February 18, 2008
Pictures of Lili
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TRINIDAD - It was sad last night. When we got back to the house in which we were staying, two women were watching a DVD on a computer. They were Lili, a woman in her thirties with big, lively brown eyes, and her mother. They were watching pictures sent from Florida by Lili's son, who now lived there and had just met a girl who seemed likely to be permanent. The mother made clucking noises and Lili was damp-eyed.
Both Lili and her husband had been married before. The young man who had moved to America while it was still allowed was from Lili's first marriage. She was moist-eyed because she knew there was little chance of seeing her son again. She didn't have the right to leave Cuba and I'm not sure whether the son would or could return. Her husband, on the other hand, was not only Cuban but Spanish, because he had had a Spanish father. The stepfather could therefore see his stepson but the same right didn't extend to mother and child.
I left them to watch their pictures, the usual shots of family life with faces pulled at the camera, pictures that suddenly whirled or jumped. And I felt sad for everyone concerned.
Lili had warned us that it was going to be cold in the morning. "Muy fria," she had said.
"How cold is that? Quatro, cinco?" She smiled but her huge brown eyes said: "Don't be so ridiculous... We're in the Tropics, silly." Out loud she said: "About 15." We both laughed. In parts of northern Europe, "about 15" is when you start thinking about going to the beach one day soon. In Cuba, it is cold. Lili had never known cold any more than had the guardian of Che Guevara's cave.
In fact it turned out as pleasant a morning as any other, and if there were a few isolated clouds, then they were welcome. The local bike club must have thought so, too, because they appeared on the road ahead of us as we rode through the traffic out of Cienfuegos, looking over their shoulders and waving to us. They rode, this time without the escort and the mechanic with spare wheels that other groups had had, little faster than we were. We felt impressed by our fitness - until we realised they were dawdling because they were waiting. A moment later, in a starling-like twitter of high voices, a group of young boys rode up beside and past us, their Bambi-like legs dangling below slender bodies. Their low gears made them look like animated spiders. They smiled and said hi as they passed and there was the usual mutual examination of bikes. Theirs generally but not always had alloy frames but always they had the telltale signs of economy of equipment, with looping brake cables and down-tube gear levers.
"How many kilometres today?" I asked.
"Fifty," said a bright-eyed, coffee-skinned boy of about 14. He looked at my bike and took his own turn to ask a question. "How many gears?" He tapped my left brake hood.
"Nine," I answered. "Y tres aqui." I pointed to the triple chainset. He looked impressed.
"Campagnolo?"
"Si."
His look suggested that Cuban cyclists didn't see a lot of Campagnolo. In fact, that equipment was hard to come by. The training group which had ridden repeatedly up and down the hill on our first full day on the road were all nicely kitted out but they were the exception. It must take a lot of sacrifice and effort to keep a decent bike on the road.
I always felt sorry for Cuban cyclists. I don't mean those like us, real cyclists of some sort, but ordinary folk for whom a bike was the only way of getting about. As often as not the pedals had worn and fallen apart and all that was left were the spindles. So many saddles had vanished, leaving only a rear rack to sit on, that much of Cuban cycling looks like a poor man's imitation of a Harley-Davidson easyrider. You'd almost suspect a saddle-stealing racket.
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The man back at the velodrome had said that bikes and money were a problem even at the top of the sport, and he'd told us that there would have been more teams in the Tour of Cuba had the money been there to invite them. On our way along the hilly coast road through cactus and palms, we met two riders coming the other way who said they probably had the Tour of Cuba behind them. They'd spent the night in Trinidad and seen the riders there and been told that the race was setting off at about ten. Since we were going that way, we'd doubtless cross and see the spectacle.
Tamara and Christian were Italian, dressed in the gear and riding mountain bikes. It hadn't been easy, they said.
"Today we have the wind behind us," they reported unnecessarily since we had been fighting into it since that morning. "Today it's easy for the first time, but it's been so hard that we've caught buses and even used a private car to get where we wanted."
We exchanged cards collected from bed-and-breakfast houses, they reminded us about the Tour of Cuba, and our brief encounter was over with mutual offering of e-mail addresses. By then I had really started looking forward to seeing the Tour. We'd seen it on television a few evenings and it seemed a race lively enough not to have suffered too much from the ropy camerawork. Much of the film seemed to have been shot from a position in the middle of the crowd.
We never did see the race, though, because soon after leaving Trinidad it had turned up the vicious climb to Topes de Collantes that we plan to ride in a couple of days. Instead, we saw a long procession of team cars, countless official cars and a handful of buses making their way separately to that night's overnight halt. We did get a poster, though. A red car covered in stickers pulled up when its driver spotted us and a man in his 30s got out and handed it to us.
"I've signed it here, you see?" he said. I think we should have been more impressed than we were because he went on to add: "I used to be on the national team, but then I had a bad crash and that ended my racing." I couldn't work out the signature but I suspect he must have been a household name in Cuba, at any rate among cyclists.
There are no professional Cuban cyclists but there's no hiding the capitalism that floats the Tour of Cuba. The race cars all carried advertising for Castrol. Without that final L, Castro is said to be quite interested in cycling. It's not his first love, of course. When he lived in America he was a dab hand at what is known in Cuba as beisbol and it seemed he was offered some sort of contract to play there. You can't help wondering how much history would have been different had he accepted. Now he is head of Cuba, and has been for 49 years, and the Tour of Cuba rode past a billboard carrying his exhortation that "Our athletes are and will always be our example."
When I saw it and remembered all the other quotations of El Jef, I remembered a tip I got at school when I was about to take an economics exam. "Always add as many citations as you can," the teacher had said. "If you can't think of any, make them up and say Churchill said them. He said so much and contradicted himself so frequently that you can say he said anything."
I suspect the same could be true of Fidel.
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Today was a wearying ride, flat at first, then over several hard hills before turning right to run at the foot of the hazy blue mountains and a short distance inland.
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The sea, when it appeared, was its usual perfect self, sometimes with little thatched sun shelters where someone had thought to build them. Maybe in high summer, which is when the beach-loving Cubans head for the sea, all of those shelters will have toasting bellies below them. Today, though, they were empty. Maybe because the wind was rolling the sea into long white lines of waves, a wind that had begun fighting us for every centimetre of progress.
It can't have been the Italians' fault but Steph fill ill soon after we met them. She felt suddenly weak and dizzy. She clung to the shelter of my back wheel for an hour but, however slowly I rode, lost it the moment the road began to rise. Which it did over and over, not in an angry fashion but like a road that keeps turning over in its sleep. And then, after half an hour at a roadside bar that supplied both cold drinks and a loo, whatever it was that troubled her disappeared and her strength returned. We didn't bound along like spring rabbits but we did make steady progress.
After that we got here with neither difficulty nor exhaustion, nor it has to be said with much fascination since the last half-hour was along an exposed road shut off from the sea and from anything else that was scenic. We got to Trinidad up a last little hill, turned off into a cobbled road, rode the streets and, with the help of a muchacha whose own bed-and-breakfast was full, found and booked two nights at a casa with an airy courtyard equipped with chairs and tables.
That's where I am right now, writing this. Life's not too bad, really, is it?
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