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2013/14 - Sunshine, Cigars & Sombreros
Jose Maria Olazabel from Baracoa!
Leaving Trinidad behind we had a 12 hour bus ride eastwards to get us to Sandiago de Cuba, the country´s second largest city, which is closer to Haiti and Jamaica than it is to Havana.
We haven´t mentioned the Cuban revolution yet and Santiago isn´t a bad place to start as it was here in 1953 that it all kicked off. Living conditions in the 1950s for the majority of people here were very poor - there was a chronic housing shortage, a corrupt government (Batista) and Cuba´s wealth lay in the hands of a few extremely wealthy land owners. Fidel Castro, a lawyer by profession but a dissatisfied army seargent at the time who, after developing support for radical change, led an attack by 120 rebels on an army barracks in Santiago. We visited the barracks, which houses a small museum with the usual bloodied clothing of those who died and the instruments used to torture them and around the entrance arch you can still see many bullet holes. That first attack was unsuccessful partly because the rebels were mainly from Havana and some got lost and separated on the way to their target! Castro and a few of his men escaped to the nearby mountains but most were arrested and tortured. Details, including photos, of the torture were published by the government as a warning to any others who might have been considering similar action but this backfired and served only to increase popular support for change. The revolution was completed six years late in 1959, with the support of charismatic Che Guevera being added in 1956, and it was in Santiago that Castro announced the news to the people of Cuba. The army barracks mentioned earlier was converted to a school as were most of the other barracks across Cuba.
We met an English couple in Santigao who had been travelling in Latin America for a year. They had two weeks to go and had had a great time. We stayed up until the early hours talking to them and exchanging stories and information. It´s from chance encounters like this that travel plans not yet made can start to take shape. We were pleased to hear that they´d really enjoyed Mexico (our next stop af the end of Dec) and have a few recommendations of where to go.
Baracoa was our next stop, a further five hour bus ride around the eastern most point of the country and passing through the town of Guantanamo, most infamous for its US detention camp which, not surprisingly, does not welcome tourists. Baracoa is on the Atlantic coast and is quite unique in Cuba as it couldn´t be reached by road until the 1960s - today there is only one surfaced road in and out across the mountains that surround the area which made for a spectacular and interesting journey. The town is famous for growing cocoa and has its own chocolate factory, opened by Che Guevara in 1963. Another factory makes a local speciality called cucurucho which is a tasty mix of roased coconut, honey, dried papaya and mandarin orange and is packaged in environmentally banana leaf cones, two for 60p.
On our first full day we went for a walk up El Yunque, a 575m hill visible in the distance which Christopher Columbus first saw when he arrived in Baracoa Bay in 1500 and something. To get onto the path we had to wade for 10 minutes across a river that was above waist height at times. The path was very slippy with wet clay, tree roots and rocks to contend with. El Yunque is in a National Park so we had to have a guide with us - ours was called David and he told us a lot about his family and especially about his two years in the Cuban army when he was sent to fight in Angola during the 1980s. As we climbed in the mud and heat we were able to pick and eat bananas and mandarin oranges from the trees. Later we had a strange but nice hot chocolate drink made from locally grown cocoa mixed with coconut milk in a wooden shack where a whole pig was slowly being roasted on a bamboo pole over an open fire (we had already heard that many rural families kill and cook two pigs a year so this must have been a special occasion, maybe in preparation for Christmas.
We also did another trip out to the Yumiri River Canyon about 20 miles south of where we were staying. When we arrived there was a commotion under the river bridge so we walked over to investigate and learned that an illegal c*** fight had just finished. Out in the river itself we saw three fishermen armed with spear guns who were returning with their catch tucked into their waistbands. We got a rowing boat upstream to where the canyon walk started and saw that a little Dachshund, the unofficial national dog of Cuba, had followed us a distance up the river bank and, where this ended had jumped in to swim the remaining few hundred yards. We discovered that his name was Theo and assumed that he attached himself to tourists taking the boat ride and trek each day. He stayed with us for the next hour or so, happily chasing off any wildlife and eating some of the coconut that was cut down from the top of a palm tree for us by a local man who shinned up the tree without ropes or harness and in bare feet. Health and safety concerns are few in Cuba!
In Baracoa we stayed at the best Casa Particular so far, an old colonial house about two streets in from the Atlantic. We knew by now that Casas more often than not offer better food than in the restaurants (a lot of the restaurants are still Government controlled and so service can be a bit indifferent and prices higher than in the Casas) and it has been in Baracoa that we have had by far the best quality and variation. Typically we have been paying just over 5 pounds for a Casa meal which includes soup, salad, main course and fresh fruit. Lobster, which we think we have mentioned before, is also available at an exhorbitant surcharge of one pound 30. Turtle was also offered to us but having launched a newly-hatched one in Sri Lanka many years ago, we couldn´t bring ourselves to try it. The portions are quite generous, so much so that we´ve cut down to one meal between the two of us which is more than enough (although not when Linda is confronted with anything in coconut sauce as a main course!) We haven´t eaten meat for well over a week now as the fish/prawns/lobster are so good. We´ve also discovered a local version of creme caramel which is delicious. But it´s not just about the food - by staying in a Casa we get the chance to talk to the family and to get a better idea of how they live and how conditions are for them now, more than 50 years after the revolution.
The song that will remind us of our time in Cuba and which we hear about five times a day is Vidar la Vida (Live your Life) by Marc Antony. Tony thinks he looks like Marc Antony but the only similarity is the name!
Nos dejarlos temporalmente con neustro habitual mejores deseos que usted esta bien.
Love from Tony and Linda xx
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