Cuba: Santiago de Cuba

A good number of the travellers I met during my stay on the island told me that sadly they wouldn't be able to get to Santiago de Cuba. I understand them — it takes a solid 14 hours by bus to reach the city from Havana. It'd be no more than 2 hours by plane, but naturally the price isn't the same. The only advice I'd give future travellers is to go anyway. It's absolutely worth it.

Santiago de Cuba is an extremely pleasant city, genuinely. For a start, my casa particular was excellent, and Maria, my host, looked after me beautifully. It confirms everything good I already thought about this arrangement. It really is a good way to get to know Cubans and to benefit from their invaluable advice. When I arrived I also had the luck of being welcomed by my Marseille friend's friend, Noel. He's a pure Santiaguero and also a French speaker (perfectly bilingual, in fact). Yes, the point of travelling to Cuba is to speak Spanish, but at that stage of my stay it did me good to go back to a bit of French.. I was struggling too much in Spanish.

Noel showed me the town centre and the various points of interest, and I took to the place immediately... The city is far more mixed than Havana, the streets are smaller, the centre very lively. That day there was a sort of street theatre performance: two women, half naked but painted head to toe, walking in slow motion. I didn't understand the concept, but I thought it was cool :-D . I saw where things were: the Casa de la Cultura, the Casa de la Música, the Bacardí museum... There's a lot of life in the streets of Santiago, it's hard to explain.. it's like Marseille, but cleaner... On the evening of my first tour of the city there was a reggae concert organised in Bob Marley's honour... At that moment I told myself I was very much in the right place at the right time.

I was also able to take some good dance classes in Santiago — Yoruba dances. I took nearly all my classes with Lesvia and a few with her husband "Chichi" as well: two very good teachers and also very good people. Lesvia isn't only an excellent teacher, she's also one of the best dancers I've had the pleasure of being around... She's really not of this world. I had a wonderful time. The setting for the class was striking: it was at my teachers' place, on a raised terrace looking out over part of Santiago, and I often got a little breeze that relieved me between two long stretches of suffering :-D. Suffering there was, because Lesvia did not mess about with me :-D . She made me sweat... but I genuinely learned good things. We worked on Arará, Changó, Ogún, Palo, and finished with a bit of rumba and columbia (I'll post some videos and explanations soon; in the meantime there's Wikipedia ;-) ).

I had the pleasure of befriending some very interesting people during my time in Santiago de Cuba. Besides my host Maria and of course Lesvia, Chichi and Noel, whom I've already mentioned, there were also my teachers' family and friends, whom I passed every day on my way to class, and a group of Swedish women — students of Lesvia's daughter in Stockholm — who were passing through Santiago: Charlotte, Joséphine, Annicka, Anja and Maria. Sadly I met them at the end of my stay, but we had time for a good laugh.

After two weeks I did have to leave. It wasn't easy; I'd happily have stayed a bit longer, to celebrate my birthday in that city with my new friends, but I knew it would have been at the expense of other Cuban cities. The night before I left, my teachers organised a lovely little party for me at their place. We had a really good time together, and I said my first goodbyes of the trip :-( . The next day I was on the bus to Baracoa.