Everyone is equal, some are more equal than others / Untangling Cuba

Every day here is like working at a knotted ball of string and trying to straighten out
more and more of it. Any time I think that I have finally untangled all the knots, I find
that there are more gnarls that I didn’t notice or that the previously unravelled parts have
become snarled once again.

Through my own cultural filter, I find this system completely incompatible with any
improvement of human welfare and inherently at odds with human equality.

This week has been another fascinating experience in working with clashing ideological
systems. Monday morning we met with V, our local jefe and we were told that the
Partido was showing up the next day to visit the farms. This is a big deal. The Partido
taking an interest in a small project like this could be very helpful in gaining access to
more resources for the farmers. We planned to go to the farms in the morning to meet
the delegation and spend the day visiting the farms with them, asking questions and
answering questions about Canada’s involvement in the project. We waited all day for
them to arrive and they never did. It was still a fascinating day.

As planned, we showed up to the head farmer’s farm at 8:30 and ended up arriving at the
same time as two extension workers from Baracoa.

*Background info: the project is run by the forestry institute and it has offices in Havana
and Baracoa. There are a handful of people from the institute involved in the project
who are supposed to take turns to come to the project site, so that there is someone from
that part of the team here every week. Since we’ve been here, no one has come since the
CEO of FBC was here. The reason that they can’t always come is that they don’t have the
budget to come stay for a week at a time. To solve this problem, the CEO had budgeted
a monthly stipend of 20 CUCs, payable to the team member upon the submission of a
report on their visit. As far as we have understood, this money has yet to get to any of the
Baracoa team members from the Havana team members who were given control of the
stipend.

We ended up talking with the team members for twenty minutes and trying to understand
the reasons that they had not come sooner. Still foggy on the details, but basically there
has been no budget for them until this week.

After somewhat clearing up this issue, we followed them as they did a recorrido (a
check up of the farms). They have several things to note down for the final report of the
project, including which farms have micro-viveros (nurseries), autoconsumos (kitchen
gardens), how many species they have in their one hectare analog forestry plots, how
many seedlings have been planted, how many have survived and more… During this
recorrido we realized a lot of things about this project that we hadn’t necessarily thought
about. Some of which I’m still processing. I’ll try to put it into words, because even now,
two days later, my feelings and thoughts are still as mixed up as the clothes in my laundry
bag.

This project is supposed to be based on analog forestry. Analog forestry (AF) is a
methodology that has the objective of recuperating degraded areas, while attempting to
recreate a climax vegetation, similar to what existed before the deforestation process.
The idea is to find ways to maximize benefits for rural communities, in terms of social,
environmental and economic forestry services. In theory, this is an incredible idea.

The farmers are workers who don’t own their farm and are contracted to plant trees by
the Empresa Forestal, whose primary objective and reason for being is to simply cover
soil. The AF methodology is proposed/imposed by the project to hopefully improve
their wellbeing in the long term. The problem is that these farmers don’t have a sense of
belonging to the farms and so don’t necessarily think past their next paycheck enough to
see the benefits of using this imposed methodology. They don’t own their land and there
is a huge amount of turnover. The turnover occurs mainly because of the poor conditions
that they live with; namely poorly constructed houses with leaky roofs, no water access
and no electricity. Some farmers don’t even live on their farms and commute every day
from Guantanamo, Cecilia, Paraguay or La Sombrilla.

The way the farmers are paid is by work accomplished. There is a head farmer of the
14 farms and he is in charge of going around at the end of every month and ensuring
that the tasks from their monthly workplans have been accomplished. Basically, at the
beginning of every year, the Empresa tells the farmers what needs to be done for the year
and divides it by month. Every month, the farmers hand in a detailed workplan of what
they plan on doing and they are paid for the different tasks that they accomplish. This can
include anything from planting a certain number of trees, planting seeds, transplanting
seedlings, maintaining a fire trench to prevent forest fires… you get the idea.

The AF methodology fits in to this by giving the farmers an opportunity to still perform
their required tasks, but with the option of planning ahead and eventually making extra
profit by, for example, selling fruit from a papaya tree that they planted instead of a
eucalyptus tree. Some of the farmers have really taken advantage of the possibility and
are working hard in their spare time to plant economically valuable species. In the end,
the methodology is just a way to help them. At this point in the project, the farmers are
supposed to be paid for analog forestry tasks, in the same way that they are paid for
general forestry tasks.

In this context, it is possible for a farmer to make more than the average monthly salary.
However, issues arise when the farmers have no tools to do this work. Anytime they
need anything, they must first ask the head farmer, who must bike to town to ask V, the
head of the Unidad Silvicola (that we are working with directly), who must try to get in
touch with the head of the Empresa Forestal (that controls access to materials, tools and
that is the official forestry entity) who then makes the final decision about the request.
At each one of these steps, only one person is in charge of transmitting information and
things get bottlenecked. Not to mention the problems with salaries and actually getting
paid in the first place. And the lack of water. Apparently plants need water to grow…?
Whodathunkit?

It is a very top down approach and a conversation with V, our jefe, this morning made me
realize this even more. I got in trouble for giving the farmers some sense of power. Oops.
J

The last time that I met with the Comite de Agua, we planned on pushing for the work
to be finished. I told the farmers that I would push as much as I could from my end and
involve the Canadian FBC powers that be, but that some push had to come from their
end as well. The idea behind the comity is to involve the farmers in the running of their
community and for them to gain some decision making power over their lives. Which
they have started to do, much to the chagrin of V.

During the recorrido with the Baracoa team members, I took advantage of the
opportunity to continue collecting info for my baseline assessment of the water situation
on the farms. The man from finca 4, E, who is part of the water comity told me that he
spoke with V and had made three suggestions to speed up the painfully slow process.
1. To have all the materials for construction of the elevated concrete plinths on the
farms so that when the builders arrive, everything they need is there. *The way
things are now, the material arrives at different times and the builders can’t do
anything when they bother to show up to work.*
2. Get the man who is supposed to dig the trenches for the pipes to the farms so that
he can see that the ground is dry enough to start.
3. To tell the farmers where the pipes will go so that they can start making a path for
the machines and be able to use the trees that will be bulldozed and wasted.

The simple fact of one of the farmers making suggestions to someone from higher up
is a major step forward. I told the finquero (farmer) that this was wonderful and that he
should put these suggestions down in writing, formally and make notes of what he wrote
in his Comite de Agua notebook.

That brings us to this morning. V lectured me about how the farmers don’t have the
same amount of power that we as interns have and that he as head of the Unidad has.
He still calls us his “children” to enforce the hierarchical difference between us. He said
that decisions and suggestions couldn’t come from those who are lower down because
Cuba doesn’t work that way and we needed to understand that. He said that he was in his
position because he is intelligent and has a specific strategy of how this process will work
and that the farmers have no business interfering with this. He said that he was under the
impression that the water comity would focus on water quality and water use, not bother
themselves with questions about material and construction. He said that in the Cuban
system, power belongs to those who are in higher positions. He said that the farmers had
no business knowing what was happening with materials. He said a lot of things.

I had been awake for approximately 7 minutes so all of my retorts came out sounding
like garbled incoherent nonsense. One thing I did manage to say was that, coming from
Canada, I’m used to everyone being equal, so it is very strange for to work in this system.
I was hoping to bait him on this point so that HE would respond something about the

communist system, where all men are brothers and THEN I could jump onto this point
and BAM, knock him down with words. Unfortunately, he didn’t take the bait, but I’m
still happy I took that jab. I played dumb and asked him why he was bringing this up,
because he made it seem as though this conversation was coming out of nowhere. He
mentioned that E, the farmer from #4 had made requests and at that point, I was able to
bring the conversation around to backing up E and pushing for these suggestions from my
end.

V also mentioned that because there have been ministers in town from the Partido,
security has been increased and we are being watched more closely. We basically have to
be careful what kind of questions we ask the farmers in case this information gets back to
the spies and we come under more scrutiny for not sticking exactly to our work plan.

Meanwhile, the few elevados (raised concrete pillars) that have been built need to be
redone because they are already falling apart and need to be able to support over two
tonnes. The concrete still hasn’t been delivered to the farms, but this might happen this
week… Hopefully. The man who will be digging the trenches will be checking out the
farms today or tomorrow and supposedly starting on Monday.

I am meeting with my water comity today to discuss advances and plan a workshop for
next Saturday. Next week I will be receiving documents about the river’s water quality
and I’ll plan a workshop around demystifying the different water treatment techniques. I
plan on involving the members of the water comity in putting together the workshop so
that they get used to doing this.

Guajira Guantanamera

I’ve officially fallen in love with this charming place. The vibrant town and all of its
quirks make up for the difficulties and frustrations of working in Cuba.

Work things aside, I’ve gotten into a nice rhythm here and am meeting some fascinating
people. I am taking salsa classes three times per week at a dance company a few blocks
away from my house. The dance company just put on a four day dance festival and I
attended an incredible dance show every night. The ballerinas are all extremely friendly
and open. After each dance show, we were invited to stay and party with the dance
companies. I have never been so intimidated to dance in public. Not only are they all
Cuban and have this amazing innate sense of rhythm, but they are all trained dancers…
Intimidating. Luckily, I hide my nervousness by acting like a fool and joking around,
so I’m able to at least make them laugh. All of this was free and we never once felt
unwelcome. People here are incredibly friendly and welcoming.

As a “gracias”, P and I want to put together a little show for the dance company, where
he would play his accordion and I would spin fire poi. The only problem is finding lamp
oil to light my poi. And finding a place where the police won’t stop me from playing with
fire. Normally I wouldn’t worry, but I’m living in a town where if you’re sitting in the
park with your foot on the bench, the park “attendants” come by and reprimand you. I
can’t imagine the reaction of people watching a foreigner spinning balls of fire in public.

On the work front, things are progressing, though very slowly. The arrival of
the “Canadian Delegation” was both motivating and discouraging. Discouraging because
the so-called Canadian Delegation consisted of just two men who work as consultants
for CIDA. In the 48 hours that they were here, they spent a total of 90 minutes on two
farms and in one part of the community. I can’t imagine what they can ascertain from that
amount of time, the little that they saw and the few questions that they asked.

It is incredibly frustrating for us as interns and especially for the farmers to have these
people come with so much supposed power and only see such a small part of the project.
Our jefe here made sure that the Canadian Delegation only saw and heard about the most
positive parts of the project. We did our best to have alone time with the delegates to tell
them what is actually happening on the ground here and I hope that our comments were
taken seriously.

The visit from the delegates was also motivating in a sense because we realized that
this project isn’t as f*cked as we thought. There have been amazing advancements in
terms of social wellbeing and environmental restoration since it originally started, and
though the project is as far from perfect as you can get, something special is happening
here. It gave me the little nudge I needed to get away from the negative mindset that I
had been surrounded by. I thrive on challenges and seeing the project through the lens of
the delegates helped me understand that this is one of the most difficult systems I might
ever work in. If I can survive Cuban bureaucracy and the Cuban no-solution headspace, I
know that I can work in other difficult situations and this is making me work harder here.

I also realized that I’ve managed to turn this internship into a water management
experience, which was exactly what I set out to find last January.

The four of us held our first workshop on Saturday and we had a great turnout. The main
objective of the meeting was to put together different “comites”. The idea behind this is
to ensure a smooth transition for the end of the project and teach the farmers how to put
together their own workshops and take charge of their own community development. We
will be involving the farmers in creating workshops, bringing specialists to the farms,
organizing events and planning the implementation of their sustainability plan so that the
project continues to gain ground after we withdraw.

It’s a great experience to be here at the end of a project and work on a transition and
withdrawal plan. Though, the kind of work I’m doing right now feels more like the start
of a project, not the end of one. The baseline assessment I’m working on should have
been done a long time ago. I’m evaluating the farms’ current water situation so that after
the system is installed there’s a way to concretely evaluate changes. I’m using specific
indicators like illnesses, water use, hours spent collecting water as well as general
comments that come up in conversation with the farmers about their view of water.

When the CEO was here a few weeks ago, the idea of creating a water comity was
thrown out and a few people volunteered. Since then, they haven’t done anything or even
met to discuss what they want to do. On Saturday, I sat down with my water comity and
facilitated creating clear objectives of what they want to accomplish and made an action
plan for the next few weeks that I’m here as well as their goals after I leave.

The main problem right now is that the water system has yet to be installed. After the
CEO of FBC left and the Canadian Delegation left, the work basically stopped. The work
that needs to be done is quite simple and back home would probably take a week of work.
Here, to use my favourite Cuban dicho (saying): No es facil!

Here is a BRIEF summary of the issues involved in putting together the water system,
excluding all the finer details of the process. You might want to sit down for this. Or
stand up and then sit back down.

Before anything could start, paperwork had to be properly filled out. This of course took
three months to do and only began after the pipes arrived from Spain, which in itself was
quite the ordeal.

Each of the 14 farmsteads has a 2100L water tank that will be raised onto concrete
plinths. To do this, a round hole 1m deep and 1m in diameter had to be dug for the
foundation of the concrete pillars. Simple? Not when shovels are inaccessible. Digging
the holes took two weeks longer than planned.

Once the holes were dug, the cement pillars could be built. Simple? Not when cement is
inaccessible. Supposedly, the director of the empresa that supplies cement had a nervous

breakdown, so no one has had access to cement for some time.

Did I mention the difficulty in finding the ribar (reebar? rubar? I have no idea how to
spell that word…) that will hopefully hold the poor quality cement together? Also, since
there isn’t enough cement to build all the pillars properly and have a stable foundation,
they needed rocks and sand delivered to the farms. Simple? Not when trucks and gas are
in short supply and a different empresa controls sand and rock supplies and requires extra
paperwork.

The six farms that are closer to Gtmo will be connected by water pipes to the community
of Cecilia, where a small brown river flows and supplies guajiras with enough water for
their basic needs. Once the concrete pillars are built and the tanks are raised, a machine
can come in, make a trench for the water pipes and the system can be finalized. Our
jefe kept blaming the wet ground on the fact that the pipes had yet to be set up. This is
interesting since one of the main reasons this water system is so necessary is because the
area is incredibly arid.

The 8 farms that are closer to the community of Paraguay already have the pipe
infrastructure and are connected to the village’s water supply. The issue here is that the
pump in the community is broken. Part of the system that was bought with the budget for
the project was water pumps. All that needs to be done to connect the furthest 8 farms to
running water is to set up the pump in the village of Paraguay. Simple? I still don’t have
an explanation why this hasn’t been done.

I’ve never been anywhere where access to basic material was so difficult. The farmers are
getting to the point where they are ready to start digging the trench by hand. The craziest
part of all of this is that all but three of the farms are directly on the main highway and
easily accessible. Today we met with our jefe to confront him and we made a plan to
continue the work. Tomorrow a group of men from the Partido arrive to check out the
farms. News of the project has made its way up to the Comandante so it should be an
interesting visit.

I can’t believe that it’s already November. The four of us celebrated our six month
anniversary this weekend! I’ve never spent so much intense time in the company of
such a small group of people. We’ve gotten to the point where we can’t imagine going
home and not seeing one another for a few days. Speaking of home, I received an early
Christmas present from my mom who changed my flight home so that I could come
home for Christmas! It’ll have been almost exactly one year since I took off with no plan
other than accomplishing my three personal goals: live abroad, improve another language
and do something to advance my career goals. Not a bad way to spend a year!

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.

Ending Chapter Two of my internship

The tally:

Over two months of waiting

Two visitors

Many fun nights

Many lovely sunny days

Too many frustrating days

Linguistic improvement

Deeper understanding of Cuban culture and accent

Various activities created and documents written

Countless times of saying NO to taxis and various other offers

Discovering my favourite spots in Havana and becoming a regular at certain places

And finally…

ONE CARNET!

So last week we were told that we had to bring certain documents to an immigration building downtown to fill out more forms and get our papers. After two months of waiting for our work documents, we were really excited to get it done. Finally!

We walked into Old Havana and asked a police officer who was standing on a street corner where the building we were looking for was. He stood, puzzled and blinking into the morning sun, thinking. He clearly had yet to drink his morning coffee. A full silent minute later, he still hadn’t answered us, so we moved on and found the building we were searching for. It happened to be situated 10m from where the policeman had been standing.

We saw a long line-up outside and asked around about where we had to go. We were ushered inside by some official looking people. A woman standing inside behind a desk stopped us as we walked by her. As we approached, she suddenly stopped doing what she had been doing (nothing) and started talking to three people who had been standing silently behind her and quickly became intensely involved in the previously non-existent conversation. After she had us wait an appropriate amount of time to make her feel like she was somehow useful, she stopped talking to her three companions and told us where the immigration office could be found. It turned out that the office we were looking for was up a gorgeous stairwell that was tiled in a Moorish fashion like in the South of Spain.

Walking up the stairs, we crossed paths with a woman dressed in a customs uniform. “Once you reach the top of the stairs, go right, then left.” She said, clearly indicating LEFT then RIGHT with her hands. We took her at her word and found the immigration office at the end of a deserted corridor.

We walked in and were immediately politely ignored by the 12 people working there. We inquired who was “ultimo” (last) and hurried up to sit down and wait for our turn. Only two people were ahead of us.

After twenty minutes of waiting, watching the employees huddling around a desk, talking about their new manicure (very important official business) and being shushed for laughing (me and E), P stood up and asked a question.

“Are you going to start seeing people soon?”

He was told that the woman who deals with immigration issues hadn’t arrived yet so we should sit and wait. We did, while wondering what the hell the rest of the people in the office we supposed to be doing if not dealing with immigration issues in this “immigration office”.

Another twenty minutes later, a woman showed up and after walking around the office saying good morning to everyone and seeming to inquire about the state of health of every single member of everyone’s family, finally sat down and pulled out some important looking files. She was then handed a manila envelope, from which she pulled out even more important looking files. She stared at them intently for no less than thirty seconds and them threw them casually in a drawer. I imagined the drawer having a label written “garbage” on it. 

As it turned out, all that we had to do at this office was get our thumb fingerprinted. Mine came out looking like a smudge. It made me very self-conscious about how beautiful my fingerprint is. After each one of us went through the process of sticking our thumb onto an ink pad and pressing it onto a piece of paper, we each asked when we could come back to get our carnet. To each one of us, the woman replied that we should come back in one week to get them.

With that answer, one would assume that we could come back in one week to get our papers. Right? In Cuba, not so much…

One week later, which again happened to be a Tuesday, one of the two days per week that this office is open, we returned. Into the building we walked confidently and excitedly to pick up our papers, which would allow us to finally leave Havana and go start the project that we had come to Cuba for. We passed the woman at the desk who had told us where to go the week before. I reached the stairs, turned around to make some silly joke about the nuns in front of me and realized that I was alone. The other three were standing, talking to that woman in the middle of the hallway. I walked back to see what she had to say. Apparently, she couldn’t let them walk by because they were wearing shorts.

“I told you last week that you couldn’t wear shorts in here.” She said.

“No you didn’t” We responded in unison.

“You aren’t in Europe anymore” She pointed out.

“Clearly!”

“I can’t let you go upstairs in shorts, it’s not appropriate.”

At this point, we became frustrated seeing as she was standing there, in ¾ length pants, with her back to a group of women and men who worked in the building, ALL WEARING SHORTS!

We pointed out the flaw in her reasoning.

She calmly explained that they were all wearing work shorts, a completely different matter. Apparently my mini jean skirt was more appropriate than the jean shorts of the same length that E was wearing or the nearly ¾ length shorts that both of the boys were wearing. The woman told us off a little more and then let us walk upstairs. Our feeling was that she was annoyed that we already knew where we were going, therefore making her job useless and so she needed to say something so that we knew that she controlled the comings and goings.

We got upstairs to the office and again we were immediately politely ignored.

This time, P asked a question within the first few minutes. I was sitting in the designated waiting area (4 rows of black plastic chairs, crowded into the corner of the office) with E and M. All I saw was P asking the woman a question and her shaking her head and laughing.

UH OH.

Some minutes later, when P had gotten all of information out of the woman, he motioned for us to get up and go. In Cuba, there’s no such thing as volunteering information. You know how back home, when you ask a question, people tend to answer it and usually offer various other helpful tidbits with their answer? That doesn’t happen here. It seems like if you can get a straight answer out of someone, you’re doing pretty well. This being said, anytime we have to find something out, the conversation lasts approximately 6.7 times longer than it needs to because we have to ask the exact questions to ensure that we have extracted not only the right answers, but also all other associated answers from the person.

The answer that P got from the woman was that of course we couldn’t pick up our carnets there! They were sent off somewhere else. Obviously. Silly Canadians. Why would we think that being told to return in one week to pick up our papers meant to return in one week to pick up our papers? I could feel my hopes and dreams of leaving the city ASAP come crashing down around me. Were our papers even ready? The woman doubted it. She explained that it was likely that the fingerprints we had made last week hadn’t even been picked up yet for processing. What processing? I still don’t understand. P was told to call the other immigration office to find out if they had our papers yet.

We set out in search of a payphone. Not an easy thing to find. The first one only accepted prepaid cards. The second one had a long line-up. The third one was also a card-only phone. The fourth one was out of service. Fifth time’s a charm! The phone worked, accepted coins and had no line-up. P picked up the receiver and dialled while we held our breaths, hoping, fingers crossed that our carnets were ready. We waited…

The line was busy.

F***************

By that time a few people had lined up to call as well. After three other people had made their lengthy calls, P picked up the receiver again and dialled. We heard him saying a few words to Lourdes, the woman we had been dealing with at immigration for the past two months.

He hung up.

We waited for him to speak.

SO MUCH SUSPENSE!

“She has our carnets!”

Amazing. We were quite confused as to how they ended up with her and why she wouldn’t call us to tell us. But they were ready. She had been waiting for us to come get them. We hopped into a maquina and headed out to the part of town called Miramar. We practically ran into the immigration building. Lourdes was sitting at her desk, smiling, holding four little cards out to us. She passed them out to us. The carnets that had taken two months of Cuban bureaucrazy to get done look like library cards with our picture, thumbprint, mother and father’s first names, country of birth and some other info. Two months for a plasticized piece of paper.

After this we split up, P heading to the institute to deal with O, our local coordinator, and us heading back downtown to get some internetting done. E and I went to the bus station later that day to book tickets to Gtmo.

That little card is like a secret password, as soon as you flash it, the price drops significantly. The price for a bus ticket if you have the card is 1/10^th of the price they charge foreigners. The only problem with the Cuban bus to Guantanamo is that tickets were sold out until January and our bike boxes wouldn’t fit on them. OK. Expensive bus it is! Then the only other problem was that they were full until Sunday. There was no way I could wait that long. Some bargaining from my side and some phone calls by the woman at the ViaAzul bus counter allowed me and E to fit onto a bus leaving on Thursday and the boys on a bus leaving Friday. Again, I encountered the frustration of trying to get information from them about where to go, what time and what to do about our boxes. I always have the image of wringing out a wet piece of clothing for every last drop of water. You twist the clothing as tight as possible and wring it out, letting a stream of water fall down, but you know that there’s more you can get if you could only wring it out a little more. Getting information from this employee was like that. I knew there was something I was missing. My questioning yielded information about where to show up, what time, what to do with our bikes boxes and how much more we would be charged for them.

OK.

Carnets.

Check

Bus tickets.

Check

Packing.

Almost done

The boys went to go pay for the tickets that we had reserved for them and were told to go to a different bus terminal to get their bike boxes on the bus before anyone else. Great. I knew there were a few drops of information I didn’t wring out of that woman…

So todat I am finally off to Guantanamo to start my project, halfway through my placement. I knew this internship would be challenging and frustrating and to date, it is meeting those criteria. I’m excited to begin working with the farmers and the communities. I’m excited to learn and to help where I can.

I feel confident about the activities I have adapted and designed and I believe that they are great tools to leave behind. I know that I don’t have enough time to complete everything that I had set out to do here on my placement. However, I think that if I can have a positive impact on a handful of people’s lives, it will be more than I can ask for and will be worth the past two months of waiting.

So to those of you who have followed my writing and ranting for the past while, I thank you for taking the time to read my words and I hope to have the ability to keep posting over the next two months while I’m in the campo.

Wish me luck!

Cuban Bureaucrazy

More than one month in Cuba and we are still waiting for our work papers to be processed. P, the “comandante” is charged with the task of calling immigration and attempting to push through our documents. Why does a Canadian who doesn’t know the system have to do this when our local coordinator has done this same process for at least the past 7 years of interns? No idea. But he does. The task seems simple to the casual observer, but anyone who has ever had to use the communication network in Cuba knows the reality.

He spends three days trying to reach immigration, who don’t pick up the phone at various times of the day for various reasons. Either they’re on break, on lunch, busy with other people, the office is closed or the phones don’t work. When he finally reaches them, they are so happy to hear from him.

But they have bad news.

“We’re missing a letter mi amor!” They say.

“So what can we do?” He responds, looking for a solution.

“Hmmm… that’s a good question.” They respond, stumped.

… He waits

“Well, tell O (our local coordinator) to call us, she knows how this works.” They explain.

This is funny for two reasons.

First, the woman from immigration is implying that someone who doesn’t work for immigration understands the system better than she does.

Second, reaching our local coordinator is more even difficult than reaching immigration.

Third, O wants P to take care of this.

“We can’t reach her, can’t we do something to move this process along?” Says P, still looking for solutions in this “no-solution-system”.

“She understands the system really well, she should call us.”

OK

So then P spends three days trying to get in touch with O. Calling her rarely works because either her phone doesn’t have money on it, she doesn’t pick up, her phone is off, she’s on vacation or she lost her phone. Or all of the above. Stopping by her house doesn’t work either, because she’s never there.

When she is finally reached, the situation is explained to her and she rolls her eyes, complaining about the Cuban bureaucratic system. She says that she’ll take care of everything.

Three days later, she calls and says that she took care of everything and that we have to call immigration in another three days to make sure that they are processing everything and are working on our papers. “Everything” here has a different meaning than back home.

This same process has happened cyclically for the past month until finally something different happened this week.

P called immigration and finally reached them after many attempts.

They are so happy to hear from him.

But they have bad news.

“Your thirty day visas have run out mi amor!” They say.

“Yes, because we’ve been waiting for our other papers to process!” P explains.

“What exactly are you waiting for?” They ask.

This is funny for two reasons.

First, this is the same person we’ve been dealing with for over one month.

Second, this is immigration. WE JUST WANT OUR DAMN PAPERS.

“… Excuse me?” He responds, somewhat dumbfounded at having been asked this question.

“Well, everything has to be in order before I can process your papers. We can’t do anything. You should call O.” They explain.

And so the process continues.

As it stands now, from what we have understood, is that O had a letter written and sent to immigration to extend our 30 day visas so that they can continue/start over processing our work papers.

In the meantime, the four of us are stuck in Havana because we aren’t allowed to go to Gtmo without our work papers, in case something happens to us and the Institute we work for comes under fire from the powers that be.

This city is expensive and our stipend, supposed to last us nearly 6 months is quickly running out.

We are being as productive as possible. On my side, I’ve been creating/adapting activities to integrate into workshops or school programs that focus on water education.

One of the activities teaches kids the concept of “everyone lives downstream from someone else” and talks about water pollution. Another activity is about protecting common resources and will show the group the importance of communication and planning to conserve vital natural resources. I’m working on another that is more of a presentation to explain the scarcity of freshwater in Cuba, and the importance of keeping those freshwater sources clean.

Other than the activities, I’ve created a few documents about natural purification techniques, involving a tree called Moringa. This plant is spectacular. I contacted my GIFTSofhealth network and asked for more information. Basically this tree grows quickly in all types of soil, has leaves that are extremely nutritional, the flowers can be made into medicinal tea and the seeds of the tree can be eaten and are useful for water purification. I found a document that describes the methods to purify water with the seeds, which I will be testing out if I ever get to Gtmo.

I’ve put together a variety of other documents, ranging from water-borne illnesses, low-water agricultural techniques and water-harvesting methods.

I’m also working on a survey to get a baseline assessment of the community that we’ll be working with so that we have a starting point to see if there was a difference after our internship… if we ever get there…

Drink the water

After almost one full month in this country, I finally feel like I’ve started to adapt. Not to the heat, though. Never to the heat. I will forever love the idea of the tropics and never be able to stand the hair-frizzing humidity and the skin melting heat.

However, I have had a few experiences over the past few days that make me feel like I have adapted to this lovely, fascinating and contradictory country.

First, I drank the tap water last week. I did it so unconsciously that afterward I felt like I might as well have a few more glasses. I walked in to my cool apartment from the sweltering heat, dying for a glass of water. There I went, straight to the sink, grabbed a glass, turned on the tap, filled my glass and gulped. As I drank down my last swallow, I realized what I had done. Up until then, I hadn’t been very careful with, but at least I hadn’t imbibed a full glass of unfiltered water in one standing. I stood at the counter for a few seconds, staring at my empty glass… “oh well”, I thought as I refilled my glass and drank it. In for a drop, in for a gallon. I felt like Alice, drinking the bottle on the counter, waiting to see what would happen to her. I stood in the kitchen at the island, with my hands on the counter, trying to establish how my body was feeling. Would I shrink? Would I grow? I tried to communicate with my stomach to see where it stood on the whole “tap water situation” and ascertain whether or not there would soon be a gastrointestinal revolt and an impending dash to the baño… Turned out I avoided la turista. I guess I’m not a tourist after all!

Tap water. Check.

Second, I finally rode the wawa. The wawa is what the city bus is called here. This may not sound like a big deal, but I get extra claustrophobic when it’s hot. The first time I rode it was on the way back from a salsa club at the other end of the city. It was quite empty that time, being that it was approaching 2am. Most of the times I have ridden the bus, it has been lovely and partly filled with hilariously drunk Cubans at all hours of the day. One morning though, I made my way downtown with my Cubana friend W, and we managed to get a spot on the bus during rush hour. Yay… sense the sarcasm. We were packed on the bus like sardines and then we started to fry. The heat of the day hadn’t quite broken yet, so on the plus side, the ride wasn’t as bad as it could have been. It was a brand new challenge and I survived!

Wawa. Check.

Third, The aforementioned experience with Cuban “law”.

Police encounter. Check.

Fourth, I ate in a woman’s kitchen for lunch today. Not a restaurant, not a cafeteria… a kitchen. E was introduced to the place by a friend and had been talking about it for a few days, saying that it was the best food she had eaten in Havana. M and I were working in the “office” when E walked in just as our stomachs were grumbling. She brought us around the block from the hotel to a little pedestrian street. We passed by a few street vendors and then walked through a doorway that had an iron gate hanging partly off of its hinges.  This did not look like the entrance of a house. A crack den maybe… Through the rabbit hole we went. The dark passageway was crumbling concrete with cigarette butts and other garbage on the ground. At the end of a 3 metre long grey, disintegrating passage there was a staircase that looked like it was in the same shape as the rest of Havana. We climbed up to the second floor and came out on colourful, open landing with two doors on the far right, a spiral staircase up to another floor in the middle and an open wall overlooking a courtyard on the left. E led us straight to door number two and we strolled in to what looked to be a mix of a hair salon and someone’s living room. The walls were plastered with hair product ads of half naked men with funky haircuts. There was a middle-aged man sleeping on a couch with a fan oscillating back and forth across the room and a tv in the upper corner of the room, playing a telenovela. Through a door that only a hobbit could fit through standing straight, was the kitchen. E crouched down and peeked through the “doorway” into the kitchen to ask if we could eat. A rotund woman with dyed blond hair peered through and told us to have a seat. We sat, took in our surroundings and watched some telenovela while we waited for food to be ready. Within a very short time, we smelled delicious criollo food wafting out of the kitchen through the hobbit hole. Not even ten minutes later, she called us into her clean, pink tiled kitchen and sat us at her little wooden table. The kitchen opens up onto a balcony that overlooks the street and a few other roofs. I’m constantly surprised by how run down this city is and how hard everyone struggles against it. The sounds of renovations can be heard at all hours of everyday, as people fight against the natural order of things, trying to keep their crumbling city from falling apart. Every roof shows evidence of repairs that remind me of little band-aids plastered hither and thither on a broken body.

The woman placed three huge plates of lovely looking food on the table and said buen provecho! The food was the best I’ve had so far: delicious rice and beans, banana, avocado and a pork-chop that tasted like bacon. All of this wonderful food and the experience of eating in this woman’s kitchen for $1.

Best cheap eating spot in town. Check.

It normally doesn’t take me this long to jump into the culture of wherever I’m traveling. The difference this time being that I’ve felt like I’m limbo here. Not quite tourist anymore, not quite living here yet. It’s a weird feeling. Adaptation is in process.

The most recent news is that our papers might be ready next week! Our local coordinator called this morning to say that the papers that had been wrongly assembled were being corrected and that we needed to call this week to follow up.

 

The Law!

We had our first encounter with the Cuban law enforcement/legal system.

Wednesday night, M, E and I headed downtown to Habana Vieja to meet up with two friends. We immediately found our friend O, who is hard to miss with his rasta dreads that reach his knees. He said that J would be another thirty minutes so we decided to walk down the street into the Barrio Chino to get some water. When we got back, and stood around for a little while, waiting, E mumbled something to me and subtly gestured to the two cops who were hovering nearby. I asked for her to repeat and she shook her head and said “later”. J still hadn’t returned so I suggested that we wait inside, being that it was already quite late and I was excited to hear some music other than salsa for a change.

I walked in immediately behind O who handed the doorman the 1CUC entrance fee. Upon seeing three foreigners about to enter, the doorman stopped us and said that it would cost 5CUCs for each of us. I laughed and we counter-offered 5CUCs for the tree of us together. One of the bouncers agreed and the other shook his head and stuck firmly to his price. Miffed at this injustice, we 180ed and walked out as the bouncers started calling after us with a lower price.

We waited outside with O for a few minutes and E again whispered something that I didn’t hear and again pointed to the cops with her eyes. I pulled her a few steps away so that she could tell me. She explained that the night before, she had been obliged to stand apart from our friends so that the cops wouldn’t harass them for talking with tourists. That explained why O had been standing off to the side when we were standing around outside.

After a few minutes, the cops approached O and asked for his ID. I say cops… imagine two young kids, 18 at the most, all dressed up in their uniforms with their batons and guns, walking with their chests puffed out and their chins jutted out. O handed over his ID and they garbled something into their walkie-talkies. We waited nearby in case O needed us to explain to the cops that he wasn’t harassing us.

Some rapid fire Cuban Spanish back and forth between the cops and O had the three of us confused and lost within moments. One of the cops walked over to us and asked us if we spoke Spanish. “Por supuesto”, we replied in unison.

The cop began asking us how long we had known the guy, where we met him, why we were out, what he had said to us. We answered the questions and then the cop said that O had lied to them and was calling him a liar and untrustworthy. At this point, the cops were becoming increasingly cocky and O was becoming disgruntled at being talked down to by kids half his age. The other cop walked over to us and they both seemed to have latched on to the fact that he had supposedly lied. The “lie” was that he said he had met E the day before and she had told the cop that she was waiting for another friend who she had met a week ago.

The two cops started lecturing us and explaining that we can’t just go around talking to any Cubans we want and that we had to be careful because some of them are bad and will take advantage. Blah. Blah. Blah.

I kept asking the cops why we weren’t allowed to talk to Cubans. What was wrong with it? At that point the cop became patronizing and telling me that not all Cubans are good people and that this was to protect us.

“He lied to us” the cop said.

‘No he didn’t, it was a misunderstanding” I explained.

I didn’t like his tone. I started getting “Em-like” with the cops (as M put it). That means bitchy… I started asking them what the problem was, why they were bothering us and our friend. They very politely explained that there was no problem.

“So we can go?” I said.

“You three can”, the cop answered pointing to us whities, “but he can’t”, gesturing to O.

“So there is a problem?” I retorted

“Yes” He said.

“So you lied to me…” I said.

“No, it’s a police problem, not a tourist problem” He answered

“We’re not tourists. And he wasn’t bothering us. You are.”

At this point, M took over the conversation and politely asked the officer to explain what was going on.

These guys were kids with guns. It’s insane to me that the government just hands these guys a uniform and guns and tells them to go uphold the law, without them ever questioning what they are doing or why.

J showed up and calmly tried to sort out the situation, but at this point, the cops were changing shifts and the new guys on the scene decided it would be easier to just sort this out easily.

Long story, but basically O was arrested for talking to tourists and put in a police car and taken to the station. We had to go to the police station to tell them that he wasn’t harassing us and that we were there with him as friends, not tourists. This country is so odd. I suppose it comes from an attempt to protect their largest industry, which is tourism. The way they go about it is so strange. Not allowing Cubans to freely speak with travellers is such a backwards, intense, dramatic way of protecting tourism.

Anyway, we walked to the police station with J to clear everything up. J ended up knowing one of the guys behind the desk. He walked up to him, shook his hand and explained the situation. The man behind the desk picked up the phone, spoke into it for 3 minutes and said that our friend would be right out. Just like that. After all that insanity, all it took was someone knowing someone. J told us that it helped that we were there too, as they don’t want to cause a scene in front of foreigners.

We found out afterwards that if a Cuban is stopped 5-6 times for “harassing” tourists (basically just walking and talking with them), he can get a big fine, or be placed under house arrest, or placed in a work yard or sent to prison for one year, depending on the person’s contacts.

When the friend came out of the cell, he described it as a cesspit and a total violation of human rights. Apparently there were 120 people inside in the cell in the basement, waiting for the ridiculousness of Cuban bureaucrazy to work them through the system. The courtyard of the police station was filled with families just waiting for their loved ones to come out. If only they knew the guy sitting behind the desk…