Have Glove, Will Travel_ Adventures of a Baseball Vagabond - Bill Lee [74]
About an hour before the banquet ended, I left to walk back to the hotel with Jake Robertson, Tom’s eleven-year-old son. This was my first opportunity to learn how the town was laid out. The narrow sidewalks in the older section of Vinales looked barely wide enough to allow pedestrians to walk side by side. Most people in this village lived in attached buildings of peeling stucco in hues that had undoubtedly looked vibrant long ago but had since faded into dreary pastels of pinks and blues swirling into each other. These simple, boxy structures had shops on the ground floors and residential apartments above. Pigs, chickens, and goats scurried in and out of the stores and sauntered down the avenue browsing the windows.
Billboards along the cobblestone streets trumpeted the glories of Castro’s revolution and incendiary graffiti splashed across the walls of many of the buildings. We paused to watch two young artists paint one fence with some slogan for or against Fidel—my Spanish is limited—and they wielded their brushes like machetes, posting their message in angry, slashing red and black strokes.
We could not walk far before encountering reminders that Cuba still ranks as the cigar capital of the world. On one block, an elderly woman sat in front of a bodega rolling cigars, a ten-inch stogie hanging from her lips. Passersby smiled at you with a mouthful of fractured teeth tinted dark by nicotine. Teenagers chewing blunts congregated on every street corner.
Nothing smells like a Cuban cigar store, an aroma acrid but sweet and utterly masculine. If you are trying to quit smoking, shops such as these should never appear on your itinerary. The products sold in these stores smelled straight-off-the-farm fresh; workers finished them on the premises. Shops that catered to tourists sold these smokes for $20 apiece, but in these bodegas you could buy ten cigars of the same quality for a buck. The price discrepancy offered an example of the two marketplaces that coexisted in Cuba, one for the monied foreign visitors, another for the impoverished locals.
In the back room of one store, three women worked at a wooden table. A compressed block layered with tobacco lay in front of the first woman. She rolled the leaves while the woman next to her trimmed them into cigar shapes. The third worker applied the cigar’s final wrap, a large high-grade tobacco leaf, before rounding off its tip with an implement that resembled a miniature scythe honed razor sharp.
Some tourists asked the workers to pose for pictures. The women happily agreed but insisted on receiving a gratuity. The teenage girl who cut the cigars was pregnant and she patted her swollen stomach while explaining that the coins were not for her but “for the bambino.” With the economy so thin, most Cubans constantly hustled in the best sense of the word. Nearly everyone on this island worked two jobs and cottage industries that attracted extra cash abounded.
Throughout Vinales, Jake and I saw people selling homemade products, mostly clothes such as white cotton blouses, floral print dresses, hand-stained leather belts, and rope sandals. One vendor hawked baseball bats. He could not afford the lathe artisans traditionally use to mold their bats, so he carved each one by hand. Most of the bats came out too short, the handles too wide, to be useful to any hitter. He fashioned his product from a wood so porous,