Remedios-Cuevas de Guajabana
I came to hide in a cave for a time. I lived there for a year and a half. I went in there thinking that I would have to walk less and because the pigs from around the farms, the plots, and the small landholdings, used to come to a kind of swamp just outside the mouth of the cave. They went to take a bath and wallow around. I caught them easy enough, because a big bunches of them came. Every week I had a pig. The cave was very big and dark like the mouth of the wolf. It was called Guajabán. It was near the town of Remedios. It was dangerous because it had to way out. You had to go in through the entrance and leave by the entrance. My curiosity really poked me to find a way out. But I preferred to remain in the mouth of the cave on account of the snakes. The majases are very dangerous beasts. They are found in caves and in the woods.
--Esteban Montejo
The earthy smell of coffee in the morning always makes me smile, especially when I am resigned to hitting the road without it. Joel is the owner of the hostel. It bears his name, brightly painted in blue on the metal garage door. A colorful bandana wraps his head and he has coffee on the stove. He hands me a cup of steaming espresso.
“Drink as much as you want,” he says. “I can make more.”
Two or three demitasses later, I stand on the street, fueled by the coffee, ready to go. Alexis arrives with his sons, fraternal twins that do not look at all as if they belonged to the same litter. One is tall and slim, the other short and wiry. Later, Alexis tells me that the mother left them with him years back and he had raised them alone. She ran off with a guy who could resolver better than Alexis, he said; solve the daily problems of life in Cuba. Alexis expected to introduce me to two other members of the Remedios Speleologists Club who lived in Caibarien but they never made it. They could not find transportation that early. One local member, Sany, will walk with us to the caves but must leave right after. “I have to work,” he said. “Can’t take the entire day.”
With Joel, the group is complete. We will all spend the next two days together, night and day.
***
The walk to the caves of Guajabana is straightforward. We slowly slide off the outskirts of the city of Remedios heading down a dirt road to the east. We cross the main road leading north to Caibarien and south to Santa Clara and keep going. The small hamlet of Rojas waits patiently some 6km away.
The morning is calm, clear, and smells of moist earth and humid grass. The sun blues up the sky and whitens the clouds. A mist covers the fields like strands of cotton.
We pass a now aband
oned secundaria (secondary school); one of those cement structure built after the Revolution to serve the previously underserved students in the region. The design was environmentally efficient, with outside stairways and plenty of ventilation in the classrooms. It now stands empty, having succumbed to the demographic changes of the region.
“Not now,” said Joel when I ask if it is open. “Not enough young people around to fill it. People not having kids, and many are moving out.”
Cuba has one of the lowest fertility rates in Latin America, driving the growth of one of the largest elderly cohorts in the Caribbean. Swing sets in the small-town playgrounds sway eerily in the wind, empty, like ornaments of ancient monuments. Seeing a baby draws stares as if an alien in a stroller just passed by. Cuba is shrinking.
There is still a custodian on duty, though. A sereno (night watchman) that walks the grounds during this early hour. I wave high over my head, not sure if he can see us. He waves back.
Carretones and horseback riders heading to Remedios pass in the grey mist. We push by Rojas, a hamlet with a few houses lining a road that fluctuates between asphalt and terraplén. When Esteban Montejo was born in the 19thCentury, this road was part of the Camino Real del Norte, according to historian Esteban Pichardo in his Caminos de la Isla de Cuba, published in 1865. Guajabana was a waypoint on the major route for travelers coming from the East—from Moron and Yaguajay—to Remedios. Pichardo’s one-hundred and fifty year old description of the path still captures its essence today.
This road, called the Real del Norte, because it follows more or less the North Coast, is approximately 20 yards wide in the areas where it’s not limited by the savannah, and is well kept and useful for wheeled vehicles... [The road] is highly important, since so many other roads have relationships to it, and is serves as the trunk of those who lead to the various ports of its extensive coastline, deserving to be classified as a road of the 1st order.” (author’s translation)
Just before Rojas, Joel points out a monument to a campsite established by the revolutionary army of Mambí fighters from the 23rd to the 30th of September in 1898. This area has many similar monuments since the sugar mills served as major targets of the liberating army as well as a focus of defense for the Spaniards. Esteban roamed these regions after he joined the Mambí liberators. A rebel camp here would be within striking distance of the sugar port in Caibarien and a couple of kilometers from the railroad taking the sugar from the fields near Zulueta and Placetas to be loaded onto ships on the coast. I will see Zulueta and Placetas within the next two days. Esteban worked as a wage laborer in the same mills that the Mambí army, years later, targeted to destroy.
We pass Rojas. We will be back this way again to take an old trial south since we cannot cut to the south directly from the caves of Guajabana. I would have preferred not to backtrack, anathema to a trekker. I ask Alexis about the possibility of heading straight south rather than retracing our steps to Rojas from the caves.
“We will get lost in there. There is only marabú[1] and forest. No paths. I had to go in there once with a group looking for a lost cave entrance. We barely made it out.” He shakes his head. “We’ll have to come back to this road,” he says firmly, pointing to a dirt path disappearing into forests at the eastern edge of Rojas.
“This will take us to Viñas. It’s a nice walk through a forest. And,” he adds smiling, “It’s uphill.”
***
Guajabana has a name, but not much more. A Circulo Social, a covered cement structure that serves as the center of social activities, already hums with workers from the area lining up for juice and little square white bread sandwiches with a rumor of paprika-colored spread in between. Across the dirt road from the Circulo, in the shade of the looming forest, stands a cinder block bus stop to shelter travelers from the elements. Behind the Circulo stretches a vacation cabana complex of the Asociación Nacional de Agricultores Pequeños (ANAP), the organization that represents the small private landowners. This was the village center.
The plan for the day is to explore the cave, eat lunch at the cafeteria of a local enterprise, and spend the night here at the ANAP cabanas. The Caibarien Cultura office planned the evening entertainment to welcome us with a community event filled with music, dance and a history lesson. Waiting at the bus stop for our packs gives us plenty of time to talk with the local promotora about all the details. From Rojas to where we sit is her region, she says. The bus stop stands on the (very) “mero” seam of the division between municipios. The show planned for tonight will be put on by “her people.”
“You’ll like the show. It’s just for you, from us.”
We wait for our packs in the shade of the bus stop, eating bite size sandwiches of ham and cheese, drinking face-contorting, super sweet pineapple juice, listening to Alexis tell stories of cave explorations in the region. We cannot go to the caves without the packs, or rather the contents of the packs. We need headlamps to cut a swath through the earth-bowel darkness of the cave. We sit warming the cement benches for much longer than it has taken us to walk from Remedios.
Alexis talks about the creations of the caves and the river that runs near it. The caves in the hills, and there are many, were created by water eons ago, by rivers that ran underground and water that worked its erosive magic while this part of the island laid patiently under the waves. Rivers are important in the history of Cuba. Although few are navigable, all are critical in the agricultural and the pattern of urban development of the country.
“Our rivers are in crisis,” says Alexis. “We’re cleaning them up but the pollution on many of them poisons everything around them. So nomore pollutants going into rivers, but many are so polluted already that they will never be the same. Decades of degradation have destroyed it, at least for my generation and maybe even for theirs.” He nods towards his kids sitting by me, their eyes riveted on their father and his stories.
Our irritation grows as the sun shortened shadows. Still waiting. We call the Remedios promotora several times. She is trying her best to get our packs to us, but she has no car available. She requested a car from the head of Culturabut nothing is available.
“What do we do? Can’t just sit here all day. It’s past 11 already,” I say.
“We can’t go in without light,” says Joel.
A truck pulls up across the road and the driver went into the house next to the Circulo Social to take care of whatever business had brought him.
“Wait here,” says Joel, heading to the house.
One thing that never ceases to surprise me in Cuba is how well-connected people are to each other over a relatively large and remote geographic areas. It was not a rare occurrence to be walking for hours, through mazes of cane fields or shady forests and see one of my guides point ahead and say, “look here comes my brother in law, my neighbor, the friend of my daughter, a guy I know from the such and such organization.”
“I know him,” says Joel, returning from the house. "He works for a company up the road.” “He’s going to see if he can take me back to town to pick up the bags."
It is only 10K or so back to town. He could make the trip in a few minutes.
“He just doesn’t have a license, so he’d have to leave me in the outskirts while I go after the bags. He doesn’t want to drive into town. The boys can come with me. My house is close to the road.”
The driver takes care of his business at the house across the way and walks to the bus stop where we have been waiting for nearly three hours now.
“Listo,” he says. Ready.
Joel and the boys jump in the truck and wave at us through the dust.
Alexis and I adjust the afternoon activities. Even if we spend a couple of hours in the caves exploring where Esteban lived a year of his life, enough daylight awaits on the other side for us to continue our way to Viñas.
“The folks here will be disappointed, but we’ve been sitting most of the day. We need to move.” I shake my head realizing their disappointment. I push away the creeping feelings of guilt.
I presented the new itinerary to Joel when he returns with the bags. He is happy to move on.
“The walk is in the shade, mostly,” he says. “Forest. Old railroad line from the 19th Century.”
He pulls the flashlights and cameras out of his bag and Alexis does the same. We’re ready to climb to the cave.
[1] Marabú is pervasive, nasty, thorny Cuban weed of African origin, took over the countryside after the Special Period, when the Soviets stopped subsidizing Cuban production and farms fell into disuse. It has a beautiful flower but it is impenetrable. It is estimated that over twenty thousand kilometers of Cuban farmland have been devoured by the plant. Accustomed to making lemonade out of lemons, Cubans are now utilizing and exporting charcoal made from marabú.
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