roads of stone » Cuba

241. Cuba 4: Cienfuegos – a pearl endures

Roads — Fri, 01 Jul 2011 06:33:12 +0000

Daybreak, 250 km east of Havana.

The sun is rising languidly above Cienfuegos as I take in the view of architectural wonders from the hotel roof.

Far below me in the city’s famed central square, Plaza de Armas, stands a fine statue of José Martí, most inspirational of Cuba’s great nationalist heroes.

The square is, quite simply, stunning.

Alongside the classical lines of its cathedral, theatre and town hall — all adorned in white — stands a billboard to Martí’s spiritual successor, Che Guevara.

Tu ejemplo vive — tus ideas perduran:
Your example lives — your ideas endure.

The colonnaded streets of Cienfuegos would thrill any aficionado of Hispanic architecture.

How rare it is to enjoy a World Heritage Site without any other tourists — and with just a few ageing Ladas and Polski Fiats for company, I run easily down the long boulevard stretching out towards the water.

Just before the causeway, I find another poster — urging the youth of Cuba to stand united for the cause. Further on, a billboard proudly describes Cienfuegos as La Perla del Sur, the Pearl of the South.

The ornate and sumptuous villas lining the bay road to Punta Gorda tell of this town’s affluent past, reflecting Cuba’s riches a century or so ago.

The city is still a centre for sugar, coffee and tobacco. And Fidel Castro has a house in this city, down on the waterfront in one of the finest villas of them all.

Story has it that El líder maintains a residence in Havana and in each of Cuba’s 15 provinces, so that he can be at home wherever he spreads the word of this most enduring of all socialist revolutions.

The heart of Cienfuegos is spectacular and iconic. Yet the shops here are almost empty, and away from the main streets it’s a much more modest and earnestly struggling lifestyle which endures.

Since the financial crash bled the life out of tourism, the Cuban economy has been suffering.

The people suffer through isolation and restrictions as best they can.

There are riches in this country, make no mistake. They just don’t filter down.

That’s a universal observation, of course, and there’s less inequality here than in most developed nations. But even in Cuba, some are more equal than others.

Because ideas may endure and principles stand firm, yet the essential problems remain unsolved.

232: Cuba 3 – Havana

Roads — Wed, 03 Nov 2010 00:30:33 +0000

The street outside Graeme Greene’s Hotel Sevilla is quiet, but as the dramatic Prado opens up beyond, suddenly the sheer scale of this paradox strikes me: Havana is truly a world city.

Columbus sighted Cuba in 1492 and landed here two years later. The island has been a prize for empires ever since. Spanish, British and American armies all fought for this land.

Cuba’s history and her population embrace that diversity. Cubans of every shade and colour fill the streets.

And whether descended from white Europeans, African slaves or indigenous peoples, they’re all simply Cubans.

By rights, Havana should be the hub of Latin America, entrancing and captivating in her charm, passion and style as nowhere on Earth.

Yet today she stands as the capital of a nation isolated and completely unknown by her neighbours just across the narrow Florida Straits to the north. And it’s undeniable, when you’re here, that the loss breaks both ways.

For Cuba, with its faltering economy, restricted freedoms and limited opportunity, fifty years of isolation is hardship enough. But for the whole of America, simply not knowing the gifts that this vibrant country, this incredible city and all that her wonderful people can offer — surely that loss is every bit as impoverishing.

Beyond the Museum of the Revolution, with its tank parked dramatically outside, the sweeping boulevard takes me under shady trees and alongside splendidly crumbling tenements.

The legacy of revolution is many things, but commercial prosperity isn’t one of them.

There’s little traffic here — just a few smoky old trucks, Polski Fiats and Ladas as well as the more classical 1950s American sedans in various states from showroom splendour to loving disrepair.

The famous Real tobacco factory falls past on my right — featuring in all the guidebooks but mysteriously shut down.

Has the world’s appetite for cigars faded with healthier living or recession? Either way it’s a blow to such limited Cuban trade as 50 years of the US embargo will allow.

At the top of the street lies a huge open square with an almost perfectly contradictory reproduction of the Capitol in Washington DC. But there’s not an American in miles.

At least, not any more. Until 1960, Americans flocked here on holiday, enjoying the looser living and tropical breeze. Al Capone lived in Varadero not far down the coast, and here in Havana, Ernest Hemingway holed up near the Cathedral to write.

And as I run that way, down busy Obispo, the shop fronts and bars of Havana reel me progressively in.

Because while a guidebook can describe the sound and feel of music and dance on every street, there’s just no substitute for experiencing it.

There’s energy, excitement and a passion for living here, and with the average wage at $18 a month I can’t help wondering just what it is about European and American life that we’ve long since mislaid.

The Hotel Ambos Mundos where Hemingway stayed is still here, surrounded by tourists, but it’s further on, in narrow streets beyond the Plaza Vieja, that I can feel the modern heart of old Havana beating.

These are everday streets, walked by people who are enjoying life while eking out a living. The weather is fine here, but the economic climate is grim. Yet despite the deprivations that brings, there’s so much more determination to let the best of life flow.

Back near the Parque Central, the early commuters are now waiting for their ancient bus to work. I catch the eye of one, a young man wearing dirty builders’ overalls and a widening smile. He waves and calls encouragement as I run by. Maratón!

And it strikes me now that for the past fifty years Havana has required endurance on a different scale. Whatever the world has thrown at Havana — its Latin spirit remains simply irrepressible.

Political and commercial restrictions, cultural and economic isolation, hardship — these are all facts of life since the revolution, just as corruption and excess defined the years which came before.

But you can’t define a country by its GDP, and that’s clearer in Havana than anywhere else I’ve seen.

I run back down the Prado one more time to the Malecón — the great crumbling boulevard where Havana faces the sea. At the weekend, all life is here — families and lovers out for a stroll, and incessant traffic roaring by.

For now, though, it’s quiet, and beside the Castillo de San Salvador just a few old fishermen stand enjoying the calm before a busy weekday begins.

Here, looking out across the Florida Straits, I take a moment to reflect on this incredible world city that is so dramatic, awe-inspiring, authentic, vivacious — you can search for the adjectives, but the truth is that Havana defeats every one.

Today, Cuba stands alone. But isolation can’t last for ever, and one day soon, what gifts to the world she will bring.

178. Full fathom five – on Elbow Beach, Bermuda
98. Off the shoulder of Orion – Costa de la Luz

222. Cuba 2 – Viñales: Talking ’bout a revolution

Roads — Thu, 03 Jun 2010 00:58:19 +0000

I approved the proclamation which Fidel Castro made in the Sierra Maestra, when he justifiably called for justice and especially yearned to rid Cuba of corruption. I will even go further:
… In the matter of the Batista regime, I am in agreement with the first Cuban revolutionaries. That is perfectly clear.
– US President John F. Kennedy: 24th October, 1963

Daybreak, 210 km from Havana.

It’s dawn. The rainforest stands still etched in grey, the air dank and humid with half-forgotten warmth.

The sky is dimly promising a future brightening through blue, already revealing white-topped clouds in the firmament above.

Behind me, the friendly valley calls. The massive limestone mogotes above Viñales rise to frame a monochrome outline of last night’s perfect Cuban sunset. I turn the other way and run towards the sunrise.

The track is damp from unseen rain fallen in the night. The air is heavy, silent, folded thick amongst the trees and scrub lurking close around the path.

The Cuban Revolution started somewhere like this, in the Sierra Maestra above Santiago. The 82 men who sailed from Mexico in December 1956 on the yacht Granma were swiftly cut down to twelve when they landed on Cuba’s swampy southeastern shores.

The survivors, among them a charismatic Argentinian doctor named Che Guevara, fled for the refuge of the mountains where they could regroup and recruit fresh rebels for their cause.

Their ideals then were simple — to oust the corrupt and decadent regime of President Fulgencio Batista, and instal a people’s government run simply for the benefit of the people.

It took three years, but with perseverance, courage and inspiration, finally the revolution succeeded in its journey from a slow dawn in the rainforest to taking power in Havana in the very first days of 1960.

There’s been a lot of history since then. Growing tensions with the US led to the Bay of Pigs invasion on Cuba’s southern coast in April 1961, ultimately setting the stage for the Cuban Missiles Crisis in October of the following year, when the Soviet Union stationed nuclear weapons on America’s southern doorstep and it seemed the future of the world lay on a knife-edge.

Both sides backed away, leaving Cuba to live three uncertain decades propped up by the Communist bloc. The fall of the Iron Curtain and the withdrawal of Soviet aid in 1990 left the national economy in disarray, leading to a renewal of the emigration which had begun with the Mariel boatlift ten years before.

Once more thousands of balseros risked everything as they set out in makeshift rafts across the Florida Straits. Finally, in recent years, Cuba has gained another kind of notoriety through the enforced detainment and torture of Al Q’aida suspects in the US base at Guantánamo on the island’s eastern tip.

These events have helped to shape our modern world and the conflicts which still rage upon it. And yet it’s here in Cuba, unexpectedly perhaps, that the world has changed least of all. Five decades on, the same once-idealistic government is still in power.

Such limited and relative promise of prosperity which the arrival of non-US tourism brought since 2000 has proved transient in the face of a global financial crash, and once again now Cuba faces economic challenge on a massive scale.

Yet despite this, the achievements of the revolution were many. Not just in enduring — although given the trauma of invasion, international isolation and half a century of crippling trade embargo, arguably endurance was the greatest of them all. But beyond this, Cuba’s new revolutionary rulers set an agenda to stamp out corruption, to banish poverty and provide health and education services for everyone. And to a large extent they succeeded.

You won’t find shanty towns in Cuba. The people might not be wealthy (far from it) but the bleak bottom tier of deprivation, which blights the lives of so many in South and Central America, has been effectively eradicated here.

The Cuban universities offer free education — a precious gift we surrendered some years ago in Britain — and there are more excellently-qualified doctors per head of population than in almost any other country.

Given the backdrop to these achievements through fifty years of economic strangulation, during a period when trade and humanitarian support from the United States were banned, it’s remarkable that such progress could be made. Who needs wealth and materialism, when a different quality of life is assured?

It makes for vivid discussion between us — as always, the views of a new country proving as important in the way they reflect sharply on a different life at home.

Across these days and as we travel, we collect Cubans along our way. With access to cars a rarity here, we drive open and often completely unsignposted roads in the welcome company of a hitch-hiker or two.

That’s simply how it’s done in Cuba. On the way out of town and underneath any motorway bridge, you’ll find a gaggle of patient people waiting hopefully for a lift. It’s efficient use of the available resources, and an effective way to get around since drivers will happily stop to pick people up.

For us, it’s a good way to get to know the people. The Rough Guide suggests we don’t ask about politics, but after a few minutes of introductions, Emma still has time enough to get there. Qué piensas del gobierno, y de Fidel Castro? she asks. What do you think about the government, and its long-time leader?

The answers say so much we can’t read in any guidebook. Driving to a village in the south, one lady puts it well. Yo soy Fidelista, pero no soy comunista, she says, quietly — respecting the charismatic leader of the revolution, but with no time for Raúl Castro, who deputised for his ill brother in 2006 before becoming President in 2008. It’s a view we hear repeatedly.

One day we deliver a medical student to her training post in Pinar del Rio. She’s a strong advocate of the revolution, but then we learn from another passenger how university places are only awarded to supporters of the party.

At the hospital, the staff and director are very welcoming as we deliver a few simple supplies we’ve brought from home. The place is full of doctors, but it needs a lick of paint and some post-1950s equipment would surely help as well.

In the hotel, a complimentary copy of Granma is given to every guest. It’s the government’s newspaper — and the only one allowed. And while we can travel here to read it, the vast majority of Cubans aren’t allowed passports.

* * * * *

The day is lightening slowly, and I’ve run almost far enough. A small clearing beckons me towards a ridge where I might be able to catch a wider view, beyond the confines of the rainforest.

And so it proves — as a few steps through the bush reward me with an unforgettable view of sunrise across the Embalse de Salto — a hidden beauty of water which neither I nor the guidebook ever knew was there.

There’s so much to ponder about Cuba. How have colonial Spanish and modern revolutionary history fashioned the vibrantly cultural and yet politically contradictory place she is today — so full of charm, so firm in noble ideology and yet so poor in basic freedoms, too? How did a revolution with such overwhelming popular support come to leave its moral right behind?

Even to begin to understand this country, there’s much more we need to see. More steps I need to tread.

And so I turn my back to the rainforest and the sunrise, and run towards another Cuban day.

214. Three years of Roads of Stone

Roads — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 16:57:52 +0000

Things have been slow around here, for a little while now, and in more ways than one.

I’ve had less time for running, and less still for writing. I’ve been unfit, distracted and slow.

And yet — there’s been real progress, too, hidden not far beneath the surface.

Our 95,000 visitors this year may have found only 22 new posts to read, but it’s been a momentous year of change, both in London and abroad.

The great crash formed the backdrop to the year, but it was in America that destiny was decided.

A changing political landscape marked the 2008 US election and the new opportunities that brings, for America and the whole world beyond.

My critical writing in the divided by an ocean section has now given birth to an entirely new chapter entitled united in a future. And let’s hope that we are.

The war in Gaza was the year’s lowest moment, pointing to new hazards ahead and mistakes not far behind us.

Yet there are some signs of a new mindset emerging. As the Arab-Israeli Peace Process begins once again, a reconciliation of the past may yet hold hope for the future.

Change in the world of sport gave us a glimpse of a new world order at the Beijing Olympics, and a return to the dominance of the US in the Ryder Cup.

Much closer to home, a new office location last autumn has seen me running and racing in a new town, whilst reflecting on the geology of my own.

February saw me chase Sussex shorelines, and run through rain and desert landscapes in Spain, before returning to the wintriest weather seen in England for two decades or more.

After blizzards came a Snow Patrol concert, and a pure nostalgia-fest from Radio Luxembourg — the most popular post of the year.

I ran beside Shakespeare’s Avon from winter into spring, and then before a long summer break, I explored the extended impact of the economic crisis on the energy market, as well as wider concerns about peak oil ahead.

The fourth year of Roads of Stone sees us awaiting an end to the recession, whilst pondering the future of London as a financial and banking centre for the world.

Across the twelve months ahead, I’ll continue my Cuba series, and fill in some footsteps left this year without write of passage. You can expect to return to Houston, to run by the lake in Geneva, and to climb the Chalk downs with Tennyson.

It may not run fast around here, and it may not always run pretty. But I’ll keep our feet moving forwards, as we run on towards the future.

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212. Cuba 1: Just imagine

Roads — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 18:13:54 +0000

Just imagine.

Picture a beautiful country of fertile green plains and lush, forested mountains.

A country washed by warm tropical seas, blessed with the finest beaches in the world.

A nation with a proud history extending across three millennia and more. A land coveted by great empires and fought over for centuries — where the fate of our planet was decided, many times more than once.

Think of a country rich in art and architecture, with nine World Heritage Sites for culture and nature.

Wander streets at the cradle of music and dance, listening to rhythms echoing all around the world.

Dream of stunning cities, beautiful towns and remote villages, set across a landscape unblighted by shanty towns or ghettoes. A land where men, women and children of all different colours live side by side, and where racism is confined to the past.

Envisage a country with excellent health care which is free and accessible to all. A society where life expectancy rates equal those in the United States, and where infant mortality rates are significantly lower.

Imagine a nation with more doctors per head of population than almost anywhere, which provides thousands of medical staff each year to humanitarian missions in developing countries across the globe.

Think of a small, poor country which has achieved the world’s highest literary rates, and where university education is free.

Envision a people and a government committed to preserving their natural environment, in a nation with one of the smallest carbon footprints in the world.

Imagine a society built on dreams of equality, set firm against corruption and crime. A fiercely independent country, founded on utopian ideals and principles written in blood. A land where the past meets the present, and the future looms uncertain. Think of a nation which has proved infinitely adaptable, whilst standing staunch and uncompromising to a fault.

Close your eyes beneath palm trees. Scent the warm breeze of paradise, and feel hot sun on your skin.

Open your mind for a moment, and dream far across the gates of freedom. Listen to gunshots, drowned long ago beneath the blue waves of a faraway beach.

Capture the vision of this incredible, contradictory country. Immerse yourself in its beauty and charm. Steal a taste of its fascination and flaws.

Picture this country you’ve never seen, which lies just a few miles away.

Imagine Cuba.

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