Description of the trip by Felipe Pich
The drawings are a graphic document of a trip through Cuba, from August 14 to 25, 2016. 3 days in Havana on foot and by taxi through the streets of the oldest part of the city. A lot of heat, a lot of humidity and a lot of contact with the people who were asking us at every step. We were surprised by the presence of so many layered circumstances from the past: Indigenous Cuba, American conquest and colonization, Ganster's empire, Fidel and Che's revolution, and the subsequent Soviet pressure. Until arriving at the present moment where everything seems to float in the air.
We went up the van to Viñales and the tobacco area, a beautiful trip back in time, when the exuberant nature of Cuba, barely altered by buildings and civilization, welcomed the indigenous populations in immense humid grottoes and the penetrant jungle, as a paradise. There are now extensive plantations of quality tobacco leaf there, and very diverse maturations that serve the complex elaboration of the local tobacco industry. There, we all smoked a cigar and it could not be otherwise.
From there we continued to the east through the main road that is the central highway. This vast road runs through the island from end to end and forms the backbone of its communications and economic activity. Any displacement in Cuba is very complicated due to the lack of reliable public transportation and its very precarious road network. The central highway is a line of asphalt that crosses the jungle and where crowds of individuals who cross, hitchhike, sell fruit or ride horses.
That is how we arrived in Santa Clara, an illustrated city on the north coast. There are hardly any tourists here. The central mall, with its plaza, its garito raised by the orchestra and the well-defined facades in its perimeter of classic construction, remind you of so many other cities of the Caribbean. Here we heard the few dissident demonstrations against the established order for the first time, wrapped with the rhythm of music.
In Santa Clara the memory of Che Guevara survives intensely. There is his mausoleum, a legendary monument of exaltation of his person. Also there, the decisive skirmish of the revolutionaries of Fidel Castro is recalled, who managed to retain an armored train belonging to the official army, a fact which changed the course of the events.
We spent a whole day touring the beaches of Cayo Santa Maria, an entire day under the sun and in the water. In those beaches the spectacle of the reflections of the waves and the clouds always drawing changing forms made us fantasize with the presence of some silhouettes of pirates.
Towards Trinidad we descended through impossible roads to the south coast of the island crossing the steep slopes of the sierra maestra and then crossing the leafy valleys that flow into the Caribbean Sea. In those valleys the old sugar plantations that employed thousands of braceros slaves during the XVIII and IX centuries for the cultivation and the harvesting of the sugar cane, can still be visited. Some ferocious characters founded rich family sagas in the commerce and the dominion of so many tragedies. This is the place called Valle de los Ingenios, a torrid and terrible landscape.
Trinidad is a charming and compact city. A network of orthogonal streets with well-ordered houses that do, however, create plazas and small interstices of extraordinary urban quality. In Trinidad one perhaps feels music and art more intensely than anywhere else on the island. There stayed Alexander Humboldt for some time during his tour through Central America as well. After the harsh sun of the afternoon hours, the city is enhanced at night by the night and hundreds of people who were hidden during the day.
Bordering the south coast we arrive to Cienfuegos and its deepest bay after crossing a long stretch of the south coast. There we live the memory of the bay of pigs on Jiron beach, where a rather shabby museum recalls the attempted invasion of Ciba by the United States,taken by Che Guevara. That event, which kept the world population in vilo for 3 days, finally decanted revolutionary Cuba in the arms of the Soviet Union and what had until then been a monument of sentimental liberation ended in a treaty of ideological adherence to the communist cause.
Back in Havana for one night we followed the trail of the "chic" tuburbios that Hemingway frequented so much, that memory is worth a dinner in the Floridita accompanied by Daiquiris.
The drawings that we present are the graphical report of our route surely allow to read many things impossible to describe otherwise. They are drawings made directly in the place, in a notebook 3x15 centimeters, of satin paper. The instruments are synthetic markers of pints and very different provenances. There is also a ballpoint pen and a soft-tip graphite pencil. The rubber was never used.
