Santiago, as far east as we get.

Dear All

Well, I’ve obviously found a connection.  Sometimes it’s a hotel with wi-fi (which are as rare as hen’s teeth) or otherwise a slow internet terminal and I’ve surreptitiously slipped a memory stick into a USB port.  We’ve had to show a passport to get an internet log-in.  This is a frustrating country.

We’re as far to the east as we plan to go in Cuba, having started in Havana and then moved eastwards through Cienfuegos, Trinidad, Sancti Spiritus, Camaguey and now Santiago.  From here we plan to go back along the main highway stopping at a few different locations before spending a few days near a beach. 

One thing that surprises me, because of the time it took us to realise it, is that the people asking “taxi” etc. outside all the bus stations are not taxi drivers.  They have a bit of English, negotiate a price which is always wildly more than a local would pay and then call a taxi and tell the driver how much the fare is.  Local dialect “ees a beautiful car” means “this is a deathtrap”.

The Belgians I mentioned in the last email left on the midnight bus for the 15 hour trip to Havana where they have about 3 hours before catching their Aeroflot flight to Moscow for a 5 hour wait and then another 3 hour flight back to Brussels.  I’m not sure whether catching it or missing it would be best.  They told us that no alcohol is available on the Moscow/Havana flights and had wanted to fly from Santiago back to Havana but after they’d queued for two hours to buy the tickets, were laughed at and told that the next Havana flight was in two weeks time.  We’ve found that the concept of Customer Service is virtually unknown here, indeed few Cubans appear to understand what a Customer is.  Almost without exception the Cuban view of a customer is someone who interferes with them chatting to their friends or just doing nothing for their working day.  This may well be different in the big resort hotels at Varadero which we intend to visit at some point.

We met the Cuban who arranged our Casa in Santiago and his story was believable.  Winning a scholarship offered by the British when he was a late teenager, he studied at Bristol University, works for a cruise liner company and runs a selection of his family casas in Cuba.  What made it plausible was that he had a good idea of what customer service is.  Roy, a good Cuban name, said that his staff all said “why bother” when he was trying to school them in some sort of service ethic.  He said he puts it very simply in terms they understand.  It was “you want more money for your children.  You smile, say hello, ask how things are and you get more tips, darling”.

Here’s an example of normal service.  I needed to cash some money and in the bank for the first time anywhere in Cuba we saw that people had tickets with numbers on and a monitor saying which number and desk was waiting, just like a deli counter.   A woman at a computer printed and handed out individual tickets and the subtle Cuban method (Banking Bingo) was that the numbers appeared on the screen out of sequence.  Yes, really.  It would go from 147 to 155, back to 149 and then onto 176 for example.  An Italian who had arrived after us went to talk to her about this and she looked him straight in the eye, said nothing but turned to a woman next to her who was also an employee and had a chat.  When my money was counted out, I naturally watched carefully and counted while the cashier did, thought it was short and counted it in front of her.  It was short and the missing 10CUC was just slid across the counter without a word.  My guess is that she has relations who are taxi drivers.

It was in Santiago that we went into a coffee shop and ordered two café con leche (coffee with milk for you non-linguists) and were told “no milk”.  The waitress did at least laugh when I asked if they could do coffee without milk.  OK it isn’t funny but it did happen.  One lunchtime we ordered two drinks and a plate of chips at the same café as we had ordered exactly the same the previous lunchtime.  Ten minutes after our drinks arrived I asked the same waiter where the chips were, “no chips”, “why didn’t you tell us”, “I am by myself”.  I could see two more staff over his shoulder.   One bus station café had any drink you wanted as long as it was beer or a bottle of rum.

We have visited a few museums because to be fair there is little else to do in a town except look at the architecture and people, have a cocktail and look at a menu which in itself is pretty pointless because they are almost always the same.  It is sometimes the menu rather than a menu because there is only one which we get to look at while the waiter waits for it back.  I must mention one museum exhibit I saw which was a display case with half a dozen pieces of broken pottery which was labelled somewhat pointlessly but with disarming honesty ‘fragments of pottery’.  

As always, there are musicians everywhere of varying skill level but usually good, especially the bands.  Some play officially in a restaurant but there are others who will play with friends at a table decorated with rum bottles in the corner of a café or just in the street somewhere.  There are few beggars as such but lots of people selling small items or ‘doing a turn’ for tips.  In Santiago, one elegant man dressed in shiny black trousers and a jacket plus a walking cane and hat would appear at a table and perform some magic tricks, an egg from nowhere or a coloured handkerchief or perhaps a bit of customer service.

This is a hillier town than most and so has no bicycle rickshaws or horse taxis but it has a central square with the Hotel Casa Grande along the eastern side with a wonderful roof terrace about five floors up with a fresh breeze, great views of the hills surrounding the city and cocktails on tap at 3CUCs a pop.  Graham Greene stayed here while writing Our Man in Havana and trying to get an interview with Fidel Castro, then a rebel hiding out in the hills.   He was unsuccessful in the interview stakes just as we have still not sold any vacuum cleaners (in response to one of my readers).  

We went to the beach from here, a journey of 16kms or so by taxi for 20CUC and came back by open sided cattle truck for 0.35CUC for both of us and we’re sure we paid more than the locals.  It’s almost amusing that as virtually the only tourists there, as we get out of the taxi there are locals saying “taxi, taxi, you want taxi”.   For goodness sake, there is nowhere to go, we’re at the end of the road.  The beach is a curve with bands of different hues of blue water a’lapping away.  This area was badly hit by a hurricane in 2012 and the beach is littered with bleached coral from the destruction offshore so there’s no telling how much of the reef still exists.  Lots of tourists come to Cuba for the diving and a coral reef takes years if not decades to recover from damage so this sort of thing is bad news for tourism, the biggest foreign currency earner that Cuba has.  Onshore there are ruins along the badly damaged areas to the west which look nearly as bad as parts of Havana.  The town is very untouristy and we see only about half a dozen obvious non-locals,  It has a couple of beach bars, what turn out to be two massage tables on the beach plus a couple of people just standing next to them and no sign or indication that a massage is an offer on the table as it were.

And so we say farewell to Santiago, gateway to the east.

On 26 July 1953, Fidel Castro led a group of about 120 rebels in an attack on the Moncada Barracks here in Santiago in his first attempted coup.  The 26 or so cars drove into the city just after 5.00am but couldn’t have made more noise than the old tub taking us to the bus station at about the same time.  The coup attempt was what military historians refer to in their arcane language as “a complete balls-up” because the rebels got lost in the city, half the rebels were captured and executed while Fidel escaped into the mountains.   However, we made it to the bus station OK.