Casa Azul Viñales
The concept of alone time is unknown in Cuba. Reared like battery hens in their crowded homes, eremophobia - a fear of solitude - is a real thing. Give the average Cuban a few moments of silence and they’re likely to begin shouting at a wall or find a saucepan to bang on the ground. Anything to wrestle the silence out of the moment. If you ever come across a silent Cuban the coroner can’t be far away.
Blast the TV in one room [1] and by all means crank up the reggaeton in another; how about allow the local children to scream on the front porch at the same time? Cubans like noise.
If modern vehicles are ever introduced en masse I’m convinced the locals will deliberately drill holes in the exhausts because the otherwise silent drive would be insufferable. [2]
A rare exception to this appeared to be two farm houses - one pink, the other blue - which we could see from our vantage point of a rickety veranda at Restaurante Mirador “Balcón del Valle”.[3] Located on the hills of the southern side of Viñales Valley, a few hundred metres from our casa particular, we were eating breakfast at the restaurant prior to commencing a day of hiking through the valley. From this distance of a few kilometres they stood like beacons of calm in an island of throbbing reaggaeton beats and thundering classic cars.
TRACK TO CASA AZUL: Dwarfed by the huge mogote behind them, a group of tourists take the easy option of horseback, rather than hiking the unforgiving valley. It’s easy to tell a tourist from a true vaquero because the tourists always wear shorts and sandals to ride a horse and generally suffer from saddle rash as a consequence.
We all knew we wanted to take a closer look at them once we were down there, but for Ari and I - me, raised on the age-old English sensibility of minding one’s own business; Ari, a Yanqui raised on guns and, therefore, expecting the inhabitants of a rural hut to be armed to their teeth - this would entail no more than walking past at a respectful/safe distance. Lafonda, however, had different ideas. A native of these shores and raised in the aforementioned conditions, a passing glimpse of the rows of yucca in the front field wasn’t enough. Before we could stop her she was walking up the pathway to the blue house as though she always called around first thing in the morning.
As Ari and I prepared to flee across the valley - wincing at the inevitable sting of buckshot peppering our bare legs - a short blond woman with piercing blue eyes appeared on the porch. We were too far away to hear what Lafonda said but within 10 seconds she was waving us up the pathway.
MI CASA ES TU CASA: Making himself at home, the veguero neighbour tilts his chair back perilously on two legs. I often do the same and look as cool - if not cooler - even though I chose to chomp on a healthy carrot rather than a cheroot. It was noticing the mud on the neighbour’s boots which made me realise here was a house I need not worry about making a mess in.
By the time we arrived at the open door Lafonda had already entered and was being given a tour of the home. It was a small house - essentially a hut - built on a concrete slab, with only sparse furnishings. The front door opened into the living room, no more than 4 metres squared, which had two rocking chairs and three normal chairs set in a semicircle. A moustachioed young man sat immediately to our right watching a small TV - the volume set to eleven. He wore an unbuttoned denim shirt and muddy trousers and boots, and chomped on a cheroot as he watched a boxing match on grainy reception. From underneath his sweat-stained broad-rimmed hat he acknowledged us gruffly in the classic Cuban-male way - welcoming but unbothered by the intrusion. He was a neighbour - a veguero from the next farmhouse along - come to watch the Olympic Games.
A doorway midway down the right-hand side of the living room led to two small bedrooms with hammocks stretched out. Inside was light and airy and painted in the same aquamarine colour as the outside. Towards the back was a serving hatch which led into the kitchen. Beyond the kitchen, through an open door, led to a small orchard, where amongst the mango trees roamed chickens and goats.
It had rustic charm by the bucketload. Even better, it was the kind of place you didn’t even have to feign manners by asking if one should leave shoes on or off.
The blond woman welcomed us in and gave us the tour which she’d just given Lafonda. Isabel lived in this hut with her husband - who was in some other town - and father, Alberto. She’d lived here all her life. They lived off the land, growing mostly yucca and, out the back, rearing pigs. They had a small plantation of coffee as well as sugarcane too, and before long Ari and I were forcibly seated in the rocking chairs and waited on by Isabel: each of us given a cafe cubano and a freshly scalped coconut. With the front door wide open to allow the home to aerate we could rock back and forth contentedly, sipping on the sweet coconut water and imagining we were dons of the valley.
GAME, SET, MACHETE: Despite treating the house like his own, the veguero was a decent chap. Here he is decapitating a coconut with the same machete he would later - probably - use to slice the throat open of the corralled pig.
Isabel and her father had it made. Sure, they may have looked a little weather-worn, and their friendliness belied an underlying resignation that life, being a tough old bitch, was hard in these parts. There was little money to be made in growing yucca, or a small yield of coffee. Existence here was mostly about self-sustenance. Out the back they had corralled a pig into a small pen made of wooden stakes driven into the dry red dirt next to a mango tree - in a few more weeks it would be fat enough to slaughter. This was life in the valley. But here they were with their own metaphorical alfalfa patch, the kind Lenny and George could only dream of, in the midst of one of Cuba’s most stunning vistas. Had they been born in Havana or Santiago de Cuba the family home may have been a small apartment squashed in with seven other families. Out here in the - albeit, sweltering - countryside they had space to roam, to grow veggies and to rear animals. I intimated as much to them, stopping short of chastising Isabel for appearing ungrateful for her lot.
“Sure,” I said, “I’ve travelled and become culturally proficient in several countries around the world, but you are rich in many other ways. I envy you.”
Isabel nodded sadly in agreement. Or she would have had she understood English.
ON FOOT: Forgoing the comfort of horseback, here I am in full “action man” mode, scaling a barbed wire fence and diving into 6-metre high grass. Note the length of my shorts here which ride up well above mid-thigh: though often the sign of a nonce, in this case I wore them to show to the world that I was not afraid of a few scratches. It certainly made Isabel’s neighbour look at me with a whole new light (i.e., respect).
By now Lafonda had gone out the back to talk to Alberto, while Isabel busied herself with a basketful of washing, food preparation and mopping the floor. [4] Ari and I were left rocking back and forth in the living room, watching the boxing with the neighbour, whose giant dog had now bounded in, filling the room. I asked if they had another coconut and the neighbour stood up. For the first time I noticed the well-used machete swinging from his left side. I followed him to the kitchen where he took a green coconut from a pile and then went outside where he lopped the top off the handed it to me.
When Lafonda returned with Alberto they were brandishing three giant stalks of sugar cane which would be our final snack at casa azul. The least we could do was compensate our hosts for their generosity, but how does one decide on an appropriate amount without offending? On the one hand they had supplied us with coffee, coconut water, and sugar cane, as well as shelter from the scorching sun. They had welcomed us in to their home. On the other hand, to treat them as charity would have been insulting. And besides, when you consider their home was actually of a higher standard than 99% of backpacker hostels around the world, it was apparent Isabel and Alberto were living the good life. By now, after one hour in their company we felt like old friends, and does one pay friends for the pleasure of their company and food? It was a point Ari made quite veraciously. In the end, however, we reasoned with him that it was only right to pay them something.
We left Isabel and Alberto waving to us from the porch as we recommenced our hike through the valley. We’d experienced a rare moment of tranquillity while savouring classic Cuban hospitality. In a few days we’d be back to the hustle and bustle of Havana, a life - thankfully - Isabel and Alberto would never need suffer.
A-MAIZE-ING: No sooner had we left the casa azul when we came across a field of maize which Isabel and her father had not told us about. Sure, we’d had coconut, coffee and sugar cane, yet it would only have taken another 10 minutes to boil some water and quickly blanch an ear of corn for us each. Here you can see Lafonda moments before she dated inside to take, rightfully, a few of the best husks for our dinner later.
Guaranteed to be a telenovela.
To me the title of Colombian writer Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s novel One Hundred Years of Solitude (Cien Años de Solidad) has only positive connotations, whereas, for Latinos in general, I imagine it reads like a form of punishment.
From the terrace of Casa Anita we gazed over the mist-covered views of Viñales Valley each morning while dining on Anita’s breakfast of huevos y frutas. Anita was short portly woman with sunburned cheeks which assisted when she encouraged us - passively aggressively - to eat all our meals with her. We didn’t, of course. In fact, the first two days we committed only to the breakfast. Less understanding visitors to Cuba frequently complain of the pushiness of the locals, especially in their casa particulares. When one understands that these operators have to pay the Cuban government a fee for the privilege of running a casa regardless of whether they’ve had any guests, their motives become clear. The government has no way of monitoring whether the owners have sold any food and so the profit the likes of Anita make on food goes straight into her pocket.
It makes me mad that she had to do all those chores, especially with the limp and beginnings of stooped back. To think the neighbour just sat there watching the boxing!