Mal Tiempo-Cruces
After touring the plaza with Maipu and Aniel, we enter the motel. Cookies and a cold drink wait for us. Elias, the manager welcomes us. After I summarize the project, he offers to give me a tour.
“We have nine large rooms with the capacity for forty-five people. It’s not the Hilton but we receive people year-round. Groups of tourists, but mostly school trips or national organizations.” He points to the work area at the end of one wing. “As you can see, we’re renovating.”
He tells me how back in the day, when the Baños de Bija were functioning, the motel would be full of guests.
“A little bus would stop right out front and take visitors to the baths and bring them back later. A bus from Cruces stopped here too on the way to los Baños.”
Outside, we say goodbye to Aniel. The promotora probably wished that she could join him, but she silently resigned herself to her fate, accompanying me to the Mal Tiempo sugar mill through the shrub.
We work our way around a fence to the south of the monument and head towards the smokestack sprouting in the distance. It is hot as hell by now. Waves of heat rise from the sandy flatland, making the palms in the distance undulate, like some tropical Van Gogh creation. Maipu wraps a long sleeve shirt around her head in a makeshift turban and we weave through the scrub brush. The terrain reminds me of the high mesas in the Southwestern part of the United States. I half expect to see a sagebrush blowing past us, had there been any wind.
The original name of the mill was Andreita. After the Revolution, all the mills received names more fitting for the revolutionary times. The new name, Mal Tiempo, and the year of the change, 1971, are faded and almost invisible on the smoke stack which towers over the remaining structures. The Mal Tiempo batey is only two kilometers from Cruces and maintains a healthy population, mostly workers who make the daily trek to Cruces to work. The mill has been retooled into a vegetable farm designed for local production. It provides steady work for some.
At the core of the old mill stands the frequently renovated barrancones, where the slaves and afterwards the wage laborers slept in the days that forged the Cuban nation. The existing structure is many generations removed from the original one, but the typical long warehouse shape makes its genealogy unmistakable. Across from the old barrancones a thin young woman, black hair pulled back in a ponytail, serves guarapo to a shifting group of thirty workers. Guarapo is sugar cane juice and, the colder it is, the more it resembles the nectar of the gods, particularly if you manage to luck into a glass after a five kilometer schlepp through an arid grassland in central Cuba. Sweat pours from Maipu’s face and arms as if she were a squeezed sponge. She looks at me, wiping her forehead with a white handkerchief and points to the guarapo stand.
“Te invito.” She invites me for a drink.
Although it is barely above room temperature, the sweet drink cools me from the inside out. My throat hugs it all the way down and it rejuvenates me.
The feeling reminds me of the time that my son, in high school at the time, and I walked the Camino de Santiago. On a particularly punishing day in the hills around Leon, we dragged ass into a tin building that seemed to block the path we followed hypnotically though the hardwood forest. A few men, all looking like neighbors stood at a simple wooden bar. We asked for something cold to drink.
“We have cider,” said the bar tender.
“Then cider it is,” I replied.
He pulled a full green bottle from behind the bar, popped the top, and, starting with the bottle touching the glass, raised the bottle and lowered the glass while pouring the cider. The glass was large enough to take the entire bottle as the liquid poured dead center into it from the bottle at the top of the bartender’s wingspan. He handed me the glass and repeated the ritual for Carlos.
“Asturian cider,” he said. “You have to “escanciar” the entire bottle at once or it won’t taste right.”
We drank the cold, frothy cider and fresh energy shot into our legs. We laughed and walked for hours afterwards. We both still recall it with excitement whenever we talk about our walks.
Maipu and I quench our thirst, mop our faces best we can and carry on, entering the town through an area where a playground and a 19th century home share the land, and head for the house of the cultural staffer of the area. On the way we walk past the smokestack of the mill, with Mal Tiempo painted on its side. The old administrative building, last renovated in 1909, stands vacant near the stack.
“Niña,” the local cultura staffer says to my companion when we arrive. “What are you doing out in the hot sun?”
My guide, head wrapped like a beduin in the North African sun, is asking herself the same question. We all laugh as I take a picture.
Together we walk to the railroad line that leads into Cruces, two kilometers away. A small red train still runs the route for passengers. We see its slow, shiny cars move away from us.
“You can’t walk the tracks here. Train will get you,” says Maipu. “But the road runs right next to it.”
“Want to walk it?” My guide looks at me with tired, sad eyes, like her dog just died, before adding, “We can get a car here if you don’t mind. It’s less than two kilometers but it is so hot.” She fans her face with a hand fan, un abanico, as she asks.
***
The car drops us off right at the edge of the urban area, about a kilometer and a half from where it picked us up. The driver never got out of second gear. We wind our way through the narrow streets of Cruces, to the offices of Cultura. The town is bustling at midday. Bicycles, cars and mule drawn buggies all share the hole-filled streets. The dark, almost solid streams of burnt oil billow out of car exhausts. Narrow sidewalks are no match for the number of people milling about. All streets are pedestrian streets, even where cars jockey for space.
The promotora spots another güarapo stand under a beautiful tree blooming pink flowers next to the railroad line.
“This one will be colder,” she smiles.
“This one is on me, then,” I say.
It is a popular place. We wait our turn in what to an untrained eye might seem like a formless crowd all vying for the attention of the young woman serving up the magic elixir and the reward was the coldest, most delicious güarapo that I have tasted in a long time. Perhaps ever. I take small sips, pressure sucking the cold nectar onto my tongue to make it last. My mouth does not want to let it go.
My backpack waits for me, sitting comfortably on a couch at the administrative offices of Cultura. The dark panel walls of the space inside the small office waiting room magnify and trap the wild heat running the streets outside. An oven comes to mind. I wait outside until yet another local promotora approaches to greet me. I recognize her from Potrerillo. She came with Lazaro and Orlando.
A large group of people with nothing better to do wait in the front room to welcome me at the Casa de Cultura. The voices introducing themselves roamed the cavernous room before making it to my age worn ears. I encourage the group to sit in a circle, in the comfortable rocking chairs that populate the room.
“Thank you for the welcome,” I say after the introductions. “Let’s talk about the project.”
The Casa Cultural of Cruces is in the largest building serving cultura in the province, according to the director. It is a grand building. The exterior shares the large pillar architectural design of the other addresses along the covered, blue colonnade portico that ran the length of the street. Inside, the large main room, beautifully tiled and with an echoingly tall ceiling, welcomes the visitor. Across the room, and beyond three marble columns, the space opens into a large theatre with about three hundred seats in a subtle curve facing a raised stage. Behind the theatre are the offices and the bathroom.
Physically, Cruces seems to be a town with little to attract tourism. Beauty and decay, and decaying beauty, surround the main square. The outside of the old theatre, across the street from the Casa de Cultura, its classic columns in the tragic moments of renovation with the old elegance erased and the improvements still in the bags of cement, stands in ruins. [1]
***
Like in Potrerillo, the guide for the next day was unidentified until my day of arrival into Cruces. I can’t help but compare this last minute pulling together of details to the clockwork arrangements in Villa Clara, where even when I threw them a curve ball by changing the route, they hit it out of the park with humble but solid organization.
But maybe I am being too harsh. Other than the guides, I did not anticipate any of the organizational details that became the rule in Villa Clara. Here in CrucesI have a floor to sleep on and a promise of a guide. A floor to sleep on is all that I really hoped for at each stop and here they even provided a mattress, a fan and an extension cord, allowing me to move the fan to be in close proximity to the mattress and my body. The extension turned out to be an industrial contraption consisting of a wooden wheel a foot in circumference with plugs on the side and a thick wall cord extending from its center that looked thick enough to withstand a direct lightning strike. But it works. That is all I need.
[1] To be fair, I visited Cruces a year later and this initial assessment seems a bit harsh. Its central park, in full bloom and with plenty of traffic, now that it served as an internet hub, was way more welcoming than I remembered walking in. The commemorative plaque honoring baseball great Martín Dihigo (El Immortal), in the park and the small exhibition in the museum made my second visit a hit. But in 2017 the town was still not ready for tourist, with only one paladar and only a couple of casas particulares.
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