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¿Como andas?

So ya ya ya, I’m a slacker on the blog once again. Sorry dudes. I’m going to skip ahead to what I’ve been doing lately and hopefully fill in the gaps later on in life when things calm down a bit. Explanation for the rush-Throughout our program we were told that we would have our carnets (Cuban Temporary Resident card) until the end of our trip. However, at the end of March, Immigration let us know that they would be revoking them at the end of April to begin processing our exit visas. So…subtitles, this means that we are only able to pay for travel in Cuban pesos and rent rooms in casas particulares as students until the end of April. Due to that, we bumped up our planned travel schedule (us being my travel partners in crime Katie, Susan and Mary) up to fit in all of the places that we’ve wanted to visit. Our professors have been awesome and taken a week from our April class schedule and moving it into May so that we could have an extended time to travel to the farther ends of the country.

Three weeks ago, Katie and I ventured to Camaguey for a weekend. It’s a small city mid way down the island (similar distance as between Albany and Buffalo) that was built as a labyrinth to prevent piracy in the 1800s. The bus ride was excruciating…we went Cuban style. First, the bus was very small and the space between the seats made even me feel cramped, so you can only imagine how tight it was. Also, driver insisted on stopping at least once an hour, sometimes more, playing western films between blaring Cuban pop and cooling the bus to a not-so-sleep-conducive-when-in-shorts 50 degrees. We finally arrived after 11 hours at 2 am. After that, we had a great time though, our casa was amazing, with 18^th century tiling throughout and a very helpful host family that made killer breakfasts (but still not as good as a diner!) We took a tour of the city on Saturday with a friend of the family who owns a bici-taxi, a bench seat with a canopy attached to the back of a tricycle…it was sweet. To make it better, our guide’s name was Tai-Chi…and he’s the local Tai-Chi instructor, pretty flipping sweet if I do say so myself! We got to see the many churches that dot the city, many of which were visited by Pope John Paul (Juan Pablo) II when he visited the city in 1998. There was this amazing square that was constructed by one of the cathedrals in 1998 that has sculptures of local residents and because it is still fairly new, you can still catch the inspirations hanging out near their replicas waiting for curious tourists. After that, we went to the bus terminal to get our return tickets for Sunday evening, but in typical Cuban “lets really annoy them’ style, the Cuban peso ticket office closes on weekends, making purchasing a return impossible. To calm down, we treated ourselves to a steak dinner, French fries and drinks, a big splurge at 5 CUC (woot!) We got ice cream at Coppelia after that and resigned ourselves to the fact that we would have to cut our trip short and not go to Cayo Coco to make sure that we got back to Havana by Monday. So we packed in early and got up early to try and get on the bus waiting list. Oh yea…there were 95 people on the list when there are only 2 buses that go to Havana, each with 40 seats, so that wasn’t going to happen. So, being the resourceful Cubans that we’ve become, we went outside, did some bargaining and pitting taxi drivers against one another and hired one to drive us the 11 hours back to Havana for $20 each (how far would that take you in NYC?) He made it in 7 and just in time for us to eat dinner back at home at ANAP.

Week=same ol’ same, classes, research for paper writing, the boys playing their guitars on the porch, eating peso pizza, watching half-century old restrictions being lifted. Ok, maybe that last one isn’t so bland. One of the cooler prohibitions that was removed was the inability for Cubans to enter or book hotel rooms in tourist hotels. A few of us ventured out just before midnight and headed to the Hotel Nacional to celebrate the change-over and picked up a Cuban friend along the way. The hotel was just as quiet as it would be on any other night, are friend being the only non-hotel employed Cuban there. We had a great time celebrating, but it was a definite sign that although there are changes here, Cubans won’t be immediately affected if they still don’t have the money to take advantage of the opportunities. Anyway, as we were leaving, our friend stood in the middle of the lobby and yells, “I’m legal in here now!” and all of the employees started cheering. It was quite the fun time.

Oh yes. A fun detail on Friday. I was bitten by a dog. Yup…chalk that one on to my “I do my own stunts” list. I was walking with Katie in Habana Vieja looking at paintings when I went to look closer at a piece on an easel and caught the tail of a dog that was sleeping underneath. He jumped up and bit the left side of my left foot, then when I tried to shake him off, he went for the right side of the same foot. Not a pretty site, but three Canadian tourists with a car came to my rescue, pouring purified water on my foot and took me to the hospital. Apparently “Cuba is a rabies free zone.” Uh huh…so they refused me a rabies shot, instead cleaning the cuts, giving me a “muscle relaxant” injection and sent me on my way. Turns out that the muscle relaxant was a tetanus shot that I neither needed nor was told about, so that was a bit frustrating. Its all good now, just was very swollen and sore for a week or so.

After that ordeal, we packed up once again and headed toward Santiago de Cuba on the opposite end of the island. We knew it was going to be long, the ride is about the distance from NYC to DC, but predicted to take 17 hours including all of the stops along the way. So we settled into our cramped little seats and passed the time between napping, watching awful western films, listening to iPods and reading. Intermixed in that was a mariachi soap opera that was on repeat on full blast that must have cycled about 8 times throughout the trip, once playing as our wake up alarm at 6 am (you can bet how that one went over). Including a 3 hour stopover in Camaguey to find a new bus driver, the trip took 21 hours and we finally arrived at our casa particular at 8 am.

After a nice nap, we toured the area around our casa, which was right in the heart of the historic district with a famous church 3 blocks down, a few museums scattered around and the site where Fidel proclaimed the Revolution’s triumph on December 31^st, 1959. We attempted to buy bus tickets the next morning, but as Cuba goes, it wasn’t easy. We had to stand in line for 3 hours before getting up to the window and being told that every bus to the destinations that we wanted to go to, 2 in Santiago and our return trip back to Havana, were sold out. Panic set in for a few, but we put our names on the much more expensive tourist bus lists for one of the excursions, Baracoa, as well as back to Havana, but no such luck to the Sierra Maestras. As we were about to walk away in dejection, two guys came up and offered to “use their contacts” in the bus station to get us onto the Cuban peso bus to Havana. So, going with the flow, we explored our black market options. Lo and behold, an hour later, we ended up with tickets to Havana in Cuban peso, bought “a la izquierda” with a small bribe fee-oh well, eso es Cuba. We were very proud of ourselves for finding a way to get home, a little amazed by how we did it. In our wait, we bargained a day tour on a bici-taxi to the harder to get-to sites on the outskirts of the city. First up was the cemetery where we saw the changing of the guard at José Martí’s tomb, as well as the graves of Tomas Estrada Palma, the Bacardi family, and many soldiers from the 26^th of July movement. After that, we toured the Santiago Rum factory, which is one of the most famous in Cuba and happened to have free samples. Then we headed to the Loma de San Juan (San Juan Hill) where Teddy Roosevelt and his Rough Riders fought in the Spanish-Cuban-American War. That was a long day, so we treated ourselves to dinner at the Melia Santiago, the local 5-star hotel, where we got garlic bread and hamburgers with Coca-Cola and Sprite for 7 CUC, it was AMAZING!

The next day, Susan and I headed five hours northeast to Baracoa, the first settlement in Cuba, founded in 1512. The ride was gorgeous, but was a literal zig-zag through the mountains the whole way, which made for some fun games of rollercoaster. We got there and found the most beautiful place on Earth-it’s like tropical jungle mountains blend into a crystal clear Caribbean beach with a quaint village in the middle and some early Spanish colonial forts thrown in for good measure. It was incredible, we just sat on the Malecón for a few minutes and stared in disbelief. All of that until we realized that we were given bad information and had no way of getting home. Have to love Cuba. So luckily, while staring out to sea to try and relax for a minute, one of those pesky hustlers came up to the two of us and asked it we wanted a taxi or boyfriend. Susan, being the feisty one she can be, says “Nope, out of luck with those two, but you can help us out by finding us a way back to Santiago.” As luck would have it, he actually did have a way and arranged for his brother to drive us back that night…PHEW! Finally able to enjoy the town, we walked along the ocean to the main square, where we found a peso chocolate café (Baracoa is Cuba’s chocolate capital), a few art galleries, live musicians, and a church with Latin America’s oldest cross. We then headed the other way through town, to the harbor, when we got trapped in a rain storm and wound up talking to a family for about an hour and a half. After that, we went up a giant hill to an old Spanish fort, explored there, then had dinner and drinks overlooking the town. We met our ride at 8 and hoped in for another great journey through the mountains, I got to see the Guantanamo Naval Base from a distance and was otherwise fun except that I got sick, but it passed and all was well.

The next day, we took it slow. Saw the Moncada Barracks, where Fidel and his army first began their rebel activities in 1953. They failed miserably the first time around by the way, got sent to jail for a bit. Later that afternoon, we met up with some friends that we had met in a park and went to the first game of the Cuban Baseball World Series between Santiago and Pinar del Rio. It was an amazing game, everyone was on edge and into the game, it was a ton of fun. No peanuts or beer, but lollipops and coffee did the trick from the same type of vender. After an amazing 7^th inning where Santiago scored 7 runs, they won the first game 9-2! (They eventually went on to win the title)

We took a ’55 Chevy out to the Bay of Santiago the next day to see the marine sights of the city. First up was El Morro, a fort that protected the entrance to the Bay during the Spanish colonial period. After exploring that for a while and finding Coke in a tourist shop, we headed down to a ferry (more like a covered motorized row boat) to Cayo Granma, a secluded fishing island in the middle of the Bay. We walked around that for a bit, amazed at the disrepair of the houses and the cheeriness of the town people, we stumbled upon a roof top restaurant owned by one of the island’s fishermen. For a whopping 40 CUC, the four of us got 2 orders of lobster, 1 order of both shrimp and fish, a large tomato and cabbage salad, soft drinks, and individual plates of rice and corn. Such a good lunch! After that, we headed back to the casa where the others took a nap and I headed out on an adventure. I had wanted to go to this church way out of town in the middle of the mountains that the locals rave about its beauty, but no one else would go. So, I took local transportation-a covered livestock truck with benches inside, hey, it was 40 cents of a Cuban peso (less than 1 US cent) instead of 30 CUC-up through the mountains for 45 minutes to El Cobre. It lived up to its hype. This huge cathedral was nestled in a valley between two mountain ranges and when I arrived, sunrays cut through the clouds and shown just to the right of the main steeple. It was absolutely beautiful. I got to talk to some of the older ladies that lived around the boundaries of the church and heard the history of the buildings and their experiences living so close by, so that was a fun additional touch. After getting some advice from the gas station attendants on how to get home (some things never change around the world), I caught another truck back into the city. Fun sub-adventure, I caught a motorcycle taxi back to our casa! Up side-it was my first motorcycle ride, down side-I burned my leg on the exhaust pipe…oh well!

Friday was set aside to go into the Sierra Maesta mountain range to hike the trails that the Castros had followed as they started their Revolutionary regrouping and planning in ’58. Long story short, the driver never showed and we ended up going to Santiago’s 5-star hotel to drown the disappointment in pasta arribiata, garlic bread and their swimming pool! It ended up being a great end to the week and just the relaxation that we needed before the bus ride home (which ended up being much easier and getting in an hour early-unheard of in Cuba!)

Ok…more to come: Isla de Jovenetud and more daily life!