Ola! It's cola!

February 18, 2008

VINALES - Don't let me commit myself to anything too positive but I think we've cracked a number of problems. Specifically, money and food.

I said a while back that we were having trouble buying the small everyday things of a bike-rider's life because they were available only in local money. Tourists, on the other hand, got only international money. Well, today we called at the bank. There aren't many banks in Cuba and that too can be a problem because there are virtually no cash dispensers either. Nor does anybody but perhaps the big swanky coastal hotels take credit cards. You come to Cuba, therefore, with a bank card you can use just once a week and with heaps of money hidden all over your bags, your bike and your pockets.

Neither wanting to carry too much cash nor to break into it until we had to, we took out our ATM card and walked to the bank. There was, as usual, no ATM machine so we prepared to take it to the counter. Cuban banks are computerised but they are not fast. Their very scarcity means they are always busy. From that has developed two natty systems. The first is the Cuban "cola", the local word for a queue. When you walk into anywhere with a heap of people all waiting their turn, and when you can't work out where the end of the line is, you simply shout "Ultimo?". The last person to join the mob will then raise his hand. Everybody calls "ultimo?" at the entrance and so, while nobody knows the order of the queue, everybody knows who's immediately in front of him. In that way you can wander off to look at the leaflets or chat with a friend or take a seat somewhere, because all you have to do is see when your "ultimo" is being served. When he is, you're next.

There may even be a queue supervisor. He will be a man, always a man, dressed like a security guard and he will memorise everyone who comes through the door and he will send each to the right counter in turn. If there are too many for his memory, he just shuts the street door and everyone else waits outside having reverted to the "ultimo" system for being allowed in.

And so we took our card and we took a passport, because nothing happens in Cuba without a passport, and we took a note of the address of the place we are staying at because sometimes that's asked for as well, and eventually we reached the counter and we smiled and proffered the bank card and asked for pesos. The clerk counted out what we were due and pushed it beneath her grill along with a printed account of the transaction. At the bottom of the account was a fee roughly equal to the annual loss on the Cuban sugar harvest.

"What's that?", Steph asked, more alert to these things than I am.

"Commission," the clerk answered.

Powerless but now also a little money-less, Steph winced. It took a while to find that money exchanges done with a bank card, of any currency, are converted first to US dollars and then to pesos. The peso is tied to the US dollar but, because Havana doesn't want to get back to the state of the dollar being the de facto currency in Cuba, all dollar conversions are taxed 10 per cent. The outcome is that you don't see dollars in Cuba any more and the only time you hear the name is when you're asked to give someone one, "dollar" still being the popular Cuban name for the convertible peso.

It's a mural by a group of Germans rather than Cubans but no doubt this detail of the US dollar screwing the world meets approval in Havana

Once we had dried our eyes from weeping, Steph pushed back a small note and asked for "moneda nacional", the local currency. Certainly, the clerk said, but not here. She waved her hands to demonstrate going out of the bank, down the road and then into a further money-changing office called a cambio. There, having gone once more through the lockout and the ultimo system, we managed to change five international pesos into a fistful of far grubbier local pesos and the aluminium-like coins that go with them.

Five pesos sounds nothing. In fact it isn't very much at all. But convert it into local money and it goes a long way. You now have limited access to the prices that Cubans themselves pay. Five pesos is the most you can change at a time but I suppose Havana gambles that few people would have the patience to go round and round the ultimo business to get much more.

Well, hallelujah! Cuba has now taken on an altogether different tone. We can eat! We can go into flyblown pizza bars. We can buy bananas by the roadside. We can buy great bags of tasteless but doubtless energy-giving biscuits of the sort you never see in the main shops. And we have decided that whenever we can, we will get either the people we're staying with, or people we meet along the road, to make us bread rolls for the middle of the day.

With local money we can buy bananas fresh off the tree...

The first man to be appointed sandwich-maker to the wandering tourist was Henry. I don't suppose that was his actual name but that's what he said it was and his command of English, and his wish to employ it in an endless stream, suggested that he had grown used to anglicising his name for foreigners.

Henry is a man in maybe his late forties but looking younger, a man who looks like the Cuban equivalent of the equally talkative British athlete of a decade or so ago, Daley Thompson..

"For you," he said, as though serving bike-riders was the greatest honour he could have, "I will open my stall an hour early. When you want your sandwiches? You say. I'll be here."

...or cakes from a woman in her doorway...

We said, and he was there. Or eventually he was there. Fearing he wouldn't keep his word, when we found his shack at the top of a short flight of concrete steps all closed up, we went off to one of those many Cuban food places that from the outside, indeed from the inside, appears to have nothing in at all. It takes a while to get over ingrained Western capitalist culture that insists that shops and other places make themselves as attractive and as glitzy as possible to haul in passers-by. In Cuba it is different: if it looks like a shop then it must be a shop and a shop doesn't need a lot of fancy artifice to make it even more of a shop. If it says it's a food shop, it will cook food. The food will be out the back, because that's where the kitchen is. Why have it in the front when either, if it is cooked, it will go stale, or if it is uncooked, someone will have to pick it up and carry it into the kitchen where it should have been in the first place?

...or drinks through a balding man's window...

It takes a while to get the hang of that, and then you feel guilty because the logic is irreproachable.

When you walk into one of these places, you're greeted not with unfriendliness but with a slight reserve. There must be many tourists, of course, who know they can change their money, but then again there are many fewer independent travellers in Cuba than those who flop into giant hotels on the coast and pad daily to the beach. Divide the independents by the number of shops and you can see that many shops can go days or even weeks without seeing a foreigner. When they do see one, the first thought is probably that they'll have to be shooed away for not having the right currency. When that doesn't need to happen, and when it turns out that you're just hungry and you're happy to chat and make friends as much as your language will let you, then you're welcomed as though you'd been shopping there for years.

...or even a birdcage made for us on the spot. Although I don't suppose we actually shall.

From there, then, we got four thin rolls just in case Henry didn't turn up. We had them hidden away by the time we reached Henry's stand again. We were just cursing his broken word when he shouted - there is no other word for Henry's conversations - the universal Cuban greeting of "My frenns..." from two metres behind my ear. Henry had been circling the street looking for us just as we had been walking it and looking for him.

"You have a million dollars?" he asked as he unlocked his cabin and began buttering bread and demanding we drink a litre of mango juice for which he insisted we didn't have to pay. I had just asked him what would happen in Cuba when Fidel retired, as he was likely to do in another week or so at the annual presidential conference. "If you have a million dollars, I can answer your question. If you haven't, I'll tell you the truth anyway, which is that I don't know. Nobody knows.

"Truthfully, if I knew, I would tell you. But nobody knows."

He was altogether more confident on the issue of our route to Vinales, which he pronounced Binny-ah-lay. Cubans have no truck with the letter S on the end of a word, meaning they count "uno, do, tré..." The city of Cienfuegos becomes Sin-fwayo, since Cubans don't have much confidence in the letter G either. And when they warm to their dialect, they just abandon last letters completely, so that Trinidad, the island's most beautiful town, becomes "Trinny-da".

Henry's view of our route to "Binny-ah-lay" was that it was crazy. Loco. His view was that if there was a flat way and a hilly way, then...

We on the other hand wanted to ride up through a steep national park, on a road known for its crumbling surface but which would take us not only through promised magnificent scenery at the price of no traffic but also close to where Fidel would have holed up had the Americans invaded at the time of the Missile Crisis and also to the cave where Che Guevara actually did live for a month.

"You're crazy," Henry insisted, in a tone of "Nobody goes that way and lives."

"You know what it's like, that road?" He shot his hand into the air over and over to indicate repeated hills of an impressive steepness. "How long you planning to stay in Vinales? You'll need a week to recover. And the road. All holes. Skinny tyres like yours..."

We said we knew about rough roads. Touring only gets really interesting when the roads get bad. He tried again to send us out of town a different way, along the rest of the flat main highway that we'd used for much of the ride into town, then gave up.

"Loco!" he said good-naturedly with a tap on the side of his head. "But look, if you insist, give me your map. I'll show you where you ought to go and not where the cyclists always go." And with a finger still smeary from the butter that didn't make it to our rolls, he traced a line along a thin white road on the map.

"My frenns, you take this road. When you get to a saw mill, go left. There's no sign but you go left. The other cyclists they go on further and then they go left on the bigger road. But that's hilly and there's fast traffic. My frenns, you go this way and the surface isn't so good but the road is quiet and the scenery is wonderful and you'll be riding in a rock canyon all the way to Vinales."

We said that this time we'd take his advice. And with his buns in our bag along with those we'd bought half an hour earlier, we set off. With a song in our hearts for the first time since we'd been in Cuba.

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