Toronto skyline and a progressive cow barn

Here are a couple more sketches from my sojourn in Toronto en route to Cuba.  The Toronto skyline is distinctive, drawn here from the man-made Leslie Street spit.  The spit is a popular birding spot, with many bays made of construction rubble, and woodlands growing on the older parts.  Local birders were excited by the arrival of spring.  Spring is a relative thing - it was a sunny day, but with a strong cold wind, and I was glad for the shelter of a rock berm that I shared with two trumpeter swans and a flock of kinglets.

The Gray grist mill and Donalda cattle barn is a beautiful historical building dating from the 1830's.  After nearly a century grinding flour, powered by the Don River, it was converted to a cattle barn on a "model dairy farm" owned by the Dunlop family.  They had progressive ideas - the cows had steam heat, fresh air ventilation, and "soft radio music" (according to the historical plaque at the site).  I'm envisioning cows dancing the Charleston.  The building is shingled, except for the silo, which is covered in glazed ceramic tiles.  It looks like it should be good for another couple hundred years.

Cuba Day 9: Home

I had an hour in Havana before I had to leave for the Varadero airport, so I sat on a park bench and drew passers-by.

I splurged for a taxi to the airport, a friend of the casa owners.  The car turned out to be a 1955 Buick - one of the most common cars in Cuba, and fun to ride in, if a little bit bumpy for drawing.  If the driver looks like he's in a funny position, it's because he drove on the highway with his right leg bent up on the (massive) front seat, and his left leg on the pedals.  He drove normally in towns.  It seemed to work.

I heard horror stories of how long it takes to check in at Cuban airports, people missing flights, so I was there early.  Check-in took about 30 seconds, so I hung out under a palm tree watching birds, had a cheap lunch attended by two cats at the bus-drivers' (outdoor) cafe, then spent about one minute getting through the apparently infamously slow airport immigration and security.  And before I knew it, I was over the Florida keys and the endless sprawl of Miami, where so many Cubans have tried, or dreamed, to go.

When I landed in Toronto, I was genuinely horrified to see snow drifts at the airport, on a very grey, cold afternoon.  (OK, I exaggerated the greyness a bit).

As one final bonus from Cuba, I had got my Toronto-Vancouver boarding pass in Varadero.  Organization and computers do not seem to be a forte in Cuba, so naturally there was a mistake - they had put me in business class.  I sat there, with the businessmen all complaining about their free food and trying to pick up the stewardess, and read my copy of Granma, "the official newspaper of the central committee of the communist party of Cuba."  The masthead had a quotation beside a picture of rifle-raising rebels: "El hombre crece con el trabajo que sale de sus manos."  ("Man grows by work that comes from his hands.")  I'll take that as encouragement for urban-sketchers.

  

Cuba Day 8: One last day in Havana

A lot of people in Cuba spend a lot of time sitting around their front steps, on their balcony, or in the plazas.  It's probably a sign of the horribly inefficient economy.  On the other hand, a lot of people at home spend a lot of time working to be able to afford a bit of leisure time.  So on my last full day in Havana, I mostly sat around too.

The first place I decided to sit around was outside the Museo de la Revolucion, a former presidential palace turned into a museum commemorating the Cuban revolution.  People who know my (highly undeserved) reputation for attracting attention from security guards when I draw will not be surprised to know that I looked up from drawing the impressive building to see six soldiers heading straight towards me, in full goose-step mode.  I was aware that you're not supposed to photograph police or military areas, and figured that I had just involuntarily extended my stay in Cuba.  But once they got to me, they broke step, started smiling and talking, checked out my drawings, and headed into the building behind me.  It turns out I was sitting on the steps of their barracks.

I had spent a lot of time in Havana taking candid pictures of people, so I figured it was time to do some people drawing.  With life lived in the street, there is no shortage of models.

I did one more drawing of the buildings, with their fascinating mix of ornate, decayed, and sometimes downright collapsed structures and details.  Judging by comings and goings, many people were living in all these buildings, including somewhere in the back of the one that was missing a roof, floors and some walls, and had trees growing out of it.

Then a few random details in the evening: practicing for my beer-illustrator career with dark beer at a micro-brewery, a rare or maybe unique thing in Cuba; a mojito that I managed to draw before drinking; little bits of architectural details that are everywhere; a restored church dome seen over a collapsing and patched-together wall.

Cuba Day 7: Havana streets and galleries

I had a more leisurely day in Havana, not feeling I had to hike around frantically trying to take it all in.  I started by changing some money, which can be a very leisurely pursuit, but by then I had a grasp of the queuing system and Cuba's two currencies, and it was pretty smooth.  And any waiting time is drawing time.  This bank was in an elegant old building, although when I looked from the outside, one corner was collapsing and patched together with plywood.

One challenge drawing in Havana is the touts trying to sell you something, but that's mostly a matter of getting away from the touristy areas, and knowing enough Spanish to get rid of them politely or humourously.  A common intro is "?De donde, amigo?" (Where from, friend?).  If you reply "Canada", they will tell you about their sister in Montreal, leading eventually to the inevitable tale of woe.  So I started answering "De Antartida, soy pinguino"  ("From Antarctica, I'm a penguin.")  No sisters there, everyone laughs, and you're left alone.  Males travelling alone also get lots of offers for "?Chica, senor?", to which I replied "No gracias, ya tengo bastantes."  (No thanks, I already have enough).  Kids also come up to you asking for gifts like pens or soap.  Cubans discourage giving into this, because the kids are inevitably working for someone who sells whatever you give them, and the kids start skipping school to pursue the short-term profits.  Much better to give to organisations, or simply spend your foreign currency, most of which goes to the government which provides the education and health care.  For me, a bigger drawing challenge was simply the overwhelming amount of detail, especially when you want to capture so much.  On a bustling side-street, I tried to do a detailed pen sketch then just colour the central point of interest.  I'm not entirely sure that worked.  The next one I reverted to my fat water-soluble pen, which guarantees that I have to simplify.

I stopped by the national gallery, the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, sticking to the building with Cuban art.  I wasn't expecting much, but it was fantastic.  (And it was also the only air-conditioned building I was in the whole time).  They have some colonial era paintings, and a section from the early modern period when everyone was imitating the Europeans.  But most of the large space was devoted to more recent art, and I really enjoyed the quality and some of the messages I gleaned about Cuban identity (okay, I also tagged along with a passing tour group with a very insightful local guide).  I found many new-to-me artists for future googling.

Cuban artists have a relatively high stature in the egalitarian country, and there are some top-notch studios around.  Printing studios seem particularly favoured, maybe because of the revolutionary history of posters and pamphlets.  I visited the Taller Experimental de Grafica, a big open studio with a group of artists drawing and printing, and with its own high-end gallery, then had dinner at the Magritte-inspired Eso No Es Un Cafe outside, while a son quartet played. My excellent meal was Pollo Pollock, chicken with colourful sauces splashed around the big plate, a la Jackson of the same name.

  

Cuba Day 6: Viñales and back to Havana

On my third day in Viñales, I went for another morning walk, for the early birds - avian and human, as the farmers start at dawn to avoid some of the heat.  I ended up at a cave part way up one of the littler mogotes.  There are a couple big caves in the area that are main tourist attractions (one has a disco in it), and hence dis-tractions to me.  But this one was basically just a cave, with no one there.  The fun thing was that the cave went right through the mogote, and was long enough that it was pitch black for a little bit in the middle.  I started on the hot dry south-facing side with lizards basking on the rocks, and popped out on the cooler north-facing side in thick vegetation with a Cuban trogon, Cuban solitaire and Cuban vireo singing right there.  It was a nice shady place to sketch the view down to the valley.

I had a bus to catch that afternoon, I didn't know the area, and there was no trail ... but, I have a pathological inability to go part way up a (little) mountain without going to the top.  So I scrambled to the summit.  It was a bit of a challenge, with some razor-sharp rock edges and innumerable prickly things, including a vine-like cactus that I'm quite sure actively leapt towards my neck.  But I made it up, and down, and had time in town to draw some of the flowers that make any tropical town pretty.  I ended up gathering quite a crowd of schoolkids on lunch break, not to mention a German tour group, watching me draw, while a feral dog who followed me on my hike slept at my feet.

I had a few more moments to do a quick sketch of the casa I stayed in.  I had to note the nurses walking by in fishnet stockings, similar to policewomen I had seen in Havana and on highway patrols.  It's just part of the culture, and these women are completely professional - the police were just as armed as their male colleagues, and the nurses were doing their rounds checking on the elderly and sick people (something our health care system couldn't afford).  I saw one small boy shortly after he had fallen face-first off a railing.  A doctor showed up on a bike in about 5 minutes, and I saw a nurse visiting the next day.  There are a lot of challenges for the many poor people in the country, no doubt, but health care is not one of them.

The bus back to Havana had me and two French tourists.  It's hard to find tickets, but once you get one, they honour it!  Back in Havana I went to a government restaurant called "Hanoi" - reflecting political alignments, not culinary ones.  (The other places I ate were all private paladars, which is a fairly new development).  The government restaurants have a bad reputation, but the food was fine, and cheap, and the dour waiter was almost jovial when I was teasing him about whether "the best mojito in Havana - if we lie, it's free" was perhaps only the second-best mojito in Havana.  I didn't push the argument, because it was almost free to start with.  Service is supposed to be terribly slow, but I found it exactly slow enough for me to draw (badly, again), the old car outside the window.  I then spent the evening sitting in the adjacent plaza, mostly a tourist-free zone where families come for the kids to play and the adults to discuss the state of the world, baseball, and who knows what else.

Cuba Day 5: Cayo Levisa

The friendly government information people in Viñales hadn't got the memo that they are supposed to say "No" to all requests, so I was able to get a ticket for a day trip to Cayo Levisa, a white-sand islet off the north coast.  The remarkably cheap ticket included the bus to the coast, the ancient ferry to the island, lunch and beer.  I'm not a beach person, so I was ecstatic that this was the one stormy day of my trip.  The beach is about 3km long, with a thin strip of forest and mangroves behind it.  There is one small, fairly rustic looking resort of beach cabins, but very few people on the beach.

I did my little bit of lounging on the beach and swimming in the waves, but mostly I walked the length of the beach in both directions.  At one end, the beach ends at mangroves.  I did some mangrove bush-whacking - probably the only visitor to the island ever to do so.  It doesn't work; don't try it.  But there were some good birds, including a Cuban black-hawk who was very tame, but showed his displeasure in my intrusion by screeching "I HATE you, I HATE you" in a very squeaky voice.

At the other end, the beach fades into an eerie dead forest, where the shifting sands buried the roots too deeply.  But just where the open sand ends, there's a tiny hand-painted wooden sign saying "Bar a Punta Arena" (bar at Sandy Point), a little arrow and a barely discernible trail through the dead trees.  I couldn't resist following it, even though the high waves were washing into the forest at places.  After a good 500m, the trail pops out of the woods onto another open beach, with another little wooden sign.  Way off in the distance at the very tip of the island, there was a little palapa, and, miraculously, a tiny bar, complete with a nattily dressed government bar-tender.  There was nobody else within a kilometer of us, although the bartender said he had had a few customers that day.  I was wondering if they were Gilligan, the skipper, Mary-Anne...  

Back in Viñales, I defied the common wisdom that there is no good food in Cuba by having another great dinner, as I did every night I was in the country.  This was on the main street, so I could draw the colourful building across the street.  

A note from the family I stayed with in Viñales: "Please tell everyone who comes to Viñales to bring earplugs".  It turns out the quiet little town of Viñales is not so quiet on Saturday nights.  From, say 11:00pm to 2:30am, when they bring out two enormous speakers into the plaza and play the loudest music I have ever heard (and I was three blocks away).  There is no glass in any windows in the town, which I originally thought was due to hurricanes.  I now realize that this is because it would all be shattered by the Saturday night music.  I told one of the sleep-deprived family members that I love the music (electronic dance/salsa) but I like to choose when I listen to it.  She said "En Cuba, no escogimos" - "In Cuba, we don't choose"... 

Cuba Day 4: Vinales valley

Vinales is one of 3(?) places in the world with mogotes, vertical-sided limestone mountains.  They give an other-worldly appearance to the landscape where they pop out of flat valleys of rich red soil, where the best Cuban tobacco and other traditional crops are grown.  I circumnavigated the little mountain range in this picture, a distance of about 6km, walking along well-worn foot, horse and oxen paths through fields and patches of forest.  And occasionally less well-worn paths when I got lost.  I didn't see any mechanized vehicles in the valleys, just ox-carts, oxen pulling plows, and people on horseback or in horse carts.  They were all much faster than me, because I had to stop to look at all the birds, ranging from the tiny spherical and brightly-coloured Cuban tody to the large but very stealthy great lizard-cuckoo.  I also saw a Cuban hutia, a big rodent that looks like an arboreal beaver.  And I was reminded the hard way that you are supposed to tuck your pants into your socks when walking in chigger country.

I talked to various people en route, even managing to understand a few words of what they were saying in the spectacularly slurred rural Cuban dialect.  Tobacco farmers are given fertile land by the government, but they have to give 90% of their crop to the state.  They have quotas they have to meet, or they lose the land (though they may also have plots elsewhere with other crops).  The other 10% of the crop they can make into cigars and sell.  They come up with all kinds of secret tricks for aging, flavouring and rolling the tobacco to make their cigars stand out from the rest. I declined to purchase any cigars since I use my lungs for other things, but it is a very appealing to see the age-old traditional craft.  And I was glad that I could stand under the big ceiba trees watchng the farmers and the birds, and not be out driving an obstinate ox-team or bent over harvesting the tobacco leaf by leaf in the hot sun.

The paths around the mogotes join a road again at the Mural of Prehistory, a huge cliff face carved into a mogote and painted in a psychadelically garish mural, with images of...well, I'm not sure what exactly.  It is a good example of why people should never let their revolutionary leaders design large public art.  It was definitely not Fidel's greatest moment.  I didn't draw it, because watercolours wouldn't do it justice.  You'll just have to go see it yourself, perhaps as part of a tour of the world's 10 most hideous art works?