Last Days of the Revolution, Part 3 – Cuba November 2006
The next sign took forever to arrive and when it did I got a sense of how messed up we were. I hastily put together a Plan B and away we went to a place called Santa Lucia. There’s a beach here, and a couple of crappy hotels. I get the impression it’s mainly used as a backup plan for when all the real resorts are fully booked because there is not much going on here at all. A total hole.
A dirt road at the end of town leads to a fishing hamlet and another beach. That beach is nicer and the open-air restaurant seemed like a pretty good plan. But the only accommodation option was renting a resident’s home for forty CUCs. It was right on the beach but was exposed to mosquitoes. I mean, for the price of a couple of mozzie nets they could do good business but alas it was not to be. We ended up back in town at a training hotel. Even the beach in Santa Lucia isn’t much – tons of grass both in the ocean and scattered on the beach just got in the way.
HOLGUÍN
From there, it was south towards Holguín. The roads started to deteriorate a bit at this point. The truth is, though, is that the horrible roads we’d been promised hadn’t materialized yet. Not to say that roads in Cuba are pristine. There are potholes, there aren’t lights, there are people and horsecarts and chaos. Passing horse carts is the worst. You see them coming up, and want to pass. But there is an oncoming vehicle so you don’t. The horsecart is doing almost nothing. But you’re thinking all you have to do is slow down a bit and bide your time. No. You need to come to a virtual stop if you don’t want to crash into the cart. That takes some getting used to.
Holguín was a bit frustrating. It’s pretty tightly packed. Density in most Cubans cities is high. There is an acute housing shortage. Extended families live in two-room shacks. So you can drive through a city like Holguín, which has several hundred thousand people, in about fifteen minutes. There wasn’t much for accommodation here and we ended up in a Bulgarian hotel on the edge of town.
We were given a really crappy room. Nothing worked. We’d paid for a safe, but there wasn’t one. We went back to the desk and requested another room. We got it. This has modern everything, nice furnishings and a safe. It seems that we’d originally been given a Cuban room, not a tourist room. You see, Cubans pay in local pesos and thus pay significantly less. But they get significantly less. Nice of them to try and stick us with the cheap room for the expensive price. It was a quiet night, and we watched Cuba’s national baseball team playing a tournament in Taiwan. Baseball season started the day we left Cuba, so we missed out on that experience.
Next stop was Santiago de Cuba. People in the Spanish world often differentiate between Santiago de Chile and Santiago de Cuba, whereas Anglophones are often oblivious to the Cuban one at all. Getting out of Holguín was an adventure. You see, they don’t really “do” road signs. The role of navigator is something you need to take seriously, as it involves piecing together multiple clues. I had two maps to work with, plus various hints in the guidebook.
The road east was pretty abysmal – the worst yet. Thankfully, upon entering Santiago province the road improved immeasurably. For a while it was uneventful, passing plantations for sugarcane, corn, plantains and tamarind before reaching a small, random town (Palma Soriano, to be specific).
When they started building the Autopista, the national highway, they started at both ends. At the eastern end, it didn’t get far. So just outside Palma Soriano, the Autopista dies out. For real, it just gradually dries up, like a river in the desert. It’s as if they literally were working on it one afternoon and the foreman came over and said “Yeah, we’re done with this Autopista. No more money. Go home, don’t come back until we call you.” And they just left it there.
Still, with even a little freeway the remainder of the trip is fast and easy, save for the odd crater-sized pothole.
Approaching Santiago, you come into the Sierra Maestra mountains. The vegetation is especially lush and varied. In the glens it almost looks like every single tree and plant is from a different species. Amazing.
As densely packed as any Cuban town, Santiago arrives quickly and within a matter of minutes, the Autopista plunges you into the heart of the city. Accomodations were again quite tight and we ended up a casa on a very busy road. The Santiago accent was near impenetrable, too, I noticed. When I approached the first casa, the guy there said something and I couldn’t understand a single word. The other thing they do a lot is when you first approach them, or ring their bell, they say “Digame!” which means “Talk to me!” Not so many pleasantries exchanged, huh. Still, Santiago is the reason we came out so far and it lived up to expectations, really bringing the trip to life after a couple of moribund days of hard driving.
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