February 18, 2008
Slipping up on bananas
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LAS TERRAZAS - We had our first problem with the dual currency this morning. It added to my impression that Cuba isn't an easy country to ride a bike. I don't think we've made a mistake in coming but the succession of problems is becoming a strain.
The big worries are finding somewhere to sleep and finding something to eat. That has added to the feeling of unease that came from the distressing nature of Havana and the problems of the lost visa. You see, whereas in many countries you can find a bed without much trouble, in Cuba there are few hotels outside the few cities and it is against the law for local people to take in foreigners unless they have licensed their houses and agreed to pay a lot of tax. There must be severe consequences to breaking that law because our inquiries - just asking if there's "una habitacion" - has been greeted with bewilderment, sometimes almost with a hint of fear.
As it happens, we knew where we planned to end the ride today and we were sure of finding somewhere to sleep. But my first impression is that cycling in Cuba isn't going to be a light-hearted business because you're restricted to cycling to where there's accommodation, for fear of finding yourself doubling your distance because you thought you'd take a chance.
Food is also a problem. This morning we bought a bunch of bananas. Playa Baracoa has little one-man shops and a few farmers selling whatever they have by the roadside. We picked some bananas to see us through until we'd next find food and offered the tall, dark-skinned man in field clothes the smallest note we had.
He didn't look pleased. He looked worried. He couldn't explain the problem and we couldn't guess it.
"No devises", he kept saying, and from beneath the wooden box from which he'd taken the bananas he pulled a few bank notes of a sort that didn't look like ours but appeared a great more used. Slowly we realised that "devises" meant convertible pesos and that he, a small trader, wasn't allowed them. On the other hand we, foreigners, seemingly aren't allowed the domestic pesos which would have done the job. That was the difficulty I'd discussed with the Germans in Havana and now it had become reality.
Were we to get our bananas? And if we didn't get them, and if there was nowhere we could buy food with convertible pesos, what was going to happen after several hours' hilly riding? The answer is that we did get fed, that we got our change in local money and that we left a banana-seller wondering how he was going to account for cash that he shouldn't have.
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We, on the other hand, had a similar but less consequential a problem: we too had money we thought we shouldn't have but at least we could spend it. If we came across somewhere...
But suddenly all the problems crowd in together. For a start, there is no advertising in Cuba. Not only are there no wayside advertisements other than political hectoring but there are no signs above shops. Since shops don't look like shops but more like empty garages or huts, it's more disorientating than I feel happy admitting.
And then, when you start recognising shops, along comes a fresh problem when you go inside. For quite often you are shooed out before you've said what you want. That, for anyone from a nation rooted in capitalism, is a strange, strange sensation.
At first we thought it was because we had only international money. The shops would have the same problem as the banana seller. Then we realised these were the shops that Cubans used for their monthly ration. They took their ration cards and their local currency and stocked up for the week, the month. Since we had neither local money nor a card, we were out of place.
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I'm not going to go on about this. Suffice to say that by the end of the day, our first full riding day, we learned to find the shops we wanted and that thanks to the banana man's change, we had food to get by. But we still haven't cracked the problem of how to get more local pesos.
We left Playa Baracoa this morning at eight and we rode on a quiet, flat and dull road west, just inland from the sea. The drivers were courteous, folk stopped what they were doing to wave and shout, and enthusiasm to help with directions was heart-warming. Had it not been that our route unavoidably led to the industrial port of La Boca, a museum of concrete-producing plants, things would have been fine. As it was, we were passed by one heavy truck after another, each struggling to refind its lost youth of the Russian period in which it was built, each wheezily accepting in a pant of thick black fumes that it had grown old and tired. We breathed more diesel than oxygen today at times.
When we did get back to fresh air, we rode past sugarcane fields where men hacked with machetes and horses stood with their carts. Ahead of us we glimpsed our first fellow cyclists of the trip, cyclists on whom we were gaining until they turned on to an unsurfaced trail to ride to the sea with their bright red baggage.
And then an odd thing happened: we found ourselves in a bike race. Or we would have had we not stopped halfway up a 6km climb for a breather and one of our life-restoring bananas. As we stopped, they carried on up the hill, a bunch of two dozen filling half of the road in that piratical way that cyclists have when their numbers are great enough.
We were just wondering who they were when they rode back down the slope to see us. Except that instead of stopping, they shouted hello, turned and rode off again. They were all on race bikes and wearing the kit. No numbers, as it turned out, so some sort of training ride rather than a race. They headed back up the hill at a less than enthusiastic speed and a few minutes later they were back again. Followed by a third time.
"Qué pais?" someone shouted.
"Inglaterra."
"Ah, good morning."
"Pero vivimos in Francia."
"Ah, Francia? Tour de France!"
"Si," I shouted back. "Tour de France!" And with it urged them to ride a great deal harder, if not for their fitness then for my own pleasure, since little pleases me more than the sight of other people riding fast up a hill while I myself am sitting in the shade.
We are staying tonight, after some tough closing kilometres, at a campismo, what would be a camp site had there been any tents. In fact we are sleeping in a hut of wooden slats and thatch that stands on wooden legs. We are in the middle of a nature reserve. A stream splashes through rocks in a valley that has been restored just enough, or just too little, to keep its flavour of naturalness. The whole area was denuded for agriculture some decades ago and it has since been turned back to a place of woods, lakes and around 80 breeds of bird.
With us here are the two cyclists we glimpsed taking their side trip earlier in the day. They are a couple from the Czech Republic and she, it soon became clear, was having less of an enchanted time than her husband.
"I was not a cyclist before this holiday," she said. "My husband is the cyclist. We have been all over the island, riding great distances every day. We have ridden 1,200km and it is too hard for me. I do not think I will be going for cycling tours again."
And there is one other cyclist, a young American with dark, curly hair and a slow, warm way of talking that makes you wonder whether he ever entirely wakes up.
"The maximum possible amount of subversion in my life," he says, "that's what I want."
He smiles. It's a joke. He is too sleepy to be subversive. His interest is music rather than cycling. Like the woman from the Czech Republic, he too wasn't a cyclist before this trip. He's not sure he's one now, either. He has bags on his bike and a huge hiker's pack on his back. I play the Good Samaritan and suggest he straps the pack to his bike as well.
The campismo takes international pesos. It sells meals but not bananas. That's a problem for another day.
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