Remedios
I know a bit about Remedios, even before I walk into town. It has quite a reputation to uphold. I know that now, in 2016, after many years of presenting its case, the city has been officially recognized to be among the eight oldest settlements on the island. Many historians consider it to be the second or third settlement established by the Spaniards as they felt their way around the coast looking for adequate harbors. There is sound evidence to suggest that by 1578 the town of San Juan de los Remedios already existed, and that as a port of call it had been around since1514, before Trinidad. Only Baracoa and Bayamo have earlier pedigrees. But the settlement cycled through a series of names before arriving at San Juan de los Remedios and this fuels the debate about its longevity.
I walk into the Casa de Cultura where a dance group practiced an Afro-Cuban number. I watch, swaying to the drum beat with my backpack on my back while someone calls the attendant. She arrives smiling and short. I pull off my backpack saying something along the lines of being expected by the promotora. She looks puzzled, knowing nothing of my arrival.
“But it was all planned,” I mutter.
Maybe the administrative office down the street has information, she says.
I mount the pack and head out. Two blocks down, past a playground filled with colorful slides and carousels, sparking with unaccompanied kids playing their hearts out, are the regional offices of the Ministry of Culture.
I meet Alexis at the door, an expert on caves and my guide for the next two days. He wears a hunting vest, khaki shorts and straw hat. He looks like Jed Clampet’s scruffy brother. We hit it off right away. Clearly, he is part of what Kurt Vonnegut would call my karass; my tribe even if we have never met.
I feel the kinship because he is wearing shorts. This makes me smile. Cubans don’t wear shorts, as friend told me once upon seeing me ready to climb into the mountains from Baracoa on an earlier walk. You have foreigner written all over you, he told me then. Now I am not wearing shorts and Alexis looks like the foreigner. I liked him from the get-go.
“We were told to wait for a dignitary. I expected someone in a suit or something. When I saw you walking down the street with a pack on your back, I said first thing, this guy is just like us.”
Inside, the promotora cultural waits. She was a short, thin woman with dark brown hair cropped tightly to her skull and with deep dark circles under her brown eyes and a sun battered, ruddy complexion that made her look upholstered. She looks worn out. She is short but exudes the air of an elongated El Greco with a hint of Edvard Munch.
“Welcome, Guillermo,” she smiles and holds out her hand. “Here, put your bag down. We need to walk to the center of town.” She adds moving outside as she spoke. “Quickly. They’re waiting for you.”
***
The park at the center of town bustles with life at eleven o’clock. Tourists and locals stroll through its shade and sit on its benches. An orchestra of twenty folks sit patiently in the gazebo. This plaza, I think, is probably where they burned the Judas in Esteban’s day. Maybe where the gazebo stands today.
The conductor, a tall, thin birdlike man perched on the top step, looks around nervously. As soon as he sees us rounding the corner of the church, he turns and raises his baton and the crystal-clear symphonic music welcomes me into the shade of the park. The fifty or so spectators fix their eyes on me, and I feel their smiles. I have a spring in my step, marking the beat of the music, a Cuban classical piece, with each stride. The composition floating airily from the gazebo, I find out later, was a work by the local wunderkind, Alejandro Garcia Caturla. I wait politely and attentively. At least no one expects me to break out in dance. The orchestra play three pieces by Garcia Caturla.
The plaza is spotless and awash in sun. The colors glow; the pastels of the gazebo and the church against the green of the tree canopy. Tourists wander through the crowd, speaking English. One young woman glides by, staring into the tiny screen of a GoPro as she weaves through the crowd. After the last notes disappeared into the green canopy the dozen cultural workers making up the welcoming committee gather around me to extend their welcome. One very thin much older woman with dyed jet-black hair, huge sunglasses and a dark blue hat that would not look out of place at the Kentucky Derby holds out her hand.
“Glad to meet you,” she says in English.
“Ah. A multilingual member of the community,” I smile.
“A little,” she says and walks away.
The promotora and Alexis lead me on a tour of the square and the surrounding buildings. The bar on the corner in front of the church is the oldest establishment in Cuba that has continuously served the same purpose, Alexis informs me. The hotel down the street, he points, was where Maceo and Gomez signed the Agreement of the Generals (Pacto de los Generales), some agreement of cooperation between groups fighting for independence from Spain back in Esteban’s day.
We walk into a museum established as a tribute to the town’s favorite artistic son, Alejandro Garcia Caturla, a composer of Spanish descent, a pioneer of modern Cuban symphonic art, and the composer of the ethereal pieces played to welcome me to Remedios. He lived most of his life in Remedios as a lawyer and artist deeply influenced by Afro-Cuban folklore and its music. His work as a lawyer and judge ended up limiting his influence. He was murdered at the age of thirty-four by a disgruntled miscreant who he had judged to be guilty of illegal gambling.
The next museum, also facing the city center square, pays tribute to the legendary Parrandas of Remedio, those noisy, chaotic and, apparently for some, lethal celebrations that take place every Christmas Eve. The Museo de las Parrandas Remedianas also holds a few pages of the original handwritten text of Miguel’s work, Biografia de Un Cimarron, with a letter from Miguel dedicating the text to the museum. Not hiding his excitement, the young director brings me the yellowed paper from the back room. “He donated this to us years ago,” the director says breathlessly after running back with the pages. “Tell Miguel that we’re taking good care of it,” he says.
Alexi and the promotora lead me on a quick tour of a contemporary art gallery and the colorful, Afro-Cuban designs of the current artist on exhibition. The influence of Africa is clear on the almond shaped faces of the men and women on the paintings. They resemble African shields and masks in portrait format. Outside, as we head to lunch, a man on a bicycle with long white hair stops to greet the promotora.
He looks at me as I walk up. “So this is a UNEAC project. I didn’t even hear of it. It’s not a secreto de estado, (state secret) right?”
He is the head of the UNEAC in the municipio.
An independent book publisher, husband of the curator joins the promotora, curator, Alexis and me for lunch. Humberto is his name and he discusses the potentials of internet publishing in Cuba.
“We know nothing of e-publishing here. Years ago, we had a booming publishing industry. Books on everything and free to everyone. Since the special period, a crash. Now we need to move to the next level and the internet will do it. We have a very interested and literate audience. Cubans love to read.”
I remember those golden days of publishing. One of the major projects of the Revolution was to make cultural products accessible to all members of society. Cheap or free books, accessible public art, in form of posters and sculptures, reshaped the cultural landscape. On my travels to the island since the 1970s I stocked up on monographs of regional history, geography, of works describing visions of a new society; all for pennies. This access to cultural products and the reverence of those who produced them became the norm until the catastrophic Periodo Especial[1]wiped out the economy and gouged out much of the social entrails of the society. It is not an exaggeration to divide post-Revolutionary Cuban history into two epochs: before the Special Period and after the Special Period. The disappearance of the Soviet Union changed the lives of all Cubans. Record high emigration resulted. Deep, pervasive scars were inflicted on the population as everyone, in every corner of the island adapted to living in a survival mode that reshaped the meaning of being Cuban. Stories of gut-wrenching difficulties survived. Stories of working in the countryside from dawn to dusk gathering beans to take home a few for the family, of eating cats and rats, of making soup with entrails of animals sacrificed in Lukumi rituals, of spaghetti made of mops. I suppose that the disappearance of free books was one of the least damaging outcomes of this social dismantling. But the government did not fall, and it is hard to identify another country in the world where such hardships would not be accompanied by a regime change.
“Speaking of internet. I need to get on,” I tell Alexis walking out of the restaurant.
“The ETECSA offices are not far,” he says. We walk down a side street leading from the main square, past Cuba’s oldest bar, and through the narrow streets with some brightly painted and some barely painted residences pushing their flat faces to the curb, to the small ETECSA offices. The air conditioner works, and the heat stored in my body, as if it were a solar panel walking the five blocks, instantly dissipates. Three computers line the front wall, two of which seem to work. Alexis leaves me to my e-mail business with a world long ago and far away, telling me, “I’m going to see a friend nearby. I’ll be back in a few minutes.”
I pay my 3 CUCs for a scratch off card that allowed me one-hour access to an old computer hooked up to a dial-up internet. At least I do not have to pay Havana prices, 10 CUC, for the same frustration and for the shock of watching the hundreds of emails stumbling one by one, like drunks in a conga line, into my mail box.
Walking back to Cultura with Alexis, I ask if he used the internet much.
“Can’t afford it. I live off the Cuban peso. My work at the museum doesn’t pay that much and the internet is a luxury that I can’t afford.” He goes on. “Here we have two kinds of people. Those who have relatives abroad and get sent money and those who don’t. If you don’t get remittances, you have to live on the Cuban salary and whatever you can cook up on the side. That’s me. I don’t get anything from outside the country. I have to hustle a living. No es fácil.”
A bicitaxi waits in front of the Cultura offices with the promotora smiling and pointing at it from the door.
“This is your ride. Have a good rest. And I hope you enjoy Remedios.” I am finally on my way to my hotel room. I hoist the backpack into the flat bed that makes up the back of the taxi and with Alexis ride a depressingly few blocks to where I’d be spending the night.
“Hell,” I gripe, sounding exaggeratingly annoyed. “I could have walked here hours ago and showered. What is it with you people that I have to be chaperoned everywhere!”
He just shrugged and smiles. His face seems to say, “It’s not my circus.”
***
My room for the night is at another of the local hostals, officially not for tourists. But this elaborately designed accommodation is ready for touristic primetime. I enter through a tall aluminum gate leading from the sidewalk into a renovated garage. Once through the gate, a world built with care and attention to detail appears. The walls of the entrance room simulates the entrance to a cave with a glistening moisture on the wall. A small pond filled with actual water covers about a third of the floor. Two handmade wooden chairs huddle around it, in case sitting and gazing at the pond with ceramic water lillies “floating” in it is your preferred mode of relaxation.
Each wall in the bedroom is painted and enameled with images depicting elements of local history and legends. An indio representing the aboriginal roots of the town, the two churches which lends uniqueness to the town square. The inside of the bathroom also simulates a cave, with stalactites descending from the ceiling and the walls rough and rocky to the touch. And to top it all off, and by far the most important detail in the overall impressive mountain of details in the room, the shower and the toilet are first world! The shower powers a Hilton quality stream over me for a good twenty minutes and seems to be hooked up to a generous source of hot water. I stand under it until it turns cold.
***
A solid knock at the front door reverberates throughout the faux cave. Alexis and his crooked smile stand waiting.
“We’re late. They’re waiting for us at the museum,” he says calmly. “They’ve been waiting all afternoon.” And just like that, my fantasy of having an afternoon to myself disappeared into the Remedian dusk.
With nothing resembling haste, we take the long way around the eastern edge of town. He shows me the warehouses where one of the barrios which competed in the yearly the parranda.
“Barrio el Carmen” he says pointing to the sign on the gate saying just that. “This is one of the barrios that competes during the parrandas. The best one in my opinion.” There are eight neighborhoods that compete. El Carmen and El Salvador are the lead organizers.” I remember the words of, Elmo, the head of the Fundación Ludwick, “People die! (Hay Muertos!)”
At the historical museum Francisco Javier Balmaseda, the attendants, long past feeling like they had to pretend to be happy to see us, stand in exhausted attention. I feel their pain, and their desire to go home, and I keep my remarks about the project brief.
“Any questions? I’m sure you have a bunch,” I says. They politely thank me, en mass excused themselves, and file out the front door, careful not to seem too eager. The director of the museum does not have the option of leaving and with a graceful sweep of her hand and a smile welcomes me again and asks me to follow as she presents the jewels of the museum. She leads us on a tour with detailed commentary on the major attractions. Female clay statues affirming the cultural development of the pre-Colombian indigenous populations of the regions, yokes and manacles and other implements of cruelty from the slave era, the table where General Maximo Gomez sat to sign the Pact of the Generals in one of the building still standing at the center of town. With her hands caressing the air around each exhibit, she surrounds each item with a narrative sparkling narrative. In the courtyard, she points out the tiles in the very center.
“These are the original tiles of this house. From the 1800s. Look how thick they are!”
By the time I reach my room again, it is past eight o’clock. A long day.
[1] Fidel Castro announced in a speech in 1990 that Cuba was entering a period which he called “Período Especial en Época de Paz,” Special Period in Times of Piece. Economic sanctions ensued and the most critical dietary restrictions since 1959 gripped all of Cuba. For the first time since the triumph of the Revolution, Cubans suffered hunger on a massive scale.
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