Reality Check in Cruces
The room is warm. Real warm. Sweating while sitting perfectly still warm. The window leading to the side street is sealed shut for some unfathomable reason. Without the fan, the room would be impossible. Looking for the bathroom, I explore the building.
Behind the theatre stage are the restrooms. Or I should say, is the restroom. Unisex. Uni-able. One bathroom with three stalls, none of which flush, or have lids on the toilets or doors on the stalls to enclose them. And there is no light in the bathroom. So, using it requires, first, that your eyes become accustomed to the seamless darkness. If you manage locate one of the three stalls, guess the location of the bowl, and aim properly, you might not add to the novel life forms nurtured by the green-yellow swamp surrounding the base of the bowl. If you felt the socially conscious urge to flush, there is a bucket on the floor by the entrance which needs to be dumped into the toilet. The last person to use it did not bother to fill it, the tap being some distance away in another room.
This is the usual procedure to follow in most public bathrooms in Cuba and I am used to it. Usually the water is handier, most of the time coming out of a faucet inside the bathroom but the setup is un-surprising.
After I settle in my room, Yolanda, a staffer at the Casa de Cultura, walk with me to lunch at a local, state run restaurant. The existence of a menu was the only common denominator linking this gastric catastrophe with all the previous, state-run restaurants where I have eaten on the walk. The food is so dry that it is gritty in my mouth and gravely down my throat. Gritty dry hoofed mammal meat. Gritty dry congrí. Gritty dry yucca. You have not lived until you have wished to die eating dry congrí and yucca. The owner comes over. Smiling, shakes hands. Does not ask “how’s the food?” or “can I get you anything?” Or make any noises that might confuse him with someone who gave a rat’s ass about the customer. He probably knows that the food sucks and that I might not be willing or able to lie about it to be polite so he disappears into the “kitchen” as quickly as he can.
The promotora, I notice, did not eat.
***
In the afternoon, a guide is located. Xiomara came to introduce herself and we discuss the walk in the morning to the Caracas sugar mill and batey.
“It’s an easy walk,” she says. “The terraplén is straight to Caracas and then you just have a couple of more kilometers to Lajas.”
She presents herself as an amateur historian and eager to let me know why this is a very important region. We agree to leave by six the next morning.
***
Later in the evening, a man who had lived three years in the States and in Canada but decided to return to Cuba comes to meet me. He is a writer and a musician. He missed Cuba too much, even though he appreciated what the U.S. and Canada have to offer.
“There is a certain peace here that I didn’t find elsewhere,” he says. “Partly I feel it because I was raised here. But just objectively, there is more peace of mind in Cuba. The patterns of living are not easy. What is hard, is hard and there are many hard things daily. Every day is hard in some way. But things are easy too. Fewer worries about what you can’t control.” He shrugs. “I don’t know if you understand but I came back.”
We talked about the project and he is enthused about the possibility of tourists in Cruces.
“The tourists don’t stop here. Period. The need a reason to come to or through Cruces. Maybe this Camino offers some of them a reason.”
My migrant friend quickly puts cold water on my idea for marking the Camino in urban areas.
“The fist and the machete symbol,” I say excitedly. “It can be placed on the side of buildings or on the ground pointing towards the exit of the Camino through town.”
“In Leon (Spain),” I go on. “A trail of metal scallop shells embedded in the sidewalks leads a pilgrim from one side of the city to another. That’s what we could do here.”
He listened quietly. He pointed out, in a quiet voice, how that sounded like a magnificent idea. For Spain. “Here, that won’t work,” he says, quietly but confident in his message. “Here, people have no culture anymore. Not everyone, of course, but there is very little respect for the public environment. Many people, the young, the angry, won’t understand the importance of the symbol. You must understand that people now deface statues of Marti. Can you imagine? Spray them or splash them with paint. Pull off pieces. They won’t understand the significance of the machete and the fist. They’ll vandalize or destroy it.” He shook his head sadly. “You won’t be able to find a marker a week after laying them down.”
He is right, of course. Why hadn’t I thought of this? Why hadn’t I anticipated this possibility, hell, this probability? Yes, he was generalizing, as we all do, from the potential behavior of a few delinquents, but my assumptions also generalize, idealizing the behavior of all Cubans without understanding their disparate, and sometimes desperate, realities. I see his point. For some people that have few material comforts, the act of stealing or destroying is very similar to the act of creation or consumption. It is an action that alters the environment. I remember a comment made by one of the participants in one of the “Ultimo Jueves” events, a gathering of Cubans to talk uninhibitedly about Cuba, in Miami. A graduate of La Lenin in Havana, the exclusive boarding school designed to produce the perfect revolutionary subject, the tall, beautiful blond woman, stood in front of the group and lamented how education and culture were being erased in the new generation of Cubans. She must have been in her thirties but looked back nostalgically at the time when the Revolution spent significant resources in educating the population and promoting culture as a national resource. Now, she said, it was all changing. Education is not remunerated, and the cultural heritage is not appreciated. I don’t have enough information to weigh in on this broad social issue but perhaps placing the symbol of the Camino in public places is not a good idea. Maybe a stencil that left the outline of the symbol. I have to give this idea more thought.
***
At eight o’clock, church bells rang. I could not remember if I had heard any previously on the walk. I savor the moment. The sound of church bells toggles a sense of being in a time machine for me. I am transported to standing beside the gargoyles on the balustrades of Notre Dame in Paris, to the rise of the first town clocks in thirteenth century Europe calling the surrounding community to work or to prayer, to the teeth shaking vibrations of the Barcelona bells that fed life into my girlfriend’s insomnia while we lay in a cheap hotel and whose hopeless crying resulted in her becoming my first wife, to the many strange streets in the world that I have walked as a dedicated psychogeographer, and to all the church bells that have set my internal compass and quickened my step.
By nine o’clock I am back at the Casa. The night watchman does his rounds. A short, plump man, we immediately hit it off.
“You’re the loco walking Cuba,” he grins.
“That would be me,” we shake hand.
“I’ll be around all night,” he says. “If you need anything.” All of the windows of the main hall, all nine of them with double blinds each, are open. The night coolness fills the hall. A pitiful amount of it leaks into my room but with the fan, and sleeping in my underwear, I should make it.
Later, as the night watchman settles into his rocking chair listening to the soft classical music that manages to fill the large hall from the tiny speakers on the desk radio, I write some notes of the day. “Feeling hot from the inside. As if I have sunstroke,” I write. I don’t have a thermometer, but I am burning. I think back to the walk from Mal Tiempo monument to the town through the flat, dried grassland. Maybe that did me in.
Fabiana calls while I write. I mention that I felt hot and she helpfully instructs me to cool down.
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