We are only staying one night here in Santa Clara. It is on the main tourist track but only seems to be an ‘en route’ two hour stop for the tour buses at the couple of main tourists sites this town is famous for…..all things Che Guevara.
Rosie and The Operator found it quite refreshing staying in this town. The town was full of the hustle and bustle of real everyday Cuban life which seemed really obvious here, plus, there was the added bonus of not a lot of tourists on the streets either.
We arrived at about 1030 and dropped off our bags at the Hostal Florida Centre. Another beautiful, old town colonial place to stay right in the heart of the old town.
This was not a family home, more of a small hotel with 6 dedicated rooms in the building which was run by Julia, the same people that run the restaurant of the same name across the road.
Rosie and The Operator always arrive very early at their hostals because we like travelling early in the cool part of the day and it means we can get out and about while it is still cool as well. We never expect ours rooms to be ready or have access to them, all we want to do is relieve ourselves of our luggage. But, the rooms have always been ready, as was this one, and we are always made more than welcome to use them straight away. This hostal was shady and cool, with the most amazing interior gardens and decoration.
It also had a roof terrace bar and various courtyards and balconies where you could sit and relax. Rosie was a little unsure of the room being so ‘open’ to the rest of the hostal with the shutters open, but it was secure and sure was cool. It did make for a wee bit of a dark room though when we had a shower in the morning…..
Santa Clara has a cigar making factory, Rosie was not going to miss out on touring this one. It is only open for a two hour tour window in the morning and another 2 hour window in the afternoon. Sound familiar?
You have to buy the tour tickets at the tourist office on the other side of town first, so off we went with a feeling of dejavu. On purchase of said tickets Rosie confirmed the times she thought the factory was open. No, the factory closes at 1.00pm…It was already 12.00pm, Rosie asked if she would have enough time to get there and would there be a tour available?
The young tourist office girl actually shrugged and turned away. Welcome to Cuba, there is not alot of customer service here, most of these people are paid a pittance by the government, they don’t get any bonuses for going any faster or doing anything more than the bare minimum.
Off we went, The Operator had pinned our destination on his offline map on his mobile and his navigation has been faultless to date. We picked up this tip to download the Cuban maps at home before we left so we could use them offline in Cuba, it has been invaluable guidance and was a great tip!
At the tobacco factory a French girl and her boyfriend had just shown up and wanted to tour..she was told they do not sell tickets at the factory (great customer service again) she looked very confused, we explained how crazy it was and where they had to go. She blamed the taxi driver that took them there for not telling her….even though he took her to where she wanted to go.
Oh well, Rosie and The Operator were in and we were the only ones on the tour, no photos and please leave your bag at reception.
The Fabrica de Tabacos Constantino Perez Carrodegua is the tongue twisting name of the factory and it is touted as one of Cubas best factories. They make a quality range of Montecristos, Partegas and Romeo y Julietas. The workers work Monday to Friday and have the weekend off, next week they work Monday to Sat and have Sunday off. They start at 0830 and finish at 5.00pm with an hour for lunch.
300 people are employed there, they sit in a huge open plan building with rows and rows of desks where they work from. They are paid per cigar and they make an average about 120 – 150 per day. Its a complex job that takes 9 months to learn. Certain leaves from certain parts of the plant are used for the inside burn and flavour, then another layer from another part of the plant is added for the fragrance. Before the outer skin is applied they are put into a cigar press for half an hour. The outer casing itself is like a soft chamois that can be made perfectly smooth and flawless to encase it all, the clear ‘glue’ that holds it all together is imported from Canada and is a maple gum.
The quality control area was state of the art said the tour lady proudly…we had an inner chuckle, it looked totally out of Noahs Ark more like. They have a board with hols drilled in it depicting the different cigar sizes…you get it, put the cigar through the hole to ensure the right thickness.
They also had a pump and gauge to confirm that they weren’t rolled to loose or two tight by monitoring the airflow through it. We were allowed to have a wander around and look over the workers shoulders, they were pretty fast and skillful. One guy asked us where we were from, his English was flawless, he said that he had worked here for 21 years. We asked how his English was so good, he reads a lot and likes to talk to the tourists as they come through. He spoke better English than the tour lady and his hands were always busy.
It was shady in that big room and the buzz of gossip and talking was everywhere, it was very humid and hot, no air conditioning, just the louver window shutters letting the breeze in and it was through these tilted blinds from the road outside that Rosie got her sneaky pic.
One of the highlights of the working day said the tour lady was that they had a booth with a microphone in it, every morning the newspaper was read out to the workers over the microphone and then a book is selected and in the afternoons a couple of chapters are read everyday for the entertainment of the workers. Urban myth confirmed.
Santa Clara was also the pivotal town for one of the major movements of the revolution when Che Guevara liberated it. This town pays a huge homage to Che and his legacy and most of the tourist sites are Che associated and dedicated.
In December 1958 Che and a band of scruffy barbudas (bearded ones) orchestrated the fall of Santa Clara by derailing an armoured train carrying more than 350 government troops and weaponry. The victory by this small band of mostly teenaged soldiers led by Che was the death knell for Batistas ‘dictatorship’ and signaled the triumph of the Revolution.
What better way to start our Che pilgrimage than to go where it all started, but first we needed to get there, it was the hottest day yet and it was better for The Operator if Rosie didn’t walk, she gets abit cranky when she gets hot and bothered….
This town was full of horse taxi carts, they were everywhere loaded up with locals, you normally wave down a taxi cart in the direction you want to travel in as they come up to you.
They keep picking up people as you wave them down until the cart was full, normally a max of 6 people. We waved down a taxi to take us to the Train Museum, we were his first customers on the cart and it cost us $1 dollar to take us the 1.5 kms we needed to travel. Other folk along the way were waving for him to stop….but he didnt…we felt very VIP. It was probably more of a reflection of how much we paid him in comparison to what he normally gets for a ride.
The Monumenta la Toma del Tren Blindado sits on the exact site where history was made that day in 1958, the best part of the story is how they derailed the train. With a ‘borrowed’ bulldozer of course, they broke the railway tracks so the train derailed and tipped over.
The rebels then made quick work of the government troops by overpowering them primarily with homemade Molotov cocktails in Coke bottles.
The battle lasted 90 minutes and the resulting victory ushered in 50 years of Fidel Castro. The best bit, the exact bulldozer is enshrined on a plinth at the entry to the park….
…..boxcar replicas of the train and the aftermath are laid out in the formation of the day and a weird walk through museum outlining the actions of the day is enshrined in the train carriages.
Just down the road from this monument is a wee place called Cafe Revolution, it was a welcoming place to have a ham and cheese sandwich with a cold beer and look at the astonishing private collection of memorabilia that one man has amassed on the revolution.
There are only 4 tables and the cafe is in the front rooms of the owners house, it has a full cocktail bar and some youngsters were manning the place who spoke excellent English and answered a lot of our questions.
After that respite we were on the hunt for a motorbike taxi, we had seen a few whizzing around, we wanted to hire one to take us to the other spots we wanted to see and wait for us while we wandered around and took photos. It was about a 6 km distance we needed to cover and in the hottest part of the day, it was already 36c.
A horse taxi was out because they didn’t do things like that. There were plenty of bike taxis around but we didn’t have the heart to have these men sweating in the broiling sun humping our fat bums around, so we thought the motorbike taxi was the best. They were basically a motorbike with a cart attached to the back which could take 4 people.
When you are not looking for a taxi there are heaps around…there was one solitary bicci taxi guy that asked if we needed a taxi – we said no thank you. After about 10 mins standing in the hot sun waiting for a motorbike to appear he approached us again. We relented, told him where we wanted to go and asked if it wasn’t to hot and to far for him…no way, he was rearing to go.
We asked what the cost was before hopping on the bike…he said $10uc, common practice now is to barter him down, we should have come back and said $5, he would have jigged around on one foot and if we held fast he would have said OK….but it was so hot, and we were heading uphill….we said Ok to $10 and we were off. He thought all his Christmases had come at once! We were off…there is a wall we went past with political grafitti on…
He introduced himself as John, this is my name in English and it is Juan in Spanish, he spoke about 10 words of English which is 10 more than most bicci taxi drivers we have come across. He had a sound system in his bike and actually had ten gears…the first bike taxi we have found to have more than 3 gears, most are fixed on one, according to The Operator who likes to observe these things.
He asked us if we wanted music during the ride, we said OK and he put on (especially for us we think) this kitschy American soundtrack of eighties songs in musical theater form, eg titanic soundtrack and Bryan Adams….after one and a half of these songs we asked him to put on what he would listen to. It was great, kind of like Cuban dance music…fast beat and a bit electronically hip hoppy…it was good and he cranked it up, now we were racing up that hill.
We stopped at the Che statue outside the Officina de la Provincia (council/government buildings) it is a statue of Che holding a baby on his shoulder which symbolizes the next generation of Cuba.
Look closer, Juan was pointing out, the smaller sculptures incorporated into the uniform depicting the important parts of Che’s life, including the likenesses of the 38 men executed with him in Bolivia concealed in the belt buckle.
Two blocks on, we are heading into the suburbs, past apartment blocks and mass housing.
We are headed towards the towns best look out, Loma del Capiro, we can see the flags high on the hill in the distance and are inwardly cringing that Juan has to bike us up there in the heat, he is already down to a low gear and sweat is streaming off him.
Then he stops at a park and says this is as far as he can go, with a smile on his face he points to the two hundred odd stairs and says, walk, and gestures to the top of the hill.
While Juan parks under a shady tree to cool himself off, Rosie and The Operator start trekking up the stairs in the blazing sun on the hottest day we have encountered in Cuba.
This lookout was a pivotal vantage point for Che’s forces during the liberation of Santa Clara although Rosie and the Operator could not actually pinpoint the railway crossing where the derailment happened in the landscape. At the top was a sculptural lookout, there was no breeze, no other tourists in sight, we looked, took a snap and down we plodded.
Rosie was saturated after her efforts and we were all smiling as the bicci was flying downhill and a beauty breeze was generated cooling us all down.
Out to Plaza de la Revolution we were headed. This is the end point of any Che Pilgrimage, it is a monument of mighty proportions and there lies the mausoleum of Che and a small museum complex…both of which are closed Mondays…the day we were there. Gutted.
Rosie did not know much about Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara other than the fact that he was Fidels enforcer or right hand military man. His bio is compelling, born in Argentina in 1928 to a wealthy family of Irish and Spanish decent he was quite a sickly, bullied kid when young. It was the desire to overcome the wimpy stigma that instilled the willpower that would set him apart. A fierce rugby player on the field he graduated University with a Medical Degree in 1953. He shunned a conventional medical career and opted to go on a trans continental motor cycling Odyssey with a friend.
Their nomadic wanderings, well documented in a series of posthumously published diaries, would open Ernestos eyes to the poverty and stark political injustices all too common in 1950s Latin America. He devoured the works of Marx and so began a hatred for the US after being in Guatemala during the 1954 US backed coup against President Arbenz and his leftest government. He was deported to Mexico the following year for his pro Arbenz activities in 1955.
During his time in Mexico he fell in with a group of Cubans that included Raul Castro, impressed by the Argentines sharp intellect and never failing political convictions, Raul, a long standing member of the Communist Party, introduced him to his charismatic brother Fidel. The meeting between the two men in 1955 lasted 10 hours and the rest is history. They say that the two men were the perfect match in the making of the rebellion, hot headed Castro lit the fire and the calmer more ideologically polished Che worked out the finer details.
Guevaras quote has hit a chord with Rosie – ‘In a revolution one either wins or dies…. if it is a real one’.
In December 1956 Che left for Cuba on the Granma yacht, joining the rebels as their cheif medic, he was one of only 12 of the original 85 to survive the landing and battle, proving himself a brave and intrepid fighter who led by example. As a result, Castro awarded him the position of Comandante in 1957, in 1958 Che rewarded Castros faith and masterminded the battle of Santa Clara, a result that sealed the revolutionary victory.
He was granted Cuban citizenship in 1959 and soon assumed a leading role in the nations economic reforms. His insatiable work ethic and regular appearances at volunteer work weekends quickly saw him cast as the embodiment of Cubas New Man.
In 1965 Che left Cuba for Bolivia, rumers circulated that him and Castro had had a falling out and more myth pertains he had done all he could in Cuba and wanted to export his ideas to other places. On October the 8th 1967 Guevara was captured by the Bolivian army. Following consultation between army and military leaders in La Paz and Washington DC he was shot dead the next day in front of US advisers. He was buried in a mass grave in the Bolivian jungle with 82 other Cubans. His remains were returned to Cuba in 1997 and are interned in the closed Mausoleum….that is closed on Mondays.
Reading this bio in the shade, looking out onto the huge open plaza dedicated to the man myth which in turn is watched over by a gigantic statue of the man himself was quite sobering.
The man who has become such a legend here, over such a short timeline, is quite incredible. Its a shame the mausoleum and the museum were not open but hey, this is Cuba. The huge plaza has no traffic running through it and there were only a couple of other people braving the harshness of the blistering afternoon looking up at the statue, it was a very solemn place.
We went back to the tree that Juan was parked under and he cycled us back to the main square.
It is like all other Cuban Plazas, a delicate, beautiful square with an inner square of trees planted with seating under them. Where ever the shade is at any given time of day is where you will find the people sitting. A huge statue is also in this park, a tribute to a lady called Marta Abreau, she was a wealthy woman in the 1899s who also recognized the disparity between the wealthy and the poor and privately funded schools and theaters with in the town that all could enjoy, for free.
The irony is that this woman who’s life was to basically instigate and pay for the development and betterment of the town gets a statue in the corner of a park and the man who over the period of a few short years helped to halt progression and hold people back for decades gets his face on every street corner.
We popped into the Theatre that Marta built for the town. It is a stunning building, perfectly built for airflow in the hot climate, so elegant, beautiful and well preserved.
The lady that showed us around was so proud and rightly so, it is still a well used building and a rehearsal was going on while we were there.
That evening we had a beautiful dinner at The Florida Centre Restaurant, we dinned under the veranda in the lush courtyard garden and listened to a duo sing and play guitar.
It was a lovely night and our Ropa Vieja, a typical Cuban meat dish made of shredded marinated veal, kind of like a stew, was delicious.
Thanks Santa Clara we really enjoyed our stay and the history lesson. Tomorrow we are off to Sanctus Spiritus, a small town on the banks of the River Yayabo.
