Cuba - June 5, 2015

Friday, June 5, 2015: Santa Clara, Cuba

Terrible rain today. It lashed down for most of the morning. We had a nice breakfast and then stayed in the house as it was impossible to venture out in that sort of heavy rain. On top of this there was a power cut. Soon we had to  vacate our rooms as new people arrived to take them over: an Italian couple (the man being distinctly grumpy due to the poor weather) and a young American girl, Nicole, who had been traveling the world by herself for the last 8 months. She had just arrived from Honduras.

Eventually round about noon the rain eased off and we went out to buy our bus tickets. Surprise, surprise only very light rain persisted. The bus arrived and left on time and the journey was pleasant and uneventful. A guy from Dublin with a bad leg and traveling by himself gave us some very helpful advice about the area.

In Santa Clara we were expected by the people from the casa we had arranged to stay at. Pleasant landlady and her son who had very good English. He painted a very sad picture of life on Cuba with severe economic problems and people being imprisoned on their tiny island due to the impossibility to travel for most ordinary Cubans. He explained that the monthly salary of a language teacher on average is about 25 CUC. This is extremely little considering that a sack of cement cost 7 CUC and the average meal in a decent restaurant between 6 and 8 CUC; a mochito, a nice and important drink, is about 2 CUC. Thus one meal for two and half your monthly salary is gone. No wonder that corruption is ripe and the black market is flourishing everywhere on Cuba. What keeps people honest tends to be a good decent salary; one ought to tell the authorities in Cuba and increasingly in the U.S. and Europe too.

The landlady and her son also quickly informed us that we were very welcome to bring some hot 'conchitas' back to our rooms at night but due to police regulations the ladies had to display their IDs. This probably explains why we didn't get a key to the house (only keys to our rooms) and were asked to ring the bell, however late, when we returend at night. They wanted to make sure that any accompanying girls would be properly IDed. We reassured them that we intended to come back without company at night (but we still didn't get a house key, lol).

The rooms in our casa are good, still basic but better than the ones in Trinidad. We had a great meal in the very pleasant restaurant of a nice hotel and then went for a couple of mochito's to a bar and then to another bar with live music. Was good. Some ladies invted us to their casa not far away we were reassungly informed but we politely gave this a miss. Let's hope the rain stops tomorrow altogether. A frizzle of rain is still continuing; of course most unusual for the Caribean, just our luck I guess.

Santa Clara is a nice and quaint town with a large center square surrounded by some fairly nice buildings. The are some streets and a 'boulevard' leading off it. Most of the private houses provide the same picture as in Trinidad and Havana, in particularly the further you get away from the main center: semi-derelict, profoundly unsafe and unhygienic I assume; any western safety ingineer would be shocked for life. The roads have lots of potholes, some a unpaved. At first sight it  all looks very romantic and quaint in a shamboloic sort of way. Great photo motives; I took lots of them, hundreds. One also gets quickly used to this kind of street view but when considering that this is most people's main dwelling it makes you sad.

There are lots of bicycle taxis everywhere, also plenty of grand American cars from the 1950s, with some very fascinating and colorful models. A quite ugly but at the same time interesting bright green and pink seems to be a local favorite. It always amazes me that these old cars are still running though often the engine has been replaced. A car repair on Cuba always is an unpredictable affair: you may have to wait for weeks until the right part is found and fitted in. There are also plenty of horse-drawn cart taxis which quite happily seem to co-exist peacefully and cooperatively with the bicyle taxis and the normal motorcar taxis. These horses are working very hard often pulling carts loaded with up to 8 people.

Santa Clara is very un-tourisitc; only very few tourists can be seen. A Spaniard from Malaga we bumped into confirmed this impression. One of the more typically and 'natural Cuban towns he reassured us; he has been keeping a car in Santa Clara for the last 10 years and visits regularly.