In front of my hotel, at kilometer zero of the Camino del Cimarrón, I look at the stars still sparking inside an obsidian black sky which will miraculously turn azure blue in a few hours.
“So, would you call this a hotel?” I ask the night manager who is seeing me off. His eyes are bright; wide awake and eager.
“No. Not yet. But,” he smiles, “we’re going to start taking in tourists soon. Trying to take advantage of the moment in the hopes that tourist will find their way to Sagua on their way to Remedios. This is just for nationals now. You’re a special case.”
The “hotel” is a hybrid guest house designed purely for workers but now is renovating its presentation of self for the tourists that will hopefully begin to explore the island in this new age of openness with the United States. The place still has a rooming-house air about it, with the bathroom down the hall but my room was comfortable; TV, a good air conditioner, good bed, table and plenty of windows.
I lean my backpack against my leg and wait for Maykel and Carlos Alejandro, the historian and his friend. Both will walk with me today, helping me on my way from the porch of this hotel, to the town El Purio, home of the mill where Esteban first worked as a free laborer. The manager reaches into his shirt pocket and pulls out a simple business card, his name in black lettering along with the outline of a building below the inscription, Casa de Trabajadores.
“Try to get the word out. Any day now we’ll have permission to start taking in tourists. Sagua needs the help.”
It is 5:30 in the morning on a hopeful day in March 2016.
***
Maykel and Carlos Alejandro materialize out of the darkness at the end of the street, heading our way on the dirt road. Dim streetlights light the road around us. A yellow aura rises from the dirt creating a blurred canopy gathered above the road by two or three streetlights. Follow the yellow dirt road. The two boys amble towards, shimmering.
“We ready to go, right? Everyone slept like babies last night, right?” I ask.
Maykel laughs.
“Couldn’t sleep, I was so nervous. Running the route in my mind. How to get from here to there. No one that I know has done it. We have to create it.”
“Pa’lante,” I say and started walking. Immediately, it dawns on me that I didn’t know the way.
“Uh…This way?” I ask, looking at Maykel.
“Pa’lante,” says Maykel as his way of saying yes, pointing in the right direction. Onward!
Yesterday at the museum, he mentioned this path as “the perfect route,” the one that would take us along the river’s edge to Sitiecito, where the Cimarron was born.
"When we catch the river,” he said, “we will be walking along the old road to Guata; a dirt road that skirts the river and traces some of the old Paseo Real through the entrance of the 19th Century Villa del Undoso, where the first settlers set down stakes next to the Undoso River.”
We wind our way along dark streets with darkened houses and horses standing eerily still in their shadows. After a few minutes, we hook a right and start along the path parallel to the river, a path through which history has traveled for over two hundred years.
I breathe in the cool night air soon to disappear with the first rays of the sun. It feels good to walk. Finally, after all the months of planning and hovering over this very same spot on Google Earth, I am on the road. The dirt crunches under my feet as if I were pulverizing grains. The moon, two days waning, still bright enough to lay down a grey ribbon on the terraplén, hard and wide, straight and sure, as far as I can see. We walk three abreast with no difficulty. Passenger cars could manage it if needed, but it was an agricultural trail connecting towns and fields. Horse-drawn buggies or tractors rule this land. And lanky and sun worn güajiros in straw cowboy hats traveling on horseback or on foot. Esteban would feel at home in this land.
***
Sagua la Grande straddles the Sagua river in the north central region of the Villa Clara province. In the 19th Century one could navigate it from its interior origins all the way to the coast, some thirty-two kilometers away. Isabela de Sagua, a post-card-ready fishing village, sits near its mouth, where the river flows into the Florida Straits. Water has always played a part in the history of Sagua. The word “Sagua” reportedly comes from “Cagua,” an indigenous term meaning “site of abundant water.”
Back in the late 1500s, the settlement was known as “El Embarquadero,” “the pier” in English. El Embarcadero served as a major port, out of which the highly priced wood of the region travelled either to Havana for the building of ships, or to Europe for the construction of mansions. The noted geographer and naturalist Alexander von Humbolt in his 1827 Ensayo Político sobre la Isla de Cuba recorded the Sagua river as one of the few navigable rivers in Cuba.[1] In 1862, the settlement received the glorious and abundant name of Villa de la Purísima Concepción de Sagua la Grande. By this time Esteban was two years old and spent most of his time inside the infirmary grounds in the sugar mills on the outskirts of the city.
Thanks to the river, the city developed into one of the most important hubs in the northern coast of Cuba. During the turbulence of the wars of independence in the late 19th Century, foreign capital, both European and American, funded the city’s development. The economic growth made Sagua the “Pearl of the North Sea” well into the middle of the 20th Century. At the time, the city was unrivaled in its wealth and opulence. Today some of the remaining architecture does its best to conjure up memories of a glorious past but the city center lies badly damaged after years of neglect, looking more like a post-apocalyptic version of the Neo-classical beauty that characterized this mid-20th Century urban jewel.
***
We walk the terraplén out of Sagua la Grande, rubbing shoulders with the river as the sky slowly fades into blue. Another cloudless day ahead. No rain anywhere in sight. No wind to speak of either. The heat will try to break us, but we are ready for that.
An hour into the walk, a fork to the right leads to Sitiecito and its mill, Esteban’s birthplace, where we had walked the day before, just south of Sagua. We take the left fork, which keeps us on our journey to the old Mariana Grajales mill. Mariana, as the locals call the ingenio and its batey, is the most recent name given to the old Flor de Sagua mill[2], where Esteban worked as a slave and from where he ran to become a Cimarrón. If all went according to plan, our long first day of walking would take us from Esteban’s birthplace, Sitiecito, to the place where he first toiled as a slave and eventually escaped, Mariana, all the way to the setting of his first job as a free man, El Purio. At El Purio we would settle down for the night. All in all, a distance of almost forty kilometers lopped off the 300-kilometer walk. A bit long for a first stage of any trek. But, as my football coach used to say as I huffed across the finish line after a post-practice mile run, I have the rest of my life to recuperate.
***
The terraplén ends at northern Cuba’s main road. The Circuito Norte is part of the Cuban road system, a stretch that winds along the northern coast of Cuba, from east and west of Havana. Taking the Circuito Norte to the right would take us back to Sagua. Staying on it for about nine kilometers past Sagua to the west, however, would take us to Chinchilla, the small town where Esteban’s godfather and mother lived. He visited them in the 1890s, right before the War of Independence; before he became a Mambí fighter. As Esteban recollected to Miguel, his godparents, Gin Congo and Susanna, told him who he was: “They even told me the plantation where I was born….They told me my parents had died in Sagua….Because I was a runaway slave, I never met my parents. I never ever seen them. But what is true can’t be sad.” (7)
“Pero eso no es triste, porque es la verdad.” This phrase engraved itself in Miguel Barnet’s memory, serving as a summary of his time with Esteban. Decades later, in interviews and documentaries dealing with Esteban and the book, Miguel quoted Esteban, as if the secret of it all, of the meaning of life, could be found in this simple phrase.
“How simple and elegant,” Miguel told me once. “This tells you a great deal about the extraordinary nature of Esteban. What is real, what is truthful, can never be sad. I think that’s how he saw his suffering as well as his joy.”
***
We do not stay on the Circuito for long. Maybe one hundred meters. Our goal, this morning and every day, is to stay away from main roads and cut “campo abierto,” through the open fields, using animal and güajiro paths to reach our destination. But without signposts to guide the way, no direction is completely certain. We stare across the asphalt of the Circuito, unsure where to cut across to the open fields waiting for us on the other side of the road.
“Excuse me. How do we get to Mariana?” Maykel asks a dark haired woman carrying a full paper bag like a baby, walking past us towards Sitiecito.
“Head up the road a bit, then go right on the way to Mesa,” she says gesturing past us down the asphalt, her eyes fixed on some distant point. “See that bus stop? Turn up there.”
The “way to Mesa” formed part of the oral transportation tradition of the area; that is to say, neither the way there nor Mesa itself had any identifying marks. All locals know the way to Mesa and “radio bemba,” lip radio, is their way of communicating that knowledge to the uninitiated. We head in the direction of her gesture and, just before committing to the right turn, we ask another local for the way to Mesa.
“Yes,” says the young woman “haciendo botella” (hitchhiking) on the asphalt, “take a right at the bus stop."
Three women wait for the bus or anything remotely resembling transportation that would get them to work or to wherever they were headed. Two of them smile, staring at my pack, as we turned to the south, up the narrow dirt street. As soon as we see the smokestack of the ingenio, we will know that we were on the right path, says Maykel. I look around. Some small wooden houses to our right line the street. Up ahead climbs a soft hill. We crest it and reach railroad tracks where some box wagons stand idle. The path continues straight ahead splitting fields of sugarcane up to the horizon. Still, no smokestack announcing the ingenio. We stop to evaluate. Have we lost our way? From behind us to the left a group of workers appear.
“How do we reach Mariana from here, amigos?” asks Maykle. It seems that in having to find our way without the aid of roads and signs, my guides and I were on somewhat equal ground. None of us know our way around here. We are all strangers in a somewhat familiar but strange land.
The two women and two men, dressed in official-looking brown and white uniforms, stop and in perfect unison, all four lift their left arm and point
“Keep going along the tracks,” begins one woman, “until you get to an asphalt road.” “Take a right there and then a left right before the house near the powerlines,” continues the second one. One of the men squats and begins to draw the directions on the dirt with a stick. Cubans will stop whatever they are doing to help a stranger.
The first woman continues talking and waving her arms as if giving semaphore signals to our destination. As her arms settle by her side, a thin campesino carrying a white, bulging, plastic bag over his left shoulder and a brandishing a machete in his right hand walks past us, leaning forward as if walking against the wind.
“Oye,” calls our main direction giver. “You going up towards Mariana?”
“Not that far,” he says, bending his machete arm to shield his eyes from the sun, now an hour into the day.
“Take them with you as far as you can,” orders our direction giver.
He waves his machete indicating that we could follow him.
Head down, we follow the man, watching our steps. Doing our best to avoid the potholes camouflaged by overgrown grass. Passing through the cane fields and heading directly into the sun. We leave the railroad tracks behind. Acres of agricultural fields stretch to the right, fringed by palms. Always the palms. Esteban roamed the land of palms, cane and machetes.
At the road that is supposed to be asphalt, rumors of this glorious past persist as uneven black slabs beneath the dirt, the campesino takes a right and, after a few meters, pauses to point with his machete towards a small path leading into the cane field on the left.
“Keep going through the cane. It will open after a while and you will see the ingenio. Buena suerte.” Good luck.
He cuts a circle in the air with the machete as a goodbye wave and continues trudging the dirt road towards a small blue wooden house that sits at the top of the crest of the road. I look back and see that we had climbed a decent height. The Circuito Norte stretched east-west below us. Uneven ground stretches beyond, but from here to the Florida Straits, some forty miles to the north, there are no mountains, only mole hills. I turn and catch up with Maykel and Carlos Alejandro, who have disappeared into the cane.
The path is clean and clear to the eye, with short grass working its way into the occasional well-worn tractor tracks. The guardaraya (path between the cane) gives way to an open field with a small path that meanders in a slow, rhythmic pattern as if it were undulating through the grass. The narrow ribbon of dirt and grass leads us past small plots of agricultural land thick with leafy vegetables of some sort between newly planted cane fields. In the distance, above the bristled top of the cane, we see the ingenio smokestack. Maykel turns and smiles.
“Can’t get lost now.”
I asked my mother once about how much of Cuba she had seen. I was surprised/not surprised to hear that she had seen almost none of the island. The area around Havana was her Cuba, with vacation get-aways to San Miguel de los Baños, a town with thermal springs off the Carretera Central (Central Highway) approximately one hundred kilometers east of Havana. It did not take me long to see more of Cuba than my family had ever seen. When you think about it, Cuba for my mother was just as much an abstract idea as for me.
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