Oh how we chuckled! What rib-tickling fun!

February 18, 2008

JAGÜEY GRANDE - Oh how we chuckled! What rib-tickling fun! You'd get a puncture and you'd start mending it and then someone would walk past and, sympathetically no doubt, ask the somewhat obvious question: "Got a puncture, then?"

I used to shrug and lift my eyes to the heavens in a quest for sympathy. A pal, though, used to say in perfect seriousness: "No... It's just that these modern tyres, you have to change the air every 500 kilometres." Men, he said, never fell for it. They'd grin knowingly, enjoying the joke, and walk on. Women, he said, always did and he used to relish the image of their getting home and recounting the encounter with a "You'll never guess what you have to do with bicycles these days..."

Now, this bit goes into that bit and then you pump it up... That right?

Today I had a puncture. But you can't play my friend's trick in Cuba because too many people ride bikes and therefore too many people know about punctures. There are even professional puncture-menders; poncheras, they're called, in what sounds like excellent Spanglish. This flat tyre happened right out in the countryside but within moments we had an audience of middle-aged women, each assessing our repair technique.

"Have you got another inner tube?" one asked. Nobody's ever asked me that anywhere else.

"Have you got patches?"

When I found both a hole and a suspect patch that had started wrinkling at its edge, both were studied with professional care. Only when all looked well and it was clear that we didn't need help and wouldn't be a source of further entertainment did the women set off to go, leaving us two bananas to improve our day. Some minutes passed before we had the wheel back in place and the bags refitted, time enough for the youngest of the group to return on a trailer, pulled by a tractor, loaded with water. Many houses in Cuba, even in town, don't have a mains supply of clean water and tankers pass along the street filling storage tanks.

"Is it all repaired?"

She smiled and produced four more bananas for us. Such is the simple warmth and friendliness of Cubans.

Smiling as ever, Yenelio returns with fresh water... and more bananas

We left Matanza - which means "slaughter" in Spanish, although nobody's sure what it refers to - soon after it got light. That meant riding through heavier than normal traffic on a narrow, rolling road full of fume-spouting lorries and buses. It wasn't fun but it was tolerable. And after a while it got better. Out in the countryside we paused at one of the many roadside concrete shelters built to protect those hoping for a lift from a passing truck. Across from the shelter was a single-storey shop with no glass in its windows. And no sign and no advertising.

The trade was obviously all local, from surrounding farms, and customers arrived in a horse-drawn bus. We were waved over and we were welcomed by handshakes so warm that they gave me my first chance to address someone as "compañero", which is the way Cubans address each other.

In this shop, most people were collecting milk in bottles they had brought with them. What looked like a litre was poured and signed for but not paid for. I knew that children get a free litre a day and the same may go for families as part of the allowance of virtually free food. Their signature was acknowledgement of the ration.

The horse-buses that ran to the shop were the everyday transport. The shoppers did their shopping, the horse was led down a track to graze, and then when everyone was finished the bus took them back to town again. And in town there were horse-buses everywhere, like an outdoor bus garage, waiting to collect passengers for their regular routes. Western eyes, accustomed to the tourist trade, took a while to get used to this being not a trap for a few more coins but the everyday transport for all.

We had a hot meat roll from a market trader, then left the traffic behind as we turned off towards the Bay of Pigs, our destination for tomorrow. We rode through fields of sugar cane and then endless hectares of orange trees. Through them, every five kilometres or so, we could see great blocks of apartments from which came shouting and music. They were remote from any other habitation and they held too many to be useful for housing orange-pickers and sugar-planters. They looked shabby, but not as bad as at first glance; the Cuban habit of having not glass in windows but thin, horizontal shutters that can be swivelled to let in or keep out the air while keeping the sun at bay gives almost any large building the appearance that it has been boarded up and then left to fall apart.

Cuban young people spend a time working in agriculture. These huge blocks, so far as we can work out, were built at intervals to accommodate them.

We wondered about these places for a long time. They were so strangely located and so run-down and yet they had been planned with care, as the basketball courts and other facilities showed. Eventually we found they were agricultural colleges of a sort, bases from which young Cuban people can carry out their compulsory spells of working in the countryside. They didn't need to be in or near towns because the population was temporary but they did need to be near the farms because that's where the residents worked and studied. Inside each block, apparently, are most of the facilities that had been in the vast area of public housing we'd seen by the coast a few days back. And to judge by photos of when the buildings were new and sparkling, there were then and may still be now swimming pools in courtyards.

Tonight we are in Jagüey Grande, pronounced pretty much like "Hawaii". We could have stayed in Australia, the only place in the area with accommodation according to Lonely Planet, but local knowledge said we'd be better off here.

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