The Cuban Will Tell You the Truth. Or Not (Part I)

Taxi driver is not a profession, it is a state of mind – you cannot imagine how true these words are Cuba, where the vast majority of drivers drive American cars from the 50s that are somehow still alive.

Broken window crank? No problem. Pull hard enough and you won't be afraid of any stuffiness. Disturbing sounds coming from under the hood? Who cares! A cloud of smoke rising from the exhaust pipe? The most important thing is that the radio works, the speakers are good, and Gente de Zona recorded a song with Iglesias.

American, '48, '56… This is how any comment about Cuban taxi drivers should begin (in the context of their cars, of course, not their year of birth). It would be useful to include a detailed description of the tools they use to work – old-school cars that would be worth a fortune in Europe, but here in Cuba are an inseparable part of the landscape.

Cuba Autentica - in the homes of Cubans

CUBA - Havana, Vinales, Cienfuegos, Trinidad, Cayo Santa Maria
Hot rhythms of salsa and rumba, delightful Caribbean beaches, romanticism and decadence of Havana, energetic music and extremely favorable weather. The last bastion of communism in a tropical edition invites you to its hot thresholds!

Everyone probably knows this atmospheric image. Literature and film use it willingly, and tourists visiting the Caribbean queen of islands are all the more eager to spread it on social media. However, one important element escapes the viewer in the vastness of colorful, similar snapshots, which show vintage American cars, colonial tenement houses in decline, a table in a decadent pub, and on it a glass of rum, a large cigar and Cuban coffee as black as tar... We are talking about a person.

Obvious? Sure, someone has to drive Cuban cars, what's more - that someone talks and often has a lot to say. And what if I told you that I learned the most about Cuba not from tourist guides, not from scientific books, not from Cuban television, which I watched avidly late at night in my hotel room, not from guides showing me around Havana, but... from taxi drivers?

Enrique Iglesias breaks the ice

Do you know this song? It's Gente de Zona with Enrique Iglesias. Cuban band! – the taxi driver who picked me up at the airport is bursting with pride, but he needed an impulse to make such charming boasts. He wasn’t so keen on talking from the start. I had to encourage him to do so, which in Cuba is easiest to do through music and at least a basic knowledge of Spanish. Luckily, I didn’t have to sing, nor dance – one short sentence was enough: I really like this song. They are playing it here in Poland now.

One innocent piece of music provided me with several pages of notes on my first evening in Cuba! I didn't even leave the hotel, because I arrived in Havana after 23.00 p.m., I only made it from the arrivals hall to the taxi and from the taxi to the hotel reception, and yet, thanks to complimenting a universally known song, I learned more about Cuba than during a few dozen minutes of a guided tour of any museum. A conversation lasting half an hour was like three hundred pages of a guidebook, although not a single word was said about palm trees, beaches, cigars and rum.

A Journey Through My Notebook

I never go on any trip without a notebook, preferably one with an inspiring, travel cover, and there is no shortage of such wonders on the market. And this time – on the most important trip of my life so far (and solo at that!) I took a beautiful notebook and wrote in it meticulously every evening of my stay in Cuba, and also on the fly during sightseeing, when an unexpected reflection, an idea for an article or simply the need to write down some burning observation appeared in my head.

Thanks to the diligent notes I made in the strangest places and positions, I can recall many, even the smallest details, and my notebook is a real treasure trove of knowledge about Cuba as seen by its locals, ordinary taxi drivers. Many of those I met on the island were educated, many opened up to me and told me their life stories, there were also those who simply cheated me to earn a few more dollars – that's Cuban reality, a typical landscape of the Queen of the Caribbean, a kaleidoscope of human characters.

Che Guevara rhymes with Santa Clara

Jose, that was the name of the taxi driver who took me from the airport in Havana to the hotel, turned out to be a nice elderly gentleman, with whom I spoke as if to a long-time acquaintance, despite obvious cultural and ideological differences. When the awkward silence was broken by my remark about Iglesias's song, Jose started talking in earnest. When another song rang out from the radio - this time about Che Guevara, not the first and not the last during this short ride, the taxi driver began to tell me about this hero of the Cuban revolution and the fight for the unification of Latin America, idealized to the limits of possibility. The subject of the famous Argentine was to come up several more times during my conversations with local residents.

In Varadero, a Cuban resort crammed with tourists, at a dinner in one of the hotels organized for employees of travel agencies, I heard a story that became for me the quintessence of the Che Guevara legend, because it exists in Cuba without the slightest doubt. This legend has grown here to the point of absurdity, which probably only outsiders can see. Cuban representatives of the hotel told me a certain situation, which supposedly took place at the time when revolutionaries led by Fidel Castro and Che Guevara were hiding in the forests of Sierra Maestra, from where they conducted guerrilla operations against the dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista.

Well, according to the accounts of two hotel employees, Ernesto Guevara had often shown extraordinary strength of character and restraint at that time. As one can imagine, the guerrillas suffered in the Sierra Maestra mountains, they lacked food and water. One day, one of the revolutionaries responsible for preparing food cooked a soup in a large pot, which contained everything that was swallowable – the taste of this meal could not be admired, of course. Che Guevara, as a doctor and one of the leading guerrillas, received at that time from his companions a dish that was a real luxury in the current conditions – chicken rice, or rice with chicken. The eyes of the Cubans telling me this story sparkled in the dim light of the hotel restaurant, and I waited in disbelief for the rest of the story.

Self-drive in Cuba

CUBA - Havana, Viñales, Bay of Pigs, Cienfuegos, Trinidad, Varadero
A trip to Cuba is a journey into a world that is irrevocably fading away before our eyes.

What did Che Guevara do when his companions honored him in such a magnificent way by preparing a luxurious meal for him? Ernesto, as bearded as any of bearded, took his portion of still steaming chicken with rice and threw the entire contents of his plate into a common cauldron, where a soup as thin as borscht, not particularly nutritious, was boiling for the rest of the guerrillas. He did not want to put himself above other revolutionaries fighting for the cause of the Cuban nation, even at the cost of his own comfort and feeling of satiety, he considered himself their equal – this is how the Cubans I spoke to summed up this legend. They spoke with such conviction that open doubt in the credibility of this episode would be deeply out of place. They did not see the absurdity in this story, they did not feel the idealization to which the Argentine figure was subjected. In retrospect, I looked at the stories about Guevara as legends that have grown up around Alexander the Great in our cultural circle. It is a pity that while the situations from the biography of the leader, who lived before our era, are not easy to investigate and prove, much more can be said about the life of Guevara, one of the most controversial revolutionaries of the 20th century. Unfortunately, not in Cuba.

But let's get back to the taxi driver who sang me a revolutionary song of praise to Che Guevara. We are waiting for the wedding, with the first snow, to plant the flag, in the light of your sonrisa – the words of one of the most popular songs dedicated to the Cuban revolution rang out in the taxi, Forever, in which the city of Santa Clara is an important element, where one of the key battles was fought during the Cuban revolution. Isn't it ironic that Santa Clara rhymes with Che Guevara?! That's ready-made material for propaganda songs!

Not a single word was said about Fidel. This was characteristic of all my conversations with Cubans. They talked about Che Guevara even when not asked, and in their monologues Fidel seemed to not exist. Is this a manifestation of fear, or perhaps a habit of keeping quiet about certain topics, so as not to say too much in inappropriate company? It comes to the same thing, and yet – it deeply puzzles and embarrasses the interlocutor, who is still trying to feel where the limit of what can be asked is without depriving the Cubans of a minimum of comfort during the conversation.

Too short pants and branded tracksuits 

The first taxi driver I met in Cuba surprised me with a few more stories and tips about traveling around the island. I learned that the girl tan bonita como here (at this point my face turned raspberry) can't feel safe in Cuba, whose inhabitants are true lovers of the fair sex, but this trait probably applies to all Latinos. More surprising was the request I heard a moment later.

Jose asked forI was forced to leave my clothes in Cuba, as long as I had taken things that I didn't particularly care about and could get rid of without regret. He explained to me that there was a shortage of everything on the island, including clothes, and told me about children and teenagers who wore pants that were too short because they quickly outgrew the clothes they had acquired with difficulty. Cubans whose relatives were doing well abroad, or more precisely, in USA, especially in Miami, where the number of residents of Cuban origin is growing year by year. In the end, I didn't leave my clothes with anyone, but I did leave painkillers, basic medicines and cosmetics.

Love is blind

The culmination of my several-dozen-minute-long chat with the aging taxi driver, the absolutely charming Jose with distinctly sad eyes, was a comment about old cars. Looking out the taxi window, I marveled at the old-timers approaching from the other direction, but my compliments did not go down well with the driver. The fact is that the taxi in which Jose took me to the hotel was new, I don't remember what brand, but it was definitely manufactured after 2000 (which was only because the car most likely belonged to a travel agency, not to a Cuban). How outraged he was by my delight and compliment about the charm that old-school taxis give to the streets of Havana!

These are just touristic ideas that only old, falling apart cars are allowed to drive around Cuba! I had upset Jose with such an innocent comment, and in return I had to listen to a long sermon from which it was clear that there were many new cars on the island – here followed a tirade of almost breathless foreign car brands (statistics, however, tell a different story – Cubans have been able to buy cars quite freely for some time now, but they simply cannot afford them).

Decadent Havana and paradise Cayo Santa Maria

CUBA - Havana, Cayo Santa Maria
Would you like to travel to a country that lives for music, and whose streets are filled with the sounds of salsa and rumba from dusk until dawn?

What could I add? The Cuban's sincere indignation and speech in defense of the wounded Cuban pride sealed the reflection that was to accompany me until the end of my life. travel around Cuba. Cubans love their country blindly and uncritically – this is what the revolution, along with its propaganda and the myth of Che Guevara, taught them. The question arises whether this love is sincere or is it merely the result of self-deception and creating an artificial image for the needs of foreign tourists? Do Cubans really believe deep down that in Cuba there are… no mosquitoes? But more about that – in the second part of my report!

CDN

The second part of the report is coming soon – I invite you on another journey through the monologues of Cuban taxi drivers, during which it will turn out that there are no mosquitoes in Cuba, Cubans practically do not get sick, and in addition, they are all educated, and what is more – really happy, certainly more than those who decided to leave the island and live in the States.

PS To get into the mood of a ride in a rickety Cuban taxi, I recommend the following soundtrack to the report: Hasta siempre, Buena Vista Social Club. This is the song the taxi driver who picked me up at the airport in Havana sang. Listen to it, and if you don't know Spanish - be sure to read the translation!