them “bandits.” Back in Trinidad, in what used to be a church, there’s the marvelously named Museum of the Struggle Against Bandits, which should certainly open a branch in the U.S., maybe in Dan Rostenkowski’s*** old congressional office. Not much was actually in the museum. The centerpiece was a beat-up pleasure boat supposedly captured from the CIA. Two suspiciously new and definitely Soviet machine guns had been mounted on its deck with unlikely looking half-inch wood screws. The rest of the displays were mostly devoted to photographs of Cuban soldiers “martyred by bandits.” One of these poor soldiers was named O’Really. Not much was actually in Trinidad, either. It’s very old, if you like that sort of thing. Trinidad was founded in 1514 by Diego de Velazquez, the conquistador of Cuba. Although Cuba didn’t really take much conquering. Confiscador would be more like it. The local heyday was in the eighteenth century, when Trinidad was a major slave port. Then better slave off-loading facilities were built in Cienfuegos. Not much has changed in Trinidad since, and this gets the guidebooks excited. Fodor’s goes on at some length about how this “marvelous colonial enclave” has not been “polluted with advertising, automobiles, souvenir shops, dozens of restaurants and hotels, and hordes of tourists milling through the streets.” Which, translated, means nobody’s made a centavo here in 200 years. The buildings around the main square were patched and painted. The buildings not around the main square weren’t. Practically everything was one- story high and built flush against tiny, crooked streets paved in stones as large as carry-on luggage. I got lost heading back to the hotel. The streets were becoming even tinier, and the people standing around in those streets were not looking full of glee that UNESCO had declared Trinidad a World Heritage Site. In fact, they looked depressed and mean. I was getting more than the usual number of cold stares and catcalls, and just when I’d thought to myself, “I wouldn’t care to stop here,” I stopped there. The starter motor whined uselessly. The car was inert. A crowd of impoverished Cubans gathered around me. I was frantically looking up “Placating Phrases” in the Berlitz when I realized the rude noises and gestures had stopped. The people in the crowd were smiling. And not the way I would have smiled if I’d found a moneyed dimwit trapped in my barrio. “ El auto es
Made with FlippingBook - professional solution for displaying marketing and sales documents online