El Palenque
The next morning, at 5:30, I met El Químico along with an eager group of his students at the gazebo in the park La Libertad. From there, we will take on our way to Remedios.
There are six students; four boys and two girls, all dressed casually. No uniforms. All talking at once, standing around El Quimico as if he were a totem.
“That one there,” said El Quimico as we get ready to head out. “The tall blond guy. He’s the son of the owner of the paladar where we ate yesterday. They do ok. The economy is helping them. Here if you can’t get in the new economic current, the tourist and things like that, or people who help you from abroad, you’re swinging with two strikes.”
The private sector in Cuba is growing but only in selected geographies and in specific economic arenas. Restaurants and bed and breakfasts (paladares and casas particulares) lead the budding entrepreneurial pack. If you are lucky enough to have a private restaurant that is well stocked, the hungry world will beat a path to your door. But keeping it stocked is no easy feat. It requires establishing a broad network of food informants that will facilitate the raiding of the local supermarket, when the chicken and shrimp arrive from China or Arkansas, and targeting the farmer’s markets as far as you are able to mobilize transportation to buy all the tubers and vegetables you can corral. There are no refrigerated warehouses in Cuba to help producers distribute their products nationally. All distribution of agricultural production is limited to the local market. Individual households, the private restaurants and casas particulares are all hunting and gathering in the same area. A well-organized network of casas and paladares can easily clean out a supermarket in a few hours. This is one reason the government gave for ceasing to grant licenses to open new casas and restaurants in 2017. This, and perhaps the fear that a rising economic middle class will have equally ascending political expectations that the government is unable to direct. A growing, de-centralized private sector might float most economic boats but it might sink a centralized political system fearful of losing control.
The sky offers no sign of the impending dawn. The park lights wear their blurry yellow bubbles, like retro space helmets, smearing with light the air around us. The streets bordering the park are already buzzing with the sounds of buses, cars and pedestrian activity. Workers navigate the insufficient transportation system, students with backpacks making it on time for school, fast walking mothers pulling sleepy children to the daycare before catching the bus for work. Days starts early in the Cuba, one encounters por dentro.
Transportation represents a major challenge which Cubans have to overcome every single day of their lives. The wheel is reinvented each and every day. Finding transportation – to work, to the beach, or to the hog farm– is a daylong quest. If there is a bus or a truck that heads your way and you identify and catch it, you are one of the lucky ones. If not, waiting by the side of the road “haciendo botella,” (hitchhiking) is how you gamble with time. Fortunately, since everyone is in the same boat, rides are offered frequently and not grudgingly by those lucky enough to have a drive shaft attached to their steering wheel. Nevertheless, getting from point A to point B is a source of never-ending stress—stress which dwarfs the frustrations faced by middle class residents of any car-centric society when we are confronted with the pains of having too much transportation; the stress of traffic jams and aggressive drivers.
The sky is liquorish black as we head out of town. Our pack of walkers moves down the Ramon Cubilla street, past the park, past the stadium and over the railroad tracks. Soon we reach what the locals call “el callejón de manacas,” a well-trod tree-lined path about six kilometers long, ending at the hamlet of Taguayabon. About five kilometers into the callejón, the students stop to test the pH of a local creek. This is the educational portion of the walk; the fieldwork activity that allows the professor to take his students away from the daily routine of the classroom. They squat around the pools of water bordering the stream, bent down, and capture the samples into pipettes. The air hung moist and green above the pool. They hold them up to the dim light for inspection, drop pellets inside and shake them to detect impurities. El Químico hovers around them as they discuss what they see, asking questions and offering answers.
After fifteen minutes devoted to science, we move on. A bit further we cross a collection of railroad tracks that connected the sugar fields to the nearest Central. A train car loaded with cane passes slowly, dragging time to a halt, the sugar cane lying on the flat-bed like giant green toothpicks on a topless box. It rides slowly into the dawn. Wheels complaining in a grinding, high pitch groan. The sky, navy blue a minute ago, now turned into a celestial baby blue. No clouds are visible, at least from my vantage point with a forest to the east and the long tail of the tracks leading west. Beyond the tracks, we see the sprouting of houses; the outskirts of Taguayabón.
The broad dirt street, bounded by blue, yellow, white wooden homes, is not dusty yet. Elementary school children run in and out of doors dressed in their red and white “pioneros” uniforms. A bus will come by at some point and take them to the nearest school, probably in Vueltas.
Up ahead, bursting through the screen door of a light blue house on the right, a little girl dressed for school, runs towards El Quimico, arms up in the air, big smile stretching wide, running full speed into his arms. He hoists her high over his head.
“This is my baby,” he announces to me as he hugs her to his chest, her sneaker-wrapped feet dangling. The child in his arms is the daughter of one of his first students, he explains.
“And here she comes now.” A short blond and very young woman rushes out of the same door and trots our way. He introduces us in the middle of the street and puts down the little one.
“Marlen. This is El Caminante. We’re accompanying him to Remedios. Walk with us.”
“I wish I could,” she shakes her head. “Have to work today. But I’ll go with you to the tracks.”
“Tell me when you’re going to the Escambray again,” she asks El Quimico.
“Maybe next year,” he said. “Not cheap anymore.”
“Let me know anyway,” she said, “I’ll try to find the money to go with you.”
After waving at her as she heads back from the tracks, he tells me the story of the baby’s conception.
“She met her husband in one of our first trips to El Escambray,” he remembers. “They fell in love on the trip and the baby was conceived in Tope de Collantes!”
Tope is one of the highest peaks in the Escambray Mountains. He is proud of the role that he had played in creating that little girl. That little girl, I think, will always be part of his family. Tio El Quimico will look after her.
***
At the end of the street we turn left and then, within 100 meters, take a quick right at a new set of railroad tracks. The previous tracks fed the sugar mill. These are public transportation tracks, stretching all the way to Remedios and beyond to the east and at least as far as Sagua to the west, although El Quimico is sure that they extend to Cardenas and Matanzas but he has no personal experience to back it up. By the side of the tracks at the Taguayabon juncture stands the well-kept ruin of one of the many fortified towers designed by the Spaniards to protect the railroad; el fuerte del Hato de Taguayabon. The massive brick fortress looks imposing, particularly in comparison with the humble homes across the tracks. From here, the trip is simple: follow the tracks directly into Remedios, some five kilometers away.
The students run like puppies on and off the track. The blond kid whose family runs a paladar walks with me after we hit the tracks. “Why are you doing this?” he asked. “It sounds fantastic but why do it?”
I tell him about the project. “Besides, human are made to walk and I miss being human sometimes.” We both laugh.
As romantic and Woody Guthrie as it might seem, walking on railroad tracks for a long distance is awkward and uncomfortable. It is hard to establish a regular walking pace. The stride does not quite fit the distance between the ties. A full stride plants my foot on the rocks in between on every other step. After half an hour of trying to negotiate the tracks, I decide to climb down and take my chances with the on- again, off-again footpath parallel to the tracks.
Fields and forests border on both sides until we reached a spot where the view opens to the north, exposing a short, flat hill with a settlement at its base.
“That’s Palenque,” says El Químico. “Slaves ran away from plantations. Like your Cimarrón. And they established free communities. Palenques. That was one of them up there. And the name of the town there today is still Palenque. We’ll pass close to it on the way to Remedios.”
Much as it happened in other places where slavery became the norm, in Cuba slaves rebelled against their masters and the conditions they imposed from the very beginning of the colonial period. They fled into the mountains to hide from slave hunters, the hated rancheadores, who used fierce hunting dogs to chase them down. If caught, punishment was brutal. Esteban spoke about the shackles that cut into his skin after his first unsuccessful attempt to escape. “…they caught me like a little lamb, and they put some shackles on me that I can still feel if I really think about it. They tied them on me tight and put me to work…” (8). The famed anthropologist Fernando Ortiz also commented on the fate that awaited captured Cimarrónes. “[I]n 1553, Governor Manuel de Rojas captured and killed four Cimarrónes in the mines of Jobado. He took their corpses to Bayamo, where they were cut up and their heads placed on tall stakes, according to a report from Rojas to the Emperor on November 10, 1534”. Esteban got off easy.
Although this one was not much to look at, the settlements known generically as “palengues” hold an important place in Cuban history. The communities of those seeking freedom—these maroon societies--were known by a variety of names throughout the Caribbean: quilombos, macambos, cubmes, rancherias, ladeiras, magotes, manieles and palenques. Some consisted of scattered huts, others expanded into full blown towns, with fortifications and an established social order designed to promote solidarity among the residents. Picking a spot for such a settlement was not easy but one simple requirement seemed to rule: place it as far away from plantations as possible. This one hugged a hill a few miles away from the Florida Straits. In all their configurations, the purpose of palengues was to isolate themselves from society in order to create a fully autonomous community.
Historian Francisco Perez de la Riva reports that life in the palenque was rudimentary and simple, but did not lack social diversity, organization or intensity. “Neither all the leaders nor all the inhabitants of palenques were Negroes. Even though the palenques consisted mostly of runaway Negroes or marrons, they also served to harbor fugitives from justice, habitual criminals, and pirates involved in smuggling and trading. In some cases, the heads of palenques were either whites or Yucatecan Indians. A fact which supports this contention is that in 1797, one of the captured leaders of a Palenque near Jaruco was reported to be Huanchinngo Pablo, a Yucatecn Indian.”
Social order depended heavily on trust. And the development of trust in the palengue, where everyone could be assumed to have a traumatic, deprived and sometimes spotty past, often became an organizational issue. Ways of “phasing in” of new arrivals into the community were designed. “In marron communities throughout the Americas, new recruits served probationary periods, often in some kind of domestic slavery. In Cuba, new marrons underwent a two-year trial period during which they were not allowed out of the village.”
As isolated as they were, palenques were not completely disassociated from the colonial world. Perez de la Riva also mentions an Italian merchant, Luis Rufo, who sailed the coast of Cuba trading with the inhabitants of palenques. One of the palengues visited by Rufo was near Sagua, according to a report written in 1819 by the lieutenant governor of Baracoa, a settlement on the eastern tip of Cuba. “With a small boat, he would take clothes, shoes, hats machetes and other articles to a place on the coast called Sagua, in order to sell the merchandise to the marrons.” Maybe this palengue traded with don Rufo. We are a couple of kilometers from the coast and relatively near Sagua. Could be.
Trust and a sense of solidarity was crucial for the survival of the palenque but Esteban was skeptical of the reliability of cimarrones. Esteban recounted to Miguel the distinction between the fugitive slaves that lived in communities and those who took their chances in solitude. “Cimarron with Cimarron betrays (sells out) a Cimarron.”
Cimarrons together in a palengue, in other words, were not to be trusted. Esteban preferred solitude. Alone he eluded the rancheadores with their dogs and the conniving guajiros who made a living chasing down lone wolf cimarrones. Even knowing that he was always hunted, he avoided settling into a palenque. Perhaps because he distrusted people in general or because he innately recognized that many slaves had internalized the power of the masters, even when no longer in their presence, and could not be trusted. He was his own master.
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