Submitted by James Williams on the 2017 winter session program in Cuba sponsored by the Department of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures…
Pinar del Rio is the northwestern most province of Cuba, about a two hours drive from Havana. As part of our program, we drove to the province, specifically to the farming community of Las Terrazas. On the first Saturday we were in Cuba, we stayed the night in the town of Viñales, and returned on Sunday.
Las Terrazas was completely unlike a farming community in the United States. The farm was communal; every tenant leased their houses from the commune, nobody individually owned the animals and people were free to move in and move out as space allowed. The countryside was hilly in harmony with the mountainous landscape of Pinar del Rio. We visited a local coffee shop which had the best coffee I’ve ever had the privilege of drinking and a local restaurant where the food was essentially home-cooked. The farm was one of the most beautiful towns I’ve ever seen and we were fortunate enough to have the opportunity to purchase art from a local artist named Ariel. A landscape painting of his of Las Terrazas will reside in my dorm.
Next, we headed to Viñales. Viñales made a reputation for itself as a tourist town which had stark implications. Every single residence we saw had a sign indicating rooms for rent, even the houses of doctors and lawyers. The fall of the Eastern Bloc took such a severe toll on Cuba that they are almost completely dependent on tourism for their well-being. We stayed with a local family for the evening. Their hospitality was no exception to the Cuban spirit of joy despite hardship. The houses in Viñales (theirs was no exception) appeared to be falling apart on the outside, but the interiors were hospitable, perhaps being the only strictly necessary capital good element of a house for tourism. Our communications were facilitated by a godsend Puerto Rican member of our program, but my own Spanish skills sharpened in the face of their complete absence of English knowledge.
That night, we were struck by the amount of international tourists in the town. One of my friends, as he struggled to command Spanish well enough to purchase snacks, drew the ire of some men, who I later spoke to and determined to be Spanish nationals. A German man approached our group, his command of English being especially refreshing. He was an artist, going through Cuba, experiencing the life and the people. We found a young British brother-sister pair, in the country for holiday, and discussed our countries’ flirtations with right-wing politics and our collective ire about our situations at home. Finally, on our walk home, we encountered another Spanish man, needing assistance lighting a cigar, and to his insistence, female company. The night was truly a mosaic of Western nationality in such a beautiful country.
All of this exposes the new colonial situation of Cuba. Doctors often drive taxis or work in tourist-serving restaurants because the pay is much greater. Their monthly salary, approximately $40 U.S. dollars, was the cost of a 1-hour taxi drive through Old Havana that my group took. It is clearly a problem when every single person in a town is compelled to rent out rooms as a primary source of income. Their investment is also apparently primarily focused on the bare-essential capital goods required for tourism, such as home interiors, rather than meaningful public goods, such as sidewalks, plumbing or home exteriors. Their path outside this neocolonialist tourist economy remains unclear, but to call Cuba a free, self-sufficient country, would be a gross misunderstanding of their economy.