El Purio-Puente de Pavon
Five o’clock arrives unusually early but I need no alarm. By 4:30 the soreness of my body makes itself known, squeezing my leg and shoulder muscles patiently, not like the rhythmic squeezing and releasing of a massage, but more like the relentless compression of a python or a maja, Cuba’s native constrictor. The body’s memory of the first day always presents itself as a heaviness and a soreness the next morning. There is a thick fatigue that lingers inside the body, as if your blood has turned into heated condensed milk, thick and totally disinterested in carrying out its task of supplying enough oxygen to the muscles to spark movement. Can’t think about it. Just do it. I peel off the silk sleeping sack and swing my legs off the bed. The soles of my feet touch the cold tile. I have to pee.
I sleep in the T-shirt that is accompanying me today, so it is only a matter of putting on pants, socks, and boots and heading straight into the breakfast hall, where the unlucky cook who woke up unnecessarily early to deal with the extranjero asks me what I want. The director of the facility is also there, a tall, straight, strong Cuban, stereotypically American or German looking with his broad shoulders, chiseled complexion, and unexpected blondness. He looks strikingly out of place, playing the part of waiter as he brings me eggs, toast, juice, and the multiple refills of coffee I demand. No one talks.
As I finish my breakfast and walk back to the room for my pack, the promotora chases me down and introduces me to a man trailing behind her.
“This is your guide,” she says pointing to an old, stocky, salt-of-the-earth brand of black man in his forties. He wears a red sleeveless t-shirt and dark work pants that still wear the work dirt in patches on the thigh where he wipes his hands before reaching out to shake mine.
“In five minutes,” I point to the room. “I’ll get my pack.”
This stocky worker answers to the angelic name of Rafael. He will walk with me while another guide, a late middle age white guy with Reagan-esque thick white hair will ride ahead on a motorcycle with a sidecar and scouts the path. “In case one gets tired,” the promotora said as he introduced him. “Armando has the day off and volunteered to go with you.”
“Thank you, Armando. You can carry my pack.”
He smiles, “Seguro.” Sure.
By 5:30 we are on the road. Armando rolling ahead on his motor and Rafael stride-for-stride by my side. We follow the dark street running from the training center to the mill. The tall chimney rises, ash white, its thick lower part reflecting the dim lights lining the street before its grey luminescence tapers into the ceiling of the still dark, starless sky. At the mill, we cut right. following the grid of the guardarayas (path between the cane) for several kilometers until we climb onto the flat, packed dirt of the canal, heading due east, full frontal on the rising sun.
The path lays out as straight and flat as a tarmac to the eastern horizon. Long flat surfaces like this allow a walker to see the future. Our entire morning is just ahead, leading to the sun, all the way to Puente de Pavon. To our left, the ubiquitous sugar cane will follow.
Rafael, his heavy muscular presence glowing with sweat, walks solid as a stone golem by my side. He is the working-class man personified: strong barrel chest, thick arms made strong from working the fields - Esteban had once likened his own arms to railroad ties.
The thing about talking to working-class folks is that there is no such thing as “small talk.” The mostly patterned contours of each day, from the simplest, most predictable activities—going to the store—to the most unique and surprising—being asked to guide a crazy visitor to the next town “por dentro,”-- all of them, are significant and worthy of serious discussion and disassemblage. The weather, which for some of us is the topic of last resort in small talk, is a subject to be discussed, deconstructed, and established as either a constant or a variable today, hoy, because it matters when you work outdoors or have to travel by uncertain means to a job that might or might not be outdoors. The weather mattered for Rafael today, as he squints at the sky and proclaims the day to be rain free.
“We’ll go good today. It’s not going to rain.”
For decades Rafael woke up every day, ate some toasts with coffee, when available or milk or too often just water, and picked up a welding torch, his preferred weapon in the daily struggle to keep vehicles on the road in the region of northern Villa Clara. Welding is an art, he tells me. You cannot think it, the act of welding two objects that are not meant to be together. Thinking will not help you. But your body, your hands know what to do to make it happen; make it “occur” as he said. You need the correct eye, a steady hand, to use the torch in a way that makes a difference. In a way that does not let people down, he said.
“People depend on my work,” he says, “Or depended. I’m retired now.”
He has lived and worked his entire life in El Purio and environs. He has seen better times and he has seen worse times. The Special Period in the 90s was the worst of times. Then, he had to work just to eat and what qualified as food, he says, encompassed a very broad category of products that he would rather not discuss but qualifies as requiring “mucha creatividad” to make digestible. He retired, officially, a year ago but is still “en la lucha” doing odd jobs. We talk of the almost worthless pay, and bemoan, in a low, matter of fact way, his lack of contacts abroad to send him remittances. Those are two constants that will never change, he says looking down as we walk. The pay will never improve, and no one will ever send him money.
“Those who have people abroad, live better,” he shakes his head. “They do.”
Then, after the silence of a few steps crunching the dirt path. “Not much that I can do about that. Asi es,” he states matter-of-factly. He laments how finding things to buy is a problem with the little money that he has. “It was not this way before El Periodo Especial. I remember times when I had plenty of money and there were plenty of things to buy. Food. No problem. Things for the house. No problem. Now,” he shakes his head. The never-ending difficulties of chasing down food makes daily groceries a challenge equal to the task facing an aboriginal hunter reading the tracks of elusive game. “Es como todo,” he says to end a discussion, as a summary, and a life view. This, whatever we are talking about, is like everything else.
The sugar cane never leaves our side. About an hour into the walk, the sun already making its entrance at the end of the canal, glowing like an incandescent egg yolk inside the thin splatter of white clouds, I duck into the cane. “I have to take a shit.” When I come back out, he has disappeared. A few minutes later, he appears from the cane twenty meters down. “Me too,” he smiles.
We talk about the so-called changes that are not changing anything for him.
“We’re not in the way of change here,” he almost laughs saying it. “We don’t bother it one bit. Just passes us by undisturbed. But at least we have hope that it will bump into us on the way wherever its going. That things will get better,” he said. “Asi es.” He used that phrase, “asi es” (something close to “it is what it is” in meaning), as punctuation. “There are those that don’t want change and have power to stop it or slow it down. And some that do but don’t know how to do it. Change. Asi es.” He is not complaining. More like accepting that which he cannot alter. Life is hard but it is his life and he is working it as best he can.
I remember talking with Ricardo Alarcon years ago about life for the average Cuban coming out of the Periodo Especial. He was still president of the National Assembly. He worried about the class differences being created by the money being sent from Miami and elsewhere in the diaspora.
“It helps us, the Cubans here, for sure,” he said, “but it creates problems too. Most of the diaspora is white. They send remittances to family and friends. Also white. You can appreciate how after a while that can create a division in society. Class and race.” He sighed, “But some people don’t see this.” This observation came as part of a discussion on the wisdom of allowing unrestricted travel for all Cubans. At the time, Cubans wanting to leave the country, even those not planning to emigrate permanently, required “exit visas,” acquired though a stigmatizing bureaucratic process which branded the person as a deserter. Alarcon figured that by erasing this requirement and allowing anyone who wanted to leave the island would increase the possibility that they would return and that remittances would be spread throughout the population. Not that it would help Rafael. But maybe it would. This was an idea ahead of its time since it was not until January 2013 that the Cuban government did away with exit visas.
A few hours into the walk, I offer my walking companion 20 CUC, about a month’s salary in his world. He objects weakly but after all our talking about life’s difficulties, I know he will be grateful.
“Gracias, mi hermano,” he says, pocketing the bill.
“Now, just so you know, I’m going to give the same to our friend in the motorcycle,” I say. “This is not a secret gift. I’m thankful to both of you for giving of your time. You are not a functionary of Cultura or the UNEAC. On some payroll. And I thank you for giving me your time.”
I offer the bill to the driver when we catch up with the motorcycle. He protests mightily. He is much more insistent in his refusal than Rafael. No way he would take money for doing me a favor.
“I do this because I want to. Really. I’ve never taken a money for doing things that I love.”
Eventually he relents, after hearing my descarga (rant) about appreciating their time and patience. And realizing that I am not taking that money back from his hand, no matter how many times he waves it in my direction.
The canal ends on the asphalt road leading south to Puente de Pavon. The promotora and her driver stand by a car, waiting to take us to a merienda at a training center about a kilometer to the south. A pit stop for a snack, nothing more, but I try not show my exasperation. The kindness of strangers is beginning to chafe me raw. We ride the short distance, which would have taken us at least ten minutes to walk, in less time than it takes my ass to settle into the cramped back seat.
“All the way to where? Cienfuegos,” laughs a thin blond server at the training center, putting a jar of pineapple juice in front of me. “You are crazy, boy.”
I love it when women who could be my daughters call me boy--niño. As quickly as we can chew and swallow, we said our goodbyes and crawled back into the car and head back to the juncture where our footprints stop being laid down.
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