Twenty Captures From My Travel in Cuba

June 6, 2016
Caribbean/Central America, Cuba, Photo Essay

“It must have changed so much!”

That is what nearly everyone I know has said to me since I returned last week from my travel in Cuba working with Espiritu Travel. Of course this was my very first visit and so I don’t know for sure but…I don’t have the sense that it has changed in the way people think it may have changed. Of course nothing is static. No place is static. Culture is a process, not a thing. But I didn’t have the sense that Cuba has undergone dramatic changes in the past few years. What I did sense is that Cuba is on the cusp of dramatic change. Massive change. But it just hasn’t happened quite yet.

In Baracoa, on the extreme east coast, I talked extensively with a young woman who said plantively: “Cuba will never change!” She is 23 years old. I told her that it was my opinion that by the time she is 30 years old Cuba will be a totally transformed country. For good and for bad. I told her that I think she is about to live through something huge. She wasn’t so sure. Time will tell

Here are twenty shots from my recent (May 2016) travel in Cuba….

Friday evening. Santiago de Cuba.

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Havana. These girls were racing up and down a covered promenade in Havana’s old center. No boys allowed! Several boys were watching but none participating. Everyone put much more effort into the race after I asked them if I could photograph the contest.

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Havana. Note the water delivery truck. I’ll discuss that more below.

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Everywhere the joke is told in one form or another about how Cubans will eat anything and everything. It’s a bitter joke. It comes, I think, from the 1990s which was a terrible time in Cuba when there was precious little to eat. In the east I asked a fisherman if there were crocodiles in the river where he was fishing. “There were until we ate them all,” he said. “Now they all stay in Florida where they are safe from Cuban stomachs.” The Malecon in Havana is not only a place for lovers and painters and partygoers but also for fishermen. This man was on the rocks below the Malecon casting his net for sardines. I asked if there was anything bigger he could get. “No. The big fish know to keep a safe distance from Cubans!” he said.

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I stood on a crowded corner in Havana trying to decide if I was lost or not. Around me were dozens of these plastic sunflower bouquets and folks weaving in and out of them and around my bewildered self. This guy called out to me and told me he was the plastic sunflower bouquet merchant and would I like to buy one? I declined and then he said that I should take a photo of him with his flowers. I did. Then I showed him the photo. He was happy with the shot and that was that. Then a truck pulled up and a bunch of ladies jumped down and gathered up the plastic sunflower bouquets and put them in the truck. “Big sale?” I asked the man and he just shrugged. The bouquets were gone and he was still there and that was that.

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Evening on the Malecon. The roadway and promenade was built in three stages beginning in 1901. The final section was completed in 1952. It is an amazingly wonderful place to just chill out and people watch.

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On a very rainy afternoon in eastern Cuba (closer to Haiti than to Havana) we came to the Yumari River where it drains into the Bahia de Matanzas and met a man they called the ‘little goat’. He was taking beer and some clothing to a woman up the river…I think…it was kind of confusing….we paid him to take us too. The Yumuri drains the rain-soaked mountains west of Baracoa. Along the way we saw small herons, huge colorful crabs and bats braving the rain to fish along the river. Once the delivery was made to the woman standing in the river we made our way down to the mouth of the watercourse but had to hide out for awhile under the trees sheltering the river when the rain came in sheets. I’ve read in several places that visitors should avoid buying the colorful Polymita snails that hawkers push on you at the river’s mouth. I guess the snails have been harvested to near extinction in the past few years for sale to tourists that travel in Cuba. Most likely it was the rain that kept them away but there were very few hawkers when I was at the Yumuri.

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Of course it wouldn’t be me if I returned from a trip to anywhere without bird photos. I present you the Tocororo or Cuban Trogan. This is Cuba’s national bird, chosen so because it’s colors mimic those of the national flag. Espiritu Travel’s expert nature guide Rainer pointed out this guy in Topes de Collantes Nature Reserve in the Escambray mountains north of Trinidad.

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And this is the ‘little farter’. El Pedorrera. Officially he is a Cuban Tody. There are five Tody species in Cuba. They are related to kingfishers and seem to be pretty common. I sat and watched this guy dart out and capture insects one after another. Why El Pedorrera? The little farter? I think it’s the rapid fire ticking call that sounds a bit like machine gun flatulence. A bit. That’s if you’ve ever heard machine gun like flatulence…..

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Local spearfishermen return from a successful hunt along the coral reefs near Baracoa on Cuba’s extreme east coast. Baracoa was easily my favorite place. A small town ringed by mountains and blessed with daily downpours and a cool evening breeze, Baracoa reminded me of my town of Taos, New Mexico. Edgy, artsy, extremely diverse and even a tad bit mystical somehow.

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Thursday evening in Santiago de Cuba. The streets are full of music and kids playing soccer and people chatting from doorway to doorway and dogs running up and down. A man walks by carrying a fish. Another man tinkers in his car. A woman hands a bag of bread through a window to a friend. Two viejos share a bottle of rum. Life is on the streets in Cuba. And it’s colorful. The man on the right asked me why I thought it was worth a photo and I told him in large part it was the colors. We don’t have houses painted like that in New Mexico. “Well you should,” he said. Perhaps so!

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The boys of El Cobre. About 20 kilometers from Santiago de Cuba in the foothills of the Sierra Maestra sits one of Cuba’s most important Catholic shrines, El Sanctuario de Nuestra Señora de la Caridad del Cobre. Sitting next to the copper mine that gives the impressive church its name the structure rises on a hill overlooking the valley. Cubans come from all over to ask for protection from the Virgin of Charity. As the legend goes, the wooden statue that represents Cuba’s patron saint saved the lives of three fishermen caught in a hurricane in the Bay of Nipe in 1611. The men grabbed a hold of the statue and stayed afloat through the storm, eventually making it safely to shore. These boys purchased votos that were blessed by a priest just inside the door and will be offered to the Virgin in hopes of healing a sick family member.

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Football (soccer) on the streets of Baracoa in eastern Cuba. What I really wanted to see and photograph was a cuban baseball game. The only game I saw however was being played by military personel near Havana and there were signs all around the field making it pretty damn clear that taking any pictures would not be welcomed.

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These two cowboys walked up the cobblestone streets of Trinidad and into a throng of Chinese tourists wearing surgical masks and latex gloves. Each Chinese tourist held an unwieldy paper map. The cowboys were silent and polite as they passed through the crowd and then turned a corner and burst into laughter. Then they stopped, did an about face and went back to the corner and just watched, seemingly enthralled. We were all watchers. The Chinese watching the Cubans and the Cubans watching the Chinese watching them and this American watching all the watching. I snapped a photo of the Cuban watchers and turned to find another Cuban watcher, a woman with a child, watching me. We both cracked up laughing. Tourism can be insane.

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A container ship passes under Castillo de San Pedro de la Roca (El Morro) at the mouth of Santiago de Cuba’s bay. Santiago is Cuba’s second largest city and an important port. Santiago is also one of the oldest European cities in the Americas and was a hot target for English and French pirates, which is why the imposing fort was built in second half of the 1600s. It is now a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

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The chefs of Restaurante Venami in Havana. This paladar (see below) is a literally a tight squeeze being so narrow but is worth your time and effort. I had the pasta, which was perfectly cooked, but the real reason these guys are making a mark is with the thin crust pizza. Skip the more well-known and touristy Italian places in Havana and land at Venami. At least once. Cause then you’ll go again.

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The rooftops of Bayamo. Cuba has water problems. At one point, much of Cuba possessed an impressive potable water delivery system. But as in the USA, it is falling apart. Like us, the Cubans aren’t investing in their infrastructure. Unlike us however, Cuba has little money to invest. A statistic I heard several times (but have not confirmed) is that about 45% of the water pumped in Cuba is lost due to broken and leaky pipes. Then there is the severe drought that has hit much of the country the last few years. The Cuban government says that about 70,000 people in Santiago de Cuba are supplied by water trucks. About that same number are dependent on truck delivery in Havana. Cubans store water in whatever they can find, including these large rooftop tanks that double as a way to get pressurized water into your house. The casas particulares I stayed in always had running water and nice showers…although I admit I felt guilty for any shower that went on longer than a minute. In the evening, the water truck came and this man pulled out a generator so the truck could pump the water right up to his rooftop tank.

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Trinidad.

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In Playa Larga on the Bay of Pigs there is more or less a hole in the wall on a back road out by a bunch of farms and next to a swamp and really not too far from the bay. Pass through that hole into the friendly, cool restaurant of Don Alexis. Stick your hand out and you’ll find it filled instantly with a delicious….and strong….mojito. When Alexis asks what type of fish you’ll want for lunch you may have to take what the fishermen are bringing off that bay at that moment. Over the past six years, guys like Alexis have been able to work and save money and open their own private restaurants known as “paladar“. In America we think of private restaurants as the norm. But not so in Cuba. This is a new test thanks to Raul Castro and the private establishments are blowing the government run restaurants out of the water both in price and quality. The Cuban paladares are the places I had some of the best food of my life. Seriously. And of all the amazing places I ate while in Cuba, Alexis’ paladar took the cake. So to speak. Or the red snapper as the case may be. Anyway, there is nothing quite like it.

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