sunburnt and sandy: travels in cuba and costa rica
Not a cloud in the sky and a well-earned sunburn peeling off my back, I'm finally sending scattered words back from a month+ of travels cuba and costa rica. I'm in the capitol city of san jose at the moment, after bouncing first to one coast and then the other, and tomorrow i head to a farm called "siete estrellas de jicotea," in a village in a valley east of here, near the town of turrialba, in the province of catago, to cut sugar cane and prune coffee bushes on an organic farm for a few weeks, in exchange for room and board.
Nothing momentous to say, really, just a few sketches from along the way, with fond backward-looking thoughts of all the places i'm not and people i miss.
*
(a couple of new years revolutions)
It was National Lampoon's Cuban Xmas Vacation, and mum and dad and tracey and i celebrated the 45th anniversary of the cuban revolution and the 10th anniversary of the zapatista uprising (a.k.a. new years day) in truly memorable fashion. We had been criss-crossing cuba in a rented car since the 20th, rolling and reeling down roads with no names, through towns with no maps, where no one gives you the same directions twice but you always get where you're going, eventually. On new years eve we rolled into
santiago at dusk, after 6 hours on a 2-lane highway crowded with bikes and horse carts, and 4 hours on a creaky old ferry before that, to find santiago full to the brim of tourists and our casa (bed & breakfast) reservation passed off to a third party, where we were promptly bumped by an italian sex tourist who had arrived a few days earlier than anticipated. The dude would later stroll in with three jineteras while tracey and i, our host from upstairs, and some boozy blues musician were singing "guantanamera" at full volume in the living room of our almost-accommodations. --But I'm getting ahead of myself.
We had booked 5 days in advance and had called that very morning to confirm, so were a little miffed to find ourselves without a place to sleep after such a long day of travel. (Imagine the indignity: turfed out on the street because some jackoff came prematurely!) The matron of the house scrambled and found us clandestine lodgings with a nervous but opportunistic young couple on the 11th floor of the same building (they were nervous because hosting tourists without a license is highly illegal; opportunistic because $50 US is a small fortune in cuban pesos). Our new hosts demanded cash in advance and warned us not to open the door if anyone knocked -- indeed, to retire quietly to our rooms until whoever was knocking went away.
The thought of a suspicious cop at the door didn't exactly make for restful accommodations. My poor mum, who has probably broken more bones in her life than laws, was particularly nervous, and would shush us urgently if we raised our voices above a low mumble. As settled and comfortable as we were going to get in our new surroundings, we hit the town for chinese food and traditional cuban music to ring in the new year. A few good meals and several drinks later we were in some traditional music venue, dancing and singing at the top of our gringo lungs, arm-in-arm with four spanish women who tracey and i swore were right out of some Kids in the Hall skit (more kathy and cathy than francesca fiore), and with whom we all fell madly in love when we finally managed to stop giggling. Sometime after 2 am our nuclear family staggered back to our sketcy digs, still singing and laughing.
Back in the room, mum was suddenly tense and shushing again (even though the noise from the party three floors down was rattling the windows, drowning out any suspicious canadian-accented noise we could possibly have made), and we were half-way through declaring emphatically, for the third time, that no one was going to come banging on the door at 2 am on new years day, so we might as well enjoy ourselves, when - yes, indeed - someone started banging on the door.
Wide-eyed, we ducked into our rooms, as common sense crumbled like sand in our hands and we suddenly found ourselves inhabiting some kind of hitchcock plotline. The loud knocking continued for at least 5 minutes while we scratched our heads in varying degrees of confusion and/or fear and tried to decide what to do. We only really had two options, and option one (do nothing and hope whoever-it-was would just go away) didn't seem to be working. Then the midnight knockers began calling tracey and i by name, and we figured either the state's Bureau of Illegalities Purporting to Tourism was pretty freaking sharp to have found out our names, or it was just our hosts, whom we had always assumed had a key of their own.
We opened the door to discover our hosts, no longer nervous, grinning ear to rum-soaked-ear, enthusiastically inviting us downstairs for a "fiesta de guitarra" (insert goofy rubber-wristed air-guitar strumming for every time dude said "fiesta de guitarra"). They thought it was hilarious that we hadn't opened the door for them. In pure relief and in spite of ourselves, tracey and i quickly caught their mood and laughed again from pure relief. Mum was still in hiding and too mad at everyone involved to laugh, and dad was snoring soundly on the bed, clearly unfazed by the entire affair (which only served to further piss off mum, unfortunately).
To his credit, though, dad roused himself enough to present our hosts with his and mum's bottle of scotch (after pouring himself a healthy nightcap), and tracey and i headed downstairs with our friends for the much vaulted "fiesta de guitarra," where we sang and drummed along with some grizzly musician, to the only spanish song we both knew the words to -- and in the home of our former-supposed-almost-hosts, no less! (Here's where the lecherous italian fellow rolled in with his young friends, and coincidentally about the time we were ushered out, in spite of our high-quality singing.)
After a second performance in the musician's apartment downstairs (where he tried to sell us one of his cds for a special friends' price), we finally rolled back in to the casa clandestina sometime after 3 am, to find dad asleep in a chair (goodnaturedly "waiting up" for us), still gripping in his hand the glass of scotch he'd poured before handing off the bottle. He snoozily wished our hosts a "guinis nachis" ("um... 'buenas noches,' do you mean?" quizzed tracey, attempting to clarify. "no, i mean... happy birthday," he replied calmly, without once opening his eyes.)
Perhaps impressed by his grasp of the Spanish language, our hosts were still keen and alert enough to show us a large stack of their family photos, one by one (mostly of dude's brother's wedding, but interspersed with shots of his dad in angola and moscow) before we all finally crashed out, the new year having rolled over us somewhere in the process.
Best family vacation, ever.
(And for the record, I did raise a glass to all of y'all who made it to San Cristobal for the big day, which sounded fun too.)
*
What a strange and intense place Cuba is -- so ingenious and inspiring in so many ways, and yet such pressures it has endured in the 45 years since it took control of its own destiny and gave the greedy behemoth to the north the finger. There, under the thumb of the land of the free, dignity pays a high price for its socialist and anti-imperialist intransigence. After the collapse of the USSR, tourism by necessity replaced sugar exports as the prime engine of the embargo-crippled economy. A US dollar sells for 26 Cuban pesos, but by general consent, tourists pay for most things at a one-to-one rate -- a dollar for a cup of coffee a cuban would buy for a peso, $15 for a 15 peso bus ticket. $10 US is the equivalent of a month's wages for a cuban teacher or a pharmacist, so those shady characters who ply on tourists and who manage to slip past the ubiquitous police can find themselves suddenly wealthy, in a place that had abolished opulence for so long. An effective beggar or hustler, pimp or prostitute can earn exponentially more than a doctor. How must this be warping the social values of the place, when the low road is just so bloody lucrative, and there are just so many gullible tourists to dupe!
And so, greed stalks the sunburnt gringos and reduces many once-fiercely independent cubanos to cunning and obsequity. It's a heavy, heavy irony that the cuban people as a whole, who have held out in principled defiance of US power so long and so brilliantly, are now one-by-one falling to the seductive power of the US dollar. Miami glitters in the dreams of many, while Haiti and Jamaica, the more likely comparisons, are just shadows on the horizon. As tourists, we felt both used (rightly so) and complicit -- we were both helping to keep the cuban state afloat with badly needed foreign currency, and (through the casual and naive dissemination of US$) contributing, perhaps, to its downfall.
Cubans have only been allowed to carry US dollars for a decade, but already the spread of the $ has created a two-tier economy. As a young cubano in Cienfuegos remarked to me, "if tourists paid dollars and cubans paid pesos, that I could understand." But that's less and less the case; there are peso stores and there are dollar stores, and all the trendy luxury goods are only found in the dollar stores, with plenty more people peering in the windows than buying. Sometimes i felt like i was witnessing the slow crumbling of the revolution.
Which is tragic, because Cuba is in spite of everything an incredible place, with a level of political literacy unparalleled anywhere i've been. Healthcare and education (including university) are free for all, and Cuba rates significantly higher than the US on many scales of social development (literacy, infant mortality...). Cuba still sends thousands of doctors to africa and latin america, where it is greatly respected, and there's a genuine pride in the voices of many people we spoke to about what cuba has managed to do under such adversity. The contradictions and complexity are startling, and i know i hardly scratched the surface.
*
My folks and sister returned to canada after two weeks, leaving me by the side of the road at the turn-off to Santa Clara for a week of solo travel before I flew to Costa Rica to begin my winding road north to Canada. I spent much of my time that week trying to get cheaply from one place to another, and trying to escape the tourist track and find the "real" cuba: I largely failed on both counts. Cuba, sadly, is a difficult place for budget travel, and jumping off the tourist track usually means landing squarely on the other side of the law (though it's highly unlikely that it would be me who would pay the price). Foreigners can only stay in the homes of people who pay huge sums of money for a license, and those homes are only in the places where tourists go. Hitchhiking is an option, but everybody does it (in fact, by law, government vehicles have to stop for hitchhikers if they have room, or face a stiff fine), and cars are always already full to the fenders. (It was a nice change, really, from counting 9 single-passenger vehicles out of ten whipping past your outstretched thumb, but it still left me by the side of the road.)
Cubans are prohibited from interacting with tourists, and so the only people who will chat with you almost invariably expect something in return, and are as often as not seeking to perpetrate one hustle or another. My goal for my week alone there was to have at least one interaction with a cuban that was not, at heart, an economic interaction. Speaking passable spanish helped, but the results were still inconclusive at best. Perhaps my goal was unrealistic. Next time, if there's a next time, I'll bring a bicycle and a cooking stove and a tent, and stick to the countryside as much as possible.
Che Guevara, pray for us now.
*
And from la habana i flew to san jose, costa rica, and hiked to the hotel nicaragua to rendez-vous with the eight-months sight-unseen newly-become brunette lass known in spanish-speaking lands as yeni. We had coordinated our wandering to wander together a short while, and swap stories of our respective southern sojourns. And south we went, by bus and by boat and on foot like fugitives, though who knew what we were fleeing, or chasing. We pushed deep into the pacific rainforests of corcovado, on the peninsula of osa, and at the end of the trail, on an empty beach before the setting sun, we were confronted by the completeness of our solitude together, without even the familiar crutch of touch to fall back on. And after a night beneath the brightest stars i've yet seen we spent a perfectly lazy beach day tracing spirals in the sand and letting whatever words trickle like saltwater down our backs while time ran like honey. And when the words stopped trickling like saltwater down our backs and time ran like rainwater again, we bid an amicable goodbye, and yeni blazed back north, across lake nicaragua with a head full of troubles she had tried to set aside. And burnt by the sun and slightly dazed, i went east through the mountains to the blacksand beaches and reggae rhythms of the caribbean lowlands, and thought a great deal about love and memory, and swam in the ocean and slept on the beach, and came to no conclusions but forgetting.
*
puerto viejo, most of the way along the coast to panama, was beautiful, and for a while time ran like honey again. little more than a beach with tourist shops, p.v. was equal parts rasta and latino, but with rather a lot of lotus-eating american and european youths in dreads and sarongs (though, who am i to judge), and plenty of huppies in land rovers. (for the highly-entertaining coining of that useful term, see "cathy vs. the dreaded huppies," http://potluck.bethechange.ca/node/view/43 )
*
tomorrow i head to a farm for a couple of weeks, as i said, before striking out north to nicaragua and all points onward, armed only with the motorcycle diaries of ernesto guevara, the autobiography of emma goldman (vol.1), a borrowed copy of the grapes of wrath, and the good graces of those i meet along the way to light my path. north overland, all the way to canada by april, that's the tentative plan. i want to send postcards, but sadly have very few people's addresses with me. please send addresses, and i'll send postcards!
*
i just realized i'm the farthest south of anyone i know. how about that.
sending all my love north, then,
dave
~*~
"Security is mostly a superstition. It does not exist in nature, nor do the
children of men as a whole experience it. Avoiding danger is no safer
in the long run than outright exposure. Life is either a daring adventure,
or nothing."
-Helen Keller
Nothing momentous to say, really, just a few sketches from along the way, with fond backward-looking thoughts of all the places i'm not and people i miss.
*
(a couple of new years revolutions)
It was National Lampoon's Cuban Xmas Vacation, and mum and dad and tracey and i celebrated the 45th anniversary of the cuban revolution and the 10th anniversary of the zapatista uprising (a.k.a. new years day) in truly memorable fashion. We had been criss-crossing cuba in a rented car since the 20th, rolling and reeling down roads with no names, through towns with no maps, where no one gives you the same directions twice but you always get where you're going, eventually. On new years eve we rolled into
santiago at dusk, after 6 hours on a 2-lane highway crowded with bikes and horse carts, and 4 hours on a creaky old ferry before that, to find santiago full to the brim of tourists and our casa (bed & breakfast) reservation passed off to a third party, where we were promptly bumped by an italian sex tourist who had arrived a few days earlier than anticipated. The dude would later stroll in with three jineteras while tracey and i, our host from upstairs, and some boozy blues musician were singing "guantanamera" at full volume in the living room of our almost-accommodations. --But I'm getting ahead of myself.
We had booked 5 days in advance and had called that very morning to confirm, so were a little miffed to find ourselves without a place to sleep after such a long day of travel. (Imagine the indignity: turfed out on the street because some jackoff came prematurely!) The matron of the house scrambled and found us clandestine lodgings with a nervous but opportunistic young couple on the 11th floor of the same building (they were nervous because hosting tourists without a license is highly illegal; opportunistic because $50 US is a small fortune in cuban pesos). Our new hosts demanded cash in advance and warned us not to open the door if anyone knocked -- indeed, to retire quietly to our rooms until whoever was knocking went away.
The thought of a suspicious cop at the door didn't exactly make for restful accommodations. My poor mum, who has probably broken more bones in her life than laws, was particularly nervous, and would shush us urgently if we raised our voices above a low mumble. As settled and comfortable as we were going to get in our new surroundings, we hit the town for chinese food and traditional cuban music to ring in the new year. A few good meals and several drinks later we were in some traditional music venue, dancing and singing at the top of our gringo lungs, arm-in-arm with four spanish women who tracey and i swore were right out of some Kids in the Hall skit (more kathy and cathy than francesca fiore), and with whom we all fell madly in love when we finally managed to stop giggling. Sometime after 2 am our nuclear family staggered back to our sketcy digs, still singing and laughing.
Back in the room, mum was suddenly tense and shushing again (even though the noise from the party three floors down was rattling the windows, drowning out any suspicious canadian-accented noise we could possibly have made), and we were half-way through declaring emphatically, for the third time, that no one was going to come banging on the door at 2 am on new years day, so we might as well enjoy ourselves, when - yes, indeed - someone started banging on the door.
Wide-eyed, we ducked into our rooms, as common sense crumbled like sand in our hands and we suddenly found ourselves inhabiting some kind of hitchcock plotline. The loud knocking continued for at least 5 minutes while we scratched our heads in varying degrees of confusion and/or fear and tried to decide what to do. We only really had two options, and option one (do nothing and hope whoever-it-was would just go away) didn't seem to be working. Then the midnight knockers began calling tracey and i by name, and we figured either the state's Bureau of Illegalities Purporting to Tourism was pretty freaking sharp to have found out our names, or it was just our hosts, whom we had always assumed had a key of their own.
We opened the door to discover our hosts, no longer nervous, grinning ear to rum-soaked-ear, enthusiastically inviting us downstairs for a "fiesta de guitarra" (insert goofy rubber-wristed air-guitar strumming for every time dude said "fiesta de guitarra"). They thought it was hilarious that we hadn't opened the door for them. In pure relief and in spite of ourselves, tracey and i quickly caught their mood and laughed again from pure relief. Mum was still in hiding and too mad at everyone involved to laugh, and dad was snoring soundly on the bed, clearly unfazed by the entire affair (which only served to further piss off mum, unfortunately).
To his credit, though, dad roused himself enough to present our hosts with his and mum's bottle of scotch (after pouring himself a healthy nightcap), and tracey and i headed downstairs with our friends for the much vaulted "fiesta de guitarra," where we sang and drummed along with some grizzly musician, to the only spanish song we both knew the words to -- and in the home of our former-supposed-almost-hosts, no less! (Here's where the lecherous italian fellow rolled in with his young friends, and coincidentally about the time we were ushered out, in spite of our high-quality singing.)
After a second performance in the musician's apartment downstairs (where he tried to sell us one of his cds for a special friends' price), we finally rolled back in to the casa clandestina sometime after 3 am, to find dad asleep in a chair (goodnaturedly "waiting up" for us), still gripping in his hand the glass of scotch he'd poured before handing off the bottle. He snoozily wished our hosts a "guinis nachis" ("um... 'buenas noches,' do you mean?" quizzed tracey, attempting to clarify. "no, i mean... happy birthday," he replied calmly, without once opening his eyes.)
Perhaps impressed by his grasp of the Spanish language, our hosts were still keen and alert enough to show us a large stack of their family photos, one by one (mostly of dude's brother's wedding, but interspersed with shots of his dad in angola and moscow) before we all finally crashed out, the new year having rolled over us somewhere in the process.
Best family vacation, ever.
(And for the record, I did raise a glass to all of y'all who made it to San Cristobal for the big day, which sounded fun too.)
*
What a strange and intense place Cuba is -- so ingenious and inspiring in so many ways, and yet such pressures it has endured in the 45 years since it took control of its own destiny and gave the greedy behemoth to the north the finger. There, under the thumb of the land of the free, dignity pays a high price for its socialist and anti-imperialist intransigence. After the collapse of the USSR, tourism by necessity replaced sugar exports as the prime engine of the embargo-crippled economy. A US dollar sells for 26 Cuban pesos, but by general consent, tourists pay for most things at a one-to-one rate -- a dollar for a cup of coffee a cuban would buy for a peso, $15 for a 15 peso bus ticket. $10 US is the equivalent of a month's wages for a cuban teacher or a pharmacist, so those shady characters who ply on tourists and who manage to slip past the ubiquitous police can find themselves suddenly wealthy, in a place that had abolished opulence for so long. An effective beggar or hustler, pimp or prostitute can earn exponentially more than a doctor. How must this be warping the social values of the place, when the low road is just so bloody lucrative, and there are just so many gullible tourists to dupe!
And so, greed stalks the sunburnt gringos and reduces many once-fiercely independent cubanos to cunning and obsequity. It's a heavy, heavy irony that the cuban people as a whole, who have held out in principled defiance of US power so long and so brilliantly, are now one-by-one falling to the seductive power of the US dollar. Miami glitters in the dreams of many, while Haiti and Jamaica, the more likely comparisons, are just shadows on the horizon. As tourists, we felt both used (rightly so) and complicit -- we were both helping to keep the cuban state afloat with badly needed foreign currency, and (through the casual and naive dissemination of US$) contributing, perhaps, to its downfall.
Cubans have only been allowed to carry US dollars for a decade, but already the spread of the $ has created a two-tier economy. As a young cubano in Cienfuegos remarked to me, "if tourists paid dollars and cubans paid pesos, that I could understand." But that's less and less the case; there are peso stores and there are dollar stores, and all the trendy luxury goods are only found in the dollar stores, with plenty more people peering in the windows than buying. Sometimes i felt like i was witnessing the slow crumbling of the revolution.
Which is tragic, because Cuba is in spite of everything an incredible place, with a level of political literacy unparalleled anywhere i've been. Healthcare and education (including university) are free for all, and Cuba rates significantly higher than the US on many scales of social development (literacy, infant mortality...). Cuba still sends thousands of doctors to africa and latin america, where it is greatly respected, and there's a genuine pride in the voices of many people we spoke to about what cuba has managed to do under such adversity. The contradictions and complexity are startling, and i know i hardly scratched the surface.
*
My folks and sister returned to canada after two weeks, leaving me by the side of the road at the turn-off to Santa Clara for a week of solo travel before I flew to Costa Rica to begin my winding road north to Canada. I spent much of my time that week trying to get cheaply from one place to another, and trying to escape the tourist track and find the "real" cuba: I largely failed on both counts. Cuba, sadly, is a difficult place for budget travel, and jumping off the tourist track usually means landing squarely on the other side of the law (though it's highly unlikely that it would be me who would pay the price). Foreigners can only stay in the homes of people who pay huge sums of money for a license, and those homes are only in the places where tourists go. Hitchhiking is an option, but everybody does it (in fact, by law, government vehicles have to stop for hitchhikers if they have room, or face a stiff fine), and cars are always already full to the fenders. (It was a nice change, really, from counting 9 single-passenger vehicles out of ten whipping past your outstretched thumb, but it still left me by the side of the road.)
Cubans are prohibited from interacting with tourists, and so the only people who will chat with you almost invariably expect something in return, and are as often as not seeking to perpetrate one hustle or another. My goal for my week alone there was to have at least one interaction with a cuban that was not, at heart, an economic interaction. Speaking passable spanish helped, but the results were still inconclusive at best. Perhaps my goal was unrealistic. Next time, if there's a next time, I'll bring a bicycle and a cooking stove and a tent, and stick to the countryside as much as possible.
Che Guevara, pray for us now.
*
And from la habana i flew to san jose, costa rica, and hiked to the hotel nicaragua to rendez-vous with the eight-months sight-unseen newly-become brunette lass known in spanish-speaking lands as yeni. We had coordinated our wandering to wander together a short while, and swap stories of our respective southern sojourns. And south we went, by bus and by boat and on foot like fugitives, though who knew what we were fleeing, or chasing. We pushed deep into the pacific rainforests of corcovado, on the peninsula of osa, and at the end of the trail, on an empty beach before the setting sun, we were confronted by the completeness of our solitude together, without even the familiar crutch of touch to fall back on. And after a night beneath the brightest stars i've yet seen we spent a perfectly lazy beach day tracing spirals in the sand and letting whatever words trickle like saltwater down our backs while time ran like honey. And when the words stopped trickling like saltwater down our backs and time ran like rainwater again, we bid an amicable goodbye, and yeni blazed back north, across lake nicaragua with a head full of troubles she had tried to set aside. And burnt by the sun and slightly dazed, i went east through the mountains to the blacksand beaches and reggae rhythms of the caribbean lowlands, and thought a great deal about love and memory, and swam in the ocean and slept on the beach, and came to no conclusions but forgetting.
*
puerto viejo, most of the way along the coast to panama, was beautiful, and for a while time ran like honey again. little more than a beach with tourist shops, p.v. was equal parts rasta and latino, but with rather a lot of lotus-eating american and european youths in dreads and sarongs (though, who am i to judge), and plenty of huppies in land rovers. (for the highly-entertaining coining of that useful term, see "cathy vs. the dreaded huppies," http://potluck.bethechange.ca/node/view/43 )
*
tomorrow i head to a farm for a couple of weeks, as i said, before striking out north to nicaragua and all points onward, armed only with the motorcycle diaries of ernesto guevara, the autobiography of emma goldman (vol.1), a borrowed copy of the grapes of wrath, and the good graces of those i meet along the way to light my path. north overland, all the way to canada by april, that's the tentative plan. i want to send postcards, but sadly have very few people's addresses with me. please send addresses, and i'll send postcards!
*
i just realized i'm the farthest south of anyone i know. how about that.
sending all my love north, then,
dave
~*~
"Security is mostly a superstition. It does not exist in nature, nor do the
children of men as a whole experience it. Avoiding danger is no safer
in the long run than outright exposure. Life is either a daring adventure,
or nothing."
-Helen Keller
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