, I had never heard of this “Flair Air” before, although the Air Transat necklaces suggested to me that it might some sorta quasi-independent company drawn up by Air Transat so they could fly to Cuba without getting dinged by the American embargo. At any rate, the flight down there wasn’t too bad, although it felt like the pilot was showing off on the way back with hairpin turns and a corkscrew landing… and to think I was sick before the flight began. Oh well, one Albertan couple we met said their plane bounced off the runway before landing for real. At any rate, we did land safely in Veradero at a small airport where we were greeted by a couple stern-faced but short-skirted Cuban border control ladies who after they gave us our paper visa (separate from your passport so Americans won’t get in trouble when they return to the US) and then it was off to the hotel.
Once in Veradero, we were taken to our 3-star hotel, which compared to the digs I had grown accustomed to in Europe seemed extravagant. Called Hotel Sunbeach, it was fairly clean, the food was decent (and occasionally traditionally Cuban), and I only saw one tropical cockroach. Incidentally, if you’re wondering what traditional Cuban food is like, sometimes referred to as Criollo (Creole food) or Uruguayo food (Uruguayan-don’t ask why Cubans have this identity crisis), it often involves things like ropa vieja (“rope-like” or pulled beef), copious amounts of pork (they really put the “ham” in hamburger), and my favourite los cristenos y mores (the Christians and the Moors, basically white rice mixed with black beans.)
Some people said the resort areas restricted access to Cubans—something called “tourist apartheid”—but when I looked out my front door, right across the street were hundreds of weathered but lived-in looking Cuban homes, so if you wanted to meet real Cubans it could be done in Veradero, although they would probably ask for your hat or wet towel and try to sell you a cigar. The hotel supplied all its food, drinks, and entertainment (ie. Nightly dance shows) for free, although the open bar proved a harsh mistress to many of my associates. On the up side, I learned how to say “I’d like a cuba libre with dark rum and a little lime” in Spanish.
As for the beach, it was across the street from the resort, and deserving of its reputation of being the best beach in Cuba (presumably, although we didn’t visit any others). Now, I enjoy a beach as much as the next guy, but no matter scantily clad Cuban women one might find there, I can only spend a day or two at most just beaching it. That said, it is a nice beach, and not as tourist-laden as I had expected (definitely wasn’t as saturated as the much wimpier beaches in the south of France) and I most certainly enjoyed taking a spin on the old Hobie Cat while Megan befriended the well-built Cuban life guards. Still though, we only spent a couple days in Veradero, give or take a jeep safari (or should I say “heep safary?”) through rural Cuba and culminating with a swim in a flooded cave.
Ultimately though we had chosen Veradero for 2 main reasons A) it was cheap and B) proximity to Havana (or as the Cubans call it Habana). Havana is by far the largest city in the Caribbean and is a place unlike I’ve seen before. Once quite the haven of sin and extravagance, Havana’s once booming waterfront looks tired and weathered from years of Castro’s efforts to create an egalitarian socialist utopia (whether or not he succeeded, that’s open to debate). Say what you will about Castro’s or Batista’s regimes (I’ve heard plenty of arguments for and against), the Cubans are such a talkative and expressive people that I doubt anyone could effectively limit their freedom of expression.
Certain icons of Cuban culture are just as ubiquitous here as they are in the rest of Cuba, although you’re going to find them in concentrated amounts. This means plenty of short-skirted latinas and well-built latinos, kids playing bottle-cap baseball with sticks in the alley (a plastic-bottle cap is the Cuban equivalent of a wiffle ball), and of course the ever-present classic American cars from the 1950s held together with (occasionally) new paint jobs, rust and duct-tape, and the Caribbean work ethic and Cuban optimism and know-how.
As with the rest of Cuba, you won’t find much advertising here, save for the occasional ever-so-subtle dose of anti-American propaganda. What you will find is a bunch of people wandering around at any given hour, and throngs of people on the market strip of Obispo which just so happened to be where our casa particulare was located (a casa particulare is a Cuban version of a bed and breakfast, in this case run by a couple named Juan and Margarita). The casa we stayed on the 5th floor of a building, which below had a clothing store and a series of Juan’s relatives. Margarita wasn’t there when we there, but Juan was, and as chatty as my friend Ray and had suggested (Ray had recommended this particular casa particulare). A retired engineer, Juan lamented how bizarre his country’s economic situation was. In a presumably socialist country, they had not one but two circulating currencies the Cuban National Peso (which was designed to be used by everyday Cubans) and the Cuban Convertible Peso (which was designed to be used by tourists). One is 25 times less valuable than the other, I’ll let you guess which. Still though, my guide book at suggested I could save money by using National Pesos, so I took 20 dollars worth of them and tried it out, only to find that as a foreigner I could only seem to spend them on peanuts, and since I didn’t really want to eat THAT many peanuts I was practically giving them away by the end of the trip. Juan also said that he made for more in a month running the casa particulare than he ever did as an Engineer, and far more than what was average for a doctor, a teacher, or a host of other highly trained personnel. He had been to the US once to visit family (apparently Cubans could do this) and enjoyed reading the Globe and Mail and the Toronto Sun, although I never thought to bring one.
The first day in Havana was museo day, and we checked out la museo de la revolucion and a cigar factory. The Museo de la revolucion (the Museum of the Revolution, in case you needed that translated) was basically Cuba’s National Museum of Propaganda which very creatively finds means of blaming the US for all of Cuba’s problems since the Spanish-American War (which apparently Cuba was just on the verge of winning on its own, before the US stuck its nose in). While I can definitely appreciate the US’s tendency to screw around in foreign countries when it shouldn’t, I think it goes a bit far to blame them for the introduction of Dengue Fever to Cuba.
One interesting thing that happened at the Museum was some form of summit meeting between Cuban and North Korean diplomats which for some reason was happening on the day we were there. Intrigued by this up close encounter with one of the most mysterious and tightlipped regimes still left in the world, I decided to try and take a picture or at least talk to some of the North Koreans (the women were all in traditional Korean dress while the men wore Soviet-style military uniforms with over-sized hats that suggested they were compensating for something). I think one of men caught me trying to get the attention of the North Korean women, and he gave a suspicious glare so I smiled and said “how its goin?” then remembered that he probably didn’t speak English. He looked at me funny, then smiled and nodded and when back to watching some guy go on about how awesome Kim Jong Il is and I tried to take a picture but another short-skirted Cuban security woman intercepted me.
After the Museum we hit the cigar factory, one of Megan’s must-sees and I’m glad she suggested it. Now, I don’t smoke, but Cigars are such a part of Cuba’s cultural identity that you have to at least give them a look-see, and I must say this factory was an interesting one to say the least. Housed in a century-old building, it employed hundreds of employees, rolling and packaging cigars by hand (everything was by hand, no robotics in this factory). Although I wondered how healthy it was to handle so much tobacco on a daily basis, the Cuban workers did seem more or less content with their job and apparently they did occasionally bring in entertainment, although I think I’ll shop my resume elsewhere. I did end up buying cigars although not here, but at a grungy storefront in Veradero where a man happily sold me a cheap package of Relobas after he got up from his siesta.
In exchange for going to the factory, I insisted Megan accompany me to a Cuban béisbol (baseball) game. Now, I knew Cubans were fanatical about baseball (the number of kids playing it in the street being but one sign), and it just so happened that Juan informed that the top two teams in the league, the Havana Industriales and the Santiago de Cuba uh… Wasps I think, were playing each other that night at the Estadio latinamericado. Now, the rivalry between these two teams—representing Cuba’s two largest cities—is legendary, think Montreal Canadiens vs. Toronto Maple Leafs, Saskatchewan Roughriders vs. Winnipeg Blue Bombers, New York Yankees vs. Boston Red Sox, now add all three together, double that, and put them on crack, and that’s how off the hook the stadium was that night.
Not only did the stadium sell out, but it was half full of Industriales fans and half fun of Santiago fans (both of which had a cold war of how enthusiastic they could get). We sat behind the Santiago bench, and the crowd was so stoked that even so much as one of their players made it to first base everyone would be on their feet chanting what I can only presume were derogatory songs and cheering as though they had just won the national championship. You don’t even want to know what they did when someone hit a home run.
Highlights from the night include the stadium bathrooms (think stadium bathrooms in Canada, then remember this was in tropical and often run-down Cuba. Effectively they were like rusted troughs with god knows what organisms evolving over the course of an inning. Mmm smells delish!), at least 2 or 3 intentional beamings, the fact that the game ended in a tie at 1 am and they had postpone the whole damn thing and do it all again the next night. Probably best of all though was El Mascoto, which for Santiago consisted of a dude wrapped in a thin layer of taped on cloth, a tattered cape and a hood, a bella clava, and a whistle. Looking like a last-minute Scarecrow Halloween costume, El Mascoto would pump the crowd—cuz Lord knows they needed pumping—by boxing the air with his fists, blowing his whistles, and intimidating the other bench through a series of pelvic thrusts.
The next day we visited the Yoruba cultural centre (a museum about Cuba’s African population and their traditional beliefs) and El Museo de Ron (no, not the museum of some guy named Ron, but the Museum of Rum! Hell yeah). Sugar cane never tasted so sweet (except that time we went up river into the Cuban jungle on the jeep safari on these drug-runner type boats and cranked fresh sugar cane out of the stalk). Of course, I didn’t buy my rum there, but at a rum shop in Veradero where it was cheaper and where I got to try a sweet 7 year-old Cuban rum called Legendario, which was probably one of the smoothest rums I’ve ever had the pleasure of drinking (sorry Newfoundland Screech, but you’ll always have a place in my heart).
That night would be our last night in Havana and we had still not really appreciated the crazy underground nightlife this colonial metropolis had to offer. We started off the evening by investigating some noisy drumming on Obispo which turned out to be a Santeria ritual on the second floor of a building. After watching a Shaman who reminded me something of a Caribbean Snoop Dawg dance about and sing in Spanish a blind beggar approached me beseeching funds so I dropped one of my useless peso notes in his box, thinking it was only fair to pay my respects for being allowed to observe their religious ceremony. Of course whether giving this guy 20 national pesos was ridiculously extravagant or ridiculously cheap ass I’m not sure (I was never good at calculating the value of that bloody currency). One things for certain though, as soon as that 20 peso note dropped, the ceremony stopped and the shaman and everyone else starred right at me, the dumbass tourist with camera in hand. The shaman danced over to me and before I could do anything, he ran his hands up and down the left and right sides of my body like some sort of Santerian airport security guard, before taking off inexplicably to the back room for what I can only imagine was some form of coffee break. Seeing my dumbfounded look, Megan—who had spent 8 months living in Tanzania, although she said this had nothing to do with Santeria—explained that I had just been blessed. So I said, “okay” and we decided to leave the ceremony in peace.
After stopping at a few places for supper, including one place with the archetypical Buena Vista Social Club type band we decided to try our luck at the deservedly scandalous Havana night clubs. Apparently, before Cubans can dance (and Lord knows they have such difficulty dancing), they have to be entertained by what our guide-book referred to as “karaoke” but which would be better described as the Politically Incorrect Drama-Comedy Variety Especial with the ever-present Scantily-clad dancers! After that wonder was finished, the dance floor opened up. Shy at first after a busy day, I soon regained energy after a cuba libre and two and after an agreement to refer to each other as hermano and hermana (brother and sister), we hit the dance floor. I lost track of Megan although I’m told she was quite successful in my insistence of her taking on a campaign of seducing Cuban men, while I somehow found myself with a Cuban MILF (not sure what the Spanish word for cougar is) on either hip who promptly introduced me to their daughters to the point where I’m pretty sure I bumped and grinded with the entire double X chromosome section of an entire Cuban family to such classics as the Numa Numa song and Girl I Want to Make You Sweat. Good times, at one point a Cuban gentleman stopped me and said “What the hell is your fucking problem?” to which I presumed he meant I had gotten a little too close to his girlfriend, although it later turned out he was passionately opposed to my drinking of a rum and coke instead of beer. As for what happened between me and the Cuban ladies all I can say is what happens in Havana, stays in Havana, and occasionally spills over into the streets.
Now then, so what else did we do in Cuba? Well we rode the Hershey train back to Veradero (the Hershey Train is a dilapidated old streetcar system that originally serviced one of the Hershey Chocolate companies sugar cane processing centers before Castro kicked their American ass out and turned into a trans-urban transportation system.) I say trans-urban, but the vast majority of stops featured a single glorified bus shelter in a field in Cuba’s equivalent of the middle of nowhere, still it was an interesting ride and a great way to meet Cubans although don’t be surprised if one of the train conductors tries to get you to send him a Pentium III hard drive from Canada. One thing I should mention about Cuba, as one of the only major areas of concern (other than the difficulty in finding cheap reliable Internet access) is the constant presence of jinteros/jinteras (ie. Hustlers) who will target you like the tourist you are and often not let go until you elicit the assistance of sympathetic Cubans (which we had to do on 2 separate occasions). That said, as long you can be firm with them and learn to keep them at bay, Cuba ain’t so bad. Of course, we did go back to the resort for a few days where we met a group of young Montreal entrepreneurs (including one interesting gal who sells homemade gothic dolls), Toronto’s Cuban girls-gone-wild wannabee contigent, and a collection of Russian air traffic controllers visiting Cuba in the hopes of attaining a romantic vacation from their wives.
posted by clomy @ 5:25 PM
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