Today we travelled west to Vinales, the home of Cuban cigars. We met our guide, 26 year old Javier, at the hotel and quickly established that he spoke three languages (Spanish, German and English) but that English was not his preferred language, so on many occasions Peter and Hans would speak German to him!
Like Luis, his honesty and openness was refreshing and we asked him many questions and explored many topics with him during our drive up into the mountains. We were amused when he summoned up the courage to ask us a question in return: ‘Is it true that you have cannibals in Australia?’ We have no idea where that one came from but assured him that it was not the case.
During our drive to Vinales we passed many crops, the most prevalent of which was sugar. However for years now the sugar industry has been in a state of decline. There used to be over 160 mills but only 40 remain open today and production has been reduced from 7 million tons to 1.5 million tons annually. We also saw rice, bananas, corn, pineapples and of course tobacco. There were also herds of brahman cattle, goats and pigs, while horses and mules were the most common means of transport.
With the exception of government (blue plates) and military vehicles (green plates) cars and trucks, outside Havana we virtually had the road to ourselves. As cars can cost $30,000 (that’s if you can find one for sale), not many people have one (privately owned Cuban cars have yellow plates) and driving is considered a ‘profession’ (like being an airline pilot) since so few people actually know how to drive. (We had to adjust my mindset on this one as where we come from its assumed that everyone drives!)
One also assumes that the highways are for cars, but we quickly realised that these flat pieces of road were the main thoroughfares for people walking, cycling, riding on horseback or travelling in horse drawn buggies. We also learned that the people don’t necessarily travel on the correct side of the road and can often been seen proceeding up the road ‘against the (vehicular) traffic flow’.
We saw many people sheltering from the heat at the underpasses. As we drove past they waved money at us. Javier explained that public transport outside Havana is poor and that therefore most people are forced to hitch hike if they are travelling long distances. In keeping with official communist philosophy it is expected that, if you have more than you need, you should share your resources and so drivers will pick up people on the side of the road until their car was full.
Public transportation problem solved! A new problem however emerges with tourists (who travel on maroon plates) who don’t have a communist manifesto and don’t pick up stranded people. We felt guilty as we drove past desperate people, but lessons learned in another less safe and trusting culture die hard.
It was easy to tell when one had entered the cigar tobacco growing region as the soil turned suddenly from barren rocks to a rich volcanic red loam. The process for making a cigar (especially a good cigar) turns out to be much more complex than we thought. Firstly one needs five leaves – 3 filler leaves, a binder and the cover leaf. The cover or wrapper is the best leaf and is often grown in a special location under a muslin shade cloth. This cloth protects the plant and encourages it to grow bigger leaves.
A tobacco crop is grown from seedlings derived from last year’s collected seed. These seedlings are then transferred by hand and planted in a field. It takes 9 months to produce a good leaf and they are harvested by hand three leaves at a time. The farmer takes great care in selecting the best three leaves. These leaves are then threaded, placed over a pole and then, when the pole is full, the pole is transferred to the adjacent wooden ‘drying huts’ and left to dry in stacked racks.
The newly racked leaves are hoisted to the top and as they dry out they are moved to lower and lower racks until the drying process is complete. It is extremely labour intensive and all done by the eye and the hand.
The signature of a good cigar is that it contains little nicotine and this results in ‘no head spin’ when it is smoked. For example, a Cuban ‘Cohiba’ cigar goes through a two year ageing process that involves it being stored in sacks that are repeatedly wet with water and then hung out to dry. 
This process leaches the nicotine from the tobacco leaf and results in a smoother and vastly more expensive smoke. Hans, who is keen cigar smoker, really enjoyed himself … but we found the process fascinating.
Next we were off for a boat ride to see the limestone features in a local cave and then a mural on the side of a cliff – oh the things that tourists are taken to see….that said due to a shortage of paint, the mural was quite interesting as it was constructed from strips of colour alternated with horizontal strips of black paint … apparently the unnamed Cuban artist (‘a student of the Mexican master Diego Rivera’) could not get a hold of enough coloured paints to finish the mural, so he used the black strips to ‘pad out’ the images.
On the trip home, we found ourselves closer to the local livestock and noticed that they, and many of the local people, were very thin indeed. Was this this caused by lack of food, or parasites or both? We never found out the answer. We noticed men with cowboy hats on horseback in the streets, simple homes of several rooms with three or four children playing in the yards and, next to the house, subsistence farming.
Cows, horses, chickens and goats all roamed in the fields and animals were often tethered to stakes on the sides of the highway.
In the city the families often only have one child and there are eight people to a house and consequently
little or no privacy. They have few personal possessions. Once schooling is completed at 15 years, students can choose to do either two years of military service, if they are then going to go on to University, or four years military service, if they are afterwards going to be completing a trade qualification in one of the many ‘technical schools’. As a consequence of this policy that one can observe in Cuba so many ‘mere teenagers’ in positions of authority – police/army/security – all somewhat unnervingly armed with guns, big guns.
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