Cuban Chronicles

Fun in the sun, homegrown food in Havana and other memories from Bánhmì11′s holiday to the jewel of the Caribbean.

The sails are up, raised proudly toward the vertical midday sun. In the cool breeze, they flutter like red and orange butterflies and our catamaran glides on the turquoise blue sea, powerful and yet graceful like a dancer leaping on air and touching the ground for only brief moments. On one side we see miles of glittering white sands, dry palm thatched beach umbrellas and red brick roofs. Here and there are groups of people, small and interspersed like miniature figurines in a toy box, ready to be picked up and played with by the chubby hands of children looking for amusement. On the other side, stretching toward the horizon, beyond the curve of the earth, is the sea, the serene, sparkling, blue and infinite sea. At the back steering the catamaran is our captain Rudolpho, singing old Spanish ballads and intermittently yelling “ca map”, God knows where this half Cuban, half Russian man picked up this Vietnamese word for shark, which gets us every time looking at each other bewildered, and then bursting out laughing. Life here, for a moment, really seems like a beach.

Cocooned within the realms on the resorts, first in Varadero and then on Cayo Santa Maria, our days took on a happy routine, full of physical activities and magical moments. We would get up at seven and head straight to the sea for a morning swim. The beach is almost always empty at this time and the sun is just rising, sparing us of the scorching heat of the rest of the day. The morning sea is spectacular – the sand is smooth, the waves are gentle, the seabed is sloped and shallow, the water is warm, not too salty, and underneath the clear surface, small silver fish swim at our feet, apparently undisturbed and perhaps even entertained by splashing humans. After swimming, we would snorkel around the nearby reef, walk along the beach, take salsa lessons on the terrace, go along with aquagym in the pool (Cuban style, which means a lot of touching, massaging and even squeezing other people’s nose), or simply lazy around on a beach chair with a book.

Sometimes we would break our routine for something more interesting, like going scuba diving from the Las Brujas marina. Our diving instructor was very charming, in that Latin way which means that he is on autopilot for flirting when in front of girls. We had barely sat down on the bus when he announced “I am going to marry one of you three…” and with a spontaneous decisiveness, he pointed at the the one of the us who sat closest to him and concluded with utmost conviction “You!”. We just bursted out laughing, which was probably a good thing because we were quite nervous. It rained the night before and the sky was all low gray clouds. Our boat looked like a rustic fisherman’s operation, with the exception of two rows of oxygen tanks along the sides. By the time we arrived near the coral and anchored, the boat was rocking violently amidst the heavy winds and strong waves. As we put our wet suits on, people started to throw up and were seasick even underwater. We were not in the calm Caribbean waters of Varadero but the mighty Atlantic ocean around Santa Maria. The seabed was shallow but visibility was poor. I held on tight to the hand of my partner, thirty-two year old IT engineer Alberto from Barcelona, whom we had only met a few moments ago. On land he was a complete stranger to me, but under water I held on to him as if my life depended on it. Without the sun, the corals looked not like the colorful underwater world of Ariel the mermaid, but a rugged prairie of yellow-green, willowy high grass. But the fish were very pretty; we saw big purple fish, small silver and yellow fish, octopus and even baby barracudas, long and slim like a knife. The flora and fauna could have been more interesting, but we were content with how well we did underwater, enduring two immersions of forty-five minutes each, and some of us emerging with still a quarter tank of oxygen left. No mean feat for three beginner uncertified divers in the Atlantic currents.

Now one can not travel without experiencing the food.  In the resorts, food was unimaginative but abundant and we stuffed ourselves full three times a day. There was always a huge buffet in the main restaurant with everything you expect of a fancy cafeteria. And in addition there were at least three more sit-down restaurants, from romantic seafood criollo by the beach to steakhouse with air conditioning and white table cloths, and then there was the snack bar, the pool bar, the pizzeria, the ice cream parlor and the beer garden, all of which are dangerously enough included in the stay.

Back in Havana, we realized Cuba was the first place we travelled to where we wished we brought snacks along, more than when we were on road trip to Tibet or on safari in Kenya without refrigeration for weeks.  Strolling the street of San Rafael near the Capitolio, we found out that the longest queues were not for the best restaurants, but the ration shops where people lined up with their tickets and stamps for the daily bread. There were oranges peeled with a peculiar machine, hot pizza being sold through the bars of a living room window, and pound cake with a top layer of creme caramel by the sidewalk, and soft ice being sold to Cuban children at 3 pesos monedad nacional but ten times more expensive at 1 pesos convertibles to foreigners.

We stayed at one of Bánhmì11′s friends’ parents’ house at the enviable address of Fifth Avenue and 72nd Street, in the enviable area of Miramar, with a view to the sea and a private guard around the clock. But even in this stately residence, her mother grows their own vegetables and fruits, because in Cuba, money does not cure the shortages and scarcity of basic food stuffs. There was coconut, papaya, mango and orange trees in the garden. When we cooked squash and spinach, she went out to pick them as the water was boiling. When we steamed lobster, we went out searching for bushes of lemongrass and lime. Every week they travelled outside of Havana, all the way to the Matanzas countryside to local farms to buy chicken, eggs and milk, which we pasteurized at home by boiling and skimming out the cream. The rice we ate was carried in hand luggage from Mexico and there were three American sized fridges in the house, where everything from meat, mushrooms, to tomatoes and mangoes were frozen and stored for gradual consumption.

We ate with a guilty conscience, that perhaps this sumptuous meal was depleting the subsistent garden, that we did not know how long all this food had been saved up for us, that other people were making long trips in the heat so that we could have a smoothie in the morning. But although guilt may have crossed our minds, our stomachs were so satisfied and our hearts truly happy. Everything tasted so good, so fresh, so fragrant; the way organically grown, local, real, just-picked-from-the-earth food is supposed to taste, the way we remembered food tasted like when we grew up in Vietnam before pesticides and growth hormones became so available. We cooked simple dishes, fish soup with tomatoes and tamarind, minced pork sauteed with green onions, and they were more flavorful than the elaborate five-course meals we sometimes ate at home. Bananas were sweet from ripening on the tree and papayas were huge, with a layer of moss outside their skin but firm and fresh on the inside. We still had an appetite in the hot climate and we loved everything we ate, savoring each bite, enjoying each spoonful, not minding the preparing, cooking, dish washing (with a disintegrated sponge) cycle that repeated every few hours, from breakfast to dinner.

Outside of the home and when rationing is not a problem, Cubans showed how they really knew how to cook. Using a mix of very poor Spanish and English, we asked the staff at two hotels nearby for a good paladar, which is a private restaurant in a private residence, as opposed to the state-run restaurants and resorts we ate at for the most part of our trip. We were unanimously recommended to La Fontana, a place only a few blocks down where we lived. London has the underground restaurant scene, and Havana has the paladar scene, both acts of turning the mainstream food on its head and bringing it back into the private home. On the menu was ropa vieja made from lamb, which we did not have the courage to try but went instead for the tomatoes stuffed with crab and avocado, the fillet mignon special and the grilled red snapper special. The food was imaginative, but showing real reverence for the ingredients – from the crisp tomatoes to the ripe and melting avocado to the tender beef- exposing their flavors and leaving their tastes lingering in our mouths long after we have eaten.

Perhaps more importantly, all the staff was always smiling. The waiter was attentive without being intrusive. The sommelier was knowledgeable without showing off. The band approached our table and asked to play music, which meant that we should tip, without being hustling. And as the drummer played the favorite tune of our trip, “Chan chan”, on his bongo, his head was turned around to gaze at Shakira’s bedroom eyes on the screen, which made us smile too. Cuban men, they make no pretense for checking us out by the pool, whistling to us from their truck, crying out from the divider of the road for us to come and join them for beer, and blowing kisses everywhere. But we could laugh it off as they were not vulgar, not weird, just really friendly, really fun. No wonder the women here walk with their head tall, their clothes tight, their heels high and their behind shaking from side to side like they are dancing on a catwalk.

People speak about Cuba and the embargo in the same breath, with a tone of resentment, and pity. But rather selfishly, somehow we saw Cuba’s reluctance  to be swept along the wind of change, the chase for prosperity, the race for global competitiveness in some aspects as a blessing for the island. Life here is certainly not glitzy, but the arts blossom. We saw amazing flamenco and salsa and Cuban son, where the dancers were graceful and daring like acrobats, sensual and colorful like carnival paraders. We heard music everywhere, even in the non-tourist quarters of Havana Vieja, where children beat plastic bottles against carton boxes to make the most amazing tunes. We rummaged the arts market and saw an impressive collection on Goya-like bursts of color in oil on canvas, somber black and white portraits of Che and contemporary images of Havana superimposed onto each other into collages. Life here is certainly not full of surpluses, but people are ingenuous with what they have. Plastic bags are washed and dried for reuse, water bottles are never thrown away and used as containers for everything, a plastic colander replaces bin liners and a plate works as cling film to cover food, trash bags are teared up to use in place of tape and sometimes when you really need it, even… condom rings substitute for rubber bands.

The supermarket shelves are empty but people have access to good healthcare. They are not obese, not diabetic and learned to dance, to swim before they could walk. The television has three or four channels of old documentary films but at night people gather around the Malecon, the 8-kilometer long promenade along the sea, watching the sunset, basking in the fresh breeze. Visiting the small village of Cojimar outside of Havana, tracing the footsteps of Hemingway for the thirty years he lived in Cuba, we imagined life here has not changed very much since he left.

Siting in darkness in the white wedding gazebo by the beach, looking up to the starry sky and half moon, listening to nothing but the sound of the waves, we felt like time stopped. We love Cuba because for the ten days that we were there, it turned a bunch of internet-addicts into active people who did not miss facebook, emails, text messaging or even phone calls. It taught us the simple pleasures of moving our hips and legs like we actually can hear a rhyme in our heads, and enjoying the constant companionship of each other without rescheduling to meet up for months. It taught us that t it was okay to smile to strangers who blow kisses at you from a truck, to get up on stage and dance along in the lime light, to breathe underwater while you are throwing up on your regulator. It taught us  that it was possible to look great without having ever heard of any designer brand, to make exquisite food from simple ingredients, to listen to thoughts in our heads instead of always finding distractions, to find joy in introspection.

Cuba is easy to love, because we had a choice, to like it and return or hate it and leave. If given a choice between the makeshift plastic and carton jukebox and a computer game, between the street pizza through the window bars and the supermarket frozen meal, between slow moving serenity and the hectic but no-queues life, we can not tell which path Cuba would choose. One thing we do know, however, is that instead of feeling sad for the Cuban people, the way we feel many times traveling through the developing world, we feel envious of this gorgeous, dignified, smiling, and passionate people.

They say Cuba awaits imminent change, that you should go while the legacy is still intact, the way you should visit Tibet before the railroad came or Antarctica before the polar caps melt or South Pacific islands before they submerge.  To us, Cuba did seem fragile, but only in that humorous way that a perfect day at the beach may be wrecked by the rain, a perfect meal may be ruined by biting mosquitoes, a perfect mojitos may be thwarted without the yerba buena. Sometimes somethings are too good to hide in memories…and that’s why we will keep coming back for more. Viva Cuba y Hasta Luego!

Posted on: 29.09.2009