Last night we had gone up to the terrace bar as there was a storm brewing and we had a fantastic view of lightning all around the bay as we sat having a couple of drinks watching the storm constantly expecting it to start raining any moment but it didn’t after an hour or so the storm passed by so we went to bed. This morning we set off for Trinidad and we had arranged to go via Santa Clara again as this time the museums would be open. We were picked up at 10:00 by our guide and driver and taken to Santa Clara. The first stop was Revolution Square and the mausoleum of Che Guevara. Because our guide was more used to doing this tour we received slightly more information. Apparently this is where the May Day marches are held each year the platform holds around 190 dignitaries and the soldiers march in front of the statue. We started by going round the mausoleum which has the remains of Che and his revolutionary colleagues, they seemed to have been organised into companies and the people of his company will ultimately all be honoured in this mausoleum. There is a red carnation on the tomb of each of the warriors and yellow roses in front of Che’s, apparently on the birthday or possibly anniversary of their death a different colour flower is placed in front of their tomb. After walking round the mausoleum we went into a room that had pictures of the life of Che Guevara, most were taken in Mexico when he and the Castro brothers were in training, originally Che had known Raul rather than Fidel but they all joined together to fight against the oppression! The statue to Che on top of the mausoleum was made from metal donated by local people of the area, the reason the statue is so big is because so much metal was donated as he is such a hero of the area. We asked if Castro had a similar mausoleum dedicated to him but apparently he had said that he didn’t want any schools or buildings named after him and he didn’t want a big monument when he died so he just has a tomb in the cemetery in Santiago du Cuba. After walking round the mausoleum we went down to the town square again and had a look round. Our guide explained all the buildings including the rather boring green one in the corner that definitely looks like it was built in during the soviet influenced era as it is very austere but interestingly it has a number of bullet holes in it which were during the revolution and therefore before Russia provided assistance to the country. School had very obviously been let out as the square was full of students of various ages. I found out that the secondary school is for children from the age of 12 until 14 and the college covers the ages of 15 to 17, after this time if you have a career you do 1 year national service, if not you do 2, I think a career covers going to university as they tend to be focused on specific things, tourism, medicine etc. All education up to and including university is free and if you go to university away from your home town a hostel is provided free of charge as well. We haven’t really got to the bottom of the fact that they train a lot of medical personnel for other countries for which the government gets a fee, but I will continue to try and find out about that. From here we went to the derailed train, when we get back to the UK and have more access to the internet I am going to have to investigate this period of history as this is the site of the derailment of the train which was carrying supplies to the government US backed troops and is what caused Batista to leave the country therefore allowing Castro to come to power, however, looking round the pictures in the train cars it looked like the city had been bombed before the train was derailed. On the plus side it did answer the question on how they knew the train would be full of munitions they had spies inside the transport company and the villages helped by blockading the roads which stopped troops coming to the aid of military personnel. After this it was time for lunch we had said we would try somewhere different this time so we drove to a purpose built hotel that is designed in the style of a ‘traditional village’ although I am not sure what kind of tradition they were trying to follow. The food was ok but the setting was better last time we were in Santa Clara however they did have self service ice cream so we had some of that, mango and strawberry although the mango tasted more like vanilla to Chris and I! it was then time to drive to Trinidad, on the way we made a couple more stops the first was at a farm high up in the mountains, here we saw the ‘traditional’ way of life, although some of it was on show for the tourists. They still have the original kitchen which is to the rear of the house – possibly to stop the house burning down and they are basically subsistence farmers, they have chickens and pigs and they grow coffee, mango and beans which they live off. They are part of a coffee cooperative which seems to work the same way as the tobacco farm we went to, they give / sell 90 percent to the government and are allowed to keep 10 percent for their own use. They grow corn to feed the chickens but I am not sure what they do to it as it was rock hard, we were encouraged to feed the chickens while they were brewing the coffee, the chickens had a number of chicks which were lovely and the pig actually had quite a few piglets, we picked up one of the chicks but didn’t try and catch one of the piglets! By the time we had finished being shown how they dry the coffee the coffee was ready, we were given a cup about the same size as an espresso cup into which they put sugar but we resisted as it really didn’t need it, the coffee was so nice and smooth we had quite a few cups, they actually make a saucepan full of it and give you a ladle to spoon it into your cup. Once we had finished the coffee we left and drove to our final stop before arriving in Trinidad. One of the trips we had planed to do from Trinidad was to visit the Ruinas de Ingenio San Isidro de los Destiladeros or the Ignenio sugar plantation. This was a sugar plantation that utilised slave labour to function, it has a tower that allowed the overseer to keep an eye on all the workers to make sure they were working hard enough. There was a bell outside the plantation house which was only rung when there was a runaway slave or if there was a visiting dignitary. The plantation house is now a restaurant run by the government but you can still get a view of the rooms and the layout and out the back they have a sugar cane crusher that rotates to crush the cane and provide the juice that is ultimately made into sugar. This is still working although only for the tourists and is no longer driven by oxen although I did push it round, we walked round a bit but didn’t bother going up the lookout tower for the view across the valley then we started the drive to Trinidad, on the way we passed the sugar processing plant which is no longer in use on the way down the valley we also saw the coffee factory where they had all the coffee beans laid out in a square to dry before being processed. We finally arrived in Trinidad about 5:00 and as we checked in we were handed a rum and coke which although is not something I would normally drink actually went down very well. There is an international food festival in Trinidad this week which basically means that all the restaurants and bars have special events on, I think we are going to like this town. After talking to our rep we went up to our room which is lovely then came down to the bar for a couple of drinks and a snack while we were updating the website as we have been told that the best wifi signal is in the public areas in this hotel. Although we haven’t done much we always find it a little tiring when we spend an amount of the day in the car so we will probably have an early night before heading out to explore Trinidad tomorrow.
