Thursday 8 March - Sancti Spiritus to Trinidad

4:30am Cock-a-doodle-f**king-doo!
4:45am His mate joins in!
5:00am Hotel generator starts up.
5:30am First scooter of the day.

Then, in no particular order - more scooters, revving lorries, what sounded like - and I’m not kidding here - a military drill, then commuting, Cuban style which means horns, shouting, more revving and bicycle bells ringing like a campanologists convention.

Got up, shouted out of window and solved mystery of how to get hot water out of hotel room shower - you turn the blue tap. Of course! Hot shower - ahhhh! Open window, sausage dog on balcony across street, traffic on road and smell of cooking and pollution. Drink in the ‘atmosphere’ and take obligatory balcony photograph.

After breakfast (which included ‘pleasured eggs’), strolled around town. Lots of decaying buildings and crumbling roads. Lots of people. Also lots of dogs. Dogs in Cuba seem to just take themselves for walks. In addition there are lots of dogs on balconies. These, I think, must be a special breed, small, light and able to urinate into space rather than up a tree as most doggies do.

I had thought that the ‘classic’ American 1950s Detroit monster cars would just be in Havana but nope, they are everywhere. They don’t look ‘classic’ though, not in the sense that over in England they’d be kept in a garage, polished every weekend and only driven to meetings of enthusiasts. In Cuba they are everywhere and range from looking cherished to looking like they are held together with paint and prayer.

Took my first picture of a Che mural. In Cuba there’s no advertising, the only branding you see are the ubiquitous ‘Havana Club’ signs outside bars. There are lots of Che murals and lots of sayings of Fidel. Can you imagine what would happen if Tony Blair started putting his sayings on walls? This no advertising thing took a while to sink in but once it did, it was like a sorbet for the brain. Free of clutter and visual intrusion you really have time to think about things. What I mainly thought about was how refreshing it was not to have some product or other relentlessly being advertised.

The other thing they don’t have in Cuba is litter. This is probably because there’s bugger all to throw away, but I think there might be that Spanish sensibility of public spaces being an extension of the private house, that people spend time on squares and streets and so see no reason to dump their trash there.

I was, though I didn’t know it, entering my period of adjustment. This was proper foreign abroad and being there, away from Starbucks and media made me think not just about the Cubans but about Britain too. The advertising issue is one that I returned to frequently. Because of the socialist regime in Cuba there’s what we’d call poverty but is actually need. Nobody starves or is homeless but there are shortages of things. This is mostly because of the US embargo and while it means the people on the island are deprived of a lot of stuff, it means they are protected too. It was a bigger shock coming back to England and seeing fat children than it was going to Cuba and feeling hot in March.

When there’s no advertising you realise how much of it there is in England, and how insidious it is. It’s not just a billboard with a bra or a beer on it, it’s the whole culture of being told not that you want something, but that you need it and, what’s worse, that you deserve it and it’s making us all selfish. How much advertising is for something that has a genuine social good?

Wandered past the cinema, one of two in the town, which was showing ‘Cujo’ - dog owners beware. The town also has a radio station. I know this because, at 8:30 in the morning, the station was broadcasting from loudspeakers from its studios on the town square, while young women in bikinis danced on its balcony/terrace!

Everything’s owned by the state but there is private business. On the intersection below our hotel room two guys had little stalls and were doing a roaring trade in lighter re-gassing. In a country where everybody smokes, this is big business. You’d not get that in England where, of course, we prefer to throw our lighters away. So is re-gassing a sign of poverty or sustainability? In the UK we think that sustainability is okay as long as we do not have to compromise the lifestyle we’ve been told we deserve in any way, shape or form - that’s why we have unleaded 4x4s. Other private enterprise was a flower seller. He was doing good business too.

Other business included holding a huge shotgun and looking bloody sinister - at least the security guard guarding a delivery of cash to the bank did. Group 4 should take tips.

Back to the hotel for our briefing about Cuba. Coffee, tobacco and rum are good - drugs are very bad. Then we had time to ourselves until lunch. Leisure has been such an alien concept to me recently, as I rush from deadline to deadline, that I was genuinely at a loss. So I hit the bar, always an excellent default option.

Sitting with a cerveza and your thoughts or making conversation while drinking was wonderful. Without beer…not so sure.

Out the front of the lobby of the hotel just about to wander off for lunch and am approached by a ‘begger’. The inverted commas are there because the guy was not after money but pens! Apparently there is a national pen shortage in Cuba. Knowing this I had brought a shed-load of biros with me. Naturally these we in my suitcase but luckily the wife keeps, along with a load of other stuff, a few biros in her handbag. The chap seemed very happy with his plain bic and biro that popped out when you touched the cap of the pen.

It actually took me a while to work out what he was after. He kept making what, in England, is the universal sign for ‘can I have the bill please’ - a scribbling motion on his palm. I may be a callous bastard but I’m not about to invoice a bloke in his own country. He may not have had much money but he certainly had a load of wrinkles, he looked like a lean version of an overbred show dog.

Walked to lunch past classic cars. One of which had Che transfers on the headlights - how cool is that?

Over lunch we experienced what was going to become a feature of the week…music while you eat. You sit down in a restaurant in Cuba and barely has your starter (salad of cabbage, carrot and cucumber or bean soup) hit the table when there’s the sound of bongos, a guitar strums and somebosdy starts singing. As an English person you have to make a deal with yourself very quickly. Usually one would either feign amused tolerance or simply pretend the music was not happening. Not options here, so you have to enjoy the music but, and this is important, still make conversation. Takes a while to get used to. It was lovely though, being serenaded through lunch. Afterwards, they pass the tip basket and, as often as not, there’s a CD in it that you can buy if you want. Cottage industry has arrived in Cuba. Some bugger somewhere has a laptop churning out these things. I think that over the course of the week a few were bought by our tour group (I finally succumbed in Havana), after all you need something to play over your slide show when you get home.

Fuelled and off to Trinidad, through the Cuban countryside, dodging motorcycle-sidecar combinations (men always ride pillion, no matter how dangerous, the sidecar is only for crops or women), horses and horse and cart combinations. On the way to Trinidad we learned a little of the history of the island - which is basically one of constant exploitation right up until Fidel said ‘enough’ and the revolution happened. The Brits owned Cuba for 11 months which, apparently, the Cubans really liked, because we opened it up to free trade.

Sugar and slavery were very big business and in order to keep an eye on your slaves cutting your sugar you need to have high towers to keep watch. Stopping at a farm we saw one of these towers and had the opportunity to go up it. The ‘Tower of Terror’ as I came to call it was a slender finger of stone reaching a long way up or, to put it another way, it’s a long way down from the top. The one paso entry fee is, I think, not hypothecated to maintenance, as the wooden steps looked about one creak away from a spectacular crash. Still, the swaying and creaking added an extra dimension of raw fear to the proceedings. The view from the top was spectacular, either that or my senses were highlighted by terror. Climbing it was an exercise in the conflict between the childish need to get to the top and my instinct for self preservation but, once up there I wondered just what a plantation owner would do if they saw a slave misbehaving. By the time you came down the steps and got to the field, the miscreant would be well away.

Sitting patiently alongside the farmhouse was what I thought was a trolly-bus or tram but was in fact a Cuban train. The railways criss-cross the island, crossing the countryside, their paths punctuated by the occasional dusty halt - I don’t think a concrete canopy quite merits the term ‘station’. The rails also cross the roads without bothering with such niceties as level crossing barriers in the countryside although, to be fair, there are signs.

The road to Trinidad took us through the Valley of Tears - so called because of the onions and garlic grown there and then into Trinidad valley, UNESCO protected and rather beautiful. The other UNESCO sites I’ve been to are Stonehenge and Avebury. The turkey buzzards and the sparkling blue Caribbean made Trinidad valley rather different to Stonehenge. The Caribbean looked amazing, it really was a dazzling blue, the blue of seas in dreams.

Trinidad itself is a UNESCO site and is quite different from Avebury - no tea shoppes for a kick-off. The UNESCO bit is in the centre. Apparently it’s the cobbles that are important, if the street is cobbled then the buildings are falling apart because they have to be preserved and restored in a certain way. Across the street the very same looking buildings are on tarmac streets and are falling apart because nobody has the money to slap a coat of paint over them.

Trinidad is full of pastel painted houses that are peeling and dogs that are thin and occasionally odd-looking. The theme of the dogs is ‘which bits am I missing thanks to fights’, even the bronze dog in the church square is missing a bit.

Lots of vendors in the street, slightly pushy but, at one paso for a necklace what I should have done is filled my suitcase with them and flogged them back at home. Trinidad is small but fun to walk through. They have cannons buried in the cobbles to act as bollards and the climb to the Mirador in the centre of the town was another exercise in aerial bravery, this time a precarious climb up a narrow staircase and then a walk over a catwalk suspended over the gift shop. Thank god we’re all thin Europeans.

The gift shops were interesting. Got my first Che tee-shirts there. Did not want to go mad as thought there would be other shops. And there are, but they all sell the same tee shirts. That’s right, you can only buy about 30 types of state approved tee shirt on the island. Another thing, they don’t do refunds or exchanges, at all, so shed your inhibitions and try on before you buy one. Up the mirador and take plenty of photographs with Trinidad in background, Caribbean in background, church in background, that sort of thing.

Churches in Cuba are little used. I think that religion wasn’t suppressed exactly, but was not encouraged. There are two religions on the island, Roman Catholicism and the worship of some saint, a religion that came over from Africa with the slaves. Walking through Trinidad and peering shamelessly into open doorways and windows, I saw the occasional plaster saint and religious postcards, even one four foot model! Religion is interesting, like a seed it can survive underground for a long time and then, with the right conditions, it sprouts. I would have thought an agricultural community would be the perfect place for religion - farmers pray all the time, for rain, for the rain to stop or for their EU subsidy cheque to come through.

The worship of the saint involves giving him the first drink from your bottle of rum when you open a new one. Seriously, this is how much rum there is on the island, when the barmen span the top off of a new bottle of Havana Club, they would jerk the bottle and splash a good measure on the floor. I had to stop my natural reaction of diving to the floor, mouth open, to try and intercept the stream of alcohol on its journey to the floor.

It was rum time again, this time served with lime juice and honey and served up in a terracotta pot which was not so much ‘washed’ between uses, rather dunked in warm soapy water. Well, warm water. Easiest job in Cuba? Weights and measures department. Forget 1/8 of a gill, the appropriate measure of rum in Cuba is ‘upend the bottle, start pouring, keep pouring and, when you think you should stop, go another few seconds’. Second easiest - health and safety.

We sat in the shade and enjoyed our rum cocnktails, listening to a bloke on bongos and then watching with interest as a young Australian tourist, who had got in really close to get a photograph of him, was roped into his act. I have to say she was really good and seemed to be enjoying herself as much as her rum-soaked audience.

Meanwhile a tough-looking hombre had entered the bar wearing a two foot machete. Even in its leather sheath the thing looked sharp. Apparently you can’t wear them in cities like Havana but in rural cities like Trinidad…it’s okay. So, that’s okay then. The guy apparently is on the front cover of one of the guides and looking at him, skin turned to leather by the sun, omnipresent cigar and all, I could see why - he looked like Jack Palance…with attitude. And he was smoking a huge cigar, of course he was. Everyone here that smokes a cigar smokes one as thick as your arm. Not for them the weedy cheroots so beloved of West Midland small businessmen, nope, out here they spark up a cigar in the morning and it’s good to go all day. Keeps the flies off apparently.

Back on the coach and back on the road, out of town, past houses with gardens, including one with a set of rusting bodybuilding weights, and a bodybuilder sitting on his bench, resting between reps, his huge arms sticking out from his pumped up chest. On and on, to the hotel - and my first experience of ‘all inclusive’.

Fist things first, get your wrist band. The hotel is basically a small village dropped on the Caribbean coast, an international village full of brits, Italians, Germans - all sorts. My skills in working out who was from where were going to be polished in the next few days.

Next culture shock…everything is ‘free’. You get a drink, you don’t pay. You get another drink, you still don’t pay. Thanks to your magical wristband you have entered the kingdom of plenty. No wonder they keep this place so far from the city. You switch from beer to cocktails and it’s still free, so I switched to wine.

Hummmn. The waiter was obviously very proud of Cuban wine and stood by me while I tried it. Actually it was tight up my Strassa, rough as hell, just the way I like my reds.

The wine was rough but the poolside entertainment was smooth. As we sipped our cocktails and debated when to dine, a chap in loafers and a white jacket started crooning away, then did the ‘lounge’ thing of wandering over and singing to the ladies - lots of eye contact and so on. Great stuff and a good singer but he was up against some stiff competition, when we arrived the entertainment staff gave us a taste of their evening floor show - including a bunch of young women in thongs and feathers! Still we cut him some slack and applauded enthusiastically. I knew that if we did not, he’d start singing to the men.

A word about Germans

Shaved heads. Moustaches. Tattoos. The German males fall into two categories - the first wear a look of permanent pained constipation when fat, possibly brought about by the realisation that they’ll never fit in the turret of their Panzer tank again. The second look as if they enjoy filthy sex games (actually so do the first) - there’s a reason for this and it’s their vile tattoos, usually something over a full chest, like an eagle, with a swastika in its claws. Okay I made that last bit up but there was this bloke sat at the snack bar, shaved head, ‘tash, tattoos and a tiny speedo swimming costume. I’d imagine that underneath his photograph on MySpace is the caption ‘Hello I am Rolf and I very much like to make the Schizsserpumpen’.

Concluded the evening putting together my list of rudest nations. Germans like to rush into things (like Poland), the Italians are indistinguishable from gypsies, the French are just French…but offensively so. There’s so many national quirks on display that you have to start sub-leagues. Like the English are best at ‘speaking their mind’, which is ignorance masquerading as character. How to spot the English on holiday…look for the football shirt.