GTMO

So Guantanamo.
How to describe my first few weeks here?

E and I left Havana one day before the boys because the buses were fully sold out for several weeks. We arrived to Gtmo after a freezing cold bus ride, during which E and I had to huddle for warmth and at one point; I thought I might never stop shivering. I asked the bus driver to turn down the AC at around 2am, when I had had enough of shivering under my long sleeved shirt and scarf. His response? He chuckled and just shook his head, pointed to the wind shield and mumbled something about how the humidity would prevent him from seeing out of the window. Now, I’m no physics major, but I’m pretty sure that the drastic change in temperature between the freezing cold inside of the bus and the warm outside air is what would cause the condensation.

Anyway, we arrived safely with, SURPRISE! All of our luggage, including our big bike boxes. We convinced a cab driver to take us, with all of our things to the agricultural hotel where we would be staying for less than one dollar per night. None of the cars at the bus terminal were big enough for all of belongings, so that taxi driver shoved one box in the trunk, from which it stuck out like a slobbery dog’s tongue and the other box was placed precariously on the roof without any form of attachment. No string, no tape, no hands holding on to it… Just gravity and friction. It was quite impressive. We moved into our room and napped, trying to catch up on our sleep. Within a short amount of time, we were summoned by local liaisons and almost immediately were thrown into the thick of things.

Our arrival to Gtmo coincided with the CEO of FBC´s arrival with her friend and colleague, an Analog Forestry specialist. By the time the boys arrived the next day, us girls had already met the team here as well as the higher up people of the Unidad that we are associated with and the Empresa that funnels resources into the Unidad. The week with the CEO and the specialist was a whirlwind of meetings, farm visits and planning of future projects. I will comment more on this aspect when the internship is over and I am safely removed from my association with FBC and the people involved. All I can say for now, without lying is that it was an interesting experience in “International Cooperation and Development”. I use the quotations liberally.
After the departure of the CEO and the AF specialist, I informed the local liaison here that I had a friend arriving the next day so that I could sort things out with immigration.

Every week, we need to hand in a work plan to our liason here, who calls himself our Cuban dad (either as a term of endearment or to establish a form of hierarchy… probably both) so that he can then bring them to immigration so that they are informed of our comings and goings. Considering the first intern here wasn’t even allowed to go visit the farms or the communities, this is a big step forward. We are mostly free to visit the project site, as long as immigration is aware that we are going and that we have one of the two leaders of the farmer’s association guiding us around. It was only when I left Gtmo with my friend that I realized why immigration is so worried about foreigners poking around there. The drive out of the town, towards Baracoa leads past the farms, past the communities and takes you approximately 3km from Guantanamo Naval Base. It took an outside perspective for me to realize that I am working only several kilometers from one of the world’s international hot spots.

So instead of jumping right into the project that I was so desperate to get to, I went rogue for a week and visited the province with a friend to get a good lay of the land. After a week with the boss, very little/no alone time and no privacy due to the nature of my living arrangement, I was pretty desperate for some time away from the group. Not to say that I didn’t do work while I was out of Gtmo, I visited a mangrove forest site that was part of Alexander Humboldt National Park,  got to know the sea life around the cliffs that dropped down from my hotel as well as saw many other fincas forestales in the mountains.

 The road to Baracoa is called la Farola (lighthouse) and takes a route over the Sierra Maestra , where we stopped at the Mirador at the very top, from which you can see coast to coast. It was incredible. The actual lookout platform was rickety, filled with holes, missing stairs and had rusty nails sticking out from various joints. My favourite! It reminded me of a lookout that we used to be taken to during canoe camping trips in Park Papineau Labelle. Only this one was surrounded by tropical lush mountain forests instead of Laurentian woods  and in the place of lake views, it had views of the Caribbean.

Arriving to the town of Baracoa, we were instantly swarmed by hoards of jinteros, trying to get us to stay in their casas. They were persistent to a fault and turned us off from staying with any of them. We wove our way through the maze of one way streets and ended up at the end of the town where the road widened into a kind of pier with a lovely view of the open sea and the little bay. Right across from the town, I spotted a hotel that seemed to be quiet and I pointed to it and said that I wanted THAT room. Fighting our way through the crowd of pushy jinteros that had accumulated in the few minutes that we stepped out of the car, we got back in and miraculously found our way to the hotel, through the labyrinthine Baracoan calles. We parked and I inquired at the desk about room prices. To our delight, I discovered that since it was still low season, rooms were half the price as usual. We got a great room with a little balcony that gave onto the bay and sat directly across from the town. The few days that we were there, we ate the best food I’ve had in Cuba yet; coconut shrimp, curried shrimp, spicy crab… Delicious.

On our way back from Baracoa, we decided to take a different and ended up on the road less travelled. Leaving Baracoa, we veered off of the main road to find Rio Yumuri which is touted as one of the most beautiful rivers on the island. Before arriving the main part of the little town that is built around it, we were flagged down on the road by a man standing in the middle of the road. Not being used to Cuba, my friend wanted to know what the man wanted. He offered us a tour of the river on his boat. I said no and we drove onward toward the river. As we pulled up, we saw a group of fifteen men standing around, trying to flag us down in the same way as the first man. We drove through the crowd and kept driving, deciding to forget about visiting the river. Neither one of us wanted to deal with the touts. The road took us up a steep, narrow, windy road, up the river canyon wall. High up, past where the group of men could catch up to us on their bikes, we stopped in front of a little casa that had a small sign advertising Agua de Coco. I chugged my icy cold glass and then asked the woman to fill my 1.5L bottle with the refreshing juice.

We continued on our way and were soon stopped at an army checkpoint. My friend got out of the car to go talk to the guard while I waited. I could tell from the snippets of words that drifted over the breeze and from their body language that the guard wasn’t going to let us through. The guard walked over to the car and I pushed my luck, thinking that I might have better luck. I whipped out my trusty carnet that I had waited over two months for, and the guard immediately changed his entire composure.
“OH! You have residency here! “
“Yes sir!”
“So you’re not tourists?”
“No sir, we work here!”
“Well then, go right on ahead!”
BAM!

The gate lifted, he waved us off and away we drove, along a road that no foreigners are allowed to take. The road was in terrible condition but the scenery made up for the ruts, crevices and teeth jarring passage. For over an hour, we drove through little communities made up of forestry farms, small scale agricultural plots, wooden or concrete bungalows and autoconsumos. The mountains were lush and breezy, making it a great climate for the many kilometers of coffee plantations that we drove through. Mmmmmm coffee.
We came out of the forests and the world opened up to a panoramic view of verdant green tropical forests that dropped intermittently over cliffs into the calm cerulean Caribbean sea that mirrored the azure sky, speckled with puffy white cotton ball clouds. (Don’t you love how many descriptive words for blue exist?)

The drive down brought us closer and closer to the water and we ended up hugging the coast. The road less travelled takes you on a jaunt between the sea and craggy cliff faces. We stopped three times along the coastal road to admire the natural beauty of the area. We first parked when we had just arrived near the water and walked through a small patch of dry forest to the cliff edge and sat, two meters above the sea that was lapping against the shore. It was one of those perfect moments where I just sat in silence, watching the world and absorbing how amazing life is. Our second stop was an attempt to access the cliff to see if we could climb. We attempted to bushwhack our way up to the base of the rock face but were consistently halted at every attempt by cacti forests.  Our last stop of the day, before returning to Guantanamo, was at the estuary of a small meandering river that we followed to the sea and spent a few hours on a pebbly uninhabited beach. The unfortunate part of the beach was that it wasn’t ideal for swimming. There was a strong undercurrent that kept sweeping my feet out from under me and dragging me along the rough stony bottom. Other than that, it was great! 

I returned to Guantanamo in high spirits, expecting to find my colleagues excitedly launched into the project and have to struggle to catch up. Not so. They had had a rough week and had to move three times to appease immigration and the ridiculousness of the rules that we have to live by here, being stuck between laws for foreigners and for residents.

Getting to the farms from the town is fun, it’s a 25 minute bike ride from our casas to the closest farm and nearly an hour to the farthest one… this is the most I have biked in years. My first time out, I was the only one of three of us to bring water and I ended up getting heat exhaustion. The sun is terribly strong and I need to prepare myself better with more water, better covering, and sunscreen. Not to mention to pace myself. The farmers are wonderful and are my biggest motivation for this project. Months later, the water system has still yet to be installed and so I am trying to work around this fact and try to develop water management techniques so that they can function even without being connected to the nearby community’s water system. I have been reading about rain water harvesting in arid areas and I believe that I can incorporate the activities that I created in Havana into great workshops.

A delegation from CIDA and the Canadian Federal Government are supposed to arrive this week and there has been talk by the local liaison  who runs the Unidad that we are associated with (the man who keeps referring to himself as our Cuban father) about putting on an “obra de teatro” for the delegates. That is to say, to pretend like they are more advanced in setting up the water system. He doesn’t seem to understand that we might actually waste less energy by actually setting up the water system than by puppetteering something to impress the Canadians. The main excuse around here when something doesn’t get done is to blame bureaucracy. In Cuba, that excuse is accurate more often than not. Each farm has gotten a 2100L tank that will be elevated on concrete pillars and filled by the new water pipes. The concrete pillars were supposed to be made last week in three days… at least that was the official plan that was created when the CEO of the organization was here. This has yet to be done for most of the farms. The pillars we saw at one of the farms looked like they would crumble at the slightest pressure and M easily knocked a gravelly section of the pillar to the ground. It will be interesting to see what happens when the Canadian delegates are here to check on where their funds have gone.