Walking to la Casa de Tejas
Back at the The Potrerillo promotora tells me about the activities awaiting me. No dancing girls. No comedy routine. A lunch with her family and a shower at her house whenever I was ready. In the afternoon, she recommends a walk up the road to a house, in ruins but worth the visit, where Antonio Maceo and the other Mambí generals met to strategize the assault on Mal Tiempo.
“It’s called La Casa de las Tejas. (the House of Roof Tiles) It is only a kilometer or so down the road. Raul will take you.”
Later in the afternoon, after a delicious and ample lunch and a shower in a bathroom with first-world water pressure and blue tiles on the walls, I walk with Raul to Las Casas de las Tejas. He assures me it is a two-kilometer walk. Most people are not good judges of distance. Long distance walkers have an advantage in estimating distances, usually conceived as a linear concept, because we have the combination of space (multidimensional) and time to work with. Hills speed up time and diminish the space that we cover. On flat land we can air it out, shrinking time and expanding space. In the final analysis, our pace is our fate and we play games in our head trying to predict the future.
But mere mortals are more prone to error when calculating distances. So, when Raul said that the Casa de Tejas sat no more than two kilometers away, I cut him some slack and thought the distance might be a bit more; say three kilometers. Still, I can only blame myself for wearing flipflops on what turned out to be an eleven-kilometer round trip to the ruins. Had he mentioned that the house was near Lomitas, I would have prepared differently. Lomitas is a town south of Potrerillo where the Maceo’s entourage stopped on its way to Mal Tiempo. The initial route through Manicaragua and Barajagua would have passed through Lomita and entered Potrerillo from the south. It did not dawn on me that the Casa de Tejas was that stop. Was it worth the walk? The house is in ruins. Its significance is not evident. No architectural badge of honor on the wall identifying this as a historic place. No tribute to the Mambí warriors. But, yes, it is worth the walk. La Casa de Tejas was the center of the universe for Maceo, Gomez, Esteban and the other men thinking of Mal Tiempo as perhaps the last place where they would breathe Cuban air. These walls in ruins at one-time protected rebel forces as the leaders planned their strategy.
“Nearby,” says my guide as we stand in the ruins of La Casas de Las Tejas, “is Los Mangos, where they camped before the assault. Want me to take you?”
“How near?” I ask.
“Oh,” he thinks it over. “Maybe a couple of kilometers.”
“No thanks,” I say. “I don’t have the shoes for it.”
Walking back to town, out of the blue, he asks, “Do you read the bible?”
In all my decades traveling Cuba this is the first time that anyone has posed this question.
I pause before answering.
“I’ve read the bible. But something tells me that probably not like you have read the bible,” I smile.
“I’m a Christian,” he says, using the broad evangelical terminology for what is really a very specific form of Christianity. “We have a group of us that regularly get together to read the bible and discuss it. We’re part of the Hermanos en Cristo church. Our pastor travels frequently to the U.S. to talk and to meet people, gather resources. I’d say we have over two thousand groups in Cuba; throughout the island. We’re growing.”
As soon as he identifies himself as a “Christian,” I anticipated some sort of contact with U.S. evangelical imperialism. Too strong a word? Perhaps. But the Evangelicals see in Cuba and other countries in Latin America fertile ground to expand their charismatic beliefs. In Cuba, I’ve seen evangelical churches from Baracoa to Bayamo, from the Bay of Nipes to El Cobre, and their numbers are growing.
Back in town, I resume my daily quest to discover a geographic location associated with a decent cell phone signal.
My escort to the Casa de Tejas suggests a visit to a house that has “the best connection in town.”
“The family has a son in the States. He has them wired with technology that increases the signal,” he says. “I’m sure that they will let you use the connection to call your wife.”
On a side street a few blocks away from the CC stands a yellow and white 1955 Dodge Coronet Lancer hardtop all pimped out and gleaming like a jewel in the dusty street. This car in Havana would make the driver a favorite of European tourists and a fortune if seen by a U.S. collector. I whistle when I see it. Raul smiles.
“They have a son in the States.” As if to say, this is the inevitable consequence of having a son in the States.
We call out, knock on the door and when no one answers, Raul calls a woman’s name. Around the side she came, drying her hands. She looked to be in her late 40s or early 50s but age is hard to judge in Cuba. The hardships of maintaining a household and dealing with the general dysfunctional elements of daily life wear down women and men, but not equally. Women get the short end of the stick. Here there is no simple second shift as suffered by women in the States with housework after a long day at the office. Women in Cuba are always on the clock. Scavenging for hours to find the store with the chicken in stock, the eggs, the protein, cooking it when they bring it back home, making sure that the house is fit to live in in a dusty, windows-wide-open world. Then there are the people that inhabit this world that is so difficult to maintain. The husband, the kids. Hell, anyone getting by with two shifts trying to survive in this economy is considered lucky. Men aren’t in that great shape either.
“Hola Raquel. Aquí tenemos un amigo que necesita una conexión buena para comunicarse con su familia en los Estados Unidos.” A friend needs a good connection to the States, he explains.
“Entren. Sientense. Quieren café?” Come in, she says, want some coffee?
The house inside is as pimped out as the car. A 62-inch Samsung TV stands on an entertainment center a couple of meters across from a plush leather sofa. Pictures of the kids, those portrait face shots that strive to give an angelic look to the little devils, and glass ornaments of animals decorate the top of wooden living room furniture. High on the side wall next to the TV set is signal enhancer of some sort. Raul points it out. Whatever it is, I catch five bars on my phone for the first time since leaving Havana. I excuse myself to talk to Fabiana as the rest of the household members, a young woman and one old enough to be Raquel’s mother, carry on with their activities in the kitchen, undisturbed by the gringo speaking English in the living room.
My mother’s condition has worsened, and the end could come any day, Fabiana tells me. The precariousness of her situation weighs heavy on me. It has already influenced my decision to cut directly to Potrerillo rather than face the uncertainty of Manicaragua and Barajagua. Now I realize I need talk to Lazaro about changing my ticket to return to Miami as soon as possible after arriving in Havana.
I had planned a few days of decompression in Havana. Entering the normal routines of life after a couple of weeks on the trail is a little like reentering the earth’s atmosphere after spending time in the International Space Station. I wanted to regain my bearings, normalize the social although this walk had been atypical in its sociability. But given my mother’s condition, I need to change the departure date to ASAP after arrival in Havana.
When done, I look for Raquel to say goodbye and find her in a small room on the side of the house doing laundry. Always working, these Cubans.
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