Viñales

Our taxi driver asked if we minded if he made a quick stop to take care of something and we obliged him. Then he turned into a hotel parking lot on the edge of a cliff and everyone in the taxi, my cousin, two Polish girls, and myself, joined in a harmonized “woooooow!” as our vision was filled fully with a lush valley of tobacco fields backgrounded by green covered limestone cliffs: the very same postcard vantage that made me so determined to come to Viñales months ago.

Earlier in Havana, we were dismayed to find the bus we needed well past full, but we were sure there would be some other disappointed Viñales bound travelers besides ourselves and we resolved to stay planted and find new friends to split a taxi with. The plan worked and we beat the bus by a good couple of hours.

Viñales is a verdant rural town famous for its tobacco production and dramatic limestone cliff formations. Walking about the main village, teeming with dogs, chickens, pigs, boys with baseball gloves, and classic American cars, it felt like we were walking around a tropical alternate reality version of 1950s middle-of-nowhere America. The street cuisine does little to dispel that feeling. Pizza, spaghetti, and sandwiches seem to take a significant share of a Cuban’s diet and are available in restaurants at nearly U.S. Prices or in local stalls for around forty cents and paid for in a different currency entirely (It's 24 CUPs to 1 CUC, with the CUC's value being fixed to the USD – but don't bring USD to Cuba because you'll incur a 10% additional tax penalty in the conversion). So most meals consist of white starch, a heap of cheese, and a smear of vaguely tomato-esque paste. Cheap college food.

We stayed in our first Casa Particular, a rentable room in a Cuban's home; an interesting recent exercise in free enterprise and the most affordable way to sleep in Cuba. We based our pick of casa on how well its outdoor space accommodated dusk time cigar smoking and settled on a casa close to the farms with a table on its roof.

In the morning our hosts introduced us to Diosnel, who would take us around the valley. Our day started at a cigar factory where we were walked through the process of making cigars, though the tour's being done entirely en Español limited our comprehension. Sweaty shirtless men packed the leaves tightly in bundles using a giant metal press. The leaves are then fermented in a powerfully acrid aging room. In a warehouse room full of dozens of middle aged women, the leaves are stripped of their steams and then separated into wrapping and fillers.

We stopped next for coffee at Diosnel's home and he sold us maybe a dozen really crappy cigars for way too much – probably dollars to a few cents (a wildly typical scam here – in the cities you learn to drown out the sound of “Cigar!?” as you get around).

Diosnel drove us deeper into the valley until the roads made the car no longer practical, and we loaded into a horse cart led by the noble Reggaeton. We discovered the right way to motivate a horse was with a nasally, “cabaaaaaaaallo!” We plowed through muddy trails past thatched tobacco huts and cigar smoking farmers in ox carts and we learned more intimately the nuances of those dome capped cylindrical lumps of limestone covered in bushes, palms, vines, and moss.

Eventually we landed at a tobacco farm where a handful of farmers greeted us with complementary cigars – their tips dipped in honey – and a cocktail they called Coco Dios: a coconut split open and filled with honey, orange, grapefruit, pineapple, and of course, rum. Brian had been lugging around a bottle of Bushmills he bought at the Mexico City airport in anticipation of St. Patrick's Day, and we decided it would be a good moment then for a cultural exchange. The farmers' eyes widened when they learned the bottle cost about what their monthly stipend from the government was. Before pouring the whiskey for each of us, a portion was spilled on the ground. For the saints they said. But not too much. (This ritual seems to be pretty closely adhered to elsewhere too – I'd seen several bartenders since pour a little on the ground even when no one was supposed to be watching)

One of the farmers took us for a hike through a series of fields, occasionally pulling out a sample from the soil for us to try. Yucca, boniato, and malanga are terrible raw, but I would later learn each are wonderfully delicious when prepared properly. We saw red young pineapples poking out of bushes – somehow I had always thought they were borne of trees.

We walked past pig pens, plantain trees, termite mounds, and up a hill crest with lovely views of the valley to the south and then the ocean when facing north. We liked the farmers and decided to buy enough cigars there – decent ones this time – to last us the rest of the trip.

The next day, despite being discouraged from doing so by several locals, we struck it out on our own on the trails. Very quickly our boots were saturated with clay red mud. Early on we saw a silly mural commissioned by Castro, depicting a scene of the history of evolution as a child with crayons might. Shortly after, we stumbled upon a crippled farmer's home where three day old piglets were stumbling about. The farmer's wife handed us a bottle of goat's milk and let us feed the newborns. I'm not sure I've ever freaked out so much from cuteness before, but I freaked out real hard.

Viñales is an incredibly beautiful place to get lost in, and we did get lost. In arguments concerning bearing, Brian tended to be correct more often than not. We chatted up a few farmers, enjoyed the valley from every angle, drank deep from coconuts, and peeked into a cave carved into a hillside by a brown river. We were plenty winded just prior to sunset and managed to flag down a car and hitch a ride back to the village we found a main road at last.

Havana

La Habana is like the grandest seashell in all the ocean, built centuries ago by the king of crustaceans as a colorful tribute to lavish living and boundless extravagance – but this same crustacean has long been gone, and another creature has since moved in and made its home there. The shell now has cracks plentiful in its colorful design and this new sea creature is too miserly, tired, and disinterested to be bothered with its maintenance.

Now, this metaphor is trying to speak to the system and history here, and not so much its people. I haven't a bad thing to say about the Cubans I've met so far (well okay, except perhaps for the numerous and very persistent jinteros, or hustlers, that are about just about anywhere tourists are). On a first glance, they seem athletic, wonderfully diverse, and share a strong sense of community on both local and national levels.

Our first stroll through Old Havana seemed a densely choreographed show. Cubanos with a destination would stop to talk with every familiar face peering through painted bars of open windows or leaning over balcony railings. For a minute it seemed like the sky was falling for all the things flung down from balconies to open hands: keys, cash, and whatever else. Flirting was done publicly, aggressively, and as often. Small packs of boys would line a section of street to play baseball with a wooden stick, pausing to let bicycle taxis, horse drawn carts, and classic American cars pass. Every door and window seemed to be open and dared you to peek at the world inside. More than once a peek would become an invitation, and we were waved into a backyard boxing ring for young boys and later a dingy little bar with forty cent glasses of rum where a beautiful dark skinned Cubana in a headwrap showed me pictures of her kids and complained about her hypocrite man.

As you head to old Havana's downtown it almost seems as if there's a very specific line you cross, and all of a sudden the streets and buildings are in good repair and the cast on the street gets widely replaced with upper middle class white tourists. Despite a vaguely Disneyland-esque cultivation of the government planned tourist zones, there's no denying the beauty and authenticity of the downtown architecture. Strolling through bright cathedral laden colonial plazas and waterfronts mounted with fortresses and cannons, it isn’t hard imaging retired privateers in many buttoned coats with a cigar in one hand, an expensive prostitute in another, and bottomless chests with decades worth of plunder in the basements of their lavish mansions. A fedora toting casino running gangster wouldn't look out of place either, and neither would Hemingway himself – though, his old haunts are now obnoxious tourist traps and terribly overpriced. The worst and most expensive cocktail I had in my nearly three weeks in Cuba was in El Floridita, which claims to have invented the frozen daiquiri and sports a bronze statue of Ernesto sitting at the bar in the corner.

Music, much as I was hoping, was abundant in Havana, and certainly one of my principal motivations for sneaking away to Cuba. That and the rum. (Cigars too, I suppose. The country side, architecture, and history are strong selling points as well.) I had my first Havana Club daiquiri just weeks prior to my trip while still in New York – and I hate hearing the word sinful to describe Epicurean pleasure, but that's just how it tasted. Already a damn fine product, the rum was made all the more delicious by its being forbidden. If I'm going to be committing some light treason, I sure as hell might as well be enjoying myself.

For my cousin Brian's birthday, we decided to buy our first cigars and plant ourselves at a jazz club recommended by the bartender at our hostel (the first hostel in all of Cuba and a relatively new thing in the country). But first, we purchased a bottle of aged rum and took a stroll upon a malecon, a waterfront drive with dramatic views of the new downtown, Vedado, and occasionally interrupted with tremendous Caribbean waves that pound their way upward into the air after hitting the rocks below. We stopped briefly before the jazz club in a large clearing full of university aged Cubans. We talked at length with a young Engineering student set to graduate. He seemed terribly embittered about his lot, knowing that were he to be embracing his new career just about anywhere else in the world, he would be compensated well beyond his needs for comfort, but soon, as a Cuban engineer he'd be making the same roughly 20 to 25 USD per month as everyone else. He told us that happiness for him and his family is a great struggle (something I heard more often in Cuba than many of the much poorer nations I've been to, unfortunately). 

An older man came by and attempted to join the conversation. He seemed very insistent on getting everyone's names and circumstances with great specificity. Brian couldn't shake the suspicion that he might have been a plain clothes cop that might have stumbled upon some subversive dialogue with foreigners – something not taken lightly here – and we hope our friend's candid conversation didn't land him in trouble.

In the jazz club we lit our cigars, which were far from the priciest cigars I've ever bought, and I enjoyed the best tobacco I've pulled on to date. The smoke blew thick thick thick but felt silky in the mouth and there wasn't a trace of that ashen accumulation I've come to expect from even good cigars. After a couple of mojitos we were rocking out to the jazz and the saxophonist poured himself out through those windy brass tubes and stole the show.

By the third day in Havana we couldn't help but laugh each time we caught a jintero telling us it was Havana Club's anniversary and that they wanted to take us to the party (a comically common scam where the jinteros get kickbacks from overpriced drinks). It was Saturday, and Brian wanted badly to see a baseball game, and while not originally enthused, I had a really great time at the stadium. We killed some beers before going inside, as they were no longer for sale in the stadium thanks to repeated instances of the crowd getting drunk and out of hand. I've never seen anyone enjoy baseball as much as the Cubans do. The sound and the energy would have been right for gladiatorial combat, with persistent yells, horns, and drumming. It was the nation's premier team, the Industriales, versus the team from Santiago at the far end of the island, and the Industriales mopped the floor with their opponents. We closed the evening out with drinks near the capital building (which resembles our own but is supposedly a few centimeters taller), with a number couchsurfers and then another bottle of anejo at the malecon.

Photo by Brian Linzmeier

Oh, I seem to have omitted my experience with customs when arriving in Cuba. What a tense and drawn out mess. While in line, we were first interviewed by a plain clothes officer in great detail. He asked us about nearly every stamp in both of our passports and then took my journal from my hands and skimmed through it, asking occasionally about its contents. Then we got our tourist cards stamped (no passport stamps for Yanks, thank you). Baggage claim took forever. The only luggage out for a long time was that which would be pointless to search. Strollers and the like. Then came innumerable bags wrapped tightly in plastic wrap. I suppose those in the know know that the wrap deters closer inspection and then saves you time. Well after that, every other checked bag. I assume that every bag was searched by hand, and I have since resolved to be more like Brian and join the carry-on only club.

Before we progressed any farther, we were asked to wait to the side by another customs officer who took our passports away for another uncomfortable ten or so minutes. Another agent came and led another interview while writing down each of our responses. I was actually starting to sweat a little because I had stupidly bought my forward flight flight for the wrong date, a date well beyond the permitted 30 day tourist visa limit. Despite the thorough questioning, I was never asked to show my exit flight ticket, nor did anyone inquire about the liquor we both checked in our baggage from Mexico. Our agent ended with, “sorry, it's my job” and then “welcome to Cuba.” Oddly, many of the agents were crazy beautiful, an observation a German friend we made also shared.

“You can take me to the back room if you want,” he said.

Mexico City

Zocalo, Mexico City's central square – one of the largest public squares in the world – in a way, is the spiritual center of the whole country. When Cortez governed from the overlooking palace, it was the heart of New Spain. Before he marched upon it, it was the main square of the Aztec capital. Modern Mexico City is a city build upon cities, and physical fragments from each of its incarnations remain still.

Stand before la Catedral, the biggest church in all of the Americas, and you might find yourself on a reinforced, but translucent, platform. Look down and you'll see the ghost of a city: exposed stone walls, some even with human skulls embedded in its surface. Between the cathedral and the palace: ruins of a native civic building. There stands a wide pedestal exposed to sunlight in one of the subway transfers I frequented. As the new city grows, we see more of the old city, and our understanding gains further definition with new excavations.

Native culture doesn't merely remain as a lingering architectural feature, but lives on also in the language and in the blood of the Mexicans – and this is something I greatly admire about our neighbors to the south. I wouldn't dare say anything like the natives of what would eventually become Mexico endured any less suffering or cruelty there, but by contrast, it seems that in the states native heritage has been largely sequestered away and forgotten by by the American main stream; isolated from our communities and our conversations in remote and often squalid reservations. In Mexico, native culture is in the public art and in the food. It's celebrated. The Mexican regard for its European forefathers seems somewhat more complex, with a more coherent regard for the wake of bloodshed and suffering they left in their footprints.

The night of my arrival, Zocalo – normally full of entertainers and happy loiterers – was occupied entirely by an exposition put on by the Mexican special forces. Attendees were welcome to climb aboard tanks and helicopters and pose with anti aircraft weaponry. Demonstrations of basic training and canine units drew large crowds.

The service men on the inside of the show were as well armed as those on the streets. The police and federal officers maintain a strong visible presence most places I went, armed with shotguns and imposing fully automatic weaponry. Given the numerous accounts of theft and violent crime prevalent in Mexico City I've taken in, I was usually happy to see them around.

Tuesday afternoon became cause for a joyous reunion, when my cousin Brian walked out of a cab and into my hostel's reception. He's a seasoned traveler that I've always seen quite eye to eye with and I felt very privileged to share the road with him.

I poured him a welcoming shot of tequila and led him on a walking tour of the Centro area (I went through the same motions on Monday, but everything in Mexico City – EVERYTHING – is closed on Mondays). We saw some of Diego Rivera's better known socialist murals in the Secretary of Public Eductation building and in the National Palace. We got a good look inside the beautiful Palacio de Bellas Artes, art noveau on the outside and 30s art deco on the inside. We took a stroll through Alemeda Park, which used to be the main market in the Aztec city, and is now a rare green space in a city that's somewhat monotone and grey compared to much elsewhere in Mexico. The green is occasionally cut with the flower blossoms all over jacaranda trees, which punctuate the city all over with an out-of-place seeming but still soothing purple hue. We finished our stroll at Opera Bar, a classy space where we sipped mezcal served with spiced orange slices, and which sports a bullet hole left by Pancho Villa.

We took the metro – which is cheap, clean, and fast, though it does have trouble keeping up with the volume of riders – to Arena Mexico for an epic match of Lucha Libre wrestling. We didn't forget to drink a few cervezas and buy masks first (my wrestler name is El Puño – The Fist). The best match was a three vs. three bout where they would tag each other into the ring, but order would occasionally dissolve into inside and outside the ring into six man madness.

My team of choice was composed of Diamante Azul, Titan, and Maximo. The first two were lucadores of classic pedigree: old fashioned masks and thick oily muscles. Maximo, on the other hand, was a flabby unmasked wrestler with a pink mohawk, effeminately floppy wrists, and his signature move was planting a smooch on his opponent's lips when he had him cornered. The crowed loved Maximo and pleadingly chanted “Beso! Beso!” if Maximo got ever close enough to lock lips.

My team was decimated in round one by Scorpion Rey and his cohorts, a villainous duo without masks dressed like cavemen. Given how wrecked my wrestlers were, it was truly unbelievable how they were able to recover so swiftly and with such strength that they were able to fight back with high flying kicks and throws enough to win the two final rounds and send those goons back home.

Gigante Rojo y El Puno

I didn't catch the names of the wrestlers in the final one on one round, but given the shouts from the spectators, I would guess their names were Puto and Cabron.

The next morning saw us on an early bus to Teotihuacan, a series of native ruins featuring the second largest pyramid in the Americas. Driving in the city's perimeter, you get a greater sense of just how enormous Mexico City really is, and then just how many of its people are impoverished. Once a native city of modest size built upon a lake set island, the lake has now been long since drained and the metropolitan area has swollen to over 20 million people. Far from the the classical architecture of the central zone, the hills are dense with small concrete boxes in a dull grey that mirrors that of the low hanging clouds. On the undulating hills, the houses almost seem as if they are growing organically but reduced to simple geometry, like some kind of sad grey coral that only grows in 90 degree angles. The density of population in these spaces is reportedly one person to every square meter. I was startled when it occurred to me these communities weren't structurally so dissimilar from those built up and down the hills of Guanajuato – these here were merely devoid of color. That simple element can paint the difference between a scene of joy and a scene of sorrow.

Eventually as we passed along the road, the houses thinned out into clay colored hills and patches of green cactus, and the stony tops of two great pyramid pierce their way into view.

The layout of Teotihuacan was planned cleverly in accordance with astral movements and the four cardinal directions. The two main pyramids are named after the sun and the moon and are each echoed by the mountains they foreground as seen from the area's central plaza. Running up the sides of several temples remain stone depictions of gods: the feathered serpent form of Quetzalcoatl and a stone god chiseled into right angles with binocular scopes for eyes.

Much of the ruins remain underground and there were several teams of excavators hard at work during our visit. At each corner of the pyramid of the moon, skeletal remains of bound children were discovered, placed in ceremonial poses suggestive of human sacrifice. In lunar based intervals of a duration I can't remember, a male youth was selected among his peers as being a living god among men, and his was a life of prestige. That is until the cycle was up and his life was taken with a great ceremony.

The people that built the pyramids abandoned them for reasons we still don't understand, but the Aztecs that arrived from the north around 500 b.c. Found here the fulfillment of their prophecy: that they should found a capital in the place where they find an eagle perched upon a cactus swallowing a snake.

Guanajuato

I had a few days to kill before I was to meet my cousin in Mexico City, but hadn't until the morning of my departure from Guadalajara settled on a destination. I decided to follow a couple of strong recommendations in the direction of Guanajuato, an old town known for its odd geography as a mining town and alternately as having a bustling college scene.

It was hard not to be instantly smitten. The historic center of Guanajuanto is cradled in a valley between mountains and cheerful homes of every color spill from the mountainsides and collect in the middle so densely there's only but a little room for vehicular traffic. The cars are driven away from the surface to underground tunnels passing each way through the city, leaving the intimate cobblestoned alleys and passageways between buildings for feet and bicycles alone. The city's years as one of the world's leading silver producers treated is well, as is evinced by the grandeur of its cathedrals, theaters, and civic buildings.

Being a university town, there's no shortage of hip cafes with good food and coffee – often playing American music. I've frequently found there's a latency effect in the way music is enjoyed geographically, and I was hearing a lot of the indie tracks that were hot when I was in college five or six years ago: Radiohead, Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, and the like. Live music is abundant as well, and there are popular outdoor film screenings in and near a few of the vibrant public squares.

One of the city's greater tourist attractions is el Museo de las Momias, with a permanent collection of unusually mummified corpses disinterred from local cemeteries. The experience is made all the more gruesome and strange by its playful irreverence – many plaques adjacent to specific mummies have monologues detailing what the mummies had been through since being buried, and all in first person narrative. One of the museum's prizes is the smallest mummy in the world, a four to five month old fetus.

More than once I found myself underestimating distances in the city's very not-to-scale tourist map, and I'd then be panting and sweating for hours only to forget what I was working so hard to see and caring much less by the time I arrived. I think it behooves someone visiting Guanajuato's outlying sights to figure out the local bus situation.

A Japanese traveler by the name of Kaz I had met in Guadalajara ended up in my same hostel, and we met up for dinner and drinks. I had molé enchiladas and dark beer. Here and a few places elsewhere, dinner is preceded by cuts of bread with a terribly bland tomato sauce – like salsa without the heat. Kaz explained to me how competitive eating is out in Tokyo and renting karaoke booths and going out singing solo is in. I taught him how to make and “L” sound.

Excited to share my love of mezcal, I pulled Kaz into my our first mezcalria, and then another, only to be wildly disappointed each time. Mezcal, with its complex layers of smoke and tropical fruit, is enjoying a new respect and reverence from New York's bartenders, and in my mind, mezcalrias ought to be dimly lit smoky affairs with only a couple of wizened old Mexicanos huddled over the bar with a veritable library of local hootch on the walls. Instead, both of the Mezcal bars featured not a wealth of Mezcal varieties, but rather a long list of a single cheap mezcal mixed with sugar and different artificial flavors and served in plastic cups. I ordered a peanut and an Oreo, and couldn't be bothered to finish.

The owner of my hostel I checked into is one cool Mexicano. His English is probably excellent, or at least it seemed so... but he refused to use it. Instead, he scales his Espanol based on the proficiency of his guest, forcing them to improve. His place had a very homey feel and an excellent view from its rooftop patio where its myriad guests meet and swap war stories. I met another American bartender who was aiming to be on the road over a year and had already spent about a month in Guanajuato at that point.

By the time I left, Guanajuato was one of the most interesting destinations I had never prior heard of that I've now visited. I'm going to miss its narrow alleyways and vitality and I look forward to returning one day.

Guadalajara

A bus brought us back to another Guadalajara suburb, Tonala, where the Fortaleza bottles are blown into their shape by hand and by mouth. Globs of molten red glass are pulled from a heat belching furnace and are rolled into a cylinder shape before being placed in a mold and then blown into their final form through a long metal tube with a mouth on one end. Were one to inhale instead of exhale, they would end up in the hospital. We each got a chance to blow our own bottles into shape.

The man overseeing the operation holds the record for largest glass bottle blown by a single individual, a feat he repeats a couple times a year including, luckily, the day of our visit. He has to get on a step ladder to blow the giant wobbling mass of red hot glass into its mold. The final product could certainly hold a heck of a lot of tequila.

Day time in Guadalajara central treated us to a bustling cityscape of classical colonial beauty. In the governor's palace I laid my eyes on my first renowned Mexican mural, a massive piece by Jose Clemente Orozco featuring a massive depiction of Mexican hero Miguel Hidalgo gazing alarmingly over a scene of religious and political leaders causing chaos and violence. The infinitely more famous Diego Rivera was a poster boy for socialism. Orozco seemed to regard all politicians as crooks regardless of their alignment. In a set of his murals in a building constructed to house orphans, his final strokes were made to cover up his already painted portrait of the governor that commissioned that set of works. The same building features an image of Cortez being crooned by an angel while he sets to slaying natives with a sword. His armor looks improbably mechanical and even robotic, a twist that makes the armor look foreign, mysterious, and dreadful in a way that I'm sure the natives must have felt.

There was also time to romp around an enormous market full of piles of odd looking animal parts and pirated DVDs. It looked and even smelled like many of the markets I had seen in Southeast Asia. I wonder if perhaps there's some kind of popular cleaning agent at work that's banned in the states.

The final party of the Fortaleza sponsored trip took place on the rooftop bar of our downtown hotel. Guillermo poured us our last shots of tequila for the trip and on top of all the prior generosity, gifted each of us a bottle of his blanco.

Things were surprisingly well behaved that night... that is until everyone got to the after party at a gay strip club down the block. For a couple of hours a bunch of straight gringos took the place over and started a real ruckus on the dance stage. I may or may not be awesome at strip pole dancing. I refuse to comment on whether a thing like that might have even happened. Later in the night the stage was reclaimed by lip-syncing trannies. It was a Fat Tuesday party and masks were distributed to all the guests (mine had a pink color that wouldn't rub out of the skin on my face for half a week). Guillermo found one of the trannies uncomfortably convincing. Things happened that made the gay scene in New York look rather tame.

The next day was full of goodbyes. Most people had to go right home. My adventure was just beginning. I don't think I ever enjoyed such a wealth of hospitality from people I had never met before as was shared by Guillermo Sauza, his son, and his employees. I had a fantasy of what a few rowdy nights in hot and dusty Mexico should be like, and the time I spent with them, among locals and expats, other guests like myself, and copious amounts of tequila certainly fulfilled that fantasy. Fortaleza is setting up a guest house for industry visitors to stay at the distillery to harvest, crush, and distill agave – to actually learn how it's done with their hands – and I don't think my arm has to be twisted too hard to get me back to Tequila. ¡Viva Fortaleza!