Travel with Indigo

THE DOMINICAN REPUBLIC

With a population of nearly ten million and at 85 percent the highest literacy rate in the Caribbean, the DR has much to recommend it, but proximity to a felicitous neighboring country is not among its best features. It occupies the eastern two-thirds of the island of Hispaniola and is verdant, fecund and comparatively safe for human habitation. Haiti, its immediate neighbor, occupying the other third of the very same island, is the opposite of all of these, barren, infertile and dangerous. By any measure of a society’s achievements, and of its pathologies, Haiti occupies another statistical planet. A country’s GDP per capita, using Purchasing Price Parity to minimize differences in currency valuations, is a decent rough and ready measure of a country’s relative attainment. The DR’s is $8,500, Haiti’s a pathetic $1,300, a figure, dismal as it is, thought to be wildly fraudulent.

While the DR’s population is 73% mulatto, 16% white, mostly of Spanish origin, and 11% black,  Haiti’s is 95% black Creole and 5% mulatto and white. The DR’s modern history is a series of military junta’s and junta-backed strongmen followed most recently by a more or less honest and stable democratic republic. While the wholesale massacre by plantation slaves of its slave owners and ruling plutocracy deeply scarred Haiti’s more distant pass, consecutive gangs of feckless thieves ruling over human misery characterize its modern history. It is today hardly a country at all, in any coherent sense of the term. I am not aware of anywhere else in the world where two adjoining countries are so starkly in contrast.

Just why this is so is the subject of considerable academic debate. My own opinion is that the mass killing of its entire ruling class and their functionaries destroyed any hope that legitimate, lasting political and administrative institutions would ever arise from Haiti’s ashes. The DR never had such a murderous revolution and benefited from institutional stability arising from Spanish colonial influence. Whatever the causes of their contrasts, the DR is a fine place to visit and Haiti to avoid.

My long time close friend, Jack Burnell, joined us for a week in the DR at Casa de Campo and in the capital city of Santo Domingo before having to fly back home for an important meeting. Together we idled away time with leisurely walks, lunches on Indigo and dinners in fine local restaurants and car tours to the notable attractions, few as they are. We both admired the superb Spanish Colonial architecture of the city’s old town dating from 1496, making it the oldest permanent European settlement in the New World. Established and governed for a time by Bartolomeo Colombo, a brother of Christopher Columbus, a statue honoring him, along with a sturdy fortress, guards the harbor’s entrance. Jack, ever inquisitive, climbed an exhausting (to him) length of stone stairs to the top of the fortress, where he enjoyed a great view of the harbor, imagining himself to be a Conquistador I’m guessing. As an avid practitioner of energy conservation, I declined to join him but instead sat on a tree-shaded bench and watched tourists go by.

As we strolled through a leafy town square in the heart of the old town, a street shill for one of the local retailers, a man with that naturally engaging charm common to his profession, approached us. His appeal leaped to a higher plane when he mentioned that the store he encouraged us to visit housed a large collection of fine rums and cigars. What he failed to say was that the store carried only these items, all in a dazzling assortment of flavors, shapes and sizes, tastefully displayed from shelves and glass cases covering two large floors. We had happened upon Man Heaven, without the terminal inconvenience of having to die to get there.

From Casa de Campo, we traveled the short distance to Bajaibe, a nearby beach resort town where locals board large catamarans for a five-mile trip to Isla Saona, one of the world’s most picturesque beaches. Intrigued, we visited the beach using Indigo’s tender (by water is the only way to get there) and joined a few hundred locals lying about under the shade of a magnificent palm grove sipping on rum drinks conveniently sold from rustic thatch-roofed huts. So identical is the beach to the universal mind’s eye picture of the idyllic tropical paradise that many advertisements around the world, and more than a few Hollywood films, feature it as just that. It is at least as perfect a beach as any I have ever seen, including those of Polynesia and Thailand. Although without the DR equivalent of the Flora Bama Bar, that most august and widely esteemed institution, it cannot hope to compare favorably to the Redneck Riviera. Few beaches can.

After Jack returned home, I met up with my friend from five years ago, Jose Peguero, with whom I have stayed in touch in the meantime. He and his wife kindly took me on a tour of La Romana and filled me in on the details of daily life in the DR. We saw a great many more Haitians than I remembered, all of them refugees from the calamity of their awful country. Unsurprisingly, since their arrival, crime rates have soared.

After we said our goodbyes to Jose and his wife, Indigo made her way around the east end of Cuba and westerly along its extensive north shore to Havana.

HAVANA

We reported as required to Marina Hemmingway and there tied up to a concrete seawall in a former resort complex of apartments, several hotels and modest villas whose designs appeared to date from the 50s with little improvement since. The grounds and buildings were poorly kept. Castro’s compound, in which he is now currently living, is just across the street.

To get into the resort or to leave it required passing through two police checkpoints, not to prevent cash bearing tourists from leaving the area to spend money in the city but to prevent impoverished Cubans from boarding vessels and leaving the country. Uniformed and plain-clothes cops are numerous in Havana, and snitches, hoping to ingratiate themselves and their families with these, even more common. During our entire stay, at least two plain-clothes cops hovered on foot around Indigo twenty-four hours a day.

Cuba is the only country I have visited where the government blocks both the sending and receiving of emails and text messages. Locals can send and receive both, though solely with government phones overheard by government snoops, at a cost few can afford.

As we tied up, a friendly man in his mid-30s with an exuberant mass of unruly red hair greeted us in flawless, unaccented English. From experience, I know that hucksters commonly come forward in this manner, but here experience was misleading. The Fixer, a nickname I will use to protect him from possible, though improbable, arrest, turned out to be an invaluable guide through the intricacies of Socialist/Black Market Cuba.

For guys, the very first thing you notice upon arriving in Havana is the cars. When Castro arrived, those who could do so departed and left behind their US-made cars, all of them dating from 1959 and earlier. Most of these, still painted in their original hues and with original interiors, radios and the like, are now government owned taxicabs. Their motors and running gear, long sense worn out, have been replaced by Japanese made, fuel efficient 5-cylinder diesel engines and 5-speed manual shift transmissions with their modern shift mechanism linked to authentic hand levers mounted on the steering column. Their brakes are modern, hydraulic disc in place of the original drum.

During our four-day stay, I saw an astounding variety of car makes and models, all reminiscent of my youth. I rode often in a 1948 –a year considerably earlier than my car conscious youth, thank you– Chevy 4-door sedan. It had rolled and pleated red velour seat covers and a back seat large enough for a small party. It was the sort of car that leant itself well to furtive canoodling in lovers’ lanes.

There were also Desotos, Buicks, Willys’ Jeepsters, Studebakers, Edsel’s, Nash Ramblers, Oldsmobiles, Plymouths, Dodges, gloriously finned Cadillacs, lots of Chevys and Fords, including Corvettes and T-birds, two- and four-door sedans, convertibles and faux-wood paneled station wagons, none of which was produced after 1959. There is hardly a better way to travel around Havana, or anywhere else, than in a gleaming red 1958 Impala convertible with the top down and its chrome shined to perfection, and this you can do in Havana in a taxicab.

Cars owned by the government and used as taxis were in poor repair but still cool, while the few cars owned privately were immaculate objects of mechanical and aesthetic perfection glistening in the subtropical sun. Because selling anything for a profit is a capitalist corruption, the government forbids owners of cars, indeed owners of any of the preciously few items of privately owned property, from selling them, ever. As you might expect from people who of necessity are clever, there are illicit ways around these prohibitions. There always are.

The Fixer escorted me on several day and night excursions into the central city’s tourist area, a recently tarted up old town of magnificent Spanish Colonial architecture. There, I mingled in crowds of tourists just arrived off whatever cruise ship was in port and with those bussed into town from a long stretch of beachfront hotels nearby. There are boutique hotels, fine bars and a few decent restaurants. Shops selling tourist goods of a middling sort line the shaded parks and charming plazas, and everywhere you look lines of those delightful old cars pass by adding color and character to the place. Of the old town’s new hotels, all in buildings converted from some prior use, the Saratoga is said to be the finest.

Just a block off the main pedestrian walks, though, the streets and buildings are care worn and dilapidated, as is the entire country. Buildings not painted since the Revolution, concrete spalls, exposed torn and rusted rebar, shutters hanging loose on their hinges. What the tourist sees is merely a façade, a thin veneer of respectability hiding the squalid effects of socialist perversion. Hard currency earned from cigars, sugar, rum and the tourist trade only postpones the day when the entire fraudulent, corrupt enterprise is sure to collapse. That, at least, is the prediction, and has long been the prediction, though sadly for the Cuban people it has yet to come about.

Despite cops and snitches, Cuba is one vast black market in which employees and enterprising thieves steal goods and services of every conceivable description, sell them to distributors or back yard assemblers, who then sell on to retailers and the public, local and tourist alike. Here are just two examples I encountered. One man, a friend of The Fixer, works at an airport pumping gasoline for state-owned aircraft and vehicles. Each day when he goes to work his wife prepares his lunch and puts it into a backpack, which he wears openly. Also in the backpack is a flask made of flexible plastic sewn into its lining. At day’s end, with his backpack stuffed with the empty wrappers and leftovers from lunch, the better to disguise his illicit mission, he fills the flask with stolen gasoline and goes home. The half gallon it holds brings a high price on the black market and when accumulated over a year amounts to what for him is a hefty supplement to the pittance the government pays him, about $15 a month for the average worker.

Another example is the Cuban cigar. Street peddlers accost nearly every tourist walking through the old colonial zone and surreptitiously offer in hushed tones a “deal” on authentic branded Cuban cigars. These are invariably cigars made from floor sweepings designed to look like the authentic item. They sell for $2 to $10 each, while the branded, higher quality version in the state-owned cigar store sells for $30 to $50. Wishing to buy eight boxes of authentic branded cigars of the highest quality but not wanting to buy them from the state, I worked with The Fixer to obtain these through the black market.

As he explained, the state-owned cigar factories supplement their workers’ pay by giving them two to three cigars a week for personal consumption. The workers accumulate these and steal quite a few more then sell all of them on to an assembler. He combines these with cigars from other workers and those from casual thieves, adds authentic paper cigar rings, fancy boxes and wrappings also stolen, and sells the finished product to men like The Fixer, who sells them to tourists like me. By purchasing his goods from factory workers, the assembler assures that the products he sells are of the same quality as that of the state-owned stores. Moonlighting cigar rollers, using inferior tobacco waste and reject wrappers, produce the shoddy cigars sold to the innocent tourist.

For eight boxes containing 200 high quality cigars, I paid $5 per cigar. Because I did not have time to wait for the assembler to gather up the very highest quality cigars rolled by the best tobacco rollers, The Fixer admitted to me without prodding that although these were excellent they were not of the highest quality. He, along with his accomplice, a small, wiry man with a scarred face, aptly called Scarface, delivered them to me in a black nylon duffel bag while we sat behind blackened windows in the backseat of The Fixer’s car parked out of sight from enquiring eyes. I tested a select few, agreed with The Fixer’s assessment of their quality and paid over the cash. It was all very exciting.

Driving back to the boat, the senior man on duty at a police checkpoint in the Marina Hemmingway resort waived us through because he is a friend and cousin of The Fixer and gets a small piece of the deal for his troubles. At the boat, two plainclothes cops, detailed to Indigo to make sure that we didn’t help any Cubans escape, stood in the way of getting the bag full of illegal cigars onboard. With a modest amount of cash in US dollars in his hand, The Fixer got out of the car, went over to the two cops, slipped the cash into their hands and said they looked as if they could use some exercise and that maybe a brisk walk would do them some good. Presto, the cops left and the cigars and I got safely onto the boat. That I am not writing this from inside a Cuban prison is testament to The Fixer’s skills. I know in retrospect that this was a foolhardy thing to do, but the excitement of it was just too much to resist, along with the pleasing thought of stiffing Castro. I gave away all of the cigars.

One night, The Fixer escorted me to a cabaret in which the famed Buena Vista Social Club performed. They are a mixed ensemble of musicians, singers and dancers who have entertained tourists in Havana and all over the world for years. Many of them, now well into their 70s and a few in their 80s, may have lacked the passion of younger performers but had lost none of their skill. The 2-hour program was dazzling to see, and the audience of fellow tourists and I loved it.

I went for lunch to the historic National Hotel and visited briefly the Capri and Riviera hotels, all once owned by the mob in the person of Myer Lansky. The National is still a special place occupying a promontory looking over the sea and a lush garden. In it, you have the sense of living in the 40s or 50s. At the bar, cocktails from that time, like the Gibson, Rob Roy, and for Havana the iconic Cuba Libre, are popular. Black and white autographed photos of celebrities and authentic furnishings and other interior appointments from the era decorate the public spaces. But when you step outside and see a line of shiny American cars all from the mid- to late-50s waiting to take you on a tour of the city, some of their drivers in period costume, you wonder for just a moment if you have not somehow made a temporal wrong turn and wound up in a bygone time.

I went for dinner one night to the only privately owned restaurant in Havana, called La Guarita, which, I am told, means the small cave. It is located on the top floor of a 3-story walkup apartment building in what was once an up market neighborhood but is now, like all of its surrounding buildings, a shabby tenement. There was no signage on the street or the building to indicate the restaurant’s presence. The street was unlit and inside the building’s entry, a single bare light glowed in its foyer.

The Fixer and I walked up the time worn, dusty staircase, past urchins playing amid clothes hanging out to dry. Wood trim and doors at each of the apartments had gone without paint since the Revolution and the common areas without cleaning. We walked past castoff steel drums that once held Castrol but were now plumbed into the apartments and used as water storage tanks. At the top floor, a single small sign identified one apartment as the home of La Guarita. The Fixer pressed a buzzer on the wall next to the tall unpainted wood door. An attendant opened it without ceremony admitting us into a small foyer jammed with people waiting for a table.

Cozy rooms off a central hallway were full of tightly packed tables, all full, and there was a friendly energetic air about the place. The host seated us in one of these rooms with tasteful art hanging from its walls, and there we enjoyed a decent, though not exceptional, dinner with wine at a cost that seemed reasonable.

To get into town from the marina requires a drive of about ten miles, passing through an area whose principal street is Fifth Avenue. Once a district of graceful mansions set in lush gardens, it is now home to administrative offices for various government agencies. Consequently, those fine old homes and their once luxuriant tropical gardens have sunk deeply into disrepair. The most prominent of the homes are now foreign embassies, all maintained to a higher standard.

Just beyond the Fifth Avenue district, the road passes by the singularly most hideous building in Havana, possibly the world, the former Soviet, and now Russian embassy. In its aesthetic appeal, it compares unfavorably with the US Army’s prison at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, a facility to which as a Military Policeman I once delivered a prisoner, in winter no less. There are a few other Soviet contributed buildings in the city, all of them grotesque and unfortunately sited prominently.

During the long period when the USSR was Sugar Daddy for what should have been one of the world’s leading sugar producers, Russian apparatchiks came to Havana in large numbers and universally failed to endear themselves to the Cuban people. To this day, Cubans, according to The Fixer, loathe the Russians. Their feelings toward Americans seemed to me to range between indifference and real affection, complicated by an imperfect history.

I liked Havana very much, most especially its hard working, clever and decent people and would eagerly return there. On my next visit, though, I would want to tour the whole country just to see what life is like outside the big city. I have an idea of it from all I learned from The Fixer, but I would like to see it for myself.

THE BAHAMAS AND HOME

As we departed Havana and coasted along the north shore of Cuba, we were over flown by a US Navy patrol plane, which made two passes, one of them from our stern so that he could read our name from the transom I imagine. US law requires the captain to file with the Department of Homeland Security prior to our arrival there a form listing our last five ports of call, a list that of course included Havana. He had filed it by email, so we assumed the fly over was in response to our having visited Cuba. I began to worry about my cigars.

I treated the crew to four fun-filled days in the Abaco islands of the Bahamas, my adopted second home. From our anchorage off Matt Lowe’s Cay, we took in all the usual watering holes, like Pete’s Pub in Little Harbor, where I was pleased to see Heather and Greg but missed Pete, and Nippers on Guana Cay, where I talked with old friends from there, including the owner Johnnie Roberts. I had a truly delightful lunch one picture perfect day with my friend Rad Lovett, his tall, handsome 14-year old son, Rad’s sister, and her precocious young son.

During our stay there, the captain received an email from the US Department of Homeland Security informing us that we were randomly selected (yeah, right!) for a pre-entry search. It instructed us to proceed to a fixed position offshore of Ft. Lauderdale, outside the 12-mile jurisdictional line and hold there until a boarding party arrived at a set date and time. Again, I worried about my cigars.

It occurred to me, as I am sure it occurs to you, that giving anybody you intend to search for illegal contraband a 48-hour advance notice of the search is not the ideal means of apprehending miscreants or confiscating prohibited merchandise. Little wonder that few Americans, including me, have much confidence in their federal government.

We arrived at the location and on the day and time prescribed, but the boarding party showed up four hours late, using as an excuse some mumbo jumbo filled with arcane references to their protocols and policies, none of which made any sense. Still, I made my displeasure for their tardy arrival known both to the leader of the boarding party and to his boss.

The boarders arrived in high speed, high tech boats powered by four large outboard motors. When we attempted to take photos of the boat for the website, they cautioned us not to do so, but we did anyway. Eight large guys, dressed over dramatically in combat boots and black fatigues and all packing weapons came on board, brusquely introduced themselves, poked around a bit and left. They were looking for illegal immigrants and explosives but did not bother looking in our cavernous forepeak, where we could have hidden twenty immigrants and tons of explosives. To my relief, they said they had no interest at all in Cuban cigars.

Following that welcome home, we proceeded into the harbor in Ft. Lauderdale and docked just across the canal from the very dock from which we had departed on our round the world adventure exactly five years and two days before.

THE END, for now.