Trip of My Life - Cuba (Day 5)

Horses, trekking on foot, and the most epic Cuban meal - ever - were the themes for this day. Did I mention that Kristina, my parents, and I have been eating 3+ meals per day of which we are NOT used to that at all! However, I observe 2 things from my family in Cuba. The food ceremonies are ways that we’re all getting closer and to know each other more. And they simply eat 3+ meals every day in spite of the scarcity of ingredients and food items. Again, the meal ceremonies are all home-cooked by amazing cooks with as much love as they can muster into the pork, the rice, beans, yucca with olive oil and garlic/onion “mojo” (pronounced mó-ho; somewhat of a marinade you drizzle generously), sliced tomato and cucumber salad with olive oil, and bread…always bread! So the day started with a breakfast of which Kristina and I were still digesting last night’s dinner so we opted out. Instead, we partook of lunch and then decided to do foot trek around Cabaiguan.

We really needed to get some sort of exercise in, even if it was just a walk around town. When we told my local family we were going on a walk, the reaction was priceless. They asked, “on foot?!”, in as emphatic of a response as they could muster. It was hilarious given that there’s no such thing as Uber and when I look at the offline Google map I had loaded on my iPhone X, the total area of the town center couldn’t have been more than 4 square kilometers. According to Wikipedia, it states Cabaiguan is roughly 230 square miles. I have no idea where they come up with that calculation other than to include the “suburbs”…I’m joking.

Nevertheless, Kristina and I embarked on our trek with the safety of my speaking the language and offline Google maps to navigate. We walked around looking for the post office because we want to mail ourselves a post card as a memento. As we discovered the post office was closed on this day. No worries, we have the memories in our heads. We’re crossing one of the streets and suddenly this guy on a motorcycle stops right in front of us looking a little sketchy. He takes off his helmet and says, “yo los conozcos a ustedes” (translation: I recognize you.). It was Gregorio’s son-in-law and has seen pictures of us from his wife and never met us. Wow, it’s a small town but it suddenly got a lot smaller. We’re conversing for a while there getting to know each other. He’s been working and hasn’t had a chance to meet up with us yet so we set a dinner date to come over to their house tomorrow. An incredibly unanticipated encounter on our “long, tiring” foot trek of central Cabaiguan about half a kilometer from Gregorio’s house. Now THIS must be what small-town living must feel like. I certainly don’t encounter that in Portland, Oregon, but it’s really apples and oranges, isn’t it?

As Kristina and I are venturing around the town center and generally looking like tourists, we see a common sighting - horse-drawn carriages. We decide (more conspiring) that we need to get on a horse-drawn carriage today with my whole family on it, especially my mother. So the mission objective is set. We meander slowly back towards Gregorio’s house and who do we coincidentally run into but Gregorio himself. Now Kristina look at him with a little sideways glance and ask him, “are you here to check on us because my mom and Yamila asked you to?” He says no because he’s bringing his car for a servicing, which I do know he said he needed. We take it at face value and continue on our slow return to the house, by way of one of the “particulares” near his house with a little cafeteria in front to see what they had for bars of guava jelly.

Now the mental image of something called guava jelly doesn’t really describe it. It’s more a cellophane wrapped bar of basically sugarized guava pulp that is dark red and gelatinous though not runny, It’s hard to describe, but unforgettable once you’ve tried it. We see that they various sizes so I decide to get the largest size that was just shy of a two by four at the Home Depot lumber section. Next came an interesting experience. They had a little sign next to the guava bars with the number 20 next to it. Recall in an earlier post from this trip that Cuba has two currencies - the CUC and the CUP. The CUC is what the tourists use and exchange for their dollars or euros. The CUP is the Cuban peso that the local’s use and is a MUCH lesser expensive exchange rate. Without delving into the math (math is hard) I had the lady at the counter a 20 CUC’s worth. She immediately warned me stated that it’s 20 CUP and ended up making change handing me most of what I gave her in the first place, albeit mistakenly. When I did the math at that time, it was something along the lines of $1.50 that I paid for this huge bar of guava that I’ve never seen in the states, including Miami. And if you did would probably cost upwards of $10-15 given its size. Honesty and integrity in practice there, my friends. We were very encouraged although when we got back to Gregorio’s house, he told us that possibly not every shop would be as honest and pocket the money without us being the wiser. I’ll hold on to my romantic perspective of human’s generally being good and honest people.

We get back to house (note that from afar we can see a couple of heads peaking out the front door looking out for us…yes, they were my mother and Yamila…oh, those Hispanic habits die hard!) and rally everyone to get on a horse-drawn carriage ride. We have lots of takers except my mother who is afraid of a butterfly. Nevertheless I am a person who doesn’t take no for an answer, so we embark on our “hard on the backs” jaunt from one house to another where we’re planning on taking a drive to Guayos for dinner at one of the “case particulares” which Albert, Gregorio’s son, knows the owners. Before that came the highlight of the horse-drawn carriage ride - watching my mother disembark the carriage. Getting on what humorous enough, but we didn’t know the extent of the hilarity at the end of the ride. I’m just going to post this picture showing my dad trying to help my mother down from the carriage. As they say, a picture is worth a thousand words! The look on her face, the pretend whining, and my dad’s reaction were absolutely priceless. It was a MasterCard commercial in the making. Just to punctuate the experience, I had to take a selfie while both my dad AND I were helping my mother traverse the little steps (they were a bit small) from the carriage down to the ground. I’m hoping that my facial expression tells it all. I tried :)

Once we’ve all disembarked the horse carriage, tipped the driver, pet the horse, get into the house to do a little stretching from the suspension-less carriage ride through the “paved” streets of Cabaiguan, we’re no commenting on the hunger starting to set it. Dinner time? Heck yeah! So pouring into the cars we go to drive the 10-12 kilometers to Guayos and what I’m anticipating to be quite the personalized and memorable dinner experience with my entire family. I mean, we got EVERYONE to attend and I wanted this to be the gastronomic and intimate highlight with this group of people with whom we only recently started creating memories about them. This group of people from the decades past that remember me, but I had no memory of them. See how the meal-time seems to be this opportunity to break bread, tell stories, learn about each other, laugh in the moment, cry for people who we wish could be there with us (my maternal grandmother passed away 4 months prior to this trip), and most effectively create some of the most hard-wired memories we’ll now have without the need for selfies or missing the moments behind the screen of a smartphone and its camera. But of course, I had to memorialize the occasion and did manage to capture everyone. for the most part, in the group photo you see here. A few things happened here.

• Once the wine (a LOT of wine) kicked in, the conversation was very fluid, very open, very memorable and lovely. Not that we needed the wine, but it helps.
• I learned so many more details of the short time I was here before immigrating to the US from the point of view of my uncle, Cuso, my mother, older cousin, Yamila, and Gregorio. These people basically became my time capsule of which all I needed to do was to open it up and out sprouts answers to so many of my questions of my birthplace.
• We ordered WAY too much food! Again, the quantity of food is proportional with the love and intimacy of these people.
• The quality of the food is incredible, from the tuna ceviche (more on that later) to the tostones and the paella.

When the bill came, I took one look at it and almost fell back. Let’s do the math again (I know, we all hate this part). Twelve people, about 4 bottles of wine, appetizers (multiple), huge paella with leftovers, dessert (the flan was EPIC), and dessert wine…approximately US$120!! I can’t downplay the quality of the food and service. If they were on Yelp (they’re not), I’d give them 6 stars and a raving review commentary!

Lo the end of the dinner was here, a short walk around the center plaza in Guayos with all the stray dogs, try to get the digestion to kick into high gear before we stuff ourselves into the cars to return to Cabaiguan and Gregorio’s house for some after-dinner rum and porch conversation before calling this 5th day in Cuba a yet-again successful and positive set of events in our journey of life.