This working week our comrades at the convent have been giving us tours of the various municipalities of Habana, in the hope that we will gain a better insight into the history and life of the city. We have walked miles and miles along leafy boulevards, smelly side streets, through glades and suburban housing blocks. Yassir, who has been cruelly nicknamed “Yollum” took us again to the scale model of Habana and gave us a thorough history of the city and detailed descriptions of important areas. It gets a bit nauseating after a while, staring for ages at this huge expanse of intricacy, you look up and everything is at the correct scale again and people on the other side look like huge giants towering over small villages. We were shown ‘what not to do’ in the guise of terrible hotels, soul-less suburban semi’s and office blocks masquerading as pleasant residential nodules.
Bruce Willis and the friendly cyclops took us to Parque Lenin. Built between 69’-72’ as a ‘pleasure ground for the people’, it existed for years as THE place to go on the weekend - an idyllic country retreat with hundreds of aces of forests, lakes, restaurants, and even a little railway. Parque Joy was perhaps plan B for its name. Since the dire days of the periodo especial the park has fallen into neglect and is a shadow of its former self, a surreal landscape of dried up ponds, deserted amphitheatres, and empty roads. We visited the amazing Las Ruinas - which is a combination of the ruined walls of an old sugar mill encased in a striking modern restaurant, all hidden behind a very modest stone wall. You walk through the damp doorway into a tropical garden with large white walls breaking the forest floor into habitable segments. It’s a very hard place to describe but all I can keep thinking of is Jurassic Park, once again. Lost in the forest the building looks, in parts, unfinished, with huge concrete beams rising and traversing the upper canopies, with soaring trees rising through them. At any moment I half-expected a velocoraptor to appear round a corner, poking its head through the palm leaves, spot me with its keen eyes and pounce, impaling me with its terrible claws. Inside the restaurant you are simultaneously standing on a smooth marble floor looking at a huge stained glass separation wall, whilst also confronted with crumbling stone walls, birds flying overhead and fragments of the past nestled perfectly with the new.
Sadly we didn’t eat here, instead we were towed through rolling grasslands in the shell of a small bus, by an old boy and his tractor. After 15 minutes we came to Restaurante El Bambu, Cuba’s premier vegetarian establishment. For 50p we were treated to a buffet of salads and pulses, butternut squash’s dimmer friend laying beside a plate of pink flowers for a pleasant garnish. It was a much welcomed diversion away from our day-to-day beige diet. There was also a Japanese strolling garden adjacent that whilst nice enough was a bit of a half-arsed attempt fallen at the wayside. We also visited an aquarium built in the shape of a spiral, which you walk through, continuously turning left until the curve becomes tighter and tighter and you emerge at the central café. Great idea but they can’t have had customers for some time. There were a couple of very unhappy looking crocs sharing a dank pond with a distressed fish, and several empty tanks. There is also a modest theme park on the banks of the main lake. Oh how my childish heart leapt at the sight of the blue and yellow loop-the loop! Alas it was closed for maintenance. One of failures affecting the park is transport. The rail link is disabled and the bus takes an age. We caught the M6 ‘camillo’ – or camel, so nicknamed for its 2 humps. It’s a huge bulk of metal cut from old military vehicles and the cheapest bus you can catch. Cheap means busy too and you cram in until people are hanging out of the doors. Its fun to see one chug by but not to be in at midday when you are having a sweat attack.
It is the 29th Latin Film Festival this week and our local cinema is playing British films. Admission is 2 pesos (5p) and the cinema itself is tip-top. There are no adverts or trailers which is brilliant and so far I have watched an Irish film called The Wind That Shakes The Barley, Atonement, the very uncomfortable Venus, and the shoot-your-baby-in-the-face depressing Glaswegian film - ‘Red Road’. The Cubans aren’t getting a very good overview of life in the British Isles - Irish civil war, lovers torn apart never to reunite, an old man’s questionable relationship with a very young woman and a CCTV operator who has sex with a man that killed her husband and daughter.
Some facets of Fidel’s rule are wonderful but others – like the serious neglect of Central Habana can’t really be lied about much longer. Apparently Cuba doesn’t disclose much information to the UN about its human rights and it’s hardly surprising. But you need only walk down the streets that haven’t been filled with 5 star hotels and fake mojhito bars to see what life is like for the average Joe. Behind the romantic facades the houses are falling in on themselves and at some point the government is going to have to inject a massive amount of capital into rebuilding. The big question is whether to restore and replicate or invent a new style, hopefully not copying international architecture.
I am trying to plan a post-xmas excursion and I tried to ask Mario at work if this was ok that I go away for a week. He only speaks Spanish and French, and my Spanish is embarrassing. He took me to a happy lady and we three then jumped into a broken conversation where very little was made apparent other than my glaring incapability to communicate with them. However I think I have agreed to have daily Spanish lessons at the convent, that I also think may be free. Happy lady is also going to give me the number of a friend who’s room I may rent when I go away. It’s all up in the incomprehensible air, and so frustrating.
In my suitcase are a few Birthday and Christmas presents from my parents, neatly wrapped and begging to be opened. The wrapper of one faired quite badly in trans-Atlantic transit and for 2 weeks now I have been trying to ignore the unmistakeable Lindor packaging poking through the paper. Yesterday I had a moment of weakness and hurriedly retrieved the small box of chocolate balls before my mind thought better of it. In a valued moment of solitude I unwrapped one of the beautiful spheres and devoured it slowly and without shame. It’s only a matter of time before they all meet the same fate, but I hope for their sake that they are given the full digestion they deserve. Being without certain pleasures makes them all the more appreciated when received. Music is one of them at the moment. It has never sounded so good, blissful tunes flooding my ears and transporting me away for an hour. The only CD’s you ever see here are either cheap copies of crap laid out on the pavement or ridiculously expensive imports displayed with hushed reverence on a bare shelf. And in the bars it’s either the same Cuban beat retrodden and remixed or the entire back catalogue of Celine Dion, with a hint of Disney thrown in for good measure.
I’m still trying to get my head around the money situation here. Our pals at the convent, Bruce Willis as an example, get the small sum of 15-20 CUC a month. To put that into perspective I am paying 17 CUC per night for rent, a beer is 1 CUC, cheap lunch for 5 CUC. A new CD for 25 CUC and a pair of converse shoes – 90 CUC!!! But then there is the dual currency situation. Some things are paid for in money de national – all street food, transport, cinema and some restaurants. And if you make the effort to look around you can easily live on 50p a day rather than £10. I imagine if we came back here in 10 years it would be a different place entirely, but I have no idea how Cuba can open its doors to tourism and possibly capitalism without loosing its identity. But then sometimes I don’t care at all because America is going to initiate world war 3 soon enough with either Iran or China and nuclear warfare will burn all our skin off. I am reading 1984 and it’s all a bit too close to the bone.
We have another presentation tomorrow on everything we have seen over the last 10 days. Everyone snapped up the interesting tasks straight away and I am left with resizing images and choosing suitable fonts. In a moment of madness I volunteered to draw a cross-section of a typical housing block in central Havana. This is like slowly pouring your soul into a drain, and can only be surpassed in boredom by reading a dossier. I don’t even know what a dossier really is but I imagine it to be a massive wad of A4’s possibly spiral bound, on a topic such as ‘gross interest rates in the bathroom products sector for the year ending 2005’.Dossier, the word makes me want to throw paint all over a pristine showroom and shout FANNY out of a moving car.
There is one more Lindor, sitting nervously in the fridge, awaiting its tasty fate.
