It was 18 July, my Birthday, and we spent it in Cuba. We poorly plan trips, I should say, so we celebrated it in Santa Clara. It was the fourth day in a town which is worth two days maximum, so on that day we had literally been everywhere and done everything possible.
The very morning was rather remarkable, since for the first (and for the last, I suppose) time in my life I got a bouquet of 101 roses!
My boyfriend later confessed that he bought them for a song, comparing to which a bottle of quite mid-priced Champaign cost an arm and a leg. Later on we were just sitting on a playground and counting poultry grazing around us (after the 30th we got scared of increasing number of geese and decided to get going). Crystal clear – we were longing for company that evening. So we did as we had always done in Cuba – sat in a crowded park and lifted a bottle of rum in the air. The magic worked and two guys joined us for a drink. “Recommend us a restaurant and, please, be my guests”, I asked them and that’s where we went.
Out of the blue emerged this band with a cool Rasta-looking guy, the waitresses also decided to join us and closed the place for other visitors (four enormous lobsters were on discount for us that night and the jumbo shrimps spread around them were on the house, as a happy Birthday). We paid $10 to the band (they were perfectly happy with that) and went dancing to live Cuban music for the whole night (not mentioning drinking as fish).
The next morning our new friend Louis took us to the lake.
For some reason very few tourists know it exists, so it is indeed an unspoilt place for the locals. We took a guagua (a public bus) to get there and it was totally, totally worth 40 minutes in hellish heat. To begin with, the lake looked like a sea with those tiny Robinson-like islands scattered around it like peas.
We had an amazing, amazing freshly-caught tilapia for lunch ($2 for 3 fish).
People who were there sang songs, played dominoes and drank local beer (this is something a bit different from the beer you buy in shops, it has a slight honey flavor). The most amazing thing was the glasses: they were made of former Havana Club bottles, however also were supposed to cost something, so that Louis had to leave his ID as a deposit and return the glasses after we had emptied them. The rum we drank there was local too and it did taste like gasoline a bit, but we got used to the taste strangely fast. A helpful tip for you, by the way, NEVER, NEVER eat mangoes with rum (heartburn after is unbearable).
So we swam in the lake, talked about things (hope, Louis, you have opened a restaurant, as you dreamed!) and had really good time. We took our last bottle of rum into the return bus, opened it there and… passed it forward. So forward it moved and returned…. The other bottle returned! Somebody else, and then again somebody, and then again, kept on opening new bottles, everyone opened windows, lit cigarettes and cigars (no problem with smoking anywhere in Cuba), someone started singing and beating on the lap, the others started dancing in the aisle… That’s what Cuba is for me. I have never felt so… so free in my life, and no other experience has ever been so shared with complete strangers. It is not friendship, it is, as the Cubans say, soledaridad.