May 3, 2007 at 2.51 am · Filed under food, travel, Cuba, Holguin
After a night’s rest and a weird ham sandwich for breakfast, we found that Baracoa came up shy of its glimmering recommendations so we pulled up stakes and headed back west for the small town of Holguin. Desperate for something, anything, to eat, we slowed the car in front of a woman dangling cones of an unknown make or origin from her fingers. For a nickel we found ourselves digging through dulce de coco, an indescribable paste of smoked coconut and palm sugar. After three finger scoops (we’d no spoons so it was God’s dining utensils for us), the cloyingly sweet mix sent me into a light diabetic coma lasting until the rumble of the pavement outside of Holguin shook me to.
Full of vigor, Holguin proved to be the Cuba I had always imagined; rife with grumbling old cars sputtering through the narrow streets and even older men squabbling through cigar stained mustaches over domino tables in the park. Even the nimble breezes from the Atlantic that tip-toed around crumbling corners seemed to whisper of happier times.
We quickly found a place to stay: two rooms in a local family’s home tucked neatly between the central park and the town’s almost ridiculously large baseball stadium.
Finding a tiny Spanish restaurant with a colonial era garden, we elbowed up to ceramic pots of nuclear-hot paella, crisp and vinegary cucumber salad and Cerveza Cristal bubbling lazily in jelly jars. I was slowly beginning to see that there is definitely good food to be had in Cuba. You just have to head off the beaten track and do some hunting to find it (and besides, chances are, you’ll be so hungry by the time you find it, it won’t matter if it’s all that great).
As our late lunch settled, we meandered through the vibrating streets while the Holguineros, in spite of our presence, went about their business. Back at home beneath an ancient ceiling fan slowly stirring the already cool afternoon air sleep wasn’t too far off, nor was a late night out on the town.
- Last Meal:: Gallo Pinto and Queso Frito
- Listening to:: Youth Group
- Location:: Casa Luna, Tamarindo, Costa Rica
May 1, 2007 at 9.30 pm · Filed under food, travel, Cuba, Guantanamo, fresh fruit
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.
