This was my first day free of seminars at INIFAT and it started as a rainy and cool one. After breakfast I took a little walk through town up to the CADECA to change some more money so I could be sure that I would have enough money to pay for the weekend’s adventures. Santiago Street
Santiago is a busy little town and around 9am each day stalls pop up selling things in front of many of the houses. Since 1993 it has been legal for Cubans to become self-employed and run their own small business. Initially this started with 150 different occupations but each year this has increased little by little until most recently on 1st January 2012 when Cuba expanded its free-market reforms further to include carpenters, locksmiths, photographers and repairmen. They will be able to set their own prices, while paying taxes and leasing their premises from the state. The measures are the latest reforms aimed at reviving Cuba's socialist economy by boosting small-scale private enterprise. This change will be rolled out gradually over the course of the year, starting in six provinces including the capital, Havana and is expected to add to the 200,000 Cubans who are now thought to work for themselves. In Santiago these changes are most apparent to outsiders in these little stalls that sell a wide variety of items from toiletries and hair bobbles to snacks and drinks. This makes for a fascinating landscape in the town that is changing all the time.
On that particular day this informal market dotted throughout the town include one old gentleman selling books from the small patio outside his book filled house. He sat out front in his rocking chair with a prosthetic leg at his side on the floor and had no qualms about engaging in a very heated argument with his son (that was far to impassioned and angry for me to understand!) whilst I browsed. Most of the books on sale were between 10NP and 20NP (30p and 60p) and I was happy to find a lovely anthology of Shakespeare plays from 1960s Cuba and an interesting book about typesetting and typography in Cuba for Jo.
By the time I got back to INIFAT the weather was starting to clear just in time for my visit to the national botanical gardens with Marisol. El Jardín Botánico Nacional is a huge expanse of parkland to the south of Havana, and about 10km away from Santiago, containing a massive variety of plants and trees. Laid out as a savannah the grounds are split into sections according to continents, including a beautiful Japanese garden donated by the Japanese government in 1989 to celebrate the 30th anniversary of the Cuban Revolution. The best way to see the park is to join the guided tour that takes you around the gardens in what is billed as a trackless train but is effectively a tractor pulling a trailer, that is full of seats and that are protected by a roof. Beautiful lake at the Botanical Gardens
Our guide was a lovely gentleman called José who spoke clearly and eloquently about the park and who also had an impressively well-pitched patter with a group of teenagers who had joined the tour as research for a project that they were doing at school. I later learnt that he had been a secondary school teacher before he worked at the gardens that explained why he was so natural in that situation!
Semi-protected Glass House
When we stopped at the Japanese garden in the centre of the park there was a beautiful vegetarian buffet (an absolute rarity in Cuba!) and José joined Marisol and me for lunch there. As we chatted and ate José explained that he was also from Santiago de las Vegas but from a different neighbourhood to INIFAT and Marisol. It soon also became clear that he was an absolute expert on the local history of the town! He explained that Santiago had been built for people who came over to Cuba from the Canary Islands and who became tobacco farmers in the area, growing tobacco for the king. These people were known as las vegas hence the name. And a very similar reason to where Las Vegas in the states got its name too! He also explained that the local village called Calabareza was named after a driver who crashed his trailer and spilled his cargo of pumpkins (calabazas) into the river. And that Ranchero y Los Boyeros gained their names from “los rancheros de los boyeros” or “cowboys of the bulls” that used to populate the area.
Most interestingly this local knowledge was backed up by a great commitment to his local cultural identity and history, with a sense of sadness that much of this was being lost to a new generation who were more interested in national and international affairs.
“Without a local story a place is nowhere,” he explained. “So the loss of interest in these stories is always going to be a very sad thing. Santiago used to have its own philharmonic and two cinemas. It had a glorious cultural life for a place of its size. And on top of that people visited here because the town had pride and believed that there was a reason for people to come and visit. Einstein came here, the Pope, Federico Garcia Lorca. People came here and there was a record made of it. But now that kind of event doesn’t happen and if it does it isn’t recorded in the same way. And without that the identity of our town will gradually stop existing as well.”
Beautiful Cuban Leaves
Later when were about to leave the park Marisol nipped to the bathroom. Whilst I was waiting for her José came out of his office with a leaflet for me as a reminder of my visit.
“What do you think of Cuba?” he asked, the question that many Cubans seemed to like asking.
“I like it,” I replied. “I like the people and I like the diversity and mixture of people living together.”
“Yes,” responded José. “We are certainly all a mixture and we are certainly all a contradiction. Cuba… it’s a country of great contradictions. That is certainly how I’d describe it anyway.”
I liked José. I liked him a lot. He had a kindness and honesty that seemed reflective of most of the Cubans that I had met so far on my trip. Take Marisol for example, Saturday was supposed to be her day off work but she was insistent that I should not be on my own. Thus organising our trip to the gardens and our trip into Havana the next day and reflecting once again the great sociability of Cubans and their desire to look out for people and do the best they can for them, no matter how much or little they know them.
It was also nice to spend this day with Marisol away from INIFAT and have time to talk more in the tranquillity of the gardens. I was particularly interested to hear about her experiences working in Mexico, which she had to do as part of her job. First time she visited for ten days, then another trip for three months and now she was preparing to go again, this time for a whole year. A year when she would be a way from her husband and son, with little or no easy contact with them. It was sad to hear her talk about this because her family obviously mean a great deal to her but she approached the situation without any self-pity or criticism. It was simply part of her job that could not be avoided and on this basis she would live with the situation as positively as she could and make the best out of it that she could.
Marisol was a very nice person. A typically kind and honest Cuban, two qualities that are very common in Cuba and that I would come to really admire during my stay. She was clearly deeply knowledgeable in her own specialism of soil but also had an incredible love and knowledge of all things horticultural, which she brushed off as just being part of her job – it isn’t! I loved Marisol’s openness and positivity and hoped that one day I may be able to reciprocate her wonderful hospitality in my own city. I’m not sure how this may be possible but I’m determined to make sure that one-day it will be.
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