CUBA

I returned from Cuba yesterday evening; I'm spending this morning in the purgatory of an aparthotel near the airport in San Pedro Sula, Honduras. It's a good opportunity to catch up on some work-related reading, which is why I'm blogging right now. In the small "Business Centre" of this hotel, beneath the signs prohibiting email, blogging, and children under 16, overweight gringo-Honduran kids screech at each other about their progress on video games. I can think of many places I'd rather be. But, although I wish I was still with Simon, I don't know how long I could handle the exhausting energy of Havana.

The best illustration of the holiday is the Saturday night before we left Havana for Trinidad. My friends were arriving from Honduras that evening, and we'd agreed that we'd swing by their casa particular at around 10.00 to collect them for drinks, food and general merry making. An extraordinary coincidence had led us to pick up and old friend from Trim Co. Meath outside the university building that afternoon, and so it was that the three of us wandered into Ernesto's home to find the three Irish girls who were supposed to be arriving from Honduras that night.

No sign of the Irish girls, so we left them a note, took Ernesto's phone number, and strolled out onto the draining streets of Habana Viejo. We asked (Joe asked) a local if he could recommend a nearby bar where we could wait for our friends. The local - who we came to know as Angel - pointed us to the Plaza Vieja, a standard fairytale square packed with salsa bands and $4 mojitos. The more local joints were mostly shutting up for the evening; Havana isn't the city that never sleeps you might have thought, at least not for the Cubans. Were we interested in santería, asked Angel.
Funny you should ask. In fact, we're very interested indeed in santería. This is the fusion religion brought by the Yoruba people from Nigeria to Cuba on the slave ships, a system of African deities merged with Catholic traditions to get them past the Spaniards who rejected all things "native". The sixteen orishas who survive in Cuba have the characteristics of Catholic saints (St Lazarus is the patron of Havana); but they also have other qualities, more live and interventionist than your average saint. On Cuban streets you often see people dressed from head to toe in white, with lace headbands and long coloured beads: these are new initiates to the religion, the colour of the beads representing the deity to whom they belong. Later, we learn that initiation is expensive; according to Angel because you have to buy the right animals for sacrifice.

So are we interested in santería? Certainly we are! Would we like to see a ritual? Umm. It didn't take long before we were following Angel upstairs into a family home, busy with kids and toys and women at the kitchen table, with a faint sound of drumming overhead. Then up a bockety spiral staircase which led into an attic room packed with people crowding around a small stage-like area.
It was hot and pushy, we were in the entranceway, and couldn't move to make space for anyone. Angel encouraged me to crane my neck, peer through the bodies to see the clear area, where two men flailed around to the drumming; I was informed they were brujos - witches - though I don't know if that's what he meant. Their eyes rolled, and one had a bottle of rum in his hand (rum is unbelievably cheap in this part of the world), which he occasionally gulped only to spurt it out of his mouth. When he was led out of the room, a mantle over his head and bent double, there was nowhere for him to go but past us, shoving urgently as we pressed ourselves as far into the wall as we could.

Angel occasionally whispered elements to interpret the event for us, and made it clear that he was our - sponsor? protector? - in the room. But I was completely completely lost. I had no idea what I was witnessing, or why, or how the other people there felt about my presence (though my guess is they felt indifferent). After 10 minutes at most, Angel led us authoritatively back down the stairs, while the service continued. At the foot of the stairs, in somebody's kitchen, Simon spotted the domestic touch of a small blackboard on which the services were carefully outlined for the coming month, much like a village church, which I guess is what we had just left.

Angel took us across the road to a paladar with a neon sign and a band playing tunes from the Buena Vista Social Club, and $4 mojitos, one of which we bought for him, to thank him. We drank a few beers, talked about the embargo, and then went back to collect the girls. They still hadn't arrived, and didn't until 5AM that morning. On our way home, at about 3AM, Simon's bag was stolen in the entrance to our casa. Which is a whole separate entry, I think.