Sunday was suppose to be our decompression day to do some sightseeing and get ready to travel to projects on Monday (today). The mess with the airlines killed that plan so we were up early to get started. We travelled about an hour or so east of Havana to a town call Perico.
The purpose of going to Perico was to visit a project that Catholic Relief Services supports through Caritas Cubana. The project is to facilitate a gathering of elderly people who socialize, play games, get some food and establish a social connection outside of their otherwise desperate lives. The elderly are particularly vulnerable in Cuba. The get a pension of about $3-4 a month and they cannot survive on that. Of course, their job opportunities are zero so if they are not getting support from family outside of Cuba they are in a situation of desperation. Here’s a picture of the group when we arrived:
The group makes handicrafts for sale. Here is the table where they were displayed:
They insisted that we take whatever we wanted and they did not want to charge us.
There were some introductions and some short speeches. These people get virtually “no” visitors so this was a special day for them. After awhile the program turns to music. There are three old guys that call themselves something like “Traditionale Perico”. There is one guy on the guitar, one on the bongos and a singer. Here is a picture:
The woman on the far right of the picture is someone with a beautiful voice who sings in church but has never practiced or performed with these guys before.
Well, the scene starts to build. Everybody is having a great time. People are singing along. People are dancing. People are requesting songs. The snowball is rolling, out of control, down the mountain. One old disabled black lady with a cane gets up and starts shaking it. I mean really shaking it. We’re getting concerned because even if she survives today, tomorrow is going to hurt.
I ask them to perform the song “Perfidia”. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfidia Being the musicians that they are, they performed it. The female singer put her heart and soul into. As she came to the end she pulled me up and looked me straight in the eye and sang to my soul. “My Heart Cry’s Out Perfidia.”
Eventually, after some bad food, a lot of good times and an amazing experience it was time to go. Here is a picture of some of the participants leaving for their homes:
From there we went to see the other side of Cuba which is Veradero. Veradero is the beach area on the north shore of Cuba that is there only to attract tourists. Of course, most of them these days are from Canada or Europe. Veradero has the only golf course that survived the revolution. The place is magnificent. The centerpiece is the Xanadu mansion which was built by the DuPont’s. http://www.varaderogolfclub.com/en/xanadu.asp Yes, I asked the same question. Isn’t Xanadu a Hearst term? Not in this case. The DuPont’s used it.
Here is a picture of the beach:
So this is communism, huh? BTW, that’s not the Dupont mansion, this is:
So we travel back to Havana. Not much traffic because there are so few cars. Yet, there was one particularly interesting thing of note. We were traveling along a highway on the north coast. Along the way there were a number of oil drilling rigs. Near these rigs were camps for the workers. The interesting part; the rigs all had two prominent flags on them. One flag was Cuban, the other flag was Chinese. So, let me understand this, we are embargoing this country that is 90 miles off our shore, yet the country that is the biggest threat to us is in partnership with them drilling for oil. What’s wrong with this picture?
Back to Havana for dinner. More to learn tomorrow.