Ciego Montero—Palmira
The next morning the young woman who signed me in the night before is still on duty.
“You live here, or what?” I say, putting my backpack down by the front desk. The entire front of the building is made of glass so I can see down the long driveway all the way to the road. No sign of my ride; no lights slicing through the darkness yet and it is almost 6 a.m. A stray dog sleeps curled up right outside the glass doors.
“Seems that way,” she says. “Going home today. Twenty-four-hour shifts. Want some coffee?”
“Always,” I say. She disappears into the dark hallway and returns with some delicious black morning gold.
Carbajal and the driver arrive before I started my predictable, introspective pissed-off rant about Cubans always being late.
“Just in time,” I smile, when they roll up parallel to the curb. I throw my backpack into the trunk and we are off.
Six members of the original welcoming committee wait to see me off from the Casona. Carbajal’s mother consumes me in a bear-like hug.
“You have your house here. Whenever you want.” she says. “Don’t forget us.”
Carbajal hugs me too. “We appreciate what you’re doing,” he says. “I wanted to give you a CD full of articles about our history as a remembrance, but I had problems with the computer. I’ll send it to you via Orlando.”
At this point, Orlando’s stock was pretty low in my portfolio. I will probably never get that CD.
“Thank you, Carbajal,” I say. “For everything.”
Ricadel, my guide, on mule-drawn buggy drives up as if on cue. He sees the look of disapproval on my face when I see the ride.
“We’re walking. Don’t worry,” says the guide. “This is just to bring me back.”
The young guajíro driving the rig behind the mule nods.
“And for your bag,” he smiles. “If you want.”
Now that I can get on board with. I throw it in the back, take a final selfie with the group, and wave goodbye as we put boots to dirt in the direction of the park.
The smell of fresh coffee pours out of open doorways. Inside, children fumble with backpacks and breakfast toasts. Women in batas (house dresses) shuffle around the kitchens which, at these early hours, are the center of the action, a stage where the day's events take shape. TVs flicker. Soft playing music and the voices of grave TV announcers provides the soundtrack as we walk away from the morning’s drills in these twin towns. Ricadel walks in silence, not bubbling with eagerness. But it is early.
Guajiros on bicycles heading into the fields stream by like worker ants. We follow some of them into the darkness. No cars anywhere in sight. The vanguard of sunrise begins to color the horizon in front of us with a streak of orange that looks totally misplaced in the black sky. After the sky grows orange, yellow, and finally blue, Ricadel points to what looks like a factory silhouetted against the sunrise off the road.
“That’s the Cantera Santiago Ramires,” he says. “We go into the cañaverales through here.”
A cantera is a rock quarry and it marks the turn from the dirt road into the guardarrayas of the sugar fields that we will follow all the way to the Ilpido Gomez sugar mill, where his sister works. This, I thought as we meander through the cane field, will be one impossible route to mark.
The horse and buggy rides ahead until forced to stop to wait for us. The driver is a young man, early or mid-teens, in jeans, short sleeves, red plaid shirt and bright yellow rain boots stretching almost to the knees. He doesn’t say much, except “Jump in,” every now and then. I think this is more to make it easier for him and his mule than for my benefit, my pace must be maddeningly slow.
“I like walking,” I say each time, “but you go ahead.” I gesture to Ricadel to get on.
He declines the invitation for the first couple of hours but about three hours in, I take a call from Fabiana and he takes the opportunity to jump in the wagon while I follow, phone to my ear, speaking English.
***
Rabbits jump across the path. Large ones. I take a picture and realize that I have seen very few non-farm animals on this entire walk. After Remedios, climbing to Esteban’s cave Alexis had picked up and proudly showed me that wild jutia poop. Other than birds, some that looked large, perhaps falcons or vultures, I have seen no wild fauna on the path. I walk through lands thoroughly tamed by humans. I wonder about the impact of the Periodo Especial on the small mammal population in the area. Tales abound of families eating cats and worse during those horrible years.
The goal for Ricadel and me today is to reach El Recurso, a small Consejo Popular on the outskirts of Palmira. There I become the responsibility of the next cultural region.
“We were getting close,” says Ricadel. If you look at the sugar fields from a helicopter, you would see a maze of tractor paths cutting in all directions through the green stalks. Flat beds carts full of sugar stalks are found scattered throughout the tractor tracks. We seemed to have followed a fairly straight path from the Cantera Santiago Ramirez to the outskirts of the Central.
“Yes,” says my guide. “We came straight. At least as straight as the guardarrayas allowed.”
“It will be hard for others to follow our path” I say.
“I’ll have a map maker from the mill create a map for us to show the way we came,” he says.
I am ecstatic. Marking the path for future trekkers is always on my mind and cutting through what ultimately is a field of huge grass that is seasonally cut is a hell of a challenge to mark.
“Can you do that? That would be fantastic.”
“Yes. Agriculture has the best map making equipment.”
As we approach the Central Elpido Gomez, a tractor wheels around the bend in the guardarraya.
“Wait,” says Ricadel. “That’s my brother in law. I have to talk to him.”
I should be used to it by now but meeting friends and family in the middle of some random route always surprises me. Bumping in to an acquaintance in Miami, outside of work or maybe your neighborhood, is as unlikely as a nickel landing on its edge.
At the Central, Ricadel disappears inside to say hello to his sister.
“I want to see if the cartographer can make us a map of where we just walked,” he says walking away.
The mule, young driver and I take in the scenery of a working sugar mill.
The dewy aroma of hot molasses thickens the air. Tractors clatter to and from the fields, workers in straw hats headed to their tasks or standing around the freshly painted blue “Casa del Azucarero” at the crossroads of the mill. The entire operation gleams with efficiency. Large warehouses painted bright blue frame the central plaza. The smokestack shines like a giant ivory tusk with the name E. Gomez and the year 1964 sharply painted on the side. Grey smoke drifts from its top. The green sugar fields stretch far into the horizon like an endless garden. The train cars with open tops wait for their load. It all looks, well, beautiful. This was how the world worked in Cuba when sugar was king although “beautiful” is a word that Esteban never uttered to describe the world of sugar that he knew.
Ricadel walks out from the administration building, shaking his head.
“What bad luck you have,” he says. “Today is the cartographer’s day off. Today!” But he assures me he will deal with it, getting the map made of the route from Ciego to the mill, and he will send it to me, via email if nothing else, as soon as he can.
***
We arrive at El Recurso and we settled under the roof of the town rec center. All Cuban towns, no matter how small, have a space set aside for events and entertainment. Some sort of covered dance floor with a stage at one end and a snack bar or counter to that could be easily converted into a service surface. Now to wait until the Palmira folks appear.
Ricadel turns the conversation to my life in the States. Where do I live? Do I know any Cubans? I laugh when he asks if I know any Cubans and give him the short version of Miami and its Cuban enclave. He knows that many Cubans live in Miami but not that many, he says. Miami is not, I assure him, like the rest of the United States. He does not have any relatives abroad that he knows of, and he is happy here. He has never thought about leaving.
“You’ve seen this town. This peace. These people,” he says gesturing in the direction from where we came. “Why would I leave this? I just wish we had internet.”
“And a decent cell phone connection,” I add.
“Yeah. Then everything would be perfect. We don’t have much but what we have is real. With real deep roots. We look around and say, ‘we build this.’ That’s a good feeling. Really it is. I could never leave this.”
Eventually, and I mean an hour or two later, the Palmira folks arrive in the ubiquitous dark colored Lada. This one is dark green. Some are dark blue. Black. No yellow or fucia in the lot. All very drab, compared to the parrot colors of the retooled American cars pleasing tourists in Havana.
I say goodbye to Ricadel with a strong thank you hug and dump my bag in the back seat of the car after my new handlers, two men friendly enough at first impressions, shoot down my idea of walking the final two kilometers. They shake their heads in unison. I am not walking because they are not walking, and their instructions are clear: bring me in now.
As usual, I am late for the welcome.
“Who schedules these welcomes, anyway?” I ask. “Does the scheduler know how long it might take to walk from Ciego? I doubt it. And I’ve been here for two hours waiting for you. I could have walked in easily and made the welcome. They say I’m late? Have the scheduler walk with me and then tell me that.”
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