Thursday 1st April Set off for Cuba from Bonaire.
Our course is set straight for Cuba’s eastern tip, with a detour to get around the south-western peninsula of Haiti. 316° True. Eight hundred-odd nautical miles – or a thousand land miles - of sea lie ahead.
For the next six days, we just have each other and the fridge for our mutual entertainment. As a special bonus, there is also the “Multi Purpose Mosquito Bat”, a battery-powered Chinese-made toy from Bonaire. With it, we purge the boat of the no-see-ums we picked up there too. There is a most satisfying crackle each time one gets swatted. If you can arrange the cull over a white cloth, a tally of small black cinders builds up. Revenge for a month of itching!
The sea out in the ocean is a deep, translucent blue, transparent and saturated with colour at the same time. Sunlight sparkles down into the utterly clear depths. By tea time, there are 8,000 feet of water underneath us, filled with – who knows what. The eye is drawn down and down, all sense of perspective lost: that band of light could be six inches from the surface or sixty feet.
Little waves strike each other every now and then to produce a bigger wave uplifted like a Mohican haircut.
Lunch tomato and boat-grown beansprout salad with boat-grown basil. Tangerines. Supper Seafood risotto, tangerines.
Two hour watches during the day, three hours at night. Long enough to get a bit of proper sleep, but the person on watch doesn’t get exhausted.
Fri 2nd Spanish, diary, sew up Bonaire courtesy flag and mosquito nets. Starting to wonder if all our lovely Bonaire provisioning will be impounded by Cuban customs, as suggested by (some of) what we have read. Should we eat it all now – no, can’t get through 2lbs of cheese!
Lunch pea and lettuce salad, toast and paté, grapefruit. Supper curried mince with aubergine.
The seas get up and come forward in the night, and we get several damp slaps, one of which comes right in through the small forward port of our cabin. Curtains and my sewing bag are soaked. The kicker goes bang, in the middle of the night, while A is on watch – the rivets have come out of the mast. We have a wet and stressful hour while A lashes it on again, I am trying to keep the boat head to wind. We are ok, but trying not to put too much pressure on it, keeping the sail partially furled. Gusts up to 30 kts. Should we make for the Dominican Republic instead (500 miles away)?
Half moon, waning.
Sat 3rd A rather groggy day, we both nap several times. Abandon day watches, sleep as we need. I am reading Waterlog – a very refreshing antidote to all this salt water!. Seas calm and the swell moves slowly aft. During the day we see several ships on the radar, but none by eye, and start to realise how convoys could cross the Atlantic in WWII. There is so much empty sea out there. At night, the wind falls irritatingly low, and we wallow. Both still quite tired.
Lunch – bacon and pine nut salad, supper reheated risotto.
Change watches to be three hours starting from end of hand-over so the one off watch gets a proper sleep. It means we start and end the watches at odd times – but does that matter out here?
Sun 4th Easter Sunday. In the morning, the wind gets up, at our back, so we boom out the yankee and off we go. I sent my older nephew, Ralf, a copy of Treasure Island for his birthday, and am now trying to compose a cross-word for him based on some of the key words. A good deal more difficult than just an ordinary one – finally give in, and realise I will have to allow non-themed words if it’s going to be more than disjointed entries in a sea of black. Pouring rain, which washes off all the dust from Bonaire – everything had become rust coloured. The mosquito nets had been doubling as veils for the whole boat.
See a ship! A cruise ship - ? heading south from Florida.
1600 there is a very rhythmic thump like the bass of a sound system. Dum dum dum chicka dum dum dum. Sounds like it’s coming from land – but there is none. Could it be a submarine?
Waves now from astern, and quite large – six to ten feet – each one rising up behind Tomia and threatening to break over the stern, and then bubbling and hissing as she lifts her bottom elegantly, and they just slide under. Her key competence: floating. World class at that.
Moonlight is replaced by early morning cloudy sunlight, but the monochrome silver colour scheme stays the same.
Now we are sailing between Haiti and Jamaica, just 11 miles off Haiti at night – nothing to be seen. Not a light from a city, no neon glow from roads. None of the orange loom of settlement. Just totally dark. The only sign of life is the smell of wood smoke wafting off the shore. The most melancholy smell. I can feel the darkness reaching out for us – sitting in the cockpit thinking of loved ones to keep the cold fingers of despair at bay. And when we get further on towards the south coast of Cuba, the only sign of life for a long time will be the glare from Guantánamo.
Lunch bacon salad wraps. Supper canned frankfurters disguised with canned tomatoes and plenty of garlic, onions and tamarind sauce. Who needs radar when they can smell us coming?
Monday 5th A bad 24 hours. We turn north around the SW corner of Haiti and run smack into the Windward Passage. Wind and current bang on the nose, thump thump thump. The chain plates start leaking over the bunks again, and a lot of water is coming in – concerned about the electrical junction box which is underneath. Stuff a towel in, and arrange the awning to give as much protection as possible. The mattresses are sodden, thank heavens, they have probably soaked up most of the salt water. Salt water in the spinnaker, in a box of frusli bars, in our wheeled trolley for shopping. Disentangle it all, and move to the forepeak to stop it from getting wetter Looking forward to being in Cuba and rinsing the whole lot out with gallons of lovely fresh water and putting it all in the sun to dry. Nothing to do but carry on. Spanish irregular verbs to the rescue.
Finish Waterlog with regret and move on to A. S. Byatt’s Matisse Stories, alternating with chunks of Penguin Latin American History.
The watermaker also decides to call it a day – only doing one “thump” instead of two. Probably another O ring gone. Plenty of water in the tanks, good thing we always keep them topped up. Made bread. A cleaned the outboard. Neither very hungry, there really hasn’t been a lot to do since we left, and we nibble our way through the night watches.
Lunch bread and cheese, supper the last of the good Bonaire currant buns, with cold sausages.
Tue 6th Got round Punta Maisi, and life became a lot easier. A pleasant if slightly rolly day’s sail downwind. We start off by staying outside the 12 mile limit, then are forced in by shipping lanes and the Bahamas bank – and nobody shows any interest in us at all. Had expected coastguards bristling with sub-machine guns. Suspect, though, they know where we are.
The water system is not right – it has been playing up for some months now. The first symptom was that it would have little pressure burps when the taps were off. A found and tweaked the switch that regulates the pressure in the accumulator tank, and that cured it for a while. Then it started up again, accompanied by the pump cycling rapidly on and off while a tap was open. Tweaking the pressure switch stopped the burping, but not the cycling. We have been living with this now for some time, and no idea what the problem is, except that it is getting worse, so I decided to have a look at Nigel Calder – what a genius he is! Turns out that accumulator tanks can get “waterlogged” – the air that provides the pressure gradually gets replaced by water. The solution, quite simply is to pump it up with a bicycle pump. Who knew?
Shipping all of a sudden, tracking it on radar.
Good to be able to look out around the side of the spray-hood without getting a bucketful of water in the face.
Lovely healthy masses of coleslaw for lunch with extra raisins and almonds.
Wed 7th Preparing for landfall in Cuba. The unknown. Throw basil plant overboard in case it would be impounded, having stripped all leaves and put them to steep in olive oil. Turn in towards the bay: “Yacht approaching the coast. Identify yourself, and proceed to Bahia de Vita.” Run aground in the entrance channel. Anchor at last. Isn’t it nice when it stops. Bird song.
Thursday, 27 May 2010
Sunday, 16 May 2010
Cuba - part one
Friday 16th April 2010, day 546, 9,648 miles. 21° 04’.28 N, 075° 57’.28 W, Bahia de Vita, Cuba.
Here are some words that won’t appear in any writing about Cuba: shiny, new, crisp; freedom, debate, efficiency; luxury, choice, plenty. And some others that won’t appear either: celebrity, tawdry, yob; drunken, surly, aggressive; ill-fed, unhealthy, obese.
The second-hand bookstalls in the Plaza de Armas in Habana Vieja sell a mixture of 1950s issues of Life magazine, coffee table books of photos of crumbling colonial buildings, and writings about Revolution, here and elsewhere. We bought three books, all written just before or just after the Revolution; the thoughts of Fidel and of Che. They inspire and depress at the same time: the bright hopes, the desperate desire to root out poverty and injustice, and the fervent belief that men can be motivated by an appeal to the best in their nature rather than by offering them material goods, all read more than 50 years later amid a failing infrastructure, agriculture which has gone back to ploughing with oxen, and little old ladies begging in the squares for soap.
In many ways it is a gravity-defying miracle that Cuba continues on its Revolutionary way, 20 years after the fall of communism in the East removed the props to its economy. One has to wonder for how much longer it can stagger on, until the very last tractor falls apart for lack of spares. When Castro took over, his immediate priority was to give land to the peasants, and make sure everybody had a house and access to the basics of life. His writings at the time display a visionary belief that giving peasants the right to farm their own land and removing them from a condition of semi-slavery, would so motivate them that, together with management by a wise and benevolent government, Cuba could become wealthy and self-sustaining by focusing on agriculture alone.
It hasn’t worked, or perhaps it’s fairer to say it’s worked in parts.
If you’re comparing the outcome of economic models, I would have to say that the average Cuban we met seemed happier and healthier than many of the miserably dough-faced and pudgy representatives of capitalism we met mooching off cruise ships up and down the Caribbean. Everybody we talked to was friendly, generous and open, ready to share whatever they had with complete strangers. The passegiata (or whatever the Spanish for it is) goes on in the evenings, and people sit around gossiping and flirting in the squares as dusk falls, having just as much fun as if they were in a chic bar wearing the latest fashions.
Which just goes to show that there’s more to live than possessions, because it is hard to imagine the level of material deprivation, the near-total absence of stuff, in Cuba unless you visit. A lot of basics are simply not available; while we were there, these included butter and potatoes – for breakfast we were given mayonnaise to spread on the bread, and for lunch and supper it was always rice and beans (or occasionally beans and rice). Things like razor blades and loo paper could only be found in hard currency shops, where they stood in proud, if well-spaced out displays, with other fancy goods like cooking oil or pasta. Simple things such as moisturiser or saucepans are luxuries for most people; at a roadside stall, the going rate for more bananas than we could eat in a week was half an (unused) bar of soap, a biro and an old pot of nail varnish.
We spent one night, not quite legally, in a private house, just west of Santiago, that was not part of the government’s licensed chain of B&Bs. Built of concrete slabs, it sported three rooms, with a tiny shower room and kitchen tacked on the back. The walls were painted a chipped and faded blue, the concrete floor a certain red, which emphasised the similarity, in both style and size, to a spacious two-car garage. The son of the house was turned out of his bedroom for us, so we were free to examine the one piece of furniture in the room, a short railing across one corner, and to count up the two pairs of jeans, two pairs of shoes, four shirts and two jackets that constituted this teenager’s possessions. His six-year-old sister owned three coloured crayons, a pink plastic teacup and saucer, decorated with a large purple flower, and a shabby blonde partially-dressed doll, all stored on a shelf beneath a picture of Jesus and the Sacred Heart. But they were of course good company – perhaps better than some children we know, who have learnt to become grasping before they are eight. In the shower room, a bucket sat ready to be filled to flush the loo, and an empty shampoo bottle paraded on the single shelf, symbol of good times that had been, and a talisman that they might come again.
That’s the setting for people who earn the standard wage, of around 300 pesos a month, equivalent to £7. But not equivalent in purchasing power, when rent and electricity are minimal, education and health care are free, as are the weekly rations of rice, beans, bread and meat. Vegetables in the markets, where farmers are allowed to privately sell a portion of their crop, cost 5 pesos a kilo. Nobody starves in Cuba, nobody is homeless, but most people don’t have very much of anything.
Then there’s a parallel economy, one that runs on hard currency. Some Cubans get access to this via their jobs: a worker in an industry that has dealings with tourists might get an additional 10 Convertible Pesos (CUCs) a month, around £6, to buy themselves toiletries. But what keeps many families going, and gets DVD players and frilly china ornaments into the better-off houses, is remittances from family members who have escaped overseas.
Escaped? Yes, because this country is pure communist in its approach to personal freedom. Debate and discussion are not tolerated, let alone dissent. As an example, a person would drop their voice and check they were not being overheard before venturing the opinion that Raúl Castro is not as eloquent a speech-maker as his brother. No internet is allowed in private houses, and even those who work with computers have very limited access to the internet. The authorities aren’t particularly concerned about stopping visiting yachts smuggling goods into the country; what they worry about is that we might smuggle someone out. No Cuban apart from customs and immigration is allowed on a foreign boat – or probably a local one too – not even in broad daylight for a drink. Any GPS or radio that wasn’t wired into the boat had to be sealed up and accounted for on departure, in case it helped some Cuban make his way over the straits to Florida.
The other thing missing, in addition to butter and freedom, is advertising, at least in the way we recognise it. There is one brand, and only one brand in Cuba – the Revolution. Every community has its slogans painted in red on a blue background: “Hasta la Revolucion siempre”, “Unidad y Sacrificio”, “Remember the glorious martyrs of the revolution”, “Global Financial Crisis – the revolution lives” and, more ominously, “In a revolution there are no neutrals” or “Propaganda = Knowledge”.
These, with the constant pictures of the young, cinematically handsome, Chef, would be inspiring if it weren’t so patently obvious from everything around that the revolution, after fifty years of endeavour, has failed to give Cuba a functioning economy. Fidel’s words, from a book written in 1966, have an ironic and tragic ring to them: “In time it will become apparent that only those countries in which a revolution has taken place will be in a position to fulfil their international financial obligations.” A promise as illusory as the one he made at the same time to retire “at an early age.” (Though the subject of financial obligations isn’t one that any country can
afford to feel smug about at the minute.)
There is a terrible wistfulness about all these slogans now, reminiscent of Miss Faversham sitting in her wedding finery, feeding on the memory of youthful promise while real life decays around her.
This sense of the country being ready to crumble around its own ears makes it seem odd that the US maintains its embargo and antipathy towards Cuba. Certainly, they were made to look very silly in the Bay of Pigs, and certainly, Fidel has lost no opportunity of deriding “Yankee neo-colonial imperialism”. But it is hard to believe that the island poses any sort of threat now – or not to imagine that there are plenty of ways in which it could be a very much more dangerous neighbour if more effective operators took control.
Cuba has the feeling of being a failed harvest or two away from collapse. Everybody is housed, educated, and adequately (if monotonously) fed, but achieving that has exhausted the limits of the country’s capacity. It is criss-crossed with overgrown railway lines which used to carry what used to be a surplus of sugar-cane. Now they import sugar. Horse drawn carts have replaced buses in the country areas, oxen have replaced tractors. Fields are lying fallow. The roads are crumbling, the buildings are crumbling, the electricity network, the distribution network, are crumbling. People’s faith in the revolution is crumbling.
This is a country in serious need of support and friendship. And if they don’t get that from the US, they will get it from someone else, who the Americans will like even less than what they have right now. This period before the Castros die is perhaps the last chance to become Cuba’s new best friend, and to ease their transition to the new era that must follow, sooner or later. I don’t know who are the people who are jockeying for power when Fidel and then Raul dies, but for sure they will be sponsored by some heavyweight nasty countries, just dying to twist America’s tail. If the Americans don’t like having the Castros on their doorstep, they will like Chavez or Ahmedinajad there even less.
The biggest challenge for anybody trying to help Cuba is how to move it forward economically, without losing all the excellent things about its society: its cohesiveness; its freedom from putting a monetary value on every pleasure; the warmth and unquestioning generosity of the people.
The second instalment, rather less serious, is about our travels in Cuba.
Here are some words that won’t appear in any writing about Cuba: shiny, new, crisp; freedom, debate, efficiency; luxury, choice, plenty. And some others that won’t appear either: celebrity, tawdry, yob; drunken, surly, aggressive; ill-fed, unhealthy, obese.
The second-hand bookstalls in the Plaza de Armas in Habana Vieja sell a mixture of 1950s issues of Life magazine, coffee table books of photos of crumbling colonial buildings, and writings about Revolution, here and elsewhere. We bought three books, all written just before or just after the Revolution; the thoughts of Fidel and of Che. They inspire and depress at the same time: the bright hopes, the desperate desire to root out poverty and injustice, and the fervent belief that men can be motivated by an appeal to the best in their nature rather than by offering them material goods, all read more than 50 years later amid a failing infrastructure, agriculture which has gone back to ploughing with oxen, and little old ladies begging in the squares for soap.
In many ways it is a gravity-defying miracle that Cuba continues on its Revolutionary way, 20 years after the fall of communism in the East removed the props to its economy. One has to wonder for how much longer it can stagger on, until the very last tractor falls apart for lack of spares. When Castro took over, his immediate priority was to give land to the peasants, and make sure everybody had a house and access to the basics of life. His writings at the time display a visionary belief that giving peasants the right to farm their own land and removing them from a condition of semi-slavery, would so motivate them that, together with management by a wise and benevolent government, Cuba could become wealthy and self-sustaining by focusing on agriculture alone.
It hasn’t worked, or perhaps it’s fairer to say it’s worked in parts.
If you’re comparing the outcome of economic models, I would have to say that the average Cuban we met seemed happier and healthier than many of the miserably dough-faced and pudgy representatives of capitalism we met mooching off cruise ships up and down the Caribbean. Everybody we talked to was friendly, generous and open, ready to share whatever they had with complete strangers. The passegiata (or whatever the Spanish for it is) goes on in the evenings, and people sit around gossiping and flirting in the squares as dusk falls, having just as much fun as if they were in a chic bar wearing the latest fashions.
Which just goes to show that there’s more to live than possessions, because it is hard to imagine the level of material deprivation, the near-total absence of stuff, in Cuba unless you visit. A lot of basics are simply not available; while we were there, these included butter and potatoes – for breakfast we were given mayonnaise to spread on the bread, and for lunch and supper it was always rice and beans (or occasionally beans and rice). Things like razor blades and loo paper could only be found in hard currency shops, where they stood in proud, if well-spaced out displays, with other fancy goods like cooking oil or pasta. Simple things such as moisturiser or saucepans are luxuries for most people; at a roadside stall, the going rate for more bananas than we could eat in a week was half an (unused) bar of soap, a biro and an old pot of nail varnish.
We spent one night, not quite legally, in a private house, just west of Santiago, that was not part of the government’s licensed chain of B&Bs. Built of concrete slabs, it sported three rooms, with a tiny shower room and kitchen tacked on the back. The walls were painted a chipped and faded blue, the concrete floor a certain red, which emphasised the similarity, in both style and size, to a spacious two-car garage. The son of the house was turned out of his bedroom for us, so we were free to examine the one piece of furniture in the room, a short railing across one corner, and to count up the two pairs of jeans, two pairs of shoes, four shirts and two jackets that constituted this teenager’s possessions. His six-year-old sister owned three coloured crayons, a pink plastic teacup and saucer, decorated with a large purple flower, and a shabby blonde partially-dressed doll, all stored on a shelf beneath a picture of Jesus and the Sacred Heart. But they were of course good company – perhaps better than some children we know, who have learnt to become grasping before they are eight. In the shower room, a bucket sat ready to be filled to flush the loo, and an empty shampoo bottle paraded on the single shelf, symbol of good times that had been, and a talisman that they might come again.
That’s the setting for people who earn the standard wage, of around 300 pesos a month, equivalent to £7. But not equivalent in purchasing power, when rent and electricity are minimal, education and health care are free, as are the weekly rations of rice, beans, bread and meat. Vegetables in the markets, where farmers are allowed to privately sell a portion of their crop, cost 5 pesos a kilo. Nobody starves in Cuba, nobody is homeless, but most people don’t have very much of anything.
Then there’s a parallel economy, one that runs on hard currency. Some Cubans get access to this via their jobs: a worker in an industry that has dealings with tourists might get an additional 10 Convertible Pesos (CUCs) a month, around £6, to buy themselves toiletries. But what keeps many families going, and gets DVD players and frilly china ornaments into the better-off houses, is remittances from family members who have escaped overseas.
Escaped? Yes, because this country is pure communist in its approach to personal freedom. Debate and discussion are not tolerated, let alone dissent. As an example, a person would drop their voice and check they were not being overheard before venturing the opinion that Raúl Castro is not as eloquent a speech-maker as his brother. No internet is allowed in private houses, and even those who work with computers have very limited access to the internet. The authorities aren’t particularly concerned about stopping visiting yachts smuggling goods into the country; what they worry about is that we might smuggle someone out. No Cuban apart from customs and immigration is allowed on a foreign boat – or probably a local one too – not even in broad daylight for a drink. Any GPS or radio that wasn’t wired into the boat had to be sealed up and accounted for on departure, in case it helped some Cuban make his way over the straits to Florida.
The other thing missing, in addition to butter and freedom, is advertising, at least in the way we recognise it. There is one brand, and only one brand in Cuba – the Revolution. Every community has its slogans painted in red on a blue background: “Hasta la Revolucion siempre”, “Unidad y Sacrificio”, “Remember the glorious martyrs of the revolution”, “Global Financial Crisis – the revolution lives” and, more ominously, “In a revolution there are no neutrals” or “Propaganda = Knowledge”.
These, with the constant pictures of the young, cinematically handsome, Chef, would be inspiring if it weren’t so patently obvious from everything around that the revolution, after fifty years of endeavour, has failed to give Cuba a functioning economy. Fidel’s words, from a book written in 1966, have an ironic and tragic ring to them: “In time it will become apparent that only those countries in which a revolution has taken place will be in a position to fulfil their international financial obligations.” A promise as illusory as the one he made at the same time to retire “at an early age.” (Though the subject of financial obligations isn’t one that any country can
afford to feel smug about at the minute.)
There is a terrible wistfulness about all these slogans now, reminiscent of Miss Faversham sitting in her wedding finery, feeding on the memory of youthful promise while real life decays around her.
This sense of the country being ready to crumble around its own ears makes it seem odd that the US maintains its embargo and antipathy towards Cuba. Certainly, they were made to look very silly in the Bay of Pigs, and certainly, Fidel has lost no opportunity of deriding “Yankee neo-colonial imperialism”. But it is hard to believe that the island poses any sort of threat now – or not to imagine that there are plenty of ways in which it could be a very much more dangerous neighbour if more effective operators took control.
Cuba has the feeling of being a failed harvest or two away from collapse. Everybody is housed, educated, and adequately (if monotonously) fed, but achieving that has exhausted the limits of the country’s capacity. It is criss-crossed with overgrown railway lines which used to carry what used to be a surplus of sugar-cane. Now they import sugar. Horse drawn carts have replaced buses in the country areas, oxen have replaced tractors. Fields are lying fallow. The roads are crumbling, the buildings are crumbling, the electricity network, the distribution network, are crumbling. People’s faith in the revolution is crumbling.
This is a country in serious need of support and friendship. And if they don’t get that from the US, they will get it from someone else, who the Americans will like even less than what they have right now. This period before the Castros die is perhaps the last chance to become Cuba’s new best friend, and to ease their transition to the new era that must follow, sooner or later. I don’t know who are the people who are jockeying for power when Fidel and then Raul dies, but for sure they will be sponsored by some heavyweight nasty countries, just dying to twist America’s tail. If the Americans don’t like having the Castros on their doorstep, they will like Chavez or Ahmedinajad there even less.
The biggest challenge for anybody trying to help Cuba is how to move it forward economically, without losing all the excellent things about its society: its cohesiveness; its freedom from putting a monetary value on every pleasure; the warmth and unquestioning generosity of the people.
The second instalment, rather less serious, is about our travels in Cuba.
Wednesday, 5 May 2010
The land of the brave ...
and the home of the fully stocked supermarket! Together with internet links, so we are happy. Currently in West Palm Beach, and off to Brunswick, Georgia, tomorrow. Lots of blog to post when we get ourselves sorted out.
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