Five hours of traveling to Santiago de Cuba. It’s still early but it’s already hot. I love Santiago. I realize that it is a city with its own personality and pulse. Music plays loudly, the women seem to wear a smaller size than they need, no one is in a hurry, everyone knows each other, or so it seems, by the familiarity of the way they treat each other which I don’t escape.
I wonder if at any moment this city isn’t going to go up or down, I don’t see even a single street that isn’t on an incline. I talk with everyone, in Santiago it’s the easiest thing in the world; people complain about prices, or the shortages that are seen everywhere, but it doesn’t reach the level of criticism I see in Havana, although clearly, my view is superficial.
This hot Habanera looks for any pretext to get into an airconditioned place. Lunch at El Baluarte, a restaurant that trades in national currency. The portions are small, but my last impression of the State food service in Havana is horrendous, this doesn’t seem as bad to me. I continue to go up and down the streets, commenting to my host that Santiago is a city that lives with its back to the sea, and he says I’m right, but takes me to a place known as Velazquez’s Balcony, with a spectacular view of the bay.
One peculiarity of the alternative transport in Santiago is the motorbikes. They have no license to carry passengers, but everyone uses them and they take you where you want to go. I talk with my driver who brought his bike from the former GDR where he was qualified to work in the Celia Sanchez textile factory. When they closed the business, he appealed for his bike and said they’d have to kill him to take it from him.
I asked him about the number of houses I saw under construction. Almost all are victims of hurricane Sandy,he told me, and I didn’t comment, but it’s clear that in the urgency to build technical standards have been overlooked and those thin boards portend future problems.
I remember my cousin Mayito Coyula with his observation that when you’re going to be operated on you always want the best surgeon and yet building houses is left in the hands of the equivalent of the orderlies.
Dinner is at a “paladar” (privately run restaurant) on Enramada Street; the prices are like those in Havana and the customers are all foreigners except my table. The best food and the best service of the whole trip. I go to Santiago without being able to eat a mango sponge cake.
1 July 2014
