exotic Cuba

It’s an adventurous ride to Banes, according to our guide book.  Early on our first climb we are passed by a lycra-clad tourist on a road bike.  It’s a beautiful ride.  Climbing up you get views of all the surrounding landscape, distant hills.  It’s sunny and green and sweltering.  We both agree we need to get started earlier if we’re to beat the midday heat.  As it is, the ride to Banes is quite short.  But we feel absolutely knackered.  The ride is up and down the whole way.  We eventually pass the other cyclist who has stopped to fix a puncture.  The road is in fairly good condition and on the big descents we can get up quite a speed.  

a nice quiet road

After a pizza kiosk stop, opposite the hospital, we ride into town.  A man rides alongside speaking perfect English.  He must be a jinetero – a tout.  The jineteros will lead you to a guesthouse and collect a commission from the owner.  We give him the brush off politely and he rides away without much ado. The only problem is, we can’t find the guesthouses recommended by our guidebook and by previous hosts.  The streets are not signposted and none of the locals know the street names.  We reach an empty plaza with an art deco church.  It’s the one in which Fidel Castro first married.  The lucky couple ironically received a $500 wedding gift from the president Batista.  Castro was the son of a wealthy Spanish farmer – part of the Cuban establishment.  

We find a guesthouse and a friendly black woman invites us into the shade of the entrance.  There’ll be a room free mid-afternoon.  A couple of guests are leaving later.  Gayle is invited to see the room.  The guests are there.  “Sex tourist!” Gayle whispers when she comes back.  An older white guy and a young black woman.  There’s another older white guy staying and we finally put him together with the chatty woman who first greeted us.  We wonder if there’s a network of ‘friendly’ guesthouses for these odd couples, because the fancy resort hotels won’t accept them, as she tells us later that evening, “because of the age difference”.  We want to ask her more about what she is doing with this old guy but our Spanish is still rusty and she natters away like we’ve grown up together, so we keep missing some of what she tells us.  Later I look up a word she keeps repeating in the dictionary – presas, muchas presas – prisoners, many prisoners. Female prisoners, presumably locked up for prostitution.  We also wonder what other Cubans think about this part of the tourist industry.  And about the women who do this.  They are almost always black.  Are they viewed simply as prostitutes?  This woman clearly doesn’t identify as one, but how can you ask someone you’ve just met about this?  It’s not just language.  Sometimes I feel too English.

She tells us about a private restaurant that has prices in moneda nacional, but when we turn up we are inevitably given the tourist menu with the prices in CUC’s.  The dual pricing is beginning to wear.  We vote with our feet and find a state-run café that does a mean pork and rice.  Not fancy, but we’re paying the same price as the locals.  On the way back we cut through a park where people sit silently, faces aglow in the dim pale light from their phones as they get on-line.  The evening’s the best time but it makes for a weird scene.  The streets in Cuba are pretty lively with people during the day, lots of talking, shouting, queueing.  Only in the parks and plazas in the evening it sometimes takes on this zombie air.