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.
