Visiting Palma Linda

By Aurelio Pedroso

From what was once a harmonious and noisy sugar mill called Palma Linda, now, nearly at the end of 2010, only the tower and a stately mansion remain, in an unequal fight against time. On the building’s facade, a sign announces “Sugar Workers Union.” Right now, the hall is used for everything, from wakes to parties.

Looking at the old multipurpose house reminds me of those state-owned city taxis that in the morning carried the deceased person’s grieving family to the cemetery and in the afternoon took a happy couple to the notary for a wedding ceremony. It was a very emotional ordeal for the driver, who usually was a woman. For the mental health of whoever drove the vehicle, that practice also ceased to exist. Grief on one hand, joy on the other, and hope in an authentic sweet-and-sour sauce.

The name of Palma Linda is a provocative invention by this author, on account that a couple he knows has an extensive family in that region of Villa Clara.

It is surprising how lonely are the place and the lives of those who have decided not to move to another urban center with greater attraction. Leaving the hectic capital of Havana, taking the highway, arriving in Santa Clara, about 260 kilometers east of the capital, and taking the narrow road that leads to the northern coast, turning halfway just before reaching Camajuaní, crossing an embankment and driving into Palma Linda is a contrast so abysmal in all aspects of human behavior that you need a long time to adapt and understand its people.

It is like entering an old and forgotten Far West town where the dogs need to lean against the walls in order to bark.

If the term megasurreaslism doesn’t exist, I would like to patent it with more than sufficient evidence. Read this, because I will try to use the most delicate words: I met a family who after completing their first physiological need, wipe themselves with the old mill’s payroll sheets. And not as a form of protest, concealed and solitary, but out of pure necessity.

This can lead to serious problems, I am told, because occasionally, for reasons of retirement, certain documents are lost and people must refer to the old payrolls without knowing that one of the local families has literally cleaned itself with them.

A good guess is that Palma Linda’s population doesn’t exceed two thousand. You won’t go hungry there, but there are many needs. The people are extremely educated in terms of courtesy and respect. Also very grateful and, to the same degree, hurt by the shutdown of the sugar industry during the nationwide floods that left few people grinding cane on the island.

The town has a clinic with a health professional who receives much praise. Because he is a graduate of a “holistic medicine” school, he ventures into various specialties. Things get complicated in an emergency. The delay of the ambulance from Camajuaní could be fatal in a case of asthma, for example. Public transport is nonexistent and going somewhere is up to whatever driver a traveler can find.

Few people lack rice, beans and tubers, three ingredients necessary to make a meal. If we add the fact that chickens, sheep, turkeys and pigs share many a backyard, any festivities are not limited to the basic menu. There is a small market where you can buy goods in foreign exchange or in convertible pesos, or CUCs. You practically never see CUCs in the town because the Cuban peso is handiest.

Speaking of festivities, the old Carmita mill (named after a daughter of the late President Gerardo Machado, they say) is primarily used for opening a bottle of rum of dubious quality and tippling to the sound of reminiscences and the well-known speeches generated by alcohol speeding through people’s veins and arteries.

On occasion, City Hall sends a keg of beer to the small park, so people’s tongues may be loosened and they can speak of old and new loves, work, baseball or a national television program whose signals arrive with an acceptable quality. Some, however, prefer to go fishing at a nearby dam so they can bring home fresh fish or sell it to neighbors.

Some people have fun in other ways. A young homosexual takes advantage of the weekends to spruce himself up and hitch a ride to the provincial capital, where he does his thing in a place called El Menjunje – The Concoction.

The one thing the people of this area have in common with those in the big cities of the island is that they all look forward to a better future. With drinks or without them. With reggaeton or soap operas at full volume. When they don’t look nostalgically at the mill’s tower, the tower watches them as if saying “here we are, folks.”

Meanwhile, Cuba prepares for the sugar harvest. Before the end of this year, 15 mills will be grinding. Then, in January, the remaining 24 will start. Nobody told them. They read it in the national press, where Orlando García Ramírez, Minister of the Sugar Industry, said that the resources would be invested in the safest and most stable mills.

Palma Linda dropped out of that list a long time ago. It was one of nearly 170 mills scattered throughout the island.