Dispatch from Cuba: Prayers from a paused land
Editor’s Note: Apalachicola photojournalist Richard Bickel last month completed his 15th trip to Cuba on the heels of two hurricanes, an earthquake and a national power grid failure. He said conditions were the worst that he’s seen in his 30 years of travel to the communist island.
In the far-flung fishing village of Puerto Esperanza on Cuba’s northwest coast, Pablo Mesa has worked a long and brutal night. Unable to find gasoline for his outboard, the 58-year-old fisherman has rowed five miles out to sea for a wage. Square-jawed, of sturdy build, and with a perpetual fisherman’s squint, Pablo comes across as a no-nonsense man of the sea.
He greets his visitor with a handshake grip with the impact of a truck door closing. “Last night was a good catch,” grins Pablo, surveying the blue Caribbean, then tossing an oar into his wooden skiff. On the boat dock are a dozen sizable grouper and snapper. He loads the catch into several sacks and begins negotiating with a man selling satchel of rice. A trade is arranged, Pablo heaves his rice onto a horse cart for home.
And so it goes in a port called Esperanza, a word appropriately meaning “hope.” Which seems to be nearly all that is left here – and indeed throughout the better part of today’s increasingly desperate Cuba. Out of hundreds of the port’s fishermen, only a handful remain; the others have left with their families seeking a paycheck in Havana or beyond, consigning the fishing-dependent town’s income to near-economic ruin. Without fuel for their motors, few mariners are willing to endure the harshness of fishing by oar.
In Puerto Esperanza town, few cars are found on its dusty streets fronted by squat, columned 19th century homes, their paint pale and chalky from unrelenting sun, and their verandas mostly peopleless. A distant baby’s wail permeates the soundless air; a boney mutt slumbers in the shade of a scrub palm. It seems a ghost town.
A testing paradise
The pavement from Puerto Esperanza to Viñales Valley, Cuba’s famed tobacco-growing region, is fractured and potholed, and requires a good hour to negotiate its 12 miles without a blown tire. But how can there be urgency with open car windows ceding intoxicating, earthy essences of tilled soil, tobacco drying in roadside barns, and cattle-strewn pasture? And behold the vistas! Karst mountains rise abruptly from the flat valley floor like great hulking beasts. Thatched-roofed homesteads and hammocks of majestic royal palms punctuate emerald fields. It is a paradisiacal land, as beautiful as one will find on this earth with breathtaking vistas unmarred by strip malls, billboards or fast-food joints. Experiencing rural Cuba is a journey to another place and time.
Yet life is challenging for Viñales campesinos. Tractors are mostly unknown, tending fields is by oxen and hard hand labor. Fertilizer is a challenge to find, as are irrigation pumps. Climate change has created droughts and generated ever-more intense hurricanes. Power blackouts cut off cooling fans causing sweltering interiors with sleepless nights. (Air conditioning in farm homes is unheard of.)
Bienvenidos, smiles Juan, a sixtyish yucca farmer, his sun-creased face shaded by a tattered cowboy hat and work boots caked with red mud. He opens the gate to his family compound with pigs and poultry scattering from our path. “Un momento,” he says, vanishing in a cloud of wood smoke. As throughout Cuba, the family is enduring yet another day without electricity and must cook tonight’s supper over an open fire. Juan re-kindles the fire, stirs a kettle of black beans and nods to his yucca field. It’s green and vibrant, perversely saved by Hurricane Rafael’s rain after a months-long drought and an unavailability of irrigation pumps. (Happily, at least for Vinales Valley denizens, the bulk of Raphael’s wrath was far to the east, as were the effects of Cuba’s recent 6.8 earthquake). Asked of his future hopes, Juan simply says with a breath of fatalism, “We hoe, we hope, we pray.”
But Juan’s 6-year-old grandson sees things a bit differently. Happy, bright-eyed and spirited, he seems emblematic of the children one finds in Cuba. The people of Cuba are beautiful, and their children especially so. Though they have little, the children are not aware of that. And they are loved; Cuban families are among the closest found anywhere on earth.
A stone’s toss from Juan’s farm is the homestead of Felix Quiñones. Felix, in his late 70s and a retired tobacco farmer, sits stationary on his porch rocker, barely able to rock, let alone rise to greet his guest. Nevertheless, he pushes himself up, and smiles to extend a hand, reflecting the heartfelt hospitality this visitor has perpetually found in Cuba.
Felix is living with congestive heart failure, but barely. Medications that would help give him a normal life have, like so many things, disappeared from Cuba’s pantry. Indeed, walk into any pharmacy throughout the island and you will find bare shelves. This, in a country that but a decade ago prided itself in highly capable healthcare.
Motel La Ermita not quite what tourists expect
High above Viñales Valley, Motel La Ermita, an aged state enterprise, clings to a hillside overlooking entrancing valley landscapes, yet is not what most foreign guests had hoped for. (Imagine a 1950s motel unmaintained since its construction.) Blackouts are faithfully irregular with outages for hours, with the hotel generator – acquired only months ago – already failing.
Today, a scattering of corpulent German tourists baste themselves in tanning oil, and lounge by an algae-greened pool while an emaciated hound forages for crumbs dropped from snack plates. (The motel, I learned, was at a dismal 15% occupancy due to the negative publicity emanating out of Cuba.)
Somehow keeping its doors open, La Ermita limps along. The TV signal is out motel-wide, save for one Chinese station that curiously pulses 1980s-era soaps, and today the dining room is out of, among other things, sugar. (This, in a land that once produced a goodly portion of the world’s supply.) Plumbing is in disrepair, and hotel electricity, if it does happen to flicker back on, quick, take your shower! For when there’s no electric, there’s no water.
Armando, La Ermita motel manager, hasn’t an easy job. The Germans are quite unhappy with the blackouts, and indeed with the property in general. He straightens his tie to promise the power will return in an hour, as will the water. And “si, si,” the television! The guests glance at the three clocks above the front desk, placarded for times in London, Tokyo, and Havana. All three are dead-stopped, reflecting the paused land they’ve chosen for a tropical vacation.
With some help from the Saints
When things are bad, humans universally turn to religion, and for the downtrodden of Cuba, the Santeria faith offers a powerful message of hope.
“Yes, of course!” vehemently replies Luisa Carrera, a Santeria santera (priestess), when asked if Cuba’s downturn has attracted followers. “My flock grows daily with their sorrows.”
This visitor has been invited into Luisa’s home, chockablock with spirit dolls, masks, fetishes, ritual drums, and ceramic urns to collect sacrificed animal blood. On the floor is an altar with a plate of fresh fruit, today’s offering to Eleguá, gatekeeper to all Santeria saints.
Luisa is held in esteemed regard by Santeria followers, indeed she is in the hierarchy of Santeria clergy nationwide and garners pilgrims from throughout the land. (Guanabacoa is Cuba’s cradle of Santeria, and today’s epicenter for the faith).
“I descend into a trance,” says the priestess, when asked to describe how she communes with the saints and thus provide advice to her disciples. “The spirit voices can offer advice, and can reveal the future,” she explains, adding that a Santeria colleague told of the coming of Covid. Regarding animal sacrifice, the saints advise the animal to be selected. “They mostly ask for chickens,” she says, stroking beads of her prayer necklace, “but they can require the blood of a sheep or goat.”
The bare bulb in Luisa’s dim interior suddenly flickers and dies. Blackout. Luisa squeezes her visitor’s hand to softly offer a prayer for the visit. She bids goodbye.
In the midday Guanabacoa street, the sun is white and overpowering. There, an ancient Dodge is being pushed uphill by three men, then a half-dozen more join to help. The car isn’t broken down; it’s simply out of fuel, and the nearby gas station has a two-day, sleep-in-your car queue, as commonly found in Cuba. Vendors prowl sidewalks proffering brooms, bananas, single cigarettes, whatever will earn a peso or two. A boy sells a rooster to passersby; a man offers a canary in a cage. A wide-smiling teenage girl displays flashlights; her business is understandably brisk.
Such is today’s Cuba. Subsisting on the edge of human endurance, the resourceful Cubans seek to get by with dignity and resilience.
And with a little help from the saints, perhaps they will.
Richard Bickel’s photographs of Cuba can be viewed at his gallery at 81 Market Street in Apalachicola, or at www.richardbickelphotography.com.
Meet the Editor
David Adlerstein, The Apalachicola Times’ digital editor, started with the news outlet in January 2002 as a reporter.
Prior to then, David Adlerstein began as a newspaperman with a small Boston weekly, after graduating magna cum laude from Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts. He later edited the weekly Bellville Times, and as business reporter for the daily Marion Star, both not far from his hometown of Columbus, Ohio.
In 1995, he moved to South Florida, and worked as a business reporter and editor of Medical Business newspaper. In Jan. 2002, he began with the Apalachicola Times, first as reporter and later as editor, and in Oct. 2020, also began editing the Port St. Joe Star.