Day 5-6: Mambo de la Luna, Santiago de Cuba

Sitting on a rooftop dining area, the scene of possibly my best cuban meal so far, condensing two days into one in the hope I’ll get all caught up. It’s not that the days are blurring together, but right now, on the other side of the International Date Line, I really have no idea what day it is, and time is certainly flying by.

Yesterday started with the last minute packing, the usual breakfast of coffee, omelette, juice and fresh fruit, and then we were on the road to the airport. While Cuban traffic can be a little chaotic, with random roadworks, and horse drawn carts to dodge, I’m yet to encounter any really major issues or traffic jams.

Havana airport has three terminals, one fairly new international terminal (the one L and K used), an old international terminal (the one I landed at), and an old domestic terminal, which we used this time. It has the bare essentials: places for people to queue, security screening, uncomfortable seats, and a small array of food (mostly biscuits).

If there are two things that are hard to find in Cuba, they are chocolate, and potato chips (crisps). We have seen both, though the latter was very expensive when found, and the former was at a specialty store (Havana’s Museum of Chocolate, also very crowded).

The flight to Santiago de Cuba was uneventful, which is what we’d hoped for given the aircraft, an old Embraer 170 twin propeller that we walked to and from across the tarmac. It went up, stayed up until it was time to come down, then landed where it was supposed to on all of its wheels, stopping before the end of the runway. Job done. Santiago de Cuba is a very small international airport that sits on top of a cliff, flying over an old Spanish fort on approach, so there’s the potential for excitement. The arrivals hall is a single room and baggage carousel, and before you can leave they check your ticket stub against your baggage tag to make sure you have the right luggage.

Santiago de Cuba sits mostly in a valley surrounded by 1,000 metre hills, so isn’t the flattest of towns, there’s a lot of up and downhill to get anywhere. There are also a lot of narrow one-way streets, some of which were blocked off as we arrived during the annual Fiesta del Fuego, or fiesta of fire. The Fiesta del Fuego is a Caribbean celebration which involves a lot of people coming to the hottest city in the region, Santiago de Cuba, and culminates in setting fire to el Diablo.

Santiago de Cuba has three histories: first there were the days when pirates came and looted, plundered, generally did their thing including stealing church bells. Next came the later days of the Spanish occupation: to stop the pirates they built a fantastic fortress in an incredibly strategic part of the harbour mouth, with excellent protection on all sides and a commanding position over the town. Unfortunately it took a while to build, a few hundred years, so during the building the pirates used to just land a bit further up the coast and go around to loot and plunder, steal church bells etc. By the time the fortress was finished, the golden days of pirates was past. So the Spanish turned the fortress into a prison for dumping revolutionary scallywags. The next time the fortress could have been handy was during the Spanish-US war in the late 1890s, when the Spanish fleet sat inside Santiago de Cuba harbour, while the US fleet sat outside, just out of range of the fortress’ old cannons.

For some reason that wasn’t quite clear to us touristas, the Spanish fleet decided to leave the safe harbour, where they had food, water, safety, church bells, etc, and take on the US fleet by leaving through the narrow harbour mouth one at a time. As you can imagine, this didn’t work out so well for the Spanish.

The third history of Santiago de Cuba is during the revolution, where Fidel Castro spent much time hanging out in the mountains surround the city, generally making a nuisance of himself, sticking his beard out occasionally to blow raspberries, that kind of thing. So when the Spanish lost the battle of the beards against Fidel and Che, it was in the main square of Santiago de Cuba that Castro proclaimed the Cuban Republic. We got to see the balcony where he did this.

So that’s the history, if I understood what Beberli told us. It’s known as the City of Heroes, for the links to the revolution.

It’s also considered to be the hottest city in Cuba, and it was pretty warm when we were there. I’ve been struggling to drink enough water, as the whole system of finding shops where we can buy extra water has been difficult. We’re still getting the communication right with our guide, getting it across to him that we’re happy just having a quick stop to buy a bottle of water, that we don’t need to stop and sit at a cafe. Maybe it’s just not how Cubans do it. We did manage to convince Beberli that we’d actually like to go to a supermarket to see what sorts of foods and groceries there are, which really was quite interesting. They are like Aldi, or the way Coles/Woolworths are going, where there is almost no brand selection: one product, one brand. And each shelf is stocked with a single product. Lots of biscuits and canned goods, expensive potato crisps, cooking oil, a frozen section almost totally full of chicken (no icecream), and booze, including 1.5L plastic bottles of tinto de verano, or literally red summer wine. We came away with a few bits and bobs, including a 6 pack of cola cero and a 12 pack of water, which should keep us hydrated for a while with all the fire festivals and such.

We caught the fire parade from a street corner, a little stop and start but each group, from all over the Caribbean, sang and drummed and danced while wearing incredible costumes. Lots of latin rhythms, the occasional pirate, and a surprising amount of older performers made the streets come alive.

While watching the parade, we befriended a woman who has some English and explained some of the performances to us. Like almost everyone who comes up and starts talking to the touristas, she was running a scam, so when the parade was over and she suggested taking us to a restaurant run by her friend, we figured that it’d probably cost us the price of a drink or two. And she seemed pleasant enough, so we figured that was fine.

Well, at the restaurant she tried to sell me some 11yo and 12yo “Ron de Santiago”, which if it was the real thing, someone needs to tell this large corporation to get a better inkjet printer for doing their labels. Fortunately “Australia only lets us bring a very small amount back, and we were already at our limit”. She also tried to sell us some cigars too, but “No fumar” sorted that one. She did manage to order what turned out to be three drinks and two main courses, both the most expensive things on the menu, which out of politeness we ended up paying for.

Next time I boot up Sid Meier’s Pirates game, I’m getting a Ship of the Line, and 400 pirates, and I’m going to plunder Santiago de Cuba over and over until it’s a village that not even Indians would bother attacking.

I could go into a rant here about how unenjoyable it is to be always on guard against scammers, and it’s certainly not isolated to Cuba, but I might save that for later. I am, however, churning in my mind some ideas on how to turn these scams back on the scammers. We’ll see. Otherwise I’m just practising in my head “No gracias, me gusta caminar” for the constant callers.

Oh, and the food at the restaurant was excellent, freshly fried plantain chips, and I had a breaded pork fried with jamon and queso.

The best meal of the trip to date wasn’t at the restaurant above, but the first night at the casa. Dana offered us a home cooked meal of shrimps (camarones), with all the usual trappings of arroz y frijoles, and just sitting up on the deck having smelled the food cooking was very splendid.

For all the hills, scams, and heat, I like Santiago de Cuba more than Havana. But I’m still burning that sucker to the ground.