Cuba: Coches de Caballos

There's a lot to say about my trip to Cuba, and not all of it will eventually make it to the blog, but to start out with I'd like to talk about the cognitive dissonance that Cuba causes a "yuma," un estadounidense, an "American."  ("Yuma" is the Cuban term for Gringo, "estadounidense" is Spanish for a person from the United States, which is much more accurate--I learned in Chile last year--than calling ourselves "American").

When I saw the coches de caballos (horse cars), which most Cubans seem to call just "coches," I didn't think of Charleston, Savannah, or any other historic city that has the twee phenomenon of horse-drawn carriages, but upon reflection those seeming anachronist tourist conveyances in US are a powerful juxtaposition  of the basic needs of Cubans that highlights the difference between life in the two countries.

This is not a tourist trip; this is a local taxi taking, among others, kids to school. Gibara wakes up with crowing roosters and squealing pigs being carts off at the end of "la madrugada," the time between midnight and dawn, and the rumble of the coches is not far behind.  Coches are a cheap way to get across town, and like taxis anywhere, they congregate where people look for a ride--the bus station and the crossroads of crowded, bleak Soviet-era apartment blocks.  Cheap and plentiful, these are the yellow Checker cabs of Gibara.

But it gets more complicated.  Horses need feed, and there's not a whole lot for them to eat in these densely packed village streets.  Where there's a need, there's someone willing to do the tedious work to fill it.  As we rode a truck made in Detroit in the early 50s and retrofitted to look like a military personnel transport vehicles, we encountered men on the side of the road with machetes hacking, gathering, and hauling grass to town to sell to the drivers of the coches for their worn-own steeds.

This fellow was pretty far out from Gibara.  As Holly noted at the time, relative to the horses in town, this one looks well fed, grazing while his master hacks at the roadside grass.  Median grass, shoulder grass, gutter grass:  a raw, natural material that estadounidenses wouldn't consider as having any value, as being a nuisance requiring state maintence:  in Cuba, it is a way to make a little money using what resources are available.  Backbreaking.  I can only imagine how little this guy gets paid for harvesting and transporting grass back to the towns.

And while these guys take a wagon load to market, they get passed by a late-model Korean car,  a rental driven by tourist.  The smoke in between is from the exhaust of our 1949 Plymouth truck.  The disjunction is jarring.