Cuba: 21 March – 15 April, 2011

…Part Two: Cienfuegos and Santa Clara.

Just to expand on the Cienfuegos comment from the last post: we went to Cienfuegos for three days, and unless you like water bottling factories and shipping ports, you won’t like Cienfuegos. Every Cuban we had spoken to about going there all said that the city was ‘tranquil’. Aburrido is the Spanish word for ‘boring’, so we’ve got no idea what they were talking about…

Cienfuegos has no museums, no galleries; it has one café, very few restaurants, and absolutely no sites to see – other than a very small central square with no shade so the person sitting in it gets blasted by the hot sun and even hotter breeze (this is probably the exhaust fumes from the bottled water factory). Overall, there is literally nothing to do.

While we were there, we decided to get away for a day, so we went to the town of Santa Clara. Santa Clara is the location of the battle during the Revolution that elevated Che Guevara to a living legend all around Cuba. He and a small group of other Rebels (18 or 19 in total) derailed an armoured train carrying 350 of Batista’s troops. All were captured, and the following day, Batista fled Cuba and the Revolution was complete. A picture of the scene is printed on the back of the 3 Peso note.

Anyway, Santa Clara is a smaller version of Cienfuegos, equally as boring, however it has one major drawcard: the Che Guevara Memorial, Museum, and Mausoleum (all on one site). So after arriving in Santa Clara, and clawing our way through the swarms of touts, hustlers, crazy taxi drivers, dodgy cigar salesmen, beggers, and casa particulares owners who congregate just outside the bus station, we walked to the memorial.

The memorial itself overlooks Santa Clara’s Revolution Square (about a quarter the size of Havana’s (which incidentally, fits over a million people), and is a series of statues and murals. Overall, it was tastefully done and quite a peaceful place to visit. 

Che Guevara statue at the
Memorial in Santa Clara

After sitting there relaxing and enjoying the sunlight for 20 minutes or so – the tour buses rolled in. At this point we checked out the museum – very impressive for such a small museum; lots of old photos, clothes, his diaries, pipes, etc – and then had a look at the mausoleum. I was expecting something grandiose with the mausoleum, but it ended up being more of a memorial garden-type affair – no big murals, nothing flash. In fact there wasn’t even a plaque showing where his remains were buried. A nice enough little garden, until you look around and see the half dozen armed guards with very large machine guns.

One thing has since struck me as odd (and this has only occurred to me as I’m typing); there were no hawkers selling Che t-shirts anywhere nearby. And for that matter, I can’t really recall anyone in Santa Clara selling them.

Anyway, after the day here, we went back to the drudgery of life in Cienfuegos.