I’ve been meaning to do this forever, so here goes, the first installment of mini-travel essays about Cuba, through photos. I have taken literally hundreds upon hundreds of pictures in Cuba - mostly of monuments and winding, ancient streets - which makes it very hard to pick just a handful to feature here. I’m going to go with the ones that mean something special to me, are offbeat, or show a different side of Cuba you don’t often see.
Here’s one of my favorites. It was taken very early one morning - just a little bit after dawn - at a small local beach twenty minutes by bus from the hotel.
Education is completely free in Cuba, and the tiny empoverished country has one of the highest literacy rates in the Western hemisphere, beating most Latin American nations (and quite possibly the US too). All the kids are given the uniform seen here - white shirt, red shorts/skirt, blue kerchief - the colours of the Cuban flag. High school kids wear yellow shorts/skirts instead of the red of elementary school. I love this picture because so few people are privy to a moment like this. I was extraordinarily lucky to be in Baracoa - the town depicted here - perched on the Easternmost tip of the archipelago in the first place.
This was one of the first places visited by Columbus upon his “discovery” of the West Indies, and the first place to be colonized by the Spaniards in Cuba. It’s cut off from the rest of the country by a chain of mountains - the famed Sierra Maestra that later sheltered Fidel Castro and his band of revolutionaries. (Castro’s success owes much to the poor, cut-off Eastern half of Cuba, popularly called the “Oriente”).
Baracoa was so cut-off that colonialists eventually moved westwards, and without proper roads (trust me on this - I got to experience the quality of the roads first hand), Baracoa was sealed off entirely from the rest of Cuba until after the Revolution, when Fidel had the scenic “Farola” highway built. Apparently the views from the Farola are breathtaking, but I couldn’t tell you because I travelled through the old bumpy, pot-holed, winding road where my big, awkward tour bus had to compete with bicycles and mule-drawn buggies for space (we would zip along at a normal pace for a glorious five minutes only to come to a screeching halt behind a mule).
Though Baracoa is one of the many enclaves in Cuba that benefited immensely from the revolution, when you see it you can’t help but imagine that people here are still living their lives very much in the same way they always have, revolution or no revolution. Skinny, shirtless boys riding dilapidated bikes (with a second passenger perched between the handlebars) are everywhere. So are the meandering sows with litters of piglets trailing around them, chickens, and goats. Banana trees grow wild, lush vegetation is everywhere and civilization as we know it is hard to spot. But it’s there… those thatched open huts dotting the sides of the road are actually bus shelters constructed from organic, endemic material, in perfect harmony with both nature and the history of the region. The boys may be riding their bikes shirtless, but the schools are there, and open to all, and even the tiniest tot in the farthest corner of Cuba gets to go to school in a clean, neat uniform, even if they have to take the beach route to get there.
February 2nd, 2009 at 12:32 pm
What a fantastic picture! You really captured the moment with this one. Interesting to learn a little more about their schools, too :).
February 3rd, 2009 at 8:12 am
Very cool. So glad you are writing more about Cuba. Would love to see the place, without having to sneak in through the “back door” (as an American). I’m sure their literacy rates are much higher than the States.
February 4th, 2009 at 12:05 pm
Thanks guys - I’ll be posting lots more about Cuba. Eventually I’ll even have the article I wrote for Atmosphere (Canadian travel mag) up here as well.
March 9th, 2009 at 7:11 pm
just for your info , as a native from baracoa it was never cut off from the rest of cuba as you state, since the 1930.s travel to baracoa was done by plane or by boats. the farola was not a fidel project it was begun by the batista regime and later finished by fidel. baracoa was a sleepy town that had access to the rest of cuba ,where people lived in harmony and were able to express their thoughts without fear of being taken to jail. by the way did you know that someone recently in baracoa dared to dissent outloud in the park and is in jail waiting for a trial. i really don.t know what benefits youre talking about were brought to baracoa after the revolution today it.s houses are dilapidated and what.s worse it.s a place where human rights are violated . i know, i am a native born and have lived the before and after the revolution and believe me the before with all its faults far exceeds the after . good luck i hope one day you can wake up from your dream and see things as they really are for the cubans who have had to live under the same government , same president for 50 years and counting .what would you have done if you had had gwbush for 50 years!!!it.s really sad that people dont get to see the reality when they visit by the way i used to go to school in baracoa before fidel ever took power and we also used to goto school with clean uniforms . by thw waM rodriguezy my family was not a rich familythey were just hardworking folk
March 10th, 2009 at 8:56 am
First of all - thanks very much for your comment, I really appreciate that you took the time to voice your opinion on such a nuanced topic, and since you are from Baracoa and have a personal stake in the issue, your thoughts are that much more valuable.
And 50 years of George W. Bush… that’s the most persuasive argument against dictatorship I’ve ever heard!
I would also say that yes, Baracoa is fairly cut off in that it was a really long, bumpy bus ride from Holguin in a country where most people don’t have cars. Cut off doesn’t mean “impossible”, it means that it requires special effort, effort that is beyond the means of the average person. If you are among the privileged who could take planes and boats, then great, but according to what I saw myself, and to the conclusion the Spanish settlers of Baracoa came to after a few decades of feeling “cut off” and subsequently relocating to what is today Santiago de Cuba, I would say that it’s not easily accessible.
Dictatorship is awful, but it’s also relative. Ask the Afghans. When the Taliban first came to power, (and I’m pretty sure we can agree that Fidel is preferable to the Taliban), the Afghans were happy about it, and not because they are insane. Populations are short-sighted and lazy, but not crazy. It was because they were preferable to their predecessors, anarchy, or occupation by a foreign power. You can be sure that if a regime is able to persist, there are reasons behind it. Unpopular Middle-Eastern regimes for example, persist for lots of complex reasons, some of which are social and others that have to do with assistance from the United States.
Back to Cuba… I’m not Cuban, and while I value my personal freedoms very much, I can tell you that the way Cuba is managed compares favorably to many other parts of the world - it just depends what you’re looking at. Most Iraqis today would take back Saddam Hussein, even the shi’a (though probably not the Kurds who live atop rich oil fields).
I also know a few formerly wealthy Egyptians who were aristocrats under King Farouk and fled when the very popular Nasser came to power (he came into power under a similar set of circumstances as Fidel). Egypt is now under military dictatorship and “elections” are fixed.The wealthy benefited under Farouk, the poor fared better under Nasser, and now, a new class of military elite has emerged under the current dictatorship.
I will venture to say, however, poor Cubans and much better off than poor Egyptians, and Egypt is not exactly a banana republic. In many cases, poor Cubans are also better off than the poorest of Americans.
Closer to home, Canada’s health care system draws criticism from one very loud and vocal class of people: the affluent. I recently went for a checkup in a Canadian hospital as a non-resident, so I paid for it, and the charge was upwards of $200. And this is Canada, where care is cheaper than the US! And it was just a 15 minute check-up! I couldn’t help but wonder what would happen to me if I needed surgery or had cancer and was uninsured (like 50 million Americans) or under-insured (hundreds of millions of Americans). I would go bankrupt, and this is not an exaggeration - I really would.
This is why Cuba holds so much appeal to many non-Cubans: those of us exposed to poverty, and who understand that our own good fortune was simply a matter of luck (why am I, a Palestinian, not among the dead of Gaza, or at least among the slum-dwellers? Was it because of something *I* did, or did I just win the “womb lottery”?) can’t help but see the positive in Cuba. We are also susceptible to downplaying the negative because, as I said earlier, dictatorship is relative. Like all absolutes, it’s a knife that cuts both ways, and that can be used for good or for evil. Because human beings are selfish, we take Fidel’s excesses with a grain of salt, but we can also see that RELATIVELY speaking, he has done good for the non-landowning, ex-slave, poor population of Cuba, which is to say the great majority. Egypt is a capitalist country, very wealthy in terms of natural resources, it has a sophisticated culture, an illustrious history and recieves shitloads of financial aid from the US (mostly military, but isn’t that telling in itself?). You ought to take a look at their slums though, and compare them to Cuba’s before you take such an absolute stand against Fidel.
March 10th, 2009 at 9:00 am
PS: “not rich” is also relative. I am “not rich” compared to most lawyers, doctors, celebrities, etc, but I do belong to the top 10% income bracket of North Americans. I struggle to pay bills and save for a down payment on a house, so I always wonder - and blog about - what those “median” income earning families of North American, with incomes hovering around 25,000 have to do to make ends meet.
Or maybe I’m just spoiled.
March 10th, 2009 at 10:35 am
One more thing about dictatorships (don’t you hate that you can’t edit comments???): Evo Morales of Bolivia, whom I like very much, is sadly going down that path right. However, the question of whether he could legally run for another term was put to Bolivians, and Bolivians voted for it (ditto for Venezuelans and Hugo Chavez).
Does Evo Morales have visions of grandeur or does he really think that the future of socialism (which, by the way, is not a dirty word) is at risk in Bolivia and he is the best person to save it?
This is where it gets thorny. It’s hard for onlookers to have a solid opinion on that because it’s hard to perdict the outcome of this no-term-limit thing: will this pave the way for a Cuba-like dictatorship in Bolivia, and is that preferable to the (rich, whire, non-indigenous)oligarchy of yore? I don’t know, and neither does anyone else, no matter how convincing they sound.
Maybe I am delusional about Cuba Mr. Rodriguez, but the one thing I’ve seen everywhere, is people’s tendancy to judge their country by how well its richest citizens are doing. No one wants to admit they’re poor, or that their country is actually a banana republic -see India’s reaction to “Slumdog Millionaire”.
Queen Ranya of Jordan is a stunning, charming, articulate woman with a great education, a YouTube channel, and is featured in this month’s Vogue.
Meanwhile, the Jordan you don’t see in Vogue wishes it were a banana republic - it’s more like a “sand republic” where if you don’t have connections, good luck getting a decent job and where the government is having a hard time pasing laws against honour killings. But if a Jordanian were to read this comment, they would probably send me hate mail.
The truth hurts sometimes. Sorry.