March 27, 2014 Cienfuegos and Trinidad

Thursday, March 27, 2014

Cienfuegos, Cuba

Cuba spends a considerable portion of its economy on the arts, with each province having an arts school.  We began this day at the Benny More Art School, a center for music, dance and visual arts.  The façade of the facility is lovely, but the insides are desperately poor.  We were ushered to a very large room used for recitals/demonstrations and we had a number of students perform for us.  Here’s a 13-year old classical guitar student:

Some dancers performed for us.  In this photo you can see the performance space; there was a single working fluorescent bulb in the entire room:

We then toured the art school and spoke with some of the instructors:

All the students here take an ordinary academic program and then do their art on top of that.  Their days are longer than 12 hours!!!

We then drove to Trinidad, the “crown jewel” of Cuban colonial cities.  It was founded in 1514, and is a UNESCO World Heritage site.  The Plaza Mayor is “an open air museum of Spanish colonial architecture” according to Wikipedia, and it is truly gorgeous:

The side streets have open-air markets:

I bought a hand-made woven straw hat.  I paid $4, although I knew if you bargained hard you could get one for $2; I just didn’t have the heart:

The streets are cobblestones which came as ship ballast on return voyages from shipping sugar out of Cuba:

There are dressed-up characters who pose for photos for a coin:

We then met with a couple who are running a B&B in Trinidad and learned of the ways in which they deal with remarkable regulations and impossible conditions on their small business.  Suffice it to say that they are very entrepreneurial and figure out ways of coping with great ingenuity.  They were quite open with us, but I don’t want to publicize all they told us.