I am increasingly impressed by how fast time goes by. I don't know if it's true what they say, when you get older time tends to go faster, unlike when you were a child when everything went so slowly and you could do thousands of things in one day. But well, this only trip I made to Cuba was in 2009, to visit and meet some relatives, because more than 15 years ago my mother married a Cuban and we wanted to meet the family and of course the country.
In all the mess on my hard drive I tried to find these photos, which I took with an old Handycam camera that worked with small disks, but even so I am missing many photos that I cannot find, but the ones I have displayed in this public place are a representation of some places I visited during 15 days of stay in Cuba, however there were many places left to see and visit.
I remember when we took the plane in Caracas - Venezuela, and the flight lasted about 3 hours, and from above at night I could see the lights of Jamaica, for me this trip was very exciting, just seeing those lights already made me excited. Then when we arrived in the city of Havana, a relative of my stepfather was waiting for us and we immediately went to the town of Santa Clara, about 4 hours from the capital, of course I didn't have time to see the city of Havana, although we already had plans to visit it when we returned to our country.
We arrived in Santa Clara, but our destination was to go to a town called Vega de Palma, the truth is I would have liked to find those photos. Most of my stepfather's family lives in that town and it is where he grew up, a very pretty place with a view of large fields of crops where my stepfather's father had coffee, rice and garlic crops, well that is what they have always dedicated themselves to. Just the next day I witnessed a strong cyclone for the first time and despite not being so close to the beach it was so strong that a large tree in the field broke.
I spent the days playing dominoes with my family, as well as chatting and listening to Cuban music played by a local. Then a visit was organized to a beach that was specifically Caibarién, a town that was about 40 minutes away, and the truth is that I liked it a lot, a very clean beach with white sand, this was the only beach I visited in Cuba ironically.
Among other memories of this trip is the fact of having visited the Ernesto Guevara mausoleum, as well as in the last two days in Cuba while already in Havana, I was able to visit the Plaza de la Revolución, a place called El Prado where I could find a statue of John Lennon, and other places of great interest in this beautiful city. However, I still wanted to enter the capitol of Havana, but at that time it was under maintenance, and I also missed seeing some museums and places of great interest, but the important thing is the experience I had at that time, as well as the fact of having met many noble people from a country with a lot of history, culture and great architecture. I hope to have the opportunity to visit Cuba again, with the intention of walking its streets more and taking many photographs.
Because that is what photographs do, they bring back good memories of places you visit, of those moments you share with those people you meet and to forever capture everything said as a treasured jewel.
All photographs are my own.
