Lunes 3/28/2016
What’s a road trip in Cuba? Is it a 4-hour ride taking 9 hours? Or arriving at Playa Jamon (Bay of Pigs) to find that the entire town is out of power? Perhaps it is your professor getting a flat tire and riding on a donut for the last 30 minutes of the trip; or it could quite possibly be getting dropped off at a petting-zoo-like tourist trap while your driver searches for a gas station that actually has gas, then getting lured into betting money on where a hamster will run to after it has been violently spun around in a box. Whatever the case may be, our road trip ended with our successful arrival at our marvelous casa particulare in Cienfuegos, Cuba—a vibrant, all pink house across the street from the crystal blue Cienfuegos bay. The featured picture here is the stunning view from the porch on the roof.
The day began bright and early—we watched the sunrise as we loaded up the van for a 7:30am departure. We made a few stops, the first for breakfast at a roadside stand. Not super hungry I had what would be considered a non-alcoholic pina coolata back in the states—fresh pineapple, coconut, and milk blended up into a smoothie, sprinkled with a little bit of cinnamon on top. Absolutely delicious (and as always in Cuba, all organic). Our beloved van driver Cose pulled over for gas at the last station before about an hour stretch to Playa Giron (what Americans know as the Bay of Pigs), only to find that they were out of gas. We had to backtrack to another station we had passed, so he dropped us off at a nature observatory to await his return. I’m not a fan of places in Cuba where the only Cubans present are the workers; my favorite way to pass time is people watching, not paying for a picture holding a baby crocodile or sitting atop a giant ox. So sitting at this tourist trap watching the Transtur buses unload really made me appreciate the experience I’m getting here. I’ve said this many times by now, but it is truly a once in a lifetime experience to be here, living in a community among real Cubans every day, being able to frequent Havana and the life it contains at leisure rather than as an item on the itinerary.
Cose returned and we were back on the road, driving by a whole lot of undeveloped land for at least an hour before arriving at Playa Giron. The first thing on our minds was lunch, but the only thing on the menu at the tiny restaurant across the street from the Bay of Pigs museum was spaghetti and tomato sauce due to the fact that the little strip that this town consists of was entirely out of power. Getting the bowl of it down required suppressing a lot of wonderful memories of Italian pasta dishes back in Rhode Island, but food is food and you definitely cannot be a picky eater here in Cuba.
Restaurants here tend to be miss or miss—there isn’t an eating-out culture here like in the United States, never mind such a thing as fine dining (though there are a handful of restaurants in the cities that are tailored to tourists; very good, but sadly they boast American prices). You’ll never have a bad plate of rice and beans though, and if Ropa Vieja is on the menu and luck is on your side that they actually have it available, then I highly recommend that you order it, wherever you may be. Eating-out here seems to consist of just needing to get some food in your belly, and stopping at a street side window into someone’s kitchen with a sign next to it is the most effective way to get the job done in Cuba. You’ll pay 5 nacionales (CUP) for a ham sandwich at most places (less than 20 cents), like the place just outside of our community. One time in El Vedado we sampled some personal-sized window pizzas cooked to order for 10 CUP, served to us on pieces of paper; it tasted good, and here I am today, alive to tell the tale. If you get a drink (usually they have fruit juice of some sort—mango, pina, naranja, guava) they will serve it to you in a glass cup. Around lunch time you’ll see Cubans around the windowsills of these places chugging down their juice and cafe, waiting for their sandwiches (always ham or hotdog, sometimes with some cheese). You’ll eat it over conversation with the people also standing around waiting, or you’ll take it off the plate and eat it on the go. This is so commonplace to me now that I haven’t snapped a picture of it, but I’ll be sure to remember before I leave.
Due to the lack of electricity the Bay of Pigs museum was closed, so some of us headed to the south end of the town to take a look at the beach where the invasion occurred. It’s hard to be surprised by much now that the craziness of Cuba is becoming normal to me, but it was quite the surprise to find a hotel—Villa Playa Giron—splayed out at the end of the street, between us and the beach. We walked through the open lobby and past the large outdoor pool to get to the shoreline, to see a skyline marred by a wave-breaking wall less than 50 feet out. We walked east to escape the bizarreness that was this Bay of Pigs resort, and quickly came to the undeveloped shoreline overlooking where the invasion took place. Our hour at Playa Giron almost up, so we turned around and headed back to town, climbing into the van for the final leg of the trip to Cienfuegos.
Between Playa Giron and Cienfuegos were fields of sugar cane, grazing pastures for horses, goats, and cows, rocky hills with not much going on, and tiny run down towns that would pop up everywhere the road crossed the railroad tracks. We started to see more tiny 1 or 2 room houses, and finally they started to get bigger and closer together, apartments atop shops such as in Havana, but of French design instead of Spanish—which entails grandiose pillars and columns, lots of porches, and fewer buildings painted entirely one vibrant color like Havana, but rather mixes of pastels. We saw a big sign welcoming us to Cienfuegos, and we knew we had arrived. We passed through Central Cienfuegos to Punta Gorda, the peninsula end of Cienfuegos that juts out into the bay—el Bahia de Cienfuegos. The front of the house is just a walk across the street and a climb over a short cement wall away—another Malacon, just like the one back in Havana, just like the one back at our Cuban home in Nautico, and just like the Narragansett seawall back in the states. Our homemade dinner was served outdoors as we watched the sunset on our first night of this Cuban spring break.
