Here’s what I saw, what residents say

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Editor's note: Emmy Award-winning photojournalist Richard Bickel recently completed his 15th trip to Cuba on the heels of two hurricanes, an earthquake and a national power grid failure. The Florida resident said conditions were the worst that he’d seen in his 30 years of travel to the communist island.

PUERTO ESPARANZA, CUBA — In this far-flung fishing village on Cuba’s northwest coast, Pablo Mesa has worked a long and brutal night. Unable to find gasoline for his outboard, the 58-year-old fisherman has rowed five miles out to sea for a wage. Square-jawed, sturdy build, and with a perpetual fisherman’s squint, Pablo comes across as a no-nonsense man of the sea.

He greets his visitor with a handshake crush of a truck door closing. “Last night was a good catch,” grins Pablo, surveying the blue Caribbean, then tossing an oar into his wooden skiff. On the boat dock are a dozen sizeable grouper and snapper. He loads the catch into several sacks and begins negotiating with a man selling a satchel of rice. A trade is arranged, Pablo heaves his rice onto a horse cart for home.

And so it goes in a port called Esperanza, a word that translates to “hope.” Which seems to be nearly all that’s left here ― and indeed throughout the better part of today’s increasingly desperate Cuba.

Out of hundreds of the port’s fishermen, only a handful remain. The others have left with their families, seeking a paycheck in Havana or beyond, consigning the fishing-dependent town’s income to near-economic ruin. Without fuel for their motors, few mariners are willing to endure the harshness of fishing by oar.

Inside the town itself, dusty streets are barren; there is no traffic. It is soundless. The stagnant smell of the sea drapes squat, formally-columned 19th-century homes, their paint pale and chalky from the unrelenting sun, their verandas mostly peopleless. A boney mutt slumbers in the shade of a scrub palm.

Puerto Esperanza has essentially become a ghost town.

A demanding paradise The pavement from Puerto Esperanza to Viñales Valley, Cuba’s famed tobacco-growing region, is fissured and potholed. It requires a good hour to negotiate its twelve miles without a blown tire. But how can there be urgency with open car windows ceding intoxicating, earthy essences of tilled soil, tobacco drying in roadside barns, and cattle-strewn pasture?

And behold the vistas! Karst mountains rise abruptly from the flat valley floor like great hulking beasts. Thatched-roofed homesteads and hammocks of majestic royal palms punctuate emerald fields. It is a paradisiacal land, as beautiful as one will find on this earth, with breathtaking vistas unmarred by strip malls, billboards, or fast-food joints. Experiencing rural Cuba is a journey to another place and time.

Yet life is challenging for Viñales campesinos. Tractors are mostly unknown; tending fields is by oxen and hard-hand labor. Fertilizer is a challenge to find, as are irrigation pumps. Climate change has created droughts and has generated ever-more intense hurricanes. Power outages stop cooling fans, causing sweltering, sleepless nights. (Air conditioning in farm homes is unheard of.)

“Bienvenido,” smiles Juan, a 60-ish yuca farmer, his sun-creased face shaded by a tattered cowboy hat and work boots caked with red mud. He opens the gate to his family compound with pigs and poultry scattering from our path. “Un momento,” he says, vanishing in a cloud of wood smoke.

As throughout Cuba, the family is enduring yet another day without electricity and must cook tonight’s supper over an open fire. Juan re-kindles the fire, stirs a steaming kettle of black beans and nods to his yuca field. It’s green and vibrant, perversely saved by recent Hurricane Rafael’s monsoons after a months-long drought and an unavailability of irrigation means. (Happily, at least for Viñales Valley denizens, the bulk of Raphael’s wrath was far to the east, as were the effects of Cuba’s recent 6.8 earthquake).

Asked about his future hopes, Juan simply says with a breath of fatalism, “We hoe, we hope, we pray.”

But Juan’s 6-year-old grandson sees things a bit differently. Happy, bright-eyed and spirited, he seems emblematic of the children one finds in Cuba. Though they have little, the children are unaware of that. And they are loved; Cuban families are among the closest found anywhere on this earth.

A stone’s toss from Juan’s farm is the homestead of Felix and Maria Quiñones. Felix, in his late 70s and a retired tobacco farmer, sits stationary on his porch rocker, barely able to rock, let alone rise to greet his guest. Nevertheless, he pushes himself up, and smiles to extend a hand, reflecting the heartfelt hospitality this visitor has perpetually found in Cuba.

Felix is living with congestive heart failure, but barely. Medications that would help give him a normal life have, like so many things, disappeared from Cuba’s pantry. Indeed, walk into any pharmacy throughout the island, and you will find bare shelves. This, in a country that but a decade ago prided itself in highly capable health care.

The Quiñones home is a slat-board, two-room residence. “Things were better,” says Maria, “before Hurricane Ian hit.” (The category 3 storm raged with 125 mph sustained winds to level homes throughout the Valley in 2022.). She gestures to a nearby bare concrete pad where their larger family home stood. “We tried to rebuild, but there is nothing to build with.”

Motel La Ermita: Not quite what tourists expect High above Viñales Valley, Motel La Ermita, an aged state enterprise, clings to a hillside overlooking entrancing landscapes, yet may not be what most foreign guests had hoped for. (Imagine a timeworn Days Inn unmaintained since its construction.) There, blackouts are faithfully irregular, with outages for hours, and the hotel generator – acquired only months ago to supplement municipal outages – is already failing.

Today, a scattering of corpulent German tourists baste themselves in tanning oil and lounge by an algae-greened, half-filled pool while an emaciated hound begs for a crumb from their snack plates. (The motel was at a dismal 15% occupancy due to the adverse publicity emanating from Cuba.)

Somehow keeping its doors open, La Ermita limps along. The TV signal is out motel-wide, save for one Chinese station that surreal-y pulses 1980s-era soaps, and today, the dining room is depleted of, among other things, sugar. (This, in a land that once produced a good portion of the world’s supply.) Plumbing is in disrepair and the hotel electric, if it does happen to flicker back on, quick, get your shower! For when there’s no power, there’s no water.

Fifty-ish Armando, the amiable motel desk clerk, hasn’t an easy job. The Germans are quite unhappy with the blackouts and, indeed, with the property in general. He straightens his tie to promise the power will return in an hour. As will the water. And "sí, sí," the television! The guests glance at the three clocks above the front desk, placarded for times in London, Tokyo, and Havana. All three are dead-stopped, reflecting the paused land they’ve chosen for a tropical vacation.

The hurricane came indoors A hundred miles west of Viñales Valley, in the central Havana neighborhood of Vedado, is the residence of a man who will be called “Joe.” Joe wouldn’t offer his real name, nor would he permit a photograph of himself. (He alluded to some recent "police issues" – perhaps explaining his reticence.)

His third-floor walkup is but one room, and his worldly possessions, a bed, a table and some clothes on a hook. Oh, and a metal pot and hotplate sitting on the floor, that being his "kitchen." He is unemployed but says his wife (who also remained unnamed) is a government worker whose wage is $30 per month. That said, he pays no rent; his appallingly neglected building is owned and provided by the state.

Joe’s room air is thick, steamy, stale. Walls are cracked, water-stained and mold-layered, being from a goodly chunk of his roof collapsing on his bed (happily, he was out) and in came rains from the two recent hurricanes. (He'd found a tarp, but that only diverted the torrent from his bed to the other side of the room.) A bare light bulb dangles from a cord, but today, the power is out, with the windowless room’s illumination provided by the roof hole.

Joe's living situation is not unique. Simply walk the avenues of Havana to witness the dismal state of other edifices, their facades fractured, chunks of masonry having tumbled to the sidewalk, boards, and planks here and there for jury-rigged fix-ups, some propping up one floor so as to not collapse upon another.

Indeed, just last year, a Havana apartment building caved in on an entire family, and three perished. On top of the human toll is the loss of Havana's architectural treasures with many buildings from colonial times.

"Nice day," says Joe, glancing at the blue sky shimmering through the roof gap. He reaches under his bed for a bottle. "Some rum?" he offers. Though it's 10 a.m., he's understandably thirsty.

With some help from the saints When things are bad, humans often seek religion. And for the downtrodden of Cuba, the Santeria faith offers a potent message of hope.

“Yes, of course!” vehemently replies Luisa Carrera, a Santería santera (priestess), when asked if Cuba’s downturn has attracted followers. “My flock grows daily with their sorrows.”

This visitor has been invited into Luisa’s home in Guanabacoa, a gritty neighborhood on Havana’s eastern flank. The residence is filled with spirit dolls, masks, fetishes, ritual drums, and ceramic urns for collecting sacrificed animal blood. On the floor is an altar with a plate of fresh fruit, today’s offering to Elegua, the gatekeeper to all the saints.

Luisa is held in esteemed regard by Santería followers. Indeed, she is in the hierarchy of Santería clergy nationwide and garners pilgrims from throughout the land. (Guanabacoa is Cuba’s cradle of Santería and today’s epicenter for the faith).

“I descend into a trance,” says the priestess when asked to describe how she communes with the saints and thus provides counsel to her disciples. “The spirit voices can offer advice and even reveal the future,” she explains, adding that a Santería colleague told of the coming of Covid. Regarding animal sacrifice, the saints advise the animal to be selected. “They mostly ask for chickens,” she says, stroking beads of her prayer necklace, “but they can require the blood of a sheep or goat.”

The lamp in Luisa’s dim interior suddenly flickers and dies. Blackout. Luisa squeezes her visitor’s hand to softly offer a prayer for the visit. She bids safe travels.

In the midday Guanabacoa street, the sun is white and overpowering. There, an ancient Dodge is pushed uphill by three men, and then a handful more join in. The car isn’t broken down; its tank is simply empty, and the nearby gas station has a two-day, sleep-in-your-car queue, as commonly found in fuel-strapped Cuba.

Nearby, another queue snakes blocks long to the door of a bank. Those cash-challenged are withdrawing pesos to buy food and other necessities, which are barely affordable at a near-40% annual inflation. Deepening bitter frustration, the government limits withdrawals to the equivalent of U.S. ten dollars per week.

On Guanabacoa sidewalks, roaming vendors proffer brooms, bananas, single cigarettes, whatever will earn a peso or two. A boy lifts a squawking chicken to passersby; a man peddles a solo bicycle tire. A wide-smiling teenage girl displays flashlights; in the time of perpetual blackouts, she’s found her niche.

Day-by-day existence: This is the story of today’s Cubans. It is one of facing unfathomable hardship with dignity that we in a more privileged land may find unfamiliar. But a stone toss from America’s detached shores, the people of Cuba teeter on the edge of human endurance, seeking to get by.

And with a little help from the saints, perhaps they will.

Apalachicola photojournalist Richard Bickel visited Cuba in November and early December. This story originally appeared in the Tallahassee Democrat, part of the USA TODAY Network. To see more of Bickel’s Cuba images along with his other work, visit his website at richardbickelphotography.com.

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