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Following the railroad in Cuban Granma province


Following the railroad in Cuban Granma province
Originally uploaded by
mgharris

I was delighted to see today on Flickr that someone favourited this photo. My husband David snapped this from a Viazul tourist bus as we crossed Cuba. He kindly took lots of photos of what you see of Cuba as you cross from West to East; Havana to Santiago de Cuba. This was so that when I came to write the relevant sections of Project Jaguar, I would be able to recall the images and atmosphere of this country.

Maybe I was asleep or watching the movie because I didn’t actually witness this scene myself so I’m even more grateful that he caught it. This captures the essence of how tough it is for Cubans to travel around in Cuba. Most people in Havana that we spoke to had never been to the other side of the island. And people in Santiago would tell us, “I went to Havana once, about twenty years ago.” (It’s not like in the UK where people are too busy going to Mallorca to go to London – they can’t go anywhere – it costs too much!)

Few people own a car, those who do tend to own cars that are too clapped out to get far without breaking down and of course there’s nothing like the RAC if you do. On the major roads you find small crowds of hitchhikers gathered under bridges, despondently waving money bills at passing private cars but mainly goods lorries. There’s no such thing as a free ride.

These hitchhikers aren’t game young students; ther are people of all ages, often with small children in tow.

I wonder where this woman in the photo is going with her two little ones. Waiting for a freight train to give her a lift? I wonder how long it took to get there.

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cuba jaguar's realm other books writing

This could be Sacha…

This could be Leo...

This morning, sorting through some photos I took in Cuba I came across this. I’m just writing a section of ‘Jaguar’ in which the hero, ‘Sacha’, dressed in a borrowed school uniform (they are standardized across Cuba) is escaping across Cuba. ‘Sacha’ is a blond boy, 12 years old, of Russian and Siberian descent who’s lived most of his life in a secret school in Cuba.

And lookee, here he is…

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cuba

Great Things About Cuba

Well mainly it would have to be the people, the music, the historic buildings.

Example: chambermaids at Hotel Sevilla make animal shapes out of towels and leave handwritten notes to guests, welcoming them to the hotel.

The people who deal with tourists display no envy, no resentment at all that these yumas get to enjoy life in a way that’s denied to them. Even when they are asking you for something, they are keen for you to take something from them. A woman in Santiago begged me quite insistently for clothes of my five-year old daughter’s, who she said was the same age as her own daughter (L). But by then I’d given away half of what we brought to give away and the rest was all promised. I’d asked L if I could give away her dresses and promised to buy her more in the UK, but L wouldn’t hear of it. She’s very attached to her clothes and I wasn’t going to upset her – she wouldn’t understand the argument of need. So I told this woman ‘sorry, but no’. “Please,” she said. “Or you give me something of yours,” she said, “and I’ll give you something of mine.”

We were given salsa CDs, books in Spanish, necklaces made of seeds and beads, pottery ash-trays, little wooden dolls. Nobody took a thing from us without giving us something in return. The couple we befriended in Havana, Alicia and Giovannis, were desperate to take us to Coppelia, Cuba’s favourite ice-cream chain (3 flavours!), where they insisted they’d pay for all of us (tourist money isn’t allowed there).

Hotel staff, people in the street, everyone treats visitors well. It’s a contrast with Mexico, for example, where tourists are also very important, but won’t feel all that special.

Then there’s the music.

It’s incomparable and ubiquitous. Any band wandering the street is better than any so-called ‘Cuban band’ I’ve seen in most places, except top-notch Cuban restaurants in London and Mexico City. They’ll play any Cuban tune you can name. In Santiago we asked for ‘Donde Vas Domitila?’ (the song played by the trio which follows Ralph Richardson everywhere in ‘Our Man in Havana’). Well, those old geezers had never had the song requested, but they made a fair pass at it, improvising words for the verses.

It’s awe-inspiring, such talent. Yulieski, the chisel-featured Santiaguero, a young salsa singer-in-training was the only uniformly cheerful Cuban we had dealings with. It was pretty obvious that he had music running through his head the whole time.


And then there’s the gorgeous legacy of the Spanish – similar in grandeur to what you find in Mexico, but in the Oriente it also has a French twist that makes it all a bit New Orleans.

C’est magnifique!

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cuba

Bad Things About Cuba

It’s easy to fall in love with Cuba as a tourist. Cubans make you feel very special. As a tourist, you represent the best chance for every single person you meet, for the chance, even a tiny one, at a shot of something better. If you give them a dollar (a CUC), maybe they can buy something that would otherwise be out of their reach. That’s why, like the guy who drove us to the airport the day we left (a former professor of English) and our bell-hop (tall, white, perfect English, I guarantee he was a former engineer or scientist), the poorly paid intelligentsia quit their jobs for a shot at a precious job in tourism.

Here’s a country that has screwed up so badly that being a chambermaid beats being a doctor.

But I don’t want you to think, reading this blog, that I’m infected with the sort of romanticism about Cuba that has the some people ga-ga for Fidel. (Mentioning no names, but has anyone noticed how many notable writers and actors have reported that they’ve been yacking to Fidel on the phone lately? It’s a wonder he has the energy to recover, what with award-winning actors and novelists after him day and night on the phone…)

Walking the streets of Havana, you don’t see well-dressed people. People wear cheap-looking, ill-fitting clothes, simple skirts, jeans or slacks with T-shirts. Cheap shoes, falling apart. No sunglasses, in a country where the sun shines brilliantly most of the year. The only women who have much make-up are the ones who work in tourist places.

They don’t walk with the bounce and energy of people in a Latin country like Mexico. If you discount the energy which comes from anything associated with music, you begin to notice that the energy level of every person is low. When people talk to you about life, it’s clear that just getting enough varied food to eat is a problem. People come up to you and beg you for spare sunglasses, sunblock, face-cream, clothes for their kids.

This does not happen in Mexico – beggars are happy with a few pesos. They can buy their own sunglasses etc – such products are available cheap in the massive, amazingly stocked and cheap supermarket chains. The energy levels of Mexico City are about a 100 times what you see in Cuba.

Crossing the island, two things impress:

1. The utter lack of any sign of the modern world. No traffic, the main highway is an almost uniformly lumpy thoroughfare that in Mexico would barely qualify as the ‘libre’ – the toll-free roads which meander across the country. Apart from the dreary communist/banana republic architecture (two storeys, long concrete blocks, often painted pink or blue, with shuttered windows, no glass, or lots of broken windows), you don’t see any buildings dating after the 50s. Lots of nice art deco buildings too, but everything in a state of total disrepair. There are still lots of people living in tiny, weather board huts, and it isn’t for reasons of olde-world charm, in case any visitors to the island have found this charming.

Near Havana you see lots of citrus orchards. These give away to sugar cane and bananas as you go east. The plantations don’t look anything like as large and well-tended as what I’ve seen in Veracruz, Mexico, or the expansive strawberry fields of Irapuato. There’s a marked absence of modern equipment. You might occasionally see a pathetic old tractor. Elsewhere, skinny men cut sugar cane by hand, stack it on their backs and carry it around. I even saw people carrying water across their backs, in two buckets.

2. The substitution of billboards advertising brands etc, for horrible, preachy communist slogans and propaganda. Photos of the eminently photogenic Che accompany slogans like ‘Che- it’s our hope that you’ll all be like him’, ‘Socialism or Death’, ‘Imperialism – not even a tiny bit!’ It’s funny until you realise that this isn’t a ubiquitous joke. Like citizens of former Soviet countries that I’m friends with, the people we met in Cuba just shrugged and told us that they ignore such stuff.

Well, not the enterprising rip-off merchant Daniru who took us for a very expensive rickshaw ride in Santiago. “Socialismo!” he cried, punching the air as we passed a poster of Che. “Socialism is the only way!” he yelled. Maybe he thought we’d come searching wide-eyed for a socialist paradise. But if he lost my sympathy, it was there. When it came to asking for money, Daniru demonstrated a perfect understanding of capitalism – the price of a thing is what someone is willing to pay for it, no more and no less.

Latino people are naturally pretty hot-blooded. How has an entire island of such people been suckered into accepting such a miserable existence. Is it really worth living like that, just to be able to boast that you’re independent of the USA? Maybe I’m just a stupid yuma (Cuban equivalent of the term gringo, meaning foreigner, probably from the rich West), but I think Mexico’s attitude to the USA is better, more practical, whilst also being ambivalent.

The only places you see Cubans looking really happy is in places where there’s music and dancing. The world famous Casa de la Musica in Havana, which features in so many salsa songs, is only really accessible to upper-middle-class Cubans and those with links with tourists. The dance floor fills with a mixture of Europeans and Afro-Cuban salsa teachers. It’s even worse at the Casa de la Trova in Santiago, which fills with middle-aged, non-dancing European tourists who have fallen for the world of Wim Wenders’ film, “Buena Vista Social Club”. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but if like us, you’ve gone out there hoping to mingle with Cubans dancing in their own environment, being crammed into a room with a bunch of white, middle-class European tourists to listen to Cuban musicians is not quite the draw is could be.

At times I actually longed for La Maraka of Mexico City, the most authentic latin salsa dance hall I’ve ever known. If only they played more Cuban music, it could be the best in the world!

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cuba jaguar's realm other books

Hero Pursued in Santiago


One of the charming (not!) billboards that plague the countryside of Cuba, reminding everyone how what a wonder the revolution is, what great things it’s going to achieve. Cubans must wonder what happens when the revolution goes wrong, if a successful revolution leaves a Latin-American country, once a jewel of the Spanish Empire looking something like an impoverished African country.
This one says: Santiago – in the past – rebellious. Now – hospitable. Always – heroic.

It’s no secret that I’m planning to set my next book in Cuba. (Well, it isn’t now…) Not one of the Joshua books, something new. Well this is the story of how one Cuban received the proposed plot of the book I’m calling ‘Jaguar’s Realm’. (whoever publishes it – if anyone – may well change the title).

After the son lesson, we’d invited Yulieski and his girlfriend to join us for dancing at the Santiago Melia’s fancy nightclub, the Santiago Cafe. Well, it’s another shiny, cheesy latino nightclub where they play salsa for about half an hour and then solid latin disco music, just like most latin dance clubs in Mexico and apparently Cuba too. The setting is quite nice – an ersatz square in old Santiago, with reproductions of famous city spots, like the Casa de la Trova and a well-known bar. Yulieski turned up 30 mins late – sans jeune fille! I wasn’t entirely convinced by his having apparently misunderstood that our invitation had extended to the girlfriend too. I figured she didn’t like son but might like a fancy nightclub. “I thought you were just inviting me and the dance teacher”, Yulieski said, all innocence.

The dance teacher had quite rightly turned up his nose at the invite. “That sort of place,” he muttered, “is not really my scene.”

Yulieski seemed keener. We agreed to keep quiet about the fact that he’d been out with us. I guessed that he had his reasons – didn’t buy the mix-up. There was a live band playing son. They were good but not as good as the guys we’d heard in La Trova. Yulieski was keen to try out what he’d seen the dance teacher show us. He picked it up quickly, but was too shy to dance on the main dance floor.

Between dances he smoked and asked me what stuff I write. I told him a bit about Joshua and then told him I was planning another book, possibly a series, the first book of which would be set in Cuba. I told him the plot. Years and adult sophistication fell away as he listened. “And then this could happen…he said, jumping in with a series of suggestions. Pretty good ones too, but using a plot device which I use in Joshua 2, so that, I explained couldn’t be used.

“Your story,” he observed, “is the story of all boys in Santiago. We dream of crossing the island to Havana and finding a way to get to Florida. And like all Cubans, your hero is pursued in his own country.”

“So it’s a metaphor for the Cuban experience?” I said. Yulieski nodded. “I hope they let me back into the country if it gets published,” I said. Yulieski’s eyes widened in sudden realization. “…True!”

Yulieski kept making trips to and from the bar. “Maybe I’ll stay on for a bit,” he said as we got up to leave. “There are other girls to dance with,” I said, looking around. Iran blushed and covered his face. “There are. But it’s a secret, okay?”

Not anymore, pal.