reports from beyond
The next morning I awakened to the sound of cocks crowing and horses’ hooves ringing on cobblestones. By the time I’d finished my breakfast in the patio, old men were sitting on benches outside, idly smoking cigars. In a corner, schoolchildren wearing white blouses and red revolutionary neckties clustered like bees round their teacher, sketching the bell tower. A lonely-looking fat boy, his right hand encased in an enormous baseball glove, was throwing a ball against the wall of one of the houses. It had barn-like doors and huge windows covered with black wrought-iron grilles. By 10 a.m. it was so hot that only gossiping, blackskinned women remained under shady trees alive with birdsong. Puzzled why Che Guevara T-shirts were hanging for sale on the massive oak doors of the bell tower, which looked like a church, I decided to have a look. The former eighteenth century convent of San Francisco de Asís was in fact the Museo Nacional de la Lucha Contra Bandidos (National Struggle against Bandits). Off palm-filled courtyards were rooms containing maps, weapons and the remains of a US U-2 spy plane that had been shot down over Cuba. They also had dozens of glass cases with sad photographs of bearded, black-bereted local volunteers who died fighting counter-revolutionary bands that operated in the nearby Sierra del Escambray in the 1960s. Near the entrance, steep stairs climbed past signs saying ‘Don’t play the bells!’ to the top of the bell tower. Below, Trinidad was a sea of orange-tiled roofs and compact courtyards interspersed with palm trees. To the west, sun-dappled forested mountains soared into the cloudless blue sky while, to the south, tree-lined plains stretched away to the flat, curving Ancon Peninsula and the shimmering Caribbean. The town, which seemed to be frozen in time since the 1700s, had countless other museums. Perhaps the best of these magnificent old converted mansions was the neoclassical Museo Romántico on the Plaza Mayor. Once owned by Dr Justo Cantero, a German who acquired vast sugar estates by poisoning an old slave trader and marrying his widow, it contained outstanding collections of Regency furniture and porcelain. Down the hill, the Museo Histórico Municipal had spacious courtyards and tasteful rooms with immense mirrors, chandeliers and charts showing the history of slavery. But far more interesting than the town’s architecture or museums was the Casa Templo de Yamayá, the centre in Trinidad of santería, Cuba’s fascinating animist religion. Brought by slaves from West Africa between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries, santería’s worship of ancestral spirits and Yoruban orishas (deities) was hidden behind a Catholic veneer. Since the slaves were prohibited from practicing their native religions, they secretly superimposed Catholic saints on the orishas. Thus it looked like they were praying to a saint or to the Virgin Mary, though they were also invoking one of their orishas. However, Fidel Castro has openly encouraged Afro-Cuban culture as an important part of the island’s identity, and now santería is more popular than ever. It has also has been instrumental in slave liberation movements, and has greatly influenced music such as salsa 73