No es facil

 “Are you going to start with bicycling?” asked Alexis, when I fully loaded his roof rack early in the morning. Lulu also smirked, when he saw me coming out of the jungle with two brand new bicycles in the “Kajuko”*. “One Gear, one break” I said: “nothing that can go wrong!”

 

The idea, to bicycle through Cuba was decided. We sailed with good winds in a couple of days to Cienfuegos, put the schooner at the jetty, prepared our bikes and went off with our sailing umbrellas winds astern course northwest.

 

We stopped under the shadow of a tree in the midday heat, pulled the barley juice out of the coolers that we had installed on our handlebars and continued our journey a bit tipsy till we passed by at a motel somewhere northeast on the highway. We had no trouble that all the beds were booked up. I answered the stuff that we’re going to spend the night under a tree and gave them our last beer. Then we parked our boneshakers on the lawn, threw the clothes behind a shrub and jumped into the hotel pool, while our new friends unlocked the pavilion, made some food, and got over some girls from the neighbor village. Our silent night under the tree didn’t work out. “You have to leave before sunrise” said our friend and gave us the key to one of their apartments.

 

We found ourselves before dawn - again on the highway - cycling back to the old course. At noon we threw the bikes over a fence and took our well deserved siesta till somebody pulled us out of our slumber: “What are you doing here?” asked the daughter of the landholder and her girlfriend. For them we were very strange people. In Cuba everybody has his roof; nobody has to sleep “in the wild”. Then they didn’t believe that we really wanted to bicycle beyond the next village until they saw the wire frames of our ships freezer, which we had used as luggage racks and the garbage bags with our camping stuff inside. “No es facil!” said the girls and lead us to an empty little lodge – “You can stay here – at least for a night!”

 

Kathy and I were friends from the moment on, when she revealed, that she had “Roli” tattooed on the inside of her bottom lip. I had to smile, while I cycled with her on the main bar to the market. She said “No es facil” a saying that will accompany us from now on all the way through Cuba.

 

Our bikes definitely were not made for long-term use, bearings crumbled apart, pedals broke of, part of the frame bended, and we looked for bicycle workshops in almost every village, to decelerate the dissolution of our bikes a bit. People helped us where they could; we stayed with them and listened to their stories.

 

In Cuba there is food and clothing for everybody though never enough. Medical care and education is a given but for a little bit more luxury there is always not enough money. Folks are dreaming of traveling even though to most of them their own country is unknown. “No es facil”. However, some of them – and not just the elderly – saw it like a privilege, to life in a country, where you don’t have to fight to survive, where you can hear hearty laughter and living music coming out of the alleys; a land, where families and neighbors are looking after the weak and sick ones and where people are telling their stories and others finding time to listen.

 

With our last strength we made it to Havana and into the vicinity of the train station just before a rear tire left us with a big bang. The conductor took our bikes and stored them in the locomotive right next to the engine and allocated us two seats in the stuff section.

 

For the first time it rained hard and one of the conductors, whom Lulu had asked to close the window on the opposite side, just silently moved up the frame without any pane – we spent the whole day on the desolate network of train tracks back to Cienfuegos, pushed our destroyed vehicles late at night on a donkey barrow back to the ship and gave them away the next day. With fresh crew on board and fresh wind we set sails to Santiago and further with course East to Jamaica.

 

* „No es facil!“ – Its not easy!