It’s All Experience – HA !

Hello everyone

I’m sending this from the lobby of our Las Terrazas hotel while we wait for the taxi to take us to the airport.  Clocks have changed here and we know they have in the UK since we left so we’ve been five hours behind, then four and now back to five.   It’s been so hot here it is difficult to believe that it’s still only March and that when we get home it will feel cold to us.  To those of you who do read the emails, I hope you enjoy them and for those who don’t, well you won’t see this anyway.  

  

H did say that but it was before she’d seen the inside of a Cuban clinic.  She’s not been well for a while, dosing herself with paracetemol and finally came to a head with shivering and temperature.  Naturally I defer all medical decisions to her and she finally decided that a Doctor was needed.  Our hostess Carmen could not have been more helpful.  First a nurse from next door came round with thermometer and then we trooped off to the local clinic.  It was quite literally an eye opener and without Carmen elbowing her way around, we would have just left.  It was just mucky and looked about as healthy as a bus station.  Building work on one side, medical equipment being sorted on the floor in a corridor, grimy floor, unpainted walls.  One person walking past us with a box of rubbish had the bottom fall out, just dropped the now empty box and carried on walking.  She did come back with another box a little later and picked it up.  She was one of the people wandering around with a face mask slung around her neck.   The first stop was to see a doctor.  This was a consulting room about 10 feet by 8 feet, one desk with a doctor each side both with a patient plus hangers on.  Those waiting stood at the threshold or just inside waiting their turn.  You’d hate to be there having to describe having an itchy willy.   Then it was off for a blood test.  No signs so without Carmen we would have been lost anyway.  Sterilised sharps were available, so H allowed a finger prick, but refused to give an IV sample.  Next a urine sample is required and despite the notices about washing hands after using the lavatories, hey, no handbasin anywhere.   Back in blood test bit, H asked for somewhere to wash her hands, was shown into the next room, microscopes etc. and used a tap whose basin had blood in the bottom.  Then a wait but a result within half an hour, back to the doctor, prescription written and off to the pharmacy.  Carmen gets a friend at the front of the queue to hand in H’s prescription and a few pesos (which she refused to be recompensed for) and within another 15 or 20 minutes H had her tabs.  So, doctor, tests, results and drugs within 2 hours and at no cost – top marks.  Hygiene – unbelievably bad.  So, why is it that we get outbreaks of things like Norovirus in our hospitals.  Perhaps we need to get hold of that Nora and stop her.

Unsurprisingly, it was ‘an infection’.  Drugs and/or time and sleep have worked and Heather is fine.

An unprecedented comment from H “I can’t wait to get home”.

We were however fortunate that we’d booked into Vinales for five days so there was plenty of recuperation time available and we finally got to go for a walk near the town into the countryside.  This area is scenically beautiful and we wandered northwards through some tobacco growing areas with more distant views of sharp sided wooded outcrops of limestone.  The soil was very reddish and clay like.  The tobacco plants grow in rows like any vegetable and stand about three feet tall with leaves like 12 – 15 inch long spear heads.  Each leaf is picked by hand and left on a frame to partly dry in the sun and the plants are picked over more than once in a season.  After that the leaves go into drying barns which are thatched right to the ground with just a couple of doors.  The barns smelled wonderful inside and even though cigar smoke is less acrid than cigarettes it’s a pity that all the crop can really do is kill people.   I have old gardening books at home which explain how to soak old cigarette ends to make a nicotine insecticide.  This is now considered so dangerous that it’s banned throughout Europe so is probably only used in France, Italy, Spain, Portugal and Greece.

Before this on our first morning in the town we had decided to go on the Vinales valley hop-on, hop-off bus tour to get a feel for the place.  It’s mentioned in Lonely Planet, and only in Lonely Planet which says it runs for 10 trips a day or so.  There is nothing in town that would give you a clue that it exists.  The bus stop is very faded and broken and the bus is unmarked.  Arriving 35 minutes late for the first run of the day this smart air-conditioned 30 seater stopped in the vicinity of the bus stop so it had to be the right one and on we got.   With the level of marketing it gets we had our own tour for 5CUCs each as the only passengers although some did get on later.  I should mention that Vinales is full of tourists.  Yet another ‘tear out your hair’ moment arrives as we approach the Vinales Valley Visitor and Information Centre about two miles out from town.  Would you believe that this isn’t one of the 18 stops on the 1.5 hour route and the bus doesn’t stop here. 

What we can’t understand is that with Tourism being Cuba’s biggest earner, nobody other than a very few people with their own businesses (and taxi drivers) have the foggiest idea of how to part said tourists from their money.  The tourist offices which I guess are Government run are generally not helpful.  We went into one and the woman at the desk dealing with one customer just said “wait ten minutes” to us, so we didn’t.   We were told that transport cannot be arranged in an office in Havana where two weeks previously transport had been arranged for us.  One agency is called Cubanacan and frankly it should be renamed Cubanacan’t.

Our last stop in Cuba is in at a place called Las Terrazas where we’ve booked into a proper hotel for a few days.  While all of our Casas Particular have been clean, friendly and a positive experience, the impersonal nature of a hotel will make a change.   We’ve met some really lovely Cubans who have been unfailingly helpful. 

Las Terrazas was set up as long ago as the early 1970’s as an Eco village (whatever that is) as a follow on from a reforestation project which is now part of a Unesco Biosphere Reserve.  The village stands in a wooded valley with a river which is dammed to make a series of lakes.  The houses are not in rows but are dotted about the hillside amongst small trees and on grassy plots.   There appear to be no allotments or gardens growing food, very few solar panels and so I’m not sure how the sustainability claims are substantiated.  We did see some vegetable growing away from the village while on a bird walk but I can’t imagine it supports the whole community.   However, it was very early for such a development and it does fit nicely into the landscape although I would love to know when it was first called an ‘Eco village’.   The hotel is well designed and the more I look at it, the more I like it.  It seems to sit in rather than on the hillside and incorporates large trees inside the building.  They grow through holes in the roof, deliberately.  There are views along and across the valley and very pleasant tropical gardens where we saw the national bird, the tocororos (Cuban Trogon).  This is a splendid creature, a little chunky and one of those tropical birds that looks like parts of other brightly coloured birds have been magically stuck together.  It has the same colours as the Cuban national flag, although it isn’t blue and white stripes with a red star at one end.

A few summary points have occurred to me from our travels through Cuba along probably 1000 kilometres from Havana winding to Santiago, back to Havana and then a further 200 kilometres west to Vinales and then back to Havana.  Life is lived very much in the open here, probably a mixture of climate and cultural attitude. There’s a lot of sitting outside, playing and working outside.   We’ve seen little office provision set ups with a computer, printer and camera on the street to produce documents of various sorts.  Lots of food is prepared, cooked and eaten in the streets and houses fronting straight onto the pavement don’t have curtains or often closed doors.  As we walk past, daytime or evening there are people sat talking, smoking, eating, watching TV.  Two Cubans meeting who know each other, often two men will kiss cheeks, hands are always shook and every time we’ve said “ola” or “buenos dias”, there is always a response, an appropriate response.  H has realised that apart from one sold by individuals in the streets there are no newspapers, magazines or any bookshops apart from the few selling (usually old and dusty) revolutionary books and pamphlets.   At home we get used to various technological aspects of life where we don’t even notice until they’re not there.  Here, we still haven’t used a credit card and bar code readers don’t exist in shops.  In a supermarket, every item has the code keyed in by hand to the till.  However, there are quite a number of electric motor scooters about, something we’ve not noticed at home.

Cuba has been an intention destination for me for some time and once it was announced that American relations with Cuba may be thawing a little, a visit shot up the list as if normalising relations would somehow destroy Cuba.  Interestingly, we’ve met quite a number of other visitors who’ve said in various ways “we wanted to get here before the Americans”.   A bit like before Attila the Yank got here which is unbelievably unfair.  Yes it has been good to be somewhere that multinationals don’t appear, no chain fast food outlets are around but my goodness a bit of US customer service would improve this place no end. 

Overall I have to say that we’ve had a really good fortnight in Cuba, what a pity it took five weeks.