In the morning we hit the road for the city of Trinidad on the southern coast. On the outskirts of Havana there were a lot of people on the side of the highway hitchhiking. This was a common sight in Cuba, but it became especially pronounced on the edge of the capital.
We picked up several hitchhikers at different spots throughout the day, almost filling the bus at one point. Edelso said the law requires you pick up hitchhikers if you have room and their destination is on your route.
There were US-style cloverleaf highway junctions, but not much traffic and no lines on the road. Everything had gone to seed, including the pavement. Writing freehand on the bus was out of the question. But we still moved at a good clip, I’d guess around 60 mph.
Our first stop of the day came at a rest area. There was an outdoor bar and restaurant with a gift shop and vendors outside. I picked up a red, kid-sized baseball bat that said “Cuba” with a Cuban flag for my 8-year-old nephew. It was still quite cheap despite (I assume) the inevitable tourist trap surcharge.
Shortly thereafter, we left the highway for the back roads. We drove by a field of solar panels. The vegetation was pretty lush but not quite as exotic or tropical as I’d anticipated. I was expecting the jungle, I guess, and it didn’t really measure up to my imagination. It didn’t quite feel like Fantasy Island, one of the TV shows from my 80’s childhood. There were some mountains though.
Entering or leaving some towns and cities, I’d see billboards with a picture of Fidel Castro and usually a local politician. Fidel had apparently forbidden the construction of any statues of him in his will, but the billboards kept him front and center.
We had lunch in the city of Cienfuegos on the south coast, on the second floor of an open-air restaurant. Our meal was accompanied by a warm sprinkle that relieved the humidity. Most meals ended with an espresso-sized cup of coffee accompanying dessert. I always had to gauge if I could risk drinking the Cuban coffee due to its strength, even in such small quantities. (I’ve developed a sensitivity to caffeine in my middle age.)
Thence we journeyed through the back country to get to a farm in Cumanayagua, Cienfuegos province. It’s called Finca El Porvenir, finca meaning “farm” and porvenir meaning “what is to come”. The farm is 15 years old. It’s affiliated with the Centro Martin Luther King, Jr. (CMLK). They said Fidel instilled a “love of each other,” and the CMLK “taught us how to help each other.” They credited CMLK with giving them a methodology for popular education. The farm has relationships with other centers, but they get orientation and accompaniment from CMLK.
To welcome us, they served us coffee made from their own beans. A man in his 20’s, Michael, sang as we clapped along. They gave us Cuban three-peso bills, featuring Che Guevara’s portrait, as mementos. One of the educators there, Armando, had met Nati at a Latin American political school. We were also introduced to Janette Fonseca (popular educator), Alcides Paredes, Mila Buenas Reyes and Ojuando Rodriguez. They use popular education to teach honey-making and handicrafts, such as making dolls.
Their main crop is coffee. The Cuban president, Miguel Díaz-Canel, told farmers to diversify their crops and maintain a circular economy. In response, they’ve been increasing their production of other crops.
They’ve established good relations with the nearby town of Tabloncito (which means “small piece of wood”). President Díaz-Canel declared the town a vulnerable area when he visited. There are 55 houses and 117 people in Tabloncito. It’s one of five towns receiving support from CMLK, in the form of logistics, financial assistance, materials and knowledge.
They started a bakery to provide low-cost bread to their workers and locals. They make a gluten-free bread from yuca. They plan on building a laundromat. The US blockade has caused problems with the local electrical grid. Sometimes workers have to get up at 1 am to use electricity.
Our tour began with the “children’s house,” which provides daycare for the preschool-aged children of workers and locals. They had 14 kids: seven boys and seven girls. When we dropped in they were chilly, so they lay under blankets on cots while a woman read to them.
They’re trying to raise the kids in an eco-friendly environment. They were learning about the renewable energy used on the farm. They have a vegetable garden to learn how to plant seeds and grow food. They collect rain water to irrigate the garden. The kids get plenty of vegetables and fruit in their diet: cucumbers, tomatoes, pumpkin, papaya, yuca, bananas, beans and spinach. They hope the kids will stay in the area as farmers.
Solar panels provide electricity, which is used to regulate the temperature and humidity of the tobacco, among other things. Tobacco saplings are kept in a hoop house, each in its own planter. The planting soil includes a substrate of zeolite, manure, coconut fiber and other organic matter that they produce. They’ll plant over 400,000 saplings, as well as offering saplings and technical assistance to others in the area.
After 45 days, the saplings are transplanted to the fields. They let saplings “suffer” through the weather to build their resilience to climate change. The plants take 75 days to grow in the field. When they finish the cycle with these saplings in January, they’ll plant cucumbers and peppers.
From the field, the tobacco leaves are taken to a drying barn for 15 to 17 days. If left in the field, they would take 60 days to dry. In the drying barn, the walls were covered with spray-foam insulation. Electronic instruments controlled the humidity and temperature. They also use the barn to dry banana stems. They handed us some dried stems, which felt like leather. These would be exported as feedstock to make shoes, hats and other products, an industry already underway in India and Russia.
Climate change has necessitated a big investment. They’ve introduced new technologies to mitigate harm to the soil and plants. They’re working with Cienfuegos University. They add egg, salt, sugar and aloe vera to the tobacco plants to combat stress. These act as sunblock, reducing the temperature by 2ºC compared to the control group. The tobacco needs a specific temperature.
The sun set around 5pm or so, just before we got to Trinidad. We occupied most of the rooms at a small hotel. It was like an open-air bed-and-breakfast. It was named after the Alhambra, which partly inspired the architecture. Outdoor stairs led some of us up to the roof of the 3rd floor, whence we could look out across the city’s rooftops, to the hills surrounding the inland side of town.
The hills had TV and radio antennae on top. Someone mentioned a nightclub located in a cave in one of the hills, fittingly named La Cueva (“The Cave”). I didn’t make it to that place during our stay (no surprise), but I did actually dance in Trinidad, much to my surprise. (Foreshadowing! [I think just telling people what’s gonna happen is too obvious to qualify as foreshadowing, but I’m gonna claim it anyway.])