Matagua-Potrerillo
Samuel is no longer sure about walking with me.
“My back,” he complains, “It’s very stiff. Can’t bend.”
He mentions that a cane tractor, one of those ancient U.S. manufactured contraptions older than the Revolution, that carries the cane waste (bagazo) to the mill, is leaving at six, conveniently from right in front of his house.
“It can drop us at a crossroad close to Jorobada. We’ll still have to walk but not as much. I’ll be fine for sure then.” His hip is giving him trouble as well, he adds. Makes it tougher to move. His back problem has affected his walking gait and his knee was throwing his hip off kilter. But he adds quickly, if I want to walk, he is ok to walk with me. If I want to.
The ride on the American-built cane tractor loosens my fillings. There are no shock absorbers on these things and the wheels are solid rubber, not air-filled tires like on a tractor. Nothing about the design is meant to comfort riders. We stand on a metal grate which sticks like a stiff lip out the front of the trailer being pulled by the tractor. Riding on a vibrating iron cow, on the dirt road winding through the cane fields, which would have been a pleasure to walk, is an organ-shaking affair. A danger to all fleshy portions of my mouth.
But not even the high probability of biting through my tongue can diminish the beauty of the cane field at dawn. We head straight west and standing high like this gives us a wonderful view of the sunrise. Hanging on, violently and gingerly, I turn my head to the east in short bursts, as if it swivels on a sprocket joint on my neck. The light smooths the green shades of the sugarcane softly across the fields, like running a cotton ball over a green chalk drawing. The blueness of the sky brightens, cloudless, giving it all the appearance of a theatre stage with elaborate props. We bounce through the fields but the zig and zagging of the guardarraya maintains a westerly course and remains roughly parallel to the shaded old railroad line that we should have walked.
The harvester stops at a busy crossroad. I hand my pack to Samuel and step down, my body still vibrating. At least six paths meet here and, judging from the foot traffic this early in the morning, each path heads in a direction people want to go. Samuel points to the left.
“That’s where the line comes in,” he says. Here, approaching the hamlet of Jorobada, the rails are still visible. They disappear into a tunnel of shade trees heading from where we just came. To our right there’s a row of single story, colorful houses that lead us into town.
By the time we finish taking the couple of turns necessary to find the house of my guide to Potrerillo, it is just past seven.
“He can’t be expecting us this early,” I say to Samuel. “Maybe we should wait a bit.”
“No. He’s up. The entire town is up,” he assures me.
We let ourselves into the yard of a freshly painted house and knock on the door. A middle-aged stocky man answers. He looks sleepy, dressed in shorts and the typical narrow strap, sleeveless white undershirt worn by all Cuban men.
“Come in,” he says. “Just making coffee."
“Told you we were early,” I laugh.
“No. No. I was up.”
We sit in the large front room of the living room-dining room combo divided by a waist high half wall that I’ve gotten to expect walking through every Cuban door. Our host lights the stove and prepared the coffee.
“My son will be here soon,” he says.
The coffee is sweet, strong and delicious like syrup. I ask Samuel and our host if they would draw a map of the route from Matagua to Potrerillo, hoping for some level of detail that would allow me to reproduce the important turns and major landmarks on the way. They both work on one sheet of paper, their faces changing shape as they discuss the route and turn pencil to paper to graph the decisions. Samuel offers the paper after ten minutes of work.
“Mas o menos,” he says sheepishly. What I get is a rudimentary, to be kind, set of lines on white paper that convey no more information than I could present myself based on the day’s travels. Two parallel lines head out of Matagua, forking at a Cupet gas station, then entering directly into Jorobada. Two parallel lines out of Jorobada, straight out into invisible cane fields and straight into Potrerillo. Elementary, well-intentioned, and useless.
***
We hear a horse neighing outside.
“Jiandy is here,” says our host. We walk outside. On the other side of the front gate is a caramel brown horse and a rider.
“My son,” says our host walking to the door.
Jiandry is the local promotor cultural.
“Hand me your backpack,” he commands in a soft voice from the saddle.
I say my goodbyes and thank yous to Samuel and our host and head out of town following the same street that brought us here. Past the turn off to the railroad line the street morphs into a red, and rutty path, surrounded by sugar cane.
“What’s his name?” I ask Jiandry, running my hand down the soft brown neck of the horse while walking.
“I didn’t name him.”
“You didn’t?” I could not hide my surprise.
I suppose that naming the horse would make him a pet, but that is not what he is. He is a machine with big brown eyes. He enjoys a purely utilitarian existence, not valued for the psychological warm and fuzzies he might provide the household, but for his capacity of work.
“Maybe someday I will,” says Jiandy.
Esteban had a beautiful horse near the end of the war, a white palomino, that he also did not name. He and his long-time friend Juan Fabregas snuck into a Spanish fort near Jicotea, a town thirty kilometers as the crow flies northwest of where we walk now, and made off with two horses. He did not name him, although the horse remained with him for the rest of the war. He sold him for forty pesos when he went to work in the Caracas mill after the war. He trusted that horse more than he trusted people. He recalled with some pain that even his “socio fuerte” (his main man), Juan Fabregas – with whom he worked at Ariosa; with whom he joined the liberating army; with whom he had stolen the white palomino – had let him down. Days after they stole the horse, Juan left the camp and surrendered to the Spaniards. When Esteban heard of the surrender, the news “… sent chills down my spine. Then I got mad. Anger and strength at the same time. I went on fighting in the war out of personal pride. I never seen Fabregas again. I looked for him at the end of the war, but I never found him.”
What lies ahead for Jiandy and me and the horse with no name is yet another walk through full grown cane fields. To the south faded the mountains of the Escambray. They look translucent now, blue-ish in the distance. Jiandy and I talk of the project, my wife, and his kids and wife.
He has two boys. One is almost as tall as he is at age nine. He shows me pictures on his phone.
“He weighs eighty-five pounds. Tall as I am. Almost.”
He is proud.
“It’s the diet. Our diet out here is wonderful. We do not have to depend on imports. It’s all here. We eat what we grow in the region.”
I have noticed throughout Cuba and in all my walks, that food is more abundant, or at least relatively less of a problem to resolve, in the small, rural communities. Here, pork and chicken are accessible without having to wait for shipments to come in from the U.S. or China, which in the case of chickens, is where most are hatched, raised and frozen.[1] Gardens are plentiful and even if they grow cash crops like garlic, a corner is always reserved for vegetable and beans. Local producers provide the local market.
Agriculture seemed to be the key to Cuba’s sustainable development plan. In the early 1990s the government restructured half of the state-owned land into private cooperatives (Basic Units of Cooperative Productions—UBPC). By the late 1990s, any person willing to farm the land was granted 67 hectares. Over 200,000 Cubans took advantage of the plan. However, material incentives are poor, production processes tend to be medieval, and lack of refrigerated trucks and warehouses tends to keep production local. This may seem good for Jiandry and his growing son but it is an inefficient way to run a chain of production in a land-rich country.
The cane gives way to small patches of deciduous forests and their welcomed shade, interspersed with the omnipresent marabú. The cane only offers shade during the earliest moments of the morning, or at dusk, when the sun is low in the west and its heat less oppressive. By now, approaching ten o’clock, we welcome the coolness of the trail as it meanders into the forest. The rain that I feared might make the path unmanageable has not materialized at all so far, but the cloudless skies and accompanying temperatures bring their own perils; dehydration being the number one threat. The morning starts with two water bottles filled at Jiandry’s father’s house, but the content of one already works its way through my pores it was not even midday.
No matter how out of the way a dirt road or path seems, some portion of the population always uses it for local travel. Dirt roads, stretching calmly like veins through a leaf, are the byways connecting the towns and villages of Cuba. We pass a young couple riding a horse with a tiny baby in the arms of the father. The man cradles the baby protectively with his right hand, holding the reins with his left and smiles at us. The baby seems to be none the wiser, asleep between the warmth of the saddle and his father’s chest. Lulled to sleep by the gentle swaying of a rocking horse.
Railroads tracks are the arteries of the country and although most of the path on this day is through agricultural, land pure and simple, reminders linger that the railroad connected this region to the world once upon a time. At times the guardarraya veers close to the old railroad line used to transport the sugarcane from these fields to the nearest mill, probably at Mal Tiempo, where I will be tomorrow. In one of the patches of forest, an old bridge, the span rusted deep orange takes the equally rusted rails over an arroyo. Marabú blocks the path to it and the trail winds around it in a perfect semi-circle.
[1] The Trade Sanctions Reform and export Enhancement Act of 2000 loosened some restrictions of the embargo allowed some agricultural trade with Cuba.
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