Have Glove, Will Travel_ Adventures of a Baseball Vagabond - Bill Lee [75]
The sculptor who worked a few doors down enjoyed greater success. He stood behind a table covered with examples of his expert craftsmanship: miniatures of Cadillacs, Chevys, and baseball players which he fashioned out of papier mâché swathed in bright acrylics. These merchants gave the street all the color and air of an exotic flea market. But then I saw a dark side to this underground economy as we passed one alleyway: the teenage girls, with eyes as empty as their bellies, who sold themselves to any man for the price of a sandwich.
As we neared the edge of town, cobblestone gave way to asphalt. We followed this road past the only modern housing in all of Vinales: soulless white cinderblock tenements with peeling faux stucco siding crowded against each other in an industrial-age ghetto, the remnants of the Russian presence on this island.
So much urban drab depressed me but we did not have to walk much further before it surrendered to the lavender twilight of the countryside. Here we discovered wondrous sights that I had missed while taking that shortcut into town.
In a field to the side of the road, children harvested tobacco, laying it to dry on the aluminum roofs of sheds while cattle bellowed in the near distance. Overhead, the last rays of a fading sun reflected off the quartz shards embedded in the limestone cliffs, transforming dead rock into a magic mountain of glittering jewels.
We passed immaculate clapboard homes with trim gardens set behind white picket fences. Built for single families, they housed twelve or more people. These soon gave way to more primitive housing, huts with palm frond roofs and no glass in the window frames. The owners had elevated the huts to keep them above the damp ground. Their roofs featured unusually long overhangs that prevented the rain from splashing inside. I wondered how anyone could live in one of these houses in cold weather before remembering that Cuba does not have winter.
The asphalt turned sinuous as we moved deeper into the country, a road of small valleys and peaks. Engineers had constructed a chine up the middle of the road as a rain runoff so that it resembled one long black ribbon of continual speed bumps. Your car did not race over the lanes so much as surge. Drive more than 35 mph on it and you risked becoming airborne.
Some Cuban bureaucrat had designated the road for two-way traffic. This official was obviously a city dweller whose phobia of pig manure had prevented him from ever setting foot in these parts. Unless he thought people around here used skateboards to travel. Pavers had left the road so slender that when two small cars came down opposite lanes simultaneously, one had to pull over to the shoulder to let the other pass.
And more than cars clogged this thoroughfare. The road pulsed with life. Jake and I walked behind a farmer leading a flock of billy goats with chickens straggling behind; a cart loaded with damaged furniture an enterprising young man had plucked for resale from the Vinales garbage bins; an elderly man pushing a wheelbarrow filled with tobacco; merchants moving their sacks of spices and other wares on the backs of mules; and large extended families, their arms linked and their voices raised in song, out for their evening stroll. Despite the congestion, you never heard a single car horn honk. No one rushed, no one pushed to get ahead. It looked like the road of the unhurried. The anti-autobahn.
We even saw a camel. No, not the kind that Lawrence of Arabia once rode. Camel is the name locals have bestowed on a kind of bus, a double-decker flatbed hauled by a semitruck. It can carry as many as three hundred passengers—a microcosm of Cuban working-class society—and all of them must stand, packed so close that you could faint without dropping to the floor.
Directly behind the camel, a man in overalls and sombrero drove another vehicle you rarely see anywhere else in the world: a horse-drawn cart with a heavy bench