wheels. I tried driving at them. They stayed put. The road smelled like thirty miles of crab salad going bad. It was almost 10 P . M . before I got to my hotel on the beach, the Ancon. But the buffet was still open. They were serving crab salad. I went to the bar. In the morning the ocean sparkled, the sand gleamed, the cheese sandwich with ketchup arrived. Bright-pink vacationers frolicked in the surf or, rather, stood on the beach discussing whether to frolic in the surf, having seen large numbers of stingrays the last time they frolicked. The Ancon was filled with middle-aged Canadians having the middle-aged Canadian idea of fun, which consisted mostly of going back to the buffet for seconds on the crab salad. The architecture was modernistic. The rooms were comfortablistic. The food was foodlike. There are worse tourist facilities in Cuba, namely all of them. The Ancon is top of the line. I inspected the other beach hotels near Trinidad, and I had driven out to see those along the playas del este outside Havana. Most were stark. Some were dank and unclean. And one spread of tiny prefabricated cottages with outdoor sinks and group bathrooms looked like nothing so much as a Portosan farm. Cuba serves the very lowest end of the international holiday market. When some waiter in Paris recites the plats du jour like he’s pissing on you from a great height, you can extract your mental revenge by picturing him, come August, on Cuba’s Costa del Fleabag, eating swill in a concrete dining hall. I wandered around the Trinidad region. I went to see the Iznaga Tower, an early nineteenth century neoclassical structure with seven arched and columned setbacks tapering to 140 feet at the pinnacle—monumental but so delicately proportioned that the whole thing seemed about to take flight. It looked like a spaceship designed by Palladio. The purpose of this beautiful and subtle artistry, which took ten years to construct, was to keep the slaves from goofing off. The plantation owner would get up on top and give everybody the hairy eyeball. The tower was no longer in use. With the block-captain system, the chattel labor now spied on itself. I drove through the Valle de los Ingenios (Valley of the Sugar Mills, as it’s romantically called) and over the Escambray Mountains again. As late as 1967, anti-Castro guerrillas were extant here. The Cuban government prefers to call
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