Cuevas de Guajabana: La Casa del Cimarron
We follow the asphalt road about two hundred meters to the dirt road leading up to the caves. The terrain is flat as we make the turn, but we see that the abrupt hills will have their way with us in about two hundred meters in.
“Up there,” says Alexis. “Can’t see them from here but up there are the caves.”
From the road I see two green hills; one has been flattened as a result of gravel mining.
“Las Tetas de Guajabana,” says Alexis. The tits of Guajabana. “That’s what we call them. Before they flattened one with the mining. It’s almost gone. Now it’s a teta y media.” A tit and a half.
A subtle, easy climb winds up the intact teta to the Casa del Cimarrón. Some industrial materials--cement, rebar--litter the flat land leading to a path that disappears into the trees. Excitement bubbles inside me at the chance of seeing this cave which a 1988 Bohemia article dubbed “La Casa del Cimarrón.”
Miguel has never seen the cave; he didn't even know where it was. Miguel did remember Esteban talking about living in a cave for a year and a half. He tried to describe the location of the cave (“near Remedios”), the environment of the cave (“full of snakes”) and some details on how he survived using it as shelter (keeping a fire alive and stealing pigs from nearby farms.) Miguel consulted with experts in caves in the region to try to contextualize Esteban’s experience. There are many caves, so said the experts. Cimarróns hid in this or that cave; whichever cave was handy. The specific location was unimportant, Miguel decided. But for me, it was very important. The route liks places important to Esteban, not generic place holders for slave experiences. And here I am on the path to the cave, Esteban’s cave, near the top of that hill.
Low shrubs and tall trees border the path for a few hundred meters before it breaks out into a clearing and the altitude becomes clear. To the south, jut out the well-defined rounded hills in the direction of Placetas and Santa Clara. The Florida Straits, sparking sunlight, and white stone buildings of Caibarien are visible to the north. This is where Esteban must have seen the ocean for the first time. It is clearly visible beyond the canopy which served as his patio for a year and a half.
He spoke of the ocean as a big river and as a mystery of nature. Something that he could never understand. But he understood its power. The ocean, he said, is important because it can “carry men off, swallow them, and never give them back.” I am looking now precisely at that kind of unforgiving and uncaring ocean. In Cuban history, this is precisely the role played by the ocean; it has carried men and women off the island; it has swallowed an incalculable number, never to give them back. Thousands of Cubans in rafts have launched from this region. The coast to the north of Sagua la Grande is the nearest point to the U.S. mainland. This is the frontier to the promised land. So many have been seduced by the blue to the north and the life beyond. So many never made it past the blue.
I remember crossing this same blue frontier as a child onboard the daily ferry connecting Key West to Havana. My aunt lived in Key West, and I loved visiting her on the ferry and watching the flying fish jumping alongside. That was in a different era when the world was magical and devoid of conflict. An era before the Florida Straights became littered with floating ghosts.
Alexis picked up some brown pellets from the brush and holds them out to me. “Jutia poop,” he says smiling, like a kid showing me his favorite marble. A jutia cubana is a giant rodent that looks like a cross between a rat and a beaver. It is the largest native mammal of the island. I have never seen one but here we are, on their turf, admiring their turds.
“La casa del Cimarron” erupts out of the forest and, once visible, it is all the eyes can see. There is no path around it. Going in is the only way out of the forest if you do not want to back track. It is as if the forest has a mouth.
The entrance looks exactly like the picture in the Bohemia article sent by Rober. The tall, wide opening allows the first vault to be almost fully lit. Cement stone benches surround the large rock pillars. It is like a cathedral; high ceiling with large support beams. Community educational events take place here, Alexis tells me. School trips, lectures on speleology and history of the region, all take place where once Esteban slept and lit fires to keep the “majas” (the Cuban boa) away. Graffiti covers the stone walls, some from the early 20th Century. The Viva PSP, Partido Socialista Popular, the precursor the Cuban Communist Party, in surprisingly vibrant red paint, shouted from one wall. A certain Modesto Perez left his mark on June 28, 1926; Del Rio in 1912 and someone whose fading name was exactly as decomposable as the rocks signed in, 1911.
The cave is notable, says Alexis, because it is the only one in the region that has an entrance on both sides of the mountain.
“It goes all the way through,” he says. “Like the river that formed it.”
Esteban didn’t know that there was an exit. The darkness and uncertainties it shrouded kept him near the entrance with the snakes. He was afraid of being trapped in the throat of the mountain, in the dark, with no way out. He was curious to search for an exit, he told Miguel, but with no light to explore its insides, he never ventured into the darkness long enough to make it to the other side of the mountain. He lived near the entrance vault and used it as a base from which to hunt and scavenge. One of the reasons that Esteban lived in the cave for a year and a half was that food was easily available. He loved smoked jutia, although to catch them he remembered you had to have “lightning in your feet” because they were fast and never stopped running. Jutia and wild vegetables. That was the food that kept him healthy, he remembered. And the pigs that he would steal from nearby farms. A twenty pounder would last him for fifteen days.
But he feared the majas, which his Congo friends swore lived for a thousand years and lulled an unsuspecting victim to sleep with their breath. He kept them at bay with a fire which he never let die. “El que se adormecía en una cueva quedaba listo para la fiesta,” he recounted; a particularly festive way of saying that whoever falls asleep in a cave like this would be done for. Still, he recalled to Miguel that the year and a half in the caves were a “vacation.”
***
We work our way into the darkness, careful not to bust my head on some jagged rock. The rest of the crew walk with confidence, as if they are heading to the kitchen for some snacks. Beyond the first, well-lit room we slowly immerse ourselves into the thick cool air of total blackness. Like walking into honey. In the thick darkness, I feel very close to the cave; part of it, in a way. It seems to hug me. I wait until Alexis, Joel and Sany turn on their head lamps before reaching for the small incandescent flashlight hanging from my hip pack.
“That won’t light anything,” Alexis scoffed when I showed him the tiny lamp back at the bus stop. “The darkness will swallow whatever comes out of that thing without us even knowing about it.”
I turn on the lamp. The light green tint spreads evenly top to bottom in the cave.
“Coño. Esa lamparita la trae.” Damn. That little lamp brings it, Alexis remarks, eyebrows rising to mid forehead.
A murmuring sound punctuated by tiny slapping noises fills the second room like some persistent but soothing tinnitus. I point my light to the ceiling. It boils with bats.
“Look at them,” says Joel.
“Yeah. The cave is rejuvenating itself,” says Alexis. “Last time we were here, there was almost nothing. No life.” Esteban remembered the bats in the cave as living in total freedom, since they had no natural enemies. He remembered walking on the soft mattress formed by the guano. I notice its softness as well, like walking on memory foam. Bat guano is highly flammable as Esteban discovered one day when he lost control of the fire and the inside of the cave burned like a fireball.
We work our way through the emerging tunnel slowly. We never have to crawl, but the ceiling was low in many areas. After thirty minutes of walking in our bubble of light, we enter a room with enough natural light to navigate without lamps; the other side of the mountain. This mouth of the cave faces a wall of green that shields us from the sun and sky. It is too thick to hack through, so we have to retrace our steps to find the trail back to the road. The floor of the entrance crawls with life. Centipedes thick as cigars. Black worms stirring through the leaves, digging deeper and out of sight. After a few minutes reading the plentiful graffiti and examining the rock formations, we light up the cave again and head to the entrance.
Not far from the mouth of the Casa del Cimarron, on our way down the hill, Alexis leads us to another cave; La Cueva del Obispo. Some Catholic bishop supposedly discovered or named the cave back in the late 19th Century. He must have stumbled into it. Literally. A camouflaged gaping hole in the mountain leads straight down, following the thick roots of trees that provide a rustic staircase into the darkness. The sun light goes from dim to none within a few feet of the entrance. But the inside is majestic.
Our lamps illuminate an underground natural mural; beautiful soft rock water formations layering the walls, detailing a history, the lifetime of this cave. Orange, red, white, black swirls and layers of various thickness. Millions of years ago, a river ran through it, and we are looking at the memory of the cave. Some formations earned names that described them in language that we could understand. Alexis points his light at a small boulder against the cave wall. “The Penis of the Bishop (El Pene del Obispo),” he says. I shine my light on a phallic white rock not much bigger than the penis that a well-endowed Bishop might sport. Joel drags his light along the wall to a rectangular structure that juts out of the ground a bit further in, “The Crypt,” he says simply. This cave is much more beautiful and secluded than the Casa del Cimarron. And it has no way out other than the difficult entrance we negotiated. It is a glorious hole in the ground.
***
Back on the road, we walk a kilometer or so north to the UBPC Guajabana, a factory where an empty lunchroom await. Rober Rivero Martinez, the assistant director of Cultura for the Province of Villa Clara meets us there and informs us that there is place waiting for us in Viñas.
“There’s a Pioneer camp. They’re having a summer program for kids. Don’t know what the conditions will be, but they know you’re coming,” says Rober.
At this stop, Rober also arranged for a cameraman to capture some of the experience of the walk. Robert Portal, the cameraman, follows us out of the cafeteria, capturing images of my companions and me walking and talking as if we meant it. Rober and the promotora from Remedios join us for about a kilometer.
“We can say we walked a little with you at least,” says the promotora, looking more relaxed now that we are about to become someone else’s responsibility.
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