Rickshaw, Bus, Tren

After a Sunday morning walk with camera through Camagüey, it was back to the bus station to exchange our reservations for tickets to Santa Clara. I’m beginning to feel a nomad. We travelled with a couple from the USA who recognised us from La Trova club in Santiago and who turned out to be kindred spirits. We compared our experiences of working with homeless people in Oxford and San Francisco.

In Santa Clara we made for the casa run by the friend of lovely Ana in Holguin. I later learnt that ‘friend’, in this context, means the more experienced person who the government sends you to meet when you want to set up a casa particular, so that you learn how it is done, but Maria fully deserved to be Ana’s friend in the everyday sense. She was bubbly, welcoming and ever so keen to show us the hundreds and hundreds of cacti being grown on the roof by her biologist son.

We have felt very cut off from news in Cuba but as a television was on we asked what was happening in the world. So, 24 hours after almost everyone else on the globe, we heard about the horrific earthquake in Nepal. I very briefly worked in Kathmandu and wanted to know more, but only the barest details were available. Sometimes it's felt liberating to have no internet access, never to hear a radio and rarely to see a TV but with news like this it just felt isolating.
 
We walked into town where once again, we followed our ears – past the dancing on the main square’s hotel terrace and down a side street to more dancing in the courtyard of El Mejunje theatre. Neither of these were shows, just local people entertaining themselves on a Sunday afternoon. Over coffee in the theatre café the waiter invited us to the evening’s drag show. It would have been interesting to see but it involved queuing at 10 for an 11pm start and we were tired and feeble.
 
Nearby we discovered we’d failed in our ambition to get to Cuba before McDonald’s – a bittersweet pastiche (see Extras). Actually, there’s been one in the Guantanamo Bay naval base since 1986 but predictably, Cubans aren’t allowed to go there.
 
Like most tourists, we wandered to the edge of town to see the Tren Blindado where an old revolutionary told us how, in December 1958, Che Guevara and eighteen guerrillas derailed the train that was carrying 373 government soldiers and large amounts of weaponry to Batista's forces in the east. The strike was decisive and Fidel Castro's triumphant speech from the balcony in Santiago followed only two days later on 1 January 1959. Castro's forces then made their way west to Havana and the revolution is still celebrated on the anniversary of the day that they were in each town, 8 January for Santa Clara.
 
Back at the house we were warmly welcomed by Maria’s cactus-growing son, Alejandro, and by his girlfriend, Claudia. Maria’s daughter, Claudia, was also very welcoming and we were sorry not to meet her boyfriend, appropriately called Alejandro.