Day 1: Sagua-El Purio Day 1 (Last Leg)
Down the hill from Guayabo Cuartel, we hit a dirt road and approach the Circuito Norte. Coming our way from the direction we’re heading, trooping in their flats and casual dresses, are the director of Cultura of Sagua la Grande and a heavy-set lady who will introduce herself as the promotora cultural of the town of Viana. We see their smile from afar. Once closer, we see their faces and arms glistening with sweat. The heavier one has elaborately strapped shoes. Her feet bulged like soft freshly baked white bread loaves against the plastic trusses.
“Por fin,” says the promotora as she introduces herself. Finally.
“Where is the car?” I know that they have not walked far in their gear. She points down the path.
“Waiting at the juncture with the road,” the promotora says. “This is our exercise for the day.” She laughs. “For many days, really.” She gracefully wipes the sweat forming on her upper lip with a handkerchief. We pass the closed tienda and admire a grey building behind an iron gate, a cement structure darkened with mold. “Villa Una” announces the arch above the gate. A beautiful, abandoned house that must have been something in its heyday, the solidly built and unquestionably elegant home of some local landowner.
“This would make a great refugio,” says Maykel, “for walkers doing the Camino.” We had talked about the pipe dream of establishing an infrastructure ala Camino de Santiago on this route with simple accommodations for walkers. This would be a perfect place for the first day’s layover.
On the boiling asphalt of the Circuito Norte the blue Lada waits to take us to Viana. The walking route passed far north of Viana but the town had been a dot on the first draft of the route. I quickly abandoned the idea of making it the first day’s stop. It was too close to Sagua (~10k). I swing the backpack off my back directly into the trunk and pile in the back seat with Maykel and Carlos Alejandro.
The ride to Viana is quick. The car telescopes the hours that it would have taken us to walk the distance into minutes as the landscape blurred by the window. Even after less than a day on foot, the speed of a car shocks. We arrive in Viana before our bodies realize it.
We eat a much-appreciated lunch at a school cafeteria, pile back into the Lada and, in a blink of an eye, we are driven back to the juncture in the road where the car met us. Maykel and I begin to walk the last five or so kilometers to El Purio along a flat, dusty path skirting a canal. Carlos Alejandro has had enough and stays in the car along with my backpack. We’ll meet again at El Purio.
Maykel and I talk about the changes occurring in Cuba and what he wants to see happen. Mostly, we talked about the difficulties of being a journalist in Cuba.
“On the one hand, they encourage us to look critically at situations. Our entire education, really, is based on critical thinking. But when we do it in our jobs and come away with different conclusions than the “official” conclusions, we’re the ones criticized for not being supportive of the national project or regional project or whatever.” He shakes his head. “Investigative reporting you call it. Here, no way to really do it. Or,” he corrects himself, “we do it and it’s not news.”
“Say I find corruption in a building project,” he goes on. “Or in government, or anywhere. My boss either says, ‘everybody knows that’ or ‘we don’t want anybody to know that’.” He gives a few other examples and summarized his view of journalism as a profession in Cuba: “It’s the only profession where your boss does not want you to do a good job.”
We think about this in silence for a while, walking on the flat dirt besides the canal. The sun covers all evenly in a yellowness, like a golden veil. The water drifts in silence past us heading west, to Sagua. We both appreciate the calmness, I think. No audience. No speeches. Each in our far away worlds for a while.Despite all the moments that he wishes would not exist, Cuba is his home, he tells me.
“We are all in this together,” he waves his arms like a magician in front of him. He did not mean me. “It’s a project that we have to keep building. We can’t give up.”
“Es un proyecto bonito,” I say, repeating the line said to me by a friend years back. “It’s a beautiful project.”
He nods, then shrugs. “It has some ideals and some real deep and fucked up contradictions,” he said. Then he smiled, “No es facil.”
I tell Maykel that I envied his sense of belonging.
“But you’re Cuban too. You are part of all of these ideals and contradictions. Why are you doing this trek if not to learn your place here. You can contribute in ways that I can’t, like Carlos Alejandro can’t. In a different way but still as a Cuban. Because that’s what you are.”
***
I remember the many times that I wondered, daydreamed really, about how my life would have turned out if my parents had stayed. How I would have developed physically and mentally? What career would I have chosen? Would I be a party member, a member of the opposition or, like most Cubans, simply work day-to-day with some sort of pride of place, hoping for the best.
Maykel presents me with a concrete model of what I might have been. He easily and with little bitterness and solid first-hand knowledge, criticizes the absurdities of the Cuban system. He is angry about abuse of authority by bureaucrats; about the sheltering of incompetence in the service of power and of a lack of vision by the octogenarians running the show. Yet, he will not emigrate because his country is more than its politics or Kaftka-esque bureaucracy. It is about the people and work they do together. Each time that I mention how European hikers will flock to the Camino if handled right, he reminds me that this walk is about Cuba for Cubans, not foreigners. Cubans need to do this, he says. Get to know our own country by living broadly in it. I could have turned out like Maykel, had I stayed.
***
About two kilometers into our five kilometers walk a car approaches. A crowded, white Lada riding rigidly low on its shocks and resisting every bounce that the uneven road forced on its chassis. Five heads bob inside as dust rises behind the wheels.
“They’re smiling at us,” I say to Maykel. He looks puzzled. I wave and smile back as the car slows.,
“Buenas,” says one of the three smiling women, unfolding through in that awkward lower your head, bend the knees to your mouth and stretch the leg to find the ground way.
“I’m the promotora cultural of El Purio.” She introduces the rest of the riders as each crawl out of the metal shell as the dust settles around it. I do not catch their names, but all have some title associated with Cultura, except for one young girl, introduced as the teenage daughter of one of the women, and a man dressed in a doctor’s white smock and with a stethoscope around his neck.
“You guys concerned about us,” I laugh. They probably got word that the lead dog in this Camino was not that young.
“Precautions,” smiles the doctor.
The promotora invites us to get in the already crowded car.
“Unless you have another Lada hidden in the trunk, I don’t think we can fit,” I say. “Besides, we’re almost there.”
“We’ll manage,” she insists opening the door. “If not, I’ll walk back, and you ride.”
“We’re walking in.” I shake my head slowly, firmly. “Really. We’re ok. And that’s the point of doing a walk...to walk.”
There’s no way that would hitch a ride on the first day. Especially since my backpack waited for me in El Purio, miles from my back. I felt light as a feather and the path could not have been flatter.
They accept the fact that we were going to walk into El Purio. Maykel and I continue down the dirt road as they choreograph their re-entry into the white Lada. After a few minutes of walking and talking, it strikes me that the car has not passed us returning to El Purio. I look back: the entire entourage is walking about fifty yards behind us, doc in front, promotora and her posse behind, the car trailing slowly.
“I have to take a picture of this. No one will believe me,” I tell Maykel, framing the shot.
A kilometer further down the canal we turn into the center of town as the Lada passes us, stirring the beige dirt. Our friends from the Lada join a welcoming committee of twelve folks from town, mostly women young and older.
“So you called for reinforcements,” I ask the doctor. Together, we walk the last kilometer.
***
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