It’s very complicated…

We continue our tour of Cuba, trying to get our heads around how the country works.

It is 4½ hours from Havana to the fine old town of Trinidad, a beautiful and authentic city of cobbled streets and unostentatious colonial buildings. The long drive, (in a taxi, the only reliable way of travelling) gives us an opportunity to see the countryside and stop at a couple of spots along the way. Mostly it is unremarkable flat, scrubby land interspersed with fields of sugarcane, or more likely weeds where sugarcane used to be grown. Cuba used to produce 8 million tons of sugar, last year the target was 400,000 odd tons. Actual production was half this. The government sugar mills are all falling to pieces, without the parts, expertise, or resources to fix them.

Your taxi has arrived . . .

Here in Trinidad our Casa is in a proper house, ancient and beautiful, recently restored by the fifth-generation owners, including repainting the pretty murals at dado height. It is Easter weekend, and the city pays lip-service to the great Christian festival. Like most communist countries Castro was not in favour of organised religion, immediately summoning the catholic bishop of Havana to his office and dispatching him to Panama. But religion wasn’t proscribed, sitting somewhere between unnecessary and undesirable. Today there is a colourful and noisy procession with an icon in a palanquin but there are no queues to attend Mass, and surprisingly an hour later the church is locked.

You can walk everywhere in the centre, and it is charming but once again, extracting dollars from tight fisted tourists is the major occupation. Most of the historic houses have open doors revealing displays of tourist goods for sale, but they are tended by quiet women seated in the cool interiors rather than pushy touts on the street.

Carolina and Georgie are great at getting cautious locals to chat, but when they do they reply coyly, wary of the gringos asking questions. ‘It is very complicated’ says the twenty something waitress with a psychology degree. ‘You must understand It is complicated,’ says the young waiter in a swish rooftop venue in Havana, when we ask about why as an engineering graduate he is working in a bar. ‘It is quite complicated,’ says the university physicist now driving our taxi.

OK! We get it, but we can understand complicated things – try to explain!

Mina the lovely waitress at lunch in a chic restaurant serving quality ceviche is a law graduate making more money in a day than her mother does in a month. She is heading for the US under their parole system that gives entry opportunities from countries like Haiti, Venezuela and Cuba. ‘How could I raise a family here when I can’t get milk for my children?’ she asks. I sense more anger than sadness in her response. ‘What about your mother?’ Caro asks. There is a loaded silence. ‘I have to go – there is nothing for me here.’ Harsh choices most of us have never had to make.

One particularly eeyoreish taxi driver is an accountant who tells us he would be earning $20 a month if he chose to work doing what he trained for. He wants out. ‘There is no future here,’ he says, his gloom palpable. The young are fed up. Over the last three years 600,000 have left the island. Not just a number, but the young and the educated; delightful, clever hard-working folk (who as you will gather speak excellent English). You may recall that Cuba has a literacy rate of over 99%, significantly better than the UK. These people don’t see political change as an option; they just want to be somewhere else.

I think that what the ‘complicated’ riposte really means, is ‘there is lots that I can’t and won’t tell you about how Cuba works, and certainly I won’t say anything critical of the regime’.

The guide in Cienfuegos – who worked in a factory, went to university to study history when it closed, and taught himself to speak four languages – does better than most at explaining the ‘complications’, but is uber anxious that we keep what he tells us to ourselves. My reading is that you can’t say that the economic model and the government are deeply flawed (because you might end up in prison). You can’t admit that there are real hardships and unnecessary shortages (of food, petrol, electricity, medicines) because of incompetence and cronyism. You can’t tell foreigners that the local political representation listens to your grievances but then does nothing to improve things. You dare not acknowledge that the only way the system functions at all is the black market and the ever present Yankee dollar, nor that because the state salaries are so low, everyone has to try to find some way of making extra cash just to eat, be it selling three cans of Sprite off a wooden box in a Havana street or charging a tourist $25 for a walk through a forest. There is also an absence of information. I never saw a single newspaper. Several expats who we met joked that no one knows who is in charge. The put-upon residents of Trinidad do what they must to survive but have little idea as to who is making the rules.

Basta! We are in Trinidad surrounded by beautiful buildings, adorable Cubans and there is music on the street. We effortlessly manage to catch live sounds in four different venues, albeit that the first is a popular political singer songwriter who we had inadvertently queued to hear. I couldn’t understand more than a word or two, but from the edge to the songs and the devoted audience who knew all the words, it was obvious there was a political edge to the lyrics. We could have been in the sixties at the Ise of Wight . . . We are in the sixties on the Ise of Cuba!

Actually eighteen-sixties.

We have travelled back west to Vinales a small rural town set in some of the most beautiful landscape on the island. Great limestone pillars rise abruptly from the valley floor, ragged and punctured by caves and gashes as old limestone usually is. Tropical vegetation cloaks the buttresses in a shaggy green mantle, punctuated by the aptly named royal palms. The long journey was once again by taxi, this time a battered Renault circa 1980. It goes quite well but is tiny, has no air-conditioning and the rear shock absorbers are shot so that there is not a millimetre of padding between the differential and L5. The land is unremarkable save everywhere there are horses with or without simple carriages. We could be on the set of a Clint Eastwood movie in Mexico.

Much later we are pleased to arrive, emerging like pupating insects from the taxis fumy crush. Once again, we are staying in a Casa Particular, hosted by the delightful Yuri, (born the same year as a certain Russian cosmonaut orbited the earth – funny that!) and Marilyn. He is a trained nurse turned builder, who rebuilt his house to increase the lettable rooms to five (at $30 a night – do the maths). He still works sessions as a nurse . . .

Not surprisingly Vinales is a popular tourist destination with loads of outdoor activities to please the tourists, such as cycling and zip wires over precipitous ravines. We take a more leisurely approach with an early morning mountain walk before the sun gets too hot. The forest is wondrous, enveloping us in an array of flora and fauna totally new to us, as we clamber up a now dry watercourse. Our remarkable guide Miguel identifies every bird by its call, or its shape in the dense foliage. Usually I am still asking ‘which branch?’ long after it has fled.

We descend to the fields below and come across a pair of oxen pulling a water barrel on a sledge which I photograph. Later in the delightful museum of Cuban art in Havana I see the same image painted in 1867. Pairs of oxen dot the pastures languishing in the shade of large trees. Almost uniformly they are still used for ploughing. Truly we are in 1867.

Miguel gives us a more rural slant on the vicissitudes of Cuban life. Shooting a knackered horse is strictly unlawful with the penalty of up to 20 years in prison. ‘Our prisons are full of people whose only crime is that they were hungry,’ he says. When a horse is old you must get the vet to certify that it can be put down. If it is deemed fit to eat it must be sold to the State, but if the vet says it is unfit for consumption it can be burnt on site. So, of course, the vets are in on the scam of certifying the animal as diseased and inedible. The beast is then rapidly butchered and passed around the family. Only the family mind, because an outsider can’t be trusted.

The farmers here in the National Park must grow tobacco, 90% of which they have to sell to the government at a fixed price. The remaining 10% is for their own use. During planting the government inspector comes to count the number of seedlings you put in the ground and then revisit every week to check that the numbers haven’t altered. Nobody we met was brave enough to tell us whether this process was also vulnerable to side deals.

Hurricane damaged tobacco barn outside Vinales

Time to go home says Zebedee, or was it Andy and Pandy? Another cab ride back to Havana and a chance to visit the wonderful museums that are finally open. It is a great city and I can’t help feeling deserves better than the hand it has been dealt. Everything we see and hear points to a country on the verge of collapse, with covid, the Ukraine war and last year’s huge hurricane all playing their part. In a times past Russia bankrolled Castro’s ideology but that is all over. As Gregor says ‘for years this country has survived on other countries largesse, but there is nobody left prepared to pay the bill.’ Before Covid there were 4 Mn tourists visiting per year; now it is 250,000. The hurricane had a devastating effect on the electricity distribution network, which is still struggling, (much of the power now comes from generator ships moored offshore) it also decimated the tobacco harvest. On the way to the airport, we can’t believe the 2km queue at the gas station. Carolyn grabs my arm and asks me if the plane will have enough fuel. I reassure her saying that she should relax as they always carry a spare can, but as we approach the airport and see a line of planes, I put on serious face and say ‘maybe you’re right; looks like they are queueing too.’

The charming Cubans are many things but near the top of the list is resilient. They will be OK somehow. I just want these dear folk to have a better time of it and be able to get more from the beautiful, lush and historic country they inhabit.