Escapisms

Didn’t have too bad a nights sleep with the air con on full blast and the mozzie killing machine whirring around too I was quite surprised all things considered! Breakfast was find out on the balcony and we met the owner – well I assume that she is as she introduced her self to me as Lydia.

We were having a walking tour of Trinidad this morning with Marlon as our guide. The fact that we had pretty much seen most of it last night int he dark meant that the walk was relatively quick! We met at the usual spot of the green hotel in the square (thankfully the shortest walk for us) before heading off to tread the cobbled streets of the rather quaint colonial town. One of our food stops was at the local ration provisions store.

Like most communist regimes food is rationed in Cuba. Everyone is issued with a booklet for their rations which they take to a special store where they can collect their rations on a monthly basis. Prices and amounts per person are set by the government. This is to ensure that no one in Cuba starves. It is the basics so that you wont starve but it is not enough to live on. Whether young or old, in employment or not, sick or healthy – everyone gets provisions of rice, corn flour, sugar, salt, soap, coffee, fruit preserve, eggs, toothpaste, evaporated milk, oil, pasta and some meat. The get for example – 5lb of rice a month for 0.25 pesos. As good as that sounds they don’t always have everything available all of the time. They have, for example, at the moment a shortage of salt and no evaporated milk so instead they ave powdered. Once you have your monthly allowance (which gets checked off in the ration book) that’s it. No more. There are other stores where you can buy goods, buy they are a lot more expensive. Cubans are all paid in pesos by the government and only a few CUCs. The pesos are used for the rationed items mainly as well as for paying the household bills and the CUCs are for buying the ‘luxury’ items.

One of the group chatted to a security guard at a bank and established that he was paid 300 pesos and 26 CUCs a month. As you will be able to see from the image below – the total amount for the food for a month is only 8.67 pesos. There are other expenses that are really cheap for the locals, such as bus tickets. The real value of things in in CUCs and it is really only those that deal with tourists that are paid in this ‘luxury’currency. We tipped local tour guides on average 25 CUC on our day trips for example and our bus driver got 200 CUCs (he was with us all week) as suggested by our guide for the week who got 310 CUCs from donations from all of the group. Its really only these people that can afford to have mobiles (an iPhone handset cost around 600 CUCs) and rum and smart fancy clothes. One CUC is worth 24 pesos. so if you are wanting to buy a bottle of rum or 3 CUCs but don’t have any, you can also buy one for 72 pesos. This is another reason why the lines are so long at all of the exchange houses as it is not only tourists changing money but Cubans changing from pesos to CUC and the other way around. 300 pesos doesnt really last you very long at all. Private businesses(self-employment) were allowed and encouraged by the government in the early 90’s after the dissolution of the Soviet Union (Cuba’s main trading partner) left them in a dire state. Cubans don’t get to keep all of their hard earned money though – they still have to give a percentage of what they own to the government (I see this as taxes but Marlon our guide was adamant that no Cubans were taxed). (Thanks to Val – a fellow traveller – who remembered most of this info in a post of hers that I have ‘borrowed’ the info from)

It was a really heartening experience I must say. I was pretty taken back by the poverty and the fact that in the 21st century here was a country still surviving on rations. Another sample of living in a time warp – I thought all of the old cars and joy of no advertising splashed everywhere was enough! Opposite this shop was the shop where you could also go and buy your bread and the the markets were the places for fruit and vegetables. Though most of their vegetables seemed to be root veg and the rest such as carrots and green beans were tinned. You would have thought in a country that uses their land so much to grow their fruit and veg but yet no green veg seemed to be grown – maybe it was the wrong time of year or climate – I don’t know. Their fresh fruit though – amazing!

From here we headed to a museum which was, as so many of the museums are, a former accommodation for one of the rich families of the area that has now been turned into Museo de Historia Municipal museum logging the details and items from the various years of living in Trinidad and included several rather fine pieces of furniture. You had to pay 5 CUC to take photos (seeing as you only pay 1 CUC to get in I wondered if this was just a ploy to get tourists and that maybe they didn’t need to give much of this money to the government? Is that a bit too skeptical of me? Well I coffed up none the less! There were amazing views out over the red slate roof tops of colonial Trinidad in the tower where we saw the only example of health and safety in Cuba thus far this trip as people were being restricted from ascending the tower too many at a time. The staircase was wooden and pretty steep, but definitely worth it as you will see from the photos below.

From here we headed up to visit a local artist and his wife not far from Plaza Mayor and look at the work in his studio. It was absolutely boiling. I was literally sweating buckets and made use of one of the chairs in the small gallery as we listened to Marlon translating for us what the artist was explaining about his fascinating work and immense talent. He took old plains of wood that had been thrown away from the shutters and used these to create his masterpieces by using them like lino and creating these frankly amazing masterpieces which he used photos of the elderly of Cuba that he had taken randomly on the street and once he had created the piece he used acrylic on it to help bring it to life even more. I was blown away by the detail in them. They take anything between a week to a month to crete and the one that has no pain on is the one that he was currently working on and had so far spent 15 hours on it. He was preparing for  an exhibition, I forget where that was going to be but I had already asked Marlon how much the pieces would be sold at and he said anything from $350 – $500 dollars. I’m not sure I was taken enough to want to buy one but they were fascinating and simply incredible pieces of art. His wife was also a crafty lady and created embroidery tops and crochet tops as well. Unfortunately (and fairly unsurprisingly) ladies with a larger chest were not really very likely to be able to find a top which was sad as I wanted to support them by buying something and the tops were beautifully made. I ended up in purchasing a small bag that was made out of ring pulls from cans that were crocheted together. Not sure when I will use it but I can see it being used at some point! Its only tiny anyway and they had been so welcoming, I felt I wanted to support them.

After our trip to the artist we had free time before we met up to go and book our trips the next day. I pootled around a little getting incredibly warm int he sunshine and all too aware that I didn’t have any suntan lotion on. Wasn’t needing burnt shoulders ahead of our potential visit to the beach tomorrow. I ambled down streets there and there soaking in the beauty of my surroundings, the cobbled streets, the brightly coloured houses the sunshine and of curse the beautiful blue sky. The views were simply sublime. So surreal and such  time warp, so untouched by tourism it was beautiful. When i say untouched by tourism I think I mean more that there is not hordes of hideous advertising everywhere. No coke signs everywhere, no beer advertising in windows. When the Americans break back into his country that is going to be one of the most noticeable changes I think. Places such as this will totally loose their charm. It makes me feel so sad that this beautiful colonial town is going to be so ruined by commercialism in due course.

After our free time we were all meeting up outside the green hotel on the square, I made a visit to the El FLortidita here to cool down with a daiquiri – not sure I really need are reason, made of crashed ice it was a welcome cooling drink! As I sat there with a couple of others from the group that I found in there who had a very similar idea. There were loads of the locals coming in an out while we were sat at the bar getting handfuls of cool beer and we were convinced that there was a guy that was doing home deliveries of boxes of beers. It was quite amusing just watching the comings and goings!

Having caught up with the rest of the group in the square we went to the HavanaTour office to book our day excursions for the following day, a separate expense. I was not torn in the slightest. There was a walk in the valley with a  waterfall trip and other exciting sending things, or a trip on a catamaran to a deserted island for some swimming white sandy beaches and crystal clear turquoise sea. It was a no briner. Out of the two I had made my choice when I had booked this trip back in April. From here the salsa dancers went off to there additional class, not my cuppa and so the remained of us, nearly all I think headed into the green hotel for beer, lunch, air con and some wifi!

After heading back to the casa for a spruce up and a bit of a lie down before the evening s entertainment it was apparent a little shut eye was really not going to happen as the household had music blaring, we heard it as we were walking from the square and I said it sounded like it was coming from our place. There were to only youngsters but some oldies as well sitting on the steps outside the house with a guy that we assumed they would be burning at midnight. I had a shower and lay in the air conditioning for a while just having some quiet time.

The evening meal I had ensured that we had together for and was not far from the ‘Steps’ where we were planning on being for midnight. Marlon had done a good job at managing to get us in – there are 20 of us with him and the driver after all. Another buffet style meal with several salad type things and a soup choice for starter. Everything seemed to have peppers in bar the sucking pig and chicken that was on the roast. Essentially my last meal of 2015 was meat, meat and more meat!

We headed to the Steps which had way more people than anticipated on them and that Marlon had though, possibly because there were more tourists? Hard to tell. We ordered drinks in their masses. I am NOT a fan of New Year. Never have been. It not my thing at all. Too many nasty memories and ‘looking forward’ new starts and all that bollocks. The depressive in me shines through like a beaut. I was proud of myself. Ok I may have been a little quiet in the half hour lead up and not be stand and chatty and driving and laughing but Im always in bed well before the fateful hour. I may have been spotted at one point and suggested (jokingly) that I might like to stand up and join in at some point. But I managed to survive it, mojito in each hand. No one was calling it and so decided that would be my focus. Used the timer on the iPhone and kept a close eye letting the remainder of the group that I would start us (which then turned out to be the entire of the steps) in the countdown into 2016. The music never stopped it was just yours truly. I thank you (curtseys). I lasted about 45 mins before heading home, via a rather large diversion s the short cut I thought would work easily without a map, well it didn’t! We wondered through a small few gatherings on the streets as we treaded the cobbles trying to find our way home and to our beds. Tired but excited to be heading out to the island in the morning.