Rum and cigars
A snowbird reminisces about his recent trip to the tropics
Early in March, I fled winter on the first direct flight from St. John’s to Varadero, Cuba, to spend two weeks in an upscale resort blessed by sun, sand and zephyric ocean breezes. One of my favourite waiters categorically affirmed that he had never seen snow, except on television.
For two weeks, I smoked too many cigars and drank far too much Cuban coffee and seven-year-old Havana Club rum.
I ate too much food — but not as much as most of my fellow travellers from an international kaleidoscope of countries — England, Holland, Argentina, Germany and from as far away as Russia and Japan (but not, of course, from the nearby United States).
Canadians constitute more than 60 per cent of visitors to Cuba. If U.S. President Barack Obama, in his second and last term of office, takes the bull by the horns and lifts the long embargo, the Cuban economy will benefit, but tourists of other nationalities may conclude, “There goes the neighbourhood.”
During my stay, Cubans were saddened by the death of the president of Venezuela, Hugo Chavez, a good friend and political ally who had in recent years shipped to the island, free of charge, much-needed supplies of oil.
The Cuban government declared a national day of mourning.
Business at the resorts rolled on — but with no music on the day the music stopped.
Tourism is the economic bulwark of the country, with its epicentre in Varadero.
From the balcony of my room, I could watch in the mid-distance, on the four-lane highway between the furthest resort and Juan G. Gomez airport (named after one of Castro’s revolutionary compadres) an endless stream of buses — built in China — shuttling tourists from airport to hotel and back again a week or two later. At various times I counted 10 or 15 buses passing in the space of a minute.
From my balcony, I also had an overview of minuscule golfers, many toting full golf bags, taking on a breathtaking, world-class course, parallelling the sea and dotted with water hazards. It was so beautiful I almost wished I played golf.
But, on overhearing returning golfers, I found these obsessed folk talk nothing but golf.
I also learned from them that at the resort I frequent, golfing is free, although you rent the golf carts. I generously repressed the thought that I had been subsidizing golf addicts for years.
From window or patio, you can watch frigate birds gracefully windsailing over sea and shore.
Closer to hand are glossy, black birds resembling better dressed, if somewhat smaller, crows, but with a vertical tail. The “totti,” as they are called, rule the resort, demanding food from outdoor diners on their turf. They drive away the smaller and more timid “sisontris,” but, if you are lucky, at night, you may hear the bright, complex song of the drab-looking little bird.
And then there are the familiar sparrows, hopping around and begging bread crumbs. Lots of sparrows. A tourist from England, preparing to return home, complained to her girlfriends, “We’ve come all this way from London and what do we find? Bloody sparrows!
“Why don’t they paint them red and blue and yellow?” she asked.
You may also encounter in your resort cute little dogs (usually spaniels) being walked around on leashes.
They are not the hotelier’s pets, as I naively thought on my earliest visit, but sniffer dogs.
Don’t take your pot to Cuba; leave your hash at home. The authorities strongly disapprove of recreational drugs, and Cuba’s jails are much less comfortable than its hotels.
While in Varadero, I read too much, as usual, including Evelyn Waugh’s “Brideshead Revisited” ( for the fourth or fifth time, sentimentalist that I am), a recent biography of Victorian novelist Wilkie Collins and a thousand-page collection of short stories and novellas featuring Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes, whose exploits, I learned to my surprise, are familiar to educated Cubans.
I tip often and well in Varadero, because hotel employees work long hours, cheerfully and courteously, for meagre wages. Not all tourists appreciate the facts of life, though.
I was reading on the hotel patio, provisioned with cappuccino, Havana Club and Montecristo Number 3. Enter four middle-aged Canadian ladies, who had evidently been attending a conference together.
Commandeering a table, they placed various orders for drinks; enter two more to join them and order further refreshment; enter two more, ditto; and then a ninth completed the group.
The young waiter assiduously shuttled back and forth between bar and patio. Nary a peso changed hands in appreciation of solicitous service.
But they said thank you very sweetly.
The following day, retribution was visited on all of us. High leaden cloud, wind and high seas. No beach business. A few disconsolate guests wandered around with beach towels, a handful of inveterate smokers huddled on the patio.
But after the morning of retribution, the weather gods relented, and happy days returned.
Cuba is just not the same without sun and tips.
The next day I lunched with a Cuban family in a pizzeria by an artificial lake in Varadero’s handsome public park, named Parque Josone after another of Castro’s revolutionary comrades, a park confiscated from the absent Dupont family, as was their elegant summer residence overlooking the sea, its name of Xanadu being derived from Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan,” the opening lines of which are hubristically inscribed on one wall of the Dupont reception room: In Xanadu did Kubla Khan A stately pleasure-dome decree: Where Alph, the secret river, ran Through caverns measureless to man Down to the sunless sea.
On my next-to-last night, I dined at the hotel’s toniest of four restaurants, complete with string quartet of young, classically trained musicians.
A couple of guests kindly invited me to join them. I politely declined on the grounds that I was enjoying the music, but suggested meeting for a drink after dinner.
While her husband ordered at the bar, I asked his wife the universal first question of Canadian tourist to Canadian tourist, “Where are you from?”
“Toronto,” she replied, then posed the obligatory second ques- tion, “And you?” “St. John’s,” said I. “So is my husband,” said she. When he returned with drinks, we shook hands and he asked my name. “Gordon Jones,” I admitted. His eyes narrowed and he said, “I know you.”
He proceeded to take me back to the mid-1960s, when I was a very junior lecturer at Memorial, while he was there completing his BA/BEd degrees. He had known my wife-to-be, Helen, and her eccentric brother, Ford.
He had been taught by my generous friend and mentor, Jim Francis, who had put me up in his flat on LeMarchant Road after picking me up at the airport on my arrival in St. John’s — and who introduced me to Malaysian curry, to Marcovich cigarettes (imported from Montreal) and to theatrical performance in Dylan Thomas’s “Under Milk Wood,” casting me in the very minor role of No Good Boyo, who hopelessly yearned for Helen Ball’s Polly Garter.
Anne Chislett, whom the Ontario-dwelling Newfoundlander had known before she was a playwright, played Rosie Probert, old Captain Cat’s lost lover. At the closing-night cast party, I kissed Polly Garter on the back of her elegant neck.
He inquired after my friend, colleague and sometime rival (on my part), distinguished Newfoundland writer and Memorial professor emeritus, Patrick O’Flaherty.
My new friend also seemed to know all the members of the St. John’s Players from that era.
He had also known Shane O’Dea — now university orator and architectural defender of historic sites — when they canvassed together for the NDP, a very forlorn hope in those days.
At the end of the evening, the couple left for the airport for a postmidnight flight back to Toronto, leaving me stunned by a chance encounter catapulting me back to the long-ago past.
When I returned a day later to present-day St. John’s, the roads were lined by snowbanks, same snow or different snow from when I left, I don’t know. But snow.
I shall now stay home until the white stuff goes away, mulling over past and present. And I shall avoid my family doctor for the next few weeks until my cholesterol level returns to somewhere close to normal.