Yeah, I was hungry.
Seeing that our options for breakfast this morning in Camaguey were a demitasse of the (in)famous Cuban coffee or fresh baked goods purchased from the state run bakery across the street, we opted for the latter and made our way over.
But once inside, what we had expected, walls of bread crusty and steaming from the oven, gave way to the bitter Cuban reality: packages of soda crackers and dusty boxes of candy most likely from before the days that Fidel and Che first high-fived in Havana. We snatched up a few packets of honey oat cookies, a bag of gnarled bread sticks and a bar of Turron (a chewy Spanish nougat studded with almonds) chucked down our pesos and ran for the door, knowing now that it was imperative we make it to Guantanamo by noon or we’d be scraping the coffers, looking for lunch.
Arriving at just after one to a darkened restaurant (actually the living room of a family’s home) Fernando in his endless Salvadorian charm wrangled the cook, a sweet old lady, into serving us a bit to eat. Soon after, she was bringing us a cabbage salad tart with vinegar and sugar, arroz cangri, chopped rice strafed with black beans and poached baby shrimp bobbing in a spicy tomato broth. To round it all out a plateful of tostones, crispy fried green plantains and frothy cans of beer bought from the house next door. As we lunched, the cook came back to our table and bragged on her grandson, a national chess champ, who was away at a tournament in Guantanamo province.
With full bellies and high spirits, we climbed back into the car to continue eastward towards Baracoa, the purported Shangri-La of Cuba, isolated from the rest of the island by a range of grandfatherly mountains and scrub pine stubble.
In the foothills of the Sierra del Puril we stopped and bought mangoes from a woman and her grubby, roly-poly two year old son. As I pulled apart my own headily perfumed mango with my fingers, juice ran down my arms, dripping onto my pants and the warm costal air pushed its way though the cracked window. I, in a moment of clarity, realized that I was, at that very instant, the luckiest person alive on the planet.
