So I up and went to Cuba 22-29 March. Yes I took a bicycle with me, my road racer no less, which got very, very dirty. El camino socialista es muy dura y sucia tambien. Half my luggage never showed when I arrived yet I forged onward, riding with the bare essentials on my back in a stinky little canvas bag, getting sunburned despite my spf 50 block. That's cycling, companero.
I had hoped to throw some photos up on the blog, but two conditions prevent me from doing so - a near total lack of interesting pictures and this damned machine, which saved the first one I threw at it as a .tif, which Blogger won't accept. Normally my personal camera produces jpegs, even from work but this time, no dice. Instead you find a scaled drawing my colleague Ms C. made of a little park in the downtown core of... Toronto. I needed to save it for work and I liked it, so be happy there is something to look at. (In fact what you see here is a special advance rendering of part of a new bike racecourse coming to this town 30 May around St Lawrence Market, final approval pending. It's the staging area.)
If it were more thematically correct, it would be Parque Calixto Garcia in the city of Holguin, pop. 200 000 +. Imagine a big rectange with a statue in the middle of a man on a pedestal and a ring of benches facing inwards. Latinos always know how to make a city park: a place for people to be in, not move through, as they are here. In Mexico you see that to the max - you can't even walk from one end to the other of some, they play out like a sort of maze. They're just not meant for transportation, dogwalking, or athletics. They're meant for socializing.
There are so many unique things about Cuba, besides just the potholes that buses do huge swerves to get around in order to preserve their ball joints. I love the advanced state of decay of almost everything, the absence of commerical propaganda, the women in mini-skirt uniforms, the bici-taxies (tons of them, sometimes all lined up w. parasols), the casual thrown-together quality of things, the uniformed airport customs workers riding home at the end of the day on their bicycles, the dignity of paisanos who really have next to nothing but are too proud to try to rook you. And the piglets boxed up on homemade racks; I even saw a mostly full-grown live cochino tied to a homemade carrier. Marvelous.
In short, I love the sights in Cuba because I am a stinking rich scumbag-person. Why else would I have such an appetite for all that decay and poverty? Because I don't live in it, obviously. When I returned I was feeling spent from my travels and I took the streetcar on its lazy route across the city to see mis padres for the first time in a while. And I was struck by what I saw and was temporarily un-blind to: slick little clothing shops, intense variety of goods for sale all over the place, well-dressed people in sunglasses and cellulars riding the public transit-thingy. All the things you take for granted living in el fabuloso rico pais de Canada.
You can't hire a horse-and-cart to take you and your oversize luggage to the airport in this town, but I did it in Holguin, Cuba for four pesos and four Canadian.
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