Cruces—Lajas—Ciego Montero
Electricity came first to Santa Clara. Right into the city. The philanthropist Marta Abreu brought it. It didn’t come to the Ariosa until…well, I don’t remember, but it was after the Caracas mill. Caracas brought in electric light in that area of Lajas. In the biggest mill in Cuba. The owners were millionaires, and that was why they bought the electricity. Their name was Terry. I don’t know where I was, up in a tree or on top of a roof. But I saw the lights of the Caracas mill, which were a marvel.
--Esteban Montejo
It must have been the water. I boil with internal heat even before I toss my mattress on the floor hoping to find the coolest spot in the big room. My efforts are to no avail. The fever sucks up the feeble breeze of the fan like a black hole sucks up light. The absurd dreams begin as soon as I close my eyes.
And then there were the shits.
I stagger in a stupor to the bathroom five or six times, wobbling between the theatre seats each time, and each time leaving behind more body weight than the time before. This continues until thereias nothing left inside of me.
After the third or fourth visit to the bathroom, I stop cursing the darkness and am glad that I can’t see what I leave behind. I perform the laborious flushing duties the first couple of times, but by the third and fourth forays, I abandon my waste to fester in the darkness. I know I will return.
A brutal fever creates a surreal night. My small, steaming room becomes a cave where I return each time seeking shelter after visiting the stream to shit my brains out. The rows of seats in the theater are a cane field that I maneuvered down the guardarrayas of the aisles. Delusional dreams of inescapable, dark, empty spaces torment me all night. Running through guardarrayas through undulating, Children-of-the-Cane-like fields. Somehow my nemeses from my school years in Gainesville, all of them, make the scene, mocking me from the sidelines.
The Congos said that there were evil spirits and good spirits; good souls and bad souls, of which we all have both. Souls can leave the body when you sleep. I feel like my good soul has escaped, leaving me to deal with an evil remnant, intent on making me question my place on earth. The small room whirls with Goya-esque images of screams and paranoia. Sleep does not bring rest but added delirium and frightening images of whips and shackles and boiling tar to the gut pain and fever. The swirling dreams hold me captive.
Sheer exhaustion breaks me, and I managed to sleep a couple of hours near the dawn, as dehydrated as a granule of instant coffee. As soon as I wake up, I know that I will not be walking today.
***
But I get up, out of habit if nothing else. Put on my hiking pants, shirt, socks, boots. Stuff my pitiful sickness-soaked sleeping bag into my backpack. I eye the coffee, suspiciously, in the thermos that the promotora left me the night before. But decide that the stomach virus cow is already out of the barn. I drink the coffee and wait.
The guide slash amateur historian arrives at 5:30 and I break the news.
“Can’t walk today.”
“Why not?”
I can tell that she was looking forward to this, although by her attire you would never know that she was planning to walk on the terraplén. Capri pants, nondescript but leisure wear sleeveless red top, tennis shoes. I think she dresses this way every day.
“Sick.” I say. “Had a horrible night. Don’t have any liquid in me.”
She looks at me like she needs more explanation.
“I shit my brains out all night. Vomiting too. Ok?”
“I’m so sorry. Que pena. I wanted to tell you all about our history.”
She stays a while. Leaves disappointed.
“No hug, I suppose,” she smiles.
The big guajiro walks through the door soon after. Dawn is happening, the windows brightening.
“Que te pasa, chico.” Told him the story.
“Cagando por todos los poros y una fiebre de película.” Not walking. He shakes his head, gets on the phone and figures out a driver to take me to Lajas.
Esteban relied on the healing quality of plants to get him through his illnesses and discomforts. All the leaves in the woods have their use, he told Miguel, and he got to know them all. Tobacco and mulberry leaves dealt with insect bites of all kinds. Chew them and put them while moist on your skin and the swelling will go down, guaranteed. Rosemary leaves made into a tea spirit away the heaviness that accompanies a cold and makes sniffles disappear. Itano leaves, chewed and placed on closed eyes, will help what ails them. Not sure what would have helped me that morning, but I am certain Esteban must have felt this way, as if the intestines were made of jelly, sometimes. Did he take anything or just let it run its course? He probably took something.
Had I not been in a hurry, had my mother not needed me in Miami, I would have spent the day recuperating in Cruces. This kind of event is not unusual in a long walk. A day of rest is all I need to hydrate and let the cooties work their way through the system. But plans were in motion for the closing events in Cienfuegos and Havana and then the ever-looming trip home to an ailing mother. I have to keep moving.
***
We drive along a paved road about half a kilometer north and parallel to the terraplén that I would have walked. The smokestack of the Caracas mill looms ahead and soon we pass a cement sign announcing the entrance to the Consejo Popular Caracas at what seems to be super-sonic speed.
Esteban worked in this area after leaving the Ariosa near Zulueta. He worked at the mill San Agustin Maguaraya near Lajas (name changed after the Revolution to Ramon Balboa). Work remained brutal in that mill. Yet, he spoke well of the Tomas Terry to Miguel. Terry was the major hacendado of the area. He owned several mills and much land. His memory is carried on many public buildings in Cienfuegos and, as hacendados go, history does not consider him one of the most brutal. Esteban remembers him as a cultured man who harbored the supremacist, colonialist ideas of the period but who established good relationships with the workers. He provided resources for the congos to establish two cabildos, one in Cruces and one in Lajas. Estaban visited them and remembers that a picture of Tomas Terry hung on the wall of the Cruces cabildo.
The Central Caracas, also owned by Terry, was one of the largest sugar mills in the world back in the day. The Central boasted the best technology imported from Europe in the 1860s. It was the first mill in the area with electricity, Esteban remembered. Kerosene lamps lit the lives of slaves and workers throughout Cuba except those working at the Caracas mill. And Lajas, because of its proximity to the mill, became one of the first towns with electricity in the region. The Terrys made it happen. The manor house where Terry lived when in town still stands on the grounds outside the mill.
Terry, of Venezualan origin, is a poster boy for the multi-national Cuban millionaire of the day. He lived part of his life in the United States and established a long-lasting relationship with the famous New York City counting house Moses and Taylor back in 1838. On the island, he made most of his money by recycling slaves--buying sick slaves, nurturing them back into working condition and then selling them for a hefty profit--and by extending credit to Cuban planters, mostly in the southern region of the island, at exorbitant interest rates. He also exported sugar and sugar products and imported machinery for mills, which he sold on the island. Under the guidance of Moses and Taylor, he invested in the growing coal energy industry of Pennsylvania and invested heavily in other sectors of the growing U.S. economy.[1] He was, by 1866, the richest planter on the island (being worth about $7 million when that sum amounted to real money), and was elected that year to serve as a member of the Cuban Commission selected to travel to Spain to discuss the constitutional development of the island. He supported gradual emancipation of the slaves in Cuba.[2] What sticks to Terry now, in Esteban’s memory, is his relative benevolence towards his workers and his contributions to the maintenance of the African spiritual traditions.
We blow by Caracas and pulled into Lajas just as I need another run to a bathroom. The drivers drop me at the Museo Municipal de Santa Isabel de las Lajas Benny More, where the director, a cheerful man with a perpetual smile and a surprised look, with eyebrows rising impressively high above his eyes every time he talked, welcomes me under the covered sidewalk in front of the museum. A gathering of stunned museum staffers waited for me in the front room.
“You couldn’t have expected me this early,” I say to break the ice. “I surprised you!”
One of the top administrators immediately launches into a much rehearsed and much presented short history of Lajas and an equally brief history of the museum. As she talks, the office staff behind her stand deathly still. The top administrator gestures in the general direction of the exhibits as she related the history of the town and segues into the life of Benny More, from childhood forged in a neighborhood near the railroad tracks, his rise to fame and his music. Framed newspaper articles and record covers lined the walls.
She leads us through the courtyard to the back wall where a twelve-foot statue of Benny More stands, his zoot suit painted yellow, made of bagazo, the waste product of sugarcane production.
“That’s my work,” says the Director of the museum. “I make sculptures of bagazo. I think I’m the only one in Cuba that works this medium.”
He is proud of that piece, its size and detail, but mostly he is proud of the technique that he developed to express his art.
“What’s left over after the cane is processed. And I mix it with liquids. Sometimes gasoline. Turpentine. It evaporates and the bagazo forms the sculpture.”
With that, he pulls a paper bag from out of nowhere and presents me with a white box. Inside is a small statue, about seven inches tall, of a slave wielding a machete and chained to an “iron” ball. On the wood base the words “Cimarron” are carved and painted.
“This is for you,” he says. “Laja welcomes el Caminante del Camino del Cimarron.”
The staff applaud. By the smell of the gift, I knew it was made of bagazo mixed with gasoline which has not yet evaporated. I ask for the bathroom and excused myself. I start to explain but he holds up his hand.
“We know. You drank the Cruces water. You’re lucky to be alive.”
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