Ciego Montero
The smooth terraplén screams to be walked on. One huge guardarraya between walls of cane, broken only by brightly colored wooden houses and their simple yards. Garlic grows in this region as well, and dozens of houses are overrun by battalions of the brown tufts.
In Ciego, the mule stops at the edge of town, near a park that had the air, by its clean statue of Jose Marti and well-trimmed bushes, of being an important part of town. My handler walks with me half a block to a wooden house with a sign flat on the wall next to the door announcing it as La Casona, a private home that served as the town art gallery and community center.
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| Fotografía de Julio Larramendi |
I have always associated the town with the spring which produced the most popular bottled water and soft drinks on the island, the Ciego Montero brand. And this is the only reason why most Cubans would ever know about this small town which geographically is tied at the hip with the adjacent town of Arriete. Arriete-Ciengo Montero has approximately four and a half thousand residents. Ten of them welcome me to the town.
The welcoming committee includes librarians from the local library, sundry local cultura staffers and volunteers and, Francisco Carbajal and his mother, who lived in La Casona. We sit in rocking chairs, everyone with a papercup full of lemonade in hand.
“Our town has a rich history with plenty of legends” says Carbajal. “One of our richest legend has to do with the balneareo.”
The hot springs near the town are renowned for their healing qualities, he says.
One of my welcoming committee members, an old black guy with tight lips, says, “And how they were discovered is a story.”
I train my GoPro on him. “Go to it. Tell me the story.”
He starts, surprised to be suddenly the center of attention. The Balneareo has a rich history, he begins, hesitating but gathering steam with each word. According to legend, a black slave broke out in an unexplainable skin disease during the early part of the 19th Century. Fearing that the malady would spread to the rest of the slaves, he was driven out of the sugar mill where he worked; a mill named the “Recurso.” So he is exiled, really, into the wilderness. He lives in the wilds of the region for a long time and he took to bathing in the swamp waters near a farm named Principe Alfonso. To everyone’s surprise, his “llagas” (skin sores) began to heal. The waters seemed to clear them up and soon he healed completely.
As word of the healing powers of the waters spread, the white criollos began to frequent the area. A certain Don Diego Elbicio bought the farm where the springs now stand and renamed it “Purisima,” the “most pure.” He let it be known that waters healed the ailments of his daughter it and was not long before visitors in various stages of decomposition came by the droves looking for a cure for their ailments. In 1836 an analysis of the water discovered its rich sulphur content and it was on. The thermal baths were named the Baños de Ciego Montero as a way of locating it on the map and that is their name today. The hotel which houses the guests visiting the baths is named after the public official who pushed for the creation of the balneario, Jesus Montane Oropesa.
“In the lobby of the Balneareo,” the storyteller says, “If you get a chance to go, look when you go in. You’ll see the footprints of the slave coming out of the swamp. Black footsteps lead from the floor, up the wall into a wall sculpture of trees and swamp. That is an honor for the slave who discovered the hot springs and the waters that all Cubans drink.”
He smiles, satisfied.
“What happened to the slave,” I ask. “He was an unwilling Cimarron, in a way. What happened to him?”
My hosts look at each other. No one knows. The story of the slave stops at his healing, as a creation myth, but it makes one wonder if the poor guy had to return to his slave duties after being healed. Seems like he was equally screwed no matter what.
After some minutes filled with talk of the project and the town, the gang of ten escorts me to the library, a small brick space with a metal door, which opens the entire width of the storefront, leading into the first of two rooms; the space is sawed off shotgunnish in design. There are no windows. The front room serves as a reading area, hard chairs and a couple of soft “butaca” (armchair) take advantage of the natural light flooding the small space. In the back room stand five dusty shelves half-filled with books. For the occasion, books by Miguel Barnet sit displayed on the table in the reading area, along with a picture taken when he visited Ciego years back. Despite its objective crampedness, the space was very comfortable. The simple upholstered chairs made the space cozy.
The librarian reads my mind. “Uno se siente bien aquì, verdad?” One feels good here, right?
“Yes,” I say. “and I’m not sure why.”
“I think it’s the light. The entire front opens and looks out on the park. Makes the little space seem big.”
Several members of the welcoming posse agree.
“I love coming here and sitting among the books. Reading,” says a thin young man with a NY Yankees hat, who works as a volunteer for cultura. I sit for half an hour of small talk and start to feel stronger. Tomorrow I will walk.
***
Carbajal and the young promotor stand watching as I eat. This happens a lot on this trip, people watching me eat. We talk about the Party Congress taking place in a few days.
“Things have to change,” says the mother. “We can’t go on much longer like this.”
Carbajal and the promotor smile and nod. I am sure that she has been feeling this way for a long time. I also know that they have seen worse. And that they probably know that, yes, things can go on like this for a long, long time to come.
Cell phone reception in Ciego Montero is, to use the term in the most literal of iterations, non-existent or damn near. Not a twitch of a signal at the Casona. Carbajal points to the top of the refrigerator.
“If I put the phone up there, sometimes I can get calls and texts. But most of the time the call drops when I bring it down to answer it.”
An inch up or down, this way or that, and the world disappears beyond eyesight or yelling distance. He shrugs.
“No es facil.” He apologizes for not having something that would make his life significantly easier.
The isolation imposed by the combination of poor communications and poor transportation is overwhelming. When the internet kicks into high speed in Cuba I am convinced that it will blow up with creativity. Isolated communities will make their genius known and the country will reach a new level of integration, or maybe, now that I think about it, fragmentation. Maybe competition will increase, as regions use their intellectual resources to improve their lots. It is in the cards, the future improvement of communications through technological innovation; it’s just not in the hand that Ciego Montero has been dealt at present.
I walked with Enrique, the thin young man who loved spending time in the library, to a fork in the road leading to the edge of town away from the Casona. There, he points towards the dirt road forking left, leading into farmland.
“Try there,” he said about a call that I need to make. “But not too far in. You might get a signal. I have to head back to help with the show, so I’ll see you later.” This is a magical ten-meter area right at the fork. I connected with Fabiana for an update from the home front but needed to be careful not to walk as I talk. The beam is precious, precise and inflexible. It is decided; I must return to Miami four days early. We will close the event on Friday afternoon in Havana and I will appear at dawn at the airport on Saturday to take my chances on a seat on the charter flight.
Back at the Casona, I mention my mother and my need to stay in touch. It is immediately suggested that I stay at the hotel of the hot springs of Ciego Montero.
Carbajal and his mother had planned to put me up for the night, but they do not insist.
I feel comfortable sitting in the rocking chair in the Casona. Carbajal left to take care of some pending business, his mother works in the kitchen and I write in my journal, surrounded by the bright palette work of local artists. Carbajal works on canvas, a primitive painter with a unique style. He has a series of female faces on the walls that demand attention. Elegant, elongated, ephemeral faces with pale necks and framed by long black hair look at me from their fantasy landscape of pink orchids and orange birds. Behind their heads, elongated blue flowers in their green sheaths ooze drops of nectar. They are striking in their color, simplicity, lightness and dignity.
Like always, the tranquility lasts for about thirty minutes. One of the welcoming volunteers, a librarian I think, sticks her head in the door.
“How do you feel?”
“Good,” I say. “Relaxing.”
“Come,” she says. “There is something I want you to see.”
I follow her to the house of another artist across the street from La Casona. The metal chain link gate opens into a yard full of overgrown vegetation and hanging plants from any nook that could hold a hook. Dozens of tall trees create a canopy, disappearing the sky, and plants hanging from those trees. The sheer number would make an arboretum envious. Cutting through the sudden jungle wound a gravel path to the long porch running the length of a house. I duck to avoid pots hanging from the beams. The artist works on a metal sculpture in the middle of the porch.
“Give me a minute,” he says. “Look around.”
He has collected plants from all over Cuba. He shows me some cacti and some flowering hanging plants with purple and white flowers.
“I’ve seen some cactus like these,” I say, “when I walked from Baracoa to Bayamo a few years ago. I was surprised to find the southeast corner of Cuba to be so arid. So many cacti!”
He lights up with enthusiasm. “Yes. That’s where these come from. Nobody knows about that part of Cuba. It’s magical.”
I agree. I had walked along the southernmost road of the island in that region. The seldom traveled asphalt skirted the island; to my right jutted arid hills which reminded me of Santa Fe, New Mexico or a pristine southern California coast, if that still exists. To my left crashed the waves of the Caribbean, breaking against a primeval, rocky shoreline, at times, and other times gently spreading on the grey sand of virgin beaches. And all around stood and squatted cacti. Close to the water, up the slopes of the hills interspersed among the short shrubs, cacti; as un-Cuban as any vegetation could be. Over twenty types of cacti species decorate south eastern Cuba. I felt as if I was discovering a new land, walking for hours among the natives.
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